Omega The Girl in the Box - By Robert J. Crane Page 0,20
cold and unmoving, without a trace of warmth.
Fries smiled tightly. “Yep. If you’re planning to torture me, though, I suggest you get started. It might take a while to get to the good stuff.”
A sound came from the door, unlocking and opening, cutting short Parks’ reply. We turned to see a flash of red hair as Ariadne stuck her head in. She flushed at the sight of Fries, who smiled back at her. “I need to speak with the two of you for a moment.”
“Nice to see you again, Ariadne,” Fries said with a little shrug . His hands clinked the cuffs as the chain reached maximum extension. “I’d wave at you, but I think you can see I’m a bit tied down here.”
“Just the way I prefer you,” Ariadne said. “Parks, Nealon...a word, please.”
I cast a look at Parks, who shook his head in a warning that took me a moment to decipher. I realized he meant I shouldn’t show hesitation in front of Fries, but when I looked at Fries he was already grinning at me. Too late. I followed Parks into the hall where the door slid shut behind us and Ariadne activated the lock.
“This one’s gonna be tough without getting physical or using chemicals,” Parks said the moment the door clicked shut. “He’s got a serious reserve of self-confidence that ain’t bluster. Probably been trained to resist interrogation.”
“Doubtless,” Ariadne said, “but that’s not why I called you out here—”
“He said it was nice to see you again,” I looked at her pointedly. “You know this scum on a personal basis?”
She shook her head. “In passing. I didn’t realize it at the time, but he tried to flip me a few months ago.”
“Flip?” I looked from her to Parks. “Like...physically?” I lowered my voice. “Like...”
Ariadne let out a hiss. “No. As in flip me from the Directorate to Omega. I didn’t know who he was at the time, and it was a clumsy attempt, but it had...” I saw some of the life drain out of her, “...repercussions. I’m not going to go into detail, but suffice it to say the Director is fully aware of what happened, and you needn’t concern yourself with it. We have something else brewing.”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Just a moment,” she said, and I caught movement at the far end of the hall, by the door to the stairwell that led out of the basement. “Here he is.”
A thin man in skinny jeans, with thick, square-rimmed black glasses came bouncing down the hall in a worn olive green jacket that looked like he had been paid by the Salvation Army to get it the hell out of their store. His black, wavy hair was spiked into an angled fauxhawk.
“J.J.,” I said as he walked up, tablet computer in his hand. “It’s always so nice to see you leave your cubicle for a little while.”
“Because the air here in the dungeons is so much fresher than what we get on the fourth floor?” He looked at me with a querying eyebrow. “Ariadne asked me to tell you what we found.”
“Found from what?” I asked.
“Fries’ cell phone,” Ariadne replied, smug. “Reed bagged it during your raid. Go on, J.J.”
“Recent history was kind of a boon ,” J.J. said, holding up the tablet so I could see. “The man’s not what you’d call real communicative, so it’s not like there was a ton to sift through in his thirty-day history.”
“I’ve heard that incubi and succubi can be a little unsociable,” I said without a trace of irony.
“That might be underselling it for him,” J.J. said. “Two numbers, that’s it. One’s a cell phone that I backtraced. Area code says it’s from Manhattan, but it was last used in downtown Minneapolis yesterday afternoon at about three-thirty p.m.” He held up the tablet and a city grid showed up on the screen. “It wasn’t logging the GPS, but just based on the cell tower data it looks like the user was pretty close to Fries’ apartment when the call was made. After that, it went dark, completely offline, no record that it’s been on the network since.”
“Whoever’s using it is either odd or cautious,” Parks suggested. “They might have seen your team bag Fries and figured you could track them down if they left the phone on for the networks to follow.”
“Or they might just be on planes or not wanting to be disturbed,” J.J. said with a shrug. “It’s not usual behavior for most users to