“Seventeen years old and mouthy as hell, and we just have to sit here and take it because you’re some kind of superpsycho?” He looked at Diana. “Is this out of respect for his abilities as a sociopathic murderer, or because we’re all afraid he’s going to snap and kill us?”
Nathan was older than I was by a good ten years; much younger than his credentials would suggest, though, because he, like most of the rest of the team, was a bit of a prodigy in his area of expertise. According to his file he had two masters and two doctoral degrees, most of them related to one form of research or another. He knew more about Mediterranean history than anybody I knew, which was especially impressive since one of the people I knew was Brooke/Nobody, who’d lived there for literally centuries. I knew this about Nathan because of his file, but also because he told us constantly, just like he always told us how he’d climbed his way out of the ghetto in Philadelphia, paying his own way through school and earning his first Ph.D. from Harvard before the age of twenty. He had accomplished a lot, and I respected that; what bugged me is that he knew so much about everything, and all he seemed to talk about was himself. How could I not antagonize him for that?
“He’s just staring at me,” said Nathan.
“He does that,” said Diana. “You don’t get used to it.” As much as I admired Diana, I was always secretly proud that I could unnerve her like that. She’d trained in the USAF Security Forces, one of the only armed services in America that trained women as snipers, and she had been their rising star. She’d been on the team since before I joined, so I wasn’t sure of the circumstances; the exact details were redacted from her file, just like Kelly’s. To be fair, so were mine—the team knew I’d killed three Withered, and they knew my mom had died in the final attack, but they didn’t know how. And they didn’t know anything about Marci.
I realized I was gripping the table edge so tightly my fingertips were turning white from the pressure. I couldn’t let myself think about Marci anymore. I counted my number pattern, a mental exercise that helped me calm down: one, one, two, three, five, eight, thirteen, twenty-one, thirty-four. Deep breath, in and out.
“This is definitely a gun,” said Kelly, still hunched over the photos. “That’s a good catch, John. I’ll call the others.”
“What does that tell us for sure, though?” asked Nathan. “She works late hours in a bad part of town; maybe she wants to be able to defend herself without morphing into a monster every time.”
“That’s entirely possible,” said Kelly. “On the other hand, our records say nothing about a concealed weapons permit, and yet she’s wearing one in a hospital. That’s two laws she’s breaking, which seems a little unnecessary for standard self-defense. We’ve had her under surveillance for weeks and we didn’t know anything about this gun until now. That means she really, really wants one, and she really, really doesn’t want anyone to know she has it, and those two together seem like a pretty good sign that something weird is going on.”
“That’s a lot of reallys,” I said.
“Sensitivity training,” said Nathan. I raised my eyebrow and he scowled. “Everyone else got to say it.”
The door to the conference room opened without a knock, and Linda Ostler stepped in: the woman who’d organized our team and the de facto leader of the US government’s secret war against the supernatural. Her file listed her as fifty-three, which made her older than even Trujillo, and she had the force of will to back that age up with an aura of hard-won experience and authority. Kelly stood up immediately; some remnant of her training as a cop, I assumed.
“Agent Ostler,” said Kelly, “I was just about to call you—we’ve found something new in the Gardner case—”
“Thank you, Ms. Ishida, but I’m afraid it will have to wait. Agent Potash called, and we’re moving on Cody French.”
“Now?” asked Diana.
“Immediately,” said Ostler. “Potash is observing him, and we have reason to believe that our window of opportunity is about to open. If John’s analysis is correct, we have about three hours to kill him before that window closes again, possibly for weeks.”
“Everybody suit up, then,” said Diana, already walking to the door. “I’ll meet you at the car in ten.” She brushed past Ostler and disappeared down the hall.
Kelly looked at me. “Are you ready for this?”
“I’m jumping for joy.”
“Do you need me for anything?” asked Nathan. “I’m not a field agent, but I’ve been training in firearms and I—”
“Guns won’t help on this one,” said Kelly. “Diana won’t even be much use, unless it goes wrong, at which point having extra people there will only makes things harder.” She looked at me. “This one’s all John and Potash.”