Steal the Lightning: A Field Ops Novel (Field Ops #3)(16)

She said, “Good health?”

“What?”

“You’re in good health?”

It wasn’t a greeting.

“I suppose so. Far as I know.”

“No injuries? Cuts, bruises? Strains? Heart problems, respiratory? No,” she drew a breath, “back problems?”

“Why would I have back problems?”

“A lot of people claim for back problems. The cause of back pain, as you know, is often undetectable. We only have the person’s word they have a problem.” She smiled, not warmly. “It’s a very common claim.”

I said, “No back pain.”

She tapped a key upon her keyboard.

“And you won’t be seeking counseling or other forms of mental health care? Or requesting leave on grounds related to the recent incident?”

“No! I thought this was a debrief, not—”

“First things first, Mr. Copeland. Now, sign the form, please.”

She printed off a sheet of paper. In each category she had typed an N. Apparently I was in perfect health, without so much as an ingrown toenail.

I read it, signed it, passed it back to her.

“Good,” she said. “At least we won’t have any more expense from this one.” She leaned back in her chair. She wasn’t really looking at me. It struck me she was much less comfortable with her role than she’d have liked me to believe, and it struck me, too, that people in that state can be a problem. As now, when she said, “Disappointing,” in a long, drawn out, meditative kind of way.

“Oh, I agree.”

“We’d hoped for better.”

“I wasn’t really chuffed myself.”

She pretended to read the screen. “I see you tried a retrieval on the target item. After considerable delay. And there were . . . side effects. I’ll tell you now, the company’s not pleased at all.”

“Right.”

As distinct from the rest of us, I thought, who are over the fucking moo.

But I was sensible for once, and said nothing.

Now, finally, she looked at me. Straight at me. Dark eyes that might, in better circumstances, have been pretty.

“If you could walk me through what happened? For the record?”

I sighed. But I went through it again, in quick, short sentences. She typed, though she wasn’t typing half of what I said. She definitely didn’t type the parts about the screaming, or the fear. Her face was like a mask while I told her about that.

At the end, she sat back, eyes on the screen.

“The name she gave you. Mark, you say?”

“Mark, or Mike. It wasn’t clear.”

She typed.

“No last name?”

“I was trying to gain her trust,” I said. “You can’t rush on stuff like that.”

“Your task parameters—”

“Hey, fuck the task parameters. Who knew she was going to snuff it on me, eh? You see that coming? ’Cause I certainly didn’t.”

“I don’t believe,” she said, “there’s any reason to be disrespectful here.”

She let me fume a few moments. Then she said, “Mark, or Mike.” She typed. She asked me, “Age?”

I drained my coffee.

“Young,” I said. “She called him young.”

“So—younger than you, say?”

“Could be. You get to her age, everybody’s young, I suppose . . .”

She typed this up. Then she sat back, turned the screen so that I couldn’t see it.

Ms. Ramirez put her small, elegant hands back on the tabletop. Then she said, “We think that this is somebody we’ve come across before. At least, we’ve come across his handiwork.” She tapped with her index finger, two, three times. I waited. She said, “Have you heard of Johnny Appleseed?”

“I’ve heard the name. Why?”

“Someone,” she said, “is distributing pieces of high-energy, psychoactive matter-gods, if you prefer the term. And we’re pretty sure it’s our material. Since we’re the only company dealing in the product, it would probably have to be.

“Last night’s our second, possibly third fatality. We have suspect cases in Seattle, Portland, Boston . . . reports from Vegas, too. It’s deliberate. It may be a rival company, trying to bring us into disrepute. Oil, or nuclear . . . It may be sabotage. Disgruntled employee, that sort of thing. Seventy-eight percent of all industrial problems are down to employees.

“We—I’m speaking for the East Coast office, now—we’d like you to look into this.”

“Of course.” But I was instantly on guard. “I’m tied up for the next few weeks, though. I have a mentoring job.”

I could see my time with Angel vanishing like smoke, before I’d even got to it.

Well, I wasn’t going to let that happen. Not without a fight.

Ms. Ramirez checked her monitor.

“Farthing,” she read.

I wondered who her boss was. I wondered who to talk to if she screwed me over on the mentoring. I had contacts in the US Registry but I didn’t want to use them. Mostly, I had Adam Shailer, whom I’d have very much preferred never to see again, except perhaps in court, charged with some scandalous and preferably humiliating crime. I wondered how to stop myself from sounding like a whiney teenager who’s just had his day out cancelled.