field team. The man with the mechanical voice had to be their field commander. The one on his left, their equipment manager. Her eyes stopped on the last man. His silver pin identified him as a field operative, but that wasn’t what caught my attention.
From the close-cropped black hair to the prominent nose, his face resembled a renaissance sculpture more than a man. Not a model but a man of action, and probably little thought. Wide shoulders and an easy stance said he wasn’t afraid at all of meeting the director.
Which meant he’d probably never met her before.
She nodded to him. “Go ahead.”
With flowing ease, he rose from the chair, easily my equal in height, if not experience, and strode to the screen. “These parts were here when I arrived. This over here, the meat-skin wrote with its finger. Well, what was left of it.”
His voice, rich like coffee with caramel, brought a smile to my lips.
One I squelched.
“That explains the sloppy penmanship.” I pointed to the vast smudge in the middle of the picture. “But not that.”
He laughed, a deep baritone. “That’s where I tackled and staked it.”
How could he be so cavalier? Such artifacts gave us our best insight into the Re-Animus consciousness. From them we’d pieced together theories that actually made sense, compared to “evil spirits” and “demonic possession.”
I risked the director’s wrath to drive my point home. “Do you have any idea what you did? What the value of these scenes are?” I couldn’t help myself. The clearest sample of co-org writing in one place I’d seen in six years, and not only did he kill the co-organism, he destroyed the evidence.
He put his hands together and bowed his head. “I’m sorry.” His tone said differently. “I was more concerned about the fact it was trying to crush my windpipe than about taking a picture for the fridge.”
What kind of rookie with dreams of “monster hunting” would engage up close and personal with a co-organism? “Why didn’t you use standard tactics? Back off, trap it? Pin and hold? We could have had firsthand samples.”
I hadn’t made it six years in the BSI without learning to pay attention. The stares, the hidden smiles suggested I’d made an embarrassing mistake.
Director Bismuth cut in before he could answer. “His field team is currently short three members; Operative Carson took appropriate measures. What can you make of the remnants?”
Carson. As in Heinrich Carson? BSI operative number one? He’d been hunting co-organisms long before the government got involved. No. Heinrich Carson would have been at least sixty if he were still alive, ready to stake out a desk instead of a co-org.
Which meant the cocky man in front of me had to be—
“Brynner Carson.” I didn’t mean to speak his name out loud. A name associated with as many disasters as perfect operations. A man I’d heard stories about more than once.
He grinned back at me and winked. “Guilty as charged.”
No wonder people told stories about him, though the Brynner Carson before me didn’t quite live up to the legend. No woman on his arm; no smell of alcohol on his breath. In fact, a seeping bloodstain over his right pec told me the man could and did bleed.
I looked back to the director. “It’s interpretive. Neither completely phonetic or symbolic, these glyphs indicate host exposure to late Egypt. If memory serves, it’s a passage from The Book of the Dead. At least, it was.”
I ignored the laser pointer, choosing to move closer to the screen and point things out myself. “This would have been interesting. This”—I pointed out the smudged area—“is repeating the same set of ideas over and over. Unique content was in the destroyed area; this represents degeneration of the pattern, where it simply repeats.”
Director Bismuth nodded, her eyes flicking over and passing on, in what I took as a form of approval. “And what is it repeating?”
I broke them down again, trying to keep my gaze on the screen instead of the man it wanted to wander to. He watched me, his eyes locked on my face. I’d probably missed the wholebody-scan most men couldn’t or wouldn’t avoid. Instead I focused on the table, going over the symbols. Organ center. Spirit center. “It says ‘The heart.’”
BRYNNER
No one told me there’d be special company. I’d been called up before Director Bismuth more times than I could count. I’d own more medals than any other operative if it weren’t for a fifty/fifty split between commendations and criminal charges.