Chapter Two
Tanya parked in front of the Hoover building, exchanged a few brief words with the man at the door, and was escorted into the building and straight to Sadusky's office. By the looks of things, she could tell he'd jacked himself up on coffee. "You wanted to see me?" she asked, seeing no point in the American accent.
"Your brother got beat up today in prison," Sadusky replied.
"I've heard."
"I've got guys interviewing the prisoners right now, trying to get them to talk about why they did it, but Ian told me you might know something about what they said about someone called Ole Billy."
"William."
"Any idea on a last name?"
She looked over her shoulder at the other man, who stood in front of the door, and then she stepped forward, toward Sadusky's desk and his current cup of coffee. "Howe," she whispered. "What did the thugs tell your blokes?"
"Not a whole hell of a lot."
"Let me hear them. They might be talking in code. I tend to be relatively decent at those sorts of things."
"Don't you want to-"
"Let me hear the thugs talk to each other."
Sadusky nodded, stood, picked up his cup of coffee, and walked to the door. Tanya followed, throwing another glance at the agent who led her to Sadusky in the first place. They walked down the hall, almost single file, to a room full of computer monitors displaying two men in orange jumpsuits, seated in different rooms, staring at the table or at the wall. "Let 'em talk to each other, in one of the interrogation rooms," Sadusky said. One agent nodded, and within moments, he was seen on a screen leading one of the prisoners into the other's chamber. The jumpsuits sat across the table from each other, and the shouting match began.
"You talked," the prisoner on the left snapped. He had a slight accent. Cockney? Tanya wondered. "You told the feds everything, you son of a bitch! Because of you, he's gonna kill us both! We didn't even get what he wanted out of that cocksucker!"
"You think it's my fault?" the other replied. He also had a bit of an accent, but he was much more American-sounding. "You're the one that decided to punch the guy out in the first place!"
Tanya listened to the argument play out, every now and again closing her eyes and focusing on the way they argued. So they were working for someone, and Ian was the target, though she couldn't be sure what they wanted from him. They continued mentioning Ole Billy-William Howe, she corrected in her mind-but they wouldn't say what the Howes had that these men and their employer wanted. There were several mentions to said employer, not by name, but merely as him or he, or even, "The boss." Tanya wanted to ask for employment records, but she knew they wouldn't be on the official books for anyone.
The only person who would know of anything that William Howe might've had, besides Ian and herself, lived in England, a phone call and a long-distance flight away. But somehow the pieces clicked together perfectly. She turned back to Sadusky and said, "Now I'd like to see my brother."
NTNT
Tanya walked into the prison infirmary. Ian lay on the second bed from the door. There were bandages around his ribcage, and his arm was in a cast. His ankle was wrapped in bandages.
"Hey, midget."
"You look reasonably well," she said. He smirked. "Did you recognize anything they said, besides..."
"Their nameless boss," he replied. "They kept calling him, well, he, the few times he was mentioned at all."
"Any clue as to what they wanted?"
"Just that I supposedly knew where it was."
Tanya nodded. "When Powell said you had broken bones, I suspected that you were pretty much shattered and needed to be put back together, but it looks like you came out of it well."
"I seem to have, but I'll be here a few days. Safest place in a prison, at any rate."
"Get well. Don't worry about anything else."
"I will," Ian whispered. "You be careful, too."
Tanya nodded. "I will."
"You should go. It's late, and it looks like you have a party to get back to."
"I'm not going back there."
Ian nodded, and his gaze drifted to the wall and fell out of focus. "I'll see if I can write you. If you don't hear from me, then I can't."
"Alright. I'm a phone call away, whenever you get the chance." Ian looked back at her, smiled, and nodded. "Get your arse healed up and out of that bed, alright? That's your new goal."
"Got it."
"Then I best be off. You need your rest." She whispered, "Night," and she turned and walked out of the room.
NTNT
Tanya walked into the small apartment (small compared to the Howe home back in London), kicked off her shoes, and shimmied out of her dress and into a pair of sweatpants and a tank top. A quick check of the kitchen clock told her it wasn't yet midnight. She flopped onto the sofa, put her feet up on the coffee table, and began channel surfing.
After settling on a show about Riley Poole's book, she walked into the kitchen area, put a kettle on the stove, and opened a package of tea bags. American tea wasn't as good as the stuff from back home, but it was passable. She leaned against the counter and let out a breath, trying to process everything that had happened. Her brother had been beaten for an obscure reason, by thugs working for some faceless man, most likely the one from London.
She steered her thoughts away from him as swiftly as possible. He was on the other side of the pond and she was independent in every way that mattered. She didn't need to worry about him unless it really was him behind the attack on her brother. Damn catch-twenty-two.
The kettle hissed, and she poured herself a mug of boiling water and dipped a teabag into it. She'd just set it down to cool as an historian came onto the screen and began talking about how the Knights Templar hid the treasure and all their clues and what they meant. Old news, she thought. Old, old, old news.
Steam stopped curling up from her teacup in thick whisps, and she picked it up and sipped it. The tea was still warm, just the way she liked it, and finally, just as the historian finished, she walked back into the main room, settled back into the sofa, and set the cup down on the table. Some museum bigwig was talking about a few of the artifacts from the treasure, followed by some conspiracy nutjob adding his two cents on a chapter about aliens, Roswell, and related government cover-ups and then went on about some other nonsense about Area Fifty-One and the Bermuda Triangle. None of it mattered to her mental investigation into her brother's beating.
Something, perhaps in the tea, brought her mind to life, and she picked her cell phone up off the arm of the sofa and dialled a number.
"I thought you went to sleep already," Sadusky said. "It's midnight already. Pretty much tomorrow."
"I need to set up an appointment to talk about my brother's case."
