Chapter Fourteen – Kris

 

I leaned back in my chair, hung my head over the headrest, and stared up at the ceiling as I delicately rubbed my eyes with the fingers of one hand.

Bookshelves lined the office to either side of me, the assembled weight of books and tomes and charts bearing down on me as they seemed to peer over the computer at my tired face. This had been the colonel’s office before mine, and his presence seemed to have sunk into the pores of every surface, to have saturated everything even in the short time he’d occupied it.

But I was too tired to give a damn.

In all my career, during days and weeks spent in the field in deserts and jungles. During months spent in the badlands of the world, searching through ruins and hunting down existential threats to mankind. During even flying from the Arctic Circle to Anchorage under my own power…I’d never managed to find something quite so exhausting as going through emails.

The monotony. The dullness. Expense reports, client files, client complaints, invoices. And, of course, bills. Always the bills, the monthly hunger pangs of a living business. Rent, electricity, sewage, trash. Everything needed to make a business run, or even limp.

Sighing, I straightened up in my chair, letting my thoughts wander from the email presented on the computer monitor in front of me, letting them meander down the office towards Tabitha, and what she may have found in the scant couple hours I’d already given her.

My eyes glanced down at the clock on my office phone, widening slightly at the time. Couple hours? More like five. It was nearly ten at night!

“Jesus,” I grumbled, wiping a hand down my face. Even the stale coffee I’d been drinking all night had begun to lose its effectiveness, and my whole body seemed to sag into my chair. Unbidden, my hand seemed to rise of its own accord and guided the mouse over to begin the shutdown process on my PC.

Eyes slowly, painfully blinking, I watched with a distant stare as each window shut down, and the screen darkened.

“Bed,” I muttered. “Bed sounds good right now.” I gathered myself up from my puddle of exhaustion and pushed myself to my feet, stifling a yawn as I pushed my chair back beneath my desk. In a half-daze, I glanced over at the heavy bookshelf of Harrington’s, at the bookshelf where the burner phone had once been hidden what seemed like nearly a lifetime ago. But, God, it had been less than a year, hadn’t it?

I went around the desk, grabbed my backpack off one of the chairs, and slung it over my shoulder. Several long, tired strides later, I was flipping off the light and letting myself out into the hallway.

The men had all come by hours before, each to spend their five or ten minutes asking me about my sabbatical, about my time away. I’d lied through my teeth to them. Talked about the hiking I’d done. Not all of it was a lie, of course, but most of it was. After all, I had ended up using the opportunity to stretch my wings. I had seen some of the sights the Great White North had to offer.

In the moments after I’d first stepped back into the colonel’s former office, I’d decided what I was going to tell the guys when they asked about why Hunter and I had gone on a trip together.

“Super secret dragon business,” I’d mutter, and not give another inch, no matter what they tried.

Thankfully, none of them asked directly. Instead, they danced around the subject matter with the grace of twelve-year-old boys at their first middle school dance. Only this time, this girl wasn’t in a dancing mood, and I sure as hell wasn’t looking for a partner.

I made my way through the silent office, with only the whoosh of air passing through vents overhead to accompany my steps. The men had all left hours before, and returned to their mates at home.

Headed for Tabitha’s workshop, I turned the corner and strode down the hall. I came to a stop beside Hunter’s door, drawing myself up as I heard footsteps on the other side. I swallowed hard as I heard the deadbolts on his side of the door twist back, a mild wave of irritation passing through me when I remembered that I’d told him I didn’t like the way he kept his door locked.

Oh well, it hadn’t been a direct order from me, now had it?

The door swung open, and he came over the threshold towards me with his head down and his pack slung over his shoulder. He must have seen my feet at the top of his field of vision, and drew up suddenly, a mildly surprised look on his face.

“Midnight oil needed burning?” he asked, his voice sounding as tired as my body felt.

“Something like that.” I nodded towards Tabitha’s office. “About to see what our witch has cooked up for me.”

“Information, or a revenge spell?” Hunter asked, smiling that crooked half-smile of his.

“Hopefully the first. Care to join?”

He sighed and nodded. “It’s only been a few hours. She can’t possibly have anything yet, can she?”

“Clearly you haven’t learned anything about Tabitha in all the time you’ve worked together. She’ll have something for me.”

Minutes later, the three of us were standing in the middle of the circle, my skin still tingling with a million tiny, minute pinpricks from the magical barrier I’d just passed over.

“Nothing?” I asked, disbelief in my voice.

“Nothing,” Tabitha confirmed.

Hunter suppressed a laugh, looking back and forth between us when we both shot daggers at him. “Well, I can’t speak for either of you, but I for one believe that’s significant in and of itself.”

“But there’s nothing,” I said.

“And nothing, in this case, is something. Tabitha, you’ve searched through the Pentagon and the CIA’s databases, and you can’t find any kind of funding for Harrington and his lot, correct?”

“Right.”

“I still can’t believe you hacked the Pentagon and the CIA,” I said with a groan. “You couldn’t have kept it more discreet than that?”

She dismissed me with a wave of her hand. “Don’t worry, I covered my tracks. They’ll just think some hacker in Belarus did it.” She nodded to Hunter. “And, no, I didn’t find anything there.”

“Well, clearly, he’s either operating out of a seriously pitch-black budget,” he said, “or he’s not receiving any kind of funding from the federal government. Period. Either way, that’s a significant piece of information, don’t you think?”

“But, he’s using PRB and decommissioned US military,” Tabitha replied.

“And flying under their radar, just like we did when we came home,” I suggested. “Maybe he’s using his contacts to keep the PDB secret. If those old bases don’t contain any part of the nuclear arsenal, they’re pretty much left untended. Who wants to spend taxpayer dollars to send a crew to the middle of nowhere to keep up a base that has no bearing on current tactical goals?”

“Precisely,” Hunter said with a nod.

“So, he’s completely off-grid somehow?” Tabitha asked.

I shook my head. “Not necessarily. He told me it’s private funding, mostly. A joint venture.”

“So, maybe they are intentionally looking the other way, so he can utilize military assets without any oversight,” Tabitha began.

“And the funding is, in fact, coming from some unnamed source, or multitude of sources,” Hunter finished.

“Which means no oversight,” I said, biting my thumb in thought for a moment.

“Well, that’s a good thing, right?” Tabitha asked. “He can work with less intervention from up top, focus on what he knows is the most important.”

“Not necessarily,” I said. “At the PRB, we still operated under a general set of guidelines based on JSOCs, and I heard the colonel mutter more than once about how it was too restrictive. That sometimes there just wasn’t enough actionable intelligence to meet their rules of engagement, and we’d be better off going with our guts.”

A moment of silence hung in the air over the workshop, so quiet I could almost hear a gentle thrumming from the magic circle surrounding us.

“No keeper, no oversight,” Hunter said, finally breaking the uncomfortable tranquility. He gave me a strange look, one that seemed filled with worry. “He’s finally off his leash, then.”

A little tremor seemed to rock my body as a certain queasiness climbed into the pit of my stomach. Col. Harrington was, at his heart, a good man. But, if he was actually working without any oversight, what were the implications of that? The US military worked as well as it did because we had civilian oversight, not in spite of it. They were the ones who sometimes were responsible for wrangling in our worst impulses. History was littered with failed enterprises and adventures that were governed solely by warriors making their decisions in a vacuum. Is that what the PDB was? An independent organization with free rein?

Frowning, Tabitha pushed her hair back behind her ears as she looked down at the floor in the center of the little loose triangle we’d formed. “Well, right now this is all just speculation. Ideas we’re deriving from a lack of facts.”

I shrugged. “True.”

“Point,” Hunter said.

“Give me the rest of tomorrow, and I’ll see what I can find. I still have some discreet inquiries out there to people who keep their ears closer to the ground on these kinds of developments. If the PDB’s been active already, maybe they’ll have an idea of where else I can look. There has to be some kind of shell company, or fund, he’s drawing his cash flow from. People he’s purchasing some of his hardware from. An organization like that just can’t exist entirely in the shadows; they need to have supply lines of some sort feeding them.”

I nodded slowly. “Discreet inquiries?”

“Contacts I’ve made over the years, assets I’ve held onto from my PRB days.”

“And you’re certain they’re discreet?”

“Do we have another choice?” Tabitha asked, her eyes flashing for a moment. “After all, he wants his decision from you soon, doesn’t he? Four days?”

“Less than that now, I think. But thereabouts.”

“Then this is going to be the fastest way to accomplish it,” Tabitha replied. “Once I have a fix on suppliers or actions he may have taken, I can find out more about the organization itself.”

“Like finding one strand of a spider’s web, and tracing it back to the whole net.”

“Precisely,” she said with a nod. She eyed Hunter and me in turn, saying, “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a long night ahead of me.”

“Yeah,” I said, sighing with exhaustion and frustration, “agreed. Thanks, Tabitha.”

“No problem. That’s what I’m here for.”

The three of us stepped out of the circle, with Hunter and me both heading for the workshop’s door. He opened the door for me, but, just as I was about to step through, Tabitha called my name.

“Yeah?” I asked, turning back to her, hefting the bag higher on my shoulder.

“When this is all said and done,” Tabitha said from her desk chair, which she’d spun to face us, “I want a week off.”

I laughed. “Sure thing. Not that you’ll know what to do with it.”

“Not know what to do?” she asked, stifling a yawn at the end. “The way the last three months have been, I’m going to sleep like the dead. They’ll have to pour me out of bed at the end of it.”

Hunter carefully closed the door behind us, and together we both headed down the hall without saying a word. Waiting for the elevator minutes later, he seemed as lost in his thoughts as I was in my own. There was nothing uncomfortable about it, as our hamster wheels seemed to turn in tandem.

“G’night, Larry,” I said with a nod on the way out as we passed our overnight security guard.

He looked up, his eyes going wide in his paunchy, middle-aged face. “Ms. Cole,” he said, clearly a little surprised as Hunter and I both strolled through the lobby. “You’re back from your trip!”

“Sure am,” I replied as I turned around to face him, catching his eyes on my backside. Walking backwards, I swore I could feel Hunter’s going right to it, also. “Thank you again for keeping my car looked after.”

“Of course, Ms. Cole. Anything I can do to help! You need me to look after anything else, just call and let me know.” He must have caught the implication of his own words, because he suddenly began to blush. He scratched the back of his head as he awkwardly averted his eyes from mine. “Call down to the desk, I mean, if you need anything else, ma’am.”

“Will do, Larry,” Hunter said from right behind me. “I’ll make sure she calls, myself.”

Now it was my turn to blush, and I elbowed Hunter hard in the ribs.

“Ow!” he exclaimed as I spun around. “What was that for?”

“Oh, just get moving!” I shoved him as he protested about his side the whole way while trying to hold back his laughter, through the revolving door and out into the downtown street beyond. “G’night Larry!”

During the week, and outside business hours, the streets down here were nearly deserted. Hunter and I, with him still rubbing his ribs, crossed against the light and entered the office building’s parking garage across the road. Most of the cars had already headed home for the night with their owners, and an almost eerie calm had settled over the place.

“Did Harrington have some government spook surgically install ice picks in your elbows, or something?” Hunter asked, wincing still as he gingerly touched his bruised rib.

“No, but he did teach me krav maga, so practically the same thing,” I replied as I grabbed my keys from my pack and went straight for my old, beat-up car. I unlocked the driver’s side door and slung my bag down off my shoulder. “Have a good night, Hunter.”

“Yeah, you too. See you in the morning.”

“Early,” I called after him as he trudged off into the parking garage. Without looking back, he waved a hand in assent as I slung myself into the car and dropped my bag in the seat next to me. I slid the key into the ignition, turned it, and waited.

Nothing.

Just a click and a low, electronic thrum as the battery tried, but failed, to start the engine.

I froze at the first thought that entered my mind: car bomb. The old-style ones would take a charge off the battery, and only arm after the first twist of the key. They’d even siphon the power off the car’s systems as the source of ignition and detonation.

But, who would want to kill me? I’d been out of the real game for close to two years, now. The only threats I’d helped to counter at FMS had been domestic, with supernatural creatures. Not the massive threats we’d fought while part of the PRB.

I closed my eyes and swore as the second thought entered my mind, the adrenaline already fading away, and my heart rate returning to normal.

My car had been sitting here for three months, and I didn’t have a trickle charger attached like Hunter did. My battery was dead. Plain and simple.

I swore again, resting my forehead against the steering wheel as I let my eyelids droop, the jetlag I’d been fighting all day finally beginning to take over. I could call AAA, or I could even go inside to ask Larry for a jump. But honestly, as late as it was, I just wanted to fucking go home. I hadn’t seen or felt my bed in three months, and I still wanted to make sure my place was even there.

Phone in hand, I climbed out of the car, starting to order up a rideshare from an app. As I shut the car door and leaned back against the side, Hunter’s BMW came purring down the ramp behind me, beginning to slow as he came abreast.

He and I locked eyes through the tinted glass as he came abreast of me, and he rolled down the window.

“Car trouble?” he asked as he leaned forward over the center console, gazing up at me from beneath raised eyebrows.

“Battery.”

“Want a jump?”

I sighed, shook my head. The bone-deep weariness had settled in even more deeply, and it seemed like it was all I could do to just remain standing. “I just want to go home, Hunter. That’s all.”

A mechanical sound as the passenger side door unlocked automatically. “Hop in. You’re not too far off the beaten path.”

“You sure?”

“Of course I am. If you order an Uber or Lyft, you’ll be waiting here for another fifteen, twenty minutes, at bare minimum. No one deserves to endure that kind of torture after our trials and tribulations.”

I raised an eyebrow.

“Seriously,” he said with an exasperated sigh. “Get the fuck in.”

I went around to the passenger side, grabbed my bag, then hopped into his car. I stuffed my bag down in the minimalist space of the footwell, and we were off.