Page 89 of Sweetwater and the Witch

“I was able to find him because he couldn’t avoid using tech altogether. He needed to communicate. What can I tell you? Good communications are at the heart of every successful business.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?” Taggert said.

“The Concierge made sure the leader of the hit team that was sent after me had a burner com. The leader was supposed to send a confirming code when I was dead. I sent the code for him. The Concierge, naturally, had no way of knowing who was on the other end of the communicator. He just assumed it was the team leader. After all, who else would be able to rez it?”

“You couldn’t have rezzed a burner com, not without the code.”

“Yet here I am.”

Taggert’s palms prickled. “That’s impossible. Even if you managed to use a burner, you couldn’t have used it to find the Concierge. Burners self-destruct after one use.”

“You’re a tech guy, Spooner. You should know that the process of destruction can be analyzed and reverse-engineered just like any other process. If you know how something fell apart, you can re-create it. It’s true the original quartz was shattered in the burner. It couldn’t be made to work again. But I was able to analyze the pattern of the destruction.Once I had that information, I had the original frequency. I figured out the resonating frequency, locked onto it with a tracker, and followed it to the source. The Concierge was surprised to see me, too.”

“No,” Taggert said. “No, that’s impossible.”

“I might be able to overlook the attempted hits on me. Business is business. I might have left the problem of the murdered prospector to the police. But you went too far. You put my matchmaker in the line of fire. She nearly got killedtwicebecause of those hit teams. That can’t be allowed to stand.”

Taggert got a little light-headed. He forced himself to think. “You can’t prove that I paid the Concierge to send a hit team after you. If you could, you wouldn’t be sitting here in my office. Why are you here? What do you want?”

“I want to know about Vortex.”

Should have seen this coming,Taggert thought. He took a steadying breath. He had a plan. He was going to kill Sweetwater today. But he needed a few more answers.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” he said.

“Let’s start with what I already know.” Ethan leaned back and steepled his fingers. “Arcane has a long history with Vortex, and the Sweetwaters have a long history with Arcane. We know that anything connected to Vortex is extremely dangerous, because it involves artificially enhancing the human para-psych profile by means of overstimulating it.”

“Nonsense. Everyone knows that can’t be done. Something about the sensory overload damage.”

“Let me try to clarify this for you. If you are messing around with Old World Vortex technology, you are trying to create monsters.”

“That is pure ghost shit,” Taggert said.

“I don’t think so. Got a hunch you’ve been running a few experiments on yourself. That explains the loss of control after you missed out on the Glass House Antiquity. The Taggert Spooner who built Spooner Techwould not have tried to handle that situation on his own. He would have assembled an in-house team and come up with a plan.”

“Shut the fuck up.”

“When the plan failed, he would have known when to cut his losses. He would not have opened a contract with an anonymous rez-net broker to take out a Sweetwater. He would not have let the desire for revenge get the better of his common sense. You’re losing it, Spooner. I think Vortex is the reason.”

Taggert shot to his feet, hands clenching. “Stop talking.”

“You’ve changed, Spooner. I’m willing to bet it’s because you’ve been fooling around with your new version of Vortex. You’re turning yourself into one of the monsters, aren’t you? Fascinating.”

Taggert began to rez his talent. The exhilarating sensation swept through his senses, the same euphoric rush of power that he’d experienced when he stopped the prospector’s heart.

The transcendent experience replaced all other emotions. He was no longer fighting to suppress the hot rage. The panic was gone. He was in complete control. Powerful.

He would have liked to acquire more information from Sweetwater, but it would not be a good idea to let this go any further. He had a plan, and it was time to implement it.

“You made a mistake coming here today,” he said.

“Think so?”

“You won’t be leaving this office alive. You are going to suffer a heart attack and die.”

Sweetwater frowned. He wiped the back of his hand across his forehead.

“Like the prospector you left in a Shadow Zone alley?” he asked.

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