Underground

“Hey there—” I started, but he put a finger to his lips and then leaned in to whisper in my ear. “Ignore me.”

Puzzled, I bent down to pick up the ferret before she could get too badly underfoot. Chaos bit my thumb. “Ow!” I yelped. “What was that for?”

Chaos made a high-pitched barking sound and fought to escape my hand. Quinton stopped rummaging in his backpack and turned an expression of mixed concern and curiosity on us. I loosened my hold on the ferret a little but didn’t let her go, and she settled down a bit, but still wanted out of my hand. I put her down again and she darted for her cage.

I followed and bent down beside the cage to look in at her while Quinton began to walk around the room with some kind of electronic device in his hand.

“Hey, ferret-butt,” I cajoled my pet. “What’s up with you?”

She poked her head back out of her nest of old sweatshirts and heaved a ferret sigh. I reached out a finger and stroked her ears and she rubbed against my hand, but as soon as I tried to pick her up, she squirmed away.

“What a contrarian you’re being today. Are you sick or something? You don’t look sick…”

Quinton put his things down and joined me on the floor, peering into the ferret’s cage. “How old is she?” “Six.”

“Huh. That’s getting kind of old for a ferret. Maybe she needs a checkup.”

“She’s due for shots in a couple of weeks. If she keeps acting up, I may take her in early,” I said. Then I looked him over and asked, “You done with whatever you were up to?”

“Yup. No bugs in here,” he answered, keeping his voice low. “There’s always a possibility of passive bugging through the phones, tapping at the central station, or using parabolic devices at a distance, but they’re a pain, so it looks like Fern’s either not too interested in your home life or she’s on very short rations. We should check your office, too. Has your alarm called the cell phone since she turned up?”

“Oh, damn it—my cell phone!”

I got up and found my purse and dug for the phone, tossing other things out as I hunted: keys, feather, spare pistol clip, wallet…

Quinton knelt down in front of me and picked up the feather, and then offered it from his kneeling position with teasing reverence. “Your spear, m’lady zombieslayer.”

I laughed and he gri

I turned away, putting the feather back in the bag, and tried to resume my hunt for the phone, but Quinton wasn’t having it. He stood up behind me and touched my shoulders very lightly.

“Harper. I don’t want to make you nervous. Last night was wonderful—well, after the sheer terror—but it doesn’t have to mean—”

“Shut up,” I suggested. “Don’t say it doesn’t have to mean anything.” I turned around and faced him, standing very close, and the small difference in our height in bare feet let me look hard into his eyes without having to tilt my head down much. “I didn’t drag you into my bed just because I was scared or excited about being alive or… rebounding or whatever. I like you. I trust you—with my life. And I don’t have to lie to you. I love being with someone who knows. I think it’s better than the sex—which was damned fine.”

He started to smile, but it kept on spreading wider until he gri

I got the phone out—still sealed in its crushed can. Quinton put his hands over mine, stopping me from unpackaging the phone.

“Hang on. As soon as the battery is back in, the phone can be tracked and used as a bug. Right now, you’re the only lead to me and the cell phone is the best lead to you. Fern’s friends will definitely be monitoring it for her. For now, let’s assume the office is bugged until we can check the phone from someplace other than here.”

I bit my lip and looked at him, taking a long, bracing breath before I said, “I think I need to know a little more about Fern Laguire’s motives. You’ve said several things that make me think this is personal between you two.”

“Oh, it’s personal,” he replied, nodding, the colors around him fading down to a constrained amber glow, “in an impersonal sort of way.” His tone verged on amused. “We only met a handful of times, but I know her pretty well by observation—better than she does me—and she hates me. I am the huge black blot on Fern’s otherwise stellar career. I was on loan from another agency to do some work for Fern’s group at the NSA—my previous supervisor wanted to hide the embarrassing evidence of the project I’d been working on once it blew up. I had the right mix of odd skills, so they seconded me to Laguire’s group. The NSA’s nickname around Fort Meade is ‘Never Say Anything.’ It’s a great place to hide someone with tech skills from prying investigators.” Quinton paused and looked around. “This is going to take a while. Let’s sit down.”

We parked ourselves on the sofa, leaning into opposite corners so we could see each other without one of us having to resort to sitting on my coffee table.

“All right,” Quinton resumed. “I ended up at Fort Meade because the guys I had been working for were an embarrassment—it was their project that first got me started looking at the cracks in reality—and the agency wanted to keep it quiet, but I was already starting to think I was in the wrong working world. I’m just not of the mind they are—well, you know that. But working for Fern Laguire was not the best place to nurture a sense of the rightness of big central government and its actions.

“You know about the NSA…?”

I nodded. “Crypto specialists, intelligence gathering by electronic eavesdropping. Supposedly, they don’t work on domestic systems or run covert ops.”

Quinton snorted. “Yeah, and if you believe that there’s a pointy leftover from the World’s Fair up in Queen A

“I had an attack of conscience over it and I wanted out. But there was no way Fern would let me go, because her idea of freedom and mine were not even in the same philosophical universe.”

I narrowed my eyes. “You’re not going to say they retire people to six-foot dirt apartments, are you? Because I have a hard time buying that.”

Quinton shook his head. “No. Fern’s not homicidal as far as I know, but retiring from intelligence or any classified service comes with monitors and strings.

They don’t just let you walk out and go your way and that’s what I craved. Fern didn’t want to let me go at all and she’s very good at finding ways to make people stay. It’s a big key to her success within the agency—people work for Fern until they drop. But I left. I didn’t say I was going, because I knew how she worked. I just made myself disappear, in spite of their security measures, and they didn’t know how. I think they still don’t. That alone must just boil Fern’s brain, but that I slipped the chain completely is even worse. I proved her fallible. She’s never going to forgive me. If she can get me back, then she saves face—which is all-important to Fern at this stage in the game. She’s nearing retirement and she has to be totally nonstick armored on her way out the door or she’ll get the same treatment she’s given plenty of others.”

“Ugh,” I said with a shudder. “Sounds like she wouldn’t mind if you did get killed.”