Page 19 of 72 Hours

I rolled my eyes. “I’m not bothered that you were Mr Popular while I languished out here. Don’t bother about trying to massage my ego, because to be honest, I don’t have a hell of a lot of time for one nowadays—”

“Dammit, I wasn’t! Are you listening to anything I’m saying?”

I swallowed back a retort, and then engaged my brain instead of my tongue. “Wait a sec. The person you could identify—the previous threat against a Team member—you don’t mean it was that kid who stabbed you?”

His eyes narrowed. “Yes.”

I cursed myself. That time had been one of the most distressing... for us both, despite whatever arguments we may have had subsequently. Hi, Tanner. Meet Mr Foot-in-Mouth. But if Niall could talk about it so coolly, well, so could I. “So, did that confirm the theory that it’s not political at all, but a personal attack? On the Team—all of us? Or just you?”

He shrugged. He was looking weary again, despite that exhaustive sleep. “I don’t know, I really don’t know. I checked out the kid, and he’s still in the specialist detention center. It couldn’t have been him.”

“Other family members? Associates? The guy who ran the club where we found him?”

“I don’t fucking know!” Whoa, when Niall let loose, he let loose. He saw the look on my face and growled with frustration, trying to rein the anger back in. “No, there was nothing else on that particular exercise to give us a lead. But Judith has other cases to examine, other people we’ve brought down or exposed or just generally pissed off—and anyway, that may not be a motive at all. Shit, I don’t know where to go from here.”

I looked at the papers on the floor and the couch. “Well, we could make some sense of this pulped rain forest and see if it gets us any further. Okay?”

And then the cell phone rang. The one that Judith had left behind for us. For Niall.

His gaze flashed to me, and I stared back. Then he grabbed it from a back pocket and flipped it open. We stood there, paralysed like some kind of living tableau, as he listened to whatever greeting it was. When I caught sight of his expression, there was a strange kind of wildness in it.

“It’s Joe.” He might have been presenting the weather forecast for all the outward emotion he showed in his voice. But I read him far better than that. “From the hospital. They’re going to operate tomorrow.”

I wanted to snap back at him again. What kind of cold fish was he? What hospital? What operation? How serious was it for God’s sake? And then it occurred to me that he might have been holding back on the concern for some other reason... maybe for my benefit. Hospitals were a difficult thing with me. Not that I’d spent much time myself in them; I’d rarely had a broken bone or serious illness in my life. But Niall had, and the circumstances had caused me plenty of grief.

You see, six months ago, and because of me, he’d nearly been killed.

OKAY, SO I GUESS I knew it wouldn’t be enough just to skate over the story of our prize fight as some kind of lovers’ quarrel. It was actually at the end of a time of great stress—a culmination of a strange, tightening spiral of misunderstanding and hurt and bitter, bitter disappointment. It had been threatening for months.

Things were still tangled up between us personally. Guess we never cleared the air. The Team missions got more complex, our lives got more committed, our relationship... got more crappy.

And that’s when the Team was marked out for Mission Dove.

Judith was thrilled; we all were, really. It was our first really big break, and we’d be working alongside the Department itself. No formal recognition, of course, but she was excited that they’d see what we could do. We’d make a real contribution. The preliminary work started almost at once: preparing and monitoring the locations as the delegates began gathering for the meetings, checking out their security and the people around them.

That’s where we came up against the first hurdle. We discovered that one of the more prominent politicians was spending his nights in a downtown gentlemen’s club. Nothing new, you might say, if you’re as cynical as I am. I mean, that in itself wouldn’t have merited the attention of the Project Team, except that it turned out the pimp offered access to a special selection of kids—children who were way too young and way too vulnerable for anyone to let it pass. We alerted the Department, but because of the sensitivity of the politician concerned, they nudged the situation Judith’s way.

At first, this early work only involved Niall and Joe, with Simon on support. They didn’t waste time on diplomatic platitudes, just rounded up the politician, sent him discreetly home, and started closing down the club. They’d already alerted the police to mop up the remains of the staff and to take the pimp into custody. But then I got a call from Simon, asking me to come and join them there. They’d discovered at least a dozen kids who lodged there full-time, without any other visible means of support. He was worried that they’d need emotional help to trust the Team and accept what we were trying to do for them. I think he was just a little overwhelmed with it all, to tell you the truth.

That was my skill, you see. People. Connecting with them, understanding them, making things work for them. That’s what the Team needed from me.

And yet, I seriously misread the situation. I had some poor, misguided idea that the kids would be grateful for their release. That they’d be innocent and pliable and ready to follow our lead, that they’d be glad to leave behind the life of an abused innocent in their current home. It was just a matter of reassuring them and offering emotional lollipops, or something like that. I’d had plenty of experience with adults; I had a talent for judging many a sticky situation.

But I was frighteningly unprepared for what was there. I’d not worked with kids before, and never in the sex industry. There were all sorts of shocks in store for me. I hadn’t really anticipated there’d be boys as well as girls; I was startled by the youth of some of them. Naïve, eh? Everyone had been rounded up into the main lounge of the club, where the cops took the principals away, the emergency services did their work on any physical injuries, and Niall and Joe went off doing whatever technical things they did.

And me?

I stood like an island in the middle of a sea of scum. Beside one of the low, overstuffed couches, there was a coffee table, scattered with the tools of their trade: sex toys, bondage gear, needles, and packets of designer drugs collected in a heap. The police had been gathering up the evidence. In amongst this mess I saw a brightly coloured blanket with the design of a TV cartoon character; a single slipper lying under the table. There were a couple of boxes on the floor, full of stuffed toys and a jumble of tattered old children’s puzzles and books.

My heart went out to the kids, without realising that they wouldn’t know what to do with it. I had no idea how harsh some of them were, how broken some of their minds were, how hostile they were towards intruders. I swallowed the bile in my throat and tried to acclimatise to the distorted little faces around me, but it was an alien experience.

“Fuck off, mister,” an undersized, rather smelly teenager hissed in my ear. I caught his arm as he swung out at me, and when I released him, he stumbled back in frustration.

“Do you want to feel better? We can go to your room.” A slim boy tugged at my sleeve and smiled at me, the brightness of his voice never reaching his eyes.

A vibrantly red-haired girl ran up to me and spat in my face, shouting that she hoped I got hideous, fatal diseases from it. And then wheeled away, laughing.

“Are we going home?”