The Nexus

by J. Kraft Mitchell

  “Don’t give me that. I know you have another source inside the department. You knew we had Love. You knew he’d eventually give you away. You knew there would be a mission tonight, and you knew I’d be on it.”

  “Perhaps I did. Perhaps I’ve been sent to remind you to hold up your end of the deal.”

  “We haven’t made a deal yet. You were supposed to wait for me to make contact.”

  “We’ve waited quite a while. Sketch is getting impatient.”

  “Give me some time.”

  “We’ll give you a little. Meanwhile, it’s time for me to be getting back. Your friends will be arriving any moment. But of course, we can’t let them know we work together!” The hooded guy drew his own gun. “We’ll make it look like I escaped, what do you say?” He aimed at her shoulder. “Don’t worry; I hear the armor in these uniforms is very strong.”

  The shot’s impact knocked her over.

  When Corey, Amber and Bradley got there, the skybike was roaring away. Jill wasn’t on it. Jill was alone in a heap on the cold cement floor.

  THE storage room of the Ace of Hearts was silent for several long moments.

  “You let him get away on purpose,” breathed Amber.

  “You nailed it, Corey,” said Bradley.

  “What about when Corey showed us the fish cannery exit?” Amber said at length. “The guy we saw spying...was that him too?”

  “Maybe,” said Jill. “I never saw him. He got away fair and square that time.”

  “This is all really interesting,” said Bradley, “but could we talk about it later? Like back at HQ, with Jill in handcuffs?”

  “A rather good idea,” said Holiday. He took a set of cuffs from a pocket inside his coat, and handed them to Corey. “Would you mind?” he asked.

  Slowly, solemnly, Corey took the cuffs.

  “Why?” Amber asked Jill weakly. “Why’d you do it?”

  Jill didn’t answer.

  “What would you expect from a half-blood?” Bradley muttered.

  Corey’s punch came so quickly that no one knew it had happened until Bradley was sprawling into a storage shelf. The impact knocked several tacky figurines onto the floor. Bradley ended up on his seat among the broken pieces. There was shock written in his eyes as he rubbed his face and looked up at Corey.

  But Corey wasn’t looking at him anymore. Corey was staring with questioning eyes at Jill. Then he cuffed her hands behind her back.

  “See you at HQ,” Holiday said, expressionless, and left the room.

  Corey and Amber escorted Jill out. Bradley stumbled two paces behind them.

  No one seemed to notice that the little red light on the video camera over the television was still on.

  A minute later Jill was in the backset between Amber and Bradley. Corey had just started the car when Holiday’s voice came over the car’s com:

  “Desiree, did you get it?”

  “Sure, I got it!” Dizzie reported.

  “Got what?” asked Corey.

  Amber noticed Jill’s face. “Hey, what are you smiling about?”

  “There’s actually just a little more to my story,” said Jill.

  22

  WHEN he got back to HQ, Holiday headed straight to Dino’s lab. “I’m not interrupting anything?”

  “Not really,” said the funny little man. “Just checking out these VCRs we got from Love’s clients. I’m still trying to get them to work so we can use them at the trial. What can I do for you, Mr. H?”

  “I need your help on a matter, if it won’t inconvenience you.”

  “Not at all.”

  “This way, please.”

  BETWEEN songs on his phonograph the boss heard a noise. It sounded like it was coming from out in the arcade. But the arcade had been closed since midnight.

  He grabbed a gun and opened his office door a crack.

  All game areas and consoles had been switched off. The arcade was dark except for streetlights glowing through the painted windows.

  The boss heard another sound. He opened the door a little more, and leaned out for a better peek with his one good eye.

  He saw a glow coming from up a ramp in one corner. He’d forgotten to turn one of the games off.

  ...Or someone had turned it back on.

  “UM, no offense, Mr. H, but I don’t have to go. Even if I did, I’d rather go alone.”

  Holiday smirked extra widely, but didn’t reply. He led Dino into the men’s restroom at the back of HQ, then into the janitor’s closet at the back of the men’s restroom.

  THE boss hesitated. The custodians weren’t scheduled to be here for another four hours...though when they got here they’d be plenty busy. Candy wrappers, popcorn bits, cigarette butts, even coins littered the carpet.

  So who turned the game on?

  The boss drew a gun and slunk toward the glow.

  As he got closer he saw it was one of his oldest consoles—an invaluable antique. It glowed and chimed an electronic tune while blocky letters asked him or anyone else around to insert coin(s) to play.

  ON a shelf in the janitor’s closet in the restroom was a telephone—a really old telephone. It had a rotary dial on its bulky base, and a hefty receiver perched on top.

  “You know what this is, I presume?”

  Dino scratched his head. “What it is, yeah. What it’s doing here, no.”

  “It’s here so someone can make calls,” said Holiday. “Calls that Sherlock doesn’t know about.”

  Dino chuckled. “If someone wanted to make a call from this thing, it would have to be hooked up to—”

  Holiday turned the bulky phone around, and showed Dino the phone wire plugged into the back.

  Dino whistled. “Still,” he said, “unless there’s a switchboard or something at the other end, and other old phones routed into the switchboard...”

  “This wire has been fed through the wall,” said Holiday. “I haven’t yet searched to find where it leads.”

  “So is that why you need my expertise? I do know a little about these things.”

  “I never said I needed your expertise.”

  “You said you needed—”

  “Your help.”

  Dino’s eyes shifted uncertainly. “What sort of help?”

  “A confession, ideally,” said Holiday.

  THE boss didn’t approach the game console. Someone was baiting him. He knew it. And he wasn’t taking the bait.

  Sure enough, he heard a gunshot. A bullet—or, if he wanted to be optimistic, a stunner—whizzed by him and cracked into the screen of another priceless game console.

  The boss ducked around the snack counter to an exit. He was in a passage along the side of the building. He ran on old patterned carpet beneath dimmed lights glowing from along the ceiling.

  Another gunshot behind him.

  He ducked and whirled, firing his own shot.

  Cops—at least they were dressed something like cops. He thought he saw three of them. One had the Korean taegeuk and trigrams on his mask. They leaped out of the hall and back into the arcade as the boss fired again.

  He took his opportunity. He ran the rest of the way up the passage and through a door to the back stairway of the building.

  There were only three floors. He skipped the second, got to the third.

  The cops were still close behind.

  “YOU think I put this phone here?”

  “I know you put this phone here,” said Holiday. “How else were you going to call your contact—the man who calls himself Sketch?”

  Dino was sweating majorly now. “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m talking about the fact that you’re spying on our department for a criminal ring. You have access to Sherlock—which means the man who calls himself Sketch now has access to Sherlock through you.”

  Dino sputtered. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Maybe this will trigger your memory.” Holiday reached behind a caddy of cleaning supplies on another shelf, and p
ulled out an old audiocassette recorder.

  “Hey, that belongs in my lab,” said Dino.

  “We needed it,” said Holiday with a shrug. “How else were we going to eavesdrop on your phone conversations without Sherlock knowing about it?”

  Dino swallowed.

  “Desiree was kind enough to rig this for me yesterday,” Holiday went on. “It can be remotely switched on and off. Of course, a lot of what we’ve recorded over the last twenty-four hours is useless. Apparently sometimes when you went to the men’s room, you were just...going to the men’s room.”

  THE third floor hallway above the arcade was lined with office suites. The only light was from the exit signs at either end of the hall.

  The boss heard the cops coming up the stairs behind him.

  He ran for the other end of the hall. Maybe he could double back down the other stairwell, and—

  He didn’t see the kick until he was feeling it. He rebounded from the blow, lifted his gun.

  Another kick sent his weapon flying out of his hand.

  He was unarmed and staring into a mask enameled with a flaming red emblem.

  He took two more blows in two more seconds before he decided to retreat. The other two cops, or whoever they were, had now appeared in the hall. The boss started trying the doors to the office suites. All were locked—of course.

  ...Except one.

  The boss dashed into the reception area for First Anterran Family Insurance, Korean Town branch, and locked the door behind him. Then he lunged into the largest office beyond the reception area.

  They were pounding on the door to the suite.

  The boss looked at the large window behind the insurance rep’s desk. Down below was a grassy courtyard complete with trees and a pond. Beyond that were the Korean neighborhoods he’d disappear into as soon as he got through the window—assuming the three-story fall didn’t kill or cripple him. But he had no other choice.

  Then a light flooded over him from outside the window.

  The light got closer.

  Closer.

  Gunshots sounded from outside the window. The glass pane was suddenly webbed with cracks.

  The light got even closer.

  The boss dove for cover as a skybike soared into the office via the cracked window. He was bathed in the headlight, showered with shards of what had been the window a second ago.

  DINO looked at the floor of the closet. “So, you know...everything,” he muttered. It wasn’t a question.

  “Everything,” said Holiday.

  The funny little man heaved a funny little sigh. “How?”

  “Jillian Branch.” The director handed Dino an envelope—the envelope Jill had first stealthily handed him in his office the day before.

  THE boss scooted back into the corner, looking in vain for something to grab and use as a weapon.

  Someone slid off the bike that had just creatively arrived in the office. Now that the headlight wasn’t in his eyes the boss saw the vivid blue butterfly insignia on the person’s visor.

  “Should I tell you the charges, Sketch?” a mechanically distorted voice asked the boss. “Or can we just assume you already know what they are?”

  DINO started reading the letter:

  Dear Director,

  I’m writing to you on very illegal, very non-digital paper. I received this paper from a client before I joined the department. The fact is, I can’t tell you what I’m about to tell you in any way that Sherlock might overhear. I’m afraid Sherlock has been compromised...

  He stopped reading. “Just give me the Reader’s Digest version, will you?”

  “Jill already knew there was a traitor in our department. She’d known that since the day she got here; Sketch’s stooge had told her they already had an inside source. It didn’t take her long to figure out it was you. Who else would have the resources and know-how to share department secrets in ways that couldn’t be traced by Sherlock?”

  Dino half-smiled. “And to think I was about to get out of that gig. I suppose they suspected, and that’s why they needed another insider. I wasn’t willing to help them quite as much as they wanted. They were planning to take down the whole department, you know.”

  “Do you think they would have let you live if you’d jumped ship?”

  “They would have had to. I’m safe down here.”

  “Maybe,” Holiday said inconclusively.

  Dino frowned. “Believe me, Mr. H, I’d help you catch the guy myself at this point. But he’s cut off communication with me.”

  “It makes little difference. Any moment now he will be arriving here in the hands of our agents.”

  Dino raised his eyebrows.

  “Jill had more to say in this letter than the fact that you were a traitor,” said Holiday. “She had a plan to prove it—and catch the one you’d been working for while we were at it.” Holiday pressed play on the audiocassette player.

  Dino heard his voice on the tape: “...Sure, I can set up a closed-circuit camera...Yes, just name the place...Ace of Hearts Pawn Shop, 11 p.m. tonight. You got it. It’ll be set by ten at the latest.”

  Dino reached over and stopped the cassette player himself. “How does that help you? Sherlock can’t pick up a closed-circuit camera signal.”

  “Unless someone knows the camera is going to be used for such a purpose,” said Holiday, “and rigs the camera to send a feed to Sherlock.”

  “Not to mention trace the original feed to see who’s receiving it,” Dino guessed.

  Holiday smiled. “Desiree’s help again. When you’re going to use your lab equipment for treachery, you really shouldn’t leave it lying around for us to tamper with first.”

  “Dizzie’s good at this stuff, huh? Maybe she should take my place.”

  “Someone’s going to have to, being as you’ll be in jail.” Holiday picked up the old phone’s receiver and touched a mechanism attached to the mouthpiece. “Don’t tell me you made yourself sound like a woman?”

  Dino looked more sheepish than he had at any point yet in this conversation. “Hey, so long as it wasn’t my voice being heard on the other end of the line, who cares?”

  “I’d ask why you did it, Dino, but I already know it was money.”

  “Lots of it.”

  “And you’ll be doing lots of time for it. Of course, a little cooperation might go a long way in that regard.”

  “It sounds like you already know everything. What more do you want from me?”

  Holiday pointed to the phone. “Tell me more about this.”

  THE floor of HQ became a standing ovation as the team of four agents entered from the garage. A handcuffed and blind-folded prisoner stood between them.

  “Here you are,” Jill whispered from behind her mask, her distorted voice buzzing softly in the boss’s ear. “You’ve wanted to know all about this place for a while. Now you’re here in person. Welcome.”

  “A pleasure,” he muttered. “At least take off this blindfold so I can enjoy it.

  “I didn’t think you’d mind it so much,” said Corey’s mask. “You’re always half blind-folded anyway.”

  The prisoner found that humorous enough to sneer. Just sneer.

  HOLIDAY sat in his office again. He didn’t see his field team arrive with the prisoner in custody. He didn’t hear the applause at their arrival.

  His attention was on the end of Jill’s letter. He’d read it several times, and now he was reading it again. He would probably read it again after that.

  He gave a long sigh.

  23

  HALF an hour later they were meeting in the conference room off the garage.

  “Thanks to the diligence of each one of you,” said Holiday, “we’ve apprehended a very crooked ringleader. Capturing him was a tremendous step forward for this department. As much as we owe Jillian a great debt of thanks for concocting the plan of Sketch’s apprehension, we owe perhaps even more gratitude to Corey, Bradley, and Amber, who were not let in on the plan until the very
last moment. In fact, Corey’s devotion to keeping our department safe nearly foiled Jill’s plan.” He smirked and glanced at Corey.

  “You’re welcome,” said Corey with a half-smile.

  Amber looked puzzled. “You said Corey, Bradley, and me...” She shot a look toward Dizzie.

  Dizzie smiled sheepishly. “I wanted to tell you!” she burst. “I wanted to soooo bad, you have no idea!”

  “I think we have some idea,” Bradley muttered.

  “Director Holiday threatened to kill me and cut up my dead body into little pieces if I told.”

  That got the director a set of looks. He just shook his head with an impatient smirk.

  “Well, okay, not exactly,” admitted Dizzie. “But, you know, something along those lines.”

  Holiday cleared his throat, and continued: “From the moment Jillian slipped me the letter written on Sketch’s notepaper, I decided as few people as possible must know about the plan. We chose to include Desiree because, of course, she would be running com on the mission. Also, her technical skills were invaluable in obtaining proof of Dino’s treachery. Her ability to keep the matter to herself for nearly twenty-four hours was very admirable—perhaps nothing short of miraculous.”

  Dizzie smiled widely.

  “And speaking of Dino,” Holiday continued, “he has agreed to cooperate with the department by telling us everything he knows about Sketch’s ring. The telephone Dino was using is part of a large telecommunications network created by the Anterran criminal underground to avoid Sherlock’s listening ears. An extensive investigation of this network is in order.”

  “Let me guess,” said Corey, “our team will be in charge of that investigation?”

  “Perhaps,” said Holiday. “That decision is for another time. For now, enjoy a couple of days off to celebrate your success.”

  That brought a few whoops and high fives—from everyone but Jill, that is. When Holiday dismissed them, Jill slipped out quietly before anyone else.

  ...A fact that wasn’t lost on Corey.