Chapter 1
Wallace had already spoken with Terk’s brother, Merk, asking for his help—and the loan of Levi’s satellite—to scour social media and the dark web, looking for any communications that even eluded to a psychic researcher being for hire—or kidnapping someone with energy-working abilities.
That would be a big ongoing project, so nothing had been found yet.
However, if anything popped up, they would let Wallace know immediately.
Before Merk ended the call, he suggested, “Could be big money financing the kidnappings of these gifted people. As Terk mentioned, could be anywhere in Asia. Could even be foreign governments. For that matter, could be our own government. We all know what happened to Terk and his team.”
Wallace groaned when hearing that.
Merk continued. “So, do what you do best. In the meantime, we’ll look for cryptic language that may lead to Amy.”
Wallace again checked his phone and sighed.
He and Amy had connected after landing in London, once they realized just what the British government wanted them to do for MI6. They stayed in contact, until she failed to show up this morning.
He’d waited for her and then asked Jonas about her, who suggested she must be running late.
Yet, when she didn’t show up hours later, Wallace went to the hotel to see what was going on, hoping that nothing had gone wrong.
He hoped to find her there, ready and waiting.
Instead the hotel shared that she hadn’t returned the previous night and that her security key hadn’t been used since Wallace had last seen her.
So somewhere after eight o’clock—when they finished a business dinner with several others, then dropped her off at her hotel—she had gone missing.
Considering her hotel room was on the third floor—and she hadn’t made it past the front entrance—was beyond concerning.
The added fact that nobody knew she was missing until now also meant that whomever or whatever had happened in between gave the bad guys a major head start, definitely leaving the good guys at a disadvantage.
Wallace stood up as soon as Jonas appeared, introducing the man with him as Riff.
He had offered no other name, which was so damn typical of people in this field, particularly when they were more like Terk than Jonas.
They all headed into Jonas’s office, as Riff argued fiercely with Jonas.
Finally Riff just slashed his hand out in a motion, suggesting that the conversation was over.
He turned to Wallace. “You ready to go?”
Wallace nodded. “Past ready. Do we have a destination?”
“The hotel.”
“But we checked there,” Jonas snapped at Riff again.
“Of course you checked,” Riff muttered, his tone flat, “but what you look for and may or may not find is nothing like what we’ll be looking for.”
Jonas hesitated, eyeing them. “You really think you’ll find something?”
“Yes, we do, but we have to get there first, and you need to clear it, stat.”
“It’s cleared,” Jonas confirmed, his tone grumpy, “but I don’t have time to run around and do this.”
“It’s better if you’re not with us anyway,” Riff stated. “So, stay here and do what you do. We’ll follow up.” With a smile, he added, “We’re taking the government rig though. It does give us a little bit of panache.”
“Not really.” Jonas groaned. “It will probably bring you nothing but trouble.”
“You could be right,” Riff agreed, with a cheerful smile, “but we need wheels now.” And, with that, he gave a nod to Wallace. “Let’s get out of here.”
They quickly walked away from Jonas, knowing that he knew how to play the game. Even if Jonas struggled with somebody else calling the shots, he wasn’t questioning them,… at least not much.
Riff took the driver’s seat. As Wallace got into the passenger seat, he asked, “Will this backfire on us?”
“Not with Jonas, never,” he replied, with a shrug.
“Jonas has to play within the parameters of his government job,” Riff explained.
“We don’t and we won’t. Jonas is well accustomed to keeping us out of trouble, yet he also knows that this deal is bad news for everybody.
Once it gets ugly, there really are no happy endings, not until we get to the bottom of it.
He will do everything he can to cover us, but he can’t just give us a government vehicle.
However, if I took it?… That’s a different story.
Same thing regarding clearance to get into the hotel.
Great if we have it, but, if we don’t, we’ll take it anyway.
” He glanced at Wallace. “Jonas can cover us for what we’ve done but can’t give us permission for a great deal of what we do because it’s beyond the scope of what his mandate will allow. ”
“Right.” Wallace gave a headshake. “Government and all.”
“Absolutely,” Riff confirmed, with a smirk. “Government and all. It’s tough on everybody, but we all play it this way because we have to.”
Wallace understood that.
“What the hell is this I hear about you coming over to MI6 for a job?” Riff asked him curiously.
“They dangled in front of me this concept of setting up something similar to what Terk had going with the CIA,” he shared a bit sheepishly.
“So, I came over to check it out. Amy was brought in for interviews as well. I don’t really know for sure, but, at this point, I’m wondering if we were set up. ”
Riff fell silent as he considered that. “If somebody was curious as to what you guys were up to—and especially if they didn’t know that you had these kinds of abilities—coming in for this MI6 job interview just made an announcement to the big wide world.”
“Yet nobody was supposed to even know about the interview or the job, not to mention what the team would do. Neither was there any public knowledge as to what we can do.”
“But it’s government,” Riff noted, with a headshake. “Which really just means, everybody in the government knows.”
“It’s supposed to be Black Ops–level containment,” Wallace grumbled.
“And to a certain extent it will be. However, if they’ve got somebody against all this or somebody being paid to find out information, then this intel is huge,” he muttered. “You can’t ever trust the government.”
“No, but I was thinking that Jonas’s group might be different.”
“Was it actually Jonas who brought you over?”
Wallace frowned, then shook his head. “No, you’re right there. It wasn’t him. It was implied, and I inferred, that he was involved, but nobody ever came out and stated it was his deal.”
“And because they didn’t say that outright, I wouldn’t trust it,” Riff pointed out.
“Damn,” Wallace swore under his breath.
“How well do you know Amy?”
“I used to know her very well,” he shared, with a smile.
“At one point in time we had a bit of a thing, but neither of us were ready for commitment back then. When I realized she was here for her interview, I was happy to see her again. I got pretty excited. She’s quite powerful in her own way, but I’d heard that she had been severely ill not all that long ago.
So, if she was here, I took that to mean she was back on her feet, including with access to her abilities. ”
“What abilities?”
“Remember that I haven’t seen in her years.
Last I knew of her skills, I would call her this navigation efficiency expert.
Don’t know what she calls it. She can look at a map and can pretty well plan out where to go, how to go, and has a great deal of success in getting there without traffic lights, delays on planes, and anything going awry.
” He shrugged. “It’s marvelous. Not necessarily the most useful thing in terms of government programs though because I believe it only works if she’s doing the traveling. ”
Riff took his gaze off the road to glance at Wallace. “That would be freaking awesome if each of us could do that.”
“It would. She and I both left the USA at the same time for this interview, and she got to England a hell of a lot faster than I did. Jonas did look a little confused at the initial meet.”
“Of course, being Jonas,” Riff muttered, “he’s also got to keep his own agenda moving forward.”
“Does he have his own agenda?” Wallace asked him.
“They all do. That you can count on. One way or another, they all do. As far as government types go, we trust Jonas as much as anybody, but when push comes to shove?… I don’t think we’ll ever get precedence over his work.
So, keep that in mind. If it’ll get him in trouble, there is a limit to things he can help you with. ”
“Of course there is,” Wallace noted, with a wry tone. “There’s always a limit. It’s just never quite the same as what we think the limits should be.”
“ Right .” Riff gave him a wry smile. “Not a surprise when you put it that way. It’s just one of those things we have to look at.”
“Okay, I got it, but meanwhile…”
“Exactly, meanwhile, we need to find her.” Riff shifted lanes, merging smoothly into traffic. “We went years searching for energy workers before we had anybody who even came close to being skilled, and now it seems as if, everywhere I turn, I’m coming up against them.”
“I think the more you have to do with Terk, the more you see them,” Wallace suggested, with a smirk. “In Amy’s case, I wasn’t even sure where her abilities were at, after her illness.”
“Why would being sick affect your abilities?”
Wallace looked over at him. “When you think about it, not being sick means you’re at full energy.”
“Good point,” Riff replied.
At the hotel, they parked away from the heavy traffic area and hopped out. As they walked inside, Riff suggested to Wallace, “You can go to the reception desk, if you want, but I’m heading straight to the room first.”
“Then I’m with you,” Wallace replied.
They bypassed the front desk, and nobody stopped them.
Riff shrugged. “That’s fairly typical. As long as you act like you know what you’re doing and where you’re going, nobody really gives a crap.”
“Yet we have a missing woman,” Wallace muttered. “Shouldn’t somebody care?”