No Hero Read Online Free Page A

though maybe five years younger, from before she tipped over into forty, and she has shorter hair and longer bangs. But it’s her picture, and it’s her name, and her title, and it does look terribly official, but I have to say I wouldn’t know a military intelligence ID badge if one approached me at a party and offered to show me a good time.
    “I’m sorry,” I say. “I just don’t know...”
    Felicity Shaw nods, which is a better reception than I’d anticipated. “Your cynicism stands you well,” she says. She looks away from me, out of the window. “Still, I’m surprised to find you with such a mindset after all you’ve seen.”
    It’s the conversational equivalent of slapping me about the face. I sit up straight as a bolt, stare at her, while she continues to study the window. “What are you talking about?” I ask her. But I know exactly what she’s talking about.
    And she knows I do. “They’re called the Progeny,” she says. “The creature you saw in the victim’s head. It’s called a Progeny.”
    “Shit,” I say, which is about as honest as I can get at that moment. “What do you want to know?”
    “Actually, Detective, it’s the other way around. I want to tell you about what I know.”
    She’s crazy, of course. That’s the obvious explanation, I realize. She’s escaped from another wing of the hospital. Except her madness is the same color and shade as mine. It has the same details. It’s as if she pulled the madness out of my head and into the world. But that’s not what happened, I know. So that means she’s not crazy, and I’m not, but that the world is.
    “What is there to tell?” I ask.
    Shaw’s eyes leave the window, look around the rest of the room. “Not here,” she says. “I’ll fetch you a wheelchair.”

3
    I always assumed that if you have a clandestine organization then you’d have a clandestine headquarters. Stands to reason. And—I concede this point—Oxford is, admittedly, short on skull-shaped volcanoes. Shark-infested waters— ditto. But there is some pretty awesome architecture. Dreaming spires and all that. I always thought you could bury something beneath the limestone columns and copper dome of the Radcliffe Camera. Hide something in the depths of the Bodleian Library—down between the winding stacks, through miles of books, with just one ancient tome that acts as a lever to open some hidden passageway. So when Shaw tells me, “It’s about two miles to the office,” I can’t help but be a little disappointed.
    There is no romance in the term, “the office.” Then again, Shaw seems more likely to fantasize over spreadsheets than biceps and bodice-ripping. I don’t exactly see her as the type to adore purple prose or books with Fabio on the cover.
    There again, neither am I.
    She pilots the van through Oxford’s tourist-loving heart, and heads toward the train station. She pulls up outside a shabby building thrown up in the sixties by an architect who clearly was less into dreaming spires and more into concrete squares. Shaw fetches the wheelchair from the boot of the car and I heft myself into it.
    “We’re in the basement,” she tells me. Which briefly conjures images of secret passageways and hidden riches, but I’m not that hopeful anymore.
    Shaw punches a six-digit code into a pad beside the door, her fingers a staccato blur. I can’t follow the keys she hits. The door buzzes. A second door, another code. No beeps, just the rhythm of her nails on the keys. No clues for me. To take the elevator down requires a key.
    “No thumbprint scanner?” I ask. Not my best joke, but I’m trying to make light. Then the elevator doors slide open and, of course, there one is. So I don’t even manage that.
    Considering how insecure I’m starting to feel, it’s almost a relief when the elevator doors open onto an utterly mundane corridor, lined with mundane gray office doors. The first word that really springs to mind is industrious, except...