Gale Force

No question, this was serious. If they’d succeeded with the bomb in the package, I’d be dead or badly injured, and David . . . David would be, too. Putting tainted, taunting letters in my mailbox was worse yet. It reminded me of the cruelest of terrorists, who detonated one explosion and waited for rescue workers to arrive before detonating another. My friends would have been the ones to suffer.

I tried to lighten my own mood. “Special Delivery Guy delivers the mail, too,” I said. “Give him credit, at least he’s a full-service assassin. Maybe we can get him to throw in a pizza and hot wings next time.” All my attempt at humor did was give everybody the opportunity to stare at me with faintly worried looks, as if they were afraid that I was going to scream, faint, or grow a second head.

At length, Heather said, “We’re following up on anyone who goes into the hospitals for treatment of radiation sickness or burns, but I have the feeling that a well-trained Earth Warden could have handled these letters without lasting damage, if he was careful. Or she, of course. And we have to proceed on the idea that whatever the Sentinels are, they’re well organized and well protected.”

Lewis nodded, acknowledging the point. He wasn’t watching Heather, though; he was scanning the faces around the table. I didn’t know what he was looking for, but he stopped and focused on Kevin. “You’ve got something to say,” he told the kid. It wasn’t a question.

Kevin, who’d been staring at the table, looked up, and his face flushed red along the line of his jaw, bringing a few pimples into sharp relief. His eyes were almost hidden by the messy fall of his hair, but I had no problem reading his body language. Busted.

“Yeah,” he said reluctantly. “So, I got this message about a week ago.”

“About?” Lewis’s voice was calm and even, but I wasn’t fooled. Neither was Kevin, who looked down again at his clenched hands.

“About joining the Sentinels,” he said. “They told me they could use my talents.”

There was a long, ringing silence. I instinctively put out a hand to touch David’s, telling him without words to hold his temper.

“What did you say?”

Kevin cleared his throat. “I told them I’d think about it. I figured maybe keeping the bait out there would help.”

“Good thinking,” I said. “Thanks, Kev.”

He shot me a frown. “Didn’t do it for you.”

“I know. But as it seems that they’re after me, I still appreciate it. Did they say they’d be getting back to you? Give you any way to approach them?”

“Yeah. They gave me a phone number.”

Lewis let out a slow, quiet breath. “Let me have the number.”

“No.” “No.”

“What?”

“No. It’s my lead. I get to follow it.”

“This isn’t a goddamn game!” I’d never seen Lewis lose his temper, but that was a sharp crack of anger in his shell of Zen. He stood up, leaning both fists on the table. “You can’t screw with these people, Kevin. And you’d better not screw with me, either. They want Jo and David dead, but I don’t think they really care how many people they have to take out along the way.”

It was a mistake, a big one, and I knew it the second Lewis raised his voice. Kevin had been raised by an abusive parent, and he didn’t react well to things that dredged up that bitter past.

He said, without looking up, “Fuck you, Lewis. I’m not your bitch. I don’t have to do what you say.”

Lewis started to reply, but I grabbed him by the shoulder and squeezed hard enough to get my point across. I used fingernails. He flinched and looked at me, and I saw the light dawn in his eyes and clear away the fog of anger. He took a deep breath and walked away from the table, heading for the far corner of the room where Rahel sat in silent witness. Kevin’s narrow gaze followed him, just aching for a confrontation.

I said, very softly, “Would you be willing to join the Sentinels? Go undercover?”

That brought Kevin’s attention back to me with a snap, and for a second he looked his age—far too young to be so angry and defensive. “What?” he asked. On the far side of the room, Lewis turned and made a move, but then he checked himself with a real physical effort.

“You’d be credible,” I continued. “You’re strong, you’ve never really liked the Wardens, and you’re on record as being one of my biggest nonsupporters. They’re recruiting you already. Why not join up? You could be our inside man.”

David touched the back of my hand, just a light stroke of fingers, and I heard him whisper, so softly it could have been my imagination, “Are you sure about this?” I wasn’t, but it was the best chance we were probably going to have to send someone inside the Sentinels quickly.

Kevin abruptly sank back in his chair in a trademark teenage slump, round-shouldered and boneless. His eyes drifted half closed. “Yeah,” he said. “Why not? They’ll probably be better company than the old farts around here. The Sentinels may be assholes, but at least they have some backbone.”

A few eyebrows went up around the table, but nobody said anything. They were leaving it up to me, and I knew—knew—that I was about to make a decision that could cost a young man his life.

I said, “Do it. And Kevin?” He cocked his head to one side. “If they ask you to kill me, demand at least five million. That’s the current market price. Wouldn’t want you getting shorted on the deal.”

He smiled, and I have to admit, it wasn’t a comforting smile at all. “Maybe I’ll do it at a discount,” he said, “because we’re such good friends.”

And then he flipped me off.

That ended the first official war meeting of the Wardens.

“I’m putting a stop to it,” Lewis said an hour later. He’d been pacing for at least forty-five minutes, with occasional stops at the window to twitch back the blinds and stare out at the city street. He looked off balance, and it was odd seeing him so out of control. Lewis had always, by definition, been the guy who held it together in a crisis. “He’s a kid, Jo. You can’t send him in there by himself!”

“I wasn’t planning to,” I said. “Cherise is going with him.”

He spun and looked at me as if I’d lost what was left of my mind. I didn’t blame him; if I’d meant exactly what I said, he’d have every right to order me a padded jacket in designer fall colors.

I raised my voice. “Cherise?” And sure enough, my cute blond friend poked her head around the edge of Lewis’s office door and gave me a tentative wave. “Come in. Explain it to Lewis.”

She eased inside, gave Lewis a charming dimpled smile that didn’t seem to make him feel any less unhappyabout my idea, and shut the office door behind her. That didn’t leave much room. Typical Lewis: Give him a job as the head of the entire Wardens organization around the world, and he’ll do something goofy like take the smallest office available, even if he has to kick a junior analyst out to do it. There was a battered desk that still bore scars from the Great Djinn Rampage that Ashan had led through this place, and a couple of slightly-less-than-new chairs, and paperwork. And a sleek new computer that I doubted he turned on much.

With the four of us, it was crowded. I say four, even though David was, to all intents and purposes, a shadow; he hadn’t said a word, and he’d taken up a post leaning in the corner, arms folded, watching us with an expression I could only think of as bemused.

Cherise spread her arms and dimpled even more. “You rang?” she asked.

“You have any objection to going with Kevin when he joins the Sentinels? It could be dangerous, you know.”

“Ooooh, I live for danger! But do you think they’ll believe I won’t run back to squeal to you about what’s going on?”

“I think just the opposite,” I said. “I think they’ll keep you as a hostage for Kevin’s good behavior, and that also ensures you don’t rat them out to me. It puts you squarely in the hot seat. It also makes you the one person they won’t be thinking of as a threat. What do you think?”

Her blue eyes widened; she seemed lost in thought for a second, then nodded. “Could work,” she said. “Could definitely work.”

Lewis lost his cool. “What the hell are you talking about, could work? Look, Jo, I’m iffy about sending a kid in, and I’m damn sure not allowing her to go. She’s not even a