Devil s Bargin Page 0,24

noticed against her will. Well manicured. No wedding ring, and no sign there'd ever been one.

"I'll leave you to look it over," he said. "I've got a meeting down the hall. Back in about thirty minutes. Oh, don't try to walk out with any loose change or files or anything, Pansy's tougher than she looks."

He left them without a backward glance. Jazz knew her eyebrows were soaring, and her lips compressed against a laugh. She caught the same glitter in Lucia's eyes.

"Well," Lucia said in the silence after the door had clicked shut, "he's not what I expected."

"Taller?"

"Smarter." She edged her chair closer to the desk and reached for the folder. "Oddly, that does not make me feel better about this."

The folder contained loads of legal paperwork about the partnership. Jazz blurred out after a couple of pages, but she was pretty expert in shaking wheat from chaff, when it came to legal papers, and flipped through the thick sheaf until she found what she was looking for.

"Looks like the money's coming from a nonprofit organization called the Cross Society," she said, and scooted over to give Lucia a lean-in on it.

"A religious thing?" Lucia hooked silky black hair back over her ear.

"Um...no idea, actually. Why. Are you a zealot?"

"I'm religious, I'm not actually militant." Lucia shrugged. "You?"

"Define religious."

Lucia gave her a warm, quick smile. "And that answers my question. So, what do we know about them?"

"Not a damn thing." Jazz flipped through the rest of the paperwork. "Address is care of the law firm. I don't see anything else to go on."

"Ah." Lucia nodded, and went around Borden's desk to test the drawers. Locked. She reached into her neat little designer purse, came out with lock picks in a zippered leather case, and set to work. It took her about ten seconds flat to open up the file drawer and start flipping through. "Hmm, he works for some interesting people - do you want to know about Donald Trump? - never mind, here it is. The Cross Society."

She pulled out a fairly massive-looking folder and spread it open on the blotter, on top of the partnership paperwork. Jazz came around to take a look as Lucia's elegant fingers fluttered pages.

"Here. Not religious, apparently. The Cross Society is a nonprofit organization established seven years ago with a mandate to research time, physics and causality."

"What the hell is causality?" Jazz asked.

"I was hoping you'd tell me. They seem to have given out quite a load of grants and loans over the past couple of years. Take a look at the list. Anything look familiar to you?"

"Nope, but I'll bet if we did an Internet search, we'd turn up with science stuff."

"Not all of them," Lucia murmured, and ran her finger down the list to stop on one name. Gregory Valentin Ivanovich. "I know this one. Definitely not a scientist."

"Who is he?"

"Spy," she said absently. "Once upon a time. He's in security these days. Or that's the euphemism for it. Actually, I think he more or less works for the highest bidder.... What would you say, there must be a few thousand names listed here, right?"

Jazz felt her eyebrows quirk again. "Seems to be a lot. This Ivanovich guy...you know him from business or pleasure?"

"Both," Lucia said, and ran her fingertip over the name again, as if it was a bar code she could scan. "Although you mix those together often enough you get something that doesn't fit the definition of either. Anyway, Gregory isn't a scientist by any stretch of the imagination."

"Neither are we," Jazz pointed out, and pointed at the footnote on the page.

Offers extended to Jasmine Evelyn Callender and Lucia Imelda Losano Garza on March 23...

"Interesting."

"Yeah, no kidding. I'd call it more like shocking. Imelda?"

"Shut up, Evelyn."

"If they're researching egghead stuff, why do they need spies, cops and whatever the hell you are, anyway?" Jazz asked, and tapped the paper nervously.

Lucia said, "Let's find out," and flipped through the files again.

"What are you looking for?"

"I don't know. Anything out of the ordinary, I suppose." She flicked the tabs, reading names. "Active cases. Mr. Borden's a busy young man. He's defending an insurance company against a class-action suit on denial of claims...a tobacco company...some rich billionaire with tax problems - not The Donald..."

She paused, backed up, and eased a file out of the middle of the drawer.

"What?" Jazz asked.

"Eidolon Corporation."

"Never heard of it."

"I have." Lucia kept staring at the file folder. She pulled it out and opened it