Chapter 7
A my sat in the back seat of the beefed-up SUV the whole way into town, a trip that took over an hour. She dozed in and out as Terk and Wallace talked steadily in the front seat. Several times Wallace looked around at her.
She just smiled and waved him off. “I’m fine,” she murmured.
When they finally pulled up to a stop, she jerked up and looked around to see what appeared to be government buildings. Leaning forward, a little more alert now, she noted, “I presume this is it, and it does seem vaguely familiar.”
Terk nodded. “Yes, this is where Jonas wanted us to meet him.”
“Good enough.” And then she stopped for a moment, contemplated the situation, then eyed him curiously. “You do trust him, right?”
Terk smiled and nodded. “I do. There’s always room and potential for people to change, but I’ve had no reason to doubt him in all these years that I’ve known him.”
“Good enough,” she replied. “I guess nobody’s perfect, and nobody can stay perfect all the time. So… at least for the moment, he’s not on my shit list.”
At that, Wallace burst out laughing. “Glad to hear it. I am not surprised you have a shit list,” he stated, still chuckling. “It might help if we knew who else was on it.”
“As long as you’re not on it,” she quipped, tossing him a cheeky grin, “you’re safe.”
“But how will I know if I am or I’m not, if you don’t tell me?”
“Ah, you’ll have to just keep guessing, I suppose,” she said, smirking, as she got out and stood beside Terk. “So, we’re expecting him to be here, right?”
He nodded. “He will be. The question is whether something else is pulling him back and making him late.” Just then Terk’s phone rang.
He answered it right away, “Yeah, Jonas. We’re here.
Where are you?” He looked around and nodded at something that Jonas shared.
When Terk finally ended the call, he told them, “Jonas wants to meet us up in the offices. He’s been held up with a phone call. ”
“Yet he was just talking to you,” she pointed out.
He smiled. “Indeed, but now he has to make another call.”
She rolled her eyes. “Typical bureaucracy for them. They would do and say anything to not have to get up from their desks.”
Terk burst out laughing. “Personally I would rather be anywhere but at a desk.”
“And yet look what you created for yourself,” she pointed out in a teasing tone. “I don’t imagine that you’ll be getting out from behind that desk anytime soon.”
“And here I was hoping I would have lots of people to take over various aspects of it,” he stated, with a wry look in her direction. “When you start out with a company, you don’t realize how quickly you scale up and what’s required when you do.”
“Oh, I agree, though I can’t say it’s anything I ever thought I would go into.”
“What, business?” he asked curiously.
She nodded. “Not that I had any idea for a business to run either.”
“But I ran a team for the government,” Terk explained, “so it just seemed to be a natural extension when we ended up going private.”
“It is, and, besides, you’re a caretaker.”
At that, he frowned at her. “What the hell does that mean?”
She burst out laughing. “It sounded better than running a rescue center .” He glared at her, but she didn’t give in. “You know it yourself,” she declared. “You collect people, people like me.”
“Did I collect you?” he asked, with a wry tone. “Because, if I did, maybe I need to learn how to uncollect people.”
“If you hadn’t intended to, you wouldn’t have thrown that signal out there, now would you?” She mentioned the beacon since he had failed to speak about it.
“It must have been a weak moment,” Terk admitted. “Believe me that I got quite a few calls for me to reconsider that.”
“Of course, and yet, as somebody who is benefiting from your assistance,” she added, “I can’t say that I’m against what you’re doing.”
“Of course not.” He motioned with his hand, leading the way toward the front door. “That doesn’t mean all this is something we want to continue.”
“Yet, if you don’t continue,” she pointed out, “what else would you do?”
“I don’t know. We all have families now, so we all have things that we want to consider, other than dealing with this crap on a regular basis.”
“If you had enough money that you could all retire, you could look at that.”
He shrugged. “That would be a lot of money.”
“Yeah, but throwing a satellite into orbit, that’s also a lot of money.”
“Ah, you heard about that, did you?” He chuckled. “In our business it’s mandatory.”
“Sure, and I get that,” she acknowledged, “but it always just seems that the bigger the boys, the more expensive the toys.”
At that, he burst out laughing and nodded. “Very, very true.” He looked over at Wallace and grinned. “You better watch out. She’ll be quite a handful.”
He smiled. “I know, but sometimes you really have no choice.”
Terk studied the two of them for a long moment and then nodded. “That is very true. Now, let’s figure out how to get you guys out of this, safe and sound.”
“How do you make money off this?” Amy asked. “Because I’m not sure I have enough to pay you.”
“You probably don’t,” Terk replied. “Who would? That’s just the nature of the work, and it’s incredibly expensive to run an operation like this. But a good share of the time we end up working in tandem with the government, and they can cover the cost.”
“Does that work for you?” Amy asked.
“Sometimes it does and sometimes not,” he said, sending her a smile. “In this case, you were kidnapped because of what happened at their offices, so the cost isn’t on you. The cost is on them.”
“That’s a good thing,” she muttered, with a heartfelt sigh. “I was wondering, as I don’t have a whole lot of options otherwise.”
“We all have options,” Terk declared, as he quickly led the way to the main entrance. “We just don’t always know it.”
Inside, she followed the men, looking back and realizing just what a different atmosphere it was today, versus when she’d been in to interview just a few days ago.
Different building but same government. She shook her head, hating the sense of insecurity still gripping her.
She moved closer to Wallace, as she grasped his hand.
“Hope you don’t mind, but I’m feeling a little bit like I’ve been here before, and it didn’t have the greatest results. ”
He squeezed her hand gently. “I get that,” he noted. “You’ll be fine this time though.”
“Sure, I will,” she muttered, not at all convinced. “I just don’t want to get separated from you guys again. That’s when the sharp teeth come out.”
Neither of them responded to that, and she looked over at Terk curiously. “Do you do much fieldwork?”
He shook his head. “Used to, but, no, not a lot since I started Guardian,” he admitted. “I typically do if all of us are needed or if friends are involved,” he added, with a clipped nod. “Unfortunately both happen a little too often.”
As they walked through the building and headed to the elevators, she looked over at Terk. “Do you ever get some radar hit, a sense of something wrong?”
He nodded and, not even looking at her, asked in a low voice, “Are you getting something?”
She looked around and nodded earnestly. “I can’t tell if I’m getting something or if it’s just stuff brought on from the last time I met with MI6,” she murmured. “That’s why I was asking you.”
He nodded. “It’s always a good thing to double-check a situation because emotions can completely overrun your ability to detach,” he explained. “At the moment I’m not getting anything, but it would be quite a coup for somebody to grab all three of us.”
At that, Wallace sucked in his breath. “That’s not a thought I want to contemplate.… Thank you for that mental image.”
Terk shot him an amused glance. “Whatever senses you’ve got, turn them on—because you never quite know what’s waiting for us.”
“I guess that’s why I was asking,” Amy whispered, still glancing around nervously. “We really do trust that this will be okay, right?”
“I don’t fully trust anything ever,” Terk replied smoothly.
“We do the best we can with what we have, with the expectation that it will all work out at some point,” he shared.
“We’re not foolish about it, but we also realize that, in the world we live in and with the work that we do, things can happen.
When things happen, they generally happen in a big ugly way in our world.
” He motioned forward and added, “What we’re trying to do today is put a lot of that to the test.”
Amy groaned. “I hear you. I just don’t like anything about it right now.”
He chuckled. “So far, not a whole lot you like about a lot of things.”
“Ouch,” she muttered. “That does make me sound like a prima donna, doesn’t it?”
“I don’t know about that, but it does make you wary, and, after what you’ve just been through, I think that’s a good thing.”
The elevator opened just then, and they stepped inside.
Heads nodded in their direction, and a couple people just ignored them, as the elevator continued upward.
She sent out a quick check to see if everything was okay in the world, as she could best figure it out.
She wasn’t getting any feedback, so she just shrugged.
When they got off at the top, she looked over at Terk.
“I’m still not getting anything,” she whispered.
He nodded, as they stepped away from the others.
“There’s also a weird resonance in this building.
I’ve never really understood why. Yet every time I’ve been here, something is dampening the energy, almost like a blocker was here.
” She stiffened, hearing that, and Terk nodded.
“I don’t think it’s necessarily deliberate on their part, but—”
“And yet,” Wallace interrupted, “if they could do that, it would be really smart.”