Masks (Out of the Box Book 9) (26 page)

“Riddle me this, though,” Welch said, turning back around, frown of deep thought on his face. “If you were the type of person looking to—I dunno, blow up the FBI in New York and send a meta to destroy the US Attorney’s office … why would you rob a bank out here? Just to draw the cops away? Because … it didn’t really pull presence from either of those places.”

I settled in for a second to think. “They’d only do it if they could get something from here. Something that the bank had in common with—” I stopped. “No, that doesn’t track. Banks have nothing to do with the Justice Department.” I paused, and something occurred to me. “Did you ever figure out what happened to the SWAT team on scene?”

He stared off into the distance. “No … no, I never heard …” He blinked a few times. “You don’t think—”

“If they were hitting the FBI building … would the NYPD SWAT team van get them access?” I asked. “Because, otherwise, they might be holding onto it for future plans.”

“I think it’s entirely possible it would get them access, yes,” Welch said. “We work with the Bureau on … things.” I liked the sound of vague there. “It could get them in the door, at least.”

“Shooting their way in from there … might have allowed them to finish the job,” I said, chewing on the inside of my cheek as I spoke. “And bring a bomb in to send the building to the ground. But … why not just use the meta with the glass powers to wreck the place from the get go? Why go through with mercenaries at all?”

“If it’s a revenge plot, the US Attorney prosecutes federal crimes,” Welch said, spitballing with me. “Some con could have a grudge. Someone … currently under indictment could be pissed off—”

I frowned as that tripped something for me. “Where do they keep evidence for current prosecutions?” Welch stared at me flatly. “Because it seems to me if someone wanted to trash their case—”

“They’d blow up and smash all the evidence while making it look like something else,” Welch said, nodding along. “That’s … that’s nasty. A lot of people died to pull that one off.” He shuddered. “Who would be that damned callous?”

“A lot of criminals, if they could,” I said with bracing honesty, drawing a nod from him. “The real question is … who could afford it? Because gun-thugs, at least foreign ones with military experience like these guys, plus rifles, specially-outfitted garbage trucks with mini-subs, and super-powered metas? They don’t tend to come at discount prices.”

Welch nodded. “Someone put a lot of bucks behind this.”

“So I guess the question is,” I said, thinking it over, “who’s the richest, most vicious person that you’ve seen the FBI and US Attorney go after?”

“That’s a long list,” he said, cringing. “Mafiosos, politicians, heads of corporations caught with their fingers in the cookie jar, polluters, real estate developers caught up in bribery schemes—”

“Okay, so, yeah … long list,” I said. “We can probably rule out all but the richest, though.”

Welch thought it over. “There is one name that’s coming right to mind, probably because I just ran across her yesterday—Nadine Griffin.”

“The Queen of Wall Street?” I asked. “She’s a white collar princess.”

“There’s some darkness in that lady,” Welch said with a shake of his head. “I got a bad feeling about her. She’s a real nasty piece of work.”

“She’s a scammy insider trader who stole from her clients,” I said. “Don’t get me wrong, I’ve met all sorts of scuzzbuckets, but the leap from money-grubbing thief to … planning on this scale …” I just shook my hand. “That would just about require flight powers. Of sociopathy.”

“Ehh, you think what you want,” he said, “but I’ve met this broad, and she’s bad news of the sort—”

“If you say ‘broad’ and ‘bad news’ in the same sentence, I think you hit pulp novel bingo.”

He smiled faintly. “She was giving me an itch in a bad place.”

“Your taint?”

“I don’t know what that is,” Welch said. “But she triggered my instincts—”

“Frost triggered your instincts, and he’s a moron.”

“But a dangerous moron.”

“To impressionable twenty-something women who want to remain syphilis-free, maybe,” I cracked. “To the rest of us, he’s just another goober whose primary use in life is to ice a drink.” I gave it a moment’s thought and started to lift off into the air. “Still … maybe I could pay a visit to this Nadine Griffin. Where do you think she is?”

“Her office is on Wall Street,” he said. “Look for the building with the big hole in the side where a window ought to be.” He glanced at his watch. “If she’s at home, she’s got a mansion out on Long Island. I’ll text you the address.”

“Grazie,” I said, taking off. “I’ll rattle a few bushes of my own and see what I can come up with.”

“I thought you already gave me everything you h—” I lost his words to the wind. It didn’t really matter; I needed to talk to Nadine Griffin and one other person before I had anything else for him, anyway.

I’d read all about Nadine Griffin, and she sounded like a real ball buster. As someone who had busted a few of those myself, I was looking forward to meeting her. I took to the air and cleared the buildings, heading south for Wall Street, figuring I’d check her office first. Who went home at two in the afternoon on a weekday, anyway?

When she heard a knock at the office door a few minutes later, Jamie thought for sure that it was Clarice coming back for another round, or perhaps to settle some other bit of routine business. “Come in,” she said, her voice muted, their last conversation still pressing on her as she brooded in the office, the sun’s rays cast long across her floor as the yellow disc slid lower in the sky.

The door opened, and to her surprise, there stood Jacob Penny, his eyes less lively than when she’d seen him before. Yesterday he’d seemed exuberant; today he seemed almost morose.

“Uh, hi,” Jamie said, coming to her feet and slamming her knee against her desk. The whole thing rattled and moved back a few inches, and a wracking pain radiated from her kneecap and almost dropped to her chair again. “Oww,” she said as she took the weight off that leg, standing there with one eye squinted shut, the other open to look at her visitor. “Hello,” she forced out.

“Are you all right?” Penny asked, easing into the room. He had his leather briefcase in hand, holding it before him like it was a shield to protect him from a well-placed kick. He bumped the door shut behind him with his backside and stood there, not coming any closer to the desk, a statue that was turning back and forth slowly with nervous energy. His shirt’s top button was still undone.

“Fine,” Jamie said, the pain starting to fade slightly as her surprise at seeing him increased. “What … brings you by today, Mr. Penny? I didn’t think we had an appointment—”

“We didn’t,” Penny said, clearing his throat nervously as he avoided her eyes. “I was just dropping in to—did you go to the gym today?” He asked, and when she shook her head, looking curiously at him, he pointed to her head. “I just—your hair. Looked like you might have worked out.”

Jamie stood there, stricken, and raised a hand to run it through her hair. It was tangled, a mess, probably from the time she spent in the water.
Clarice couldn’t have mentioned that while she was running me through the ringer for everything else?
She pulled her hand out of her hair; it was a lost cause that could only be solved by a shower and starting over, and besides, it was bringing out the briny smell when she touched it. Her fingers passed under her nose and she almost gagged at the resurgence of the stink, which she had faded from her notice until now. “I, uhm—racquetball game,” she said, trying to find some cover.

“Ah,” Penny nodded. “I, ah … wanted to stop by in person because the underwriters for your loan called me this afternoon.” He looked to be in exquisite discomfort. “They told me … the bank is going to have to decline your application for an extension as well as the additional credit.”

Jamie felt like falling back, just dropping into her chair in hopes that it was there. “Decline?”

“I’m sorry,” he said, still holding his briefcase handle with both hands. “They wouldn’t tell me what the criteria were for the declination, which is—really weird, actually.” He stared off into space for a moment, then looked contrite and cast his gaze downward. “But that doesn’t matter to you, of course. I’m so sorry. I was … I was looking forward to working with you and Barton Designs on this.”

“I …” Jamie stood there, stunned, as though someone had just taken a pickaxe and driven it between her eyes. “But … I thought … things were looking good?”

“I thought so, too,” Penny said, shaking his head. “I mean, we’ve made loans to companies in worse straits with less capital on hand, more credit risk … I mean … I don’t know. I guess this is what the underwriters get paid for, though, and I don’t understand their problem, especially given the collateral here in your—”

Jamie lost focus on what he was saying, the old her, the tireless CEO, stepping out from the back of her mind, her own voice droning in her ear.
We don’t have enough capital to fill outstanding orders.
We don’t have enough inventory on hand to fill even a quarter of our orders.
Our biggest accounts are still ninety days from paying in full on some of their current …

Oh … oh … no …

Clarice was right.

I stopped paying attention and look what happened
.

“Are you all right?” Penny asked, and Jamie came back to herself, dry mouth and all.

“I’m … yes, I’ll be fine,” she lied, and she sat back down in her chair, a little more forcefully than she’d intended. “Thank you for … coming and telling me in person.” Her voice sounded quiet inside her own head, muffled as though she had a cold. She certainly felt sick, though it was more of a twist in the stomach from the uncertainty of what would happen next—or perhaps the certainty of knowing that they were almost assuredly finished. And in one stroke, no less.

“It was the least I could do,” Penny said, and then he looked as though he might want to say something else, but he blushed, and opened the door instead. “I was looking forward to working with you.” And he eased himself out as Jamie sat there, watching him go at first, and then, after the door clicked closed, staring at the piles of invoices and paperwork and compliance filings and tax documents … realizing that not one of them meant a damn thing now.

Barton Designs was done.

Apparently, Nadine Griffin went home at two in the afternoon on weekdays. Bankers’ hours were getting shorter all the time. Welch had texted me her address, so I pulled it on my phone’s GPS as I left Wall Street, taking off from the roof of Nadine Griffin’s building, where I’d stopped to concentrate on setting my next destination and bringing up one of my contacts to dial. The wind was rushing in my face as the Bluetooth headset I’d grabbed on my way out of the hotel felt snug in my ear, hissing and ringing to let me know my call was going through.

There was a cool female voice at the other end. “Veronika Acheron speaking.”

“I like how you pretend you don’t know it’s me calling,” I said.

“Well, I assume you’re calling me for business and not to meet for a happy hour to swap stories, so I try to keep my tone professional—because I love money more than answering the phone, ‘Hey, girl.’ At least a little more.”

“Honestly, if having you burn off half my face with plasma hands didn’t dissuade me from hiring you, answering your phone like a Ryan Gosling meme isn’t likely to flip the table, if you know what I mean.”

“I figured burning off your face was a key factor in you hiring me,” Veronika said, hiding her amusement under the veneer of professionalism. “By the way, I haven’t heard from Kat Forrest yet. I figured she’d be calling five minutes after she landed.”

“She probably hasn’t even picked up the casefile yet, honestly,” I said. “But I appreciate you being willing to babysit.”

“Long as my pretty face doesn’t end up on camera and your check clears, I’ll help your blondie Nancy Drew all you want,” Veronika said. “But I assume since you’re calling me, you have reasons of your own that don’t involve your adopted child.”

“Reasons of my own?” I asked. “More like problems of my own. You watching the news at all?”

“Not today,” she said, a little tautly. I thought I could a heartbeat monitor somewhere in the distance behind her, but it was pretty faint and staticky, what with the wind blowing on my end and the limitations of the phone on hers stifling my meta hearing. “Why? What did you do this time?”

“Very little, surprisingly,” I said. “I’m in New York—”

“Hold on,” and I could hear her pull the phone away from her ear for a second as she punched the speaker button and a door closed behind her. “I see … FBI headquarters in Manhattan destroyed … and the US Attorney’s office … and a bank robbed … car crashes in the streets … a container ship blowing up off Long Island …” She put the phone back up to her ear and the hiss of the speakerphone and the tinny quality of her voice ceased. “Yeah. I could have figured out you were in New York just by looking at the headlines.”

“Har har,” I said. “Listen, the US Attorney’s office … it got hit by a meta who turned the whole place to glass.”

“Ouch,” she said. “I’m not an architect, but I’m guessing without concrete and steel to hold it up, that sucker collapsed on itself.”

“It’s in slivers, yes. But the problem is, we have nothing on the meta who caused it. No type, no idea, nothing. I figured you—”

“Ooh, I can feel the butter coming out, and I’m worried for my arteries. I’m about to get slathered.”

“—as a much wiser, more traveled, and quite brilliant meta with worlds of experience—”

“I like that better than ‘old.’ Good call.”

“—and someone with a keen insight into the domain of metas for hire … might have some idea who could have done this.” I paused a second as I flew over Brooklyn’s congested shorefront. “Or, failing that, maybe a type name for what kind of meta is responsible.”

“The latter, yes, for sure,” she said. “I don’t know that there’s an official type name, but I’ve always called them ‘Alchemists.’ They’re a lot like that family of idiots you ran across in Nebraska—”