Skin Deep (22 page)

A wave of dizziness hit her. The fire was eating the oxygen out of the air. She closed her eyes again to concentrate, sensed the vague shape of an opening, and climbed her way toward it. Wind pressed against her back, funneling the smoke ahead of her. She reached a point where the floor became clear of debris. She ran. A fire exit came into sight. She hit the emergency release bar and staggered into a crowded stairwell. Hands grabbed her as she fell. The door was kicked shut.

“Keep moving!” someone shouted. Several more hands steadied her on her feet as a crush of people pushed down the stairs. Wracked with coughing, she forced herself to move with them. As they descended, the hazy air lightened and became cooler. Bright white light shone below. Laura turned at a landing, and a door to the outside stood open. In a wave of bodies, she stumbled out onto a sidewalk in blinding sunlight.

She wandered into the street. Smoke and fire shot through a hole in the side of the building. Fire trucks and emergency vehicles choked the street. She moved to the opposite sidewalk and scanned the crowd around her. People moved all around her, civilians running from the building or emergency personnel running in.

A cell phone rang. She looked down at her side, too stunned to laugh. Without thinking about it, she had walked through the chaos without losing her handbag. She opened it, dropped the chunk of metal inside, and retrieved the phone.

“I’m fine,” she said as she connected.

“Thanks be,” said Cress. “Get back here as quickly as you can. The city’s under attack.”

CHAPTER 20

SHE NEARLY COLLIDED
with Cress as she came through the door to InterSec. “What the hell is happening?” Laura asked.

They hurried down the corridor. “Three bombs have gone off in the city,” said Cress. “Targets hit are the FBI building and the Guildhouse. A car bomb heading for the White House blew up at the gatehouse.”

At the end of the corridor, they swept into the InterSec situation room. Terryn sat on the long side of a table facing several monitors. Newsfeeds from across the city lit the wall. One monitor showed smoke billowing out of the FBI building. The outside wall of the building was scorched, and several windows were broken, but otherwise the damage looked minimal. The fire trucks on the scene seemed to have everything under control.

“Are you okay?” Terryn said.

Laura nodded. “Scales is dead. I was leaving his office when a bomb went off.”

“The gods were with you,” Cress said softly.

Guildhouse security feeds filled a second series of monitors. A car burned next to a shimmering white wall of essence in the alley behind the building. News channels showed distance shots of the entire building. Behind its large, activated essence barrier, the Guildhouse was undamaged.

Laura placed her handbag on the table and opened it. She pulled out the chunk of metal. “We need to get this analyzed. It’s a piece of metal from the bomb, with some kind of spell on it.”

Cress stepped back and activated her body shield.

“Sorry, I wasn’t thinking,” said Laura.

“It’s fine,” she said. Absorbing essence enabled
leanansidhe
to survive, but it also exposed them to potential attacks through manipulated essence. With her body shield protecting her, Cress held up the metal fragment. She half closed her eyes as she sniffed at it, her lips and nostrils trembling. “It feels like a shield. I do not sense an active spell but the shadow of some kind of trigger spell.”

Terryn took the metal from her. As his own precaution, he protected his hands with a warding barrier of hard blue light. “The material is hardened with essence. The spell increased its density. We used to do this with projectiles.”

Rocks, Laura thought. Terryn was talking about rocks flung from catapults or something similar. She worked with a man who made connections between a modern bomb and an ancient weapon. His nonchalant references to his age and history disconcerted her at times. He handed the metal piece back to Cress. “Dispatch agents to the crash sites in case there are delayed or untriggered spells in the debris.”

Cress held the metal chunk with a cupped hand as she left the room. “I’ll take this to Forensics for a deep probe.”

Laura stared at the monitors. The bottom row ran incoming updates from local, national, and international news. A screen banner caught her eye. Several street-level news crews were picking up house fires in a residential section of Anacostia. The scene looked more chaotic with civilians present. She pointed. “What’s that?”

Terryn pulled the channel onto a larger monitor. “House fire.”

Laura stared at the screen. A simple three-story was entirely consumed in flames. Secondary fires were burning on the houses next door. “That’s a big house fire. When did it start?”

Terryn checked the computer screen that lit up the tabletop, then raised an eyebrow. “Within minutes of the bombs. Wait a moment . . .” He tapped the keyboard of his laptop and monitors shifted to an internal computer directory. He opened a document. “I thought so. This is from the SWAT-TEAM files we were able to get before the information flow stopped. Check out the address of one of the informants for the raid.”

Laura read quickly through the form on the screen. “The house in the middle happens to be the home of Gianni’s informant. Scales happened to be the director in charge of an undercover operation investigating the SWAT team. Both targets were softer than the other two. It’s almost pointless to go after the White House or the Guildhouse with small bombs. They were a smoke screen to draw attention away from these two.”

Laura slid into a chair. She let Terryn’s theory sink in. A chill ran over her. “Mariel Tate was a target, too.”

“How so?” Terryn asked. Laura was always impressed that nothing surprised or struck him as bizarre.

“I was early. The meeting was short. I left Scales’s office about when the meeting was originally scheduled. I saw the bomb delivered,” she said.

“That could be a very lucky coincidence,” he said.

Laura shook her head. “I think I triggered it, Terryn. I sensed a strange essence field in the hall. When I went toward Scales to tell him, the bomb blew.”

“No one knew you were there,” he said.

“Scales did. Someone knew his schedule.”

“Did you get anything from him?”

She shook her head. “Scales implied there is a political angle to what was going on at the raid. That’s never a good sign for internal security.”

“Did you get any names?”

“He went secret on me, so I couldn’t get details. He made sure to mention that I should visit the Vault.”

Terryn arched an eyebrow. “We’ve updated Tylo Blume’s dossier since your visit. I’ll look a little deeper into his political connections.”

Laura’s gaze wandered back to the monitors. “Is Foyle’s team at the Anacostia crash site?”

Terryn checked something on his laptop. “They went in with the first responders. They needed a spell senser, and Foyle asked for you. I told him I’d put Janice Crawford on sick leave.”

Laura gathered up her handbag. “I’m going out there. If Sinclair ends up alone with Gianni, that might not be a good thing.”

Terryn pursed his lips. “Are personal feelings clouding your judgment?”

Laura paused at the door. “What is that supposed to mean?”

Terryn gazed at her. “I don’t see a rational basis to trust him. Maybe we need to retire Janice Crawford.”

She didn’t say anything for a moment. It would be a relief to retire Janice. Working one glamour persona was tough enough to balance against her Guild responsibilities—to say nothing of making time for assignments from InterSec. But Janice was her in with the SWAT squad. Mariel Tate would only hear what they wanted her to hear, but in the downtime in the bull pen, Janice was likely to hear a different story. “Not yet, Terryn. We need her. As long as I’m with Sinclair, he’s not acting on his own. If he’s exposed me, now would be the time to find out.”

Terryn returned his attention to the monitors. “I never like to put you in jeopardy, but I have to agree. Be careful.”

“Call Saffin for me and get her away from her desk,” she said. Retracing her steps down the hall, she pulled her essence out of the perfect stone and the Mariel persona slipped off in a sweep of cool static. Beneath the glamour she wore jeans and a T-shirt. With soot in her hair and on her face, she looked a bit mad in her bare feet. The idea amused her. She felt a bit mad.

By the time she reached the public-relations department, Saffin was gone from her desk. Laura hurried into her office and through the closet to her private room. Without pause, she pulled on her regulation SWAT-team boots, the flak jacket and helmet over her jeans and T-shirt. She didn’t want to waste time dressing. Activating the Janice glamour completed the rest of the uniform. When she hit the parking garage, she jumped in the SUV and tore up the exit ramp, with a metal band blasting from the stereo.

CHAPTER 21

WITH THICK CLOUDS
of smoke billowing in the air, Laura didn’t need directions to the house fire in Anacostia. She parked her second SUV of the week in the middle of a road blocked by police cars and fire vehicles. She jogged up the street, weaving in and out of emergency support trucks until she reached the site.

Houses on three adjacent properties were on fire, the center one completely engulfed by flames, its upper floor and roof missing. They had blown off, not collapsed, evidence of more than a simple house fire. At either end of the block, local police kept neighbors and bystanders back. In contrast to what she had seen outside the FBI building, no one was panicked, security wasn’t running roughshod over anyone, and the professional responders were treating the fire as they normally would.

She spotted the SWAT-team van on the far end of the street, then Foyle as he came around a police car. He had a wary look about him, professional anger. “Are you sure you should be out of bed, Crawford?”

“I’m fine, sir. I heard you needed a spell senser, and I volunteered.”

Foyle didn’t answer. Laura hid her curiosity behind Janice’s look of discomfort. She nodded up the street to the fire watchers. “These people don’t look too upset.”

Foyle surveyed them with indifference. “No one’s going to cry for the guy who lives here. They’re probably better off without him.”

The two of them were alone except for a communications tech in the open van. “He was trouble?” she asked.

Foyle gave one curt nod. “A dealer. We knew him.”

And didn’t do anything about the drug dealing because he was supplying you with information, she thought. False information. No one was going to be crying about him at the station house either. “Was he inside when the bomb went off?”

Foyle narrowed his eyes at her. “What bomb?”

Janice shrugged. “I just assumed with the roof missing and what’s going on in the city . . .”

He shook his head. “There was an explosion, but I wouldn’t call it a bomb. Probably a meth lab or something. Neighbors said they saw him go in before the house went up. We won’t know for a while.”

Laura watched the roaring flames and thick smoke. She didn’t need her sensing ability to find survivors. Nothing short of a miracle could enable a person to live through the intensity of the flames. Neighbors were a better source of information anyway. In the immediate aftermath of any drama, people were too excited to keep quiet. If they saw the informant go in the house, he was in the house. And dead. Besides, whoever managed to pinpoint an attack on an office in a federal building would not be sloppy enough to miss the dealer.

Laura prodded Foyle. “InterSec said you needed a spell senser.”

“Yeah. Are you sensing anything?” he asked.

Anger, she thought. Something was irritating him, but she didn’t think it was her. “Nothing from here. I’d have to get closer, but it doesn’t look like a good idea yet.”

“Sinclair is securing the rear of the building. Check in with him,” said Foyle. He climbed into the van. Laura stared at his back for a moment. If Sinclair had told him who she was, it might explain Foyle’s abruptness. But he had been that way with her from the beginning of the mission, before Sinclair figured out her glamours. Whatever he was thinking, it wasn’t making him happy.

She threaded her way through more cars and into the yard of the first house next to the fire. Halfway down the driveway, the backyard came into view, open to the next block. She cut through it to find more police and another fire truck in case fire blew in that direction.

Sinclair walked behind her on the edge of her sensing range. She kept moving, making a show of searching for him. He paced her, tracking the edges of her body signature. Whether he did it out of habit or was demonstrating that he could do it, she couldn’t tell. He moved closer. She ignored him, letting his field overlap hers, testing whether his ability merely reacted to others around him or if he had to get some reaction.

“Who were you today?” he asked.

She glanced over her shoulder. “Excuse me?”

He smirked. “Shift’s almost over, and you didn’t report in.”

She rolled her eyes, but smiled. “Yeah, well, Foyle’s not the only one on my ass. InterSec has been picking apart my report all day.”

“Am I supposed to play this game, too?” he asked.

She frowned. “What game?”

“The Janice Crawford, SWAT-team officer, game.” She tapped at her headset. He exhaled sharply through his nose. “Do you think I’m stupid? Of course, I wouldn’t talk with my channel open.”

She stared at the burning house. “I’m careful, Sinclair.”

He grinned. “I am, too. And you can call me Jono.”

“Thanks. You can call me Officer Crawford.”

He chuckled and jerked his head at the nearest burning house. “We need to shift positions. You’re with me.”

Despite having his weapon ready, he walked with a casual gait to a fence between the burning houses. They crouched and checked their sight lines.

“This looks like a bomb, like the ones downtown,” she said.

He glanced at her sideways. “Is that what InterSec thinks?”

She focused on a house across the street where someone watched the fire from an upper floor. “CNN, actually. They noticed the flames.”