Playing God (Helford #2)

(23) X

Life in the Cannes townhouse was an interesting one to watch from a distance, and probably just as interesting to observe in the middle of the action. It reminded me of ants, the way they all had their job and they all did it without question, communicating with the others to get the work done faster, everyone there little worker bees with their own missions and their own agendas. Life went on in the house in Cannes, even eight days after Alexander had been thrown into the mix; Parker was working hard, Valerie was on a mission, Meade was controlling the operation I had temporarily abandoned, and Jonathon was leading the search efforts. Alexander had this own work to do, and he kept to an office in the attic room most of the days, making me wonder exactly what Woodburn had him assigned to with the secretive ways he communicated with people behind closed doors, the way he typed vigorously and read files and always seemed to lose sleep. The bees were in the hive in the Cannes townhouse, and it was transfixing to watch it.

I hadn’t been able to bring up my courage enough to walk through the front door yet. I worked from the security hub, the extension of the townhouse’s affairs, and I was fine with my little hideaway upstairs with my monitors when I needed them and all of the information pouring in and out, all of the information Jonathon finding breaking my world open more and more.

Jonathon had a dangerous job, the most important of them all—he was given the job of tiptoeing around servers of the company upstairs but, more notably, also Shawn Masterson’s, attempting to get as much information for the Underground as he can, but the focus has been shifting lately—Shawn has been retaliating on my attacks, ripping apart half of Europe in an attempt to find where I had buried myself, causing the company upstairs’ directors’ stress levels to surge dramatically—to where Shawn might go next, where he is getting his information, where he gets his morning coffee, anything that we can know that is new and recent about him. It’s dangerous because we couldn’t know when he would trip a wire, and Shawn would drop down on us and wreck havoc. We didn’t know what was true and what wasn’t, but Jonathon was working tirelessly, and he was getting close. Closer than I almost wanted him to, not knowing what information he might find now.

On the eighth day after delivering Alexander, Jonathon struck gold.

Parker called me immediately. He was even less hospitable toward me than he normally was—not at all. His voice was clipped and short, impatient. I didn’t even bother to mess with him; he sounded like he was wound tight, and he was about to snap.

That was how I have found myself walking through the empty hallways of a townhouse I have only seen on monitors across the street, biting my lip so hard I expected it to bruise. I put my belongings into a bedroom to pass some of the time before the inevitable, meeting the eyes of the people I passed on the way to Parker’s makeshift meeting and watching their faces go pale, their eyes downcast as if afraid I would turn them to stone if they looked into my eyes. I tried to take deep breaths, but every step closer to Jonathon as Caitie was nearly impossible.

When I had met him as Nina, it had been quick and unexpected, just like ripping off a band-aid. This was like chewing off your own limb to escape a trap before you were brutally murdered. This was painful like being boiled alive.

I hesitated in the doorway, my heart hammering. Jonathon was facing away from me at the dining room table, looking toward his father and Parker and Meade, explaining something as he pointed at whatever he had found on a tablet computer, and no one noticed me immediately. I tried to melt into the wall, making no noise at all.

“It’s a riddle of some kind, protecting the last level of his firewall,” Jonathon explained to them as they hunched over the screen. His voice was like honey. “There’s no other explanation—just this.”