Sci swore again. He'd been doing a lot of that lately.
After Mike left on his errand, and Becki on hers, he decided that they needed to try to track down Josh as well. He did, however, recall the warning Vickie had given him. Vague as it had been, it had told him what he needed to know: Josh was slipping down the steep slope that Jedi stood on. In that case, Sci decided, he needed to handle this personally.
Though not solo... that would be inefficient. There was one other person who could probably be helpful if Josh was going all-out with the Force.
Unfortunately, Sci was often the only person who trusted him; everybody else only did that when they could see him and both his hands.
Well, never mind them. Sci did trust him. At the same time, he knew that this person was big on looking out for Number 1. Less so than he used to be, though.
I hope.
"Brad, I need you to come with me."
"Where are we going?"
"To find Josh."
"Two people out in a city containing unknown numbers of enemies, trying to find a Jedi who may or may not be out of control?"
"Could be worse."
"I fail to see how."
"One person out in a city containing unknown numbers of enemies, trying to find a Jedi who may or may not be out of control."
"... Point."
"Just remember... It can always be worse. You could be Mike. Come on."
"All right, this is where the firefight happened." Sci stood in an alleyway in the Old City of Jerusalem.
"You were with him." Brad, looking nonchalant, was leaning against a wall.
"Lenka was shot, he went berserk..."
"How do you mean?"
"'You wouldn't like me when I'm angry,'" Sci said by way of elaboration.
Brad didn't shudder, but he looked nonplussed. "I see. Not a pleasant thought."
"No kidding. I was looking after Lenka. I looked up, he was gone. I figured he'd moved to assist others, but that seems to have been the last anyone's seen of him."
"Shame. The trail's getting cold." Ice cold, in fact. Sci sighed softly as he admitted that.
"True. I don't suppose you can pick up on anything I'd miss?" Brad was the heir to some sort of other Force discipline, after all. Sci hoped maybe he could see something.
"Not at the moment. You'll know if I do."
"I know you prefer to work alone. He disabled his trackers, but I pulled their last locations. We'll start from there and split up."
"Fine. Lead the way."
At the point where the technological trail ended, Sci headed one way and Brad headed the other. Sci walked up and down the streets, posing as an American agent of some sort (he was deliberately vague, but left the impression that he was either a high-level intelligence operative or a private investigator, or something else), asking if anybody had seen Josh, with a visual aid.
No luck for a while, until one shopowner said he had seen the man chasing another man down the street. "Very late, too. Almost woke my children."
"Do you happen to know the other man?"
"If it's who I think it was, he's some sort of American agent himself."
"How do you know that?" Sci's heart sank.
The man tapped his temple. "Mossad. Twenty years, and I'm still a reservist."
Sci smiled despite his bad feeling. "You and everybody else. Once an agent, always an agent?" The other man nodded and Sci continued on. He's chasing Wells, he thought. This could be bad.