Chris folded his hands in front of his face as if in prayer, and tried his best to look beneficent and thoughtful. Not that he could hope to fool Alice, who knew him well enough to spot an act, even without using the Inquisition Protocol she had access to as an Auditor. It was a habit that helped him feel more confident in his presentation.
“It will probably get heavy,” he admitted. “But, you know I wouldn’t bother you for anything that wasn’t.”
“I’d probably get bored with anything else,” Alice said, gradually shredding a discarded sugar packet into dull pink ribbons. “Get to the point, please, Chris.”
“I need you to watch my back on a job,” Chris said plainly. “It’s something personal, it isn’t Society business. I can’t use my normal channels to handle this thing.”
Alice leaned back in her chair and looked at him with the most open confusion he’d ever seen her express, already starting to morph into anger.
“And now I am supposed to say ‘Just like old times’, or something, right? I’m an Auditor, Chris, not a hired dog. I don’t do favors. I certainly don’t help you deal with your ‘personal business’.”
Chris held up his hands pleadingly.
“Credit me with a bit more intelligence than that, Alice. I know perfectly well who I’m talking to. I wouldn’t have bothered to make the request, but the fact is…”
Chris hesitated for a moment, then. It was like looking down off of a height, right before he jumped. It didn’t change anything, other than reminding him to be terrified. He still had no options other than a leap of faith.
“The fact is that this job pertains to your Audit, Alice, and I think you’ll be very interested in it.”
“I already am,” Alice said grimly, her smile suddenly gone. Chris wondered how he’d forgotten how much scarier she was without it. “Have you done something ill-advised, Chris?”
Chris shook his head and sighed.
“I wasn’t planning on trying to hide it,” he said guiltily. “We don’t have nice jobs, Alice, and they aren’t easy, either. I’ve made a mistake.”
Alice leaned forward even further, taking his ice-cold hand in her own. It was a friendly gesture, but with an underlying firmness. He knew better than to flinch from her touch.
“What did you do for the Terrie Cartel, Chris?”
He heard the edge in her voice, and knew that it could go either way, but Chris faced it down with the nerves of a life-long gambler.
“Remember, when I took the job, they were still a cartel in good standing!” Chris protested. “The suspension only came down a few weeks ago. This all started almost three years ago.”
When he realized that no reaction from Alice was forthcoming, Chris sighed again, more out of habit than anything.
“The Terrie Cartel approached us, the Society, wanting to buy all kinds of intelligence — anything at all on the Witch cults, those Anathema freaks in the Outer Dark, the movements of the Weir tribes and population estimates, that sort of thing.” Chris shook his head, and wished that he could take his hand out from under Alice’s. “It’s obvious to me, now, they were interested in how much we knew, and by extension, how much Central was likely to know, rather than the information itself.”
Alice nodded grimly, but she released his hand, much to Chris’s relief.
“You provided this information?”
Alice tapped her fingers on the table expectantly.
“Of course,” Chris acknowledged, feeling a bit foolish. “There was nothing proscribed, nothing outside the boundaries of the Agreement. We continued to provide intelligence for them up until we heard about the attacks. The arrangement was terminated before Central proscribed the Terrie cartel.”
Alice’s grin returned. Apparently she had caught the emphasis on the last part of the statement, the proactive termination of the relationship. Weeks could mean everything. Nothing was trivial when Alice Gallow was sitting across the table, and Chris wasn’t about to assume any more guilt than he had to.
“What happened once you heard about the proscription?”
Alice finished the better part of her coffee in one swallow. Chris found himself wondering idly what his chances were of surviving the encounter, and then put it aside. There was no point in worrying about what couldn’t be changed.
“I told them the arrangement was dead, of course,” Chris said, immediately regretting his choice of words. “They told me that ending the arrangement would be a very serious error on my part, that it could have consequences for the Society. I walked away, never even looked back.”
Chris wondered if Alice had activated the Inquisition Protocol. She was a skilled enough Operator that he couldn’t read anything from her Etheric signature, but it was certainly possible. He hoped that she had. He desperately needed her to know he wasn’t lying.
“Why are you so cold, Chris? Why are you starving?”
Alice put down her empty cup on the table, ignoring the saucer, and the porcelain clattered against the glass tabletop.
“The entire London branch of the society is gone for certain,” Chris said, hanging his head. “They moved on us two days after they were proscribed. There was a bombing, at our central office. It did a lot of structural damage, but no serious losses. We followed the standard evacuation procedures, split up into small groups and headed for the safe houses, to wait for the all clear. They were waiting at the safe house when we arrived, I assume it was the same for the others,” Chris continued, his voice tired, wooden. “They looked like they had been there for a while. They’d killed the human servants… unkindly. There were Witches with them, and Weir, and there were only four of us. It wasn’t even a fight.”
Chris’s hand shook as he remembered Evelyn screaming while Paul and Miguel died, devoured by the maws of horrible, malformed wolves.
“Evelyn and I both activated emergency apport protocols, with randomized destinations to elude telepathic tracking. There was nothing else we could do.” Chris couldn’t look at Alice. He couldn’t stand the thought of what his face might show. With an effort, he recalled fifty years of professional composure. “I woke up in Amsterdam, near the docks, with a half-dozen bullets still lodged in me.”
“What about the Amsterdam lodge?” Alice asked, fruitlessly searching for their waiter, who had fled long ago.
“Nothing more than a burning building, surrounded by things in police uniforms that weren’t human,” Chris said sadly. “I got myself patched up by my own means, and then I went underground. I’ve kept moving since then, trying to find a safe place to retreat to. Everywhere I’ve gone, it’s been the same thing. Brussels, Paris, Madrid, Barcelona.”
“Barcelona is the largest lodge in Europe, right?” Alice looked skeptical.
“It was. All I found there was more rubble, and a package sitting in front of it with my name on it.” Chris felt an absurd urge to laugh. He wasn’t at all sure why. “Nobody watching, this time. Pretty clear that they wanted me to have it.”
Alice looked sadly at her empty coffee cup. Chris wondered if maybe she was mellowing slightly with age. Perhaps, after all this time, Alice was finally capable of dealing with small disappointments without resorting to homicide. Perhaps.
Otherwise, Chris sincerely hoped their waiter never came back.
“I didn’t open it, at first. I tried peeking at it a number of different ways, but no matter how I looked at it, it came up clean. Eventually I cut the thing open in my hotel room. There was a cell phone.” Chris looked around them nervously, checking the faces at the surrounding tables, and then continued. “There were videos, the things they had done to the others. I saw members of a dozen different lodges — Alice, I think that they’ve destroyed most of the lodges in Europe!”