A Deadly Web by Kay Hooper Read Free Book Online Page A

accepting that?” she suggested.
    “Not exactly. I think some abducted psychics
are
being used as tools. But there has to be more at play here, there just has to be. Something this big and . . . sprawling . . . has to have more structure than we’re seeing. I believe Brodie’s side is organized just as we thought, composed of smaller cells around a central base only a handful of their people know anything about. But the other side, the ones they’ve been fighting so long . . . There has to be an ultimate goal, and that can’t just be . . . inexplicably collecting psychics.”
    “Some have said that’s what you do,” she ventured.
    “Sure. Collect them, train them, and give them badges or private investigators’ licenses, for the SCU or for Haven. But what I do, what
we
do, is very much out in the open. We may keep things quiet, but even the most suspicious cop hasn’t called us secretive. We use our psychic abilities as tools, as quietly—or as openly—as necessary to do the job.”
    Miranda nodded. “And this group, this faceless enemy, has to be doing some kind of job or have some kind of goal. Otherwise none of it makes sense. They can’t just be about trying to beat Brodie’s group to psychics.”
    “Exactly. Brodie and his people believe that this other group has been taking psychics for decades, at least. But they must have been a lot more careful and quieter until fairly recently, if that’s true. Because I never got a hint about them during the early years when I was searching out psychics for the SCU.” He shook his head slightly. “Granted, I wasn’t nearly as powerful then as now, and I wasn’t looking for patterns, but I interviewed a
lot
of psychics, Miranda. All over the country and even a few overseas.”
    “And there were no fearful psychics?”
    He leaned back against the desk behind him, frowning. “Plenty of fearful psychics. But naturally fearful, of their own abilities and the way other people in their lives reacted to them. Wary, suspicious, a lot of them in denial. But none I talked to was frightened by a secret conspiracy of stolen psychics and shadows.”
    Thoughtful, Miranda suggested, “Maybe there’s a difference now. Maybe they’re running out of time for some reason, feeling pushed to accomplish whatever it is they set out to do. Maybe Brodie and his group have had more of an effect on this enemy than they realize.”
    “Could be.”
    Eyeing him, Miranda said, “You promised not to interfere.”
    “I did, didn’t I?”
    “But?”
    He smiled slightly, a smile few but his beloved wife ever saw. It made the scar on his left cheek all but disappear, and warmed his cool silvery-gray eyes by a good twenty degrees. “But Katie and Henry aren’t psychics Brodie and his people have been aware of. At least, I’m fairly certain they haven’t.”
    “So you wouldn’t
really
be interfering if you did a little quiet detective work of your own.”
    “As long as your shield holds out, love, they’ll never know we haven’t gone obediently back to Quantico. Not, at least, unless or until we want them to know.”
    —
    Not surprisingly, Tasha didn’t sleep much the rest of the night. She went over and over in her mind every thought, every question—and every action of those men.
    Who they were was such a giant question mark that she didn’t spend too much time considering that for now.
    They were men who intended something bad for her.
    That much she was certain of.
    Why, she didn’t know; another giant question mark.
    How they got into the building . . . that was the most immediate worry. Because if she wasn’t safe here, in a building like this, if men could slip in past all the security both technological and human and get to her here, then safety really was an illusion. And then there was her cell phone. They shouldn’t have been able to leave that text without the number, and she could count on the fingers of one hand how many people had that number.