Two Weeks' Notice tr-2

by Rachel Caine

  Liam was gone. It was just Patrick and Annie, and three empty mugs cooling on the table.

  “Did you hear it?” she asked.

  Patrick nodded. “I thought you’d want us watching.” He pointed toward the security monitors, one of which now showed a view of the office. The camera was pointed toward the desk, and it would have shot over Bryn’s shoulder, straight on Riley. “In my opinion, she knew nothing about the murders. She knew something, but she had no idea those people had been killed. It came as a shock.”

  “She’s scared,” Bryn said. “It’s spinning out of control, and she knows it. No matter how many FBI agents she’s running, it’s not enough to keep everyone safe. She can’t shadow everyone twenty-four/seven, and even though she didn’t say it, I think more have to be missing. It’s bigger than just three people.”

  Annalie looked from one of them to the other, and then asked, “Um…sorry. What exactly does that mean? Isn’t she in charge or something? How can she not know?”

  “There’s no such thing as being in charge of something like this. Someone up the chain of command could be lying to her, and she’d never know. That’s what she’s afraid of—that someone, somewhere, within her organization has decided her operation is a threat to national security and is mopping it up. FBI agents can disappear just as effectively as the Revived did.” Patrick looked straight at Bryn and said, “We can trust her, and take our chances that she can keep it together, or go around her. Either way, it’s risky.”

  “It’s not a choice,” Bryn said. “We have to take care of each other now.”

  Annie tried a smile. “Yay?”

  Bryn grabbed her hand where it lay on the table and squeezed it tight. “Yay,” she said. “We’re going to be all right.”

  She almost believed it herself.

  Almost.

  Riley’s visit had taken any chance of romantic encounters with Patrick off the table, which was yet another thing to resent about her intrusion. Bryn spent the rest of the evening poring over paperwork, gathering names, files, everything she could on every single Revived individual she could—a task made somewhat easier by Patrick’s help, because he’d kept duplicates of a lot of the personnel records out of Pharmadene when he’d been employed by them. By two in the morning, they had at least a partial picture of the individuals the FBI had sworn to protect.

  Failed to protect.

  “It isn’t good,” Patrick said, once he’d finished compiling the information. “Out of the fifty-two Revived we absolutely know survived out of Pharmadene, seven of them have dropped off the radar—no cell phone, home phone, or credit card activity. It’s been gradual, maybe one a week. They’re just—going dark. Slipping away.”

  “Is Jason one of them?”

  “Yes.”

  There were, Bryn estimated, about two hundred total Revived out there…counting her and Annie. If the proportions held true, at least fifteen more had dropped out of sight over the past three months. One after another, going out like lightbulbs.

  “Somebody’s got access to the master lists from the FBI,” Bryn said. “Or they’ve put things together with other insider information.”

  “Not necessarily. If they’re concentrating on Pharmadene employees, all they need is an old, publicly available organizational chart.” He pulled one up from when he was head of security and began marking off names. “Right, the red X marks are those I know died or left Pharmadene before the drugs were administered.” That was about fifteen people. “These are the confirmed dead from the explosion at the Civic Theatre. Public records.” He used blue X marks for those. “This is what we have left.”

  It was about 250 names, but Bryn knew all those couldn’t have survived the process of Revival; even with reformulated drugs, the success rate wasn’t perfect. No way to know which of those names had survived and which hadn’t. Riley had that information, but she wouldn’t share. Bryn looked over the names on the org chart, then focused on Jason Drake. Patrick drew a green circle around his name.

  “He’s at the top,” Bryn said.

  “No, he’s in the third tier,” Patrick said. “A minor VP, not—”

  “But he’s at the top of those who survived. What if they’re cherry-picking from the top? Those would be the ones most likely to have information about the drugs, right?”

  “Maybe. But the science department employees would be a better bet.”

  There were twelve apparent survivors under the research and development departmental structure—maybe ten who’d actually made it through Revival, Bryn estimated. “Maybe they did both,” she said. “Anyone in this department go dark recently?”

  Patrick matched names to records and circled two: Marjorie Dass and Chandra Patel. He brought up photographs. Dass was one of the women on the Graydon surveillance video—the first victim to burn. Patel wasn’t, which put her on the list of missing, not dead. Not yet.

  “We should focus our resources on Patel,” Patrick said. “If she’s our most recent abduction, and it seems she is from the records, then that’s the freshest trail.…What is it?”

  “Chandra,” Bryn said, and took in a deep breath. “I know her. She’s one of mine. She’s in the support group. She and Jason got to be pretty close friends.” Her chest felt heavy under the press of anxiety, and she scribbled down a fast list of names and handed it to him. “Check these names—it’s the rest of the group I’ve spoken with.”

  He compared the names with the list of those presumed missing.

  One by one, he checked them off. Of the seven names they had, five were on her list.

  “They didn’t start with the org chart,” she said. “Oh God…they started with me. And I led them to the others.”

  “We don’t know that,” he said. “It’s easy to see a pattern where none exists, when you’re looking at this kind of data. They could have just as easily started with Jason and had him list everyone whose name he knew. That would have had the same effect, Bryn.”

  Maybe. But she couldn’t escape the fact that if she hadn’t opened those lines of communication, hadn’t put these people in contact with each other to share their anguish and grief and fear, maybe this wouldn’t have happened. Chandra was a slight, nervous young lady, very shy. She’d been scared to speak in front of others at first, but over the course of four weeks she’d seemed to really bloom. When she’d missed a couple of meetings, Bryn hadn’t really thought much of it. She didn’t expect people to come every time…only when they felt they needed help.

  But they’d stopped because they’d been taken, and she hadn’t wondered. Hadn’t tried.

  “Bryn!”

  Patrick took hold of her shoulders, and she looked up at him with tears burning in her eyes. He couldn’t understand how she felt, not fully. “Chandra never hurt anyone, Patrick. She didn’t work on Returné at all. She was making drugs for children’s chemotherapy. She’s my age, and first those bastards at Pharmadene put a bag over her head and brought her back as their slave, and then…then this? How is that fair?”

  “It isn’t,” he said. “So let’s focus. Let’s find her. Let’s find them.”

  Bryn took a deep breath, nodded, and forced herself to think about the work, not the trauma, not the people she knew, liked, had shared coffee and tears with.

  Chandra.

  We’ll get you back.

  The morning came merciless and early, and Bryn was up before the sun and driving to the funeral home. Even then, she didn’t beat Joe Fideli; when she pulled in and parked, his truck was already in the lot, and the lights of the business were on, windows glowing warm in the chill dawn.

  The door was, as always, locked until opening time (and she could hardly even tell that new glass had been put in overnight), but the security was off, and as Bryn came in, she smelled the sharp, welcoming aroma of brewing coffee. “You,” she said when she entered the kitchen area, “deserve a raise for that.”

  Joe Fideli raised a cup to her, sipped, then put it down to pour her a
mug of her own. She took it black, and would have mainlined it if she could have; the warmth spread through her aching muscles and helped steady her into something like normality.

  “So,” Joe said, “I heard you had adventures last night. Which seems a lot, on top of jumping out of a burning building.”

  “How much did Patrick tell you?”

  “He didn’t,” Joe said. “I gossiped with the cops who were still here on-site. They said you’d been ambushed by two guys. Opinion was they were your garden-variety abducting serial killer types with a thing for hot blond funeral directors.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Which part of that did you object to? I hope not the ‘hot blond.’”

  “I think I should start with the cops thinking there’s anything garden-variety about serial killers.”

  “Yeah, well, San Diego is prone to that sort of thing, in case you didn’t know. We’ve had more sickos grow wild here than in Los Angeles. The police get a little jaded about it. Hell, the street talk is they just busted open a storage locker for one of those reality shows and found creepy photos from another Gacy or something. But anyway, the point is, you got jumped and stayed unabducted, which, congratulations, by the way. How’d the broken window figure into it?”

  She told him the whole thing, from the first moment of alarm to the arrival of police on the scene. One thing she loved about Joe—he was unflappable. He just sipped his coffee and nodded, as if of course it would have happened that way. “They weren’t garden-variety,” he said. “They sound like experienced professional murderers to me, not enthusiastic amateurs.”

  “That makes it so much better.”

  “Well, at least you rated someone getting paid to do you. That’s a compliment, right?”

  “Not really.”

  Joe was quiet for a second, then said in a different tone, “And what else happened?”

  She told him about the recordings, the disappearances, Riley’s threats, everything. The only time she saw a reaction in him was when he heard Riley’s threat to round up his family. Good thing he hadn’t been there within grabbing distance of the agent’s neck. It would have been over in seconds.

  By the time she was done, though, he was back to his usual easygoing self. “Eventful,” he said. “So. I guess we’re not backing off.”

  “If you want to move Kylie and the kids…”

  “To where, exactly?”

  “There’s room at the castle.” That was how the two of them always referred to the McCallister estate—half a joke, half envy. “The kids would love it.”

  “If it comes to that, sure, but I’m not uprooting my family over it yet.”

  “I just want them to be safe.”

  “Kylie’s all grown up, and you do not want to mess with her kids. That safe room in the back of my house has enough firepower to take down a medium-sized country, and she’s checked out on every single piece of it. Relax. How do you want to go at this Chandra thing?”

  “Patrick has a plan,” she said. “You’re not going to like it.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I don’t like it. You still have some access to Pharmadene, don’t you?” Joe had been an independent contractor for Patrick—someone nominally off the books, but he had a great deal of familiarity with the Pharmadene world nevertheless.

  “Not like I used to, but yeah, some. Friends on the inside, all that crap. Why, what do you need out of them?”

  “Remember the trackers that Pharmadene put on their early Revival subjects? The ones that bind into bone? I need one.”

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa, slow down. You want a tracker, I’ve got—”

  “Nothing that can’t be gotten rid of,” she interrupted. “If they make me change clothes, drop my purse, I’ll lose the chip. If you put it in subcutaneously, they’ll find it. These are pros, Joe—you said it yourself. They’ll be looking for a trace. Anything that isn’t deeply embedded, they’ll find it fast.”

  The Pharmadene tracking device was composed of nanites specially modified to lock to bone, link together, and broadcast. It was undetectable in terms of searches, and it broadcast on such a tight, specific wavelength that even a thorough scan probably wouldn’t pick it up. Ingenious. Also deadly to anyone who wasn’t Revived…The nanites themselves created a toxic by-product that only someone who’d had a dose of Returné could survive.

  “Okay.” Joe finally nodded. “I get the tracker; you’re marked so we can keep eyes on you. What then?”

  “Then I wait,” she said, “because they want me. They want to know what I know. They’ll be coming for me—soon.”

  “You’re right. I really don’t like any part of this at all.”

  “Oh, that’s not the part you won’t like,” Bryn said, and smiled. “It’s the part where you have to lose a fight if you’re around when they come for me.”

  “Fuck. Bad enough I managed to actually get my ass kicked by Fast Freddy Watson; this ain’t doing anything for my image.” Joe tossed back the rest of his coffee. “Whatever happened to the nice, calm death business where all we did was cuddle sad people and polish caskets? It used to be so…restful.”

  “Glad you think so, because you get to deal with the gang funeral today. Watch out for drive-by tributes.” In truth, gang funerals were pretty much like any other kind, only quieter. The gangs never stinted on their memorial services: always top dollar. It had unnerved her how calm and watchful everyone had been at her first one, but to her surprise the gang members had been more polite than the average country-club darling’s friends, who were often drunk and weepy, not to mention entitled brats.

  “You give me the best presents. Hey,” he said, as she refilled her cup. “How much of a fight should I put up on your behalf, exactly?”

  “Your call.” Her smile faded as she considered how long this might take. Days, maybe, before her attackers felt comfortable enough to come at her again—and she’d have to go down hard to keep her credibility. This time, she felt, they wouldn’t try such a straightforward abduction. It would be something else.

  Something worse.

  She hoped like hell she was wrong.

  Chapter 12

  The day dragged by, hour by stunningly normal hour. The sun shone nicely outside, the groundskeepers came and tended the grass, and around the city, as everywhere, people died. Most of those deaths were standard, peaceful, natural-causes events that were sad occasions, nothing horribly traumatic.

  Bryn and Joe worked a service together that morning, from church to burial, and although she was alert for anything odd, she saw nothing.

  At noon, Joe came in and gave her the usual shot, which burned. “We’ve got another week’s supply of Manny’s latest batch,” he said. “After that, we’re back on Pharmadene standard formula plus the inhibitors. We’ve got enough of that to last maybe three months before we’re out of the inhibitor.” She sat still until the worst of the shaking and pain rolled off, and saw he wasn’t finished. He held up a second syringe. “Tracker nanites. It’s going to take about twenty-four hours for them to form the chains and start broadcasting. After that, you’re golden. We can track you anywhere.”

  She expected that to hurt, too, but it didn’t. The shot did, but she’d gotten so used to the sensation of a needle that it hardly even registered anymore. I have a solid career path as a junkie, she thought, without much humor. She couldn’t even get high; the nanites would burn it off within minutes.

  Sucks to be me. But at least Patrick and Joe could keep an eye on her, virtually, once the trackers came online. There was probably even an app for it. Hell, she’d met a sniper in Iraq who’d had an app on his phone to calculate windage for distance shots. Amazing what they could do these days.

  The afternoon was the gang funeral, which she’d assigned to Joe. Bryn stayed in the office, doing paperwork, then went downstairs to see if there was a backlog of work in the prep room. Their principal embalmer, William, was finishing the last stitches in the mouth of Mrs
. Gilbert. She’d passed in her eighties, and the infusions had given her back a faint flush of color through the crepe-soft skin. She looked peaceful. “Hey,” he said, and clipped the thread neatly. If you didn’t know the thread was there, you’d never even suspect it. “Want to put the caps in for me? It’d be a big help.”

  She nodded, gloved and gowned up, and slipped rounded plastic caps under Mrs. Gilbert’s eyelids. It was one of the few things that bothered her, this cosmetic touch that kept the face looking more like someone sleeping than deceased, as the eyes were the first thing to start drying and losing their firm shape. Bryn did it quickly, and tried not to think about it.

  William added a few finishing touches, gently adjusting the skin on Mrs. Gilbert’s lips for best possible effect. “I hear you added another green funeral option.”

  “It’s popular,” she said. “No embalming, simple winding-sheet, burial in a biodegradable coffin.”

  “Ah, hell, no. I’m not rotting in some recycled cardboard crate; that’s just not dignified. Just stick me in a wood chipper and blow me over the flower beds. Does the same thing,” William said. “Okay, Mrs. Gilbert, you look fabulous. Time to put on your clothes.”

  Together, they dressed the body, which was harder to do than it looked—living bodies cooperated, even unconscious, but the dead had no such consideration. Bryn was always struck, when it came to this, how careful William was, how gentle his touch. He treated the dead like his own—no hesitation, fear, or callousness. It was one of the things she liked best about him. He took the time to get it exactly right, straightening the woman’s dark blue dress until it fell just so around her body.

  “Did you have time to finish the reconstruction on the Lindells? The husband and wife?” Bryn asked, as he settled the sheet back over Mrs. Gilbert.

  “Yeah. It’s not going to look as good as I’d like, but there’s only so much you can do when the bone structure’s broken like that. You can take a look if you want—they’re in the cooler. Hey, I heard there was some kind of robbery last night. Broken window, right? Was anything taken?”