~~*~~
While I had a persistent headache thanks to my concussion, the doctors at Queensway-Carleton Hospital were baffled by my rapid rate of improvement. I didn’t feel any better compared to when I had been released; if anything, I ached even more. What had been scheduled to be a two and a half hour affair resulted in a six-hour fiasco involving extra tests to confirm the results of the first round.
At least I walked away with my ban on coffee lifted. When they warned me against consuming alcohol, Gerald burst out laughing and didn’t stop until we were back in his car. I endured in silence, figuring he had earned some humor at my expense for going beyond the call of duty as a friend and partner in crime.
Instead of heading home after the appointment, Gerald drove to downtown Ottawa. When he pulled into the parking garage of an office building not far from Parliament Hill, I groaned. “You told me we were going to a hospital, not a business meeting.”
“I have to pick up a few things from my office. You may as well come up.”
“I could just sit in the car and avoid whatever security gauntlets you have here,” I countered.
“Don’t be a baby. You’re with me. You don’t even have any car keys on you. It’ll be a breeze, especially for me. I’ll walk through the scanners and ignore them while they pat you down.”
“So is that what you were on the phone about earlier? Something came up at the office?”
“Haven’t you learned anything about this business, Jackson? There’s always something going on at the office. Unfortunately, I’m the only one who can deal with it. Come on. The sooner I’m upstairs, the sooner I can take you back home. At least you had a nice nap this afternoon. I didn’t,” he complained, banging on the hood of his car when I was slow getting out. “Chop, chop.”
Gerald’s office was on the top floor, requiring me to navigate through three different security checkpoints. The room was large enough to fit twenty comfortably, complete with a conference table. A monster of an oak desk dominated one wall of the room, out of view of the single window.
“Take a load off,” he ordered, heading to his desk. “Hopefully it won’t take me too long to deal with this.”
The last time I had been in one of Gerald’s offices, it had been a quarter of the size and had been overrun with files. “You got an upgrade, I see. This one even has a filing cabinet, and it appears you even use it.”
“Is it as big as yours yet?” he countered.
I snorted, thinking of my nook in my house. Most of my house likely would have fit in his office, with the exclusion of my basement, which wasn’t fit for bats let alone for me. “Mines ten by ten feet and it used to be the guest bedroom, which I’m pretty sure had been converted from a walk-in closet for the master bedroom.”
“Oh? Escaped that basement you had told me about at long last?”
“I gave up and left it for the spiders. While it was larger, there’s only so many times I can deal with hitchhiking arachnids,” I muttered with a shudder. It didn’t help that the basement didn’t have any natural light, which only made the creepy-crawly sensation of a spider skittering across my skin that much worse.
“Have you forgotten that you could just claim one of your cruise ships as yours and win the office wars outright?”
“They’re not my ships. Why has everyone been calling them my ships this week?”
Gerald laughed. “That’s because you own the men who own them. It’s the same thing.”
I sat at the head of the conference table and gave the executive chair an experimental spin. When it didn’t squeak or threaten to dump me onto the floor, I leaned back and stretched. When my shins cracked into the table leg, I spat curses.
“I said take a load off, Jackson. That doesn’t mean try to break your legs on my table.”
I backed the chair up a few feet. “Spill it, Gerald. I’m pretty sure you could have asked one of your employees to fetch anything you needed from the office. Why are we here?”
“Delay tactics,” he replied, chuckling as he propped his feet up on his desk and kicking his shoes off. “Theodore is setting up a laptop for you and he’s not done yet.”
“That’s gotta be some laptop,” I muttered. “You do realize it’s after midnight, right? We could have waited until tomorrow.”
“Nonsense. It shouldn’t be more than half an hour or so.”
My stomach chose that moment to voice its complaints over having suffered through bland hospital cafeteria food a handful of hours ago during the wait for test results. “I don’t suppose you could force some delivery guy through security, could you?”
Grinning at me, Gerald shook his head. “We’ll eat something on the way home. There’s either fast food or a late-night pub we could hit.”
“We really came here for a laptop?” I asked, narrowing my eyes at him.
“I plead the fifth.”
“Gerald, you are not an American. You have the eleventh under the Charters of Rights and Freedoms. The fifth doesn’t work here.”
“There you go, nitpicking again. The fifth, the eleventh—close enough.”
“Aren’t you supposed to be some sort of big wig with CSIS? I’m pretty sure the differences between the eleventh and the fifth are important to you.”
“Technically, if I were in the CSIS, my office would be located in a different building. This is merely a security firm somewhat near Parliament Hill.”
I snorted. “A security firm disguised as an office building, complete with a bank and coffee shop on the first floor.”
“It’s the safest bank in town,” he replied with a smile.
“You’re so full of it, Gerald.”
“Security is a very important matter. Someone has to protect the coffee shop. That is not something to take lightly.”
Shaking my head, I went back to spinning in the chair, careful not to hit anything. I drummed my fingers against the armrests, leaning back as far as I could without tipping over. Gerald’s phone rang, and he answered, “What is it?”
“Yes, sir. He’s here, currently testing the spinning capabilities of my chairs.” There was a pause. “Yes, sir. He’s on a significant number of medications. How did you guess?” After a few minutes of listening, he hung up. “How do you feel about doing some consulting work for me, Mr. Anderson?”
At the use of my real last name, I tensed. The dull headache grew into a stabbing monstrosity behind my eyes. “I have a headache already, and it’s getting worse. What do you need?”
“That was the reason for delay tactic number one. We—yes,
We
—want to move on these murders. Considering the victims are witches, we feel it appropriate to call in the Inquisition. They’re far better equipped for this sort of investigation than we are.”
“They already owe you for the isotopes, Gerald. That’s a phone call away. You know that.”
“We want to hire a minimum of a hundred of their best ops and investigators.”
I gawked at him, and for a long moment, all I could do was stare with my mouth hanging open. “A hundred?”
“We want this resolved. Someone is murdering young witches—children, at that. Canada will not stand idle for such things. We don’t have so many witches, and if we do nothing, we would be guilty of taking part in a genocide. That’s unacceptable. We want the killers found and dealt with. We’re willing to offer a competitive rate, cover stories, as well as identification and passports for all agents involved. You have our approval to equip them however you feel necessary, on our dime. The CSIS is on notice to offer the Inquisition its full cooperation.”
“Holy shit, Gerald. What are you going to do next? Offer me the keys to the castle?”
“Do you want them?”
“No.”
“Pity. I’d like to watch you shake things up in town. Can you do it?”
“With pleasure,” I replied, allowing my tone to turn cold.
“I’ve got a blank check with your name on it, then.”
“Does it come with a blank pardon? What sort of sanctions will they be under for lethal force?”
“Consider it done, with the strict caveat that your license to kill is limited to those directly responsible for the murders of the witches. I’ve been asked not to let this clog up the court system.” At the caution in Gerald’s tone, I read between the lines.
Canada wasn’t ready to acknowledge the supernatural in public, the same stance the United States took, which left the Inquisition to work from within the shadows.
If justice was to be served, it’d be dealt in a dark alley instead of in the light of day. Any other day, it would have bothered me.
The families of the dead deserved to know what had happened to their loved ones.
I clenched my jaw. There’d be one extra in the Inquisition this time, and I looked forward to taking part as judge, jury, and executioner. “Understood. I’m going to need that laptop, a secure phone, and a lot of coffee.” I drew a deep breath, stopped the chair, and looked Gerald in the eye. “I’m also going to need a gun.”
It was time I learned how to fire without flinching. If I got my daughter’s killers in my sights, I wasn’t going to miss, no matter what the costs were to me.
~~*~~
Armed with Gerald’s secure line, a notepad, pen, and one of his laptops, I placed a single call to the Inquisition, bypassing my brother in favor of one of the higher ranked men in the organization, one with a track record of seeing justice done even if it meant bending a few rules in the process.
Lyle had been a cop before becoming an Inquisitor, and I wanted him for his past as much as I did for his current skills.
When he answered I said, “Good morning, Lyle. It’s Jackson, and I have work for you.”
“You have more lives than a cat, Mr. Jackson,” he informed me before yawning. “It’s usually His Eminence who is waking me up at one in the morning. You’re usually more reasonable than this. What’s going on?”
“Canada’s hiring you to hunt down a mass murderer—my guess is that it’s a group. The body count is near two thousand over the past two or three years. Almost all of the victims are below the age of twenty-one. The youngest was three, the oldest sixty-two. I have a license to kill, a grudge, and I need a hundred hit men and investigators. Interested? As a fair warning, they might be the same folks behind what happened in Oconee.”
Lyle bellowed curses. Grimacing at the onslaught, I held the phone away from my ear until he settled down. With a snarl to rival a Fenerec, he demanded, “Are you serious?”
“I’m sitting in some cruddy office building near Parliament Hill in Ottawa. It’s one in the morning. Canada is requesting one hundred of the Inquisition’s best. You’ll have full cooperation of the CSIS. They want this taken care of fast and quietly. It is not to reach the courts.”
“Jesus Christ in a bucket.”
Twirling the pen between my fingers, I asked, “How long to get a group together?”
“Two or three days. I’ll have to make some calls and see who is free. What’s our cover?”
“The Canadians will be dealing with that. I’ll need the operatives’s names, photos, and basic information sent to Ottawa. Send one of the ops. That list doesn’t change hands, period. Tell me who you’re bringing over by secure phone, and I’ll get Gerald to put a flag on their file for the border crossing.”
“I’ll bring it myself,” he replied.
“Good. There will be no leaks on this one, Lyle. People will get killed, if Oconee is any indicator.”
“What about His Eminence?”
“This is a need to know operation, and he doesn’t need to know. Last time I checked, he wasn’t one of the Inquisition’s top hundred operatives. If he thinks he needs to know what you’re up to, you call me.”
“You’re playing hardball. Okay, what can we bring with us?”
“What do you need?”
“How about the kitchen sink?”
I smirked. “They sell those here.”
“Guns?”
Setting my pen down, I grabbed the laptop and opened a spreadsheet. “They’re sold here too. Think bigger than that, Lyle. Come on. I got a blank check to play with here. What will you need?”
“What’s our limit?”
“So long as all lethal force is directed at the killers, there are no limits.”
“Even tactical first strikes?”
“Hold.” I muted the phone and spun to face Gerald. “Tactical first strikes. Yay or nay?”
“Yay, non-nuclear. Only with approval from us first.”
Chuckling, I turned back to the table and hit the mute button again. “With approval, you can use whatever the fuck you want, Lyle. Only caveat is non-nuclear devices.”
“Holy shit. The Canadians are fucking ticked, aren’t they?”
“These bastards are killing kids, Lyle. I’m fucking ticked. I have a list of the dead. I’ll give it to you when you arrive in Ottawa.” That my daughter numbered among the dead turned my rage into a conflagration, but he wasn’t going to learn the truth of that, not anytime soon. Knowing Lyle, if he found out my involvement was personal, he’d do everything in his power to cut me out of the loop.
Personal involvement was bad for investigative business. It was a rule among cops and sacred ground for Lyle.
I fully intended to let him handle the investigations, but when it came to pulling the trigger, I would get there first.
“I’m your man, Mr. Jackson.”
“I know. That’s why I called you. Build your team. Get to Ottawa, let me know when you arrive, and keep me in the loop. Secure lines only. Leave a message with Gerald that you’re in town and the hotel you’re booked in.” I gave him the number.
“Yes, sir.”
“Good night, Lyle.” I hung up. Once again, I spun in the chair to face Gerald. “The ball is in their court. The rest can wait until tomorrow.”
With a faint smile, he rose. “I think I’ve delayed us enough. Shall we?”
Stretching my arms over my head, I winced at the stiffness in my muscles. “Please. I’m about dead on my feet.”
“Don’t fall asleep until you’re at my place. I don’t think I can carry you,” he replied, stuffing his feet into his shoes. “Pub or fast food, your choice.”
“Fast food,” I said, lurching to my feet. “Is that coffee place downstairs still open?”
“It’d be a national tragedy if they closed,” Gerald replied solemnly.
“So why were you delaying, anyway? I don’t see Theodore or the laptop.”
“I’m not telling.”
“You’re being an ass.”