'Not us. Cooper is working on an ID.'
Howard nodded. 'So, he's still in London. And he just killed somebody. I wonder why.'
'Why he's here? Or why he killed somebody?'
'Both.'
'Well, it could be a coincidence, he just happened to be browsing for a nice Agatha Christie novel to while away the hours when somebody got capped the next aisle over.'
'Right. Can we backtrack the dead man?'
'Cooper is working on that, too, sir.'
Howard nodded again. 'Good. Would it do us any good to go and talk to the bookstore employees?'
'Cooper is sending over the police reports, says we can access 'em on the computer in a couple of minutes. But she says nobody saw the two men come in or leave.'
'I bet the late Mr. Wyndham saw them come in.'
'But not leave. The cops haven't seen anything like this before. The dead guy was armed. The guess is, somebody shoved a gun into his back, he tried to get out of the way. He took a small-caliber round at contact range, probably a.22, and it wouldn't have killed him, the examiner said. But he musta figured he was gonna lose, so he erased himself. The poison was one of the new explosive-pellet neurotoxins. Guy had ninety seconds once he bit the capsule and it spewed.'
'Interesting.'
'Yeah, ain't it?'
'Well, don't just stand there, go see if Ms. Cooper can find some use for you. He's close, Julio. We're going to get him. I can feel it.'
'Yeah.'
It was sunny, no wind, a perfect day for working the 'rangs, and Tyrone headed for the soccer field, full of himself. Bella had given her smile back to him, she wanted him around, wanted to see him, had invited him to her
When he arrived at the field there, Tyrone saw Nadine. Dee-eff-eff!
But when he got to where Nadine was, she was already packing up.
'Hey, Nadine.'
'Hey, Tyrone.'
'Where you going?'
'My arm's a little sore. I don't want to overtrain.'
'I've got some ibuprofen gel.'
'That's okay. I got some at home. See you.'
Something was wrong, he could feel it, but he couldn't see what it was. 'You okay?'
She looked him straight in the eyes. 'I told you my arm was sore. You forget to turn on your implant?' There was a definite hard edge in her voice.
'Whoa, dial it down, I wasn't calling you a preva, I was just asking, that's all.'
She went back to loading her backpack. 'Why do you care? You don't need to be skulking with people like me. You got Belladonna.'
'What's that got to do with anything?'
She jammed the pack shut, lifted it, swung it over her shoulder. 'C'mon, Tyrone, you know what it means. You sweat with the jocks, you don't hunch chair with the gamers. You breakfast with the dressers, you don't eat lunch at the scuzz table.'
'What are you
'You gonna make me say it, aren't you? You skulk beautiful, you don't skulk ugly.'
'Who is ugly?'
She gave him a sad smile, a little one. 'You telling me I'm in Bella's league, Ty? You'd rather be seen with me than with her?'
He was stunned. He couldn't get his mind on-line. Why was Nadine babbling on about this? Of course Bella was prettier. She was prettier than everybody in the school! What was the point?
He was trying to figure out what Nadine meant, and what he should say, when she shook her head. 'Yeah, I hear the dial tone. Copy you later, Ty.'
She slipped her other arm into the backpack and walked away.
He watched her go, and while he hadn't done anything wrong he could think of, he felt guilty. Somehow, he had just failed some kind of test, and he didn't even know what it was.
Damn. He wished his father was home. Dad knew about stuff like this. He needed to talk to him.
Chapter 32
Something was wrong, Toni knew. The small cracks in Alex's facade had been plugged up, spackled over, leaving a solid wall in front of his emotions. It wasn't so much what he said or did, but an unseen but somehow detectable shift in his posture. From her years of martial arts training, she had a tendency to view things in terms of physical engagements. What it felt like was, all of a sudden, Alex stood in a defensive stance. When they'd met, his guard had been up, but he had relaxed it when they'd gotten together, begun to allow her to get closer. Now he was hunched over, face covered, backing away.
Sitting in a strange office halfway around the world from her roots, Toni worried about it. What had happened? Sure, he had a lot on his mind, the looming custody battle, the mad hacker, and their relationship had a few bumps in the road, but none of that seemed to be enough to account for this sudden distance between them.
'Ms. Fiorella?'
She looked up. Cooper. 'Yes?'
'Your Colonel Howard has some information on his assassin. He'd like your opinion on it. He's in the small conference room.'
'Okay. Be right there.'
Cooper left, and Toni shook the worry about Alex. She did have a job to do, and while Alex certainly was a complicating factor in it, she couldn't sit here worry-warting about her love life all day. She picked up her flatscreen and headed for the conference room and John Howard.
Howard glanced away from the holoproj as Toni Fiorella entered the room. Julio was there, but Angela Cooper and Alex Michaels were meeting with one of the MI-6 higher-ups and would be a few minutes.
'John. What's up?'
'Toni. The commander will be along in a little while, Ms. Cooper went to collect him, but I wanted to bring you up to speed on the Ruzhyo matter.'
'Sure, fire away.'
He laid it out for her, using the holoproj images to punctuate the briefing. He did a fast sitrep through the stuff she already knew, then got to the new information.
The holoproj image shifted to the occult cam view from the bookstore. 'This man left the store after the incident, at almost the same time as Ruzhyo. According to what Ms. Cooper and her people have found, this is Terrance Arthur Peel, a retired British Army major. Julio, would you lay out the rest?'
'Sir. Ma'am. Peel had a fairly decent career until he was posted to Ireland a couple years back as part of the standing British force at one of the permanent treaty bases. The peace there is fairly fragile, oddball groups still agitating, and from what we're able to gather, Peel was responsible for an incident that might have threatened it. Caught some of the locals doing things they shouldn't have and beat confessions out of them. Apparently, he and his people were… overzealous. There were some serious injuries, even deaths, as a result.'
