Part Four

A familiar, spicy smell hit Wendy as she walked into her sublet. She relaxed deeply. A host of memories hit her with the corn and tomatoes and chili powder.

Then Wendy stared. Her mom and Lacey were sitting across the table from each other; Mom smiled welcome and went to the stove to make her a plate. "Lacey, you're eating meat. There's a pound of hamburger in that stuff."

Lacey grinned. "Mom made two batches. One with dead cows for you and her, one with red beans and textured soy for me. Or you can try mine and like it better and we can keep on making it."

Wendy sat. Her mother had given her a generous helping of casserole in the middle of the plate, and a dab of almost-real at the side. She tasted the variant and tried not to make a face. "Not so much. Sorry."

Mom, still standing, leaned in and kissed Wendy on top of the head. "Mike couldn't come with you?"

It took Wendy a frozen half-second to track who her mother meant. "Yeah, sorry. He had to work. I'm sure you'll get to spend time together."

Lacey shaped Mike without a sound and grinned harder. She'd put more than a few pieces together since Wendy joined the world of comic-book heroism, but she was good about not demanding explanations. She'd back them up. "I mostly call him Wendy's Boss, like Noser does," she said. "Or Sexy Boss. I was giving him the long fluffy eyelashes myself at one point, but I guess I never stood a chance."

Wendy took a bite of her (real) favorite comfort entree and a sip of diet soda. "Greater love hath no roommate than to do a fade after she's seen him in a tuxedo."

"Rowr. Mercy," Lacey agreed in her best Roy Orbison tone.

Mom smiled faintly. She'd worked hard, and succeeded better than most traditional parents, on the switch from "baby I used to diaper" to "adult woman who usually has a sex life." She'd tried the long-distance nosy exactly once, when Wendy was in art college. Wendy, with malice aforethought and on Lacey's suggestion, had answered at a detail level that left her mother speechless. "Should I ask your boyfriend his intentions?" Mom asked lightly.

Wendy had never been able to manage the word 'boyfriend' for her Middleman. It was the 'boy' part. "You might get an answer," she warned. "You know how in fairy tales, the knight gets challenged to kill a dragon or something to prove his love for the princess? Do not. Your condo doesn't have enough front yard for one, and the garbage man probably wouldn't pick it up."

Mom nodded thoughtfully. She had high standards for who and what was good enough for her only child; metaphorical dragon-slaying got a passing grade. Unlike Wendy, she didn't know there were literal ones. "What's all this about valor, though?"

Wendy had been expecting this. She still wasn't as braced as she could have been. She pictured her Dad delivering the same explanation. "We're not cops, but sometimes we're around dangerous people." Human and otherwise. The fraction of Middlemen who retired alive and reasonably healthy was below five percent; there'd never been two in a row. "We know what we're doing, and we're careful." A thought struck her. She asked with real curiosity, "What if I'd gone into the service, like Dad? That's not so safe."

"We talked about that sometimes," Mom admitted. "It worried him even more than it did me. But serving his country was his life. He would have understood you making the same choice. And so would I."

For a second, Wendy thought her mother was going to ask a blunt question. Thought she was going to give a blunt answer right back, even in front of Lacey. Even though it would betray the principles of her job. Then there'd be an argument. She knew how that one was going to go too.

Mom knew her Wendy very well. The older woman broke eye contact first, took another bite of dinner.

Wendy looked down too. Pitched her voice to sound like a change of subject. "Something I never thought to ask about, before ... what do you think dad would have done when he left the service?"

"We still had a few years to decide, unless your father had called in favors." Mom shrugged. "He used to joke about teaching calculus to high-school students somewhere. Mostly that it would qualify for combat pay. Some sort of engineering work, though he'd have had to go back to school. And once or twice, people tried to headhunt him for one civilian job or another. Usually men he'd served with at some point."

Once or twice? As in once, or as in twice? "Was any of that close to when he disappeared?"

Her mother looked up, eyes keen. "What are you asking me?"

"I don't know exactly what I am asking." I have a pretty good idea, though. "I'm looking for all the facts I can get. Do you remember who talked to Dad about civilian jobs, and when, and anything he said about them? Especially when."

Wendy's mother followed her all too well. "None of it was close to the time Peter dis... was taken from us. Or I'd have mentioned it to the original investigators." She thought it over. "Patterson had gotten a job with a regional airline and thought your father would be interested too. That was while we were still stationed in Georgia, so at least two years before the accident. James, you remember James, wanted to start a construction company. Your father turned him down outright. He'd have needed too much retraining. And ... Chris, I think it was. I didn't know him well. He and your father had met on an overseas deployment. He visited the base about two months before your father died. Peter didn't say much about that one, only that it would involve travel. I thought he was considering it seriously, but they didn't speak again that I knew of." She searched Wendy's face. "What does this mean?"

"More puzzle pieces, mostly." Wendy hadn't come this close to an outright lie to her mother since she was twelve. "I'll have to let you know."

------

Going with Dubbie and her mother to the military base had been a mistake, looking back. The Middleman hadn't realized that he'd need to visit it for illegal and unauthorized purposes. He'd been seen with the Watsons now. No matter what false documents or cover story he used, if he were caught it would splash back on them. The only solution was not getting caught.

One of the base dining halls was in the same building as the forensics and pathology lab. The civilian fresh-produce distributor delivered at night. He took a lot more care than the Middle-organization usually did with cover stories. Blue-collar civvies and a baseball cap, a forged purchase order on the right letterhead. The kitchen night shift thought he was with the delivery crew. The delivery crew didn't know he was in the back of their van at all.

Ida had a front-row seat via a lightly tinted pair of sunglasses. She whispered advice here and there as the Middleman moved through the building. She had remote links that created 'video glitches' when they were in range of a security camera. The Middleman had a gadget in his back pocket that opened any lock, electronic or mechanical. He hadn't worked semi-solo in a long time. It was the fastest way to cover the ground sometimes.

The Middleman stirred uneasily in his sleep. Nothing about being away from Wendy was supposed to be good, even for a minute. His hand found a king-sized pillow and clutched it against his chest.

No one in the forensics lab. According to the logs, the men from the DC-3 were the only sets of remains here at the moment. He was sure the pathologists didn't mind a light schedule. He'd known what to expect. Two big, wide tables with a skeleton apiece laid out in anatomical order. Clinical, but not completely heartless. Someone had taken care, cleaning and studying what they'd found in a way that suggested respect.

Middleman 1999 had had a distinctive crooked front tooth, in his old photographs. The current model spotted it on the left-hand set of remains and saluted without a trace of irony. We'll get you home as fast as we can. We still take care of our own.

Right-hand table. There was nothing to learn about Captain Watson here, except that he'd had strong bones and been unexpectedly tall for his daughter's father. A slight nod. Sir. Disturbing either was no part of the Middleman's plans. His business was with the locked drawers at the back of the room.

The watches were in the third one he opened. The Middleman put them carefully in an inside pocket, replaced them with evidence-bagged copies as superficially alike as he could make them. That was the mission settled, but another object caught his eye. He reached in and brought out the other Middleman's gun.

Not the pulsed-laser pistol with the rectangular barrel that had been standard for Middlemen for decades. A gunpowder-powered handgun, not even a semiautomatic but a revolver. The chromed surface had given it some resistance to the seawater. He estimated it as a .357; a pretty high-powered choice. Why couldn't you use your own gun? Taking it along was tempting but too dangerous. He didn't have a decoy to leave in its place.

And then he'd left, slipped undetected back into the produce van and ridden out without a hitch. Brought the two old Middlewatches back to Ida for in-depth scans, showered, gone to bed. Not this time. The Middleman turned back toward the door, slow as moving underwater, and he couldn't avoid seeing the right-hand table. Not a plain work surface now but a stainless steel autopsy table, really a giant pan with a drain plug. The body was ashen gray but whole, as nearly as he could tell with the sheet drawn up just below the collarbones.

Wendy's eyes were closed, not by her muscles but by tiny, delicate stitches. The ones he could see on the Y-incision were larger but just as careful. It showed respect.

He was awake, in the dark, thrashing against some loose confinement, and she wasn't anywhere. He felt around frantically, disentangling -- those were bed sheets. He was alone. As if she'd never been there. He swept his arm on another search arc, banged his knuckles hard against the headboard.

The Middleman sat up wearily. Turned the bedside lamp on low. It was past five a.m. Well over four hours' sleep, he ought to be more rested. His head seemed to be packed with hot sand. He was awake enough to sort dream from reality. But he had to find the pillow that smelled most like Wendy, imprinted with her lemongrass shampoo, before his heartbeat slowed down.

He didn't know if he'd made any sounds. From the standpoint of Ida realizing he'd been a hysterical fool, it made very little difference.

The sun was up. He wasn't going to get any more sleep at this point. The Middleman went looking for his running shoes.

----

The Middleman was in the 'public' entry foyer of headquarters when Wendy reached work that morning. His eyes lit when he saw her. That wasn't unusual, after a night apart. But when she followed him back toward the control room, he stopped dead just inside the inner door. Wendy had never noticed that a bend in the hall was out of view of both the foyer and the main control room. He drew her into the phone-booth-sized scrap of privacy and kissed her hard.

Couldn't wait, huh? And he was slightly sweaty; an extra workout and a hasty shower. Wendy worried a little. But he relaxed too quickly, touching her, for any serious trouble. She leaned into him, let herself enjoy the morning treat. "What happened?" she asked when he let go.

"Just a bad dream." His eyes drank her in. "Back in the real world, we have the Middlewatches back. Ida has been working with them all night, trying to recover some kind of data from the molycircuitry. No luck. They might as well be solid lumps of metal." The Middleman kissed her again, lightly on the cheek. "You aren't exactly sparkling either."

"My mom is using her powers for nosy instead of evil," Wendy said. "It's dealable. About two months before the crash, a military buddy of my dad's called Chris talked to him about a civilian job involving lots of travel."

He nodded. "Middleman 1999. That matches the time Middleman 2002 was injured and he started looking for a substitute."

"So your boss got well and had a few good years before... you got promoted." Wendy had never asked those kinds of questions before.

"I wouldn't use the word well," her Middleman said. "He could walk about a hundred yards at a time. I don't think he had a day without pain while I knew him. I was in very good shape, after the SEALs, but I didn't have the slightest idea what I was doing. We covered the job between us." His expression turned a little wistful. "He was a good mentor. And a good friend."

Wendy snuggled in to comfort him. "Is that part of why?" she asked. "The gender-neutral hiring policies all of a sudden. I can be fast, and I can be smart, but I'm never going to bench-press half as much as you can."

He held still a second, as if he'd never made the connection before. And shrugged. "No. Sorry," the Middleman said, completely deadpan. "I hired you because I had a vivid image of you in tight pants and couldn't resist the temptation."

Wendy grabbed his lapels in mock aggression. "Get me coffee before I hurt you."

He moved her hands. "You can drink it while HEYDAR does more search runs. I think I know why the Middlewatches stopped working and were permanently destroyed. Why the Middleman on the job wouldn't come anywhere near Ida or headquarters during this particular mission. Why a fifty-year-old aircraft was his best choice for transporting the artifact in question. Why he didn't or couldn't take a photograph of it instead of making a sketch. And a fact you don't have, why he was carrying an ordinary revolver when he died when our standard laser pulser is a better weapon."

"Wait a minute. You told me this once." Wendy looked thoughtful. "Magic screws up some kinds of technology. That's one of the things you hate about it. The more complicated the tech, the more screwed it is. Even the alien stuff we've got. The ugly statue thing was really, really heavy-duty magic."

Her Middleman nodded. "Order that coffee to go, Dubbie. We have an appointment with Roxy Wasserman in half an hour."

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