But just then, he veered into an office. She hung back near the half-open door, leery of going in. There wasn’t a sound. What was he doing?
A minute or two elapsed. She was debating with herself whether it would be a better use of time to go to the basement when she realized that the officer striding down the corridor toward her was the man who’d called Ella “Freddie.”
Whitaker coming to talk to Morse?
Gritting her teeth, she crept into the office and pressed against a wall. Morse, who’d had his back to her, abruptly turned. Her blood pressure spiked. God, he’d heard her?—
The next second, the officer walked in. Morse was looking at him, not her. The door shut with a click.
“Well?” asked maybe-Whitaker.
“Wait until I soundproof the room,” Morse said softly, a hint of irritation there. (Did he speak respectfully to anyone? Draden?)
She risked taking her eyes off Morse long enough to look at the other man’s uniform. Hardware on his chest. Three stars on his shoulders. Steel name tag with a single word that showed she had leapt to the right conclusion:Whitaker.
If only she’d thought to bring a recording device.
“Look,” the general said, “we’re running out of time. We can try at a later event—there’ll be other chances. But I think we’d better admit to ourselves that this one is shot.”
“No,” Morse said.
Whitaker shook his head. “I realize you and James are convinced the guy knows more than he’s letting on”—Peter?she thought—“but I was always against waiting until the last minute to grab him”—Peter!—“and now … What is that?”
Morse held up a see-through bag with what looked like rubble inside. “Project 96.”
“What?”Whitaker said, obviously aghast at the thought of his weapon in pieces, but Beatrix was horrorstruck for another reason.
“A different transmitter,” Morse said, putting words to her fears. “One that Blackwell either made after he left or smuggled out of here. We found this in the forest behind his house today.”
He dipped a hand in the bag and pulled out one of the largest pieces, no bigger than her thumb. “Here: The top half of theearrune. And this”—he extracted another jagged bit of debris.“Earagain. Same size as the runes on our copy. The color and texture of the material is an exact match.”
“Yeah? And?”
“Clearlythiswas the source of the explosion that was big enough.”
She’d thought she’d done such a good job destroying the weapon. She’d thought no one would ever know.
Whitaker waved a dismissive hand. “Come on, he was in the hospital that day.”
“He was in the hospitalafter. Twenty-one minutes after.”
“I don’t know if I see the?—”
“His weapon went off, and something happened to him. Something that put him in a coma and undermined his ability to spellcast.”
This couldn’t be happening. Itcouldn’t.
“Stop with the riddles and just spit it out, Morse.”
“Someone—Garrett, I presume—set it off using him as the fuel.”
Beatrix, shaking all over, stared in horror at the men. Morse, implacable. Whitaker, a smile spreading over his face.
“A wizard,” he said. “You’re saying that all we have to do is change our fuel from a typic to a wizard.”
Morse nodded.
“No, wait,” Whitaker said, heaving a sigh, “there’sdefinitelysomething wrong with our copy, if it is the copy. We ran tests using the variant fuels, and all those explosions are roughly twenty percent under the mark. We’re not going to get to five miles, even with a wizard. We’ll be lucky to hit four.”
