06 - Vengeful by Robert J. Crane Read Free Book Online Page B

here right now. You’re a private citizen, and you can’t go around arresting people, especially not on a personal vendetta. Which is not a mission from God or the federal government.”
    “Which one is incompetent, again?” I pursed my lips real thin. “Whoever this Brain is, she’s an eminent threat.”
    “To you.”
    “She blew up a car in the middle of a government installation tonight,” I snapped. “Conspired to poison a federal agent in a scheme that almost resulted in something on the order of a nuclear bomb going off on the fringe of a major metropolitan area, and you, as head of this agency, don’t seem to give a damn. I think I figured out which one is incompetent, and I just wish I could see a little wrath—”
    “You were the one who almost blew up the metro,” Phillips said coolly, and got to his feet, buttoning his suit jacket. “If you go off looking for this Brain while you’re still pissed off, what’s the likelihood you stay calm enough not to get civilians hurt or killed in the process?”
    “You think I’m flying off all furiously angry?” I asked.
    “Wrathful,” he said. “Fits better. You’ve been where you’re standing before.” He folded his arms. “Do I need to say it?”
    “Say what?” I got out through lips that were so tight with anger they didn’t want to move.
    “Parks, Clary, Kappler, Bastian.” He was an implacable monument carved out of the middle of the office. “Wrath.”
    It was like having someone hold up a mirror to show you the giant mud pie dripping down your face. “I’ve got two assassins in the prison below that say differently. Still breathing. Wrath reserved.”
    “What happens to the ones who really did it?” he asked, watching for my response. “Not just the weapon used, what happens to the finger that pulled the trigger?” He stared at me hard, like he really wanted to know. “Are you gonna reserve it then, too? Or am I going to have another PR mess of biblical proportions to clean up?”
    I held back from answering immediately with the cheap snark. I held back the good snark, too, in hopes that age would make it better. It was a battle just to control my emotions, not to throw an easy witticism at him, something appropriate for me but not for anyone who had a brain or an appreciation for civil conversation. “I—”
    His phone beeped and he didn’t even hesitate to interrupt our conversation. “Go.” He put it on speakerphone, even. What a dick.
    “Sir,” came the clear tone of his assistant, whom I hadn’t even seen when I came in, “NASA has sent us a FLASH emergency brief—”
    “What is it?” Phillips asked.
    His assistant skipped a couple lines, undeterred. “There’s a meteor the size of a Metrolink bus on course for Lake Michigan at the moment, due for splashdown in about twenty minutes. It’s projected to impact twenty miles off Chicago.”
    Phillips blinked, still calm as all hell. “And?”
    His assistant paused, leaving hissing dead air. “They’re wondering if we can do anything about it.”
    Phillips gave me that dead-eyed stare. “Can we do anything about that?”
    I seethed inside, months of bitterness writhing like a fiery snake in my belly, waiting to come out with a hiss and a pop of flame. “We? Probably not? Me? Maybe, but I’m suspended.” I threw that out there, just wanting to see what he’d say.
    “Yes, you are,” he said with a light shrug, and at that moment I realized that if the end of the world was stampeding toward us right now, he’d still be citing regulation and procedure to the moment of impact. “But what are you going to do about it?”
    I wanted to burn him to death right there and leave a charred, blackened corpse behind, but I didn’t. I just looked at him with enough fury that if I had said Gavrikov’s name in my head right then, spontaneous combustion would have occurred.
    Kill him , Wolfe whispered, not for the first time in the last few weeks.
    You should totally do