Anew: Book One: Awakened (27 page)

Thousands of his people living
without the restrictions that other workers in the city face. With their own
residences, schools, recreational areas, food supplies, even their own armories
and what amounts to a private military force.

“Ian must be a thorn in the side
of some people,” I murmur. Certainly those among the power elite who are intent
on running the world strictly for their own benefit aren’t likely to appreciate
his far more egalitarian approach.

Gabriella Darque stops in
mid-stride and shoots me an assessing look. “Figured that out, did you? Is it
possible that you’re not just…ornamental?”

I grimace. “Please don’t say he
called me that.”

She grins reluctantly. “No, he
didn’t, I just assumed it. But I should have figured that he’d get bored with
anyone who didn’t have a brain.” Her brow furrows. “Instead, he brings you here
and pulls out all the stops to make sure that you’re taken care of.”

She looks me over again and says
sternly, “Since you’re not a dumb little fluff bunny after all, there’s
something I want to know. What the hell are you doing distracting him? He needs
to be focused right now. Lives will depend on that soon, including his.”

I stare at her in confusion that
turns all too quickly to dismay. Suddenly, the scene I witnessed in the garage
when we arrived--armed men in uniforms moving purposefully, preparing--takes on
an all-too ominous meaning.

Has Ian decided not to wait for
the authorities to deal with the HPF, as Adele believes that they will? Is he
going after them himself?

I have a sinking feeling that I
already know the answer and with it comes a heavy sense of dread. Too clearly,
I remember how he was on the polo field, consumed by reckless aggressiveness,
without regard for his own safety or the safety of others.

My chest tightens at the possibility
that he will be putting himself in danger for my sake while in such a state. If
he does, I have to assume that he won’t be alone. At least some of the people I
see around me, those in the black uniforms and perhaps others also relaxing
with their families, will soon be in harm’s way because of me.

I hesitate, trying to decide how
to respond. Ian isn’t likely to have told anyone who--what--I really am or why
he brought me to Pinnacle House. That being the case, I can’t reveal what I
suspect is about to happen. All I can do is express some measure of my regret.
And my fear.

“Please believe me, Miss Darque.
The last thing I would ever want to do is cause any kind of problem for Ian.”
My voice cracks. “I told him it would be better if I wasn’t here but he
wouldn’t listen.”

And now it’s too late. Pinnacle
House is a fortress. No one gets in--or out--without its master’s permission.

She considers that--and me--for
a moment before she nods. “Call me Gab. You’re looking a little pale. What do
you say we skip the rest of the tour and grab a cup of coffee? Hell, I’ll even
throw in a gooey pastry.”

My stomach lurches. “Just the
coffee would be fine. I’m off sugar for awhile.”

“Oh, yeah? How come?”

I find myself telling her about
Hayden as we walk to a nearby coffee shop and order drinks.

“Scotch bombs are the bomb,
girl,” she says, laughing. “You gotta watch those things. The only safe way to
eat them is washed down with plenty of beer.”

“I’ll have to remember that,” I
say as we find a table out in front, well enough apart from anyone else that we
won’t be overheard.

The soy-something-something
latte that I order turns out to be not bad. I sip it slowly and study my
surroundings.

There are even more children
than I thought, and more families. As engaged as I am in people watching, I
can’t help but notice that I’m coming in for my own share of curious looks.

Whether because I’m with Gab or
because news of my arrival at Pinnacle House has already spread, people seem
curious about me. Their glances aren’t offensive or threatening in any way. On
the contrary, they just seem to have a friendly interest in the woman Ian has
brought into his domain.

The guilt I feel at the
possibility that they could suffer because of me quickly ratchets up even
further.

“I’ve worked for Ian for five
years,” Gab says. She’s watching me carefully. I have the impression that she
doesn’t miss much.

“There’s no one I respect more,”
she goes on. “He’s smart, tough, and absolutely reliable, or at least he always
was. But right now something’s wrong. First, he goes off for ten days on
personal business, unheard of for him. When he comes back, he’s definitely not
happy. Until suddenly he is, only then he isn’t again. A guy who’s normally
rock steady has turned into a friggin’ emotional roller coaster. I think you’re
the reason why.”

She pauses, giving me an opening
to deny that. When I fail to take it, she shrugs and goes on.

“He’s never brought a woman to
Pinnacle House before. Now you’re here but he’s keeping his distance, having me
show you around and make sure that you’re comfortable instead of doing that
himself. Whatever’s going on between the two of you, something isn’t
hunky-dory.”

At the thought of all that isn’t
right between Ian and me, my throat tightens. I have to press my lips together
to hold back the short, hard sob that wells up without warning.

Gab groans. “Shit, you’re not
going to cry, are you?”

My head jerks up. I blink fast
to hide the tears that threaten. “Of course not! What do you take me for?”

Her tone softens. “You kind of
remind me of Daphne.”

“Who’s she?”

“The love of my life.”

I can’t hide my wistfulness.
“You’re lucky to have someone like that. Does she know?”

“Know what?”

“How you feel about her?”

“Of course she does. Why would I
let her go around not--”

She breaks off and stares at me.
“That’s how it is? You’re in love with him but you’re not sure how he feels?”

The question comes as a shock. I
know nothing of love, having never experienced it. I don’t even know if I’m
capable of so profound and mysterious an emotion. The thought that I might not
be fills me with sadness.

“There’s nothing like that
between us.” I say quickly. “We’re just…” What exactly? Our relationship hardly
fits any of the usual categories. Lamely, I pick one. “Friends.”

Gab looks amused. “Oh, okay.
Since you two are ‘friends’, you shouldn’t have any trouble figuring out what’s
bothering Ian and fixing it.”

My face heats. “I wish that were
the case but the fact is I don’t know all that much about him and I’m afraid
that I understand even less.”

She hesitates and I have to
assume that she’s wondering how the only woman Ian has ever brought to Pinnacle
House can be so ignorant about him.

Finally, she says, “What do you
want to know?”

Her offer convinces me that I’ve
found another person who truly cares about Ian. That emboldens me.

“Anything you can tell me,
please.”

She knocks back the last of her
espresso, stares at me for a moment, and says, “He’s a Patriots fan, don’t ask
me why. He makes great chili. He plays lethal handball, likes kickboxing, and
has one of the highest kill shot ratings ever recorded. He’s brilliant, holds
several hundred patents, and has a bunch of honorary degrees.”

Her gaze darkens. “He hated his
father. He’s extremely protective of women. What else do you want to know?”

So much that I have no idea
where to begin. I’m tempted to ask her about the women in his life besides
Susannah but I know that would be overstepping.

“What about his enemies?” I know
beyond any doubt that they must exist. “Who are they?”

Gab hesitates. “I can reel off
names for you, men and women who hold high office and who hate his guts. But
most of them aren’t much more than puppets. The real danger lies with those who
work behind the scenes, pulling the strings. They’re unchecked and unaccountable
to anyone.”

A possibility occurs to me. “Is
Charles Davos one of them?”

She shoots me a hard, fast look.
“Did Ian tell you that?”

“No, he’s hardly told me
anything. But I’ve met Davos.” I shudder at the memory. “There’s something off
about him.”

“You think? The guy’s a snake.
And he’s not alone. Ian’s been working to find out who the others are. Or at
least he was until this HPF thing came along.”

She catches herself, as though
she’s said too much but I hardly notice. I’m too busy swallowing the fear and
guilt that come with the confirmation of my suspicions.

“Do you know when Ian is planning
to act?” I ask faintly.

“Not yet. The situation is still
being assessed. But it’s going to be soon and if he’s in less than full control
of himself--”

I think again of his behavior on
the polo field when his explosive aggressiveness and disregard for his own
safety placed him and others at risk. In a confrontation with the forces of the
HPF, the consequences could be far worse.

My own concerns seem petty by comparison.
I put them aside without a second thought.

“What can I do?” I ask.

“You’re not going to talk him
out of what he’s planning,” she warns. “The best you can hope for is to make
sure he’s focused. To do that--” She looks at me shrewdly. “How far are you
willing to go?”

My throat is so tight that it
hurts to speak. But that pain is meaningless compared to the dark fear in the
pit of my stomach.

“As far as I have to. If he were
harmed because of me--” I break off, unable to continue. Every other consideration,
including the need to make my own choices and live my own life, pales into
insignificance.

A flash of compassion darts across Gab’s face. Quietly, she
says, “Then figure out what the problem is between you two and fix it. Whatever
that takes.”

Ian

“T
he
building was vaporized,” Hollis says. “There’s nothing left but a hole in the
ground. The authorities are running around like chickens with their heads cut
off but our guys are getting the job done. They’re doing soil analyses to
identify the explosives. Meanwhile we’ve got people fanning out, looking for
anyone associated with the Institute who’s still alive.”

“Did they find anyone yet?” I
ask.

We’re on the operations floor,
always busy but now with the quickening tempo that indicates a mission is
imminent. Data flows across the walls of screens, assembling and reassembling
itself into patterns.

Operators are moving images,
matching voice prints, putting together what amounts to a four-dimensional
jigsaw puzzle, three in the physical space that the Institute occupied and the
surrounding area, the fourth as a timeline, which is racing by frustratingly
fast given how little we know yet.

For all that I can appreciate a
good laser weapon or a drone-mounted canon, the fact remains that information
is the ultimate power. Ordinarily, I’d be totally focused on putting it
together but there’s no point lying to myself. Amelia’s nearness has blown my
concentration to hell.

After the Rolls, I was
determined to stay away from her for both our sakes but circumstances have made
that impossible. I’ve never believed in fate but I do have a healthy respect
for sheer dumb luck. I’ve seen too many battles--and lives--turn on it. These
days, it’s definitely not working in my favor.

Reminding myself that nothing
matters more than her safety, I take a breath and give Hollis my undivided
attention.

“No,” he says, “and they
probably won’t. The place went up right after 9:00 am local time, which means
everyone who worked there would have been on site. The only chance is if
someone was traveling or out sick.”

I nod. “Our people need to talk
to the families before the authorities get to them.”

Down in the bowels of the
political-media-bureaucratic complex, clever gnomes will be crafting a story to
explain the explosion in terms that will reassure the public. Once that’s done,
no one will be allowed to deviate from it.

“I’m betting they’ll go with
gas,” Hollis says.

Clearly, he’s been thinking
along the same lines that I have. Accidental gas explosions are a favorite
cover for all sorts of non-accidental events. But not this time.

“They’ll have a problem with
that,” I say. “The Presidio complex gets its power from its own fusion reactor.
It was one of the first installed after they were authorized for commercial
use. There was a lot of publicity about it.”

“Then they’ll pin it on one of
the staff," Hollis says. "Make him or her out to be a suicidal nut
job, tragic event, blah, blah, move on, nothing to see. End of story.”

My eyes are on the big board as
I listen. The type of explosives present in the crater have been identified
along with a handful of fragments found near the site of the detonation.
Holographic images of them flash on the screens.

“Looks like there was some sort
of failsafe device,” I say.

All the evidence points to it
having been activated, which can only mean one thing. The HPF fuckers didn’t
just intend to destroy the Institute. First, they tried to raid the data files,
only to encounter an electronic tripwire intended to stop data loss at all
costs, including human lives. An extreme measure for any place to use but not a
complete surprise given the value of the replica technology and the controversy
that surrounds it.

The question is whether they
managed to get any of what they were looking for--especially anything that
could allow them to identify a specific replica--and transmit that information
to associates off site before they went up in smoke.

This complicates things. Badly.
I hoped for a quick, straightforward mission, the kind that can be kept under
the radar. Cut the head off the HPF snake and the body will die on its own.
Brutal but effective. That’s not in the cards anymore. Instead, it’s going to be
a whole lot messier.

Without taking my eyes from the
board, I say, “We’ll need the HPF leadership alive.”

I’m confident that they still
are. The privilege of having one’s body parts smeared across a bomb site is
reserved for the poor saps a whole lot further down the terrorist food chain.
If data was transmitted, the top guys will have it. More importantly, they can
be persuaded to tell us who they’ve shared it with beyond the HPF.

I can be very persuasive when I
need to be.

Information continues to sputter
in, most of it not particularly useful but all slowly adding to our
understanding of what happened.

“No one was off site,” Hollis
says when that’s been confirmed. “All one hundred and twenty-seven employees
were at work. Our operatives have made contact with about eighty percent of the
families and should have the rest interviewed within a few hours.”

The faces of those employees are
flashing on the screens above me. Men and women in about equal numbers, most on
the young side. Smart people who beat the odds and found meaningful, well-paid
work and put good lives together for themselves.

Until whatever future they
imagined they had was ripped away so fast that their brains probably had no
chance to even register what was happening. One moment they existed, the next
they were gone in a roar of heat and a flash of incandescent light. I’ve seen
worse ways to go--far worse--but that still sucks.

Under other circumstances, I’d
respect that those who have lost loved ones need time and space to grieve. But
that won’t work here. While they’re still stunned by the news, before they’ve
begun to process what’s happened, that’s when they’re most likely to give up
something useful.

“Keep at the relatives,” I say.
“Whatever they know, we need to know.”

The results stream in real time
across the screens. Mostly, my people are getting the usual. So-and-so was a
great guy/gal, no enemies, so much potential, how could such a terrible thing
have happened, and so on.

Usually, I have no trouble
concentrating on operations data no matter how repetitious or predictable some
of it may be. But now that I know where we’re heading, my thoughts keep turning
to Amelia--her strength and courage, the generosity of her spirit, her passion,
her trust. I can’t get her out of my mind.

With hindsight, I should have
run like hell the moment I learned that she existed. Instead, I let myself
forget what I’m capable of. What I am.

I suck in my breath as a bolt of
hollow pain stabs through me. Before it can fade, Hollis says, “Here we go.”

New information is flashing on
the center screen, the one to which everything of actionable importance is
routed. The image of a white-haired woman with a worn face that testifies to
the battle life has become for so many people appears. She’s the mother of a technician
killed in the explosion.

I can only guess at the sacrifices
she made to get her son the education and the opportunity to climb as high as
he did. With dignity that I have to admire, she reveals that he ran up a shit
pile of gambling debt in recent months playing at local casinos. He was worried
sick about it until a few days before, when he cheered up suddenly.

Hollis grins, or at least he
shows his teeth which for him is pretty much the same thing. “Touchdown,” he
says.

I nod. This is what we’ve been
waiting for. Somebody got the HPF assholes into the Institute and the odds are
good that it was the technician. Now we’ve just got to figure out how they met
up with him in the first place.

“Start with the casinos,” I say.
“I want social networks of every employee and anyone else linked to those
locations parsed down to the smallest detail. Somewhere in all that is somebody
with a connection to the HPF.”

“It’ll take awhile,” he
cautions.

“Just so long as we get the
answer before anyone else does.”

It’s only a matter of time now.
The techniques for plotting social networks to expose terrorist connections
were pioneered toward the end of the twentieth century, primarily during the
wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. They’ve been constantly refined ever since.

The quantum computers I have at
my disposal will already be crunching through virtually infinite amounts of
data to make sense of it in a way that would take humans months or longer. But
in the end it will come down to our intuition, our grasp of which results have
real significance, and our willingness to act.

I step aside to call Edward with
an update. The fact that he offered no pushback when I told him that I was
taking Amelia to Pinnacle House racked up a lot of points in his favor.

He adds a few more when he says,
“I want to be there when you question those HPF fuckers. We find out where
they've been getting their money, it will lead us to whoever’s really behind
all this, no matter how cleverly they think they’ve covered their tracks.”

 “Fair enough.” Ordinarily, I’d
never include anyone from outside but I know Edward. He won’t like what has to
happen anymore than I will but he won’t lose any sleep over it either.

When I get off the link, Hollis
says, “It’ll be several hours at least before we’re operational.” He drops his
voice a notch. “Whatever’s riding you, now’s the time to put it to rest.”

I hesitate but there’s no point
denying what we both know is true. My head is not where it needs to be. That
has to change and fast.

A big part of me knows that I
should just keep my distance from Amelia. But there will be all too much time
for that once the HPF is no longer a danger to her. Before then, I don’t want
her last memory to be of my threatening her yet again and making her feel like
a prisoner.

The plain, sobering truth is
that I don’t want her to think badly of me after everything is said and done,
and I’m no longer in her life. On a slightly better note, I need for her to
know that she truly is safe and that she's going to stay that way.

I tell myself that if I can
accomplish that much, I’ll be able to let the rest go.

I’m not a total dumbass; on some
level I know that’s a crock. But I don’t let that stop me. When a man is as
intent on making a fool of himself as I am, nothing better get in his way.

With a nod to Hollis, I leave
the operations floor.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

Amelia

Gab leaves me at the entrance to
the apartment. After prowling around aimlessly for a few minutes, I stop and
look out over the city.

A golden dusk is falling,
casting shadows that soften the corners of the buildings far below. To the
south, ships still come and go in the harbor. A few stars are already visible
low in the eastern sky.

By any measure, the view is
spectacular but I scarcely notice it. All my thoughts are of Ian.

Figure out what the problem
is.

That’s easy enough.

“I have to know that you’re
safe from any danger… including me.”

I am safe in Pinnacle House,
nothing can reach me there. But safe from Ian? How do I convince him that he
won’t harm me when I don’t even understand the source of his fear?

I’m only now beginning to
realize what a complex man he is. He projects a seemingly effortless aura of
authority that can be reassuring or intimidating depending on the circumstances.
Yet beneath that are dark shadows and a sense of vulnerability that make me
ache for the man he is and even more, for the boy he was.

The wounds he carries can’t be
fresh; their effects run too deep. Something happened to him early in life. I
am certain that it involved his father but beyond that I’m mired in frustrating
ignorance.

I’m struggling with that,
searching desperately for an answer, as I turn back to the room. My gaze falls
on a set of double doors that I haven’t noticed before.

Opening them, I find myself on
the threshold of a long, high-ceilinged gallery. Directly across from me is a
matching set of doors that must lead to other parts of the penthouse floor
where Gab indicated there were rooms for receptions and other company functions.

To the far left and right,
floor-to-ceiling glass walls look out over the expansive view. In between, the
space is filled with elegantly displayed paintings and sculptures.

The presence of such treasures
is a welcome surprise. While I have a working knowledge of art, this is the
first time I’ve been able to see so much of it for myself.

Along one side of the gallery is
a series of photographs. Those in sepia must be among the earliest ever taken,
depicting as they do scenes from the American Civil War. Others in
black-and-white show the upheaval of the world wars as well as endless local
conflicts, sometimes flaring into broader regional struggles, that continue to
the present day.