Shifting Focus (A Paranormal, Urban, Fantasy Novella) (Focus Series Book 2) by Alex Bostwick

Author:Alex Bostwick [Bostwick, Alex]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Fritzen Media
Published: 2016-07-20T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Five

An hour later, we sat at my kitchen table once more, this time drinking gin. I was still shaken from my conversation with Jason, but felt slightly better at Rick’s oddly protective response.

“I’ll rip his goddamn head off,” he swore.

“He can probably generate heat so great that it would ignite the atmosphere, Rick. The man is walking napalm.”

“Can’t do that if his heart isn’t beating.”

Rick insisted that I put my feet up, and they rested comfortably on his lap as we sat and pored over the documents I had recovered. True to my prediction, he had indeed made a comment about using my ass as storage space for the papers. I tried to act amused, but I was distracted by the prospect of doing something about the impending doom.

“This looks bad, Nora,” he told me, absently rubbing the arch of my foot.

I took a long drink, savoring the burn in my throat as it went down. “Nuclear explosions tend to be bad, yes.”

“Hundreds of thousands of people, at least. Just in the first detonations.”

“My thoughts exactly. It can get even worse after that. If the right locations are targeted…”

“An actual nuclear war.”

“It doesn’t make much sense, though. What could possibly be the motive for blowing up half the world?”

He traced a thumb lightly down the sole of my foot, pausing to take a drink. “Maybe to make himself King of the Radioactive Waste Heap?”

“Doesn’t track. The man’s a soldier, at the end of the day. It has to be about who is being eliminated, not what happens to him afterward. He’s bound to be targeting some specific locations.”

“What do you mean?”

“Jason… Fire agents are violent, yes. But by and large, they don’t go into places and level them. Most of their assignments involve eliminating specific targets, guard duty, occasionally putting down a military installation.”

“Assassins, you mean.”

“I wouldn’t call them that, but I suppose the term applies. They have specific mission parameters with their operations. Go here, eliminate this group, return to base. Some kind of Machiavellian power play in order to manipulate rogue nations to nuke targets runs counter to the way they operate. It just isn’t the way they do things.”

“Not to mention it would be awfully difficult for them to dictate to these people which targets they would hit.”

“Right. Imagine a guy like Jason talking terrorists into attacking someone other than who they wanted to in the first place. Hell, Washington or Hollywood would probably be high on their list of targets. And, whatever else we think about him, Jason wouldn’t want the United States to get nuked; the guy was born and raised in Kansas, for Christ’s sake.”

“We don’t have the whole picture.”

“We don’t.”

He was silent for a moment. He put my foot down, and switched to the other one. I hadn’t asked for a foot massage, but when a handsome man starts rubbing your feet, you don’t ask him to stop.

I was attracted to Rick. The past day had been a whirlwind of conspiracy theories

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