Page 26 of Dragon's Desire

Gil Xander laughed. He actually laughed at her. She was ready to explode. Wiping a tear away from his eye, Mr. Xander replied, "Agent Carrier, while I appreciate your position and the work you are doing, you must understand that I'm not going to be interrogated without exercising my constitutional right to have an attorney present. Given what I'm paying them to stay on retainer, it'd be a shame to see that money go to waste." He took a deep breath and continued. "Now, I would like to help you get to the bottom of this."

"I'm sorry, Mr. Xander. My partner is a little overzealous. You're not an official suspect in this investigation. Just a person of interest."

"And what of my associate here, Arnold Bryce? Is he a suspect?"

"He is the head of the division where these came from," Peter answered, his voice far calmer than Kiercy's.

"While I'm willing to have everyone and anyone cooperate with your investigation, I can't have any of them speaking to you without council present. Arnie, I want you to go down to legal right now. You should have called them first. You know that."

Arnold Bryce fled his own office with a speed that Kiercy wouldn't have expected from a man who worked a desk all day and looked so pale.

"I guess that won't look good on his quarterly review," Peter snickered.

"Are you really going to stonewall us with lawyers?" Kiercy asked.

"Agent Carrier, my intent is not to interfere with the investigation. The issue at hand here is that since Xander Technologies accepts military contracts, we have to make sure that no one is breaking our agreements by answering your questions. We sign a mountain of NDAs before we are given the opportunity to build something for the military. I'm more than willing to help you track down where in the supply chain these goggles came from, but not at the cost of my whole company."

"So, because of greed, you’re willing to let innocent civilians get hurt?" Kiercy was fuming.

"No, Agent Carrier. Not greed. Responsibility. My company employs nearly three hundred thousand workers. If you count the contractors and suppliers, it's probably closer to five hundred thousand people who rely on me to keep their families fed. If I risk my company, I risk the livelihood of all those people. I do want to help, but I will not put half a million people out of work. I do hope you can understand that."

18

PETER

Peter watched as Kiercy laid into one of the richest men in the world like he was just some regular guy. She had guts. He had to give her that. But Gil Xander remained calm and collected.

"Believe me, Agent Carrier, I'm just as upset by this as you are, if not more so. It's my company and my name on the line. I wish I could say the buck stops with me, but once an organization gets as large as mine, it becomes impossible to maintain the level of control necessary for me to vet every employee myself. But you have my word, we will get to the bottom of this, and the responsible parties will be dealt with accordingly. I can see to that personally."

He then pulled out a tablet and said, "In the meantime, let me see if I can at least start to make it up to you. It was my equipment helping him, so I think it's only fair that you have access to tech like that as well. We've got some great stuff in R&D that I'd be more than happy to lend out to help you find him and deal with him. Some of it is still experimental, and you would be field testing it."

Peter tensed. "I appreciate the offer, but I'm not looking to try to take down a powerful warlock with something that might just fall apart in the middle of a fight."

"Don't worry, Agent Winthrop. No weapon I'm lending you is going to do that. It's the secondary support equipment that may still need some tinkering, so I'd appreciate any field notes or suggestions."

He scrolled through the images on the tablet. "Here we have some blessed bolt and blessed daggers we acquired. I'm sorry, Agent Carrier, but these weapons don't distinguish between friend and foe. It'd burn you to touch them. We are still seeing if we can change that, but I believe Agent Winthrop could use them in the meantime. They'll stop Legermain from casting spells, at least. He might still be able to use magical items. We haven't had any witches interested in helping us test that use-case."

"Blessed bolts? Blessed daggers? How do you have something like this in stock like it's nothing? Where did you get something like that?" Peter asked.

"We face unique challenges now, and so we must come up with a way to meet them—a mix of old and new solutions. We've gone to great lengths to collect these items for study, and my goal is to figure out a way to engineer them for mass production. There have been some preliminary attempts to get them to function in bullet form, something easier to carry with a greater rate of fire, but those are not reliable enough yet. I wouldn't want to send you out there with something I wasn't 100% confident in. But we've managed to make the blessed bolts small enough for these."

Gil pulled up a compact, hand-sized crossbow. It looked a little fancier, but it wasn't much different from some of the models Peter had seen.

"I mean, it looks nice, but a pistol grip crossbow isn't exactly revolutionary."

"You underestimate me. It's a pistol grip crossbow, yes, but we've managed to make them easier to load than ever before and more durable. The only reason I wouldn't suggest trying to hit someone with it is we've made them light enough that you'd be better off just using your fist in that case."

This man was proud of his accomplishments, and Peter couldn't fault him for that. He'd managed to take the tools of the trade and modernize them in ways that no witch hunter had dared to try. Most witch hunters out there using a crossbow at all had to rely on very old school ones because the modern crossbows were built to handle lighter-weight quarrels made from aluminum or carbon fiber.

A mostly iron blessed bolt was just too heavy.

"Has any other witch hunter used this before?" Peter asked.

"You'd be the first officially trained witch hunter to do so," Gil answered.

"I'll take whatever you can give me," Peter said.

"Very well. I'll have it brought up with a few other things you might find useful."

---