And I have to say, the man gave amazing dream sex.
“We’d better hope he can’t,” Jack muttered. “Because I do not want him near this operation.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Why?”
“Because he is only interested in revenge. We want to bring down the cartel’s entire operation.” He sat down on the chair nearest the com-unit and interlaced his fingers. “We had our first breakthrough about six weeks ago. You remember the letter Misha left you on his death?”
It was hard to forget, given the circumstances under which he’d died. A tremor ran through me. God, I still had nightmares about those watery spiders, and Misha being eaten alive from the inside. I licked my lips, and said, “He gave us the name of the fifth clone—Claudia Jones. But he didn’t know the alias she worked under at the Directorate.”
“We’ve since discovered she doesn’t actually work for us—though she does visit several times a month.”
The glint in his green eyes suggested amusement, but for the life of me, I couldn’t see why. I mean, there were thousands of people who visited the Directorate every month, all of them for legitimate reasons.
“She’s not one of Alan Brown’s whores, is she?” Rhoan said, a note of incredulity in his voice.
“Yes.”
I glanced at my brother. “How the hell did you jump to that conclusion?”
He just grinned and tapped the side of his head. “Brains, dear girl. Brains.”
I snorted softly. “I wasn’t aware that’s where you kept your brains.”
“Enough.” Jack touched a button on the keyboard, and the com-screen sprang to life. On it was a picture of a white-haired, white-skinned woman. She was extremely pretty and yet oddly ethereal, and there was an unearthly sense of power in her luminous blue eyes. “This is Claudia Jones.”
“She looks like I did—well, except for the eyes.” I looked across at Liander. “When you made me up for the raid into Brown’s office.”
He nodded. “She seemed to be one of his regulars, so we thought it would be less suspicious if you looked like her.”
“Of course, we weren’t to know that she was Gautier’s contact.” Jack pressed another button, and the woman’s picture gave way to porno—Brown fucking Jones in his office. As far as lovers went, the man had no finesse whatsoever—just got it out, shoved it in, and pumped away. Which was probably why he had to rely on prostitutes to relieve his sexual needs.
Jack froze the picture at the point of Brown getting his rocks off, and pointed to the screen. The image shimmered slightly as he touched it, then settled. “If you look at this hand, you’ll notice her fingers have slipped under the desk. If I enhance the picture—” He did so, until the woman’s hand dominated the screen. “You’ll notice the silvery dot on the top of her index finger.”
“And that is?”
“A microdot,” Rhoan said. “Latest in storage media, and incredibly resilient.”
Jack nodded. “The desk has a small hole drilled into it. The disk was placed into a container fitted into the hole.”
“So Gautier just strolled in afterward and collected the container?” I asked, even as Jack dropped the closeup and sped up the film.
Brown did the dirty with the woman several more times, then both of them left. Nothing happened for a while, then Gautier wandered in, checking the office and walking past the desk in the process. He collected the container from the desk in a smooth, slick movement that would have been easy to miss, then left.
“So when Gautier sprung me and Quinn in Brown’s office, he was actually going to collect a drop-off?”
“We think so.”
“What made you suspect this was happening?” Liander asked. He was sitting on the arm of the sofa, behind Rhoan’s chair.
“The fact that we could find no moles in the Directorate other than Gautier.” He hesitated. “The only A.D. hiding secrets was Alan Brown, so we took the risk of reading him. You know he’s being blackmailed?”
I nodded. Rhoan had told me that much ages ago.
“Gautier’s behind it. Every Directorate decision is being relayed through Gautier to Deshon Starr. That madman knows what we’re going to do before we even implement it.”
“Which is why his cartel has managed to stay two steps ahead of the Directorate for so long.”Jack nodded again. “Of course, we then had to find out how Gautier was passing the information, which meant watching his every move, not only within the Directorate, but on missions as well. Four nights after the incident we just watched, Gautier strolled into Brown’s office, this time before Brown arrived with Jones, and even though he wasn’t actually on watch that night. That’s when we finally realized what was going on.”
“And she retrieved the disk?”
“Yes. And undoubtedly passed on a detailed report of all the going-ons in the Directorate for the coming week.”
“So how is Brown getting the information to Gautier? He couldn’t risk being seen with him at the Directorate.”
“No. But Brown likes the greyhounds, and is severely in debt to the bookies. Gautier meets him there every Wednesday night.”
“Wednesday being the day the board generally meets,” I muttered. They were organized, no doubt about that. But then, this mob had been operating for well over fifty years—though Starr’s takeover had only been relatively recent.
“Have you pulled in the prostitute?” Rhoan asked, leaning back in his chair. “Questioned her?”
“No, though we did follow her. Brown drops her off in Fitzroy Street, St. Kilda. Five minutes after he’s left, a limousine picks the woman up and drives her to a large house in Toorak.”
“To another client?” Liander asked.
“No. She lives there.”
I raised my eyebrows. “She’s one hell of a prostitute if she can afford to live in Toorak.”
Jack smiled. “She’s not a prostitute at all.” He pressed another button, and the woman’s picture reappeared. “She actually goes by the name of Dia Jones, and she does psychic readings for the rich and famous.”
Surprise rippled through me. I mightn’t read newspapers or watch the news much, but even I’d heard of Dia Jones. The woman’s predictions were supposed to be deadly accurate and, last I’d heard, the waiting list to see her was over a year long. “Why in hell would a woman like that play prostitute for Deshon Starr?”
“If she is one of the clones, as Misha said, she may have no choice,” Rhoan pointed out, then glanced at Jack. “And through her, Starr has a lot of access to the rich and famous, and possibly a lot of influence.”
Jack nodded. “The house she lives in is owned by one of Starr’s companies, and every weekend she goes to Starr’s estate in Macedon. She’s there the entire week before the full moon, and apparently there’s also a lot of influential people in attendance at that time, too.”
I remembered the estate I’d seen in one of the lab-made creatures’ minds right before I’d killed him. That house had been large and surrounded by acres and acres of lush gardens. Only what roamed its grounds were not things of nature, but creatures whom evolution had little to do with—black ghosts who possessed little in the way of recognizable human features, blue things with rainbow wings and deadly claws. Demons and monsters and God knows what else. How did Deshon explain away his horrors?
“So,” Liander asked. “This woman has wolf in her?”
“We don’t know, but given all the cloning experiments at that time seemed to have involved werewolf genes, it wouldn’t be beyond reason to think so.”
“Then why Macedon? Isn’t that a bit far out of the city to be running a crime syndicate?”
“In this day and age, no. Starr never actually leaves his estate, which is why we have never been able to pin any of his cartel’s crimes on him.”
“That and the fact the minds of his people are burned away before we can fully question them,” Rhoan muttered.
“Sounds a nice type,” Liander commented dryly.
“Oh, he’s a charmer.” Rhoan gave me a dark glance. “Which is why I don’t want Riley in on this.”
“Hey, I’m not the one who’s planning to fuck the man, so stop worrying about me and start worrying about you.”
“I’m not the one walking into this situation sans experience—”
“Enough,” Jack said. “I need you both on this mission, and that’s the end of it.”
He pressed another button on the keyboard, and several more pictures came up, these taken at night and on the streets. They featured the same woman, only this time her pallid looks had given way to brown hair and soft makeup. In each picture she was talking to a different woman, and most of them were prostitutes if the clothing—or lack thereof—was anything to go by.
“A week before each full moon,” Jack continued, “Dia apparently hits the streets for three nights on a recruitment drive. Last month, she signed up thirty women, though not all of them were prostitutes. She gives them cards, tells them to show up at a legitimate job-placement business the next day, where, after a background and physical check has been done, they’re offered extremely large sums of money to provide sexual services for Starr’s men during the full-moon phase. We gather some do stay beyond that two-week period, but most are returned unharmed to the streets the day after the full moon.”