Page 42 of Sweetwater and the Witch

Spooner’s eyes heated. Bowen felt energy shiver in the atmosphere. The man had some serious talent, he thought. Probably for strategy. Most successful CEOs were variations of strategy talents.

“Can’t wait to see what I bought,” Spooner said. “I’ll take the coordinates now.”

Spooner’s hands were still in plain sight but shards of ice trickled down Bowen’s spine. He tightened his grip on the mag-rez in his pocket.

“No coordinates until I see the money in my account,” he said.

“I assume you have your phone with you. Check your account.”

“You already made the transfer?”

“Of course. I trust you for the reason you mentioned earlier. You need to unload Glass House.”

Bowen kept his grip on the mag-rez and used his other hand to unclip his phone from his belt. He rezzed the anonymous account. For a moment he just stared at the numbers, unable to believe his eyes. A giddy euphoria jittered through him.

“Here you go,” he said. He clipped the phone back on his belt and reached inside the jacket for the locator. He tossed it to Spooner.

“I locked in the coordinates,” he said.

Spooner caught the locator and rezzed it. He studied the numbers on the screen for a moment. “This is in an uncharted sector beneath Illusion Town.”

“Course it is. If it had been in a mapped sector it would have been discovered by now. I’m telling you there’s a whole Alien lab down there, Spooner. Untouched by human hands. Wait until you see what you just bought.”

Spooner’s eyes got hotter. “I’m looking forward to it.”

Ice-cold energy surged in the atmosphere. Waves of darkness struck Bowen. His heart skittered. His vision blurred. His whole body chilled as if he had been plunged into a giant freezer. He struggled to get the mag-rez out of his pocket but he didn’t have the strength. He sagged to his knees, more confused than terrified.

“The money,” he managed. “You paid—”

“Don’t worry about my money,” Spooner said. “It was never actually in your account. It was an illusion. It’s amazing what you can do when it comes to online banking these days. I’m pretty good with tech.”

You can’t trust anyone in the mining business,Bowen thought. He took one more shivering breath and then there was nothing.

•••

Spooner suppressed the hot excitement that accompanied the use of his new talent. He could kill without leaving a trace. He had not had many opportunities to savor the rush. Sure, he’d run a few experiments using test subjects he’d found in the darkest alleys of Frequency—street people and drifters no one would ever miss—but tonight was the first time he had done it for the payoff of a lifetime. It was an incredible sensation.

He crouched beside the dead man and went through his clothes. According to the items in the wallet, the old prospector’s name was Bowen. Spooner continued, stripping the body of anything that would provide a quick ID. The goal was to make sure that when the corpse was discovered no one would conclude that anything out of the ordinary had gone down in the alley. An aging, failed indie prospector had died of a heart attack in the depths of the Shadow Zone. Not the first time that kind of thing had happened. Certainly not worth a police investigation. In the unlikely event an autopsy was performed, there would be nothing unusual to find.

There was a small green pyramid crystal in one of the prospector’s pockets, a mag-rez in the other. Spooner took both and got to his feet.

He went back to the rental car and paused to check the update from the Concierge. The team was operational, moving in on the target. Yes,there would be some collateral damage, but nothing that couldn’t be handled. She was just a matchmaker.

In the old days—last month—he would have tried very hard to avoid taking out a member of the Sweetwater clan. He would have told himself it was unwise to do something that was fraught with the risk of attracting the attention of such a powerful family. But now that his para-psych profile was so much stronger, he was far more adept at calculating risks. His talent for strategy had been enhanced even as the new talent took hold.

When he had spotted Ethan at the reception, his enhanced intuition had kicked into a high-rez state. Theoretically there was nothing unusual about a Sweetwater showing up on the opening night of the convention. Amber, Inc., was a major player in the mining and tech world. But when the resonating stone in his tie clasp signaled a device in close proximity was attempting to lock onto his sig frequency and he had looked around and seen Ethan Sweetwater, he had known he had a problem. He did not believe in coincidences.

Sweetwater might not be involved in the family business, but he was a Sweetwater, and by all accounts he was a high-level engineering talent. The combination was cause for concern.

He had immediately used his own tracking device to try to snag Sweetwater’s frequency. Not surprisingly, it had been blocked. The Sweetwaters were very, very good with amber tech.

But there had been no problem grabbing the frequency of the amber that the woman was wearing. It was clear she and Sweetwater were a couple. Tracking her was the next best thing to tracking Sweetwater.

Spooner fired up the rental and drove sedately through the Shadow Zone. He had hired the untraceable two-person hit team from the same broker he had used occasionally in the past. The Concierge was as anonymous as it got on the rez-net, a ghost.

Under normal circumstances he would have had Melody Palantine make the arrangements, but he had not mentioned this project to Melody.She would have been horrified, not by the prospect of hiring a freelance contract hit team, but by the risk involved in taking out a Sweetwater. At the very least she would have demanded an explanation for the move, and he was not ready to bring her in on Glass House.

Tonight he was more convinced than ever that the future of Vortex—his future—was riding on Bowen’s incredible discovery. Eventually Palantine and a handful of others would have to be involved in Glass House, but he wanted to get a handle on it first. He needed to assess the true potential of what he had acquired tonight. Only then could he make plans.

---