Читать книгу Unbreakable - Elizabeth Norris, Elizabeth Norris - Страница 32

eirdre reacts first. “He can’t let Barclay go.” Her face flushes a shade slightly darker, and her voice, stern and loud, escalates as she keeps talking. “And you certainly can’t go with him. Go where? In the middle of all this?”

Struz doesn’t say anything yet, so I don’t either. I stand still and straight, with my lips pressed together in a hard line. I let my body language and facial expression tell the complete truth. I let them say that I’ve thought this through, that I can do this, that it’s the only way.

Struz takes a slow sip from his coffee mug. Then he looks at me. “You’re not going anywhere. And I can’t just let Barclay go. We need to know more about what happened this fall. And if what he’s said is true, we need to know what we can do right now. After we’ve gotten information, we could let Barclay take a team of trained agents with him if he needs help and can’t trust his own people.”

“You think we can really afford to wait that long?” I ask.

“Struz,” Deirdre says. “You can’t possibly … Where the hell is she going to go? We can’t trust him!”

He doesn’t answer her. “It doesn’t have to be you,” he says to me.

But he’s wrong. It does have to be me. I think of Ben and Cecily and know that it does.

It has to be me.

I don’t say a word because my face says that I am my father’s daughter. That I’ll do this with or without his help.

Because I will.

Even if Struz doesn’t want me to. I can’t sit around and wait for someone to figure out how to get Cecily back. And I can’t sit around wondering if Ben is dead because of my inaction. Doing that last night was enough.

And Barclay isn’t going to take a team of FBI agents or Marines and go through a portal into Prima and shake things up with the IA. He isn’t even going to hang out and let himself be detained very long. If they’ve still got him, it’s only temporary—maybe even because he’s waiting for me.

When Struz pours the rest of his coffee down the sink, I know I have him.

“J, come with me. Let’s talk to Barclay,” Struz says. To Deirdre he adds, “Call another meeting for an hour from now. We need people to be prepared and not panicking. We need a way to fight this.”

“Struz—”

“D, we’ve got enough shit to deal with without people disappearing right and left.” He looks at me. “Let’s go.”