“Do you have energy for a shower?” she asked.
He shook his head. “No, not until I wake up.”
He walked over to his bed, and she swore to God that Damon was asleep before he even hit the mattress. While they did have three beds now, only two would be in use at one time. And, with the two of them down, gently snoring, an odd silence surrounded her. It was almost like no sound at all. She couldn’t hear the sounds on the street, which she could last night. She couldn’t hear anything. Curious, she got up and wandered over to a wall, placing her ear against it, but all sound was completely muffled. She didn’t know if it was due to their safeguards or whatever energy Damon was running or something that even Wade might be doing.
The fact was, these men did things that seemed to come straight out of sci-fi or horror novels. She also understood that they had trained intensely for this. Terk had found them with something, some ability, then taught them how to hone it until it was almost a weapon in itself. That’s what the whole superspecial ops program had been about. Distinct senses, tracking people, energy barriers, communications, all of the above and more.
She’d been amazed, and yet life had been so damn busy, and she wasn’t kidding about that. She had no way to even analyze what they were doing, and, when she went home and crashed at nighttime so exhausted, she didn’t want anything to do with it. Besides, at that time, anything she did have to do with it always came back to the fact that the man she was falling in love with didn’t give two hoots about her.
She walked over to their makeshift coffee bar, put on some coffee, and, when the first cup was brewed, went back to her computers to check on all the searches she had running. Then she checked the news to see if the body in the truck in the parking lot had been found. It had, and that was good, and the news showed the man’s face, asking for anybody who could identify him. She snagged a picture of the face, set it up for facial recognition, then sent it through one of her programs.
On a whim, she also sent it through the defense department programs, looking for anybody in their world who might have the same facial features. The news didn’t say anything about how he died, only that he was found in the back of a stolen vehicle in the parking lot of an office building that had been closed for the day. Which coincided perfectly with everything that Damon had said.
It didn’t make her feel any better because it was still another dead body. And she knew it was one of the other guys, one of the bad guys, and could very well have been the man who went after Wilson. At that thought, she opened the facial recognition software and started running all the images she had from the cameras at Wilson’s and Mera’s apartments.
With that running, she sat back and sipped her coffee, as she looked over at the two men. They were both sound asleep, and neither had moved. Both as still as logs, yet she sensed a weird alertness about them, as if somehow they still had some sensory advantage going on that would signal them if an attack came. It made her wary about getting too close to them while sleeping.
She figured she would just stay where she was and keep working. The paths to the bathroom, the coffeepot, and the food was clear, so she would let the two of them do what the men did best. When her computer beeped twenty minutes later, she looked over to see a photo side by side on the screen with the one she’d been scanning. And, sure enough, the dead man had been photographed outside of Wilson’s apartment building, caught by a traffic cam. She shook her head slowly, as she looked at it. “You son of a bitch, you’re the one who killed him.”
With that knowledge, all her sympathy for him disappeared. “Well, you got what you deserved, asshole.”
Then she hunted through the images from Mera’s area, and, sure enough, there was a match for the dead asshole again. At two for two, she was pretty damn sure the dead asshole was also the one who had shot up her apartment, so she set it up to see if she could find any match near her place.
When the search came up empty, she frowned.
“I really don’t like the idea of a second guy involved at this stage,” she muttered. That would just suck. But not a whole lot else she could do. Except she sent her system running through the city to see if she could track the first killer’s vehicle and his face and start charting where he’d been and what he’d done all that day.
It took her an hour and a half to get a connecting pathway, as she watched the vehicle come close to her apartment, about four blocks away, and she wondered if that had been close enough for him or if he was a secondary part of this. Maybe a backup or something. She didn’t know, but, after that, he headed off to a shopping mall or possibly a restaurant or hotel. She kept the map up on the side and started to run the hotel registrations, looking for a sign-in around the same time that he had arrived in the area. And there it was, Peter Boswell out of Maryland.
“So, what are you doing over in Paris, idiot?”
She kept following his facial recognition hits as he checked out, only to realize that he checked back into another hotel on the other side of town, but then never showed up. Well, the hotel got paid, but they sure as hell didn’t have to worry about cleaning a room or room service. The previous night he’d had steak, baked potato, and a bottle of wine. She stared at the effrontery of the man with such self-assurance, after killing one and injuring a second, to sit there and order such a meal. Worse, since he no doubt believed he’d killed Mera and Tasha too.
“Well, I hope it was your last supper,” Tasha muttered.
She left everything up on one of the monitors for the guys to see when they got up. She checked the street cams tracking this guy’s traffic patterns, trying to determine if anybody else had been in his vehicle.
“So, who the hell killed you?” she murmured to herself, wishing somebody else had been with him. Perhaps she could see someone else on the hotel camera. It took her a while to hack in, but, once she did, she couldn’t see anybody but him on them. He was talking on the phone as he headed in though. She checked the registration and realized he’d actually left a phone number. She quickly found her way into Peter’s phone records and tracked it down to see who he was calling.
She sucked in her breath when she saw it. “Bingo! Son of a bitch.”
*
Damon woke up, hearing Tasha muttering to herself and arguing about food. When an alarm beeped obnoxiously, he shook his head, bolted to his feet, and cried out, “What the hell is that?”
But she was also racing for her keyboards. “It’s an internal alarm. I set it up in case anybody tried to hack in.”
He raced over to her side to see her shutting down programs. “Do you know where he’s trying to get into?”
“Well, they’re shutting down our access to the government sites,” she complained balefully, as she stomped on the keys in a panic, trying to evade what was happening.
Damon could do absolutely nothing but stand here and watch. He glanced over at Terk, but he wasn’t even disturbed by the alarms. “How is it he can sleep through all that racket?” he muttered.
“Because he’s not sleeping,” she explained. “You should know that.”
“I do,” he agreed, “it’s just I’m surprised that the alarms didn’t jolt him back out again.”
“When he focuses, he’s like a bloody laser,” she muttered. “Absolutely nothing affects him.”