by Rachel Caine
Joe held up a hand. “Yeah, backup, that’d be me. No bullshit, Bryn. I’m not going in with you, but you’re going in wired for sound and vision, and I won’t be far.”
“Wait a minute. Aren’t I your boss?”
“Sure, in a certain time and place. This ain’t it. The good news is, probably no big deal for me to run a wire up your bra anymore, now that I’ve seen you naked.”
She glared at him, and he gave her a slow, delighted smile that she couldn’t ultimately help but return. Especially when he gave her that wink.
Liam wasn’t waiting by the door, as he usually was. Bryn walked up the stairs behind Patrick, mainly to be sure he didn’t collapse, as Joe passed them, taking three steps to their one. By the time they’d reached the second floor, he’d already checked with Liam and stepped out of Annie’s room to give a silent thumbs-up.
“I need to check her,” Bryn said. “I know she’s fine, but—I need to do that.”
Patrick nodded, as if he understood. He probably did. She squeezed his hand a little and stepped into her sister’s bedroom. Annie wasn’t on the bed, as she’d expected, or at least not on the big, king-sized Victorian four-poster; she was, instead, strapped to a hospital-style gurney with thick Velcro restraints at her ankles and wrists, plus longer straps over her chest, waist, and upper thighs.
She looked as calm and peaceful as her own memorial statue. “God,” she whispered. “Is she all right?”
Liam was sitting in an armchair a few feet away, with a handgun on the marble table beside him. From the looks of it, he had it cocked and ready. He put down his book and said, “She’s resting quietly. Don’t worry. She’s fine.”
“Is she—” Bryn bit her lip. “Is she breathing?” Because neither dead nor alive really applied in this particular case.
“Yes, very slowly. She’s in a medically induced coma while we administer the new doses.” Sure enough, there was an IV on the stand next to her, leading straight into her arm. “She’ll be all right, I think. But it may take some time—you should clearly understand that.”
Annalie had been through hell itself for six months. All right was a dream Bryn didn’t even try to imagine. She’d settle for breathing for now. She smoothed her sister’s hair and kissed her pale forehead gently, then bent to whisper in her ear. “It’s okay,” she said. “Annie, listen to me: it’s okay. I know you couldn’t help what you tried to do. I know Mercer did this to you, and I promise, you’re never going to be this helpless again. You’re going to wake up in control of yourself, and nobody will ever be able to make you do something like this again.” She felt a blinding impulse to cry and forced it back as she blinked back the tears. “I love you to bits, you know that? I hope you do.”
Bryn pressed another kiss to her cool cheek and took a deep breath as she straightened. Liam was watching and didn’t look away or pretend to misunderstand her distress. “It’s possible she can hear you,” he said. “I hope that’s so. She’s in need of all the comfort she can get, I think. I’ve been reading to her, just in case.”
“Watch her,” Bryn said. “And…watch over her, too. I’ll be back soon.”
He nodded. “No harm will come to her. Just be sure none comes to you, either. She needs you, Bryn, probably now more than ever.”
“I’ll be watching her back,” Joe said from the door. He held up a tiny device. “If you want to get this done, time to get dressed, boss.”
She nodded and followed him into her bedroom.
The daily shot came first, of course, even before she changed clothes. She waited out the grim side effects, trying to decide if it was better this time or worse; she couldn’t tell. It just felt awful, again. Then…gone. Another twenty-four hours of borrowed time, she thought. I’m a life addict.
Patrick would say that they all were, but just now, she didn’t feel in the mood for that slightly disingenuous platitude.
Dressing was a bit of a problem. If it came down to a choice of either a business suit and heels or black cargo pants and ass-kicking boots, Bryn greatly preferred cargo pants.…They were enough like her old uniform fatigues that she didn’t feel like she was wearing some sort of antique, clumsy costume. In dangerous situations—or potentially dangerous ones—she liked to play it safe.
Today, though, she was on Pharmadene’s payroll, and hence the FBI’s, and there was a dress code for these kinds of things. So she put on a skirt that was fuller than she would normally wear, and stretchy, so that she could run and kick if necessary. She matched it with midheeled pumps, a conservative powder-blue blouse, and a jacket that almost concealed the bulge of the sidearm she wore under it, at the small of her back.
Because there was no way she was going in without some kind of weaponry.
“I thought that camera thing went in my bra,” she said to Joe, who waited patiently, back turned, while she finished adjusting her clothes. “Okay, I’m decent.”
“I was just messing with you,” he said, and pinned a piece of jewelry to her jacket—a floral pin, something she wouldn’t have chosen for herself, but at least it matched. And in the center was the tiny device she’d seen earlier in his hand. “High-def camera and audio receiver, state-of-the-CIA-art that I got from a friend of a friend—you know how it goes. It’s got a limited range, and it’s a little hinky in tunnels and such, but this is as safe as it gets. What’s your panic word?”
“Um…magenta.”
“Love me some Rocky Horror Picture Show,” he said, “and that’s good, not something you’re likely to say by accident. If I hear magenta, I’m at your side in less than two minutes.”
“Guns blazing?”
“Let’s try to avoid that. I hear the cops frown on turning downtown San Diego into Dodge City.” He stuck a tiny receiver in her ear, and put his hands on her shoulders and stared into her face for a second. “Good to go?”
“Five by five,” she said.
“I won’t be following,” he said. “You won’t see me. But I’ll be around. Good luck.”
She nodded and bent down to pat Mr. French, who was sitting at her feet, watching all these preparations with a puzzled expression. He stood up, wagging his tail. “Sorry, pup,” she said. “You can’t go this time. Work now.”
He understood something out of that, because he gave her a sad look, turned three times, and plumped himself down on the floor with a depressed expression on his pushed-in face. Then he sneezed.
She was letting everybody down today.
Joe tapped his watch, and she nodded.
Time to go.
She walked out to the cars with him—her sedan was in place, and he’d traded out the truck for something that might have come straight off the rental lot, as nondescript as possible. She didn’t expect it, but Patrick was outside, too, leaning against one of the tall fluted porch columns. “Seeing me off?” she asked. “You ought to be resting. You lost a lot of blood.”
“I’ll rest soon. Bryn, be careful.”
“Always.”
He stepped closer to her and lowered his voice. “The FBI wouldn’t send you if it wasn’t something they know is bloody dangerous.”
Bryn shrugged. “It could be just another bureaucratic miscommunication. Riley was told to find an operative; she tapped me because she didn’t know what the operation was, and she didn’t know its danger level. Agent Zaragosa didn’t tell her. He just told me, and it turned out to be sort of…vanilla.” Privately, she thought Zaragosa simply had wanted to get a look at her and to warn her that even the FBI agents themselves were under surveillance.
“Zaragosa may be playing an accountant, but he’s not a pushover. Do not get in over your head. He won’t fish you out of the deep end.”
“I’m fine, Pat. Joe’s got eyes on me. He’ll back me. And we both know I don’t have much choice. If the FBI decides I’m not cooperative for any reason, they can pull me back into Pharmadene and I’ll just…vanish.” In that white room, where troubles get washed clean away. “I need to do this to
keep them off our backs for a while longer.”
They both knew that the government wouldn’t keep the current state of affairs going long; they’d made promises to the former Pharmadene employees they’d saved, the ones addicted to Returné, but what promises had the government ever made that didn’t eventually get broken? This was all locked under tight Top Secret, and if a hundred people or so had to disappear, it could be managed. Efficiently and quietly. Wouldn’t be the first time.
The only guarantee Bryn really had was Patrick. He wouldn’t flinch from doing whatever was necessary to ensure her continued survival. She trusted that.
She trusted him.
It wasn’t the time to say anything, or even for a kiss, so she just smiled at him and said, “See you in a couple of hours. I’ll bring back Chinese.”
“I knew you delivered.”
That earned him a kiss, just a quick one. She got into her car, started it up, and watched him in the rearview as she drove away. He didn’t wave, but he was still right there, staring after her, until her car made the turn to the road.
“Feeling kind of alone now,” she said. “Testing, testing…I hope this damn thing works, Joe.”
“Working fine,” Joe’s tinny voice said in her ear. “Feel free to sing along with the radio if that makes you feel better.”
“Trust me, it wouldn’t make you feel better.” She tried humming, though, until he winced. “See? I have a tin ear.”
“Ouch. Too bad for me I don’t,” he said. “Okay, radio silence from me unless you say the panic word, but I’m monitoring and recording. Starting…now. Say your name, date, and time.”
“Bryn Davis, September ninth, oh nine fifty.”
“Joe Fideli, monitoring. Okay, we’re good to go. See you soon.”
“Copy that.”
The nav system had been programmed to her destination from Zaragosa’s information, and it led her straight there without any unnecessary complications. She kept an eye out for Joe’s nondescript wheels, but saw nothing, just as he’d promised. For all she knew, he’d beat her to the area and parked somewhere out of sight. The street address was a low-rent office building sandwiched between a donut shop that emanated the aroma of stale sugar and worse coffee, and a dollar store that looked as if it might be going out of business. It was a bad sign for any economy, Bryn thought, if the damn dollar store couldn’t stay afloat.
There was a tenant list on the aged felt sign in the lobby; only a few names were listed. Most were bail bondsmen clustered on the bottom floor of an almost entirely empty building. Her eyes rested on the last listing, for the top of the building: GRAYDON INDUSTRIAL WASTE SERVICES. It was on the top floor, the eighth. There was probably a reason for the mass upper-floor tenant exodus, which Bryn found as she pressed the button for the elevator. When it opened, the floor of it was about two feet below ground level, and it made an alarming grinding noise.
She took the stairs.
Those weren’t much safer, mainly because the lights were dim (or out) on the stairwell; it clearly had been used as a toilet from time to time by passing drunks, and there may have been a dead animal somewhere. She tried holding her breath as she jogged up, and, after that became impossible, drawing in shallow gasps. By the time she arrived at the door to the eighth floor, her lungs were aching, and so were her calf muscles. Right, she thought. More jogging, less lounging. She stepped out into the hallway—also dimly lit, but blessedly urine free—and took a second to compose herself. Her breathing smoothed out, and she took long, confident strides past shut doors until she saw one in the middle that had a glow bleeding out from under it. There was no sign on the door, but the number was the same as had been listed on the sign below.
She knocked, then tried to turn the knob. It opened.
Inside was a standard, cheap reception area with thin, stained carpet and the dead skeleton of a potted plant leaning against the corner. Two plastic chairs, the kind sold at the dollar store neighbor, most likely. The receptionist’s empty station had a high counter and thick glass that looked bullet-resistant. From the dust on the desk, it wasn’t too likely anyone had been answering the phones in a while.
There was an interior door. Locked. Bryn tried the polite thing first, knocking and calling out in her most inoffensive voice. No response. She pulled out her cell and tried the phones, which rang on the other side of the glass and went to voice mail.
Enough Ms. Nice Lady, she thought, and hoped her shoes were up to it.
Her kick landed squarely where she aimed it, and the cheap lock shattered like glass, throwing the door open and back with a boom. That didn’t draw any more attention than her knocking or phone-ringing. Not a good sign.
She stepped into the hallway beyond it. Right or left? It looked like there were offices in both directions. No sound of anyone at home. She listened, turning her head each way, and when she directed her attention right, she got a hit.
Not a sound. A smell. Just a bare hint of it, ripe and rotten.
God, no. Not again. She had a flashback of walking into a rich woman’s house on the hill, and hearing the storming buzz of flies, stepping over the march of ants, seeing the moving, rotting thing on the bed.
Sack up, she told herself. You’ve seen it before. She had. She wasn’t frightened of the dead, and decomp didn’t shock her. What had shocked her back in that house had been seeing the spectral ghost of her own future, of being dead and still living, still knowing as her body fell apart around her.
But that wasn’t the case here.
She found the staff of Graydon Industrial Waste Services gathered in the break room, if it could be dignified by that name—there was a cheap old TV in the corner with broken antennae and a coffeemaker still grimly reheating a carafe of days-old undrinkable sludge. There were also seven bodies, each wrapped neatly in plastic tarps and secured with duct tape, envelope folds at the ends. It smelled chokingly vile. They’d been dead awhile, no doubt about that. The blood that had been spilled on the walls and floor was long dried to a bitter brown.
Hand over her nose, Bryn said, “You getting this, Joe?”
“Copy,” he said. He sounded grim. “Get out. I’m calling the cavalry.”
“Not yet,” she said. “I’m checking the offices. They died for something.” She had a briefcase with her, and opened it to remove and don a pair of disposable gloves. She hadn’t touched the break room doorknob; the door had been cracked open already, so there’d been no need. She retraced her steps to the left and began opening doors. The first was an office. There was no nameplate, no pictures, nothing personal…just a desk, a dead computer monitor with no PC attached, some junk in the drawers, and a few emptied-out file drawers. She checked around. Nothing hidden.
The next was another office—again, stripped bare. The third door led to a file room with ten cabinets. She checked the drawers. Empty, again. A small safe was built into the floor, but it had been cracked, too.
The next door opened onto a bathroom. The killers must have used it for cleanup; she saw drips of dried blood on the sides of the sink and a pale stain on the porcelain. The trash can was overflowing. She forced herself to search anyway.
That was how she found the thumb drive.
It was a small silver thing, wrapped in a clean paper towel and shoved down the side. It wouldn’t have wound up here by accident, not wrapped that way. It spoke of panic and fear and a last-ditch effort to hide something.
She was, in effect, holding someone’s last testament in her hand.
Bryn said, “Joe?”
“Yeah, I see what it is. Come out, Bryn. We need to get the cops in on this.”
She had no pockets in this suit, which hadn’t annoyed her until now; the briefcase she had with her was her only purse. She propped it on the sink and started to open it, but one of the combination locks had spun, and the left side stubbornly refused to open. Screw it. She took the thumb drive and stuffed it into her bra.
“One more door to go,” she said, a
nd went out and down the hall.
She knew the second that she opened it that something was wrong; it just felt wrong. In one sense it was the same as the others…emptied-out desk, missing computer, no personal effects.
But there was a square, dark shape sitting on the desk, just a dim outline in the flickering fluorescents.
It had a blinking red light that sped up as she stared.
“Get out!” Joe’s voice exploded in her ear, and her own instincts screamed it a half second later.
She was out the door and in the hall when the bomb went off with a violence that threw her ten feet, limp as a rag doll. Fire rolled overhead, and the fact that she’d fallen flat was all that saved her from the ball bearing antipersonnel shrapnel that shredded the walls at waist level. It was a Wrath of God explosion, shaking the building, blowing out glass, shattering walls, and she was buried in a fall of brick and drywall.
No time for a damage assessment of her body; she clawed her way free of the debris and saw that there was a murderously hot wall of burning rubble behind her, and a mound of burning debris that totally blocked the way to the reception room.
“I think we’ve got a magenta situation here,” Bryn said, and had the wild impulse to laugh. Shock. She had blood in her mouth and spit it out in a vivid red rush; something was broken inside, but that would heal. She got up, but her legs wouldn’t hold. Something broken there, too. She crawled instead, heading for the far end where the fire wasn’t yet taking hold. The smoke—black, thick, terrifying—billowed out and up. In seconds it had formed a thick layer over her head, and the stench of plastics melting made her retch up more blood as she crawled. Keep going, she told herself. You’ve had worse.
Not really. Magenta, magenta, magenta…She was back in Iraq, with her supply convoy under heavy attack. IED, we hit an IED, the truck rolled.…She’d survived that, survived with only minor injuries. She could survive this.
Hell, she couldn’t die.…
No, she could. She could burn.
The fire terrified her, and the fear forced her to keep crawling even as the nanites rushed to the injuries and began the cattle-prod pain of repair. Joe was two minutes out, he’d said—he might be even closer.…
