Page 148 of Agency

No gunfire followed after that. Likely suppressed, so that the reports wouldn’t carry this far.

“Guess the recoil didn’t kill him after all,” Morgan said, a grim note to his voice as we continued our trek through the trees. “Still can’t believe you left him armed.”

“Disarming him entirely would have been just as bad as shooting him ourselves,” I puffed out, still double-timing my march. “At least, this way, he had a chance to see his family one last time.”

“I guess. Pretty sure he wouldn’t have done the same for us, though.”

“Probably not. But we didn’t come out here to murder him, remember? We were supposed to do this ‘the right way.’”

“True.”

We saved our breath for the rest of the run, and eventually the smell of the lake was too intense to ignore. We broke from the trees and made our way down to the shore, scanning for the floatplane as we navigated the rocky shores.

No plane. Not in sight, at least. I reached up to trigger my coms and call Jericho, but Andrew stepped forward and pointed into the dark encompassing the lake.

“There!” he said, indicating a smudge of inky blue-black that was almost indistinguishable from the other smudges of inky blue-black. “See it?”

“Sure that’s not the Loch Ness Monster?” I asked.

Morgan barked laughed, and Andrew frowned.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Andrew asked, turning back to me. “Saying you don’t believe in Nessie?”

“Not exactly, but I believe in you,” I said with a roll of my eyes, and far more honesty than my sarcastic tone implied. “Isn’t that enough, Andrew?”

He shrugged. “Guess that makes up for it.”

There was movement then, out on the lake, and the bluish-black smudge Andrew had indicated suddenly seemed to have grown an arm and begun waving for our attention.

“See?” Andrew asked. “Right there.”

“Didn’t doubt you for a second,” I said.

“Just Nessie,” Morgan said.

“Oh shut up, Morgan,” I replied. “I can dig my own holes, thank you very much.”

We made our way to the shore, and I braced myself for the lake’s bone-chilling cold. Boots negotiating the rocks below, I’d gotten down to the edge of the water when the outside of my thigh began to vibrate and chime.

Stopping, I blinked in surprise at Morgan and Andrew, who had the same quizzical looks on their faces as I dug out the ziplocked burner phone Aunt Val had given me when we’d parted. With everything going on, I’d almost completely forgotten bringing it along.

“Well?” Andrew asked, nodding to the lit up phone, with its private number notification flashing on the screen. “You going to answer it? Or should one of us?”

I answered the call, not even bothering to remove the protective baggy. “Hello, Aunt Val. Fancy hearing from you so soon.”

“I’m sorry,” Val said. “Please know I am.”

“For the misleading me so that I stole the information for you instead of deleting it part? Or the still killing Management part?”

“Both. I don’t expect you to forgive me for either.”

“Why’d you do it?” I asked. “Was this all part of a hostile takeover or something, and we were just your willing dupes?”

“I did it because the market demanded I did,” she replied, her voice flat.

“The free fucking market?” I asked, slapping a hand to my forehead. “Fuck me, why didn’t I guess that? Hey guys, Adam Smith is the one who told my aunt to fuck us in the ass with an invisible dick on this.”

“You laugh,” she replied, “but I stand by my statement. The market is the reason, Ambyr, and nothing more. Years ago, when I was approached by the partners to help form the Agency, do you know what their argument was? Their argument was that they’d already been approached by multiple organizations looking for the services we would provide, but that the partners had been forced to turn them away due to lack of resources. That they were incapable of finding assets and personnel capable of fulfilling the requests.”