Then the shimmer died away, and his brother’s familiar face stared back at him. “You don’t know how good that feels.”
“I can imagine,” he said wryly. “Now tell me why all that was necessary.”
Stephan shrugged. “For a while I’ve felt that the usefulness of Hanrahan’s image was coming to an end. Too many people were beginning to suspect he was my alter identity—especially since both Hanrahan and I appeared to be suffering the same mysterious ailment. There was only so long Hanrahan could legitimately claim to be losing weight.”
Gabriel propped his feet on the end of the bed and leaned back in the chair. “Who, precisely?” Certainly he’d never heard any whispers about it.
“Lys knew, naturally enough. But I think both Mary and Martyn suspected, and I’m sure Byrne knew something was wrong—even if he didn’t know what.”
“Is that why you’ve taken his image?”
Stephan nodded. “I needed a new identity, and he fit the criteria. No immediate family, few friends. A loner who loved his work.”
“Did you kill him?”
Stephan’s smile held a hard edge. “I’d planned to, but my offices were right under where the bomber hit, and we were both caught in the rubble—him more than me. I doubt there’ll be much of him left to find—but I left some of Hanrahan’s personal effects, just to be sure.”
Gabriel nodded. If there was enough left to perform DNA tests, there might be problems—though it was nothing they hadn’t handled before. When the real Hanrahan had died in a boating accident, the Federation had altered the tests long before the coroner saw them.
“Tell me about the warning you got.”
Stephan rubbed his eyes. “The line trace said the caller was female, probably in her mid-thirties. She was calling from a phone booth in the Dandenongs.”
Odd. The four men who’d beaten him up had been hightailing it up there before Karl stopped them. Did that mean Sethanon had a hideout up there? “What did she say, exactly?”
“That the SIU building was about to be bombed. That I had five minutes to live.”
Reynolds said the bomb had gone off three minutes after Hanrahan received the call—obviously, the State boys questioning the driver of the bomb car had disrupted his plans. Gabriel frowned. “You had five minutes to live? Isn’t that a little strange? Why not say you had five minutes to evacuate the building?”
“I have no idea, and at the time, I was too busy trying to trace the call and check authenticity to worry about it. Plus, I was deep in the throes of another murder. One of the kites struck again tonight.”
Gabriel swore softly. “Who?”
“I don’t know. The bomb went off before confirmation came through.” Stephan shrugged. “We’re just damn lucky we got a warning, otherwise the SIU might well be crippled right now.”
Gabriel suspected luck had nothing to do with it. While he had no doubt that the aim of the bomb had been to cripple the SIU, he also had no doubt that someone out there didn’t want them to die. Or rather, didn’t want Stephan to die. That call had come direct to his office, after all. “Did she say anything else?”
“She told me the make and number of the car. I looked out the window, saw the car and ordered the evac.”
“Were you the reason the State boys investigated the car?”
“No. That was sheer chance. I had some of our own people headed up there, but they arrived far too late to prevent this tragedy.”
No one could blame the State boys for simply doing their job, though. It was just an unfortunate sequence of events. “I don’t suppose you recognized the voice?”
Stephan shook his head. “Voice scanning was in progress, but the system just didn’t have long enough before it all went to hell.”
Had the call come from the woman supposedly impersonating Lyssa? Or perhaps even Mary, using some form of voice modulator? Though why would either of them warn Stephan if they were involved with Sethanon or Kazdan? It didn’t make any sense. But, as he’d already noted repeatedly, nothing about this situation made any sense.
And with the computer network down, and who knew what information destroyed, any chance of a cross-check of the woman’s voice against Lyssa’s or Mary’s was gone. His only option now was checking whether either woman had left her safe house near the time of the warning. “Any idea who might be behind the bombing?”
“It’s probably Sethanon.”
It was a logical conclusion, given the bombing of Stephan’s place. And if Sethanon could get a shapeshifter into the labs to lock away Sam’s files, he could easily have arranged to have a car drive into the side of the building and explode. What didn’t make sense was the why. In the past, Sethanon’s methods tended to be a little more subtle. “I think he’s smart enough to realize that bombing the SIU will only make it stronger—past efforts to destroy us have certainly proven that.”
“What are you saying? That it could be any one of the hundreds of people who have a gripe against the SIU? None of them have gone this far for revenge before.”
“No. Personally, I think it’s Kazdan.”