18. Chapter 18
18
R ebecca’s gut sank even farther as she gazed out over the sea of faces staring back at her. Every member of Shade, both field operatives and Headquarters support staff, had hung on her every word so far.
She’d called a mandatory meeting in the common room to brief everyone together on the current circumstances, all at once, because there was no doubt now that this did involve everyone.
She’d just finished recounting the horrifying realization from the night before that all Shade’s business contacts, contractors, and partners had been targeted by a single enemy with the sole purpose of crippling Shade in a way they’d never faced before.
Every magical gazing back at her now remained silent and alert, waiting for their Roth-Da’al to reveal what they all seemed to believe was the rest of the pertinent information for this briefing.
There were right. There was more, and it was time for Rebecca to get around to it. No matter how wary she was of the mass fallout just around the corner.
“After this debilitating discovery last night,” she continued, “and only one of our contacts having been successfully recovered unharmed, I believe all signs point to this being a direct and intentional attack on Shade. Possibly even a personal attack. On me.”
A chorus of whispered reactions and cautionary comments rippled across the gathered task force.
Rebecca’s instant gut reaction was to quiet the noise and tell them that everything would be fine. To reassure them she had a plan.
She forced that urge to the back of her mind, though, because this time, that wasn’t an option. This time, it would have been a lie.
“Why?” someone shouted, followed by rising murmurs of assent.
“Why would someone retaliate like this?”
“Why would they his us this hard just to get at you ?”
The question rippled in various forms throughout the crowd, and Rebecca gave it appropriate space to work itself out before the common room once more quieted enough for her to address it.
“Unfortunately,” she said, “I can’t give you a concrete answer to that question. Because it could be any number of things.”
This was it. The moment she’d hoped would never come. When the necessity of transparency and complete honesty overpowered her own silent hope that it she would never need to do this.
Rebecca took a deep breath and steeled herself for the massive speech she was about to make.
“Right now, Shade faces more simultaneous threat than I think we’ve ever faced all at once. Without sufficient intel or preparation for any of them. Things are still open-ended with Eduardo and his griybreki after we intercepted his weapons shipment. Though I’d say Eduardo’s the least of our worries now, it would be irresponsible to dismiss the potential for his crew to stage any number of future attacks in retribution.
“Our operations against Kordus Harkennr and his supply chain of abducted magical civilians hasn’t improved our situation, either. Not that I’m saying that was a mistake, because it wasn’t.”
She easily found Shade’s five newest members among the gathering, those who could personally attest to the good Shade had accomplished by freeing Harkennr’s imprisoned experiment subjects at the warehouse and heavily disrupting his supply chain.
“As far as Harkennr’s concerned,” she added, “I wouldn’t change a thing about our moves against him or how we handled the discovery of what he was doing. There’s still a lot of work to do where he’s concerned, and he still poses a very real threat. Even more so because Harkennr could strike at any time.
“If I were him, I’d come at us the second I discovered Shade now faces a lot more than just a dangerous battle with him and his criminal operations in the city.”
Surprisingly, that statement elicited a round of half-hearted cheers from her operatives. The entire task force had supported and approved of her orders to hit Harkennr where it hurt, bit by bit, one piece of his supply chain at a time.
She doubted she’d receive similar support when she got to the end of this briefing.
Once the cheers settled down again into tense anticipation, she cleared her throat and dove back in.
“On top of that, we still have no further leads on the identity or whereabouts of the enemy force that ambushed our transport convoy, took Nyx out for the count, and held Diego, Titus, and Burke ransom at the abandoned amusement park until another team could recover them.
“At this point, any one of these organizations could conceivably be behind the attacks on our network through the city. But they’re not the only ones.”
Rebecca scanned the sea of faces again, took a deep breath, and plunged forward with the new information she expected to get a much more disapproving rise out of everyone. Because this would be the first time her task force as a whole heard the full truth of what had happened.
“There’s another player out there too, who’s already acted against us once, so far known only as Big Boss.”
The confusion and curious glances shared around the common room Rebecca had fully expected, though it wasn’t as bad as she’d imagined it before this moment. She couldn’t fool herself into believing that what came next would remain nearly as mild as this.
“The confirmed intel on Big Boss is that he runs a gang in Chicago, had previous dealings in secret with Aldous Corriger, and had no idea that Shade Command had changed hands until a few weeks ago. Honestly, he might still be ignorant to Aldous’s death or the major changes made to Shade’s command structure.”
A few people around the room sniggered at the news, because yes, any idiot willing to do business with Aldous deserved to be left in the dark.
But now, Rebecca had to tell them all what came next, which she’d been dreading since before she’d called this meeting.
“This intel found us the day Blackmoon and I tracked down Aldous’s secret cache in his personal Nexus vault downtown.”
“Boo!”
“Man, fuck the changeling!”
Several other similar exclamations rose around the room, and Rebecca waited patiently for the justified reactions to die down. It didn’t take long.
“When Blackmoon and I discovered the storage vault, we were ambushed by a pair of orcs. After a short-lived skirmish, we held them and questioned them for information. Apparently, Aldous had failed to deliver his end of a previous arrangement with the orcs, explaining their employer expected full recompense for those failures.
“But when they refused to provide any other information, courtesy of a binding that made further confessions impossible on their parts, I made the decision to release them. To return them to Big Boss with a message that Aldous was no longer in charge and that Shade would not be held liable for his outstanding debts.
“I believed then, with that message delivered, we would at best have one less enemy coming after us because of Aldous’s failures, and at worst, an opportunity to meet Big Boss and effectively deal with him later should the need arise.
“But the message was never deliver, because, against my direct orders, Blackmoon decided to take matters into his own hands. He killed both orcs after I’d released them, effectively ending any possibility of learning more.
“I want to make it perfectly clear, this was not a sanctioned action on his part, nor did he escape the consequences of acting on his own and disobeying a direct order. I hadn’t previously briefed anyone on this issue, because I had no other intel on Bigg Boss. And until now, the possibility of his gang in Chicago or a potential attack on Shade from Big Boss hadn’t yet existed.
“The orcs never delivered my message, so Big Boss most likely never found out what happened to them in the first place. But now the information is relevant, and I want every member of this task force to operate in the future with the full scope of available information at their disposal so these mistakes hopefully don’t repeat themselves. If ever.”
Rebecca paused at the end of that revelation so everyone had a little more time to fully digest what they’d heard. Judging by the disapproving scowls and grumbling remarks throughout the gathering, nobody liked hearing what she’d had to say, which she’d also fully expected.
She hadn’t liked saying it.
After another moment that seemed to last an eternity, the dissatisfaction rippling among her task force calmed into a tense but silent expectation once again.
Now seemed as good a time as any to continue.
“With that said,” Rebecca continued, “we aren’t entirely out of options or resources. Last night, one of our teams successfully thwarted an attack on a known contact. As many of you already know, that contact is here with us at Headquarters and will remain here until we can ensure his continued safety elsewhere. I’ve spoken with Bruce, and he’s agreed to help double down on all security measures here and our modes of surveillance already established throughout the greater Chicago area.
“That’s our first step and an important one. No matter what, our top priority now is vigilance, and this goes for the entire task force. I want everyone to be on their toes, watching, listening, however you can. Should you encounter any suspicious activity or signs of movement from criminal organizations elsewhere in the area, no one handles it on their own. You come directly to me about it. Or to Hannigan. Or to any member of Shade’s council standing up here with me. Then we’ll decide how to best move forward.
“On that note, I’ve issues orders to stay clear of the areas where our contacts, distributors, partners, and suppliers were recently attacked. These hot zones are strictly off limits until you hear otherwise. Report anything remotely connected to these various factions out there in the city who may be gunning for Shade. Every move we make from here on out has to be meticulously devised and perfectly executed.”
Murmurs of ascent rising through the room again served as a natural stopping point in what had become Rebecca’s longest—and probably the most important—address to the task force. It gave her a moment to breathe. Or at least to try.
She spared quick glances at the members of her council she’d specifically asked beforehand to stand up here with her for just this purpose.
As far as she could tell, each of those council members took her revelations and most recent orders in stride, as if they’d already heard any of it, which Rebecca had fully anticipated.
When her gaze landed on Maxwell, of course he was already staring at her, his blazing silver gaze burning across her face.
Or maybe she’d imagined that brighter glow after how dark Shade’s prospects had become.
Unfortunately, she couldn’t tell if her Head of Security wore his usual scowl because that was how he preferred to present himself or because he also disapproved of what she was doing.
He could disapprove all he wanted, as long as he didn’t sabotage her efforts to arm Shade with all the facts in the hope that it would keep them from being caught with their pants down again and their contacts were systematically wiped off the map. Rebecca had no reason to believe he would act against her in this, either.
But the way he stared at her now reminded her there was always the possibility of it.
She just couldn’t trust him the way she’d begun to believe she could before everything had so drastically changed again.
It took a surprising amount of effort to tear her gaze away from him before she addressed the common room again.
“We’re facing a bigger threat than ever now,” she said. “Made even bigger by the fact that, as of right now, that threat still doesn’t have a face or a name. It’s more work for us in the short term, but in the end, approaching everything and everyone with the utmost caution will pay off. I want to avoid anyone else getting the jump on this task force in any capacity. Which means every single one of us will need to step up more than we ever have to ensure we don’t get taken off guard like this again.
It brought her a small measure of relief and maybe even hope to see the nods of agreement rising from her operatives and support staff, expressions settling into variations of grim determination and acceptance.
They were all in this together, and it would serve them well for every Shade member to feel like they were all in this together. Like they’d made the choice to be involved, to support each other, to look out for each other, and to carry out their orders to the best of their ability.
Only together would they make it through this and come out the other side as unscathed as possible.
She hoped.
So far, this mass briefing had gone a lot better than she’d dared to hope it would. But then Maxwell stepped forward to address the common room, without preamble or any signal from the Roth-Da’al, because Rebecca had had no idea he’d planned to deliver his own little speech on the tail end of hers.
“And finally,” he said, his voice booming around the room, “because this is new territory and not something previously included in standard operations, I want to make it clear that during this time, every member of this council, myself included, will make themselves available when necessary, either to receive reports on this matter or to field any questions that may arise. Should any individual present find a little more clarity necessary to aid in successfully and efficiently carrying out their duties, I urge you to utilize us as a resource.”
It was a particularly open-ended statement for Shade’s Head of Security and far more than Maxwell was known to say beyond the scope of briefing for large-scale missions.
Rebecca wasn’t alone in her surprise.
The common room fell into a stunned silence at the shifter’s words, everyone waiting for him to either end it with what they’d grown accustomed to hearing from him or to wrap up this briefing that didn’t actually contain much pertinent information regarding the current threat.
Maxwell surveyed the gathering a moment longer, eyed every other member of the council standing in line with him and Rebecca, then nodded as if fully satisfied with the way he’d brought this to an end.
But it wasn’t quite at its end. Not yet.
“Thank you, Hannigan,” Rebecca said.
He blinked in surprise but quickly covered it up beneath his perpetually scowling mask and stepped back along the line of her council members.
His stare on the side of her face as Rebecca prepared to deliver one final bombshell of a confession made her cheeks burn instantly hot.
Maxwell wouldn’t enjoy what she had to say next, either, but he would understand why she did it now, here, in front of everyone. The risks of not doing it were had simply become too great to ignore.
“There’s one more item I want to address,” she continued, sweeping her gaze across the sea of faces still gazing respectfully back at her, though now several of them showed far more surprise and curiosity for what came next than in anything she’d told them so far.
“This has been on my mind for weeks now, and I bring it up now because I have a feeling there won’t be many opportunities in the immediate future for everyone to hear it from me, together and all at once.”
She paused, maybe for added gravitas, maybe to give herself one more brief chance to collect her thoughts and her composure before she let it all out. Her gut curdled at the thought of making this public and official in the eyes of her task force, but it had to be done.
And it was going to hurt.