Taking the Highway

TALIC LOOKED OUT THE window and thought about promises given and oaths sworn. Since civilization began, warriors had made promises—to each other, to their leaders, to their people. He had sworn nothing publicly, but his oaths bound him all the same. They were steel for his spine and a shell for his conscience.

Talic made another circuit of the room to check the windows and doors and the clear sightlines out each, then checked the restraints securing the blindfolded Oliver LaCroix to the dining room chair. Those heavy chairs were a bit of luck. Without them, he would have had to truss Oliver like a turkey and lay him out on the floor. Talic moved through the room without speaking, taking care not to menace the bound man. Anxious people were unpredictable.

“It isn’t going to work,” Oliver said. “Andre can’t give you what he doesn’t have. He doesn’t have Nikhil and he wouldn’t hand him over to you if he did.”

Talic sighed. Lawyers. “Last chance,” he whispered, bending swiftly closer. He tugged at the elastic band running around the man’s neck, just above his collar and impeccably knotted tie. “If you speak again, I put the gag in. You won’t like the gag.” He waited. “Nod if you understand.”

Oliver LaCroix nodded.

Talic moved off, resumed waiting. His instructions to LaCroix—Detective Sergeant Andre LaCroix, the deepest part of himself insisted—had been specific.

“At the corner of Dexter and Kendall there’s a Jiro’s E-verse. You know it?”

“I can find it.” The expression on the holo image had been calm, but Talic could hear the scarcely controlled rage in LaCroix’s voice.

“You have exactly twenty minutes to get there and buy the Weigle temp phone reserved for you at the bargain counter. Call your brother’s datapad when you have it. I won’t answer. I’ll return your call on another line and we’ll have secure communications. I’ll know if you haven’t followed my instructions.” He wouldn’t, but LaCroix couldn’t know it for certain and he wouldn’t risk his brother’s life.

“Show him to the pickup, first.”

“No.”

“I don’t move until I hear his voice.”

“No.”

“Then you can f*ck yourself. What’s to stop me from calling my captain? Or going straight to hostage rescue?”

“You won’t.” Talic inserted the datacube he’d carefully preserved after the most recent Overdrive crash. No time for video upload, but still shots were better in this case. Pictures told the story he wanted to tell. He sliced three stills from the video and fed them to LaCroix’s comscreen. Nikhil and Topher Price-Powell. Nikhil and LaCroix. Then, his favorite one, showing LaCroix with both hands on Nikhil’s shoulders. LaCroix was probably yelling his head off in that picture, but he leaned toward his nephew as if to tell him the world’s most intimate secret.

“Faked up,” LaCroix said. “You can’t prove anything.”

“I can prove all this, and more.” Talic kept his voice low, his tone reasonable. “Stop stalling. Even if you had a tech willing to help you, you’d never get a fix in time. Get that temp and I’ll let you hear your brother.” Talic closed the line.

With three minutes to spare, Oliver’s datapad chimed with a signature that matched the Weigle codes sold in the Detroit area. Talic cut off the call on Oliver’s datapad and read the number into the encrypted line he’d vetted so carefully. Voice-only. He didn’t need LaCroix to know that he hadn’t yet left Oliver’s house.

“I want to talk with him now. Right now. Or I go to IA and take my chances.”

“Try this on. You ask me a question. Make it something I couldn’t guess. I tell you his answer and you know he’s alive.”

A seething pause. Then, “Ask him how many points he wanted to give Sofia Gao.”

Talic considered. This sounded too innocuous to be any kind of code. He paused audio and repeated the question. Oliver’s face quirked in brief amusement, then sobered and answered.

“He claims it was a solid eighty-nine.”

Talic thought he could hear an exhalation over the cheap handset. He moved into the other room, out of Oliver’s hearing.

“Here’s the deal, LaCroix. I don’t want your brother. I don’t even want his kid. But I need the people Nikhil can give me and I can’t wait any longer.”

“Listen to me, Talic. The one you want is calling himself Topher Price-Powell—”

“I know all about Price-Powell,” Talic growled.

“I’ve got another name,” LaCroix said. “Probably just an alias. Wilma Riley. We can work these names through the team. We can do it legally. It doesn’t have to go down like this.”

Talic gave Oliver’s expensive couch a swift kick in the leg. “It has to go down exactly like this. Price-Powell has gone to ground. Your nephew knows how to get close to him. My trap needs bait.”

LaCroix’s voice became something hard for Talic to listen to—one officer to another. “You had to stop them. There wasn’t enough proof to stop them any other way. I get it. Tough call, but that was the one you made. Now the situation has changed. We have proof. We can backtrack. Find the funding. Find the source. Find the entire organization. Take them all down, including Topher Price-Powell.”

He’s a good cop after all. Talic smiled, half-wishing LaCroix could see it, but that would have given away the gambit, and the stakes were too high. “We both know I’m not a cop anymore. Not after what I’ve done today, not after what I’ve done the last two months. The same code you’re appealing to makes it impossible for you to overlook my actions. I understand that. Now you have to understand something as well.”

“What’s that?” LaCroix asked.

“Sacrifice.”

Silence on the line. Just the sound of angry breathing.

Talic twitched the curtains aside and looked into the back yard. “I have sacrificed five young men who threatened my city. I have sacrificed my career, my honor as a law-abiding citizen, maybe my life. So don’t think for a moment I won’t sacrifice your brother, your nephew and even you to get to these terrorists.”

“But I don’t—”

“Stop talking. Your brother and I are already on the move. The longer you stall, the further he gets out of your reach. I have a collapsing timetable. The economic summit kicks off tomorrow morning. My guess is that your nephew and his good buddy Price-Powell will trash Overdrive sometime tonight. Give me your nephew before then. Or better yet, Topher Price-Powell’s dead body. I want it by six o’clock.”

“Talic!” There was a note of desperation in LaCroix’s voice. “I don’t know where Nikhil is!”

“That,” Talic made himself reply coldly, “is your problem.”