Omega The Girl in the Box - By Robert J. Crane Page 0,52
smile. The photograph was color, but something about the eyes was off. He flipped to the next picture, a blond-haired man, and once I saw it, I realized who they were. “Spike and Angel, the vampires they sent after me.” I blinked at the pictures. “They didn’t look anywhere near that human when I fought them. They had red eyes...”
“Contact lenses,” J.J. said. “They were groomed up for the photos.” He stole a look at the screen. “Probably had their hair done before travel, kept their mouths shut to keep the fangs from showing. I’m guessing they did that with Wolfe, too, based on the before and after nature of this passport picture compared to the newsreel stuff I’ve seen from him. But there’s actually more still in this batch.” His fingers slid along the screen again, and another face appeared. “Look familiar?”
“Bjorn,” I said, recognizing the brown hair and blunt face more than anything else about his bearing. “The guy who’s sitting down in the cells right now,” I said to Reed. “How many of these passports are there?”
“Hundreds in the batch,” J.J. said. “It was from one specific facility in the UK over the course of a few weeks. Kinda hard to believe they’re all British citizens, but it’s possible. Anyway, so we got this whole batch, and I’m sifting through it with the Director for familiar faces, but that’s kind of a losing proposition because his sight isn’t what it used to be and a lot of these people don’t look anything like metas, and some of them don’t look like...well...anything.”
“Can you track any of them right now?” Reed asked.
“Yeah, and that’s kind of the point of this meeting,” J.J. said. “We got a good line on one of them, one of them in the batch that just landed in Minneapolis yesterday, came in from London via New York.” He held up the pad again, this time showing a female face, a dark-haired, serious woman who looked to be in her forties with a short bob haircut. “Eleanor Madigan,” is the name on the passport...but of course Wolfe was in the system under Eugene Dellwood, so...” he looked up and blinked, his twitch magnified by his glasses, “probably an assumed name.”
“Now in Minneapolis?” I asked. “So if she’s part of this Operation Stanchion, it looks like they’re moving pieces into place in the area now.”
“Probably more than you think,” J.J. said, and tapped away at his tablet for a minute before pushing it toward me to see again, holding it in the air between us. “This is Des Moines Police Department’s report on what they found in the house after you finished demolishing it.” I cringed, but J.J. paid no mind. “Looks like Bjorn had a Google Map leading him up to a hotel near the airport here in Bloomington.”
“He was coming here?” Parks spoke up at last, the voice of wisdom. “If he already had the map, let’s assume that he was going to travel within the next day or so after the attack. That puts it about now. You thinking he might be meeting up with Madigan?”
“I don’t know for sure,” J.J. said, surprisingly smug for a guy who really had nothing to be smug about, looks-wise, “but an Eleanor Madigan checked into that very hotel just last night. Room 1117.” He smiled wide, and then it vanished. “That’s the eleventh floor, by the way, and it’s one of those hotels where the rooms are all centered around a big open-air courtyard, so you might wanna...” he shrugged, “I dunno, use some discretion or something. Unless you want to do an eleven story plunge in public. Might not hurt you too much—”
“It would kill most of us,” Parks corrected him.
“Well, it’d make a hell of a scene for the news, too, y’know.” He nodded at me and Reed. “They’re still talking about the gangland house crashing down in Iowa.”
“That’s because it’s the most exciting thing to happen in Iowa in six decades,” Parks said.
“I want caution,” Ariadne said, cutting across all other talk in the room. “Bastian has lead on this, Sienna and Reed, you’ll be answering to him. I want everyone working together, no lone ranger BS—got it, Clary?” She waited until Clary picked his head up, gave her a silent nod, and then she continued. “Whoever this Eleanor Madigan is, I think we can expect she’s trouble if she’s truly with Omega.”
“You’re going to send all of us?” I asked, throwing looks around