by Kay Hooper
He turned his head and looked at her, a faint smile lightening his expression. “The Department of Defense has some of the best and strongest firewalls in the entire cyberworld. Sensible, given the sort of information they routinely handle.”
“Noah.”
“No, I didn’t just hack into the DOD.” He paused, adding, “I have clearance, actually. But that wasn’t where I was.”
“It looked like it.”
“Supposed to. A number of the psychics I’ve kept in touch with over the years wanted a safe and secure way to contact me if they had to. If they were in trouble, or otherwise needed my help. It would have been easy enough to create a private e-mail account a lot more secure than the average person feels the need for, but . . .”
“You wanted real security.”
Bishop nodded. “So . . . I piggybacked onto the DOD, in a sense. Created a safe and very, very secure area inside those firewalls, undetectable by the DOD’s system, where each of them could leave me messages. None of them could communicate with each other, just me. Individual passwords, codes, all they needed to get through the firewalls and make contact with me without alerting anyone else. And I set it up so that if one of them did leave me a message, the program would send an innocent e-mail alert to my FBI account.”
“What sort of alert?”
“A note supposedly from a friend in law enforcement here in the South. Very innocent, nothing to send up flags.”
“Except to you.”
“Yeah. I can’t always be close to the laptop all the time, of course, but I check that account several times every day, and have the laptop set up to alert me with a tone if that note lands in my inbox even when I’m not online or if it’s the middle of the night.”
Miranda shook her head. “I thought you just plugged in your laptop in the bedroom every night to recharge it. Even with our connection . . . I had no idea what was really going on. It’s an automatic thing now, isn’t it? Something you don’t think about.”
“I suppose. It’s something I set up a couple of years before I found you again, when I was actively searching for psychics for the unit. And for you.”
“I have to say . . . it’s not entirely a bad thing to find out we still have our secrets even with the connection. Is it?”
He eyed her. “Trying to tell me something?”
Miranda smiled. “A little mystery is good for a relationship. That’s all.”
“Uh-huh.” He gazed at her a moment longer, then yanked his mind back to far more deadly mysteries. “Anyway, there’ve been no notes from Katie Swan—or Henry McCord.”
“So his client was right in believing Henry has disappeared too?”
“Looks that way. And if the client has his days straight, Henry must have been taken about a week ago.”
“They do move fast,” Miranda said, sobered. “Henry last week, Katie this week. And there were two other psychics you were concerned about around the end of last year. Two more disappearances.”
“Grace Seymore and Jeffrey Bell, clairvoyant and seer respectively. With Jeffrey, all the evidence pointed to him just up and moving, running away. He’d done it before, and the same thing was happening to him again. He tried to disappear into the woodwork, do his job and live quietly, but somebody got curious, looked into his background—and the whole circus started for him again. He couldn’t escape the desperate people begging him for whatever it was they needed to know.”
“So it looked like he packed up and left.”
“Yeah. Grace Seymore, on the other hand, was a more troubling case, at least at the time. She’s a born psychic, not triggered like Jeffrey by some kind of trauma. Her abilities had been getting stronger, and her control was erratic, but she was handling it. Mostly. Her second husband, apparently, couldn’t. The divorce was barely final when she disappeared. A concerned coworker came to check on her and found everything as it should have been at her house. Nothing disturbed, nothing missing—except Grace. Her car was in the garage, keys in the house, cell phone showing no suspicious calls, house phone the same.” He frowned again.
“What?” Miranda asked.
“The only odd thing, at least to me, was that her disappearance looked planned. But not obviously, if that makes any sense. She’d just gotten a nice inheritance from her grandmother’s estate and used some of that to pay off her house. All of her utility bills were autopays, and there was plenty in the bank account to cover those debits, even for a year or more. Her cleaning service showed up every week to take care of the house; they’d been paid in advance for six months of weekly cleanings.”
“The police didn’t find that suspicious?”
“It wasn’t unusual for her, according to the service. She’d been paying them ahead for the last couple of years. Her bank statements confirmed it. Friends said she didn’t like dealing with bills and finances, so had streamlined as much as possible. It made sense, given what her friends and neighbors and coworkers said about her. There was absolutely nothing to make the police suspicious.”
“Except that she was gone.”
Bishop nodded. “I never even found the hint of a trail to follow. Her ex had moved out of the country more than two weeks before she disappeared, had a cast-iron alibi for those weeks. No family to speak of, and a couple of distant cousins we finally located hadn’t heard from her in years. She was just gone. Then we got busy on the first of several difficult cases, and before I knew it my list of missing psychics was getting much too long to ignore.”
“What happened with Grace’s house?”
“Nothing. Her estate is large enough that she has both an attorney and a financial advisor, both honest. And they’re just continuing on with the last instructions they were given. The attorney hired a property manager to look after her place and the financial advisor is taking care of investments—conservative—and banking proceeds as instructed. They both act as if she’s coming back. And as far as the law is concerned, she could be. At least for the next seven years.”
“Until she can be declared legally dead.”
“Exactly.”
“If Henry disappeared from a job he was working on,” Miranda said, “and Grace disappeared from home, then we need to visit both places.”
“Yeah. And both are in or near Charleston.”
“That’s convenient.”
“Very,” Bishop said. “For someone.”
NINE
Brodie was restless. Tasha had slept all day and now into the early evening. Sleeping deeply. She hadn’t even stirred when the security guard from downstairs had indeed come to check on her; Brodie had invited the guard in and even encouraged him to peek into the bedroom, which he had done. And since it was obvious Brodie had made himself comfortable in the living room, a sports event on TV and the scent of coffee apparent, the fixings for a sandwich out on the kitchen counter, the guard had relaxed and had left the condo reassured that Tasha was in no danger.
Not something Brodie agreed with, except that she was in no danger from him.
After what had happened at the coffee shop, he wasn’t sure of much else. The connection he apparently had with Tasha after she had looked into his mind had caught him completely off guard. Over the years, he had been “read” or “scanned” by many psychics he was aware of, and quite possibly a few he’d had no awareness of; like most nonpsychics, his mind normally provided only minimal shielding against a psychic’s probing, and he’d only ever been able to actually feel the most powerful psychics when they scanned him.
But today . . . that had been different. At first, no, the same, not really sensing a presence in his mind even though he had known she was there. But then something had changed. His own memories had begun to surface without his volition, passing before his mind’s eye in scenes that moved faster and faster until they were only a blur.
Even more, he had begun to feel Tasha�
��s presence, feel her absorbing not only the memories, but his emotions as well. Hell, he’d almost been able to see her in his mind, not flinching even though some of his darker emotions had struck her like actual physical blows. She felt what he had felt. All he had felt. That had been a strange, unsettling sensation, and his instinct had been to draw back, to preserve something of himself, retain some sense of personal privacy.
But then something else happened, something he couldn’t explain even to himself. Tasha had gone deeper into his mind, below thought, vanishing into some dark place Brodie hadn’t recognized as being part of himself.
Really didn’t want to recognize if it was part of himself.
And if it wasn’t . . . then what was it? Where was it?
All he knew was that the experience was a confusing jumble after that. Something about a dark, chilly maze and Tasha being trapped there.
“A few psychics have reported that when they dropped their shields and read one of our Guardians initially, they were pulled deeper, seemingly by a third party. Into some kind of dark maze.”
“That’s the first I’ve heard of it.”
“Well, it’s never happened with you before, right? So there was no reason for you to know. Especially since we don’t know what it means. The few psychics reporting that said it wasn’t really a big maze, but a dark one, and that they felt compelled to follow a voice urging them toward the center of the maze.”
Was that the maze Murphy had spoken of? A maze to test the psychics Duran was interested in?
Inside his mind, and yet not. Tasha drawn deeper and deeper, until he could no longer see her. Another presence shadowing her, challenging her somehow. He had felt more than seen Tasha weakening, because she’d been in that dark place where he couldn’t see her, and yet he had somehow felt what was happening to her and instinctively reached out to help her.
When his fingers had wrapped around her wrists, he had been conscious of the strangest feeling. He couldn’t really describe it even to himself, except . . . he was connected. They were connected. Somehow a part of each other.
And closer than he had ever been to another human being in his life.
Closer than he had been even to Elizabeth.
—
“He found you,” Tasha said.
“Yes. I knew better than to make a scene, but I asked how he had found me. He seemed to take great pleasure in telling me that the student I had been slightly wary of was, in fact, one of theirs. They were everywhere, he said. Sooner or later, one of them had been bound to find me. So he had waited.
“And . . . he thanked me. Because I had, through that agent of theirs, given them a very valuable psychic.”
“The young powerful girl,” Tasha said slowly.
“Yes. He said they had her.”
“Jesus.”
“It made me feel sick. Sick and helpless, because he kept talking to me as if what he’d told me didn’t even matter. And what he was telling me then, was . . . terrifying. He was so calm, so matter-of-fact and sure of himself as he laid out my future.
“Quietly, reasonably. Implacably. Now that they had found me again, I wouldn’t be allowed to go free. My path was with him, and I had to accept that. I was intended for him, he said. We were a genetic match. I could not escape my destiny. John didn’t matter. My marriage didn’t matter. I was intended for Eliot.
“He was psychic; I couldn’t hide from him my revulsion or my soul-deep determination to do whatever was necessary to escape that fate. Even if it meant taking my incredible story public and making sure I could convince everyone it was true. That was in my mind. That was what he saw. That was the threat.”
Feeling a bit queasy herself, Tasha said slowly, “I don’t think I like where this is going.”
Elizabeth sighed. “If I had only guessed . . . But I didn’t. Even after what I had felt in Eliot, I didn’t know how far they would go to make sure their secrets weren’t revealed.
“Eliot got up and walked away. I should have remained where I was and waited for John. I should have stayed around people, because that offered me some protection, a truth you figured out for yourself. But I was frightened. I set out walking, taking a familiar shortcut across a park, meaning to meet John. Instead, I once again met Eliot. But this time, he had a gun.”
Tasha couldn’t say a word. She just lay there on her bed, on her side, and listened to the dark, lovely woman Brodie had loved.
“I don’t remember the shot,” Elizabeth said almost conversationally. “Not even the sound of it. I remember a blow to my chest that knocked me backward, and it was dark for a time. Very dark. Then I heard John’s voice calling me, and for a moment I could open my eyes, for a moment I could see his face. Just for a moment.”
Tasha was silent for several heartbeats, then said slowly, “I guess the rest is obvious.”
“I guess it is. My name is Elizabeth Lyon Brodie, and on the twelfth day of September ten years ago, I died.”
“And Brodie became a man with a mission.”
“Yes. Protecting people like you. Saving people like you. Because he couldn’t save me.”
—
Duran didn’t follow Murphy when she left him, though he did change his own location, taking the usual precautions. The meeting had given him much food for thought, and though he had not, he trusted, revealed much to Murphy, he’d been left feeling more than a little grim.
Brodie had always been a worthy opponent, and if Duran had privately considered them more equal than many in either his or Brodie’s organization, he had told himself it was simply because theirs really was a level playing field; between the two of them, it would always come down to a battle of wits, intelligence, strength, and strategy.
And, of course, sheer determination.
But if Brodie could tap into a psychic’s abilities . . . especially this psychic’s, Tasha Solomon’s . . .
That changed things.
That changed important things.
And even more so if Bishop had indeed become aware, perhaps even involved. Because he could cause them a great deal of trouble without having to do very much at all, positioned as he was inside the FBI.
Even the possibility caused Duran to rethink what he needed to accomplish at this particular meeting.
He had chosen as this meeting place somewhere a lot more open than a bar, and honestly he wasn’t sure if it was his dignity he mocked or that of the man he was meeting. He was sitting on a park bench beneath a lamppost illuminating the walking path, casually smoking a cigarette.
He felt more than heard the quiet engine of a very expensive car get as close to the path and the bench as was possible, heard a car door open and close with quite excessive noise. Like the footsteps approaching him, too quick and nervous.
Some people just couldn’t be quiet about things. And that could be dangerous to more than just their own lives.
“Jesus, Duran—”
“Sit down.”
After an instant’s hesitation, the other man sat. “I didn’t know you smoked,” he said.
“I don’t,” Duran said calmly. “But there are so few acceptable places to smoke nowadays that someone smoking on a park bench at night never causes a second thought in anyone’s mind.”
“You’re always aware of what people might think, aren’t you, Duran?”
“I’m still alive, aren’t I?”
That silenced the other man, but only for the space of a few heartbeats. When he finally spoke, it was measured rather than hasty or . . . disrespectful. “I had to slip away from the party. I can’t stay long, or I’ll be missed.”
“Since it’s a fund-raiser for your campaign, I imagine so.”
“The speeches are over and so is dinner, so it’s music and half-drunken dancing and a lot of political arguments. Still, I should get back there as soon as I can.”
“Generous donors?”
“Very. And a very wealthy political hostess here in Charleston wants to hold another on Friday. With, she tells me, a whole new crop of very rich people eager to back my campaign.”
Duran took a draw from the cigarette and blew the smoke out slowly. “That might not be such a good idea.”
“Campaigns cost money, Duran, a hell of a lot of money, you know that. And I can’t use any of your funding sources, not without a risk we’ve both agreed is too great. I have to go the normal, typical, political route—the squeaky-clean version. Fund-raisers and shaking a lot of hands and making a lot of speeches—and staying miles away from any scandal. No backroom deals, no lobbyists, no dirty money. Not a cent. You can spend money on your end, but it can’t be traced to me in any way. Not now and not years from now. That was the plan. Has anything happened to change that plan? The one you and your boss have spent decades working toward?” A tinge of mockery had crept into that polished, trained voice.
Duran took a final draw on his cigarette, then leaned forward to drop the butt onto the ground and crush it with his shoe.
Pleasantly, he said, “It might be worth your while to remember that you aren’t the only possible candidate we have. It’s our habit to have backup plans for our backup plans. So there are others standing in the wings, ready to . . . activate . . . their own political ambitions. Even a few who already have. Starting over at this point would not be so difficult. And we’re patient. We’re very, very patient.” He straightened and turned his head to look at the other man. “You have no idea. You have, in fact, recently become something of a complication. One I haven’t—yet—decided how best to deal with. In the meantime, if I were you, I wouldn’t value myself so highly that I forgot what my part was in that very careful plan.”
“I didn’t—”
“There have always been kingmakers. Think of it that way. It’s kinder to yourself than realizing you’re . . . only a puppet.”
