Page 12 of Into Darkness (Night Prowler 6)
“Fräulein . . .” the Grand Minister’s gaze dropped to the name tag on the lapel of her uniform. “Bohn.” His one blue eye gazed into her two brown ones. He seemed to be waiting for a response, so she nodded, and even that small motion felt loaded with guilt. She moistened her lips, waiting.
There were six men in the small office with them, lined against the walls on either side. Four more were posted outside the door. None of them had spoken to her as she’d been led in. None of them had touched her. Every one of them peered at her as if down the sights of a rifle.
All of them bore the faint scent of metal, and a much stronger odor of chemicals, bright as a new penny underneath the other scents of soap and cigarettes and skin.
Guns. Collars. Tranquilizers. The only things they’d need to take her down, and keep her there. When they moved, she heard the muted, musical chink of metal on metal as the collars hidden beneath their clothes moved with them.
She shifted her weight from one foot to the other as the Grand Minister watched, his face devoid of emotion.
“I’m informed you were an eyewitness to the incident that occurred yesterday evening.”
Lu nodded, trying hard not to blink under his penetrating stare.
“And?”
Lu cleared her throat. “It was . . . ah . . . disturbing. Sir.”
His nostrils flared slightly, and she wondered if the man could actually smell a lie. If so, she was safe for the moment, because the incident had been disturbing, even if she’d been the initiator.
The Grand Minister kept staring at her in that inscrutable silence, and she was abruptly more angry than afraid. He’s trying to intimidate me into giving something away.
But Lu was used to keeping silent. And she hated bullies. She lifted her chin and said nothing.
The faintest hint of a smile curved his bloodless lips, there then gone. “Tell me, Fräulein Bohn,” he said, his tone conversational, “how old are you?”
Lu blinked. What an odd question. “Twenty-five, sir.”
He made a noise of interest. “Any health problems around your twenty-fifth birthday?”
Now Lu did more than blink. She did an outright double take. “Sir?”
The Grand Minister made a vague gesture with his skeletal hand. “Headaches, strange pains, sudden sickness, things along those lines. Anything out of the usual?”
Lu couldn’t help the look of incredulity on her face. This was what he was interested in? Her health? Where was the infamous assassin, the cruel tyrant of lore? It seemed innocent enough, but her senses prickled with the knowledge that this line of questioning was anything but innocent.
“No, sir. Nothing like that,” she insisted. “I never get sick.”
This piqued his interest, as evidenced by the lift of his brows. “Never? How lucky for you.”
Two of the guards shared a fleeting look. Lu’s sense that something was definitely wrong ratcheted a notch higher. “I mean . . . I . . . of course . . . the usual colds, that sort of thing, but nothing severe.”
This was a blatant lie. Lu had never been sick a day in her life. Not a headache, not a stomachache, not a single cavity. More than once, her father had insisted she take a “sick” day from work to hide that troublesome fact.
“I see,” said the Grand Minister, smiling now like the cat that has just devoured the canary. It was one of the most unnerving things Lu had ever seen in her life.
Her stomach began a slow, creeping slide toward her feet.
“And the date and city of your birth?”
There was an employee file open on the desk in front of him in which, Lu knew, all her information was held, including the date and place of her birth, but he ignored it as if it wasn’t there.
“September twelfth, twenty-twelve. Vienna. Old Vienna.”
He lifted the skeletal hand and stroked one finger slowly along the edge of her file, his thin lips pursed, his expression thoughtful. “So you would have been about . . . thirteen months old at the time of the Flash. An infant.”
He said the word infant as if it was bomb or plague or serial killer. Lu was mystified.
“Yes.”
