Read Online Interesting Times (Interesting Times #1) by Matthew Storm - Free Book Online Page A

me like…well, I never asked again.”
    “Why does she look like a child?”
    “I don’t know.” He shrugged. “She never
hit puberty?” he guessed.
    “I see,” Oliver said, although he didn’t
see at all. “And you work for her. How did you get involved in this?”
    “I used to be a cop,” Tyler said.
“Honolulu. I got mixed up in…well, that’s not really important right now. When
the smoke cleared, Artemis recruited me.”
    “And you just went along with her?”
    “After what I’d seen?” Tyler asked. His
eyes took on a faraway look for a moment. “She made an offer and I didn’t have
to think about it for long. I was never going to be the same person again.”  He
used his chopsticks to toy with a piece of chicken. “I guess I could have
buried my head in the sand and pretended none of it was real, but that’s not
me. I don’t regret it, not really. My world is a lot bigger now. The things
I’ve seen since then…” he trailed off.
    “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t
believe,” Oliver quoted from an old sci-fi movie.
    “You’ve got it,” Tyler nodded. “That’s
it exactly.”
    “So there’s you, and that psycho Sally…”
A dark look crossed Tyler’s face and Oliver knew immediately he’d gone too far.
    “You want to cut her some slack,” Tyler
said, a little roughly. “She’s had a bad time lately. The way she is right now,
she’s not always like that.”
    “What happened?” Oliver asked.
    Tyler looked down, considering.
“Something terrible,” he said finally. “It’s not my place to say. But the
person you met today isn’t the person I met two years ago.”
    It didn’t seem worth pushing the issue.
Oliver decided to change the subject.  “So are you guys government agents? Some
secret agency you could tell me about, but then you’d have to kill me?”
    Tyler reached into his back pocket and
found his wallet. He flipped it open and showed Oliver a badge that identified
him as John Connor, a special agent with the FBI.
    “Really?” Oliver asked. “Wait… John
Connor ?”
    Tyler chuckled as he flipped the wallet
shut. “No, of course not. Well, check that, the badge itself is real. If you
run that through any government computer it’ll verify my name and that I’m an
agent, but it’s not really true. I’ve never even been to Quantico. It’s just
part of the bag of tricks.”
    “How did you get the badge, then?”
    “Artemis has contacts everywhere. I mean everywhere . And anything she can’t get, Seven could probably make.”
    “You said that name before. ‘Seven.’
He’s your tech support guy?”
    “Well, he’s not just the guy who fixes
the printer when it breaks, but yes. You may meet him, eventually, but he
doesn’t leave the office much. Has trouble with crowds.”
    Oliver nodded as if everything he was
hearing did not sound completely nuts. “So it’s just the four of you? That’s
just enough that you could all fit inside a van.  You could drive around
together, solving mysteries.”
    “I made that joke once,” Tyler said.
“Nobody else got it.”
    “Oh.”
    “And it’s not just us. We actually have
branch offices all over the world, but they’re mostly just support staff with
the odd specialist here and there. I doubt most of them have any idea what we
actually do. Sally and I are the only field agents, at the moment. There are
never more than a handful of us. Well, in my time, anyway. I can’t say
historically. Artemis has been doing this for a long time.”
    “How long?”
    Tyler shook his head and shrugged. “Last
chance for a pot sticker,” he said, motioning at the soon-to-be-empty plate.
    “That’s okay,” said Oliver.
    “Your loss,” Tyler said, popping it into
his mouth.
    The door to the restaurant swung open
and a bedraggled homeless man wandered in. Oliver recognized him; he’d seen the
man panhandling in the financial district dozens of times. He’d given the man
change once or twice, if he remembered