“Talking to Cole?”
“Now there’s the smart guy Bob promised me.”
The tapping she heard at the other end of the line wasn’t a keyboard. Judging by the frustration in Adderson’s voice, it was most likely a pen being bounced off a desk or even the crackling of knuckles. “I’ll be candid with you, Paige. Things simply never settled down long enough for us to get you in to see him. Now that he’s been …diverted, that situation is worse.”
“Where has he been diverted to?” she asked.
“Actually, although one member of the IRD checked Cole out of Canon City, he was taken away by someone not under my jurisdiction.”
“So …Cole’s just gone?”
“He can’t be far,” Adderson assured her. “Our people are watching the roads and have a great number of contacts in that area. That’s why it was so vital for us to make our move in Denver as opposed to—”
Paige interrupted in a voice that was sharp enough to snip an iron post in half. “Is it possible the real cops took him from one prison and transferred him through the system?”
“We’re checking on that.”
“Yeah? Well you’d better not be waiting for our trouble with the cops to blow over. By the time that happens, Cole could be a stain on an electric chair. What do you know about what happened to him?”
“We had visual confirmation that Cole was taken into Canon City. He was put into Maximum Security Holding and was under constant surveillance. After we sent someone in to deliver the message from you, he was moved.”
“Where to?” The long silence she got was enough to answer her question. “You seriously don’t know, do you?”
When Adderson failed to respond to that, Paige gritted her teeth and prepared to unleash as many kinds of hell as she could summon. Before she could spit her first piece of brimstone, another car rolled to a stop several yards away. It was stuffed with two adults in the front seats and several bouncing little ankle biters in the back. The driver pushed open his door and staggered out, looking as if he was ready to take a dive over the guardrail just to earn a few moments of peace.
Turning her head away from that car, she said, “You guys are supposed to know what you’re doing! The only reason I agreed to let Bob set me up with you is because you had the resources to start getting this fucking mess cleaned up.”
“We’re a privately owned organization operating outside the parameters of several official agencies. Right now, it’s taking everything we’ve got to keep from being noticed.”
“Don’t give me that bullshit!” Paige snarled. “With all the contacts you’ve made and the resources you’ve got, there’s no way you could work outside every government agency. Someone’s gotta know about you.”
After a pause, Adderson calmly replied, “Highly ranked officials in the Army and Marine Corps are aware of us, but not in an official capacity. Perhaps it would also make you feel better knowing that one of our men in that SWAT van with Cole kept him from being shot by angry officers who lost their friends that night. And before you spout off again, I realize you Skinners had nothing to do with actually killing those men and women. You want to know what we’ve been doing? The IRD has been stretched almost beyond our limits just keeping the truth about all of this from being spread across the Internet. Do you have any idea how difficult it is to create plausible deniability regarding monsters that are showing up on everything from conspiracy blogs to national news sites?”
“Actually, yes. I do.”
“Your friend Cole did some good work with those doctored videos and pictures he circulated after the Kansas City riots. Those got a lot of people willing to write these instances off as a bad hoax in troubled times. But there’s more to it now. You people simply do not know how to lay low. It’s bad enough that my agency was forced to show itself once the Nymar started targeting innocent people and police officers. With all the attention being aimed at you, it’s that much harder for us to keep our heads out of the sights.”
“You’ve got ties to the government. Doesn’t that make anything easier?”
The sound Adderson made was barely recognizable as a laugh. “We have some funding and equipment from the military and many members with federal or state law enforcement duties. If anything, that makes things a whole lot more difficult. And before you consider threatening me with becoming a squeakier wheel, let me remind you that if you were on your own, none of you would have gotten away from that warehouse.”
Paige knew he had a point, but there was no way she was about to give him that much slack. “Is that how you’d react if one of your men disappeared?”
“We haven’t abandoned Cole. We’re still trying to find out what’s going on in Colorado.”
“I want to go there. Send a chopper for me.”
After a short pause he asked, “After all of that spiteful talk, you want us to be the ones to pick you up? What’s wrong? Is there a search being conducted with your name attached to it?”
“Cole’s been alone too long as it is. At the very least, I need to try and get another message to him.”
“If that were possible, we—”
“Just take me there,” she snapped. “If you’ve got men in Boulder, then take me to them. I can help track Cole down.”
“No. Our people are placed strategically and cannot be exposed just to ease your mind about your partner. I promised we’d take him out of Denver before he was brought down by police snipers, and we did. I promised we’d put him in a facility where the IRD has a presence, and we did.”
“What about the other promise you made about getting Cole medical attention? Do you people even really have doctors that know their way around Nymar spore?”
“Of course we do. There were some initial studies done by one of our doctors.” Adderson lowered his voice until she could barely hear it over the phone. “We think the medical team is where we were infiltrated. Cole was in their care when he was taken. One of them was under my microscope about a day before Cole disappeared from Canon City.”
“Who is it?”
Surprisingly, Adderson replied, “His name is Hal Waylon. Run that by your sources, and if you find anything, let me know. As long as we get proof that he’s been sanctioned, we don’t care who does the deed.”
“If sanctioning is the same as jamming a shotgun up his ass and pulling a trigger, I’m in.” When Paige looked over at the other car, she found two sets of little eyes staring at her from the backseat. She wasn’t certain she’d been loud enough for them to hear her, but the harried dad stretching his legs suddenly seemed ready to climb back into his kidmobile just to get away from there.
“Which brings us to ground we’ve already covered.” Adderson sighed. “As soon as I get an update on where Cole is, I’ll let you know. Now, would you like me to arrange a pickup? It would be helpful for us to know if we might encounter any hostility when we arrive.”
Paige ground her teeth, suddenly thinking of reasons to refuse the offer. She needed to move faster than her stolen car could take her, but if Cole had gone missing while in Adderson’s care, then perhaps it wasn’t such a great idea to climb into another one of those choppers. Also, she had a few more tactical options available when she wasn’t hindered by any sort of authority looking over her shoulder. Even worse, the last thing she needed was to lead Kawosa to a pseudomilitary group that was armed to the teeth and had enough access to arrange tricky ways to bamboozle the citizens of a major country. She still didn’t know where the shapeshifter had gone after scampering away from that expressway. “I got some hostility, all right,” she told Adderson. “I’ve been saving it up for a special occasion and I think I know where to send it.”
“We can pick it up if you like.”