Kiss of Midnight_ A Midnight Breed Novel - Lara Adrian [717]
Roth had something very significant to hide. Something that went much deeper than his whispered gangster alliances with the crooks and politicians who tended to gravitate toward the Enforcement Agency. He was protecting a monumental secret. Something worth spilling the lives of more than a dozen people without a moment’s hesitation. Worth even more than that, Reichen was certain now.
As he stared ahead at the dark ribbon of road, a name crept into his mind like a serpent: Dragos.
Good Christ. Could the two of them be connected in some way? Had he gotten too close to uncovering some kind of alliance between Dragos and Roth?
If he’d had cause to contact the Order in Boston before, now he couldn’t reach them fast enough. Reichen leaned on the accelerator, his thoughts flying as black as the night landscape zooming past the windows of the SUV
A few minutes out of the city, he spotted an Internet café. He turned off the road and headed for the place, praying like hell that his instincts were wrong about Roth and Dragos being in league together.
If his instincts were right?
Ah, fuck.
If they were right, then he had just nailed the lid shut on not only his coffin, but Claire’s, as well.
He brought her inside the café, to an empty workstation and table as far away from the rest of the patrons as he could find. Using some of the euros he’d lifted off the dead agents, Reichen bought Claire a bowl of soup and a sandwich, and purchased himself an hour’s time on the computer.
While she went to work on her meal, he opened an Internet browser on his rented workstation and brought up the secured emergency access site address that belonged to the Order. It was a generic-looking page, basic black, with an unlabeled prompt blinking on the screen as it waited for input. Reichen typed in an access code and password that Gideon back in Boston had given him some months ago, when he’d first begun his remote work for the Order. He hit the enter key and waited, uncertain if the unique ID he’d been assigned was still valid, as the prompt disappeared and he was left staring at the empty black screen.
“What’s it doing?” Claire asked, leaning close to him.
Reichen shook his head, guessing that the warriors might have written him off as dead in the three months he’d been out of contact since the destruction of his Darkhaven. “This site links up to the Boston compound. It’s fully encrypted and continuously monitored by the Order. Once I’m verified, we should get a response from Gideon.”
No sooner had he said it than the prompt reappeared, asking for method of contact. Reichen typed in one of the numbers from the Agency cell phones, advising that the line was stolen, most likely compromised, and far from secure.
Gideon’s response was instantaneous: Acknowledged, and not a problem. Calling on a scramble right now.
The cell phone started ringing.
Reichen answered, speaking his name and a string of security words at the computerized request that stated simply: Identify.
“Guess it’s a damn good thing I got lazy and kept your access data in the system,” Gideon said as the call connected. “Jesus. Good to hear your voice, Reichen. Word out of Germany was we’d lost you. I see you’re calling in from Hamburg. What the hell’s been going on over there?”
Reichen tried to condense the past several weeks into a succinct explanation of events, laying it all out, from the attack on his home by Wilhelm Roth to the systematic, often fiery payback he’d been delivering on the vampire and his known associates ever since.
He told him that Roth and his Enforcement Agency cronies were on his tail and that the situation had just gotten even more complicated now that Claire was on the run with him. And he couldn’t leave the subject of Claire without confessing to what he’d done to her in Roth’s office.
“For crissake, Reichen,” the warrior hissed on the other end of the line. “She’s his blood-bonded mate. You know he’d be within his rights to kill you for