Her eyes flashed and she almost shrugged. “Once you’re in deep with these people, you’re always in deep with them. They won’t let you get away voluntarily.”
I laughed. “You make them sound like the mob.”
She cocked her head. “The mob would just kill you when they’re done. More merciful, I think.”
I felt a grimness settle over me. “As opposed to what? The jail time that I’ve been threatened with?”
She watched me carefully. “You don’t think you’re getting out of that, do you?”
I turned my gaze to the horizon, and thought about Clyde Clary, about how much blood had bubbled to the surface of the water when he’d died. “I don’t know that I deserve to.” I turned back to her. “But that’s irrelevant. I have a job to do.” I smiled, also grimly. “Whatever my final destination ends up being, I’ve got penance to pay first.”
She nodded humorlessly. “Let me go to Portland, then.”
“No,” I said, shaking my head. “Let’s give it a day while we plan a response.”
“She could kill more in the meantime,” my mother said. “You sure you want that on your head?”
I leaned my head back, letting it loll as I stared up into a cloudless sky. “I don’t want any of this on my head, but that has nothing to do with what I’ll actually get. This whole thing with Hildegarde is off focus. I thought maybe she could be a help to us. Hell, maybe she still could be, but the appearances are she’s in a fighting mood and is looking for—” I paused in the middle of a sentence. “Wait, why was it four FBI agents?”
My mother looked at me, deep in thought, and after a moment, she nodded. “I didn’t catch that either, the first time. It’s not like FBI agents respond to local crimes, so even if Hildegarde was robbing a bank, she would have ended up killing some locals in with those agents.”
“Right,” I said. “So the question becomes, what the hell was the FBI doing to run into her?” I reversed course, my feet crunching on the grass as I turned around and started heading back to the HQ building. Something was not right.
“Could have been the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team,” my mother said. “They deploy them for crises, and a meta group on the loose might qualify. Or it could be that Hildegarde and her group hit the FBI field office, though I can’t see why they’d provoke Century one week and the U.S. government the next. Seems like you’d want to maybe stick to one fight at a time.”
“Or none, if I had it my way,” I said, opening the front door of HQ and allowing my mother to precede me, “but Hildegarde is clearly in the midst of something entirely different.”
We kept quiet all the way to Agent Li’s office, up on the fourth floor across the main room from mine. I opened his door without knocking, and he looked up at me, phone in his hand, the receiver up to his ear, completely unsurprised. He waved for us to take a seat across from his desk and I looked over his Spartan office. There were no pictures on the wall, which was pretty standard for our setup. The office furniture was nice enough; we’d had to do a little mixing and matching to get the place filled, taking on remaindered stuff that a local school district hadn’t wanted anymore, combined with the finest offerings from some local stores. We could have gone a little more elaborate considering the funding we had to spread around, but I’d kiboshed that idea because I didn’t want anyone to be thinking about decor. Their minds were needed elsewhere.
There was a lone spot of color in the room, a potted plant sitting on the corner of Li’s desk. He was nodding along with whatever was being said on the phone, and finally he spoke. “Got it. Understood. I’ll make sure I pass that along once you send me the file.” With that, he hung up, and leaned back in his chair. “What took you so long?”
“What took me so long what?” I asked, frowning at him.
“What took you so long to get here? I expected you minutes ago.” He picked up a fresh sheaf of papers from his desk and slid them across to me. “Here.”
“What is this?” I asked, picking it up. My eyes scanned the page quickly and I realized it was an FBI report. “This is from Portland? From where Hildegarde—”
“I figured you’d want the details,” he said, “since you didn’t ask for them in the meeting.”
“Long story short it for me,” I said, putting the paper aside. “Why was the FBI in contact with Hildegarde?”
“Local investigation,” Li said, keeping a straight face. “Portland Field Office was poking into OC—that’s our shorthand for organized crime—and they’d flagged Hildegarde, thinking she was some kind of kind of mob enforcer. They were going to bring her in for questioning relating to a string of racketeering charges.”