Once Betrayed, Twice Shy

The code

CASPIAN

The interrogation takes two hours.

Monroe’s men are professionals — not the opportunistic rogues that show up at borders looking for weakness, not the ideological foot soldiers who break quickly because they believed in something and found out the something wasn’t worth what it costs. These are men who were paid well and trained well and told exactly enough to do their jobs and not enough to do damage if caught.

It takes me ninety minutes to find the edges of what they know and another thirty to confirm that the edges are real and not constructed.

What they know: the east entrance code, the patrol rotation gap, and the location of my residential wing. Three precise pieces of information that required an inside source or sustained surveillance or both.

What they don’t know: who gave the order beyond their immediate handler. Who the handler reports to. What the next move is.

What I know that they don’t know I know: the east entrance code was changed four days ago. Someone gave them the old one. Which means their source is either out of date or deliberately fed bad information.

I sit with this for a moment after they’ve been taken to the holding cells.

Soren, across the table, is watching me with the expression of a man waiting for instructions. Marcus is leaning against the wall doing something on his phone that is probably not related to pack security but that I don’t have the energy to address right now.

“The code,” I say.

Soren nods. “We noticed.”

“Deliberate misdirection or stale intelligence?”

“Could be either.”

“If it’s misdirection, someone inside this territory fed Monroe’s people a bad code on purpose.”

“Which means someone inside this territory knows Monroe’s people.”

“And chose to burn them rather than help them.”

We look at each other. The implications of that move through the room without needing to be said. Someone in my territory with a line to Monroe who has apparently decided to switch sides — or was playing both sides to begin with and has made a choice about which side to land on.

“Find out who changed the code,” I say. “And who knew it was being changed before it happened.”

Soren leaves.

Marcus puts his phone away.

“How’s the arm?” he asks.

I look at him.

“Her arm,” he clarifies. “The cut.”

“It’s fine,” I say. “Minor.”

“Right,” Marcus says. He’s quiet for a moment with the specific quality of quiet he uses when he’s deciding whether to say something. He usually decides yes. “She took down two of them,” he says. “The third one had her off the ground when you got there.”

“I know,” I say. “I was there.”

“I’m just noting,” he says, “that she took down two of Monroe’s trained men with a training blade and six months of sessions with Daria.”

“I’m aware of what happened, Marcus.”

“And she stopped to get a child to safety first,” he says. “Before any of it.”

I say nothing.

“Just,” Marcus says, “noting it.”

“Noted,” I say. “Repeatedly. Thoroughly noted.”

He looks at me with thirty years of knowing me behind his eyes. “You went east,” he says. “When the alert came in. Soren took north. Daria took south.”