Limitless (12 page)

The job was important. So I’d conceded that I wouldn’t kill quite as quickly as I might have wanted to. It had been two years since I’d racked up my last body count—Sovereign being the last tally mark on my belt—and I’d been all peaceable since.

“So this Omega group,” Webster said, drawing me back to the matter at hand, “what’s left of them?”

“Janus,” I said, ticking them off in my head, “Karthik. Waterman, Max and a few of the others.” I waved a hand at him. “The people on your list, basically.”

He nodded slowly. “Is that all?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I mean, all the ones I know about. The rest are pretty much dead.”

He took his foot off the petal and we subtly decelerated into a slow, curving turn. I was used to freeways running through the middle of cities, delivering you to your destination in minutes. Minneapolis was good like that; 35W and 94 ran right through the heart of it, branching into other offshoots as needed. On a clear night at one in the morning, I could be from one side of Minneapolis to the other side of St. Paul in half an hour by car. I had no idea where in London we were or where we were going, geographically speaking, but I got the feeling that I was wasting buckets of time by not flying.

We parked in front of his mother’s house a few minutes later. There was still a window lit in the second story, shining out over the red brick facade. “You going home?” I asked him.

“I’d stay here, but my old room feels small now that I’m used to my own flat,” he said, getting out of the car. The dome light flashed on, shaking me out of whatever reverie I’d been in. I got out, too.

He produced a keychain from his pocket and unlocked the door, opening it for me in his gentlemanly way. “There you go,” he said, his motions a little slowed. “Don’t forget to lock the door once you’re inside.” The way he said it, his voice shot through with fatigue, I got the feeling he was going to be crashing the moment he got home, too.

“Thanks,” I said and slid inside. I started to close the door and stopped an inch short of doing so. “Webster?” I called out into the night, and he stopped his trudge back to the car so he could look back at me, profile slumped with weariness, hands stuck in his trench coat’s pockets. “Thanks for the vacation,” I said, with a half-smile. I shut the door on his grin.

Chapter 26

Philip could see Antonio’s car from a camera on a bank six blocks away. It was small, but it was there, and Antonio’s voice fuzzed through the speaker of the cell phone. “She’s there,” he said. “The detective inspector walked her up to the front door and then left.”

“Good,” Philip said, nodding as he stared at the monitor. “You’re sure they didn’t see you?”

“I only picked them up on the last few blocks, like you told me to,” Antonio said. “I kept far enough away before that. There’s no way even she could have seen me, assuming she knew I was there.”

“Right,” Philip said. “Address reads as belonging to a Marjorie Webster.” He cracked a smile. “Looks like the good detective inspector’s mother.”

“You want me to take the DI out of the game?” Antonio asked.

Philip thought about that one. Thought about it long and hard. “Follow him for now. I…” This sort of uncertainty wasn’t quite like him. “It might not be a bad idea to plant a little something for him. Just in case we have to send Ms. Nealon’s world crashing down around her.”

Chapter 27

I woke to sunbeams streaming in, to the sound of faint movement on the floor below, and the aroma of some kind of breakfast cooking. I blinked the bleariness out of my eyes, then remembered as I thumbed the faceplate of my phone alight that I had not only forgotten to bring a charger with me, but even if I had, American chargers didn’t work in British sockets.

Everything was not exactly coming up Sienna. Or maybe it was, in a color sense.

I rubbed at my eyes and sniffed, the enticing scent stirring my interest. Eggs. Ham. No, wait. British bacon? Yeah, that was it. Salty. Toast. And beans?

I shook my head at the peculiarities of the British breakfast palate as I dressed myself in the same clothes I’d worn yesterday. There was a streak on the blouse that I suspected had come from my midnight emptying of the stomach at the Russian diplomat’s apartment. I took a breath as I remembered that scene. Part of me didn’t want breakfast anymore.

Whatever they’d done to the Russian, it hadn’t been quick or pretty. I wouldn’t have wanted to go that way, that was for sure. The fact that the commissioner was there for a murder was probably not a good sign. The fact that they’d had the foreign minister himself out there?

Yeah. It was a mess, all right.

“Good morning!” Marjorie singsonged as I stepped into the kitchen, already dressed and as ready for my day as I was going to get without a five-gallon drum of coffee. “I’ve got some tea ready, dear, and breakfast will be done shortly.” She was frying eggs at the stove, one of the older models with the coiled electrical burner. It glowed red like a brand, and I could feel the very subtle heat across the room. That was all Gavrikov, that sense of fire. I caught her humming something as she worked, and I noticed there were at least half a dozen eggs in the skillet.

“Morning,” I replied, turning my attention to the bacon that was already on the table. It wasn’t the glory that was American bacon, but it was pretty good, I reflected as I snatched a piece up and started to nibble on it. The pot of beans looked to be nearing finished on the stove as well, and I heard the toaster ding and throw up a couple slices.

Marjorie spun as she worked, going from breakfast item to breakfast item in a frenetic dance of activity. She hummed the entire time, and I got the feeling that she’d been bereft of company for so long now that she wasn’t going to miss the opportunity to do what she apparently did best while she had the chance.

“Did you sleep well, dear?” she asked as she flipped two eggs. I wondered how she knew to flip just those two, because she left the rest to keep cooking. She seemed a little tentative asking, and I suspected I knew why.

“As well as I could, given the limited time I had to sleep,” I said, and she broke from the stove with a teapot in hand to pour me a cup. Cuppa, I think they call it over here. I could smell the strong blend, not quite the coffee I was looking for, but good enough.

“I didn’t even hear you come in,” she said as she whirled back toward the stove. “Fell asleep with the light on, can you believe it? I tried waiting, but I just couldn’t keep my eyes open.”

“It’s okay,” I said. “I found the bed, and I was probably out about five seconds after I hit the sheets.” I’d had horrible dreams, too, ones that had involved the souls in my head intervening at various times to wake me before I thrashed out of control. It wasn’t the most fun thing to have Wolfe, the cause of so many peoples’ nightmares in his life, trying to calm me after having my own. It was actually surreal.

Surreality is more fun than vanilla reality, Sienna,
Wolfe said.

I sighed.

“I expect Matthew will be along shortly,” Marjorie said, scooping the eggs out of the pan. “He never was one to have a lie-in, even after a late night.”

It took me a minute to work out what a “lie-in” was, but I got it. “He’s an early bird, huh?”

“Crack of dawn,” she said, dishing all six eggs onto my plate with so much gusto that I didn’t feel I could tell her to keep some for herself. Next came the beans—half the pot and I was surprised she stopped at that. She dumped four slices of toast next, and I realized now I had enough carbs on my plate to take my already sturdy hips to a new level. “Eat up, dear.” She turned away, leaving me to wonder how I was supposed to fit any of the slabs of bacon in the middle of the table onto my plate.

I did what the Brits call “tucking in” and started working my way through my plate. It wasn’t much of a struggle, since I’d lost my dinner around midnight and hadn’t had anything to replace it since. After a few quiet minutes, Marjorie must have run out of things to do, because she finally sat down across from me with a single slice of toast, a spoonful of baked beans, a half-slice of bacon, and maybe a fifth of a fried egg, probably the corner of one of mine that I hadn’t even noticed had been missing a piece.

“So, dear,” she said after she’d spent a long minute chewing a bite of food the size of my pinky finger but about a third of the volume, “about what we were discussing last night…”

I cocked an eyebrow at her. I didn’t remember much of what we’d talked about. Call it the travel fatigue. “What?”

“You said you hadn’t had a holiday in a long time?” She cut a piece of bacon the approximate size of a pencil eraser and positioned it closer to her mouth on her fork. “It sounds like you desperately need a holiday.”

I paused, letting my beans drip onto my plate. “I agree. Maybe someday.”

“I don’t understand,” she said, shaking her head, that lone little piece of bacon still poised on the end of her fork. Watching her eat next to nothing and take forever to do it was making me feel extremely self-conscious about my own desire to devour everything, not just on my plate, but in the world. “Why not just take a couple of weeks?”

“Because I’m behind,” I said. “Because I have ten thousand idiots who don’t know what a meta actually is trying to get my attention every single day. I get calls from the police across the country, from New York City to Los Angeles and all points in between, who’ve seen something wild or weird, and they automatically ascribe it to metas. And I have to check out almost all of those reports, once they get to a certain point of escalation.”

“It sounds like you get about a bit, then,” she said and finally—finally, thank the heavens—put that piece of bacon in her mouth and started to chew it.

“Yeah, I do,” I said. “Half the time I have to fly commercial or on military transports to get there because I’m not awake enough to fly myself, but yeah. I get around.”

“And you can’t take a break in any of those places?” she asked innocently enough. Now she had—I swear—one fricking bean on her fork. Just one.

“I got to spend a Saturday in Arizona a few weeks ago,” I said with a shrug. “I had a hotel room with a view and everything.” I felt a little embarrassed. “But, I, uh… I kind of fell asleep at six o’clock at night. And I had a flight out at four the next morning. It’s always something like that.”

“Well, surely you get to take some time for yourself on weekends…?” Her voice trailed off expectantly.

I looked down at my plate. “Not really, no.”

“Why are you here, dear?” she asked, and I looked up to find her staring at me. “Surely this murderer can’t be that bad.”

“It is. Your son needs my help.” I felt full, now. Appetite gone, back to business. “He’s up against something—someone—that he doesn’t understand.”

“But you do?” She seemed skeptical.

“I don’t know if I understand them, at least not on a personal level.” I felt my face harden. “But there’s no one better than me to fight them.”

“Ah,” she said and looked away a little pointedly. “I see.”

I felt my blood cool a little. Something about the way she said it made me feel uncomfortable, like I’d said something to lose some of her respect. “What?”

“Why your… your young man didn’t stick around. The one who walked you out of your house after—” She looked up at me, and her eyelashes fluttered. “Oh, listen to me. I’m so sorry. That came out all wrong!” She reached a hand out as if to reassure me, but I pulled my arm back where she couldn’t get to it, and I saw her blanch at the motion. “I mean to say…”

“It’s okay,” I said. I felt a lump in my throat. “I can see you didn’t mean anything by it. And… you’re right, for what it’s worth. This—this addiction to the job—is exactly why Scott and I broke it off.”

Her lips were pursed, and they gave a little twitch. “Something you said, though, dear… it bothers me.”

Now I felt my blood really chill. “What was that?”

“You said he wouldn’t remember your time together?” She was watching me shrewdly. “Anyone else, I might assume they were being humble or self-deprecatory, perhaps just down-playing themselves.” She did not take her eyes off of mine. “Why do I get the feeling that you weren’t being any of those things?”

The lump in my throat felt like I’d swallowed Stonehenge. “I—”

Saved by the bell. The front door lock clicked and opened, and I turned to see Webster enter with his coat flapping and swaying as he shut it behind him. I pushed the plate slightly away from me, just enough to signal I was done, and looked back to see Marjorie chewing delicately on a bite of something I hadn’t seen her put into her mouth.

“Ready to go?” Webster asked, crossing the sitting room to enter the kitchen.

“Yeah, I’m done,” I said, and my voice sounded a little hoarse.

“But dear, you’ve hardly eaten a bite,” she said, then turned her attention to Webster. “And you—”

“No time this morning, Mum,” Webster said, cutting her off but not rudely. “Got a call from Dylan, said he’s going to stop by the office with something for us to take a look at.”

“If it’s pics the crime scene photographer took of me with my pants shredded, I’m not going to be surprised,” I said.

“If it’s that, I’m giving him twenty quid for the lot,” Webster said with a grin as he grabbed a piece of toast from the table.

“Matthew!” his mother called him out, though I wasn’t sure if it was for grabbing the toast or what he’d said. He kissed her on the cheek, and her moment of ire dissolved into a blushing smile.

“Got to go, Mum,” he said, gesturing at me. I was up and on the way out quicker than he could follow. I didn’t realize until later I hadn’t even thought to thank Marjorie for breakfast.

Chapter 28

“Did I interrupt something?” he asked once we were in the car and moving.

“Breakfast,” I said. “It’s the most important meal of the day, don’t you know.”

He let out a chuckle. “I like the way you say that.”

I looked over at him as red brick houses passed outside his window one by one. The skies were grey again, and he had the heat going, filling the car with the smell of the hot air ducts. The tangy barbecue from the beans lingered on my tongue. “The way I say what?”