He left her sitting in David’s chair. Rose looked around at the office, at the white walls and the gray carpet, more familiar to her than her home, so nearly lost to her forever, and something inside her twitched.
She frowned.
For a moment there it had felt like she wanted to cry.
Rose spent her first few hours as an official member of the Department watching it implode.
Everyone who even vaguely mattered, which apparently now included Rose and Nate, had gathered in the meeting room. Terrian’s laptop, which sat in front of him, was hooked up to the hologram projector. James had brought in the tea. That was when Rose first knew that the news would not be good. David had his feet up on the table, eating a biscuit and calmly watching Loren rail against the inevitable. He had gone through anger, righteous indignation and reasoned argument, and had now resorted to monosyllabicity.
“No,” he was saying. “No. I won’t do it.”
“Well, you’re welcome to go back to jail,” said Terrian. “And what will happen to the girl then?”
“Dad,” said Tabitha quietly. Loren had as yet refused to let her out of his sight, and as such she had spent most of the conversation sitting silently beside the window, watching the argument with wide, frightened black eyes. “I don’t want to go back there.”
Loren was silenced for a moment. Then: “You can’t make me do this! This is illegal!”
David took his feet off the desk and leaned closer to Loren. “Come on, let’s be frank here. It’s take it or leave it, I’m afraid: you work for us, or you and Tabitha go back to jail.”
“You killed my sister!”
“One of our squad teams killed Rayna. It was never officially sanctioned.”
Loren’s face darkened with fury. He stood up very quickly, and for a moment it almost seemed as if he was about to hit David. Six hands went to their guns. Loren looked around them, and let Tabitha pull him down to his seat.
“But why can’t you use someone else? Why do you need me?”
Silence round the table. People exchanged glances that ranged in significance from amused to grim to exasperated.
Terrian clicked something on his computer. The hologram flickered into place. It showed the broken, smoking hulk of Westfield shopping center.
“At eleven forty-six a.m. last Saturday,” David said, “this happened, as I’m sure you all know. Seventy-four dead; three hundred and fifty-three wounded; and one hell of a slap in the face for us. I don’t need to tell you how much pressure we are currently under to get the cause pinpointed and destroyed as quickly as possible.”
“Could it have been a gas explosion?” Laura ventured tentatively.
“Unfortunately for us, no,” David said, “not a chance. Nail bomb. Very messy, but ideal if you want to do as much damage as possible in a building that incorporates a lot of glass into its structure.”
“So this was definitely a terrorist attack,” James said. “Do we know who did it?”
“As a matter of fact, we do. DNA was found on some of the nails and on the remains of the bomb’s container. More to the point, we have CCTV footage of what happened. Can we get the film up, Connor?”
The hologram flickered and was replaced by a picture of a carry-on suitcase on wheels. The handle was just visible: the hand of its carrier was tight and white.
“And with the X-ray overlay?”
The hologram flickered again, and the contents of the suitcase were shown stark and white as the bones of the carrier’s hand. It was unmistakably a bomb.
“Who is this?” Loren asked. “What kind of idiot walks into the range of X-ray-equipped cameras with a bomb in a suitcase?”
“It’s quite a good bet, actually,” David said. “The cameras in Westfield are notoriously dodgy. The shopping center was renovated after the War, and ever since then their electricity has been appalling. The cameras go on and off every few hours pretty much randomly. If you had to carry a bomb past any security system, Westfield’s would be it. And look who did. You’re going to love this, Rose.”
An image appeared beside the X-ray projection: a throng of distracted shoppers on the first floor, frozen in midstep by the pause function. Terrian zoomed in on it, further and further, until the face of the bomber filled the screen.
Nate and Rose both made identical half-gasp, half-groan noises.
It was Aaron Greenlow.
Loren raised his eyebrows at Rose. “Explain?”
Rose looked at David, who gestured for her to do so. Rose had been to many Department meetings before, but she was unused to having people listen to her during them.
“His name is Aaron,” she said. “He’s seventeen. He’s Stephen Greenlow’s son. He disappeared about two weeks ago. Suicide victim, but no body was ever found. Come on, he was on the Department records. Does nobody here remember him?”
Laura and Terrian nodded. James’s jaw had dropped.
“You’re joking,” he said. “Stephen Greenlow’s son, the Westfield bomber? Do you think his father ordered him to do it? Oh, that would be brilliant! And tragic, of course,” he added hastily, at the look everyone gave him.
Terrian cleared his throat awkwardly.
“Did you know him?” he asked, looking between Nate and Rose.
Rose laughed bitterly. “Oh, yes.”
“And is he the type of person who could blow up a crowded shopping center, do you think?”
Rose looked at the picture. “Well,” she said hoarsely, fighting back memories of a softly smiling fourteen-year-old boy, “there’s little doubt over that now.”
David said, “Surely he —” and then stopped, leaned forward, and scanned the picture sharply.
“Connor,” he said, “zoom in on his eyes for me, will you?”
Terrian, bewildered but knowing enough not to stop David when he was on to something, did so. As the camera zoomed in closer, the picture became grainier, and then Loren was on his feet wearing an identical eureka expression.
He and David looked at each other.
“Oh,” they said simultaneously.
“What?” asked Terrian, looking between the two of them. “What, what is it?”
David said nothing, but stared at the picture. The beginnings of a smile crept onto his face.
“What?” said Terrian and James together exasperatedly.
“Rose,” David said, “can you confirm this?”
“Confirm what?”
“Look at the edge of his iris,” he said. “He’s high-level Gifted, correct?”
“Yes.”
“Look very closely.”
Rose did. At the very edge of Aaron’s bright green eyes was a sliver of dark.
She looked at him.
“No,” she said.
“Yes,” said Loren. “He’s right. It’s painful to admit it, but Elmsworth is right.”
“Right about what?” shouted Terrian.
David looked at him and smiled.
“The little black line at the corner of his eye?”
“Yes,” said Terrian impatiently. “What about it?”
“The eyeball,” David said, “is a convex shape. No shadow from the outer edge can reach the center.”
Terrian looked at the picture, looked at David, and looked back at the picture again. James was on his feet, his mouth open.
“You’re saying,” Terrian said slowly, “that the son of the leader of the Gospel is a Demon disguised as a Gifted.”
“That is exactly what I’m saying.”
Rose shuddered at the thought of Greenlow’s reaction. Stephen was high-level Gifted — more powerful than David and Rose, but still far from being an Angel. Knowing him, he would have been disappointed if Aaron had been a Pretender, and deeply, deeply wounded if he had been Ashkind. But a Demon — second only to Hybrids as societal enemies; dangerous to the Government, to everyone else in the world . . .
Stephen would have hated him for it. Never mind that Aaron was his son, his blood. Stephen would
have hated him.
“But that’s impossible,” Terrian said. “He can’t be a Demon. He can do magic. He passed his Test.”
Everyone in the room looked pointedly from him to Tabitha and back to the picture of Aaron.
“Right,” he said. “All right. But his eyes —”
“Who invented the hologram projectors?” said Laura.
All eyes on James now.
“No one invented them,” he said hesitantly. “They’re War inventions, the MoD just updated them. They’ve been using them for ages —”
“Yes,” said David, almost breathlessly. “The MoD has been using them for ages. How much area could they cover before, James?”
“Not much,” said James. “They could only disguise about two square inches.”
“That’s about the size of two eyes,” said David. “And who do we know who would have had access to them? Who works in the MoD?”
“Natalie,” said Laura, quietly. “Greenlow’s mother. Oh my God.”
They all looked around the table at one another.
“That’s two magical Demons discovered in a year,” Laura said. “And born nearly ten years apart . . . How does it happen? What’s different about these two?”
They looked at Loren, who shrugged.
“Trust me,” he said, “if Rayna and I had known, we’d have done something about it long before now.”
“All right,” Terrian said. Rose could see him trying to think of a logical conclusion and failing. He sat down. “Okay. David, do we have any idea as to his motivation?”
“Oh, yes,” said James darkly. “We do.”
Terrian looked at him. “What do you mean?”
James pulled over the computer. “We got this immediately after the attack.”
He punched in the commands and the picture of Aaron’s eye vanished, replaced by another hologram of the destroyed shopping center. It had been taken with a grainy camera, and across it in black Arial were the words Behold the Interregnum.
David gave a shuddering kind of sigh when he saw it. It sounded like a surrender. For a moment, all the fight seemed to have gone out of him.
“Regency,” he whispered. It was the first time Rose had ever heard him say it as if he had some control over the word, and watching him she finally understood what it meant to him: a collection of old, wild ghosts.
“Fine,” he said, without anyone asking. “The truth. Anyone here remember Felix Callaway?”
Rose and Loren nodded, but no one else did.
“Seriously?” David said incredulously. “No one? Is he not on our records? From the Croydon attack — oh, come on. Give me that.”
He strode round the table to Terrian’s laptop and punched in a couple of commands. The picture of the attack vanished, replaced by a rotating hologram of a tall, broad-shouldered man in his mid-forties with dark hair and impossibly black eyes. The darkness of them shrieked Demon so loudly that Rose leaned back, uneasy even at the sight of them.
David was staring at Felix. Rose noticed a certain, sudden stiffness in his posture, a wariness in his frame, and looked again at the black-eyed man in the hologram. She tried to match the voice to the face. I claim your death . . .
She shuddered.
“I don’t know if anyone remembers,” David said, scratching the back of his neck, “but there was a clause in the Great Truce that forbade the Government from prosecuting any army leaders for War crimes. If we had, this man would have been the Department’s first target.”
“Well, that was poor negotiation on your part, wasn’t it?” said Loren lightly.
“Yes, well,” said David quietly, “he isn’t the only one who would have been hunted down without that particular piece of legislation.”
Loren glared at him.
“Is there a point to this?” James asked impatiently. “People have died.”
David looked up at him, and sighed.
“Felix Callaway ran Regency, the largest and most powerful Ashkind army during the War. They were defeated in the Battle of Vancouver, but the army never quite managed to destroy them completely. In recent years, they’ve become more of a terrorist group than a military organization. Destroying a packed shopping center is the kind of thing Felix would do.”
Loren had not taken his eyes off the hologram of Felix since David had stopped insulting him. “Yes,” he said. “Remember Ariadne?”
“I never forgot,” said David darkly. “I believe that was the point.”
Nate looked between the two of them. “Can someone please explain —”
Without looking away from Felix, Loren said, “Ariadne Stronach was third in command of Felix’s army. She was also his girlfriend. It was difficult to get anything done when they were in a room together, believe you me. They were inseparable for years, and then one day . . .” He sighed. “One day, after a particularly destructive battle, Felix had all the survivors rounded up and shot. In the morning, Ariadne was gone.”
“That was when he first started to distrust me,” David said. “I was Head of Security. I was supposed to stop people from deserting, along with Arkwood. He thought I’d helped her.”
“And did you?” Rose asked.
He looked at her wearily. “What would you have done?”
A silence. James was watching David narrowly.
“Anyway,” Loren continued, “he spent months looking for her. Had patrols out day and night. I thought it was because he loved her. Until we found her body.”
Tabitha gasped, horrified. Loren looked down at her as if remembering she was there.
“Felix transformed to kill Ariadne,” he said softly. Rose closed her eyes. Loren did not look at her, or at David. He kept his eyes on his niece.
“How was a man like that allowed to run an army?” Laura said.
“Oh, come on,” David said, looking between her and Terrian. “You two were both in armies, you understand. Psychopaths can make the best leaders. Felix was the most brilliant strategist I’ve ever met. The Ashkind almost won the war because of him. He was the one who weaponized the use of Hybrids.” Rose could see the stiffness in his muscles as he spoke; she had to stop as well, force herself to relax. “He’d gather hundreds of them, as many as would come out of hiding, stagger their six-week cycles so there were always some ready to transform. He’d trigger them and release them onto the battlefield. Hybrids can’t discriminate between friend and foe, of course, so he had to get all of his soldiers away from the action first. That was when you knew it was coming. The retreat.”
David glanced at Rose to see how she was taking this, and alarm flickered into his eyes. Rose looked down at herself and saw that she was gripping the table so hard that her knuckles had turned white. She let go with some effort.
“Some of his enemies thought they’d won, started getting closer. That made it worse. Nothing stands a chance against a Hybrid. Fathers and sons, sisters, brothers, mothers and daughters, husbands and wives — almost everyone had lost a loved one to them. There were no unscathed hearts in those days. That’s why Hybrids are so feared. Because of Felix.”
The hatred in his voice now was old, bitter, snarling.
“Of course, Hybrid transformations don’t last forever. They were — were killed, tortured and killed, as soon as they were human again, and vulnerable behind enemy lines, so Felix made sure more were created even as the old ones died.” He was losing control. “They were dying in their hundreds and in their thousands, and still more with that venom in their veins, still more with that blood on their hands, and still . . .”
David had to take a long breath, clutching the chair, before he could speak again. His voice closed and he looked up at them.
“They all died,” he said evenly.
The hologram floated there obliviously. They looked at it in silence. Never let anyone tell you someone is evil, David had told her once. There are evil people, and there are normal people doing evil things, and if you have to ask yourself which one someone is, it’s the la
tter. When you meet an evil person — when you look into their face — you will know what they are instantly. True evil is impossible to hide.
Rose sat forward in her chair and looked for the true evil in Felix Callaway’s eyes.
“I’ve been watching Regency for years. I thought Vancouver had destroyed them. I thought Felix’s paranoia had driven everyone away. I thought Regency as an organization had curled up and died. And yet.” He gave a hoarse, shuddering sigh. “And yet. They didn’t die. They’re getting stronger, damn them all to hell. And they want me back. Me and Arkwood. Without us they don’t stand a chance. They won’t tell themselves that, of course — if we don’t come back to them soon they’ll just try to kill us and be done with it — but for the moment they’re trying to re-recruit us.”
David glanced up at them, saw their astonished looks.
“Of course they won’t actually get us,” he said impatiently. Then he looked at Loren. “I speak only for myself, of course.”
“How little you think of me,” said Loren coldly.
“How much reason I have to do so.”
“So you think Felix Callaway recruited this boy to blow up Westfield?” Terrian asked.
“I’m almost sure of it,” David said. “From the sound of it, Aaron Greenlow is prime material for Regency. Young, strong, malicious; had to hide that he was a Demon all his life; wanted a chance to prove himself.”
“Also, he’s a teenager,” said Laura. “Joining Regency would be a way of rebelling against his parents. Especially Stephen. The Gospel hates Ashkind — he wouldn’t like having one for a son, especially a Demon, but joining an Ashkind army . . . that’s something else.”
“Did he survive?” asked James.
In answer, James closed the image of Felix and brought up CCTV footage from 11:44 a.m., two minutes before the bomb went off. It showed Aaron leaving the building hurriedly. His eyes were full black now. Rose winced.
Terrian put his face in his hands.
“All right,” he said wearily. “I’ll send e-mails out to the media officially reporting it as a terrorist attack, shall I?”
The Catalyst Page 22
