A cab rolled to the curb and stopped. Just as the doorman swung open the passenger door, a fourth man rushed forward. The angle of the camera captured him only briefly. He was a short man with a round face and heavy facial hair. Even though the quality was poor, one thing was for certain: he was not Derek Yates. The short man bumped into the general—hard—then leaped into the cab, slamming the door shut as the cab sped off.
The general staggered backward, and his bodyguards caught him under the arms to prevent him falling. At first it appeared no more than a bit of urban incivility caught on film. A passerby rudely stealing someone else’s cab. But then the general pressed his right hand against his chest as his bodyguards lowered him to the ground. A dark stain spread down his shirt. Blood seeped through his fingers. He hadn’t been pushed out of the way; he’d been stabbed.
Then the video ended.
“That was not Derek Yates,” Teddy said.
“Click the next file,” Jillian said.
This video was higher quality. A police interrogation room, stark but brightly lit. A young, uniformed police officer stood near the door. A man sat in handcuffs at a small metal table. “That’s Yates,” Teddy explained to Jillian.
Before she could say more, the door to the interrogation room opened, and Clint, dressed in a shirt and tie with a detective’s badge clipped to his breast pocket, stood before the table. This video was also time-stamped: August 20, 23:07. Three days after the murder of the general.
Yates spoke. “You know I wasn’t there.”
“Then why does the murder weapon have your fingerprints all over it?”
“Come now, Clint.” Yates gave a brief, sardonic smile.
Clint placed a hunting knife, sealed in a clear plastic bag, on the table. “Are you saying this isn’t your knife?”
“Of course it is.”
“But you—”
“That knife was stolen from me.”
It was Clint’s turn to smile. “Someone stole your knife and dropped it at the scene of the murder? That’s your story?”
“You’ve known me a long time. Would I leave prints behind?”
“They wanted you out of the way, so they framed you. Set you up for murder.”
“That’s right.”
“Give me a name, then. You don’t owe them your loyalty. Not anymore. Tell me who’s behind this. Who have you been working for?”
Yates’s entire body stiffened. Softly, he said, “You know I can’t do that.”
“Can’t? Or won’t?” Clint rubbed his chin in frustration. “I’ll help you if I can, Derek. But you have to give me something to go on.”
“I’m afraid that’s simply not possible.”
Clint shoved back a chair and sat. Both men were silent, and Teddy understood that they were communicating not with their voices but with their minds. Yates went pale, and his whole body shook.
“Sign the confession,” Clint said, his voice even as he slid a piece of paper and a pen toward Yates.
“Don’t do this,” Yates wheezed.
“He’s mentally influencing him,” Teddy said to Jillian, aghast. “Forcing him to sign that confession.”
She pulled Yates’s card from her pocket and found the address for his attorney. She was going to be expelled from Whitfield in any case. At least she could right one wrong before then.
“Everything Yates said was true,” she murmured.
Which meant that Teddy didn’t want to stay at Whitfield anyway.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
TEDDY HAD KNOWN CLINT WOULD want to speak to them. She just didn’t expect the summons to arrive so quickly. Less than ten minutes after she and Jillian hit end on the video, a knock sounded at their door. Teddy opened it to find a second-year recruit standing in the hallway: Clint wanted to see them in his office. Now.
Teddy, though psychically, physically, and mentally exhausted, jolted her wall into place, shoring up whatever remaining currents of power she had available. But even as she did it, she realized how pointless the exercise was. If he wanted information, all he had to do was look into any of her friends’ minds and he’d see everything.
No sense putting off the inevitable.
Teddy and Jillian arrived to find Dara, Pyro, and Jeremy already there. She would have liked time to share Molly’s video with her friends before she confronted Clint about its contents, but that wasn’t the hand she’d been dealt. It didn’t matter. One way or another, she was going to see this through.
Clint’s office, a room that had been Teddy’s refuge, wasn’t spacious. With all six of them crammed inside, it felt like a holding cell. Dara and Jillian sat in chairs facing Clint’s desk; Teddy and Jeremy stood by a tall metal filing cabinet; Pyro hovered near the door. Before she could stop herself, Teddy’s gaze flew to the desk, to the glass dome beneath which rested the screw with the Sector Three symbol stamped on the head.
“Molly was transferred to a hospital,” Clint began. “She has a grade-three concussion. She’s conscious now, but brain injuries are complex, and her prognosis isn’t clear. Bottom line, the doctors don’t know how it will impact Molly’s life going forward. We don’t know how it will impact her psychic abilities. All we can do is give her time and hope she fully recovers.”
He studied each of them in turn: Jillian, Dara, Pyro, Jeremy. Teddy had a swift and sudden understanding of the phrase His antenna went up. She could see him thinking, considering, weighing, probing each of them for information. He turned his attention to her. His eyes narrowed, and she raised the voltage on the electric fence that kept her thoughts private.
“Next,” Clint said, “as each of you are aware, you committed several felonies. You hacked the FBI mainframe and
