to try again. He would be running in the next Grab and planned to take a mate and start a new family. He had given his blood and sweat to the cause, and now it was his turn to enjoy some well-deserved peace and quiet.
First, though, he had to get to the bottom of this whole mess with Devious getting burned as a double agent. He didn’t believe the deaf woman was guilty of anything except bad luck. Keen had interrogated hundreds of suspects and prisoners. He could spot a liar from fifty paces. That girl hadn’t been lying about anything. She hadn’t betrayed Devious, and if she had killed any of their men in a firefight, it had been in self-defense when she was too young to know better or be held responsible.
The secured door behind him beeped, and Savage stepped into the room. His face was a mottled mess of bruises and swelling. Keen felt a glimmer of guilt for his part in the fight.
“Next time we decide to run a game on Terror, you’re the one who gets to piss him off,” Savage grumbled as he dragged a chair out from the desk and dropped into it. The chair squealed at the sudden weight, and he grunted in discomfort. Holding up his bandaged and splinted hand, he snarled, “He almost bit my fucking finger off!”
“Sorry,” Keen apologized. “I did warn you that he would try to bite.”
Savage rubbed at his fat lip. “I didn’t see you jumping in to stop it.”
“Because I didn’t want to get bit,” he answered honestly.
“Asshole,” Savage growled. With a heavy sigh, he asked, “Is this going to work? Or did we just force our best operative on the run for no reason?”
“It’s going to work.” Keen felt there was at least a seventy-percent chance it would. If it didn’t, well, they would cross that bridge when they got to it. “Everything work out with Noble and Orion?”
“Seems so,” Savage said, leaning forward to adjust the view on a camera mounted in the bridge. “Noble kept me busy in the med bay. I assume Orion confined Terror to his quarters?”
“After they took a detour to Orion’s office.” Keen motioned to an intel sheet on the desk. “While you were in the med bay, there was another spike of energy in Orion’s office.”
“Another one?” Savage frowned and picked up the sheet. “Similar signature to the one we picked up before the virus that compromised our comms while Terror’s team was on the planet.” He ran his finger down the data. “It’s got to be some kind of bug that we’ve missed.”
“We’ve run all the scans multiple times. There’s nothing there.”
“Maybe it’s not something we can scan for,” Savage reasoned. “Something older? Something analog?”
“Shit. Probably,” Keen agreed, pissed off at himself for not thinking of that earlier. “But that makes me more inclined to believe your multiple agent hypothesis.”
Savage seemed relieved to hear Keen admit he had been wrong to dismiss the admittedly outlandish idea. “I still think it ties back to Flint. There’s something rotten there. The director would not remove his former boss from top secret communiques if there wasn’t something very wrong.”
“Then why aren’t they telling us?”
“Maybe the director doesn’t know who he can trust.”
Keen made a sound of agreement. “Stars help us if that’s true.”
“You know, I think she realized that wasn’t Devious’ body in the images you showed her.” Savage eyed him over the intel sheet. “I saw that double glance she did.”
“So did I.” The corpse that had been recovered from the mine fit Devious’ description in every way but one. Even with all the bloating and distension of the body, the crescent shaped burn on his upper right arm should have been visible. Devious had earned that brand during a hazing incident at the Academy. It was in his files and listed as one of his identifying marks.
“Of course, she didn’t ask how we got a familial DNA match from a body that wasn’t Devious.”
“No, she didn’t,” Keen said, feeling some shame at the way he had treated Maisie. “She was half-asleep. I’m sure she’ll piece it together later.”
“I wonder if Flint has realized that we’ve been pulling his family’s DNA profiles.”
“Probably.” Keen watched the ongoing drill. “We should think about being more cautious with our reports. Keep everything to paper for a while, you know?”
Savage hummed in agreement. “Devious obviously wanted us to go down this path. He wanted us to dig into the DNA swabs from