“Not really,” I said. “If the choice was run or die, wouldn’t you try and get away?”
“Oh, come on,” Weissman said with a chuckle, “you don’t have to lie to me. He broke your hand off and threw you from a plane. You were no threat to him at the end. Maybe at the beginning, if you’d taken that shot at the plane window, but once he’d disarmed you?” He laughed again, presumably at the pun. “Nah. I wouldn’t want to be him the next time you cross paths, but he beat you. Fair and square. The game was over, and you lost.” He cocked his head and pretended to be concerned. “How’d that feel?”
I glared down at him. “Would you like to find out?”
“You don’t need to threaten me,” he said coolly, without an ounce of concern.
“Why?” I asked. “Because you’ll do what I say and answer whatever I ask?”
“Hell, no,” he said with a deeper laugh, one far more sincere than the last. “Because you couldn’t intimidate me into talking if you emptied every bullet you had into the most painful nerve endings on my body. Because you could beat me to within an inch of my life and it’d still be amateur work compared to what I’ve seen before.” He shrugged and laughed lightly. “Because even if you had any power over me—which, hey, smart girl—you don’t,” his voice went cold as he said it, “you couldn’t intimidate me because I’ve been intimidated by the most frightening men who have ever walked the earth.” He folded his fingers across one another, steepling them. “But you can give it a try, if you want. Ask your questions. I’ll answer some of them.” He pulled one of his fingers out of the steepling. “But if you get uppity with me? You’ll find out why I’m the one holding the power in this room. And you do not want me … as your enemy.”
“I kinda think you already are,” I said, with only a brief glance back to Breandan to find him white-faced, staring blankly at Weissman. “So … Sovereign.”
“So … what?” Weissman fired back. “Is there a question in there somewhere?”
“Why does Sovereign want all the metas in the world dead?” I asked, looking down the sights at Weissman.
Weissman laughed, loudly and tonelessly. “Sovereign could not care any less about killing all the metas of the world.” He leaned forward, putting his elbows on the desk, and I caught a glimpse of some meanness in him, buried deep, a dark sliver of something terrible. “That’s my program, not his.”
I blinked, trying to reconcile what I knew of Century to what Weissman had told me. “Isn’t Sovereign your leader?”
Weissman smiled a nasty grin. “Sure. But he doesn’t call all the shots.”
I chewed that one over for a minute. “If Sovereign doesn’t care if the metas of the world are killed … why do you?”
Weissman seemed to sink back in his chair at that, like he could draw back into the shadows against the wall behind his desk. “Because they’re a threat, obviously.”
“Oh, well, obviously,” I said in total sarcasm. “Except your leader doesn’t seem to think so.” I considered that for a moment and felt a tingle that came with realization. “He doesn’t think they’re a threat to him. But they’re a threat to you?”
Weissman smiled, this time less nastily, but only a little less. “I’d heard you were smart. Not bad. Yeah, they’re a threat to me. Minor at best, but still. Sovereign … as you call him … he’s not what you’d consider a real ‘hands-on’ leader. Day to day, I’m in charge. And my job is a lot harder with three thousand metas walking the earth, interfering in my plans.”
I blinked at him, trying to process that information. “You think that in a world without metas, you can conquer humanity?”
He laughed, and leaned forward with a conspiratorial grin. “Sweetheart, I know it for a fact.”
Kill him.
I pulled the trigger instinctively without thinking about it at the first words from Wolfe, and only after the shot rang out did I reconsider. It didn’t matter, because the moment the muzzle flared, Weissman was gone. The shot hit the empty chair and padded stuffing flew out of the back, creating a little cloud of rubberized foam that settled quickly.
“Uhm …” Breandan’s voice echoed in the small office, “where is he?”
I heard the thump of something being hit and spun to find Breandan, wide-eyed and flung toward me. I didn’t have time to react before he caught me in the side and the two of us went crashing into the desk. I felt a rib crack and I cringed as I went down. I suppressed the temptation to scream in pain.