Covenant by Brandon Massey Page B

whirled to face her.  “Who are you?”
                Ignoring him, the woman put away the phone and rushed back to the staircase. 
                “Hey!” he said. 
                Quickly, she descended out of sight. 
                Cursing, Anthony hustled behind the wheel, slammed the door.  He slipped the Beretta out of the holster.  The weight of the pistol calmed him, but only a little.
                He took the Bible out of his jacket pocket and thumbed through it.  Various passages were highlighted with multicolored pens.  At the front of the book, on a page that stated, “This Bible Belongs To,” a name he didn’t recognize was inscribed in girlish handwriting.
                He placed the book on the passenger seat, leaned toward the windshield, and scanned the parking lot below.  He didn’t see Bob or the short guy with the tinted glasses, and the Latina woman had vanished as if she’d been only a figment of his paranoid imaginings. 
                But his nerves crackled like live wires.   
                Setting aside the gun but keeping it within reach, he backed out of the parking space and took the ramp to the lower level.  He exited the lot via a rear entrance.  Hitting a side road, he fed the gas and blew through the night.
                Trouble was on the way, the nature of which he didn’t yet fully understand.  But he had to get home, and quickly.   
     

14
     
                Outside The Varsity, Cutty and Valdez searched for the Judas, with no luck.  The traitor had escaped.
                “He is gone,” Valdez said, wind tossing strands of hair across her face.  “What do we do?”
                “Follow me,” Cutty said.       
                He marched across the parking lot to the Suburban.  Protocol required that he contact the dispatcher and notify him that he had lost the Judas, to allow them to use their awesome resources to relocate him.  But placing that call would be the equivalent of admitting failure, of telling his superior that he was not as capable as they believed him to be, and that they’d erred in giving him the task. 
                He had never failed, and he would not this time.  God hated losers.
                Ensconced in the driver’s seat, he powered on the mobile data terminal, which was mounted in the console beneath the stereo.  Much like the computers with which police cars were outfitted, the MDT was a customization to the truck, connected via satellite to their organization’s servers.  All of the vehicles in their division’s fleet were similarly equipped.
                A small, removable keyboard was slotted beneath the screen.  He slid it out and placed it on his lap.
                The greeting, “Welcome to the Genesis Network” filled the display, white text floating on an ocean-blue background. 
                “The man I asked you to follow,” he said to Valdez, “you got the plates from his vehicle like I asked you to?”
                “ Si. ”
                “God bless you, Valdez,” he said.  “You rock.”
                She smiled.  “ Gracias. ”
                He returned his attention to the screen, and entered his username and password to sign on to the network. 
                The Genesis Network was the brains of their division, a cutting-edge system of servers and software designed and administered by techies.  Gen, as it was casually known amongst them, was linked—sometimes secretly—to public and private databases across the globe.  He’d once toured the underground core data center where the network was housed, and had been awed by the vast chamber of servers taller than him, the giant monitors streaming rivers of data, and the gimlet-eyed programmers who spoke in