Friction

by R S Penney

  Guilt or no guilt, however, their new intelligence liaison was more than willing to put her nose to the grindstone. She had a way of taking charge of her emotions, of putting aside her doubts and focusing on the task at hand. Jack had to admit he admired her for that. He found her sitting at a table in the Nova Café, hunched over and reading through the contents of a small tablet. Gabrina Valtez wore a simple black suit, her dark hair left to hang loose over her shoulders.

  Next to her, a long railing overlooked the concourse, and he could hear the slight whoosh of an approaching train. As venues for creative brainstorming went, this wasn't so bad. The place made a fabulous broccoli soup.

  Jack approached the table with a soft sigh, keeping his head down. “Agent Valtez,” he said with a curt nod. “Thanks for meeting with me. Jena wants to hammer out a new plan to bring in Leo.”

  Gabrina looked up at him with a warm smile, her dark eyes sparkling. “It's not a problem, Agent Hunter,” she said, glancing to the chair across from her. “I'm happy to help in any way I can. Have a seat.”

  He did so.

  Squeezing his eyes shut, Jack turned his face up to the ceiling. “I wish I had some good news,” he said, shaking his head. “But I've been racking my brain for the last few hours, and I've got nothing.”

  Gabrina frowned, turning her head to stare at something over the railing. “You're not alone there,” she muttered. “I'm sorry about your hands, Agent Hunter. I honestly thought he would be unable to resist the drugs.”

  “And all the PSAs say once you start, you can't quit. I wonder what else they lied about. Maybe it's okay to talk to strangers.”

  That earned him a burst of pleasant laughter, one that made him feel at ease. She sat hunched over, smiling down at the table. “Well said,” Gabrina replied at last. “And thank you. I needed that.”

  “No luck, huh?”

  “Not as such, no.”

  “Well, we're not gonna get anywhere by beating our heads against the wall.” He slid his chair closer to the table. “How about we go get something to eat down on the surface? My treat.”

  Gabrina went beet red, turning her head to avoid eye contact. Her soft sigh told him that making the offer had been a bad idea. “I'm sorry, Agent Hunter,” she began. “I would prefer to keep things between us strictly professional.”

  He stared at her with his mouth agape, blinking slowly. “Did I cross some kind of line?” he managed after a moment of silence. “I'm sorry. I didn't mean to give you the impression that I was asking you on a date.”

  “No, I'm sorry.”

  “You didn't do anything wrong,” he said by reflex. Christ, these situations could be thorny. With the way most men treated their female coworkers, women had every right to be on guard. True, Leyria was supposed to be a magical land of gender equality, but this wasn't Leyria. Who knows what she had experienced in the weeks since her arrival. “It's okay. I can understand how you'd get the wrong impression.”

  He stood up.

  Jack felt his cheeks burning and tried his best to ignore the sweat prickling on his forehead. “I'll be honest with you, Agent Valtez,” he said, backing away from the table. “I'm kind of a klutz when it comes to flirting and signals and all that. So, how about we work on this independently? You can send me your suggestions, and I'll send you mine.”

  A rectangular section of Jena's desk was segmented so that it could rotate on metal hinges. With a few taps, she ordered the glass surface to stand up at an oblique angle to form a makeshift screen.

  Her report on their latest operations appeared: black text on a white background. Pinching one paragraph with thumb and forefinger, she highlighted a section of text and double-tapped to delete. The wording there just wasn't quite right.

  Before she could go any further, the screen turned black and the words “incoming call: Peter Tombs,” blinked at her in large white letters. Relief flooded through her like the torrent from a broken dam.

  It had taken the better part of her afternoon to construct a plan to reveal Breslan for the treacherous scum that he was, and then she had called Jack into her office to give him the details. The one ingredient missing was the Minister of Justice.

  “Answer.”

  The screen lit up with the image of Tombs sitting behind the wooden desk in his office, directing a scowl into his lap. “Director Morane,” he said without looking at her. “You wanted to speak.”

  Jena felt her mouth tighten. This would need to be handled with some delicacy. “Thanks for getting back to me,” she said. “I'm sure you've read the story about a double agent among the Justice Keepers.”

  “Are you going to tell me it's a lie?”

  Jena closed her eyes, taking a deep breath through her nose. Anxiety clawed at her insides. “I wish I could,” she answered. “But I've seen evidence to suggest that the theory is credible.”

  On the screen, Peter Tombs looked up, and daylight reflected off the lenses of his glasses. “That's an unexpected admission, Director,” he said. “I assume that your people are taking appropriate action.”

  “I have evidence that implicates one of our Senior Directors,” she lied. Her Nassai responded with a burst of shame; they really hated dishonesty. Jena couldn't blame the poor creature.

  After mulling it over for several hours, she had come to the conclusion that what she was about to do was morally questionable at best, and if she screwed up, it would mean more than her career. She would find herself facing prison time. “I'm willing to share this information with you,” she went on, “but given the delicacy of the situation, I'm sure you can understand that we must apprehend the Keeper in question with minimal collateral damage.”

  “I can agree to that.”

  Crossing her arms over her chest, Jena looked down into her lap. “So we've got a problem,” she said, eyebrows rising. “If I send you the data, it could tip off the culprit, and who knows what he might do.”

  Tombs watched her with a flat stare. The man had mastered the art of hiding his emotions. “I take it you want another meeting,” he said. “Should I assemble the upper ranks of the RCMP and CSIS?”

  “No, that would be too obvious,” she replied hastily. “News of a major gathering like that would find its way back into the wrong ears, and we could be dealing with yet another terrorist attack. No, this has to be private. Just you and me.

  “I want you to book a hotel room somewhere far away from Ottawa. That way the chances of Leo showing up will be slim. Make up some excuse about a private family emergency. I will meet you and deliver the evidence in person.”

  Peter Tombs frowned, turning his head so that he wasn't looking directly at her. He blinked several times behind his glasses. “You realize that if you're the traitor, I will be putting my life in your hands.”

  A sudden flush singed Jena's cheeks. Closing her eyes, she nodded to him. “Yes, sir, I'm aware of that,” she said. “You're just going to have to ask yourself whether or not you trust me.”

  He grimaced, then shook his head. “You don't make it easy, Director,” he muttered, sitting back in his chair. “But I believe that your efforts to capture this terrorist have been genuine. When shall we meet?”

  “Tonight would be too soon,” she said. “Someone might check the call logs and discover that I had been speaking to you.” That was only one small concern. She needed to make sure that Slade and Breslan had been back long enough to accidentally discover the meeting before she put her plan in motion. “I'd say two nights from now.”

  “Very well,” he said. “I have family in Vancouver.”

  “Good.”

  When he hung up, the call window vanished to be replaced with her unfinished report. She swiped that aside with a quick flick of her finger, then brought up the main menu. Icons awaited her on a green background.

  Tapping one, she placed a call to Jack and watched as the screen turned black. The fear in her belly was probably going to give her an ulcer, but one way or another, she was committed now.<
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  Jack's face appeared, and from the way he shielded his head with one hand, it was clear he was walking in the rain. “Hello?”

  “You're on,” she said.

  Rain fell upon the shingled rooftops of large houses on the other side of the street, each one snug and secure behind a line of trees along the curb. Their leaves had turned yellow, but the foliage was still dense enough that Jack could only see a few chimneys sticking up.

  This suburban street in Lower Town was all but deserted as evening turned to night; everyone wanted to stay indoors and keep warm. That served him quite well. He'd been standing here for nearly half an hour.

  Jack stood on the sidewalk in jeans and a brown jacket, his hair drenched from the deluge. “Come on, Pete,” he muttered. “I'm freezing out here. This is no way to treat a man who's recovering.”

  Behind him, a stone wall marked the border of Peter Tomb's property, shielding him from anyone inside the house who might glance out a window. Still…he felt more than a little exposed out here. There was no getting around it though; he absolutely had to talk to the Minister of Justice, and digital communication was out of the question.

  Jack shut his eyes tight, raindrops rolling over his face to drip from his chin. “If I get pneumonia,” he mumbled, “I'm blaming you, Jen. Somehow this plan of yours has me doing all the dirty work.”

  A few minutes later, a sleek black car pulled to the curb and settled to a stop, its taillights flaring for half a moment. The back door opened just long enough for a man to get to his feet.

  Peter Tombs lifted an umbrella above his head. When he looked up, he blinked at Jack. “Agent Hunter,” he said cautiously. “Is there some particular reason you're standing in front of my house.”

  Biting his lower lip, Jack held the man's gaze. “I can think of a few things,” he said, his eyebrows rising. “I'd love another statutory holiday in November, but I suppose you'll have a hard time pushing that through Parliament.”

  “Very funny.”

  Jack crossed his arms and approached the other man with his head down. “We need to talk,” he whispered. “I'm aware of your recent phone conversation with my boss, and I need to inform you of a few things.”

  Peter Tombs scowled. “Things just keep getting more and more complicated,” he muttered. “Are you planning to tell me that Director Morane is the traitor?”

  “No,” Jack said. “She sent me.”

  “For what purpose?”

  “Well for starters, you're not going to Vancouver on Friday. There is no meeting, and there is no evidence. The call was bait to lure the traitor out into the open. Do not cancel your reservations.

  “We need to make the traitor think that you and Jena are indeed going to have a secret meeting. With any luck, he'll show up intending to kill you both, and we'll be able to take him into custody.”

  Tombs squinted at him, shaking his head slowly. “These little games of yours make it hard to trust you, Agent Hunter,” he whispered. “I had to work up enough faith to book a ticket, and now it was all a lie.”

  “If looks could kill, they probably will.”

  “I beg your pardon.”

  Jack felt his lips curl into a small smile. He touched two fingers to his forehead. “It was a line from an old Peter Gabriel song,” he explained. “The moral of the story is don't play politics.”

  “I see.”

  Wiping moisture off his brow with the back of his hand, Jack backed away from the other man. “We had to make it look real,” he whispered. “If anyone goes to the trouble of breaking Jena's encryption, they'll find your call.”

  Peter Tombs frowned, then lowered his eyes to the ground. “And you're hoping that they'll do just that,” he muttered. “You want them to discover the call by accident so that they will think it's legit.”

  “Someone's been reading their spy novels.”

  “It's still a tenuous plan, Agent Hunter,” the other man said. “There's no guarantee your target will think to check the call logs. You could have put all this effort in for no real payoff.”

  “You just leave that to me,” Jack replied. “All I need you to do is go about your business like everything's normal. Pretend that you're headed out west in two days, then casually slip out of town on Friday. Can you do that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay,” Jack said. “Stay safe.”

  The easy part of the plan was over, and now he had to do something that did not sit well in his stomach. Rain streamed down the windshield of his rumbly old Honda Fit, occasionally brushed aside by the wipers.

  When the water cleared, he saw tall skyscrapers on either side of him and the bright red taillights of a Ford Escort stopped at the nearest intersection. The last thing he wanted to do was burn a bridge, but that might just happen if he went through with this gambit. The things he did for the people he called friends!

  “You're gonna give yourself a stress headache,” he said, trying to ignore the damp bangs plastered to his forehead. “Things will go however they go; stop obsessing.”

  He managed to find a parking spot along the curb – no small accomplishment here on Albert Street – and got out with a little reluctance. Exposing himself to the elements again was not fun. For the fiftieth time, he wished he'd brought an umbrella.

  His destination was a small Irish pub built into the face of a skyscraper, a quaint little establishment with the words “The Fox and the Pheasant” in big green letters above the door.

  Once inside, he found himself in a large room where wooden tables were spaced out on a dark green carpet and booths lined every wall but one. Lights in the shape of old lanterns provided just enough illumination to make the place seem cozy.

  On his left, the bar was staffed by a tall man in a black shirt. Thin stubble along a square jawline and salt-and-pepper hair would make this bartender quite a prize for any woman who could get his attention.

  He found Selena in the back.

  She sat in a booth in blue jeans and a black top with a silvery pattern on the collar, hunched over to rest her chin in the palm of her hand. Damn, he thought. Okay, Jack, let's keep it professional.

  “Hey.”

  She looked up at him with a startled expression, blinking several times. “Hey!” she replied. “I know I told you to call me when you had a decent story, but I didn't expect to hear from you so soon.”

  Jack sat down across from her.

  Crossing his arms over his chest, he leaned over the table to speak in a soft voice. “I need you to do something for me,” he began. “I need you to write a very specific story for Friday's paper.”

  Her face went bone-white as she looked up to stare down her nose at him. “You're telling me to write propaganda?” she asked, arching a golden eyebrow. “Do you have any idea how offensive that is?”

  “Shh!”

  “No, I will not 'shh!' ”

  Baring his teeth, Jack squeezed his eyes shut. He drew in a soft, hissing breath. “I am not asking you to write propaganda,” he whispered. “I am only asking you to help me catch the inside man I told you about.”

  The skepticism on her face was apparent, but she managed to calm herself just long enough to ask the next logical question. “How exactly will a story do that? You'll forgive me if I have some doubts.”

  He laid out Jena's plan to lure Breslan – or whoever else was feeding Leo inside information – to Vancouver. With each point of logic, he watched her expression soften. They needed a way for the traitor to find out about the meeting, something that did not look like a deliberate attempt to grab his attention. “You put together a story where you claim that an inside source in the RCMP told you about a secret meeting between Peter Tombs and my boss, Jena Morane,” he said. “A meeting in which she will provide documented evidence of treason among the Justice Keepers. You print it on Friday so that when the traitor reads it, it will look like a serendipitous revelation at the last second.”

  Selena flinched, then turned her face away from him. She
pressed three fingertips to her forehead. “You realize this could end my career,” she murmured. “Even if you catch the traitor, should anyone find out that it was a lie…”

  “I'm sorry. If there were any other way…”

  “That's small comfort.”

  Jack lifted his chin to squint at her. “People are dying out there,” he said, shaking his head in disdain. “The way I see it, you can either take the risk and help me or not, but I'm not going to coddle you.”

  Selena closed her eyes, taking deep, calming breaths. Her head sank until her chin was touching her chest. “All right, I'll do it,” she said. “So is this the part where you try to appeal to my ambition by agreeing to scratch my back now that I've scratched yours?”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “No, I'm not going to bribe you,” he said. “Either you're in or you're out. Make up your own mind.”

  “I'm in.”

  Jack stood with a deep breath, bowing his head to her. “Thank you…” he whispered, surprised at the slight tremble in his own voice. “I know I'm asking a lot of you, but if we can pull this off, life in this city might go back to normal.”

  He turned to go, but spatial awareness gave him a vision of a slightly blurry Selena glaring at him. “Agent Hunter,” she said softly. “Remember those points you earned the other day? Consider them revoked.”

  “I can live with that.”

  Chapter 25

  A two-lane highway cut through a forest of tall trees with bright green leaves on their branches, rising slowly up a gentle slope. In the distance, she saw snow-capped mountains beneath the cloudless blue sky.

  The view through the windshield of her small auto was quite breathtaking. Though most of the settlements on Alios were situated in the planet's tropical region, there were temperate zones full of majestic forests just waiting to be explored.

  Anna bit her lip, looking up to stare through the window. “Almost there now,” she murmured, squinting into the distance. “Just my luck that I have to work on a lovely day like this.”