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“Sure,” he said, sitting back again. “It has the added advantage of a built-in gas dispenser. We can increase the intensity of the explosion if we fill the canisters with flammable gas and put the valves on a manual or automatic release. Then when the gas leaks into the air and mixes with the oxygen… All it needs is a spark and boom.”
If he wasn’t talking about something so devastating, she would probably laugh at how proud he sounded. But his great plan had one major flaw. “That’s an excellent idea.” Going back to her chair, she slumped down again. “Except Brodie took my head off when I told him I’d agreed to Kahlil’s terms.”
“It’s the story,” Tuck said, turning to the table. “You can’t take it personal. He’s not pissed at you. He’s pissed about his parents.”
“I know,” she said, putting her arms on the tabletop. “I do know that. He’s lost Art and Grant, I know he claims not to care about his brother, but it has to hit him somewhere, right? Since Future’s Hope exploded, he’s suspected there were other forces at play. He never believed it was an accident.”
“It’s one thing to believe it. It’s another to have your suspicions confirmed.”
Yeah, but she couldn’t give him the time and space he needed to work it out like she’d done after Art’s death. They didn’t have the same window to let him adjust and to come to terms with this revelation because Kahlil wouldn’t wait around forever. “Kahlil is impatient. He wants the deal done. I don’t know if it’s Sikorski or Leatt or whoever he was recording the message for, but something has him spooked. He told me that he wants to leave town.”
“So let him leave.”
She took a deep breath. “I’m worried that if we let this slip through our fingers now, we won’t get another chance. Kahlil has kept this secret for a long time because of his loyalty to the man he used to work for. If that man hears somehow that he’s trying to sell the secret or that he’s working for Sikorski to obtain Game Time…”
“The previous employer might stop the leak.”
“Permanently,” she said. “If we let Kahlil go and something happens to him, there’s no one else alive who will tell us the truth.”
“But there is a truth and if Raven decides he wants it, then he’ll find a way to get it. No matter who he has to put a bullet into.”
She shook her head. “Bullets won’t work this time,” she said. “It was so long ago that the circle of people who know the details is probably getting smaller every day. How long will it take Brodie to decide? Six months? A year? Ten years? This will eat him up inside, and he’ll resent himself and probably us for not taking the opportunity when it landed in our lap.”
“We have to consider that Kahlil might be bullshitting us.”
“How does he know who Raven is if he doesn’t know McCormack history? Do you think Grant told him? I doubt it. Grant was in bed with Sutcliffe practically from day one. I think he just strung out the negotiations because he enjoyed toying with the interested parties. It made him feel important that they were clamoring for something only he had.”
She hated to talk ill of the dead, but in retrospect and given how Grant was at the end, there was a deeper pathology at work. One that had probably been ignited on the same day Brodie had first seen the darkness—on the day their parents died.
“It’s tough. You can’t force Brodie to do something that he doesn’t want to do.”
“No,” she said. “I know.”
“I can call Zave, see if he has any thoughts on it,” Tuck said.
“Thad said that Brodie and Zave were close. Do you think Brodie’s opened up to him about it?”
“They were closer back in the day, but yeah,” Tuck said. “Zave lost his parents too. He was an adult when they died, but I think talking to Brodie helped him to process. Talking to someone who had been through it gave him some perspective.”
“How did his parents die?” she asked and a slow frown began to creep to his face.
“Hold on, his parents are dead too,” Tuck said and flew up out of his chair to rush out of the room.
There might be logic in what he was doing, but it offered her no explanation. She didn’t want to be left behind. Departing the desk and the room, she rushed to the stairwell door that was still closing. She could hear him running up the stairs and knew she’d never catch up because he was faster and had longer legs. But she did her best and navigated the warren of a house to get to the kitchen where he was sitting at the head of the coffee table opening a laptop when she joined him.
“How many of those things do you have?” she asked, wondering why one laptop wasn’t like the next as she dropped onto the couch and lay down to catch her breath. Her cardio workout always got her blood pumping, but she was used to having some kind of a warm up first.
“Zave’s parents were killed when he was in his twenties,” Tuck murmured and began to type. “Speak to me, pet.” Computers were his pets, it seemed to be his universal name for all programs, like he believed the vast interconnected consciousness of the global digital network was a living, breathing creature.
“You’re trying to find out specifics?”
“I can’t remember the date, but I remember going to the funeral… Well not going, I was on over-watch.”
Of course he was. It didn’t surprise her that the Kindred—if they even were that back then—were paranoid even on somber occasions. “Over-watch for what?” she asked, but he was still typing.
“I have to call him and find out why—” Something caught his eye and he looked up at the door then sat back. “Your boy’s on his way up.”
She glanced from him to the door and back again. Art could do that, he could look at the door and tell that Brodie was coming in. She still didn’t know how it worked. But then she’d only found out after living in the house for more than three months that there were cameras watching her in her bedroom.
