“Doubtful,” said Theo. “If Rebel’s people had the ability to kill remotely, they wouldn’t have come at us with guns and swords.”
Mia couldn’t bear the thought of anyone having that power. She pictured Azral standing before some necromantic circuit breaker, shutting off lives from miles away. She could only imagine he had six more buttons, all labeled with the names of people in this room.
“Do you think maybe Beatrice got away?” she asked.
The lack of response was enough to confirm her grim suspicion. She took a moment to mourn the poor woman who’d baked her a cupcake for her birthday.
Zack remained silent from his perch on the bed, stewing over the large new problem this tragedy created for them. The Salgado van and the body of Dr. Czerny were two thick chains that tied the Silvers to the Pelletier slaughter. While the media continued to chase ghosts, the federal agents would have a stronger notion of who to blame.
—
By ten o’clock, Melissa Masaad was angry enough to break the law. It took twenty minutes of research to uncover the location of the nearest tobacco den, hidden away beneath a Terra Vista bowling alley. Six more minutes of digging earned her the passphrase.
“Are your bathrooms clean?” she asked the cashier, just as she was told.
For once, Melissa’s foreign attributes worked in her favor. The greasy old man at the counter would have never suspected she was a Dep. Even if she had been with DP-4, the illicit substances division, she wouldn’t have wasted time on such a piddling sting. The Bureau didn’t care about smoke-easies.
“We have a clean bathroom downstairs,” the cashier replied. “They’re pay toilets.”
“How much?”
“Twenty dollars.”
“Goodness. Do these exceptionally clean toilets come with Eaglenet access?”
For an extra ten dollars, they did. Melissa carried a handtop under her arm. She was determined to keep working, all through the night if she had to.
Two stairwells and one purchase later, she sat in an overstuffed recliner in the corner of a dim and smoky lounge. She closed her eyes as she savored the taste of the cigarette, her first in twenty-two months. She’d been hoping to enjoy her life in America without the crutch of nicotine, but today was a day of extraordinary frustrations.
“It’s out of my hands,” Cahill told her, five hours ago. “We hunt where they tell us to hunt.”
Melissa had crafted a no-nonsense approach to tracking the fugitives—a strategic sweep of every pawnshop and panhandle park in the ten-mile radius of the abandoned van. From all appearances, these runners were low on resources. Finding them was simply a matter of anticipating their chosen method of fund-raising.
Unfortunately, the mystery of the dead physicists crashed her plans like a wayward truck, dominating the team for the rest of the day. Nine hours ago, Melissa walked through the empty corridors of the Pelletier building, marveling at the results of her wave scans. From all gauges, the entire building had been temporically reversed, a feat that was as bizarre and unlikely as broiling a high school. Soon policemen stumbled across a bloody Japanese sword, just one foot outside the property perimeter, a discovery that made even less sense. The only encouraging find was a missing door from the stolen van, direct evidence that the fugitives had been there.
Seven hours ago, Melissa sat at the bedside of Janice Salgado, the widow of Martin and mother of the three security guards who were either missing or dead. She was a heavyset woman with a cherry-red bouffant that matched her freshly cracked eyes. A constellation of baby spot sedatives was peppered across her neck, twisting her mouth into an unholy union of a smile and a scream.
“There were six people living in that building,” Janice told Melissa. “Marty didn’t know where they came from. He said they just showed up one day with bracelets on their wrists and . . . weird stuff. They could do weird stuff. Erin took a real shine to one of them. Young girl named Mia. Poor child. Erin said . . . she said the poor thing lost her whole . . . she lost her whole . . .”
Janice sobbed and clutched at Melissa’s blouse. “Please. Please find my youngest. I know in my heart they’re gone, but they need to be buried with the family. Please.”
Five hours ago, Melissa stood at the city coroner’s office, watching through a window as men in masks examined Constanin Czerny. As they finished their work, her handphone rang. Cahill didn’t sound pleased.
“Just heard from the directors. Our scope has changed. For the short term, they want us to devote all our resources to finding Sterling Quint.”
“What? But sir, the runners—”