“How could you have let her get away?” snapped Edward “She was hurt, hurt bad, I could see that from the blood. She couldn’t have traveled very fast. You should have been able to stop her.” He glared at the other two men in the room. He was a middle aged man, and looked like nothing more than the successful business man that he pretended to be. He used the money from his illicit dealings to make his business look legitimate. Only a handful of people knew just how dangerous he could be and none of them had any desire to incur his wrath. They knew how threatening that could be to their health, indeed to their very lives.
“There were bullets flying all over the place, bottles breaking, glass flying into us, we did the best we could boss,” answered the professor. “It wouldn’t have done any good for us to get killed trying to grab her, we wouldn’t have had her then either and we wouldn’t have been around for another chance to capture her. This way at least we can keep trying.”
“Yes, well, you’d better make this other chance count for something,” snarled Edward. “I don’t keep you boys supplied with money and whatever for nothing. I expect you to make it worth my while, understand?”
“Yes boss,” answered Josh. “But…”
“I don’t need to listen to any of your buts,” snapped Edward. “That woman is one of the top agents in the country and probably the only one with the evidence to cause us any trouble. Plus she’s got information we can use. I need her alive and I need her here. Now that’s your orders, Get Patricia Mason and bring her here.”
“I doubt if she’ll talk,” spoke up the professor. “I remember what she was like as a kid. She was a genius, but she was still a kid. Stuborn little thing. Any thing she didn’t want to do, she didn’t do.”
“You just get her here,” ordered Edward. “You get her here, I’ll see to it that she talks. Now get out of here and stop wasting my time. There could be clues out there as to what happened and you need to find them.”
“Yes boss,” said Josh, he turned and hurried out of the room, glad to get out of there.
The professor nodded and followed after him. “I’m sort of glad he didn’t get his hands on her,” he thought to himself. “I can’t say I have any special love for Patricia, but I’ve known her since she was a kid and well, even though I want to capture her and use her money to carry out my experiments, I wouldn’t wish for my worse enemy to get in that guy’s hands. I wouldn’t be working with him myself if it wasn’t for the money he gives me for my experiments.”
“Whew,” said Josh. “I’m sure glad to get out of there.”
“Why do you work for him?” asked the professor, even though he was pretty sure he knew the answer.
“Same reason you do,” answered Josh. “If we don’t, he’ll make it look like we’re to blame for some of his deals and we’ll be the ones that go to jail. He can do it too, he’s got that much power.
We can’t just walk away, he’s got to much on us.”
“I guess your right,” answered the professor. “I’d sort of hate to see him get his hands on Patricia though. I knew her when she was a kid, her folks hired me as one of her teachers. Regular schools weren’t good enough for her, know what I mean? Minute that the school folks labeled her as a genius, they yanked her out of school and set up their own educational system for her. They had the money to do it too. They wouldn’t let her play with other kids or do a lot of things kids usually do, they said it was a waste of her time and her brain. Sometimes when we’d take a break in our work, I’d see her watching some kids out the window. I tried to tell her folks that even though she was a genius, she was still a kid and needed to be interactive with other kids to help her grow up able to interact with other folks, but they weren’t having it. They didn’t even want her around any kids in their own families.”
“How did she ever get into undercover agent stuff?” asked Josh. “I mean she’s one of the top ones in the country. We wouldn’t even know about her if we weren’t in our line of work.”
“I really don’t know,” answered the professor. “I’d better watch it,” he thought to himself. “This guy is trying to pump my brain to help him find Patricia. I don’t mind getting information from her to help Edward, provided helping him helps me, but I don’t really want to see her get killed or anything. If it’s her or me, well that’s a different story.”
“Well, I guess we’d better both get going, see what we can find out,” said Josh. “You’ve got quite a mess to clean up in your lab. Maybe you’ll find some clues there.”
“Yes,” answered the professor. “And I want to talk to my assistants too. I saw how badly she was hurt, I can’t believe she managed to get away. Somebody had to have helped her, she couldn’t have done it by herself. Question is, who helped her and why?”
The two men parted and each went their own way, each bent on finding Patricia Mason, otherwise known, although not to them, as Amanda Younger.
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