Free The Doomsday Device by Darrell Pitt Page A

after what you did to us.”
    Mr. Floyd held up his hand. “Please hear me out. Try to think of the arrangement as being, not so much working for The Agency, but working with The Agency. We have mutual aims. You want your people back. We want them safe too.”
    “What’s your interest in this?” I asked suspiciously.
    “There is a change in the air,” Mr. Floyd. “I can’t say what that is, but I can tell you this. Some time soon you’ll have to make up your mind as to whose side you’re on.”
    “What sort of change?” I asked.
    “We’re not at liberty to say,” Agent Palmer said. “All we can say is that a big change is coming. Whether you like it or not, you’re going to be part of that change. We are prepared to help you get your friends back, but we need you to be on side for us too.”
    “I can’t speak for the others -.” I began.
    “I don’t expect you to,” Mr. Floyd said. “But you can speak for yourselves. We want you onside after all this is over. If you can’t agree to that then…” He shrugged.
    “Then what?” Chad asked.
    Mr. Floyd inclined his head. “The door is that way.”
    I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. We were being offered a way forward, a way to help our friends, but there was a cost. I wondered about the alternatives. We had no money. No home. No car. Nothing. Only the clothes on our backs. The Agency could change all that.
    Chad seemed to be having the same thoughts. He looked across at me glumly. I know he hated the idea, but there was little else we could do. Chad might happily abandon me and Dan and the others, but Ebony was his sister. He would not leave her in a million years.
    “Okay,” he said. “Count me in.”
    “Me too,” I said.
    Agent Palmer nodded. “There are some details we need to work out. We will be supplying standard contracts to you -.”
    “Contracts?” I interrupted.
    “-but we don’t need to worry about those yet,” she concluded. “First of all we need to find your friends. The paperwork can come later.”
    “In the meantime,” Mr. Floyd said, “you boys need some food and sleep. We’ll get someone to show you to a room. Hopefully we’ll have a lead for you by morning.”
    Both Mr. Floyd and Agent Palmer left the chamber. I was slightly relieved to note that the door closed, but was not locked after their departure. Chad looked over at me and slowly shook his head.
    “It looks like we’re back,” he said. “For better-“
    “-or for worse.”
    I hoped it was the former and not the latter.
     

 
    Chapter Sixteen
    “The good news is we believe your friends are alive and well,” Mr. Floyd began. “The bad news is we think they’re being held by a man named Jeremiah Stead.”
    It was the next day. We were sitting in a meeting room in another part of The Agency complex beneath the streets of Las Vegas. Our new residence was a room in a hotel called The Windsor Arms. It was located down the block from The Hound Dog Wedding Chapel. I don’t know what they told regular people who wanted to stay in the hotel, but as far as we could tell, the entire place was reserved strictly for Agency personnel.
    Our room was on the third floor and had a view across the Western side of Las Vegas across the great urban sprawl. It wasn’t the greatest view, but we weren’t there to look out the window.
    Agent Palmer had collected us before eight o’clock and taken us to a cafeteria in the hotel. After that she took us down an elevator and through a labyrinth of corridors to a meeting room where Mr. Floyd was already waiting for us.
    “Who is Jeremiah Stead?” I asked.
    “I believe you’ve already had a discussion about him with Mr. Jones,” Mr. Floyd said.
    I looked at him blankly.
    “Jeremiah Stead is the man responsible for the theft of the Doomsday virus from the Germans,” Mr. Floyd explained. “Possibly that rings a bell.”
    More than a bell. Rather, it rang a long and disturbing chime of doom.
    “How does all this