The Shadow Project Read Free Page B

Fran snorted, but GC went on without a pause: “There’s nothing missing from the house, and I know our staff handled you a little roughly, so why don’t you just tell us what you did and what you saw, and maybe we could see our way to forgetting the whole thing.”
    â€œGeorge!” Fran exclaimed, like she was shocked by the suggestion.
    So Good Cop’s name was George, but the most important words in his speech were what you saw , Danny thought. They were up to no good, that much was obvious, and wanted to know how much of it he’d spied. Which meant there was a chance he might get out of this with a whole skin, but he had to be careful. The thing was, he hadn’t seen much. There’d been the girl, and God alone knew what they’d been planning to do to her, but just at the precise minute he’d seen her, they hadn’t actually been doing anything. She was the one who stopped him from punching what’s-his-name-Michael in the mouth, so unless she was Houdini, she couldn’t have been strapped into an electric chair.
    Danny considered his options. In a situation like this you couldn’t assume they were stupid, couldn’t pretend you’d seen nothing. This was a critical moment and he had to play it right. “All right, it’s a fair cop. I did come inthinking there might be something…you know, some cash, lying around. But the door really was open, I swear it, and that’s a big temptation when your mother—” He was going to say needs an operation but decided that would be overdoing it. “—has all those bills to pay. But I didn’t take anything, I swear to God I didn’t.”
    They didn’t look like they were buying it. Danny said hurriedly, “Anyway, when I came down here, there was a girl getting her hair done in a room with bats flying round her head, and next thing I knew this guy was running at me and I panicked, I admit it, and I hit him. But I didn’t mean any harm and I didn’t take anything, not a thing.” He thought of making an impassioned plea for freedom, but decided to leave well enough alone and stopped, waiting for a reaction.
    Good Cop George was frowning. “Did you say ‘bats flying round her head’?”

5
Opal, Lusakistan
    T here were mountains, of course, but they looked completely different from the last time. Opal stared. This was her third trip to Lusakistan, to the same part of the Pakistan border, but—
    She stopped. Mr. Carradine hadn’t said the Pakistan border, now that she came to think of it. He’d said border with China. She didn’t even know Lusakistan had a border with China. So this was a different part of Lusakistan altogether, but just as rocky, miserable, and depressing as the bits she’d already seen. The mountains were all around her, a barren wasteland.
    There was no sign of a camp.
    Which meant nothing, of course. On this sort of mission, the coordinates were always approximate and sometimes just plain wrong. You could travel for miles before you found the exact place you were looking for. But there was a standard procedure, drummed into herby her father and Mr. Carradine. You examined the area where you landed, moving in gradually widening circles. You took your time and were extremely thorough, because even though coordinates were always approximate and mistakes were often made, the area where you landed was still the most likely place to find your target. So you searched it thoroughly before you even thought of anything else.
    Opal moved away carefully. She was looking, basically, for signs of life—any signs of life. Once she spotted something—anything—she could investigate further. She was excited, as she always was on a mission. After nearly a year as an operative—and eight months of preliminary training—that had never faded. It wasn’t the thrill of danger. When she was tracking terrorists, she felt