Free A Deadly Web by Kay Hooper Page A

brief salute, then left the roof and made her way down to the street. She was somewhat preoccupied, tired but not enough to stop her mind from considering various possibilities and probabilities, weighing her own options, still walking the fine line she had been walking for some time now.
    They had so few answers. So damned many questions.
    And too many psychics like Tasha Solomon in danger and yet also in a position to possibly give them more information, more answers.
    What she knew.
    And what Duran might reveal in trying to get to her.
    Murphy had been involved in this secretive group they had never really named for several years now, and in her time the only certainty she felt able to count on was that there were two sides to this . . . conflict.
    Not a war. Exactly.
    Maybe a struggle. A struggle to find and protect psychics from some mysterious “other” that wanted them.
    Reasons unknown.
    They did know of a few of the . . . soldiers . . . on the other side, the way they
knew
Duran. Not where he was born, or when, or where he’d gone to school or, really, anything about his background. Duran headed up theirfield operations, most of them, they knew that, but who or what he reported to was a mystery.
    Still, after years, a mystery.
    So there was also a struggle to gather information.
    A struggle to understand. To learn who was behind this and why. To have it make sense somehow. To be able to look back and reaffirm that those who had fallen, to the other side or because of them, had given their freedom or their lives in a good and just cause.
    Melodramatic.
    Yes. But also true.
    There was just so damned much they didn’t
know
.
    They hadn’t even found a single way to protect psychics; each one was a unique situation and called for unique measures to make them safe. Some were in hiding, not really living any kind of a normal life and yet the only sort in which they felt even marginally safe.
    A few had taken the opposite tactic, going public in a major way, drawing media and other attention to themselves. Sarah Mackenzie came to Murphy’s mind, at least in part because Sarah’s was both the most recent and the most successful case she knew of.
    With Tucker Mackenzie’s celebrity status as a very famous best-selling author, and the publication of his book about his wife’s rather astonishing abilities garnering them both a lot of media attention, it at least appeared that Duran had backed off. They couldn’t even find evidence that he had the couple under surveillance where they lived in Richmond.
    But they weren’t
sure
, of course.
    They were never sure.
    And just when they thought they were sure of something, just when they thought there was a fact they could stand on, it was neatly pulled out from under them.
    Usually by Duran.
    Don’t think about Leigh. Don’t think about the others lost along the way. But good people, dammit. Good people.
    Murphy slipped away from the downtown area where Tasha Solomon’s condo was situated, but she didn’t return to the small apartment several blocks away, rented for the duration.
    Instead, after hesitating only briefly, she stood in the shadows of a darkened doorway on a quiet, peaceful street, and pulled one of the burner cell phones from her bag.
    Dead. The next two were dead as well, their batteries drained even though they had not yet been turned on.
    Murphy cursed under her breath, making a mental note to charge all of them later tonight.
    The fifth one she tried still had some power. Maybe enough. She punched in a number. Always the same one. He never worried they could trace the call, even ping the cell he always used.
    Because they had never been able to.
    Dammit.
    “Yes?”
    Murphy recited the address of a bar a couple of blocks from her location. A dark place, open late. Quieter than most bars, its patrons mostly intent on drowning theirsorrows and not interested in what was going on around them while they did so.
    “Fifteen minutes,” she