by Rachel Caine
“Brent,” Patrick said. “I can’t lie. There could be blowback from this. Watch your ass.”
That made the older man—Bryn couldn’t think of him as old, even though objectively he probably was—laugh. It sounded like a gravel crusher loaded with broken glass. “Son,” he said. “You think I do anything but? Fuck off. I’m done.” He slid the curtain closed with a brisk whip of his wrist, and Bryn unfolded the paper. On it was a two-line address. The city was Paradise, California.
Ironic.
As they walked away from the bar, she looked over at Patrick and said, “How do you know he won’t turn around and sell us out?”
“He won’t,” Patrick said. “He may be a hard bastard, but he’s loyal. And like it or not, he did owe me. He’ll die before he tells them a damn thing.”
She hoped he was right.
Chapter 11
San Francisco was about an hour away, but they only skirted it; in Oakland, they found a long-term parking garage thanks to Google, which was exactly what they needed. The place was staffed, but with lackluster, disinterested employees who were just holding space until it was time to clock out. No problem to shop the available selection and choose the best without anyone noticing, especially since Patrick spotted and disabled the cameras first.
Then it was just a matter of waiting until the attendant went for a restroom break, then picking the lock on the booth to retrieve the key, conveniently labeled by space number. Patrick even logged the car out on the computer, since the attendant had left it running without password protection, and they’d started it and driven off the lot before he ever made it back.
Patrick even put the cameras back into working order on the way out. With even average luck, they had a clean car, one the police wouldn’t flag for days, maybe even months.
Plus, it was a pretty sweet ride . . . some kind of BMW, one of the luxury models with all the bells and whistles. Patrick tried to take the first shift driving, but Bryn sensibly pointed out that he was still healing, and she wasn’t, so a nap would do him good. In true military fashion, he took about two minutes to sack out in the embrace of the butter-soft leather upholstery. Driving in Cali wasn’t exactly a hardship, and Bryn enjoyed feeling in control, for once—even in a minor way, by controlling speed and direction of her forward motion. And this time, there was forward motion. A Fountain Group member, on their radar. Finally.
The miles passed fast and effortlessly; the BMW was a gas sipper, not a gulper, so she had to pull in to fill up only once along the way. At the stop, Patrick woke up, visited the men’s room, and demanded to take a turn at the wheel. Despite the cups of coffee that Bryn bought, and the fact that she drank all of hers, she was asleep in minutes once they were on the road again, seduced by the faint, low rumble of the road beneath their wheels.
But she woke up instantly when she felt the speed of the car change, and opened her eyes to see that they were taking an exit from the freeway . . . toward Chico. Paradise, according to the map, was just a few miles from that medium-sized metropolis . . . a sparse community, looked like, scraping out a living in tough country. “We’re close,” he said. “We’re going to need to do some reconnaissance.”
“How about a blatant drive-by?” she asked. “Nobody’s looking for us. Not here.”
“You hope,” he said, but it was an absent-minded, reflexive sort of pessimism—well earned, these days. “Keep your hat on.”
She slid on sunglasses as well—the car’s owner was female, and had helpfully included some sweet designer frames. “How’s that?”
“Spyworthy,” he said. “Keep watch. You see anything suspicious, we abort and go at this another way.”
But they didn’t spot anything. Chico was a nice town, nobody looked at them twice, and by the time they were out heading for Paradise, they were almost alone on the road, except for the ever-present truckers. The hills were rugged, but the BMW handled them with style, and they made good time.
The built-in satnav led them through the small downtown of Paradise—pretty, neat, perched up above the coast’s fog and away from the hot zones. It looked, Bryn thought, like the kind of place she’d enjoy staying—something that might actually live up to the name, if you enjoyed the rustic comforts.
They didn’t stop. The navigation system led them outside of town, up into the hills, and indicated a dirt-road turnoff that looked isolated and private.
“Drive-by isn’t going to work,” she said, and Patrick nodded. “So, this is a job for the infantry. Want to let me out?”
“I’m not letting you go on your own,” he said, and went another mile or two before pulling the BMW into a scenic overlook spot. It had some deserted picnic tables, so it probably got some traffic; the car wouldn’t attract too much attention, provided it didn’t stay for long. “One sec.” He pulled the chip out of the navigation system and pocketed it. “Just in case.”
They locked the car, and Bryn hoped they’d see it again; she’d miss her backpack, badly. The meat had no doubt gone rancid by now, and even though she could almost certainly still eat it—with nauseating pleasure—her conscious mind had enough decency left to object unless there was no other choice. She needed to find something less perishable—maybe beef jerky, by the pound. That thought made her stomach growl, again. Oh, relax, she told the nanites, annoyed. You’re not exactly working hard.
The hike was a little strenuous but it felt good, stretching those muscles, and it had been too long since Bryn had been in the trees, enjoying the fresh breezes and the dappled sun. Patrick spotted animals better than she did, and pointed out a deer watching them from a thicket, motionless and wary; as soon as she looked, it bounded away with hardly a rustle of brush.
Within half a mile, they came upon the fence. It was, at first glance, not much of a thing . . . more an annoyance than a barrier. But they both paused and took a closer look. It was for show, of course; the real security came from proximity sensors that would feed directly into the house’s security. There were probably motion-activated cameras, too.
Patrick took her hand in a very natural sort of motion, and they strolled a little ways down the fence line to a clearing, where he pressed her against a tree and kissed her. That was nice. More than nice, actually. She had a sudden fantasy of sex in the soft grass, but she knew what he was doing . . . creating a plausible show for the cameras. “So,” he said, as he kissed her neck. She didn’t have any difficulty showing enthusiasm for that move. “Recon is probably a bust, unless you want to spend a couple of days camping out and watching the comings and goings.”
“That’s a no. It just gives them more time to trace us.”
“Then we just go?”
“We just go,” she said.
“Now?”
“Dark won’t help.” These days, the serious security had night vision cameras, and motion sensors never slept. Without tech help, they wouldn’t be able to overcome it anyway.
What they had left was pure ferocity and nerve. Unknown odds, unknown conditions, and they didn’t even know if their target was on-site.
“I love you,” he murmured, and kissed her again, with real heat. “Let’s go.”
She felt her adrenaline surge, and a smile form without any direction from her conscious brain. And then, without more than a breath to prepare, they both turned, leaped the fence, and began running for their target.
There was no outcry, no barking dogs or sirens to give alarm. The two of them were fast, and Bryn faster than Patrick, although he worked hard to catch up when he could. The uphill course crossed a couple of small streams flowing the other way, and she leaped them easily without much of a pause. It felt good, this run. This hunt. It felt like she’d been born for it. Engineered for it, at the very least.
When she flushed a rabbit out of her path, the urge to chase it down and feast was strong, insanely so, and she had to struggle to tamp it down. The distraction allowed Patrick to catch and pass her, and she took a deep breath to center herself again.
Then they both reached the top of the ridge together, shaded and concealed by the tree line, and looked down on a steep slope that led to a pasture. A large one, marked by a genuinely serious fence that marked this as an estate, and maybe a compound. The pasture was a glass-smooth expanse of lush green, no cover, no protection. The wall was eight feet high and reinforced with razor wire at the top.
“Shit,” Patrick said, which pretty much summed it up. “We can’t wait. They’ll know we’re coming.”
Maybe they did, but if so, there wasn’t the response that Bryn would have expected to see—no boiling-up of security personnel, no vehicles, no dogs. Nothing. She didn’t see a thing moving, anywhere.
“You getting a bad feeling?” she asked him. Patrick didn’t take his eyes off the scene lying before them.
“Yeah. Either this guy is supremely confident his fence will keep us out, he’s got something in place we can’t see that he knows will kill us, or . . .”
“. . . or there’s something very wrong here,” Bryn finished. He nodded. “Well. Only one way to find out. You stay behind me, no matter what.”
He drew his sidearm and nodded; no macho arguments, which was a relief. He knew she could take the abuse.
She jumped out onto the downslope and ran down, hearing a tumble of rocks and soil behind her. As soon as she cleared the tree line she felt exposed and cold, despite the warm morning sun. Any second, she expected to feel bullets striking, followed by the time-delayed chatter of a machine pistol . . . but she reached the fence easily, without any kind of attack or alarm.
Patrick said, “Bryn! On your nine!” She turned left, expecting to see an enemy, but there was nothing but fence, and . . . and a gate.
And the gate was a whole lot easier to scale than the wall itself.
Bryn climbed, slipped down the other side, and unlocked it to swing it open for Patrick, who eased in with his eyes darting from one side of the interior pasture area to the other. Nothing to see, not even a dog or a gardener. Eerily quiet.
“Maybe he’s gone,” she said. “This may not be his full-time home.”
“You know us rich people with our vagabond ways,” Patrick said, but he wasn’t disagreeing. “Go. I’ll cover you.”
There wasn’t any need. There were no booby traps, no ambushes, no hidden deadly enemies. They simply ran—and then walked—right up to the front door.
The mansion was big, and conventionally built for this part of the country. . . . It was what the well-to-do thought of as “rustic” despite being completely modern, just with rougher log finish. All the lights were on inside. Bryn thought about opening the door, but then, on a whim, decided to just . . . knock.
The door was answered by a boy.
Bryn blinked. Yes, that was a boy, all right, about ten years old, brown hair, a coffee-and-cream skin tone, eyes so darkly colored it was hard to tell iris from pupil. He stared at her for a second, then turned and yelled at ear-piercing volume, “Dad! They’re here!”
Bryn looked over her shoulder at Patrick, who seemed just as stunned. He quietly holstered his gun. So did she. Bryn had time to mouth, what the fuck? and then the boy moved aside, and a man stepped up into the doorway in his place.
He was medium height, a little plump and straining the buttons on his button-down shirt. Well-worn jeans and battered work boots.
“Ah,” he said. “Come in. I’ve been expecting you; I don’t think there’s anything I can add to what you already know, but I’ll certainly try. Can I offer you a drink? Iced tea, maybe?”
“Sure,” Bryn said. She wasn’t at all sure what the hell was going on, and from his expression, neither was Patrick. “That’d be fine. Excuse me, but you are Martin Reynolds?”
“All day long,” the man said. “And you’re here about the Fountain Group. Aaron, go play with your sister. Stay out of here until I call you—understand?”
The boy looked up at his father and frowned. “Why can’t I stay?”
“Boring stuff,” Reynolds said. “Go. Scoot.” As his son ran off through the large, comfortable living room and turned to the right, Reynolds watched him with a soft, loving smile. “Good kid.” He turned and met Bryn’s gaze with surprising directness. “Come on. Let’s get you that tea and sort all this out.”
Chapter 12
Bryn had to wonder whether Patrick found this as surreal as she did—sitting at the breakfast table in the big granite-countered kitchen while the man they’d been dead set on capturing made them iced tea. With freshly sliced lemons. “I saw you on the security cameras,” he said. “I’d have gone out to let you in, but I was afraid you’d think that was confrontational.”
He set Bryn’s iced tea in front of her, then Patrick’s. She gave Patrick a little shake of her head to tell him not to drink yet, and took a deep mouthful. Cold, tangy, and good. She waited for any ill effects, but nothing came.
“So—you’re on the board of the Fountain Group.”
“Yes.” He put his glass down, and his easy expression shifted to something serious. “At least I was, until very recently. Until I discovered exactly what they were doing in their . . . processing centers. I’ve resigned now, and I can assure you, I had absolutely no idea of the cost overruns associated with the research. If I’d known, I’d have taken aggressive action to rein in that kind of reckless behavior.”
The stunning cluelessness of it made Bryn sit there, staring at him, unable to think how to even begin. Finally she said, “You were concerned about the costs,” she repeated. “What about the—ethics of what you were doing?”
“Ethics?” He said it as if the word were untranslatable. Maybe it was, in his world. “Look, this is about budgets, isn’t it? I told you, when the true costs were uncovered, I just found it all unacceptable, and I simply could not sign off on the expense of turning it into the expanded program. That’s all. I know you’re here from the auditors, but—”
“Auditors,” Patrick said, and pulled his sidearm. He put it on the table between them with a heavy thunk on the wood. “You really think we’re auditors.”
Bryn watched his eyes go blank and wide, and his knuckles whiten around his glass. He didn’t make a move. Finally, he licked his lips and said, “What is this?”
“It’s a gun,” Bryn said. “I can give you make and model, if that’s what you’re asking. But I think we need to rewind this conversation again. Why exactly did you quit?”
“I—I told you! I found out there were significant costs that weren’t being accounted for, and it was bound to come out. I wanted to be on record as having nothing to do with it. . . . What’s going on? Why are you carrying a gun?”
“More than one,” Bryn said, and showed him hers, concealed under the jacket. “You’re talking about numbers. We’re talking about lives. The Fountain Group is killing people, Mr. Reynolds.”
“Dr. Reynolds,” he said, in an automatic sort of way as if he corrected people all the time. He did strike her as an academic more than a businessman, she thought. Someone with his head in the ivory-tower clouds. “I have no idea why you would say a thing like that, Miss Davis.”
“Bryn,” she said. “Since we’re all friendly, Dr. Reynolds. And I say that because I’ve seen it. I’ve seen the experiments. I’ve seen the damage. I’ve seen the death. And you were part of it.” His clueless confusion was making anger knot tight inside her guts. How could he—how dare he sit there with his iced tea in his smug little mountain getaway and tell her that he had no idea? She had a sudden, unsettling impulse to grab him by the throat and squeeze, out of blind fury.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” he said, and slowly rose to his feet. “I think you’d better leave.”
“I think you’d better sit your ass down,” Bryn snapped. “Anyone else in the house besides your kids?”
“No. My wife is traveling. She’s—” He sank back in the chair, even though she hadn’t made a move for the gun. “Are you going to kill me? Please, not my kids, please�
��”
“We’re not here to kill anybody,” Patrick broke in. Speak for yourself, Bryn thought.“Dr. Reynolds, you must have been aware of the pharmaceutical research being conducted under the Fountain Group’s direction.”
“Of course I was. The research is vital to national defense. But I didn’t know the cost. . . .”
“You mean, in helpless dementia patients being used as human petri dishes to grow nanites?” Bryn said. “The entire staff of Pharmadene killed and revived to ensure corporate loyalty? That cost?”
She expected him to get more upset, but oddly enough, he relaxed. He sat back in the chair, sighed, looked down, and shook his head. “I only learned about Pharmadene after the fact, and that had nothing to do with us, nothing at all. We were merely investors in the project. Once Pharmadene imploded, we took over the intellectual property, and it immediately became clear the potential was vast, so we made arrangements with the military to continue the technology in a very tightly controlled manner. There’s nothing wrong with what we did.”
They all sat in silence for a moment. Bryn couldn’t come up with a reply, not one that didn’t involve physical force. It took Patrick to say, in a tight but calm voice, “You mean you see nothing wrong with conducting illegal experiments on nonconsenting patients. Or destroying them when you’re done.”
“You fail to see the bigger picture.” Dr. Reynolds leaned forward now, earnest and eager. “Those people were dying in a horribly useless way; I know, my own father suffered from Alzheimer’s. But this drug, our drug—it gave them a chance to be useful.”
“Useful,” Bryn repeated. Her throat was so tight it hurt. “They were incubators. I was there. When you were finished with them, you dumped them in incinerators. Don’t you get it?”
