Beatrix’s shave-and-a-haircut knock split the silence. He rushed to open it, not pausing to look through the peephole, and found himself face to face with Martinelli instead.
“We need to talk,” Martinelli said, his trademark smile nowhere to be found.
Peter almost slammed the door in his face. But it wasn’t as if that would do any good. He let Martinelli in and followed him to the receiving room, his level of stress now so high that he tipped over some threshold into numbness. Whatever happened, happened. What was the use of fighting it?
Martinelli shut the door and soundproofed the room. He turned, face grim. “Why did you leave?”
“I told you that: I couldn’t take it anymore. I had to get out.”
Martinelli was pacing now. “Butwhycouldn’t you take it anymore?Why?”
“I stopped thinking about the mechanics and started thinking about the ethics.” He swallowed. “Why do you want to know?”
His once-deputy stopped pacing, threw himself into a chair and glared at the floor. “Something is wrong with Project 96. Something is very wrong.”
On a normal day, this would have induced panic. Somethingwaswrong with the version of the weapon he left at the Pentagram, spellwork intentionally designed to degrade at an accelerated pace. Though it shouldn’t have started yet, there was an outside chance Martinelli could have seen through it.
But this was not a normal day. His voice didn’t crack, quaver or have any sort of emotion in it when he asked, “What’s wrong?”
“The Army has done at least two tests I didn’t know about at the time—I found out accidentally. Saw the records about the results.Farbigger explosions than I’m getting. I don’t understand it, and I don’t like it.” Martinelli looked at him beseechingly. “Do you know anything about that? Boss—does that have something to do with why you left?”
Peter almost said yes because he was doomed regardless. Then he thought of Beatrix—how she never stopped fighting, never—and the awful feeling that nothing mattered receded like a poisonous ocean at low tide.
“You know I didn’t want to work on weapons anymore,” he said. “It’s not mysterious. I’d had enough.”
“For fuck’s sake, we’re friends!” Martinelli leapt to his feet and grabbed Peter by the arm. “Tell me!”
He felt the same old twinge—he hadn’t treated Martinelli as a friend, he hadn’t warned him—followed this time by anger. He pulled his arm free.
“Since I’ve left, I’ve been questioned by an FBI agent for no reason other than coming here, had my phone tapped and my house broken into.” He glared at Martinelli. “Oh, and I’ve been visited multiple times by a former colleague who, before I left, never once expressed an interest in spending time with me outside work. Forgive me if I don’t feel like talking about a place that can’t seem to leave me the hell alone!”
Martinelli looked honestly taken aback, and once again, Peter swung toward guilt. But he kept his mouth closed over apologies and explanations because he couldn’t trust this man.
A justification that Beatrix might very well have used to lie to him.
“All right,” Martinelli said. “All right. I’ll—I’ll take a Vow.”
Peter thought he must have misheard. “You’ll—what?”
“Take a Vow,” Martinelli said, slowly and clearly. “That I will keep in the strictest confidence whatever you tell me. That I’m not here tospyon you.” He paused and, perhaps mistaking Peter’s stunned silence as confusion, added, “You do know about Vows, right?”
It was all he could do not to devolve into hysterical laughter at that. “Yes,” he said. “I know.”
“Well?”
“Do you understand what you’d be getting yourself into?”
Martinelli snorted. “I wrote my dissertation on them. Studied more than a hundred people who’d taken them. My findings are a major reason that agencies did not start requiring Vows from their employees with top-secret clearances. So—yeah, you might say my understanding about the benefits andmajordownsides is ‘perfectly acceptable.’”
Peter had to sit down. “Why the flying feck did you not put that on the ten-page CV you pushed on me my first day on the job? You know, just mention it in passing between your runes research and your fluency in three ancient languages, perhaps?”
Martinelli gave him an odd look. “Runes and ancient-language work at least have some connection to weapons research. Are we doing this or not?”
Peter let out a breath, trying to decide.
“Boss?”
“Yes,” he said. “Let’s do it.”
