Spy to Die For

Jack remained silent. He dug a bit more. He felt oddly disturbed. And he wasn’t quite sure how to communicate that disturbance to Skye.

Finally, he said, “I know you’ve learned to think of the Guild in a particular way, but imagine this if it were a country instead of the Guild. The leader dies, and the information about the death is not clear. Someone gets blamed, but that someone might not even have been near the leader when the death occurred.”

“Is that true?” Skye asked. “I thought some crazy killed him. Isn’t that what happened?”

Her reaction was what Jack had been afraid of as he started this line of thought. He had learned long ago that people brought up in a system had trouble thinking outside of that system, even if they didn’t like the system. Since he’d never had any allegiance to any system, he had the luxury of being a free thinker.

“Just go with me on this for a moment,” Jack said. “Imagine if the someone who got blamed could possibly be a patsy.”

“Damn,” Skye muttered.

“And there’s a cover-up. No one knows, or the people who do know don’t care. To get a new leader, there are a series of hoops that everyone has to jump through, including an election through a limited body.”

Skye swallowed hard. Her gaze remained on Jack’s. He hadn’t moved. He was afraid he would upset the balance between them.

“If you control most of that body, then you get the leader you want,” he said. “But if you only control half, it might be dicey. It might take a bit of finesse. It would definitely take more time.”

“I’m not sure I like this.” Skye clearly understood what he was getting at.

“Ultimately, it doesn’t work. The new leader gets chosen but by the wrong half of the council, and it takes a while for that leader to consolidate power. That leader, who hasn’t been part of the inside group until now, knows nothing about the cover-up on the other death, and so governs according to whatever laws are in place.”

“Laws that include a discipline system that destroys careers,” Skye said. She clearly understood what he meant. She seemed both upset and intrigued by it.

Jack was intrigued, but he didn’t want to communicate his enthusiasm to Skye. He wanted her to come to the ideas slowly, because he didn’t want to have to fight her.

“And that leader will keep people not suited to the job of assassin on the job,” Jack said.

Skye backed up, hands out. “I don’t like this.”

“I know,” he said. “But you see where I’m going with it.”

“Yeah,” she said softly. “Now I understand why you used the word ‘traitors.’ You think someone is going to assassinate Kerani Ammons.”

“And this time,” Jack said, “they’re leaving nothing to chance.”

Chapter 47

It took Skye a moment to absorb what Jack was telling her. She had always assumed that she hadn’t fit with the Guild. And because she had assumed that she hadn’t fit, she had assumed that the Guild was perfect.

Sure there were people in the Guild who misused it or behaved badly, but they weren’t part of the organization. And yes, she didn’t entirely believe in the Guild’s mission, particularly on a personal level, but she understood how such drastic measures could be necessary in an imperfect universe.

She had never thought that the Guild might be scarred from within.

“So that’s what Liora meant when she said that they might not need Heller,” Skye said. “He was third because they have two other methods of killing Kerani Ammons, and if those fail, he gets to step in.”

“It’s speculation,” Jack said. “But it’s the kind of speculation I would act on if I were researching this for a client. The information about the previous director tilts the rest of this in the direction of another assassination.”

Skye sat very still. Another assassination. She hadn’t really wrapped her brain around the first one. Rafiq Zvi had died in a murder—by Guild definitions—killed by a crazy member of the Guild.

But if Jack was right, then Zvi had been assassinated: deliberately targeted with the idea of deposing him, and changing an entire system.

Not the kind of assassination that the Guild usually did. The kind of assassination, in fact, that the Rovers were heading toward, the kind that Jack wouldn’t do.

The unethical kind. If, of course, you could call any assassination ethical.

Maybe illegal might be a better term. The kind of assassination not sanctioned by all those agreements between all those governments. The kind that occurred when one government tried to influence another.

“So,” Skye said slowly, “you think that the members of the Guild who had been disciplined are doing this?”

“Disciplined and disgruntled.” He rested his hands near one of the screens. “Has anyone ever tried to recruit you?”

She hadn’t expected that question. “How would I even know?”

“You probably wouldn’t or you would have answered me immediately.” He was talking as if this were normal. Maybe in his world, it was.

She felt shaken. She had to concentrate to focus on what he was saying.

“You would have had conversations with someone—or a bunch of someones—about how much you disliked the Guild or how the current ruling body isn’t working well or what you were willing to do to get out of your contract.”

“Oh, hell,” Skye said. “I’ve had conversations like that all the time.”

Only she hadn’t had conversations. She had the openings of conversations. She had shut down the topic, usually because she figured her opinions were no one’s business but her own. Besides, most of the people who talked with her weren’t people she liked much.

No one she liked had ever had a conversation like that with her. Was that just her gut? Or had she forgotten the conversations with people she liked?

Or was she seeing everything in a paranoid way now? Was Jack right? Were all of those conversational gambits just a way to feel her out, just to see if she was interested in joining a conspiracy? To see if she was willing to be a traitor to the Guild?

She had hated the Guild so much that she never saw herself as part of it, so she never rebelled against it in an organized way. She was so against any attachments that she never even thought of the other people who were having similar issues.

If she had thought of them, would she have banded together with them?

“Skye,” Jack said gently. “Has anyone tried to recruit you?”

She couldn’t answer that, not definitively. And she was an information person. She believed in definitive. Definitive made sure the right target got assassinated, not the target’s twin brother or the person that the target tried to slip his guilt onto. Definitive meant that innocents went free and the guilty got punished, and no one got falsely accused.

She was all about definitive.

So no matter what, she couldn’t answer Jack’s question. She hadn’t thought she was being recruited into a band of traitors, so to be definitive, she would have to answer no. But she was also oblivious. She hadn’t even realized that such recruitment was possible, that people would want to conspire against the Guild.

If someone didn’t like the Guild, then they could just wait until the end of their employment or repayment contract and leave. She hadn’t thought there would be any other way.

But Jack’s theory made sense to her, in that gut way that she trusted.

“Skye?” he asked again.

She got up and went to his side of the table. She tapped on one of the screens, making the list that he had compiled holographic. She hit one other part of the screen so that the hologram included images of the people