WHAT WOULD HAPPEN WHEN the thirty minutes were up? Anything was possible. Tantalizing. Pointing her tongue to the center of her upper lip, her imagination teased.
Hugo offered her a glass of wine. “It’s an incredible way of life, isn’t it?” he asked, a laugh on his breath as he raised his glass to hers. “To new friendships.”
“New friendships,” she said, touching her glass to his before taking it to her lips.
The wine was incredible; he was right about that. The taste was somewhat tainted by the sensation of her Heart’s eyes on the back of her head. He was inside, as far as she could tell, but had her in his eyeline. It wasn’t unpleasant to know he was intent on keeping her safe. Still, he was kind of proving her point about her being a distraction.
“Your home is beautiful.”
“Thank you,” Three said. “Though not quite worthy of someone as precious as you.”
Whoa, boy, with a simple smile, she raised her glass in acceptance. “Thank you.”
Though if he didn’t want her to draw his blood, he should hit the brakes.
“I was pleased to hear that you were here,” he said, settling back in his seat, his arm draped on the wide arm, the globe of his wine glass resting in his curved fingers. “Surprised but pleased. Ares tracked you down, is that right?”
“Yes,” she said, wondering who’d fed Hugo his information. A stranger knowing so much was unsettling. “Have you been in contact with your… associates?”
“The Six?” he asked, his brows rising. “I understand Two and Five are no longer with us.” He cleared his throat. “We will have to probe into their replacements.”
That surprised her. “So soon?”
He smiled. “It’s been over a year since the Exodus,” he said. “Olympus is very hierarchical. You must have noticed.”
“And I suppose with Two gone, you’ve been bumped up a slot.”
“Indeed,” he said. “One and I have been in contact. We’re trying to hold things together.”
“Which can’t be easy,” she said, loosening, appreciating being treated as an equal. “What is the situation with Six?”
“Ah,” Hugo said, raising his glass to drink. Swilling the wine in his mouth, he enjoyed the taste before swallowing. “Lowell has put all of us in a difficult position.”
“Loyalty isn’t necessarily a bad thing.”
“No,” he said in agreement. “Zulu was a difficult operation for all of us. It was precarious from the beginning, Hades knew that.”
Zulu being the code name given to the plan to assassinate Zeus, the man at the top of Olympus. When Six, also known as Lowell apparently, broke ranks and revealed the plan to Zeus, everyone had taken cover fast. Hence the Exodus from the Olympus compound. Most of the Olympus men were still unaccounted for.
“If he’s going to continue with the organization, trust will be hard won.”
“Among Hades’ men?” he asked, then answered his own question. “Yes. Among all of us. And while Zeus is still out there, the threat to Olympus and what it represents still stands.”
Zeus was a dangerous man. She got he wouldn’t trust Harry’s subordinates, those who’d been privy to the plot anyway. Until that moment, she hadn’t appreciated how he represented a threat to the very fiber of what Olympus did.
Beyond destabilizing operations, he probably had evidence that the organization itself existed. Exposing it to the media, to other authorities, would lead to trouble for a lot of people… and, for all she knew, could lead to jail or execution for those involved. Daire told her Olympus did what other agencies couldn’t. That might include murder.
“Is there a plan?” she asked. “For how to deal with that threat?”
“Perhaps the beginnings of one,” he said, swirling his wine in the glass. “There are opinions on how we should deal with it. So long as Zeus remains in Europe, we have some breathing space on our side of the Atlantic. We’re not naïve enough to assume he couldn’t eliminate us if he wanted to. His contacts are widespread and they’re not squeamish… So I understand your father’s need to keep you safe.”
Her father didn’t need her to be safe as much as Daire did. Her trust in the sincerity of his feelings was absolute, which was saying something, considering he’d lied to her for most of their association.
“I have to be honest,” Tess said, sliding back in her chair a little. “I’m more worried about what’s being missed while all of this is going on.”
On a nod, he smiled. “You’re not the only one.”
That was Daire’s issue, and he wasn’t wrong.
“Setting up again could be dangerous. Any replacements for Two and Five will take time to get up to speed. And you have to be mindful of Six’s loyalty.”
“And most of Harry’s men are still in the wind,” he said, gesturing toward the house with his glass. “They can’t stay here forever either. You know we talked about chipping all of them, more than once.” He shook his head. “Would’ve made things a lot easier.”
“Chipping them,” she said. “Like with GPS?” Hugo shrugged. “That would make it easier to gather them together… which I’m guessing was exactly the problem.”
“It sounds cold, but men are replaceable. If we were talking one or two, there wouldn’t be a problem. But you’re right, it would help us track them, and we’d be able to get back to operations faster.”
“Or it would lead to a massacre,” she said. “If Zeus found them first—”
“Yes, and we can’t afford the time to train new recruits from zero to the required peak of ability. We also recruit young, allows us to ensure they understand the Olympus way. We don’t have to deal with bad habits picked up elsewhere or inflated egos. To have such a green team would be dangerous.”
Information was important, hence why she subdued her outrage. The men inside, Harry’s men, weren’t exactly her best buddies, but the idea of them being exterminated horrified her. Hugo talked about them as assets, as property. She couldn’t think of them that way. It would be easier if she could. But those men included Daire. In her eyes, he’d never be dispensable.
“Worked out that you didn’t chip them then,” Tess said.
“The final decision was swayed not by the potential we’d have to destroy ourselves, but by the weakness it would offer for others to exploit. Tech like that can be hacked. It would give our external enemies a way to track our people. And, possibly, damage them from afar.”
By programming the chip to do something it shouldn’t maybe? External enemies were the least of their worries at that moment. Though the thought sent her mind into a frenzy. Daire couldn’t be safe anywhere. Wouldn’t be safe anywhere. He couldn’t trust his own people and there were probably hundreds across the world who’d love a chance to damage Olympus… even if they didn’t know the name of the agency they had beef with.
“That was why we had Poseidon working on the synthetic isotope,” Hugo said. “The biological component couldn’t be hacked like plain old hardware.”
The isotope allowed Garrick, whose code name was Poseidon, to locate the men he had found. Except it was just an experiment at the time of the Exodus when everyone fled to save themselves from Zeus’s wrath.
“It’s not at its full potential,” she said. “It has a maximum radius.”
“A hundred miles, yes,” Hugo said, frowning. “It’s a shame Asclepius is no longer with us.”
That was a code name she hadn’t heard before. “Asclepius?”
“Jeremiah Landyn,” he said, taking a long breath. “Our doctor. For a long time we’ve been aware of the potential for technological corruption. To make tech unbreachable or beyond exploitation, is extremely difficult. Olympus has been at the forefront of developing biological elements, which add another layer of protection.”
Biological elements didn’t sound like something anyone should mess with. Especially when, like he’d already implied, technology could be used against whoever was in proximity to it.
“Jeremiah Landyn helped with that?”
Hugo nodded. “He worked in tandem with Poseidon and outside agencies. Third parties didn’t know the truth of his interest, of course. Poseidon, James Garrick, is a brilliant man. A genius, no doubt about it. He’s made Olympus what it is today. It’s his technology that kept us ahead of our enemies… He is efficient and organized… curious too. That curiosity led to innovations that have saved our people more than once.”
At least Hugo was acknowledging they were people. Though she wasn’t sure he really understood what that meant. They had lives, loves and desires of their own, passions and pursuits they sacrificed to be a part of something bigger than themselves.
“He’s been nice to me.”
She didn’t know James Garrick well. They’d only laid eyes on each other just over a week ago and hadn’t met under the best of circumstances. To lure her father and Daire to the house, and keep themselves alive, Garrick had one of the Olympus men abduct her from a hotel.
“Garrick isn’t much of a fighter,” Hugo said. “He’s a… theorist rather than a man of action. Your father is the man we rely on for that.”
Which put Harry at the most peril of the three principal agents of Olympus. James Garrick, Poseidon, was hardware and resources. Zeus was the strategist, the man in charge of the operations side of the organization. Her father, Harry, was personnel. He dealt with recruitment and training.
“I’m sure he’s good at it,” she said. “Though we can’t ignore that Garrick was the man who put this together.”
“Bringing our people back to the fold, yes, that was a surprise… Less so when you realize how these men rely on Olympus. It’s their world. Zeus was the first recruited. He trained for a year before Hades and Poseidon were brought in. All of them were young, Zeus was about twenty-two, your father and Garrick were eighteen, nineteen. It’s all they’ve known. It’s been their lives for a long time. Without it I imagine Garrick didn’t know what to do with himself.”
Giving one’s life in service of the greater good was noble. Maybe her connection to Daire skewed her view, but there was something sad about what the Olympus men missed out on. The institution controlled and dictated their adult lives. Shore leave wasn’t even a thing, so it wasn’t like they ever kicked back and just enjoyed life.
“It’s a worthy cause.”
“It is,” he said, sucking in a breath and leaning in to take the bottle from the table. “Not a life I could ever live.” Hugo topped off his glass and then offered the bottle her way. Putting a hand over the top, she shook her head. “Come on, you only live once.”
“I don’t like to drink too much.”
He put the bottle down without insisting. “From what I know about your life, you haven’t been positioned to have a lot of fun.”
Like the Olympus men.
“I’ve had my moments,” Tess said, hiding her mouth behind the glass.
He laughed. “I don’t doubt that from such a beautiful woman.”
“Compliments make me suspicious.”
“Is that right?” he asked, intrigued. “Why?”
“Because in my experience they aren’t handed out for free.”
His lips twisted into a smile that hinted at his motive. “And what is it you think I want in return?”
Raising her brows, her smile turned sly. “I’ll leave my suspicions up to your imagination.”
“You’re a beautiful woman, Tess. I don’t doubt you’ve featured in many men’s imaginations.”