Homecoming - Christie Golden [84]
“Then I’ll know who to contact,” Irene finished. “I do appreciate it, dear. Really, I do. But I’m not ready to leave yet.”
“As you wish. Take care, Irene.”
The next on Janeway’s extensive list of people to contact, rouse to action, or annoy sufficiently to assist her was “Red” Grady. He smiled when he saw her, but his eyes were sad. He didn’t look like he was getting enough sleep.
“We’ve got to stop meeting like this,” he joked.
She smiled without much enthusiasm. “Hello, Red. I don’t suppose you’ve been able to get anywhere with Montgomery.”
“It’s like talking to a stone wall,” Grady acknowledged.
“You should have been chosen to lead the project,” she said sincerely, “and God knows I wish you had.”
He shrugged. “It’s an old and honored tradition for war heroes to be promoted to important offices, whether or not they’re suited to it. At least he’s not Grant.” For a brief moment, his impish grin made his [250] face glow; then it faded. “He’s dug his heels in and it’s now getting to be a matter of pride to him.”
“The lives of three people hinge on a man’s pride?” Janeway said, outraged.
“I’m sorry, Kathryn, but he feels they’re a security risk, and he outranks me. At least they’ve got a good doctor looking out for them.”
“They’re lucky to have Kaz,” Janeway agreed. “But they need to be released.”
Grady sighed. “I’ll keep trying, but if I push too hard he’ll stop listening to me altogether. And Kathryn—this is going to get worse before it gets better.”
When Libby returned to her cottage much, much later, she still hadn’t slept a great deal. But she was feeling refreshed, calmer and more centered.
Harry would never have made it as a covert agent. His face was too open, too honest, and while he would never deliberately reveal in words the secret with which he had been entrusted, every plane of his body cried out that he carried the burden. His sweet face was shadowed, his body taut and tense. Libby wished she could tell him that she knew where he had been, what he had undergone, and, most likely, exactly what information he harbored, but she couldn’t.
So she had held him through the night, and they had spoken in soft voices about things that had nothing to do with holograms, Borg, or Voyager.
She took a shower and reluctantly turned her mind back to gnawing at the problem. Covington wasn’t a fool, however prickly around the edges she might [251] be. Libby mentally started reviewing what she knew.
One: There was a mole leaking information and technology to the Orion Syndicate. Two: It would have to be someone placed sufficiently high enough to have access to that information. Three: The juiciest bit of technology around today was Voyager. Four: Montgomery, who was on the initial list of suspects, had suddenly been given access to Voyager. And not only that, but because of his position as head of Project Full Circle, the HoloStrike and the Borg infestation now had also come under his command.
But where was the evidence? Not only was Libby coming up dry with evidence that could point directly to Montgomery, but all the evidence Covington had provided to her was falling apart.
Suddenly, Libby’s mind flashed back to the conversation she had been permitted to overhear between Covington and Montgomery. There was someone Covington had working for her that Montgomery wanted on his “team.”
Wanted back on his team.
One of the first tenets she had learned about espionage was to follow the trail, even if it seemed to double back on itself. Current information was yielding nothing useful. The trail had grown cold, so Libby had to pick it up where it was still warm. If this scientist Trevor Blake had worked with Montgomery, he might be worth finding.
Libby felt a rush of excited calm settle over her. This was what she was good at. She wasn’t trained as an expert to access computers, or dismantle weapons, or break codes. Her strength was in analyzing people and [252] being so harmless in the process that they let their guard down.
Libby stepped out of the shower and looked at herself in the