“Heads up,” said JC. “Here comes trouble… Melody! Stop caressing that computer and get over here! I think the Boss would like a word with us.”
Melody came hurrying back to join JC and Happy. She knew the value of a united front against danger and had always been very big on safety in numbers. If only so there was someone else to hide behind when the shit started flying. The nurse saw Catherine Latimer striding forward and retreated quickly into her ambulance, locking the door behind her. JC would have joined her if he’d thought it would do any good. Meetings with the Carnacki Institute’s Boss rarely went well when he and his team were involved. Somehow, JC knew she was already working on a way to blame the whole mess on him.
The Boss crashed to a halt before JC and his team, who all made a point of nodding casually to her in a totally unimpressed sort of way. Latimer considered each one of them in turn with a cold and very direct gaze. She wasn’t all that impressive, physically, but her sheer force of personality more than made up for that. Medium height and sturdy, she wore a superbly tailored grey suit and smoked black Turkish cigarettes in a long ivory holder. She had to be in her seventies and looked like she’d fought for every inch of it. She was the most impressive, efficient, and downright dangerous woman JC had ever met. He spent a lot of time avoiding her, which most of the time she seemed to appreciate.
“I am here,” said Catherine Latimer, the Boss, in an even more than usually harsh and clipped voice, “because the first I knew anything about this mission was when you phoned in to say it was all over. It would seem Patterson set the whole thing up himself and ran it personally from behind the scenes. I’m still having trouble accepting that Robert was a traitor. I’ve known him for years, man and boy. His father was one of my best field agents, back in the eighties. I trained Patterson personally, pushed him up the promotions ladder as fast as I could… I had such plans for him. He would have gone far, the fool.”
“It’s always the ambitious ones you have to look out for,” Happy said wisely, as the Boss paused for a moment, lost in thought. She glared at him.
“When I want your opinion, I’ll have my head examined!” She switched her glare to JC. “Was it really necessary to kill him?”
“Yes,” JC said steadily. “He betrayed every one of us, put all of Humanity at risk by dealing in things he didn’t understand and couldn’t control. And he boasted that he and his secret backers were planning to do even worse things in the future. He had to die.”
“Did you make him understand that we would have given him full immunity, and round-the-clock protection, in return for information?” said the Boss.
JC met her gaze steadily. “He was more afraid of his own people than he was of us.”
“It’s true,” said Happy. “He said he’d rather die than betray them. He did. I was there.”
The Boss looked at Melody. “Do you have anything useful to add?”
“He wasn’t the man you thought he was,” said Melody, as kindly as she could. “He wasn’t the man any of us thought he was.”
The Boss nodded slowly. “I want every bit of information you have about this secret organisation Patterson answered to. Every word he said about them. I want fully detailed reports from all three of you on my desk before the end of day.” She looked back at Chimera House. “These… New People. Were they really living gods, or the final destiny of human evolution? I would have liked to have seen them. It’s not often you get to see something completely new, in this business.” She looked back at JC and his team. “You got lucky. You do realise that, don’t you? This could all have gone horribly wrong, in so many appalling ways. But, still-you did good. Well done. Don’t even think of asking for a raise.”
She drew heavily on her ivory holder, and blew a thick cloud of aromatic smoke out onto the early-morning air. “How could something as important, as extreme as this, have got so far completely undetected by anyone in the Institute? Patterson wasn’t that high up, or that connected… He couldn’t have managed all this on his own. You’re sure he didn’t mention any other names… Of course not. You would have said.”
JC could have said something there but didn’t. Happy and Melody took their cues from him.
“Reports,” the Boss said savagely. “Extremely detailed reports. And God have mercy on your souls if they aren’t in on time.”
She turned her back and strode off, to organise things and shout at people a lot. JC, Happy, and Melody all breathed a little more easily, and moved away to find somewhere quiet, and private, so they could talk. Once they were safely away from the crowds, Kim manifested again, a vague impression on the air, an outline of a young woman in pastel colours, so the others could see and hear her. She hated to be left out of things just because she was dead.
“We’re going to have to be very careful about what we say in our reports,” said JC. “And careful that they all agree with each other, in the things that matter. Because there’s a lot we’re going to have to leave out, or at the very least fudge around. We don’t know how many other traitors there might be, hidden away inside the Carnacki Institute.”
“Are you saying we can’t even trust the Boss?” said Happy, his eyes widening at the thought of trying to keep things from the dreaded Catherine Latimer.
“She’s the Boss!” said Melody. “She’s in charge of everything! If she’s gone over to the dark side, we are all royally screwed!”
“I think we can still trust her,” JC said steadily. “If only because she’s got too much pride to hide her dark side under a bushel. If she was the villain of the piece, she’d want everyone to know, and bow down to her. No-I was thinking more that whatever we tell the Boss might not stay with the Boss.”
They all paused to consider the implications of that, and none of them liked what they were thinking.
“We have to go our own way now,” JC said finally. “Follow the leads we’ve got and run our own very secret investigations into who’s really who, and what’s really what, inside the Carnacki Institute.”
“We can’t trust anyone any more, can we?” said Melody.
“Welcome to my world,” said Happy. “Lonely, isn’t it?”
“We only trust each other,” said JC.
“Situation entirely bloody normal,” said Happy. But he couldn’t keep from grinning.
“Just because one conspiracy theory has turned out to be true, it doesn’t mean they all are,” JC said sternly. “Let us all please concentrate on the matter at hand. The Carnacki Institute is far too important to the world to remain compromised in this way.”
“What is this other secret organisation?” said Melody. “We don’t have a name, or a statement of intent.”
“They have got to be big,” said Happy. “And I mean really, really big to have the connections and resources to pull off something like this, right under the Boss’s radar.”
“So how come no-one even heard a whisper?” said Melody. “You can’t put something like ReSet together without making serious waves.”
“We did hear a whisper,” said JC. “Those agents from the Crowley Project, Natasha Chang and Erik Grossman. They said there were forces at work bigger than either the Institute or the Project. But we didn’t believe them because Project agents lie like they breathe. They live to spread lies and paranoia. But now…”
“We have one end of the string,” said Happy. “I say we tug on it and see what unravels.”
“You are enjoying this entirely too much,” said Melody.
“My entire paranoid existence has been justified,” said Happy. “I am a deeply satisfied man.”
“We’re not going to solve this mess overnight,” said JC. “We have to be in this for the long haul… all the way to the end. So we carry on taking cases, going on missions, as though everything were still normal. People… some people… are going to be watching us very carefully.”
“But… wouldn’t it be safer to let it go?” said Kim. “I mean, what can the four of us do, against a secret society this big, this dangerous?”
“We go on,” said JC. “Because we have to. Because it’s part of the job. And because no-one plays us and gets away with it.”
“Right,” said Happy.
“Damn right,” said Melody.
“Oh well, if you put it like that,” said Kim. “Kill them all, and let God sort them out.”
They walked away from Chimera House, putting it all behind them, for the time being at least. Happy looked sideways at JC.
