If there was anything I appreciated about Michael Mormont thus far, it was that he didn’t try to make small talk on our walk to the headquarters building. He walked in front of me, self-assured enough that he didn’t once look back to make sure I was following him. For my part, I wondered if I could blame it on Wolfe if I clubbed him from behind and ran off.
The sun was hot overhead, but I barely noticed, as it felt good against my sweat-soaked skin. My hair was sticking together in strands, and I could feel it frizzing above my forehead, struggling against the ponytail. I could almost see to the other side of the campus from here, and I gazed longingly at my dorm and the shower I knew it contained, wondering when I’d be able to enjoy the warm recharge within it.
I desperately wanted a drink of water now, the sour taste of bad breath making me run my tongue over the interior of my mouth as if I could rub the bad flavor out. In the distance I could hear a lawnmower running as the ground crew went about the business of making the Directorate look fabulous. I wished I was one of them right now. It had to be less precarious, dangerous and insane than what I was currently doing for work.
When we reached the headquarters building, Mormont entered, triggering the handicapped automatic door without looking back. I suppose I should have felt honored or something that he was trusting me not to run, but instead I felt an almost creepy self-assurance from him, like I was some poor puppet in his thrall and subject to his will no matter what. Then I felt a rush of irritation that bled over the torrent of emotions that had been hammering at me only a few minutes earlier.
The lobby of Headquarters was an ornate, marbled affair, black with white-flecked overtones. The air conditioning hit me as I walked in, but I didn’t feel much of the chill this round, even though I was still dripping in my own sweat. Mormont led the way to the staircase that curved up to the second floor and started up. I followed, taking the stairs at a leisurely pace, slowing down to see if he’d notice. He adjusted to match, I realized after a second, apparently in no hurry since he had me going along with him, dragging me like a magnet draws filings across a surface. Bastard.
He went on, down a hallway of white, doors on either side, taking me through a wide-open space of cubicles buzzing with activity. One of the walls of the room was windows that looked down on the lawn, giving me a clear view all the way to the garage. The ringing phones and chatter slowed not one iota as I passed through, though I caught a few eyes of workers dressed in business attire, men in suits and ladies in skirts and jackets. A few of them dressed like Ariadne, I thought, as we entered another hallway.
Three-quarters of the way down the hall, he stopped at a room and opened the door. Inside was a table with two chairs, and against the wall behind one of them was mirrored window. I wondered who was on the other side, if anyone. Ariadne? Old Man Winter? Who would have the joy of watching me square off with this guy?
He watched me as he held the door open and gave me a nod of false courtesy as I entered the room. I immediately went to the nicer of the two chairs and sat down, even though it placed my back in front of the mirrored window. He eyed me as I did it, but didn’t say anything, taking the lesser seat. He grabbed the yellow pad of paper from in front of me and slid it over to him, taking his time, giving me a last chance to read what was on it. I caught a glimpse, but not much, and it looked like a cursory summary of Scott’s account of the mission.
“So, are you settling back in?” He reached into his jacket for a pen, his hand emerging with a nice black ballpoint that he proceeded to click three times, causing me to raise an eyebrow in annoyance that he noted with a smile.
“Oh gee,” I said, “and here I thought that because we were able to make it across the campus without speaking, we’d tacitly agreed to just skip the small talk.”
“I didn’t give my agreement to that, tacit or otherwise,” he said, looking down at his pad. “Answer the question.”
“I’m settling in just fine,” I said, “and thanks for asking.” Some sarcasm, not much, compared to…uh…a teenage girl. Okay, maybe a lot.
“Let’s start at the beginning, shall we?”
“We could start at the end,” I suggested. “The part where I leave and you go back to sitting here, making intimidating faces in the one way mirror.” I chucked a thumb at the glass behind me. “You know, if that’s your thing.”
“Tell you what,” he said, “why don’t we just start with the juicy stuff and work our way back to the mundane details.” His eyes made their way up, and I caught the first sign of something unpleasant in the way he leered at me. “When you encountered James Fries – the second time, in Eau Claire…” He looked down at the pad, as if checking for some small detail. “…what did you discuss?”
“College football,” I said, snotty.
“Oh?” He looked up. “Go on.” He smiled. “What scintillating aspect of college football did you talk about?”
“We didn’t,” I admitted.
“So you were just being snide?” He smiled even wider. “Noted,” he said, and made a mark on the pad. “How did the conversation go?” I felt the air pressure in the room increase tenfold.
“He told me he was there to recruit me from the Directorate, though he didn’t say who he worked for at the time.”
“That wasn’t all, though, was it?” He peered at me across the table, eyes boring into mine. It was hot now. The air conditioner had to have stopped working. “I mean, we know how the story ends – you and he went back to your hotel room. So what happened next?”
“He showed me that he could touch my skin without getting hurt,” I said, and the uneasiness grew. “And I realized he was an incubus.”
“After which you went to your room,” he said, looking at the pad, “where you remained until Katrina – Agent Forrest – informed you that Ariadne was on a conference call?”
“Yes.”
Mormont clicked his tongue as he skimmed the page in front of him. “Could you describe what happened when you got into the room?”
“Well,” I said, “we turned on the TV, and watched an episode of The Vampire Diaries.”
His eyes came up again, half-lidded, skeptical. “I’m sorry. Was that another joke? I can’t tell.”
“You’d have to be humorless to do this job, I suppose, so that makes sense.” I flashed him a tight, insincere smile of my own. “We started to undress, and before we finished, Kat knocked at the door.”
He waited, looking at me as though trying to sift my guts right there in the interrogation room. “And at this point, you didn’t mention anything about Directorate operations, anything that was going on?”
“I didn’t know anything was going on other than that we were hunting someone who was assaulting convenience store clerks and that we’d stumbled onto Omega operations in Eau Claire that had some tie to the robber.” I folded my arms, pulling them off the table, and leaned back, felt the top of the chair press into my back, smelled the cold mechanical scent of the processed air.
“You returned to your room and spoke with James Fries again.” He looked up from the pad and tapped his pen against the yellow paper. “What did you tell him?”
“That I had to go.” I let it out, forced it out. “That I had a mission. That I was heading east,” I said with reluctance, mentally smacking myself not so much for admitting it to this stiff-collared douche as that I had done it at all.
“And he was at the Omega facility when you arrived?” Mormont looked from me to his notes. “This…Site Epsilon?”
“Yes.”
“Did it occur to you…” He looked up again, and this time there was a kind of faux concern I desperately wanted to smack sideways off his face. “…that he might be an Omega operative when you gave him this information?”