Red Knight Falling Read Online Free PDF Page B

one more thing.”
    Jessie turned, glancing back over her shoulder.
    “I’ve been reviewing your report on the Talbot Cove incident,” he said. “Good work, as always. I was just wondering, by any chance, did you happen to interview a local man named Douglas Bredford while you were there?”
    Jessie smiled. “Nope. Never heard of him. You know me: if it’s not in the report, it didn’t happen.”
    He nodded, his face an expressionless mask.
    “Just checking,” he said.
    “Why?” she asked. “Is he a person of interest?”
    He hesitated. His gaze shifted left, and down.
    “His name came up in an unrelated dispatch. Just thought I’d ask. Have a safe flight, Agents.”
    None of us said a word until we got to the elevator, and the brushed-steel doors slid shut to seal us in.
    “Does he—” Kevin started to say.
    Jessie shook her head, tight. “Uh-uh.”
    He got the hint and fell silent. Linder had ears all around him, and we weren’t sure just how far his hearing could reach.

    We sat in a row of hard, gray plastic seats, under a glowing American Airlines sign in white and cherry red. Digital clocks ticked down the long, slow minutes until boarding. Jessie drummed her fingers on a plastic armrest. She wasn’t good at waiting. Kevin kept his face buried in his phone, while I sat back and took in the sparse clumps of fellow passengers scattered around the concourse. Trying to read faces, read intentions.
    “‘Just . . . one more thing,’” April recited, her voice dry as she rolled her chair around to face us. “Do you think our beloved taskmaster was deliberately imitating Columbo, or was it merely a happy accident?”
    “You think he knows?” Jessie asked.
    April gave a humorless chuckle. “My dear, you’re asking the wrong question. But no. His body language was hesitant, and he waited until we’d almost left because he didn’t want to ask the question in the first place, then he shifted into avoidance mode. He suspects we made contact with Bredford, he absolutely suspects, but he isn’t certain. More importantly, he wants the answer to be no. Now, what does that tell us?”
    We’d met Douglas Bredford on our investigation in Talbot Cove. He was a walking train wreck, a drunk and despondent ex-cop turned sorcerer coasting his way to liver failure in a cheap backwoods bar. The alcohol never got the chance to kill him, though: the bomb somebody planted in his trailer did the job just fine.
    Bredford had dropped a name— Cold Spectrum . I thought it sounded suspicious, and Kevin had one of his hacker buddies check it out. He didn’t just find something: he woke something up . Kevin’s contact had to flee across three states and burn a fake ID to get away, while encrypted e-mail flew across government servers from coast to coast. All of it dedicated to a single question: Who is asking about Cold Spectrum?
    Bredford’s parting gift came courtesy of his next-door neighbor, who’d been given an envelope to deliver to us. Douglas knew he’d been marked for death; part of me wondered if we were his method of suicide. He had to know that once he poked his head up, whoever he’d been hiding from all those years would come after him with a vengeance. Maybe he’d picked going out with a bang over a slow death from the bottle. The envelope he’d left behind was stuffed with pictures, including one of Linder with a red-ink bull’s-eye drawn around his face.
    “We know that whatever Cold Spectrum was, Linder was involved somehow,” I said. “And we know the bombing was meant to silence Douglas Bredford. They—whoever they is—want this story to stay buried.”
    “Which means anybody who had contact with him is gonna get sanitized,” Jessie said.
    Kevin held up a finger. “Uh. Sanitized?”
    “Scrubbed clean off the earth,” Jessie said, “just like Bredford was. But Linder doesn’t want that to happen. Sure, we’re a little unorthodox and we might leave a mess or two behind for him to