Brisack shrugged half-heartedly. “No, it’s not. Then again, they were in public.”
Mal shook his head. “Doesn’t matter! There’s nothing revealing about the response, ‘I think we might have met before.’ He didn’t even give a proper response considering he was addressing an officer!”
“Lieutenant Walickiah assumed the response was intended to reveal who he is and the nature of his work there,” Brisack explained flatly.
Mal shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “That can’t be our contact. None of our men would stoop to such base familiarity. Baby tender, indeed! Tell him to look again. He’s a very quiet man. He needs to interrogate all of the soldiers that were injured last season. Take them to the privacy of the north if necessary!”
Brisack took a deep breath, but he couldn’t put off the news any longer. “And therein lies the problem.”
“What problem?” spat Mal.
Brisack hesitated. “Since his initial report, the lieutenant seems to be . . . missing. He’s gone.”
“Gone?!”
Brisack nodded miserably. “Just like the new recruit we sent last year who we’ve never heard from again. The garrison received a message today from Shin asking about Walickiah’s background. He was there for less than a week, then . . . vanished. The major was wondering if the High General might know why. Relf came by and asked for his medical records, looking for clues.”
Mal’s mouth hung open in shock. “Resigned?” he finally whispered.
Brisack shrugged again. His own astonishment had worn off a couple of hours ago, replaced by stupefied consternation. “Major Shin found the letter on his desk a couple of mornings ago. Our contacts haven’t heard from the lieutenant either.”
Mal’s eyes grew bigger. “Not even our contacts? No one goes back on the oath! No one!”
Brisack held up his hands in a futile attempt to calm him. “Actually, this would make two. Both in Edge.”
Mal gripped the sides of his chair. “Why? Why Edge?!”
“I don’t know,” the doctor whispered, looking down at his hands and massaging them. Strangely, that gave him comfort. “I’m stunned myself. Walickiah was so steady and solid, especially after his fantastic success in eliminating the parents of that captain in Grasses and beating his sister near to death. I really thought that—” He examined his hands.
Mal was quiet for a few moments before he spoke. “So you failed, my good doctor.”
Brisack’s head snapped up. “What?”
“How much is your heart in this study, Brisack?”
The doctor’s mouth dropped open. “I really wanted this to succeed! I spent hours each day for weeks with Walickiah, giving him strategies, showing him ways of getting into the inner circle, to get close to Shin, to find out—”
“As I said: you failed.”
Brisack’s shoulders sagged. “I don’t know what went wrong. He took care of Grasses so well, I thought this would be a simple assignment for him. I told him it would be difficult, only to keep him sharp, but really . . . I just don’t know.”
The good doctor rubbed his hands again, wondering what he missed doing. While he told the lieutenant to take advantage of any situation, he really had been directing him to take out the mother-in-law. She’d lived a long enough life, her death would’ve been close enough to the family to have made some impact, and the children would have been spared . . .
Brisack stopped massaging his hands.
Was the Quite Man really the baby tender? The children. What in the world was he trying to accomplish with them?
Suddenly, Brisack wanted nothing more than to have five minutes alone with him, which he knew would never happen.
Still . . .
“There’s still the Quiet Man,” he reminded Mal, but wasn’t sure what to do with that. “While two others have vanished, he’s remained loyally at the fort.”
“But what good is he doing us?!” Mal snapped.
Brisack shrugged again, the only gesture he seemed to know that night. “Maybe he’s doing more to keep Shin involved than we realize. He’s still there, devoted, while two others have abandoned us. Maybe we should just let him do his work. I see no reason to do anything more with Edge,” he decided. “We still have so much to analyze from the attacks on the three villages to keep us busy for—”
The Chairman shook his head. “No. He’s getting too cocky up there. And now these towers?! The maps, we could work with. But how will we ever sneak into the villages, undetected, with men watching in towers?! I can’t even get a message to the Quiet Man because communication in the north is breaking down again! No,” Mal said with severe resolve, “Shin must be broken. If the Quiet Man is the baby tender, he’s in a perfect position to complete Walickiah’s mission. Wait until he’s watching the children, claim there was a raid—”