“That’s all you know?”

“Yes,” she said. She said it very firmly because it was the truth. “It occurs to me you picked the wrong go-between. You would probably do better with someone who’s had more experience in the Pacific Northwest market. I’m still fairly new in this line of work. I’ve been doing it for only a few months.”

“Victor Arganbright and Lucas Pine think you’re the best one for this job. They’re almost never wrong.”

“Almost never?”

“When they screw up, they tend to go big.”

“I think you should consider the possibility they screwed up when they sent you to me.”

“Unfortunately, I don’t have time to line up another go-between,” North said. “Our first stop is Swan Antiques. We’re going to find out exactly what my father bought and take it from there.”

Grim determination charged the atmosphere. She understood. If it were her father who was trapped in a nonresponsive state she would be doing exactly what North was doing—using any means or any person necessary to get answers. Family was family.

“You do realize I’m not in business to do favors for the Foundation,” she warned. “My hourly rate is high. Very high.”

“Don’t worry, you’ll get paid. Now that I’m officially a client, let’s move. We’re wasting time.”

She held up a forefinger. “Just one more box to check off before I accept you as a client.”

North was starting to look pissed again. “What?”

“You’re not a Puppet, are you?”

“What self-respecting Puppet would work for the Foundation?”

He had a point. There were a lot of loose screws rattling around at the fringes of the paranormal underworld. Some were mentally ill individuals who heard voices or experienced hallucinations and believed they were being manipulated by people with psychic talent. There were also those with a measure of genuine talent who were unable to handle their psychic side. Instead of rationally processing the input from their paranormal senses they grasped at bizarre conspiracy theories to explain what seemed otherwise inexplicable. And then there were those who preyed on such individuals, conning them or luring them into cults.

All the so-called Puppets had one thing in common, aside from their fascination with conspiracies. They were afraid of the Foundation. They were convinced Victor Arganbright and his cleaners were bent on hunting them down with the intent of silencing them. Some believed that if they were picked up by the Foundation teams they would end up as test subjects in strange paranormal experiments.

Those who ran the cults and the scam artists who took advantage of the gullible also feared the Foundation. Victor Arganbright and his cleaners had developed a reputation for taking down the cons and the frauds. Most were handed over to regular law enforcement, but the underworld whisper mill held that some of the really dangerous people disappeared into a locked ward at Halcyon Manor, the private psychiatric hospital run by the Foundation.

So, yes, it was unlikely a Puppet would want to be connected in any way to the Foundation.