The Elites

Chapter Sixteen

For the last few months, the most amount of time I'd spent in my own country in five years, Stasia and I had been working on a case more important than any other since Emile del Goss himself. If it weren't so important, there's no way they would've called me back. My work in the states was impeccable; making me start to work with people from the Agency back home again was a risky move. I knew I couldhandle it if I had to but I had this impression that the majority of the country thought that I was constantly on the brink of a relapse, which was completely false.

What we'd been working on was a serious case of national security. In the UK, witness protection was handled by the local police forces. It wasn't like any old police officer can set you up with a new identity, but the specialists were the ones that handled the files. Of course, a new identity is only for the most severe cases - in the states, a load of the old mobsters were put into their program after testifying against their old buddies in fear of serious personal harm.

No one other than those specialists in the UK hold the records, and therefore no one other than those specialists are capable of tracking them down.

The Witness Murders case was one of the more recent factors in my distaste for the police force. Nothing like this had ever happened before, but it was a kick in the teeth for the already crappy reputation they had.

It took Stasia and I a long time to get the information that a series of murders were connected through the witness protection program. Ordinarily, Agents aren't allowed into those kinds of files. However, after a ridiculously long dead trail of similar murders across the country of seemingly ordinary people, a specialist came forward. He said he'd recognised the name of one of the victims as someone he'd reassigned five years ago. Sure enough, after checking other witness protection files, all other victims had a similar history. One had been placed in the program six month while another had been placed for over twenty years.

Once this piece of information had been discovered, pretty much every Agent was taken off the case - including Will - until just Stasia and I were left. We'd been at the forefront anyway, but now we had such a strong piece of evidence, the Agency decided to redistribute Elites like Will to other cases.

The problem was that we were still no closer to finding the killer - or killers - than we had been before. We'd drilled every specialist in the country at least twice and still the murders continued. There wasn't even any evidence that it'd been a specialist that'd taken the files; the murders were hundreds of miles apart, and each police force only held the documents of the ones they'd handled themselves.

The public had no idea of any of this, of course. If everyone knew that some of the most top secret documents in the UK had been seized and done serious wrong by, who knew what kind of chaos would ensue. If witness protection details were taken, who knew what secrets would go next?

According to Will, the press had not been too kind to Stasia or me. If they knew the full story of what we were working on it'd be a different story, but they were under the impression that we were failing to uncover a simple serial killer. It was unlikely that the truth would ever come out to the public, but my abstinence from the papers meant it didn't affect me much. Stasia, however, was really bothered by it. She was considered the best young talent the Agency had to offer, especially since getting Elite status. Her ego was taking a serious knock, and as the case progressed she became more and more annoying.

Now Violet stood in front of us with a large red countdown behind her ticking down from a minute on the hardest case the Agency had seen in a very long time. Somewhere in the country, six hostages were being held, reliant on us being able to solve that case on the spot.

Stasia was muttering things that I was probably supposed to be listening and responding to, but I knew there was no point. This was the game I couldn't luck myself out of. I couldn't risk shooting the wrong person or being able to smash a cinder block over some guy's head. All Violet wanted was at least one name.