Gale Force

coffee and tried to ignore the fact that I’d been left on my other side with Janette de Winter, who was shooting me looks that could kill.

“Any report on injuries?” I asked the table at large. They all glanced at each other, and then Sheryl Brewer took on the job.

“Minor stuff so far,” she said. “We’ve got some superficial cuts and a couple of broken bones, but nobody dead or seriously injured. The damage was contained pretty quickly. Whatever you guys did—”

“Wasn’t much,” I said, “at least on my part. Rocha deserves the credit for containment, definitely.”

Credit for more than containing the earthquake, apparently, because when he and Lewis rejoined us— coincidentally, the same time my waffles arrived, all fluffy and begging to be drowned in syrup—Lewis’s palms were smooth and blister-free again. “Surface damage,” he said to our questioning looks. “Looks like the thing’s hot.”

“Hot hot, or radioactive hot?” Brewer asked. It was an excellent question, and not the one Lewis had been hoping to answer.

“Radioactive,” he said reluctantly. “We need to find this thing in the real world and contain it. Fast. Jo, I want you to talk to Paul, figure out if we’ve got anybody who specializes in radioactivity. We’re going to need somebody who knows what they’re getting into.”

I nodded and dipped my first bite of waffle into syrup. It never made it to my mouth, because my phone rang. I stepped away from the table to answer it—it was a number that didn’t pop up with a name, but it was a New York City area code.

“Ms. Baldwin? Phil Garrett here, New York Times. I hope you weren’t injured in the disturbance down there?”

I was surprised first of all that he’d gotten a cell signal through; the Wardens had priority on connections in a crisis, along with various emergency services and governmental agencies, and I was pretty sure reporters weren’t on that list. After that surprise wore off, though, a big, ugly ball of black stress formed in my stomach where my waffle was going to go, and my knees went a little weak. I felt light in the head for a second, and braced myself against the wall. So not cut out for this.

“No, Mr. Garrett, I’m fine,” I lied, and was pleased that my voice sounded steady and almost welcoming. “What can I do for you?”

“Well, I don’t know if you remember, but a couple of days ago I tried to reach you when you were on vacation. . . . I wanted to talk about the Wardens organization that you’re part of.”

My heart trip-hammered, thanks to a sudden dump of adrenaline into my bloodstream. I supposed as an Earth Warden I ought to be able to take care of that stuff, but no, not happening. I struggled to keep my voice calm and light. “Mr. Garrett, I’m ashamed of you. A journalist, ending a sentence in a preposition?”

He laughed. He sounded at ease. I supposed this was fun for him. All in a day’s work, terrifying the people on the other end of the phone. “Ms. Baldwin, if dozens of English teachers and journalism professors couldn’t beat it out of me, I think you’ve got a lost cause on your hands.” The amusement fell away like a discarded carnival mask. “Let’s talk about the Wardens. What would you say if I told you I had a credible source telling me that not only are the Wardens real, and acknowledged by every government on Earth, at least in secret, but they also function as a kind of shadow governmental agency? One that fundamentallyaffects and controls the lives of ordinary people?”

“I’d say you need to call Spielberg,” I said. “Bet it would make a great movie. Your source is a mental case, Mr. Garrett. If you actually have one. Which I notice you didn’t actually say. So, in theory, I didn’t actually answer the question, either.”

He ignored that, although it at least deserved a chuckle, I thought. “This is serious stuff,” he said. “I take it seriously. I’m not convinced about all this talk of paranormal events and controlling the weather, but there’s got to be something behind it. Maybe you guys have technology we’re not aware of, something classified; we can get into the details later. What I want to know is the structure of your organization. I understand it’s worldwide. Do you report up through the U.S. government?”

“I’m not having this conversation.” I kept it simple this time. Garrett waited for me to blurt out something else; silence was pressure. I held on to my tongue and turned to see the entire table of Wardens watching me. Lewis put down his fork and got up, walking toward me. Whatever he saw in my expression, it couldn’t have been reassuring.

“So the organization is independent of national interests? A shadow government of its own?”

“No!” One-word answers were going to land me in trouble; he’d box me neatly in. “I’m afraid I can’t confirm any information for you, Mr. Garrett. I really have no idea what kind of fiction you’ve been fed by your source, but —”

“I have videotape,” he said. “Television footage of a woman stopping a tornado in the Midwest last week. The more I searched, the more I came up with— strange events caught on tape here, surveillance camera video there. Put it all together, and it confirms everything my source has told me.”

I took a deep breath, covered the speaker of the phone, and whispered to Lewis, “We’re screwed. The New York Times has the scent on the Wardens. I don’t think he’s going away. He sounds serious.”

“He’s looking for independent confirmation,” Lewis said. “Print reporters have to prove a story before publication. He’s fishing.”

“He’s got really big bait. Whale-sized.”

Lewis shook his head. “Then we’d better handle it. If we don’t, he’ll catch us at a weak moment and get somebody to admit to something. Tell him we’ll meet with him.”

“We will?”

“Both of us,” he said, and grinned. “Tell him to pick a dark, smoky bar. They love that kind of spy shit. Besides, we need anonymity.”

“And scotch,” I muttered. “Lots of scotch.”

Due to the excuse of the emergency, our appointment with Mr. Garrett was in a week, in New York City. He’d offered to come to Florida, but the last thing I wanted was for him to run into some busy, annoyed Warden who blurted out the truth just to get him off their backs. We were working here.

A week. I had a week, in conjunction with the other Wardens, to come up with a good fiction to feed the hungry reporter—one that would induce him to back off. Alternatively, we could go for the big hammer— get someone in the UN or the U.S. government to tell him to back off, but that would pretty much prove his whole case for him. I felt an itch between my shoulder blades, as though somebody had drawn target crosshairs right below my neck.

As it happened, there wasn’t a lot for the Wardens to do about the earthquake; on the surface, it quickly became one of those weird leading-this-hour stories on the major news networks for half a day, then slipped into obscurity. It was all over but for the insurance claims, which were going to be considerable. No fatalities, only light casualties.

We’d been damned lucky.

I never finished my breakfast. By the time I felt composed enough to eat, the waffles were cold, tasteless hunks of dough, and I needed to lose a couple of pounds, anyway. Considering how nervous I already felt about facing Phil Garrett in a week, that wasn’t going to be a challenge.

In the interest of having a comfortable place to work, I went home. Well . . . comfortable was a stretch right now, since half the complex had burned to the ground, and the half left standing had sustained smoke and water damage.

Curiously, my apartment was perfectly fine. Not a water stain, not a smoke smudge. It even smelled newly cleaned.

David had done me a favor. Again.

I had a secure phone setup in my office area, and VPN access to the Warden’s database systems back in New York; I logged in and began reviewing files. Earth Wardens who specialized in detecting and handling radioactivity were few and far between, and a lot of them were dead, missing, or had quit over the last few years. It had been tough on everybody. First we’d had internal strife within the organization, and then the Djinn had found a way to destroy the rule book that bound them to servitude, and launched their own high-body-count conflict.

We were lucky to have as many Wardens as we did, but we weren’t exactly spoiled for choice these days.