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Al made an impatient gesture, then swiftly brought himself back to stillness, as if impatience was a luxury he couldn’t allow himself. “The point is, I’m not going to pretend to give you update reports that I know you already have. You want to know if I’ve been straight with you. I have, all the way. You also need to know that I’m not working with a hair trigger here. There’s no indication that the situation with Subject C has changed, and every reason to think it won’t.”
“So you called me because, what, you want reassurance that I won’t make a preemptive move? You know better than that. If I said so I’d be lying, and you wouldn’t believe me anyway because if you were in my position you’d be lying your ass off.”
That went without saying, so Al didn’t bother trying to deny it. In his job, in their jobs, they did whatever was necessary. Sometimes the necessary was ugly; that didn’t make it any less necessary.
“I don’t want to do anything that will cause harm to Subject C,” Al said, choosing his words carefully. “The situation is balanced.”
Xavier gave a short, humorless bark of laughter. “I’ve known from day one—hell, before that—that the situation is only as balanced as I make it. Your dilemma is that you don’t know what safeguards I put in place, or how many trip wires. Otherwise I’d have been dead years ago. You know it and I know it.”
“My job isn’t to kill patriots,” Al said, a quiet note entering his voice. He was a man who’d fought for his country on multiple levels for most of his adult life, and his creed was the same as Truman’s: the buck stopped with him. He wouldn’t throw any of the black ops people under the bus; if it became necessary, he’d sacrifice his own career and freedom first. The people who worked under him knew it; Dereon knew it. That inspired a very deep level of loyalty—except, it seemed, in Xavier.
“No, your job is to protect the country, whatever that means on any given day.” Cynicism laced Xavier’s words. “And I’m with you on that, normally.”
“Except in this situation.”
“Let’s just say I trust you as much as you trust me.”
“If I didn’t trust you, you wouldn’t still be on the job.”
“Unless your motive was to keep me busy and maybe out of the country.”
“I’d assume your trip wires would cover that contingency.”
“You’d assume right.”
“So we’re at a stalemate.?
??
“Remember the Cold War term? Mutual assured destruction? That works for me.”
“You’re making enemies,” Al said. “Powerful enemies, people who wonder why they should trust you when you obviously don’t trust them. You’re forcing them to see you as a threat.”
“I am a threat, unless they behave themselves. Yeah, I know, we can all hang together or we can hang separately, but I know these people. At some point, some son of a bitch is going to figure he can outsmart me and put this thing away forever. He’ll be wrong, but the shit will have hit the fan before he figures that out. So, yeah, regardless of what reassurances you give me, I’ll make my own decisions.”
Al was silent for a moment, deep in his stillness mode. Then he said, “Don’t assume that I’m the enemy. Just remember that. If I can help you, I will.”
Dereon worked that over in his head. With Al Forge, you never knew; he could either be on the level or he could be playing Xavier. Only time would tell.
That same curt laugh sounded in their headsets. “There’s another Cold War saying: Trust, but verify. Talk to you later, Forge.” There was a brief pause. “You too, Ashe. It is Dereon’s shift today, isn’t it? Or have I lost track?” The connection ended.
Dereon’s blood ran cold. He jerked his headset off and stared at Al, his expression frozen with horror. “H-how did he know that?” he stammered. “How the fuck did he know my name?” Or what shift he worked, or anything at all about him? This was like attracting the attention of a velociraptor: nothing good could come of it.
Al closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Because he’s Xavier, that’s how. Shit. This means he has a mole in here, or somehow he’s got eyes and ears on us that our sweepers didn’t pick up, or he got this location and followed us all to our homes. He’s a patient bastard; he’d spend weeks figuring everything out.”
Followed him home? Panicked nausea rose in Dereon’s throat. “He knows where I live? Where my wife and kids are?”
“Don’t worry. He won’t kill you unless he needs to.”
“That’s reassuring!” Dereon said sarcastically, too alarmed to care how he was talking to his superior.
“It is, actually.” Al heaved a weary sigh. “If he wanted you dead, you already would be. You have to understand how Xavier thinks. He didn’t let us in on that little secret to scare you shitless—though evidently he succeeded in doing that anyway.”
Being Forge, he couldn’t let Dereon’s panic pass by unremarked. He expected his people to be in control—of their jobs, of the situation, and most of all, of themselves. “He let us know that he’s on top of us, and he also knows that we now have to spend a lot of time and effort trying to find out exactly how he found out. We have to run security checks, we have to put fresh eyeballs on everyone who works here, and we have to turn our vehicles and homes inside out, looking for bugs.”
Dereon took a deep breath, forcing himself to look at this strategically, the way Forge was doing. “Will we have to move locations?”
“Possibly, but there’s no guarantee that he doesn’t have physical eyes on us and will simply have us followed to the new location, in which case we’ve gained nothing and wasted resources. There’s also the possibility that by reacting the way we now have to react, he’ll be able to learn even more about us by watching what we do.”
