“One of my agents was exposed to Victus. I was trying to cover your ass, so when was I supposed to warn you that your feelings were going to be at risk?”
I frowned. Roz wasn’t usually so harsh with me. “I’m sorry.”
“Well you know now,” she muttered before marching off.
Addie frowned at me. “What’s wrong with her?”
I shook my head. “I have no fucking idea.”
“All right. Well, let’s get ready. This recon is going to be a joy. My bestie and the man we both hate. Can’t think of a better way to spend a Saturday.”
I rolled my eyes. “Let’s just get this over with. The sooner we get this done with, the sooner maybe Tyler will go back to that hole he crawled out of.”
“Amen to that.”
Chapter 6
Marcus
Going into the office of Exodus was a rarity.
But this was important. I wanted to make certain Lyra was safe.
Rhodes followed behind me at a fast clip as we approached the darkened underground service elevator that led us into the interior of the building.
All parking was four levels down. The main floor was still subterranean. What was above looked like a condemned warehouse surrounded by barbed wire, a chemical spill sign, and the most state-of-the-art security system money could buy. That should be completely uninteresting to anyone.
In the elevator, Rhodes was quiet, but I could feel his surreptitious glances toward me. When the elevator finally opened, we stepped into the usual bustle of activity. Agents moving about. Briefings to attend, people to interrogate.
Everyone thought when you became a spy it was going to be glitz and glamor. I’d wondered about that. What it was going to be like, but the idea was to make this place as uninteresting as possible. There was a reason we only came here for briefings.
The hallways were lit with fluorescents. The walls were a muted gray. Not much art, and what was there was heavy and dark. You could clearly tell a man had chosen all the decorations.
I gave a nod to Felix in the armory and then marched down to threat assessment. Threat assessment was open on all sides with glass walls. But it was sunken in, so you had to step down. The floors were lit though, giving it a brighter and techier feel. It was in there that we learned about the world’s nastiest creatures that needed putting down.
Our command for Exodus at this station, whom we knew only as Michael, glowered up at me when I jogged down the stairs. “Ah, Marcus. Always causing trouble.”
“Sir.”
He gave me a brief nod. “So today I get a sir. I like that change.”
I refrained from rolling my eyes. “What do we have?”
He tapped a couple of buttons as Rhodes and Maggie, one of the senior officers, joined us. Her heels made a clip-clop sound as she took the stairs down, and she gave me a warm smile. “Marcus. It’s nice to see you.”
“Maggie, ma’am.”
She waved her hand. “I’m not like this idiot who likes the sir title. Maggie’s fine. You know that.”
I shrugged, nonetheless. Considering Maggie had tried to shove her hand down my pants on a mission two years ago, I liked to keep some formality between us. She was also responsible for my psychological assessment, so even more distance was required. Though considering I had turned her down, she never held it against me. It was like she really could compartmentalize.
I had yet to meet another single agent who properly could.
She asked, “Where are we on Victus?”
Michael tapped a few buttons, and on the screen appeared the man I had been chasing. “That’s him,” I said.
Michael nodded. “Yes. Stannis Prochenko. Low-level member of Victus. He’s not important enough for us to have flagged him, but the fact that he’s here led us into a deep dive.”
Maggie stepped forward, sliding tablets over to Rhodes and myself. “Victus is after this weapon. They call it the Annihilator. Stannis is here to make a deal either for the creator himself or the actual weapon. We’re not sure which. And we don’t know where Stannis is at this moment. But we do know who he’s meeting and where.”
Michael pulled up a photo of a tall, pale white man with white-blond hair and harsh hawkish features.
“Who is that?” I asked.
“His name is Mads McLean,” Michael said. “His mother is Dutch, his father Irish and former IRA. Mads doesn’t have any of those affiliations. He’s a freelancer. Classic story, always in trouble as a youth, in and out of jail. His psychological profile indicates he’s your garden variety psychopath. He is a middleman brokering a weapons deal. He’s going to meet with Stannis to have Victus enter their bid. It’s a very unique bidding strategy. As a middleman, he travels from buyer to buyer, gets them to enter their code, and their cash is held in escrow. If they win the bid, all funds are paid to the seller, and the losing bidders’ funds are returned. I suppose they think that none of the buyers are going to try and take out the others this way since all bids are private and there are only rumors as to who is entering the bidding process. What we want to do is catch hold of Mads here.”
Maggie added, “To do that we need to follow Stannis. And intel says they will be meeting at the Venice in the City Bacchanal.”
I furrowed my brow. “Isn’t that just a glitzy rich people version of a fair?” I remembered photographs from the event last year. A who’s who of Hollywood had been there. The whole event was ages eighteen and up, and things were purported to get wild. Sex and drugs. Each year they had an artist in residence and the fair was themed around them. “Who is the artist in residence?”
Maggie gave me a sardonic once-over. “Look at you with the culture.”
She hesitated.
I knew when she was holding something back. “Who is
