Page 100 of Enthraller

When they stepped into a dark recess beside a building with a clearly neglected frontage, she let her nanos help her find a quick way onto the roof and carefully moved to the edge, crouching down to see what was going on below.

“You got him. That’s good, Kaleb. You can go now.” The man who spoke had a gritty voice, and he stepped out of the shadows from a large back entrance that looked like a loading bay, and held the laz in his hand directly at Ed’s chest.

“This is the end if it, Opek,” Kaleb said. “I’ve done everything you asked for. I don’t want to hear from you again.”

“Of course.” Opek chuckled and Kaleb hesitated, then disappeared back onto the street, the stiffness in his posture telling Wren he wasn’t a total idiot. He knew Opek would contact him without hesitation. That there was never going to be an end to it.

“One day, one or more of them will get tired of being dangled from a piece of string and bite,” Ed said.

“That might have been a worry before, but the end is in sight,” Opek said. “We’ll be in charge soon enough, and there will be no need to pull strings any more.”

“Things aren’t going too well for you,” Ed said. “You haven’t managed the big takeover you were planning.”

“I hear we have you to thank for that.” Opek’s voice dipped a little. “Still, I can appreciate a good adversary. You didn’t give us as much trouble two years ago. It was a surprise when you started making things hard for us all this time later.”

“You shouldn’t have tried to kill me,” Ed said. “That kind of thing tends to make me annoyed.”

Opek barked out a laugh. “Yes, well, obviously we didn’t employ someone with the ability to get the job done. Strange how fate works, because they’ve been dealt with for their error, yet, here I am, grateful they didn’t in fact succeed because we need you alive more now than we needed you dead then.”

“You’re looking for Pontia’s warehouse,” Ed said.

Opek was silent for a beat. “Now, how did you know that?”

“Because Pontia told us about it just before he died. And then suddenly Evette Linao was very interested in me as soon as Wren found the ancestral wreck for her and she was no longer useful. It wasn’t difficult to work out the thing that mademeuseful is my ability to use the scanner.”

“The ancestral wreck?” Opek almost choked on the words. He drew in a deep, deep breath, pinching his nose between thumb and forefinger. “I see.”

“Didn’t tell you about that? What do you think Evette Linao was doing on Ytla?”

“It doesn’t matter.” Opek shook his head in a sharp movement. “Just tell me, where is the scanner?”

“At Defense Headquarters. Also known as the Gate. Which I think you blew up.” Ed didn’t hide the edge in his tone. “That was careless of you.”

Another long silence. “Fortunately it looks worse than it is,” Opek said. “Only the two upper floors were badly damaged.”

Wren remembered Ed setting the scanner down in the secret passageway beside Velda Shanïha’s office. That had been on the third floor. And there were eight.

It should be all right.

“Lucky,” Ed said.

“I’ll have someone fetch the scanner and bring it here. Where is it?” Opek reached for his comms unit.

“Locked up in Velda Shanïha’s office.”

Opek swore. “Where?”

“In her safe, I think.” Ed shrugged.

Opek moved away, the laz still pointed at Ed, and he had a conversation with someone over his comms unit, voice hushed.

“My contact says that can’t be right. You’re lying.” He came closer, and his grip on the laz was tighter. “You had the scanner when you left the runner at the hover port.”

“The runner your lot blew up?” Ed asked.

Opek waved that away. “We have vision of you carrying it as you walked away. And while the word is you did go to Defense HQ after that, you couldn’t have given the scanner to Velda Shanïha for safekeeping, because she wasn’t there.”

“I went to her office, looking for her, and decided to leave it there.” Ed lifted his hands.

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