Chapter Twenty-five

Danny

I laughed. Maybe I'd have made a better actor than a medic. "You're right," I said. "Well, not about the gambling," I said ruefully and shrugged trying to double down. "I like a game. Who doesn't? But I have it under control. I just had a bad month."

Connaught stayed silent, and I tried not to sweat. He didn't look convinced, even with me laying out the perfect coercion material. Unless money wasn't his motive.

"You see, I've done my own research." I swallowed, hating what I was about to admit with every fiber of my being, but if I was right and money wasn't the motivator, then this was the only other alternative.

The best way to create a cover was by sticking as close to the truth as we could. It was unlikely he would associate Tony's article with me, but it was possible he would, even with a bad pic and changing my last name from Sullivan to Robbins. The only thing he would never find was my connection to Rawlings Security, and thanks to what I did and placing nominee directors as owners, Diesel had no online connection with it either. And Rawlings was regular enough so long as people didn't look at both of ours together. "You saw my service record, I'm assuming, but what it didn't state was that I was captured, along with two others the day before we should have gone home."

"I'd retired by then," Connaught said, surprising me, "but I can imagine."

"I couldn't have," I said sincerely. "No one could imagine that hell-hole. But you think you're indestructible, don't you? It ruined my life, my career." I looked him straight in the eye. "And I never want it to happen to anyone else." Which was all true. Every word.

Connaught eyed me for what seemed like a long time. "So, why are you here in particular?"

"Because you will have the highest concentration of enhanced in the country very shortly, bar the Tampa area, but they don't have the same incentive your collection has. All your enhanced are looking for a way out of their shit lives and are ready for something else. And while I'm a basic medic, I'm a superb hacker. I can change any records you need to make this happen, and they will stand up to the best scrutiny." I held my breath, but immediately realized that was a mistake and breathed evenly as I'd been taught. I could feel the sickening swirl in my gut that Sadie would have responded to.

"Very well," Connaught said evenly. "Just carry on doing what you're doing, and we'll talk some more." I knew it was a dismissal, but we needed our agenda to be moved up. I didn't trust Connaught not to simply fire me, and I didn't want Kane here indefinitely.

"I need access to the pod."

His eyebrows rose. "I'm afraid—"

"You want them to trust me? I need to get them used to seeing me. Diaz might not have been sentenced yet, but you have at least two that are less than six months away from release. I need to find out what they know."

"You think they might be hiding an ability?" Connaught looked curious.

"The teenager in for shoplifting," I said. "He hasn't demonstrated anything, which means he could either have something so remote he doesn't know what it is, or it's something powerful enough he's scared of it and hiding it. I only have three months to find out what it is. He could have an incredibly powerful gift just going to waste."

"He has a so-called photographic memory. He doesn't know we are aware of that."

"Interesting," I said. "But he may have other cognitive abilities we aren't aware of. The enhanced rarely just have one ability unless it's immensely powerful."

"You've done your homework," he acknowledged. "Very well," Connaught said, and rose. "I will inform the C.O.s." He hesitated. "Need I remind you that this conversation stays between us?" He didn't seem to need an answer, and he nodded and left.

I hoped like hell I'd done the right thing.

The C.O.s and other staff had their own room where they ate, but at all different times. I walked in and came face to face with Gary O'Connell. He grunted a greeting. "Just got informed you're allowed on the pods." He almost sneered the words, and I itched to find out where this hatred had come from. Admittedly, he could be just a douche, but it seemed almost personal with him, and the background check I'd done hadn't yielded any clues.

Gary O'Connell was forty-six. He'd been a beat cop for thirteen years, then changed jobs and become a corrections officer. It had been a little more money, but I itched to find out why the change in career. No wife, partner, or significant other. No kids. He had elderly parents he visited infrequently and two younger brothers. One was a cop three states away and they seemed to have minimal interaction, and one had died tragically in a school shooting when he was eight. I'd looked and read the reports, but apart from the tragic loss of five kids and one teacher, nothing had stood out.

Sickened thinking about that, I suddenly wasn't very hungry. Was it really the case now that school shootings were so frequent that in my mind they didn't stand out?

Realizing O'Connell seemed to be waiting for a reply, I shrugged. "It's a job. Anything that helps."

He scoffed, so I decided to go on the offensive. "Well, isn't it? Why are you here?"

He paled a little and clammed up, which was satisfying but the opposite of what I wanted. I sighed a little dramatically. "Sorry, the boss has just grilled me. Little intimidating." I grinned and he relaxed.

Really, I should be on fucking Broadway. I took a half-hearted attempt at my sandwich and my chest tightened when I realized I'd said fucking and who it reminded me of. I'd known Kane had been trying at Mom and Dad's, and for a moment I really wished he had said it and been treated to a wooden spoon on the knuckles like we had growing up, and imagined his face. It hadn't even been Mom though, but Grandma. And not that it had ever been a hard rap, but we soon got the idea.

And it wasn't the spoon itself. It was Grandma. She'd been fierce in all things. Yeah, we would be in trouble for any form of disrespect, but God help anyone who thought to attack her babies. She was our last defense. In our corner. I remembered a teacher sending Emily to the principal because Emily had pointed out she was wrong. I can't even remember what the teacher had gotten wrong, but because Emily was thirteen and the teacher was embarrassed, instead of the teacher admitting he was human, which his students would have appreciated, he'd made it a whole thing and insisted on a detention.

Emily had never misbehaved in her entire life, and because Mom and Dad were at work when it happened, Grandma went to school.

And eviscerated them.

And despite his cursing, she'd have loved Kane, and I ached in that moment to give him a family. Last weekend had been the start, and I knew Kane had gotten on particularly well with my dad. I wanted that for him.

"The warden told me a few of you work both sides," I lied, taking another bite but then wrapping it back up.

O'Connell huffed again. "Lemme guess, you were in a war, any war." I hesitated, but he mumbled. "Like the war on the streets isn't counted."

"We both had tough jobs," I acknowledged.

"Yeah, I just went from locking up scum to babysitting them." I tilted my head a little.

"What made you take this job, then?" I didn't know if the scum he referred to were all prisoners or just the enhanced ones, but his next comment made it clear.

"Should be put down at birth."

"Bit difficult when there's no way to tell at birth."

He grunted. I didn't understand why he was here at all. Where had this hatred come from?

"They've even made some of them into feds now."

My eyebrows shot up. "Really?

He eyed me. "Don't you watch TV?"

I shrugged. "No, to be honest. A couple of shows sometimes, but I can't stand all the political crap, and I haven't been out of the service long."

He leaned forward. "Assholes in Florida are actual agents. Getting TV attention. It ain't right when people with experience are passed over in favor of someone just cause they can do party-tricks."

And a glimmer of awareness trickled through me. "Ever thought of doing something like that yourself?"

A second grunt was the reply, but I was pretty sure this had something to do with it. He glanced at the clock, then heaved himself out of his chair and left without another word. I went to the locker room, which was through another two security doors, because I wasn't allowed to carry my cell phone anywhere there might be prisoners.

But all sorts of mental alarms were going off about O'Connell and I needed to do some research. I had fifteen minutes left before I had to be back and would need every one of them. My cell looked like everyone else's, but the special programs on it meant I could get as much info from it as any of my other devices.

Although, only having fifteen minutes to trawl through what might be tons of information would be problematic, and I cursed the fact that I'd never looked into this guy properly.

I didn't dare make a call because I didn't trust someone not to hear me, but I could text with astonishing speed and knew exactly who to ask.

Gael Peterson was thirty-one, enhanced, and one of the FBI agents that O'Connell seemed to resent so much. He had two startling abilities. He could read and understand every known language, including the extinct ones, but what completely fascinated me, and why we had gotten on so well, was that his gift for communication wasn't just with human languages. I was a good hacker, a great one by human standards, but Gael took it to a whole other level. Computers, street-cams, electronic devices of many sorts, actually communicated with him, as if they had an independent brain. He could input a search command and while most computers would come up first with sponsored results unless you were incredibly specific, any computer immediately understood what Gael needed and worked with him. I'd seen him actually "talk," for want of a better word, to street cams once they understood what he needed, but even more mind-blowing, they made suggestions. It was like they became his best buddy. I'd never seen anything like it, and I texted asking for help, hoping he was available to look.

It must have been my lucky day because Gael was just coming out of a meeting and had time before he met Jake and they collected their disabled son.

Jake says hi and you owe him a beer.

I chuckled. Maybe.

I quickly texted that I needed to know why O'Connell was such a douche, and my concern that something else was going on.

It took Gael three minutes as a conservative estimate. Reading through the ton of information he sent, I wished I hadn't eaten even the few bites I'd had, because I could easily throw up.

Gary O'Connell had likely been on the take as a cop. He was a lazy good-for-nothing asshole disliked by his police colleagues, and the FBI wouldn't have touched him with a ten-foot pole. He had left the force before any sort of lengthy investigation could begin, which explained the change in career. On paper it was a good fit, and because nobody could prove anything, he'd gotten away with it. I thanked Gael and mentioned I hoped to see them soon.

Wait. Eric's telling me something.

Eric? I knew that wasn't the name of any of the Tampa team, so I waited, then grinned imagining that was the name of one of the computers Gael was talking to.

You had a run in with a guy named Patrick Saunders. I confirmed that to Gael, but to be honest, I'd just about forgotten the first case Kane worked on for us. Saunders was locked up.

O'Connell was a friend of his. He was a subscriber to the fucked-up kiddy porn Saunders posted.

Everything in me went cold.

He got moved to Ware Correctional. O'Connell works on the wing he's housed in, and no-one's put it together.

It looks like he's helped Saunders stay under the radar for a lot of years.

Then came the worst part.

He had a brother die in a school shooting.I knew that. Even I had managed to find that out.

The authorities were still in the denial stage then, and there was a shooter, but the teacher got the kids locked down. They would have all gotten out if it wasn't for another student. He was enhanced. The kid panicked at the gunshots and transformed then and there, as he definitely didn't have a mark that morning when he went to school. He had a weird ability similar to Talon, where he could stop certain body systems. Every person in his reading group, including the teacher, just seized. All their bodily systems froze.

It was covered up.

And it was why O'Connell's brother had died.

And while it explained what had led O'Connell down this path, it wasn't that knowledge that made my guts clutch. Kane had been there in that house with the teen and the grandmother. And if O'Connell didn't know yet, there was a really good chance that he would know soon, and the whole mission and Kane's safety would be worth shit.

And I knew which of those two possibilities I cared about the most.