To say the woman was devastatingly beautiful would have been a gross understatement. Her long hair, so blonde that it was nearly white, was pulled into a functional braid and coiled against her neck, her eyes a startling blue that took a man's breath away. And the curves of her face, breathtaking in their perfection, were ageless as her sensuous lips curved up into a smile of her own at seeing the man in black. With such stunning physical beauty, she would have been allowed into the club without question, the envy of every woman in the line outside.
Yet, though her body was as stunning as her beauty, she was sheathed in black, as was Mordecai. And behind that perfect brow was a hardwired brain with power few in the psionic world even dreamed about.
If Mordecai was disturbed by such psionic ability directly in front of him, he gave no sign. Instead, he leaned back, arms crossed over his chest.
"So, what brings you to Calgary, Jeriko?" he asked softly. The woman chuckled softly as she took her eyes off the big man for a second to sweep the crowd.
"The same old Mordecai, cutting right to the chase without so much as a: 'Hey, Jeriko, long time no see! How've ya been?' Or: 'Damn, you look good, Jeri. Have you been working out?' You have heard of the social niceties, haven't you, Mordecai?"
Mordecai's smile thinned.
"Going to get to the point any time soon, Jeriko?" he said flatly and the blonde hardwire snorted before laughing softly.
"I guess I shouldn't have expected anything different, even after two years." The smile faded slightly. "The same thing that brought you here, my friend," she replied, bringing her gaze back to him. "This place has become such a node that eventually we'll all get dragged here. You just beat everybody else because you're stronger than any five of us put together, and then some."
"Huh," Mordecai snorted. "Of the node's power, I have no doubt. The damn thing generated a vision on the way in, for shit's sake." Reaching into an inside pocket, he drew out a long, flat crystal. "Here, read this. It may be the answer why."
Taking the crystal from the big man with a thoughtful expression on her beautiful face, Jeriko drew a silver, cigarette-case sized box from her own jacket, much like the devices that Mordecai used. Inserting the crystal into a slot in the box's top edge, she spoke softly.
"Excaliber, download all data from the crystal and format for reading."
"Confirmed, Jeriko," a soft male voice spoke from the silvery form and Jeriko frowned as a holographic page of text appeared in front of her at perfect reading distance. Then her bright blue eyes were scanning the scrolling information that rolled across the screen.
It didn't take her long to swear softly in Swedish under her breath.
"A coup against the Normals?" she said incredulously, looking up at Mordecai with an expression of sheer disbelieve. "Are they fucking insane??"
"More like genocidal," Mordecai replied grimly. "They have no concept of the Shield and hold Normals in such contempt, it'll be like squashing bugs underfoot when they strike. Jeriko, the entire future of the human race is at stake here. I'm not surprised the node is growing in leaps and bounds every damn day!"
Jeriko hissed another Swedish swear word before she deactivated her reader.
"And, by your own account, this 'Brotherhood' is massive," she said, earning herself a nod from the man in black.
"The network here, in Calgary, is just scratching the surface." He frowned. "If the scale is any indication, we're dealing with a worldwide organization with deep pockets, organization and determination."
"So how did something so big and so obviously malevolent grow without the lone gunmen finding out about it?" the blonde hardwire hissed tightly, staring hard at the table top as her mind raced.
"To be frank, I think we've already had several run-ins with this Brotherhood," Mordecai pointed out. "Remember Paris last year? And Hong Kong in '97? Not to mention a couple of weeks ago in the Bahamas." The big man's face tightened.
"In my conversation with Braddox, he asked if I was some sort of psionic cop, looking to curtail the Brotherhood's illegal activities. I would suspect that our recent entanglements, including Nassau, are all somehow Brotherhood-related. And they've been viewing our activity as some phantom psionic law enforcement agency working against them."
"Now we just have a name to give to the source of all the flare ups we've been encountering in the last few years." Jeriko slowly nodded her understanding. "Makes sense, unfortunately. Now the question is: how do we stop them?"
"And that would be a very good question indeed." Mordecai grimaced. "One whose answer I've been working on ever since I discovered the plans for the coup. But it eludes me still."
Despite her worry and concern about what the big man had just revealed to her, Jeriko found herself smiling as she looked into Mordecai's dark and intense eyes.
"Out of all of us, you're the only one that could possibly come up with an answer for this," she reassured him, reaching out to place a hand over his. She squeezed it lightly before letting go.
"Perhaps," Mordecai grudgingly conceded with a wry twist of his mouth. "But you and the others are still underestimating your own abilities. If I remember correctly, it was you and Craddoch that saved my ass in Paris after I got in over my head."
"That we did." Jeriko grinned as she fondly remembered how she and another lone gunman had swooped in at the last minute to pull the big man out of a situation that would have surely seen him dead. The kind of situation the most powerful of them all seemed to place himself into more often than not. One man against incredible odds, almost as if he had some sort of death wish.
Jeriko's eyes narrowed thoughtfully at that. Perhaps the big man did, after all. Perhaps they all did, tired of being ceaselessly pulled to and fro over the face of the earth in search of nodes in Reality where the course of evolution may be changed. It quickly became tiresome, having no control over one's life and destiny. And if she felt that, ...
She looked up at Mordecai, who seemed a thousand kilometers away as his brain worried the puzzle he had given it like a dog works a bone. If she felt that, then she could only imagine what he was feeling.
"C'mon," she said abruptly, standing as she took him by the hand. "Let's get out of here. Being around so many Normals is giving me the creeps!"
* * * *