Tems smiled. “Turning everything back around into your own questions, huh?” He laughed a little. “Panacea’s training really does run deep in us.”
“Are you really a Panacea agent?”
He shrugged. “As much as you,” he replied. “I just happened to have been recruited first by this faction in the CIA.”
This faction.Tems had revealed two things to her: one, that he’d worked for the CIA before he ever even stepped foot inside Panacea’s headquarters, and two, that the CIA he was working for was a rogue cell.
In a flash, Sydney thought of the Orange Alerts that had gone off at Panacea last year, of Sauda and Niall’s whispers and frustrations.
“You’ve been a double agent since the beginning?” she said through clenched teeth.
He nodded.
She pictured them both at the graduation ceremony, saw herself laughing at his joke about marrying their work.
It’s all part of this job, isn’t it?
“Why did you kill Niall?” she said hoarsely.
He narrowed his eyes at her, and for a second, she saw pain in his gaze. “Do you think,” he said, “that Panacea’s hands are clean? Do you think my friend would have died that night in Stockholm, had Niall not meddled in our affairs?”
Sydney swallowed hard. What happened in Stockholm had run deeper than she’d guessed, had involved Niall and some conflict between him and Tems.
“Revenge, then?” she managed to say.
“Let’s call it karma,” Tems snapped. “He deserved it.”
“Why?”she snapped back.
“If you don’t want her dead,” the eldest man interrupted, “then what do you want to do with her?”
Tems stood up, crossed his arms, and regarded her. “I think we can help each other out. I could use a recorded conversation from you that corroborates our story about how everything went down. Can you do that, Syd?”
Sydney wanted to laugh in his face, wanted to scream at him. But she just nodded.
Tems smiled carefully at her, even though she could tell that he didn’t believe her. “Very good,” he replied. “I think it would be in the best interest of your partner, too.”
She realized in a flash that he was doing this for her sake, that he wanted her to answer like this so that the other agents might consider sparing her. Was he trying to warn her that the rogue cell had captured Winter outside? Was his life at stake?
What was going on in Tems’s head? They had been trained in the exact same tactics, had done the same exercises and suffered through the same techniques. But Sydney had not been trained to confront a fellow Panacea agent. How the hell was she going to get him to talk? How was she going to get herself out of here?
She needed to talk directly to him, in private, alone. So Sydney looked hesitantly at the other agents, then back at Tems.
“What kind of recorded statement?” she said, loud enough for all of them to hear.
“You need a script?” Tems said.
“You want me to sound believable?” she answered, her lips curling into a snarl. “Then let’s talk it out, just you and me, with none of these other shits in the room.”
“You’re not in a position to bargain, Jackal.”
“And yet here you are, asking me for a favor.”
Tems glanced over his shoulder at the other agents before nodding at them. “Give us a minute,” he replied.
The agent who had been Sydney’s attacker shook his head. “No. You’re not getting private time.”
Sydney watched quietly, noting their dynamic.
