Memory Zero (27 page)

“You’d better explain,” he muttered. He shifted his hold again and followed the two officers.

“And so had you, brother. So had you.”

Stephan’s voice faded. Gabriel wondered what he’d meant. His twin’s eyes were closed, his breathing shallow. Sweat beaded his forehead and ran down the side of his face, scouring clean channels across his blood-smeared chin. Fighting not the pain of his injuries, Gabriel knew, but rather for the strength to maintain Byrne’s image.

But why Byrne’s? Why not Hanrahan’s, an image his body was used to?

Frowning, he dug out his cell phone and quickly dialed. “Michaels, I’m bringing across some wounded. With the gas leak being investigated, you’re the closest medical help I can think of.”

Michaels almost looked relieved. “I’d rather treat the living than check the dead, I can tell you. I’ll be waiting.”

“We’re on our way.” He shoved the cell phone into his pocket and hurried on.

“As I’ve said before, I’m not going to die on you,” Stephan said quietly. “Stop worrying.”

“Like you wouldn’t, if the situation were reversed?” He kept his voice low, his gaze sweeping the people in front of them.

Stephan’s smile was a mere ghost, something Gabriel felt deep in his heart rather than actually saw. “I’m the oldest. It’s my job to worry.”

He snorted softly. “Yeah, right.”

It took what seemed like hours to reach Michaels. Gabriel curbed his impatience, watching Michaels tend to the two more seriously injured women before waving him over to look at Stephan.

“What’s the verdict?” he said, once Michaels had given his brother the once-over and bandaged him up.

“Like the rest of them, he’s lucky. His right arm’s broken, his legs are severely bruised and his ankle’s either badly sprained or broken—can’t tell without X-rays. There’s nothing wrong with him that a few days in the hospital won’t fix, though.”

“No hospital,” Stephan muttered, eyes still closed.

Probably hiding the fact that they were green rather than Byrne’s natural blue. No matter what Michaels said, the stress of the injuries had to be bad if it was preventing Stephan from doing a full shapeshift. And if he couldn’t fully shift, he had no option but to avoid the hospital and the ever-prying doctors.

Michaels frowned. “Sorry, Byrne, you’ve got no choice. That ankle needs looking at.”

“No hospitals,” Stephan repeated. “Stern, make sure they don’t take me there.”

“The man has a morbid fear of hospitals,” Gabriel explained apologetically. “It’s all in his file.” It wasn’t, but who was going to check? The whole com system was down right now … he stopped the thought cold.
They wouldn’t attempt to bomb a whole building just to prevent him from getting Sam’s test results … would they?

Maybe, just maybe.

He scrubbed a hand across his jaw. The day was getting worse, not better.

“If you don’t get that ankle fixed he may never walk properly again,” Michaels continued.

“Only if it
is
broken.” Besides, Stephan was a shapeshifter. His body retained the memory of itself, and it could heal any number of broken bones, no matter how shattered, a whole lot faster than any doctor possibly could. “I have a friend, a physician. Retired, but still willing to keep his hand in. I’ll take him there.”

Michaels glanced over his shoulder as a string of ambulances came around the corner. “I guess we have no choice. He’s obviously lucid, so we can’t take him anywhere against his will. He’s all yours.”

“I’ll go get my car. Take care of him until I get back.”

Michaels nodded. Gabriel squeezed his brother’s shoulder, then rose to fetch Karl’s car.

G
ABRIEL BOOKED A HOTEL ROOM
in the middle of St. Kilda, a trendy district that held a dark heart of criminal activity. The manager asked no questions, and he turned a blind eye to Stephan’s condition—the main reason he’d chosen to come here.

Given the dilapidated state of the place, he had no doubt that if someone came looking for them, it would take only a buck or two for the manager to spill his guts. But it didn’t matter, because they wouldn’t be
here all that long. Just a day or so, until his brother regained his strength.

He lowered Stephan to the bed, then locked the door and crossed to the window. The hotel fronted the esplanade, and their room looked out over the bay. It also had a damn good view of the hotel’s front entrance. He checked the street, drew the blinds closed and dragged a chair up close to the bed.

“We safe?” Stephan asked, without opening his eyes.

“Safe as we can be.”

Stephan sighed, a soft sound full of relief. His body began to shimmer, to blur, and for an instant resembled Play-Doh being molded by invisible hands.

Then the shimmer died away, and his brother’s familiar face stared back at him. “You don’t know how good that feels.”

“I can imagine,” he said wryly. “Now tell me why all that was necessary.”

Stephan shrugged. “For a while I’ve felt that the usefulness of Hanrahan’s image was coming to an end. Too many people were beginning to suspect he was my alter identity—especially since both Hanrahan and I appeared to be suffering the same mysterious ailment. There was only so long Hanrahan could legitimately claim to be losing weight.”

Gabriel propped his feet on the end of the bed and leaned back in the chair. “Who, precisely?” Certainly he’d never heard any whispers about it.

“Lys knew, naturally enough. But I think both Mary and Martyn suspected, and I’m sure Byrne knew something was wrong—even if he didn’t know what.”

“Is that why you’ve taken his image?”

Stephan nodded. “I needed a new identity, and he fit
the criteria. No immediate family, few friends. A loner who loved his work.”

“Did you kill him?”

Stephan’s smile held a hard edge. “I’d planned to, but my offices were right under where the bomber hit, and we were both caught in the rubble—him more than me. I doubt there’ll be much of him left to find—but I left some of Hanrahan’s personal effects, just to be sure.”

Gabriel nodded. If there was enough left to perform DNA tests, there might be problems—though it was nothing they hadn’t handled before. When the real Hanrahan had died in a boating accident, the Federation had altered the tests long before the coroner saw them.

“Tell me about the warning you got.”

Stephan rubbed his eyes. “The line trace said the caller was female, probably in her mid-thirties. She was calling from a phone booth in the Dandenongs.”

Odd. The four men who’d beaten him up had been hightailing it up there before Karl stopped them. Did that mean Sethanon had a hideout up there? “What did she say, exactly?”

“That the SIU building was about to be bombed. That I had five minutes to live.”

Reynolds said the bomb had gone off three minutes after Hanrahan received the call—obviously, the State boys questioning the driver of the bomb car had disrupted his plans. Gabriel frowned. “
You
had five minutes to live? Isn’t that a little strange? Why not say you had five minutes to evacuate the building?”

“I have no idea, and at the time, I was too busy trying to trace the call and check authenticity to worry
about it. Plus, I was deep in the throes of another murder. One of the kites struck again tonight.”

Gabriel swore softly. “Who?”

“I don’t know. The bomb went off before confirmation came through.” Stephan shrugged. “We’re just damn lucky we got a warning, otherwise the SIU might well be crippled right now.”

Gabriel suspected luck had nothing to do with it. While he had no doubt that the aim of the bomb had been to cripple the SIU, he also had no doubt that someone out there
didn’t
want them to die. Or rather, didn’t want
Stephan
to die. That call had come direct to his office, after all. “Did she say anything else?”

“She told me the make and number of the car. I looked out the window, saw the car and ordered the evac.”

“Were you the reason the State boys investigated the car?”

“No. That was sheer chance. I had some of our own people headed up there, but they arrived far too late to prevent this tragedy.”

No one could blame the State boys for simply doing their job, though. It was just an unfortunate sequence of events. “I don’t suppose you recognized the voice?”

Stephan shook his head. “Voice scanning was in progress, but the system just didn’t have long enough before it all went to hell.”

Had the call come from the woman supposedly impersonating Lyssa? Or perhaps even Mary, using some form of voice modulator? Though why would either of them warn Stephan if they were involved with Sethanon or Kazdan? It didn’t make any sense. But, as he’d already noted repeatedly, nothing about this situation made any sense.

And with the computer network down, and who knew what information destroyed, any chance of a cross-check of the woman’s voice against Lyssa’s or Mary’s was gone. His only option now was checking whether either woman had left her safe house near the time of the warning. “Any idea who might be behind the bombing?”

“It’s probably Sethanon.”

It was a logical conclusion, given the bombing of Stephan’s place. And if Sethanon could get a shapeshifter into the labs to lock away Sam’s files, he could easily have arranged to have a car drive into the side of the building and explode. What didn’t make sense was the why. In the past, Sethanon’s methods tended to be a little more subtle. “I think he’s smart enough to realize that bombing the SIU will only make it stronger—past efforts to destroy us have certainly proven that.”

“What are you saying? That it could be any one of the hundreds of people who have a gripe against the SIU? None of them have gone
this
far for revenge before.”

“No. Personally, I think it’s Kazdan.”

Stephan opened an eye and regarded him steadily. “Why?”

He told Stephan of the conversation he’d overheard between Kazdan and the blond shapechanger. “I think Kazdan’s getting tired of the middle-management yoke. I think he wants more. I think he’s intending to use Sam to get it. And Eddie Wyatt is working for him, not Sethanon.”

“The SIU bomb certainly had Eddie’s style. And if Kazdan intends to use Sam in his plot, it suggests he knows more about these abilities she seems to have.”

Gabriel nodded. “It also suggests Sethanon knows. He arranged for Kazdan to be her partner, after all. Maybe he wanted to keep an eye on her.”

“That would suggest she’s somehow linked to Sethanon.”

It seemed that way, but gut instinct said she wasn’t involved with him. Not yet, anyway. “Sethanon wanted her watched but otherwise left alone. I think we need to find out why.”

“Where is she now?”

“With Karl.”

Stephan frowned. “He seemed a little tense the last time we met. Has he got family problems or something?”

He frowned, remembering the tension around Karl’s eyes. “Not that I know of.”

“Odd.” Stephan’s gaze drifted shut again. “He kept glancing at his watch and checking to see if his cell phone was on. When I asked what the matter was, he said his wife had gone to visit relatives in New South Wales and was due to call at six. He said he had to catch the call or she’d kill him.”

New South Wales. Not to Jan’s parents, who lived on a farm half an hour’s drive away from Karl’s, or even to Karl’s relatives, who lived in Queensland. New South Wales. The one place he knew for sure Karl
had
no relatives, living or dead. It had been a message—a warning—but it had been given to the wrong brother entirely.

Gabriel closed his eyes for a moment and took a deep breath. Then he pulled out his cell phone and quickly dialed Karl’s number. The phone rang several times. Either no one was home or no one was in the
position to answer it. He swore and shoved the phone back into his pocket.

“What’s wrong?” Stephan asked.

He stared at his brother bleakly. “I think I’ve just handed Sam over to the enemy.”

S
AM STIRRED, VAGUELY AWARE OF MOVEMENT
.
Rough vibrations ran through the metal floor beneath her, bruising her back and rattling her teeth. Darkness encased her. She couldn’t see.

Old fears rose, threatening to overwhelm her. She swallowed and forced them back. Now was not the time to panic. Not until she knew what was going on, anyway. It was obvious she was no longer in bed at Karl’s place—not unless it had suddenly converted to a car.

Two men were speaking close by. One voice seemed familiar, though she couldn’t exactly place where she’d heard it before. Beyond that was music, though it was barely audible above the throaty roar of the engine. She frowned. It sounded like Ennuyer’s latest hit, “Silence.” Jack’s favorite tune.

Her heart began to beat a little faster. Maybe she’d done the right thing in following her instincts and hiding the disks at Karl’s.

She shifted slightly. Almost instantly, an ache sprang
up her arms and settled into her shoulder blades. She tried to rub the sore spot, only to realize her hands were tied behind her back. The ropes were tight, chafing at her wrists. She shifted her feet. Also tied. Something rubbed across her face, making her nose itch—a cloth of some sort. She took a deep breath, and then blew it out. The black cloth puffed away from her face, momentarily giving her vision. She was in a van of some sort. Out the back window she glimpsed golden pines, and then the cloth settled back into place.