Silver Master

Chapter 11

HE WAS STILL FEELING UNNERVED THE NEXT MORNING when he walked into his office. Everything had gone wrong again last night. First, they had been unable to find the relic in the woman’s apartment, and then Brinker had nearly been caught when he tried to search Oakes’s car. It had been a very close call.

Ella Allonby, seated behind the reception desk, looked up from some papers.

“Good morning, Dr. Kennington,” she said in her crisp, well-modulated, businesslike way.

Everything about her was crisp, well-modulated, and businesslike. She was forty-three years old and astonishingly good at her job. But he hadn’t hired her for her office management skills. He had chosen her because she was secretly enamored of him. That made her extremely easy to manipulate.

He paused in front of her desk and gave her a warm smile. “How does my schedule look today, Miss Allonby?”

The impact of the smile brought color to her cheeks just as he had known it would. As always, the wielding of power over another human being, even in such a small way, gave him a pleasant little rush.

“Busy, as usual, sir,” she said. “You have three patients this morning and two this afternoon.”

“Excellent. Thank you, Miss Allonby.”

He went into the inner office, closing the door behind him, and set his briefcase on the desk. He hung the hand-tailored gray silk jacket on the coat rack and then sat down behind the desk.

He looked around the office and felt the old anger rise inside. How had it come to this? He should have been president of the Society of Para-Psychiatrists by now, with a lucrative private practice on the side. He should be publishing papers in the most esteemed journals. He should be giving lectures at the university.

Instead, he had been reduced to changing his identity and starting over as a so-called dream therapist. It was humiliating for a man of his power and brilliance. He might as well hang out a shingle advertising himself as a meditation guru or offering to read astrological charts and tea leaves.

A year ago his life and career had been on track. He had been headed straight to the very top of his profession. But the narrow-minded fools at the institute had failed to comprehend his genius. Instead, they had fired him. Fired him. His hand clenched in a fist. Not only that, but the administrator had made it clear that he would never get a decent reference. For all intents and purposes, the bastard had destroyed his career.

Admittedly, there had been some unsatisfactory outcomes among the subjects, but that was the nature of the experimental process. It was no reason to fire him. The truth was that it was professional jealousy that had led to his dismissal.

No matter. One day soon they would all pay.

But first he had to find the other relic. Luckily at this point the Guild had no inkling that there were two of the ruby amber devices. The psi-burned hunter who had found them down in the catacombs had turned over only one of the artifacts to the Guild. Sensing that the relics had great value, he had concealed the other one.

Fortunately, the para-trauma the hunter had experienced had brought him to the hospital where Kennington had been working. He had discovered the man’s secret in the course of an experiment. It had been no trick at all to pull the location of the concealed relic out of the patient. The man had, of course, died soon thereafter. It had been suicide, according to the records. It was true the hunter had been severely depressed. Kennington had made sure of it with a carefully measured dose of psi meds.

It had taken months to find a thief capable of stealing the second artifact from the Guild vault.

The other bit of good news was that it was obvious that the Guild had no clue as to the nature of the kind of power the artifacts could generate when they were operated by an individual who possessed the right type of psychic talent, his type. Those with his brand of psi abilities were statistically quite rare. The odds were excellent that no one else would realize that the relic was anything other than an alien curiosity. Nevertheless, he wanted it in his possession as quickly as possible.

One thing was clear now: Davis Oakes was a problem. Any ghost hunter capable of destroying a doppelganger without generating green fire had to be taken seriously. More crucially, Oakes appeared to have Celinda Ingram in his control. That meant that she was the key to the missing relic.

He rezzed the computer and searched for everything he could find on Celinda Ingram, professional marriage consultant. Everyone had a weakness.

He discovered Celinda’s in less than five minutes.