Page 13 of Concluded
“Agent Spanos?Con Becker here.”
Achilles relaxed a little.Agent Becker worked in the basement of HQ—everyone called it Antarctica due to the frigid temperatures—and analyzed physical evidence.He was also a tech wiz who conducted a lot of training sessions and sometimes helped out with investigative needs.Some nasty injuries he’d received long ago precluded him from going out on most assignments, but he was smart, level-headed, and damned helpful.
“Hey, Becker.You traced my subject?”
“Yeah; sorry it took a while.Sort of swamped here.”
Glancing at his watch, Achilles saw that it was past eleven.“Are you still at work?”
“Yeah.I haven’t left here for… gee, four days?I have a cot set up and everything.”
Achilles, who was going to sleep on a nice bed soon, needed to stop feeling sorry for himself.“That stinks.Sorry.”
“It’s what we signed up for, I guess.Anyway, I’ll text you the coordinates for your subject.”
“Where is he?”
“Imperial Valley.”
Achilles blinked.“Southern California?Almost in Mexico?What the hell’s he doing down there?”
“I guess that’s what you’re going to figure out, Agent Spanos.I’m also going to send you a link to a fancy little app we’ve developed.It’ll allow you to continue tracking him if he moves—as long as he has his phone and it’s getting service.”
Well, it looked as if Achilles’ visit to Oregon was going to be very brief.
* * *
After a peaceful,if too short, night on a comfortable bed, fancy donuts for an airport breakfast, and a cramped flight, Achilles was once again in a rented vehicle.This time it was a really nice SUV because he didn’t want to go ranging through the desert in an econobox.For all he knew, Martell was planning to hide out somewhere among the cactuses and dirt roads, and four-wheel drive seemed like a good idea.
The desert had always felt weird to Achilles, partly because he’d spent his childhood in the very different landscape of the Midwest.But one of his first assignments as an agent—back when he’d been far too green to go on solo missions—had been dealing with aliens in Arizona.Not the human kind, who politicians liked to use as scapegoats and who were none of the Bureau’s business.These had been refugees from another planet, trying to survive in an extremely remote part of an Indian reservation.They hadn’t been dangerous, but they had certainly been unusual, and they’d cemented Achilles’s association of the desert with strangeness.
As he drove, however, Achilles decided that maybe this location was good for him right now.It made him feel disconnected.As if neither the chaos depicted in the news or the apocalypse Grimes had warned about had anything to do with him.He breathed more easily than he had since the bear shifter, and he even found himself singing along with his playlist.
“You’re not on vacation,” he reminded himself more than once.He should be focusing on the job.
According to the file that Henry had sent, most of Martell’s background wasn’t noteworthy.Like Achilles, he was forty-one.He had a criminal record going back to his teenage years, but they were nonviolent crimes like larceny and possession.He’d moved around the country, done a little jail time now and then.At times he’d held various minimum-wage jobs.
Mostly, however, he supported himself by selling good luck charms, which nobody at the Bureau had cared about until recently, when it had come to someone’s attention that the damned things actually worked.There was no explanation in his file as to how the guy managed this, nor was there a precise description of what he was capable of.But Grimes wanted him on board.
Martell had already refused one offer to get to know the Bureau more closely, and Ferencz’s brief report had been included in the file.The report summary had said it all:I don’t think Martell knows exactly what he can do.He’s not willing to join us just yet.He’s not doing anything dangerous—but keep an eye on him.
All of that was fine, but it didn’t explain why Martell had suddenly disappeared.It didn’t sound as if his encounter with Abe Ferencz should have been enough to spook him.And even if he had decided to make a run for it after chatting with Ferencz, he wasn’t likely to have left so suddenly, with his pizza half eaten and his door unlocked.
But if the Bureau was interested in Martell, perhaps other parties were as well.Other parties whose intentions were less benign.Achilles didn’t know who those people might be, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to know.Sometimes ignorance truly was bliss.
Yet here he was, trying to find out what Martell was up to and why, heading into the middle of nowhere, which according to the app that Henry had sent, was Martell’s last known location as of the previous night.
Still piloting the SUV through miles of sand and widely spaced low scrub, Achilles instructed his phone to make a call.It rang only once.
“Afolabi here.”Her voice always soothed Achilles, not just because it was pleasant, but also because she knew things.And what she didn’t already know, she could almost always find out.The Bureau might spend a lot of time training agents on how to use various weapons, but when it came down to it, information was the most powerful thing they had.
“Spanos.How are you doing?”
“Very busy.Just like everyone else.I’m happy to hear you’re well enough to return to work.”
He decided not to inform her that his return hadn’t been entirely voluntary.“I’m sorry to hit you with more.But I’ve got a subject who, according to my briefing, can create actual lucky charms.”
“Like the leprechaun?”She sounded skeptical.
