“You were on the stage?” Tall-Dark had gone a funny shade of grey.

  I glanced around at the others and they weren’t looking too crash hot, either.

  “What?” I asked, and Blondie started to fidget.

  I zoned in on her.

  “What?” and it wasn’t really a question, more a demand and a shout, and I’m not known for either.

  “It’s just that there’s nothing left of the stage,” Mouse replied—and he glanced back at the direction the wind and noise had come from. “Nothing much left of the club, now, either.”

  “That was the club?” I asked, and we all knew I was talking about the wall of wind and sound.

  “Crap!” I said, remembering. “We’d better look for survivors.”

  Which took us pretty much to midday, and then the paperwork had us all working back. My memory returned, in bits and pieces, and it wasn’t pretty, or real forgiving.

  There’s a reason I can’t be in love with Tall-Dark—his name is Dylan, by the way. I can’t be in love with him because I’m his boss, which is why we’ve been having a quiet affair, all on our lonesome, on the side.

  And by affair, I don’t mean either of us are married; I just mean it’s quiet and on the sly, and not meant to be public knowledge with the rest of the team. Well, I really blew that one, didn’t I?

  At least, I know what the looks on their faces meant. Realizing it, I called a temporary halt to my typing and headed for the staff coffee room. It took him a minute, and then Dylan followed. I knew the move was noted by the rest of the team, but I didn’t care.

  “Well, I guess that secret’s out,” he said, coming to stand beside me, as we spooned instant and sugar into our cups.

  “Eyup,” I said, and leant up to kiss his cheek.

  I watched as he smiled, and then he said, “I guess that means I can do this, now, hey?”

  He turned to face me and kissed me full on the lips. I didn’t need any encouragement to kiss him right back, either. There was a school-kid round of ‘ooohs’ from the doorway, and we broke apart, laughing. Talk about caught in the act. Seeing they had our full attention, Blondie sashayed into the room, the rest of the team on her heels.

  Blondie’s real name is Diana, just so you know, and she was really kinda sweet—unless you went around keeping secrets from her, like Tall-Dark-Dylan and I. She was waggling her cup by the handle, as she approached, so we cleared a space for her to get to the coffee, and lined up at the urn while she made her brew, then we fled ahead of her for milk, or, at least, I did.

  I like mine light and creamy. Tall-Dark likes his black. We took our cups back out to the office, and set back to work. I remembered to put in a recommendation for Tall-Dark to join another team, or to head up another one.

  There was a vacancy or two in the squad, and he could fill any one of them easy. I emailed that request, right after my report on the night-club explosion. Officially, I’ve been on duty since midnight. There was one more report to type, and I wasn’t looking forward to it.

  I got started on that one, making sure to lock it down access-wise. No way, did I want this beastie free and easy out on the range. It wasn’t for public consumption. The team was down enough as it was, but they seemed to have forgotten my mention of things going wrong in the last coupla months.

  Just as I started into it, Blondie gave a whoop.

  “Gotcha!” she cried, banging on the keyboard, and then charging over to the printer just as it fired up.

  “Got what?” Red wanted to know, and I felt a frisson of unease.

  You see, I’d remembered why ‘Babe’ sounded so right coming out of his mouth, and that was because we’d been dating a while back, way before Tall-Dark and I had developed a thing, and not the cause of it. Tall-Dark and I had been sneaking around together for a few months before we started to have suspicions about things going wrong.

  Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

  We both figured The Albino was just a convenient excuse. He was new, and he was being set up. The thing was, neither Tall-Dark nor I could figure out why.

  Well, since having the night-club stage blown away beneath me, I was beginning to have a fair idea. It wasn’t exactly that things were going wrong because we had a plant from some dust syndicate. Quite the opposite, in fact, since the person who was busy seeing us screw up, was doing it because he wanted the syndicate to go down, but in a worse way than the law would allow, and he didn’t want to get caught doing it, or to let his job get in the way.

  Tall-Dark and I hadn’t been able to narrow the mishaps down to a particular information set, but we had been able to narrow it down to a person who’d had access to all the information sets—someone who stuck his nose into everything everyone on the team was doing.

  It would have been easy to blame it on the Albino, who was learning the ropes, and who did talk to every member the team, but he hadn’t had access to everything. Tall-Dark and I had made damn sure of that. We’d had the team members fill out training sheets for their performance reports, and we’d had the Albino fill one out, too. By cross-referencing the two sets, we’d narrowed our vengeful traitor down to one of two people—Blondie or Red.

  They were both at the printer, Blondie excitedly sharing her latest puzzle piece with Red, who was doing his usual thing of connecting the dots. I was pretty surprised when the Mouse packed up his desk, signed out of his computer, and headed for the door.

  “What?” he asked, when we all turned and looked at him…and then he yawned. “I’ve been on duty since eleven, and I’m going home to bed.”

  He’d been in the surveillance car, while I’d been singing my throat raw. I’d forgotten to debrief him, but I figured I could do that tomorrow. The poor guy just looked beat.

  “You want me to drive you?” Tall-Dark was already acting like a team leader.

  Actually, he’d been doing that for a while, now, so it didn’t matter that we’d been sprung—I’d have had to let him go, soon, anyway. The Mouse brushed away his offer.

  “I’m catching the bus,” he said. “Always do. I’ll be fine.”

  He caught the bus? And I’d thought he drove to work every day. It struck me, then, that I really didn’t know a lot about the Mouse, but he was gone, before I could think of an excuse to walk him to the stop. I shrugged, and went back to the report, thinking that, suddenly, things didn’t seem quite as straight forward as they had. After all, the Mouse had been in easy earshot of the copier conversation.

  Blondie went back to her desk, copy paper clasped tightly in one hand. She brought up her screen again, and began typing furiously, stopping occasionally to make notes on the papers she’d just printed. I worked on the report, aware that Tall-Dark was keeping a close eye on me. He had just started checking his watch in the most obvious way possible, when Blondie bounced out of her chair, and came over to my desk.

  I shut down the screen and turned to see what she’d found.

  “I’ve got a warehouse,” she said, and she was beaming.

  A warehouse was exactly what we needed, and she knew it.

  “Where?”

  “Up by Old Palmerville, where the CSIRO used to be.”

  “What are our chances of getting to this one without it blowing up?” I asked, seeing my chances at sleep vanishing at a rapid rate of knots. No wonder the Mouse had hit the door so fast. I guess he’d known what was coming.

  “Well, we need to get someone out there to check it out,” Blondie began. She glanced over at the Albino. “It’d be the perfect job for Deloit, there, to cut his teeth on.”

  “Not on his own.” Red was quick to protest, and I wondered when he’d ever started to care about someone apart from himself. He must have caught my thought, because he continued, with, “Someone should go with him, in case things go pear-shaped.”

  “Thanks for volunteering,” I said, and Red’s jaw dropped, almost like he hadn’t seen it coming. Hell, the man had surely worked with me long enough to know exactly how I’d react, right?

  I kept going before he could protest. “I’m out of hours. I’ll catch four in the bunk room, and then come relieve you.”

  I avoided Dylan’s eyes, when I said this. We both knew sending the Albino out with Red was like giving the hen to the fox. I looked over at Blondie, who looked like she was going to have a melt-down; it was her clue, after all.

  “I want you to see what you can find out about the place. Plans, if they still exist. Any recent security. Traffic cams”—not that we were likely to have any luck with that one—“Check for an increase in activity at the Gold Creek Maccas. It might give us a clue. And at the pub. I’m pretty sure there’s one of those nearby. Any new road works, walking tracks. See what comes up from the traffic copter overflights, yeah?”

  Blondie settled back down to her computer. She was the best person for this job, and she knew it. I was glad she’d figured out I wasn’t keeping her out of the loop—even if it wasn’t going to last. She was gonna be mighty pissed when she found out, just how bad Dylan and I had kept her in the dark.

  I shut down my terminal, and pushed back my chair, taking the time to glare at Red as I stood.

  “Why are you still here?” I asked. “Get the details from Blondie, and get your tails out to the site. If we’re gonna hit it tonight, I want some intel. You think you and the kid can handle it?”

  Given he’d been the one to tell me the Albino shouldn’t do it on his own, I was pretty sure he wouldn’t protest. The pair of them headed for Dianne’s desk, as I headed for the staff showers and the bunk room. Good thing, I kept a spare set of clothes here.