"Interesting."
"Yeah, ain't it?"
"Well, don't just stand there, go see if Ms. Cooper can find some use for you. He's close, Julio. We're going to get him. I can feel it."
"Yeah."
It was sunny, no wind, a perfect day for working the 'rangs, and Tyrone headed for the soccer field, full of himself. Bella had given her smile back to him, she wanted him around, wanted to see him, had invited him to her house this very evening! Life was better than good; life was great.
When he arrived at the field there, Tyrone saw Nadine. Dee-eff-eff!
But when he got to where Nadine was, she was already packing up.
"Hey, Nadine."
"Hey, Tyrone."
"Where you going?"
"My arm's a little sore. I don't want to overtrain."
"I've got some ibuprofen gel."
"That's okay. I got some at home. See you."
Something was wrong, he could feel it, but he couldn't see what it was. "You okay?"
She looked him straight in the eyes. "I told you my arm was sore. You forget to turn on your implant?" There was a definite hard edge in her voice.
"Whoa, dial it down, I wasn't calling you a preva, I was just asking, that's all."
She went back to loading her backpack. "Why do you care? You don't need to be skulking with people like me. You got Belladonna."
"What's that got to do with anything?"
She jammed the pack shut, lifted it, swung it over her shoulder. "C'mon, Tyrone, you know what it means. You sweat with the jocks, you don't hunch chair with the gamers. You breakfast with the dressers, you don't eat lunch at the scuzz table."
"What are you talking about?"
"You gonna make me say it, aren't you? You skulk beautiful, you don't skulk ugly."
"Who is ugly?"
She gave him a sad smile, a little one. "You telling me I'm in Bella's league, Ty? You'd rather be seen with me than with her?"
He was stunned. He couldn't get his mind on-line. Why was Nadine babbling on about this? Of course Bella was prettier. She was prettier than everybody in the school! What was the point?
He was trying to figure out what Nadine meant, and what he should say, when she shook her head. "Yeah, I hear the dial tone. Copy you later, Ty."
She slipped her other arm into the backpack and walked away.
He watched her go, and while he hadn't done anything wrong he could think of, he felt guilty. Somehow, he had just failed some kind of test, and he didn't even know what it was.
Damn. He wished his father was home. Dad knew about stuff like this. He needed to talk to him.
Chapter 32
Something was wrong, Toni knew. The small cracks in Alex's facade had been plugged up, spackled over, leaving a solid wall in front of his emotions. It wasn't so much what he said or did, but an unseen but somehow detectable shift in his posture. From her years of martial arts training, she had a tendency to view things in terms of physical engagements. What it felt like was, all of a sudden, Alex stood in a defensive stance. When they'd met, his guard had been up, but he had relaxed it when they'd gotten together, begun to allow her to get closer. Now he was hunched over, face covered, backing away.
Sitting in a strange office halfway around the world from her roots, Toni worried about it. What had happened? Sure, he had a lot on his mind, the looming custody battle, the mad hacker, and their relationship had a few bumps in the road, but none of that seemed to be enough to account for this sudden distance between them.
"Ms. Fiorella?"
She looked up. Cooper. "Yes?"
"Your Colonel Howard has some information on his assassin. He'd like your opinion on it. He's in the small conference room."
"Okay. Be right there."
Cooper left, and Toni shook the worry about Alex. She did have a job to do, and while Alex certainly was a complicating factor in it, she couldn't sit here worry-warting about her love life all day. She picked up her flatscreen and headed for the conference room and John Howard.
Howard glanced away from the holoproj as Toni Fiorella entered the room. Julio was there, but Angela Cooper and Alex Michaels were meeting with one of the MI-6 higher-ups and would be a few minutes.
"John. What's up?"
"Toni. The commander will be along in a little while, Ms. Cooper went to collect him, but I wanted to bring you up to speed on the Ruzhyo matter."
"Sure, fire away."
He laid it out for her, using the holoproj images to punctuate the briefing. He did a fast sitrep through the stuff she already knew, then got to the new information.
The holoproj image shifted to the occult cam view from the bookstore. "This man left the store after the incident, at almost the same time as Ruzhyo. According to what Ms. Cooper and her people have found, this is Terrance Arthur Peel, a retired British Army major. Julio, would you lay out the rest?"
"Sir. Ma'am. Peel had a fairly decent career until he was posted to Ireland a couple years back as part of the standing British force at one of the permanent treaty bases. The peace there is fairly fragile, oddball groups still agitating, and from what we're able to gather, Peel was responsible for an incident that might have threatened it. Caught some of the locals doing things they shouldn't have and beat confessions out of them. Apparently, he and his people were… overzealous. There were some serious injuries, even deaths, as a result."
Toni nodded. "Uh-huh."
Fernandez continued: "The British Army is relatively tight-lipped about all this, but Peel was apparently given the choice of falling on his own sword or being drummed out, so he retired, and the incident was swept under the rug. Next time he surfaced, he was providing security for a local bigwig, Lord Geoffrey Goswell. Peel's new boss is not only a nobleman, he is also richer than Midas, a crusty old billionaire who owns half a dozen companies producing everything from computers to catsup."
Toni considered the information for a moment. She had an idea where this was going, but she wanted to hear Howard's take on it. She looked from Fernandez to the colonel. "I see. And this leads you to believe…?"
Howard shrugged. "We really don't have enough information to make a conclusion yet. But it seems awfully coincidental that a former intelligence operative gets shot and poisoned and dead in a bookstore, and a few seconds later, a known killer and a disgraced army major busted for killing prisoners both saunter out the door. If I was a gambling man, I'd be willing to bet these two had something to do with the death. And with each other."
"You think Ruzhyo is working for Peel? Hired to catch or kill the guy in the bookstore?"
"Like I said, it's too soon to make that stretch for sure, but it certainly seems as if we ought to have a chat with this guy Peel. Even if he is totally innocent, at the very least he was there when the trouble went down, and he had to have seen Ruzhyo when he left. If Ruzhyo had been a second slower leaving, Peel would have stepped on his heels."
Toni nodded again. "All right. How do we go about it?"
"Cooper will set it up. We can go along as observers. No guns needed. Apparently, Lord Whatshisname is quite well-connected and beyond reproach."
Fernandez said, "Right. We knock on the door, have a spot of tea, then politely ask the major, 'I say, old bean, did you shoot somebody in a bookstore recently?' and he says, 'Happens I did, old boy. Is there a problem?' They are all very civilized here, pip, pip, eh, whot?"