Spy to Die For

“I didn’t mean that as an insult,” she said. In fact, she’d meant it as banter. But she didn’t say that. “I just meant that you’re from an organization that’s ‘loosely’ affiliated. I come from one with rules. There’s an actual career track. Look.”

She called it up, and showed it to him. The good grades, the high marks on the physical side of things, the internship, the early jobs, and then the successful jobs. Only the most successful assassins got the work that took brains and skill. The rest got pretty routine work, mostly dealing with fairly dumb criminals that couldn’t get prosecuted usually for some silly reason.

Only a handful of assassins from each graduating class got assignments of the kind that the Guild was famous for. And after her relationship with Misha, Liora hadn’t gotten any of those.

Misha had, though. He had never gone out of favor with those in charge of the Guild.

That had driven Liora crazy as well.

Skye explained all of this to Jack. He studied it as if it were a different language.

“Wow,” he said. “It’s like the Guild is some kind of government in its own right.”

“It is,” she said. “Once you’re in its sphere, you don’t leave.”

Or you rarely leave, she thought. She was one of the few who planned to. Even the folks who hadn’t done well in her class planned to stay after their early assignments were over. The Guild gave everyone a home, and protection.

Provided they survived their first few years as an assassin.

“That’ll help,” Jack said. “We might actually have a chance of figuring all of this out.”

“Information is always out there,” Skye said. “It’s just a case of putting it together.”

He grinned at her. “Did I say that to you?”

“No,” she said with a mock frown. “I’ve been saying it for years.”

“So have I,” Jack said, then lowered his head and went back to work.

Compatible. Similar. With the same methods and the same interests. She sighed softly. And he was impressed with her.

His life might be threatened, but she was the one in trouble.

She had succumbed to the ultimate attachment.

She had fallen in love.

Chapter 46

Skye seemed nervous and preoccupied. She paced around the entertainment room, and wouldn’t alight anywhere for long. She’d sat next to Jack a couple of times, then popped back up as if ejected from her seat.

He tried to focus on the information pooling in front of him, but he had trouble doing so. Part of him needed to monitor Skye just because she was acting so strange.

And, if he were honest with himself, he also wanted to monitor her because he had been monitoring her all along. She had become his focus. He loved her changing moods, her soft skin, the way that she laughed. He just wanted to spend more and more time with her—and he knew he had ruined that by contacting Rikki.

Not that Skye was jealous. She hadn’t been.

He’d ruined it because they had agreed that the outside contact would force them back into the populated parts of the universe. Their time together was over, and they hadn’t discussed the future.

He hadn’t discussed the future because there might not be one. Or maybe that was just the excuse he was giving himself, because he worried that Skye would tell him that once this entire adventure was over, he was on his own.

She had been so clear from the beginning that she didn’t want any attachments. The more he learned about her, the more he realized that she had lived her entire life according to that philosophy, and these past few weeks with him had simply been an aberration.

An enjoyable aberration, but an aberration all the same.

“Okay,” he said, trying to focus on the information, “when people get disciplined, sometimes they get demoted, right?”

“Yeah,” Skye said. “You find anything?”

“Quite a bit.” He already had a list of about twenty names. “Does the Guild do anything to prevent traitors in its midst?”

Skye froze. “That’s a big word. Traitors.”

“It’s what someone would be, right, if they went against a country or a government. Isn’t that what we’re looking for with the Guild?” Or maybe he was just jumping to the wrong conclusions.

Skye still hadn’t moved. She ran a finger along the edges of the screen in front of her. “I guess so, yes. But what would be the goal of these traitors?”

Jack shrugged. “Would they want to overthrow the government of the Guild?”

“We don’t call it a government,” she said. Then she leaned forward, and started tapping on the screen. “Take a look at this.”

She sent more information to him. It was about the death of the former director of the Guild, the man she had mentioned before, a man named Rafiq Zvi. According to the information that Skye just sent Jack, this Zvi had been killed by someone inside the Guild, someone who had gone crazy.

It seemed too easy to Jack.

“Let me check this out,” he said.

He dug for a bit to see what he could find. The Guild records had very little, although they claimed that Zvi had died on Guild property. But the more Jack dug, the more he found references to the nearby city of Prospera.

So he looked in Prospera’s records. Apparently, the city had claimed jurisdiction at first because, contrary to the Guild records, Zvi had died in a restaurant in Prospera. The city had investigated a little. Then the Guild informed the city that the Guild would do the investigation.

The city handed jurisdiction over to the Guild with a speed that surprised Jack. Usually police departments were very protective of their own investigations. They also wanted to make sure that a suspicious death got solved properly.

Most of the research he had done for the Rovers early on had been in jurisdictional matters, in figuring out who or what someone could get away with in a particular location. He was an expert in finding out how to avoid jurisdictional problems and when to invite them.

It looked like someone had done the same for this death in Prospera.

He dug a bit deeper, and found a name that had been on his list of possibly disciplined assassins.

“Do you know a Camalla Taub?” he asked Skye.

“Why?” she asked.

“She’s the one who got the investigation of Zvi’s death moved out of Prospera,” Jack said.

“He died in Prospera?” Skye ran a hand over her face. “Wow. I always thought he’d been surprised in the Guild.”

“Not from the initial reports,” Jack said. It took him some digging to retrieve those reports, but he managed it. “Apparently, he’d been in a restaurant with some old friends. He’d gotten up—to do what seems to be in dispute—and got beaten to death in the back part of the restaurant.”

“That’s weird,” Skye said. “The directors of the Guild come out of the top assassin pool. Do you know how hard it is to kill people like that?”

“Only in theory,” Jack said. He really didn’t want to know.

“This contradicts every story I’ve heard about his death,” Skye said.

“Weren’t you at the Guild at the time?” Jack asked.

“Yeah, and it shook up everyone. But we were awakened the next day, told he was dead, and told that the Council of Governors would elect a new director. It took weeks, and then it got disputed, and finally Kerani Ammons took over. It took her a while to consolidate power since almost half the council had voted against her.”