Trevor’s cheeks dropped. Maybe she hadn’t gone over the deep end.
“Who? How?”
She drew close to Trevor, much to his agitation. The perfume tickled his nose.
“I think you know.”
She’s trying to trap me into saying the wrong thing.
Mau answered.
“The bag is honest. The Enzathi senses no attempt to deceive.”
Trevor gave in to the assessment and played along.
“Why am I just now hearing about it?”
“Because it must not be exposed.”
Only a left hook would have caught him more by surprise.
“Wait. We’re being spied on in our offices, and you want it to continue? Now I’ve heard it all.”
Haas grabbed his arm again. Same place, softer touch.
“If we remove the devices, they’ll know we’re onto them. People will die. Not right away. They’ll wait until it’s explainable. I’ll be first.”
Trevor backed away. If the Enzathi were right, Haas believed what she said. What if the Enzathi couldn’t analyze a vivid imagination?
“I don’t know, Kieran. This sounds over the top.”
She tucked at his ruffled collar. Trevor wondered whether she wanted to divulge secrets or seduce him.
“It’s an embarrassing security breach,” she said. “But it’s been in place longer than you’d think.”
“For what purpose?”
She slipped a hand around the back of his neck.
Yep. Seduction.
“It’s complicated. So, allow me to pose a scenario. Imagine you run a covert organization intent on restructuring the human race top-down. Your problem lies in the simple fact that humanity is spread out over a thousand light-years and forty star systems. It’s a huge undertaking. Won’t be easy. Among your many strategies, wouldn’t you try to monitor everyone of importance?”
Trevor heard countless hypotheticals over the years – he engaged in more than his share of such paranoid fantasies – but recent events lent this one a ring of truth.
“I might,” he said. “How would I use this intel?”
“Oh, I don’t know. You might design military or political strategies. You might discover like-minded recruits. You might make political alliances. You might establish sleeper cells. You might embrace chaos agents.”
A new jigsaw puzzle came together in a hurry.
“I see. Might I brainwash people to become my followers?”
“Absolutely. It would be essential to a long-term strategy.”
“Might I name this plan after a mass for the dead?”
She pulled away and broke eye contact.
“You would, Trevor. You’d make sure it was a name spoken only by the truest believers. And those who spoke it out of turn would be silenced.” She swung around in a flash. “So, we will not say it today or ever. Agreed?”
Connor made a similar warning with an implied threat. Haas said it with a quiver of fear.
Shit. If she’s afraid ...
“Why don’t you go public? You’re the President.”
She laughed off the notion.
“Of course. I could sound like a crazy woman with no tangible proof. Not long after, everyone genetically connected to me – even in the most distant sense – would die, along with just about anyone inside a two-kilometer radius.”
Mau did not wait for Trevor’s inevitable question.
“The bag’s words are guided by terror. She does not deceive.”
Trevor felt some of that terror chill his own blood.
“I don’t understand, Kieran. The last thing Lana Devonshire ever said to me was: ‘Haas is Requiem’.” The word they banned a moment ago fell from his lips. If all this was a trap, they nabbed him. Might as well play on. “What you’re suggesting is the opposite.”
