“Michael Mormont gave me his recommendations of what we should do with you while he continues his investigation,” Ariadne said, breaking the silence. She had her fingers palm down on the desk, and stretched out in front of her on the black surface.
“Draw and quarter me?” I suggested. “A public flaying? Whipped naked through the campus at noontime?”
“He recommends we take you into custody,” she said softly, and I didn’t react. I didn’t know if I had it in me to even try to run, assuming I had anywhere to go other than my house, where they would surely catch me in less than an hour. “But I want you to know,” she said, catching my attention even as I felt my body slacken, as though I could slide out of the chair like the emotional jelly that I was by this point, “that the Director and I have discussed it, and we’ve discarded his recommendation. We don’t believe you’re the traitor.”
I felt a slight warmth, amazement, and felt a choked sensation in my throat. “But…what about all the things that have gone wrong…James…and I mean…what I did…”
“Mistakes,” she said, soft again, “not malicious.” She pursed her lips. “But we trusted the three of you to get the job done when we sent you on assignment, one that ended up evolving into something of vital importance at a time when we’re under more pressure than ever before, and we find you’ve been drinking on the job and…taking random men back to your hotel room who turn out to be spies for our enemy.” She said it softly, like everything else, and it wounded me even worse. “Do you have anything to say for yourself?”
I coughed, fake. I needed to clear my throat. “I don’t have anything that doesn’t sound in my head like an excuse.”
“I’m disappointed,” Ariadne said. “I guess I’d come to expect more out of you than this.”
“You didn’t even want me to go on this assignment,” I said quietly. “Remember? You were still holding a grudge from when I took Eve out of the air with a rock.”
“I wasn’t holding a grudge,” she said. “Scott is immature and acts like it. Kat’s a sweetheart, and she’ll go along with whatever he says because they’re attached at the…” She blushed. “…because they’re attached. But you,” she said, and leaned forward, fingers interlaced, “you always marched to your own tune. Since the day you got here, you’ve consistently been one of the strongest metas not only in power, but in personality, weathering adversity I couldn’t imagine.” I could see by the look on her face she was telling the truth. “You never let it weigh you down, and you never followed anyone’s orders if you didn’t want to do something. You’d let the whole Directorate hate you before you caved on doing something you didn’t believe was right. Remember Gavrikov?” She stared at me. “So I sent that girl out on an assignment, and when she didn’t show up, I guess it surprised me.”
“I can do better,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“I know you can,” she said sadly. “And I hope you get a chance to prove it. I know you hate me, but the Director and I have invested a lot of faith in you. I just hope it pays dividends at some point.” She looked down. “But right now it’s not looking too good.”
I started to respond, I did. I wanted to say something about how bad I’d screwed up, about how much my judgment had been off, and how I really didn’t hate her. But I waited a moment too long and there was a knock at the door. “Come in,” Ariadne said, and the door opened to show a small, geeky guy with glasses and kind of a bowl-shaped haircut that reminded me of pictures I’d seen of the Beatles. He was wearing hipster glasses, which I hate. Unkempt, a ragged overshirt with holes in it covering a t-shirt underneath with the name of some band on it I doubted anyone had heard of.
“J.J,” she said with a nod. “Progress?”
“Big time,” he said with a smile, and stepped into the office.
“Just a second,” she said, and looked out the door behind him. “Reed, you can come back in now.”
Reed appeared at the door, sliding into the room unmussed and without a word. He resumed his place in the corner and I watched a cell phone slip into his pocket from one of his hands. He really did look good in the suit, but his persona was off somehow; I realized after a moment his expression was guarded, more closed than I’d ever seen before from him.
J.J., as Ariadne had called him, sat in the seat next to me, a tablet computer in his hands. Tufts of cat hair streaked his dark blue skinny jeans. “So, the basics of what they did here were a deeper encryption than just relying on the normal OS security protocols—”
“J.J.,” Ariadne said, “I don’t care about that. What did you find on the computer?”
“Wait,” I said. “Is this about the laptop I recovered from the Omega safehouse?”
“Right,” the hipster geek said with a nod. “I’ve made sure it was clear of spyware, tied it into the network, and backed the contents of the hard drive up onto our servers so you can access it from your computer.” He waved to the laptop on the work hutch behind her. “But here’s the gist: a list of U.S. Assets for Omega – though they don’t quite call themselves that on their internal docs,” he said. “It’s kinda vague, but I got some analysts sifting through it now. Looks like street addresses for safehouses, facilities, the works. Some names of employees.”
“Anything in the immediate area?” She looked at him and his gaze popped up from the tablet computer.
“A guy here in Minneapolis,” J.J. replied. “James Fries? Looks like they’re paying for him to live the high life; he’s got a condo in downtown.”
“And I would love to visit and throw him out of a window to show my gratitude,” I said.
“And wouldn’t defenestration be a simplistic approach?” Ariadne said with a raised eyebrow. “One incubus dead on the Omega side isn’t going to win us this war. I’ll put surveillance on him, see if he leads us anywhere interesting.”
“And then, after you’ve done that, I can…?” I mimicked throwing something over my head. I didn’t mean it, not really – I don’t think.
“We’ve got bigger concerns than revenge,” Ariadne said, but her look was muted sympathy. “We’ve got a final tally of over a hundred and eighty dead nationwide – that’s agents, retrievers, metas and all else.”
“That doesn’t sound too bad,” J.J. said with a shrug. I didn’t like him.
“That’s about three-quarters of our agent assets,” Ariadne said. “And every one of them had people they left behind – mothers, fathers, wives, husbands, kids in some cases…”
“Oh,” J.J. said in muted surprise. “Well, when you put it like that it sounds bad.”
“Could be worse,” Reed grunted from the corner, drawing my attention back to him. A pall hung over him, a blackness of mood I couldn’t quite place, it was so at odds with the flippant guy I’d known since he offered me a ride after knowing him for ten seconds.
“How?” Ariadne asked, slight amusement causing the corners of her mouth to curl in a faint smile.
“You could be a meta in India,” he said without pause. “Their government has been running a training facility like what you’ve got here, where they’ve been sheltering metas – about four hundred of them. They’ve even been taking them in from other neighboring countries with offers of good money and a high standard of living.”
“That doesn’t sound so bad,” J.J. said with a shrug. “Working for the government would have some benefits, I’m sure. Like maybe some past indiscretions could be evaporated without having to do a hack job—”
“They’re all dead as of this morning,” Reed said darkly. “Every last one of them.”