Page 34 of 72 Hours

“Still disturbed. Evasive.” He looked carefully at me but said no more. He stretched the muscles of his shoulders, and the shirt tightened across his torso. His hair looked less than neat. I felt a shiver run through my body.

“Something’s really odd here, Niall. Judith hiding away, Simon on the run too. Still no word from Brad.”

“Joe in the hospital.”

“Yeah. Everyone’s been affected, yet there doesn’t seem to be any common factor. We’re just being isolated, one by one. It’s sort of clumsy, but whoever’s organised this, they’ve known just how to strike at us. They’ve infiltrated Judith’s own office—her own sanctum. Threatened her staff. That’s exactly what would really distress and disturb her. Then they’ve split Simon and Brad apart, breaking down any communication between them. Again, the worst thing for those two to cope with. They tried to hit you at home, as if they knew what a familiar base would mean to you, and the misery of losing it. And it’s been a blow to Joe’s confidence too. One of his greatest frustrations must be immobility.”

“And you?”

I shrugged. “Guess I’m pissed they found me in the first place. I was rather hoping to savour my own space just a little longer.”

Niall made the smallest of noises, like he’d stubbed a toe or something.

“I don’t think we should try to contact the Team again,” I said, quite firmly, despite the sick churn of nausea that was resurrecting in my gut. “I want to wait for some of them to contact us, you know?” What was I trying to say? Basically, I was worried about who to trust.

“So you also think the threat is coming from an inside source,” Niall said. “Someone who knows us well.”

For a moment, all we did was stare at each other.

AN HOUR LATER, WE’D finished several more glasses of water and eaten some soup and thick slices of ham and buttered toast—Junk’s family had restocked my paltry larder with rather embarrassing riches—but the words and numbers on the reports were now swimming before my eyes.

“You should sleep again,” Niall said. He’d have made a useless nurse, really. His bedside manner sounded like military command, not concern. But I didn’t react, didn’t have the energy. It had been a long day.

“Not yet. Sleep when I die,” I said, not caring how that might sound or how close I might actually have been to that. I could feel the edges of something tingling in my mind as I searched the mystery e-mails and the scribbled notes from Brad. “This threat. It’d have to be someone senior, someone with access to everything.” When I registered a fresh silence in the room, I looked up. “What are you thinking, Niall?”

“You know whose name keeps cropping up here? In all this mess. In all these unusual events.”

“No.” Wasn’t sure if I were being entirely truthful. That shiver was back, plucking icy fingers down my spine.

“Simon is pivotal to this,” he said. He’d dropped his eyes to some papers on his lap, but I knew he didn’t want to meet my gaze.

What the fuck?

“He knows everything about the Team.” Niall’s words plowed on, even though he looked like they left a foul taste in his mouth. “How it works, what the missions are. He’s the closest to Judith, sharing most of the strategy with her. He always knows where we all are. He brought me here, for God’s sake.”

“Sure, but that’s not sinister. He’s at risk, too, he’s just as upset as we are.” Wasn’t he? “He has Brad in the field, in danger.” I could feel an indigestible mixture of fear and anger rising up in me. We came here because we can trust you, Simon had told me, his tone genuine, his expression honest. “How can you even think that one of us would do this?”

“I don’t want to.” Niall sounded wretched now, but dogged too. “Don’t you believe that? But then we see one of his guys creeping around the site and acting suspiciously when we try to probe him for identification of your attacker. Not sent officially, it seems. Then he’s called back, out of our hands, before we can find out any more. By an e-mail from Simon, with no further explanation.”

“So...?”

“Simon’s the only one who hasn’t been targeted so far.” Niall was shaking his head, as if he were arguing with himself. “Brad’s notes are full of discussions he had with Simon about where the original attacks may have been planned, none of which seem to have been reported officially. Simon could organise anything he wished. He has access to all the Department’s resources—”

“No!” Why did my head ache so much at the thought? Why was I even listening to such crap?

“He could do all of this,” Niall said. “He has the ability, the intelligence. His previous... career... was dubious. He’d still have that knowledge.”

“Shut the fuck up! Why the hell would he behave like this? Threaten us? Attack us?”

“I have no idea,” was Niall’s reply. He ran a hand through his thick, dark hair. “Just thinking aloud, I guess.” Some of the papers slid off his lap, but he didn’t bother to pick them back up. His whole body looked rigid with tension. I knew the look too well to mistake it. Anger and distress. For once, I wasn’t the cause.

“I can’t accept that, Niall. I trust him.”

“So do I.” He looked back up at me then, and his eyes were full of misery and frustration. “But how do we know what’s really going on in people’s minds?”

I stared back, almost challenging him not to take that thought any further. “Don’t talk about it again.”

“Okay,” he said.