Two Weeks' Notice tr-2

by Rachel Caine

  “Come on,” Annie said. “Let’s get you fixed up.” She sounded less bothered than Bryn would have thought, but then again, Annie had been through six months with Mercer and Fast Freddy. “Where were you?”

  “At a nursing home.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “So am I,” Bryn said. She followed Annie into the back kitchen, spotlessly clean as always. “I can’t believe they left you alone here.”

  “Well, there wasn’t much choice, apparently. Liam said he couldn’t let Patrick run off by himself, and Joe—”

  Annie pulled the lockbox from the refrigerator and put it on the table, then frowned. “I don’t know the combination.”

  Bryn punched it in, opened the box, and uncapped one of the syringes before rolling up her sleeve and plunging the needle home. The burn of the nanites was especially tough this time, and she sank down into one of the dining chairs until the pain subsided enough to breathe. “What about Joe?” She uncapped a second shot and rammed that one home as well. She just managed not to convulse this time, or scream. When the pounding faded from her ears, Annie was talking.

  “…kids,” she said. “I don’t know where they went, but he was definite that he’d be back once they were safe, but I haven’t seen him or heard from him. It’s been…quiet.” Annie blinked, and Bryn saw tears shining on her cheeks before she hastily wiped them off with the back of one hand. “Why is this happening to us? Is it me? Are these people after me?”

  “No, not—It’s not you, Annie.” She managed to get that out, somehow, even though the agony burning through her from head to toe was so great she thought her flesh might start to smolder. Then it started to fade, thankfully. Bryn felt a rush of warmth instead, the billions of tiny machines rushing through her body, searching for all the million things to put right again. It’s going to be okay, she told herself. “Pack a bag. We have to go in about five minutes.”

  “Go? Go where?”

  “The place I used to work. Pharmadene.”

  “But—you said that was the last place I should ever go!”

  “I know. But things have changed. It’s the only place we’ll be safe. They can protect us there.”

  “I don’t know, maybe—maybe you should talk to Liam. Or Patrick. Here, I can call—”

  Bryn grabbed her sister’s arm and forced it down to the table, and took the phone out of her hand. “No,” she said. “No calling. No discussion. Go pack, now. In five minutes, meet me at the car.”

  Annie stared at her, frowning, and pulled her arm free to rub it resentfully. “I hope you know what the hell you’re doing,” she said. “Jesus, Bryn. What’s eating you?”

  Fear, Bryn thought. Reality. “Just do it.”

  Her sister left, taking Mr. French with her. Bryn cleared the used hypos and put them into the biohazard container near the trash can, then went upstairs herself to grab a few things. She didn’t bother with anything she could replace—just the necessary overnight accessories and a couple of changes of clothing. A zip-up pair of low boots that provided both comfort and traction. She looked around the room a little blindly, but everything else was just noise now, just distractions she couldn’t afford in this moment.

  She took the bag downstairs and put it in the trunk.

  Maxine had gone quiet behind the library door. Bryn checked her own skin; it still had a gray cast to it, but didn’t look quite so off as it had. “Max?” she said, and tapped on the wood. “Maxine?” She got a low growl in response. Taking Maxine out of here would be difficult at best, and being trapped in a car with an angry, suspicious Rottweiler didn’t seem like a very good plan. But the dogs didn’t deserve what was likely to come calling here. If she wouldn’t leave Mr. French, she couldn’t leave the other dogs, either.

  So she got the rest of them rounded up—the greyhounds, the pug, and the other Rottie, who was much less suspicious—and put them in the backseat of the car together. Annie came back with her bag, and Mr. French tagged at her heels; he sniffed at Bryn suspiciously, then barked and seemed comfortable enough to settle in near her again, though he didn’t beg for a petting.

  When Annie let her out, Maxine kept her distance, too, but she didn’t growl or attack. Still, there was something in the Rottweiler’s steady attention that kept Bryn on her guard. “Put her in a crate,” she said. There were travel crates, folding ones, stacked in the utility room off the kitchen, and Annie put one together and got Maxine inside; she and Bryn managed to fit the crate into the back of the car, barely. It was an uncomfortable fit with all the other dogs, even with the pug and Mr. French up front—one on Annie’s lap, one at her feet on the passenger side.

  But it wouldn’t be a long trip.

  Bryn headed for Pharmadene.

  “What happened to you?” Annie demanded as Bryn drove. Bryn didn’t reply; her attention was focused around them, looking for any signs that Jane might already have locked on to her location. She was hyperaware now of the danger, and the ticking clock. “Hey! Bryn, you’re scaring me! Where’s Patrick? And Liam? They went to meet you.…Are they okay? What happened?”

  Annie wasn’t going to shut up until she got some kind of answer, even a half-assed one, so Bryn finally said, “I met them. Everything’s fine. This is part of the plan. I can’t tell you the details right now.”

  “Oh,” Annie said, and sat back, crossing her arms. She got that thundercloud frown on her pretty face. “I see. So you don’t trust me. Still.”

  “Jesus, Annie, why does everything have to be about you?” For a wild, bitter moment, Bryn almost regretted making the trip to get her sister, but then she felt a surge of shame. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to snap at you, but—things are bad right now.”

  Annie’s frown faded, and she said, much more gently, “Is that why Patrick’s not here with you? Has something happened?”

  “No.” Yes. “Patrick’s fine. Everybody’s fine, we just…need to split up right now. For safety.” Because I might kill him if I hear him say Jane’s name again. “It’ll be okay. We’ll be safe here. The FBI will protect us.”

  “Okay.” Annie didn’t seem too convinced, but she contented herself with calming the excited, agitated pug wiggling around in her lap. Mr. French was maintaining a dignified sitting position at her feet, leaning on her leg. The greyhounds and free Rottweiler prowled restlessly in the back, as nervous as Bryn herself felt.

  She phoned Zaragosa when she made the turnoff for the Pharmadene front gates, and got his well-dressed assistant. “This is Bryn Davis,” she said. “I need to talk to your boss. Right now.”

  “I’m sorry. Mr. Zaragosa is in a meeting,” the assistant said. She could almost see his expression of total indifference. “I can have him return your call, but he has a full calendar—”

  “Tell Zaragosa that I am half a mile from the facility, and I’m coming in the front gate. It’s his choice how that happens. I’ve got my sister with me—”

  “Tell him about the dogs,” Annie whispered.

  Bryn ignored her. “—and we need admittance to the grounds and a pass to get inside. It’s important.”

  “I’m sorry, but I was told your employment with Pharmadene had ended. That means you’ll need to make an appointment to visit Mr. Zaragosa, and your sister needs to undergo all the usual background checks.…”

  “Jeremy. You’re not listening. Closed or open, I am coming in the gate. Make that happen so nobody has to get hurt in the process. And tell Zaragosa that people will probably be tracking me to your front door. Bad people who aren’t going to be nearly as concerned about the well-being of your people as I am. Understood?”

  “Hold,” he said, and she heard the soft, New Age music start playing. Bryn fought the urge to curse him, and didn’t let up on the gas as she took the curves heading up the hill to where the Pharmadene property began.

  “Bryn?” Annie said. The gates were in sight. Bryn didn’t slow. “Um, Bryn? Those are closed. And there’s a guard.”

  The hold mus
ic went off. “Mr. Zaragosa wants to speak with you, but you’re going to have to wait.”

  “Tell him I am one minute from crashing into his gate at seventy miles an hour. See if he can make a hole in his schedule for that.”

  This time, she got hold without music. Annie, who was sitting tensely now, arms protectively around the pug, said, “Bryn, slow down.”

  “I can’t,” she said. “We’re playing chicken, Annie. The first one who blinks loses, and we can’t be left out here. We’re dead if they don’t let us inside.”

  “But—”

  Mr. Zaragosa’s voice came on the line. “Bryn, you can’t just—”

  “Thirty seconds from the front gates,” she said. “It’s going to take at least ten seconds for them to roll back. Your choice, but you’ve got a max of fifteen seconds to get it done once I stop talking.”

  He wasted only one second in silence, then said, “Gate’s opening.”

  “Not yet, it isn’t.”

  “Jeremy’s calling the guard. Slow down, Bryn. I swear, we’re working on it.”

  “Work faster.” Instincts were trying to pull her foot off the gas, but she fought them and kept going. She needed to see the guard making the effort, or it would be for nothing.

  The guard ducked back into the shack and picked up the phone.

  They were less than fifteen seconds from hitting the gates. “Bryn!” Annie shouted, and Mr. French barked, responding to the alarm in her voice. The greyhounds and the loose Rottweiler were moving agitatedly in the backseat, worried by the tension thickening the air.

  I’m going to kill us all.

  The guard hit the controls, and the gates began to roll back. Bryn hit the brakes, slowing fast, but even; then the front right bumper of the car caught the metal and crumpled. The car scraped through, but only just, and then the guard reversed the course of the gates behind them to wheel them shut as Bryn brought the vehicle to a skidding stop.

  And then, of course, heavily armed guards surrounded the car as it came to a stop—a battalion of them, looked like. Bryn dropped the phone, killed the engine, and held up both hands. Annie looked frozen in place. “Pretend like you just got busted by the cops,” Bryn said. “Do exactly what they say. Don’t argue, don’t resist.”

  Annie tentatively raised her hands, too. The dogs were all barking excitedly, except for the pug, who was now cowering on the floor between Annie’s feet and next to Mr. French. He just looked like he wanted some peace and quiet.

  Bryn’s and Annie’s doors were pulled open at the same time, and Bryn popped her seat belt so the guard who reached in could pull her free without effort and send her facedown to the pavement. Annie hit the ground on the other side of the car. Mr. French bailed out and started trying to bite the guard holding Bryn, but he was kicked aside.

  “Run!” she screamed at Mr. French. He took a step back from her, looking confused. “Run, you stupid dog!”

  He wouldn’t have, Bryn thought, but then one of the guards tried to grab him, and that sent him fleeing.

  Chasing something was what the greyhounds did for a living, so they jumped out of the open car door and took off in graceful leaps after him, followed by the pug. The Rottweiler followed, leaving Maxine still in the cage. She was snarling and fighting to get out.

  The fleeing dogs ran for the parkland and woods beyond the building. Someone fired a shot, but it missed.

  “Don’t hurt them!” Bryn turned her head to yell. “You sons of bitches!”

  “No need for that,” said a voice from somewhere over her head, and she looked up to see the CEO of Pharmadene walking quickly toward them, trailed by his assistant, Jeremy, and a couple of others. “Nobody will hurt the dogs.” He looked at the guard who had her down on the ground. “Let her stand up.”

  The guard held to the letter of the order, but he slipped handcuffs on her just to be safe. Zaragosa didn’t object. He looked tired, Bryn thought, and careworn. Presiding over this place, keeping all these secrets, probably wasn’t a restful occupation.

  “Now,” he said. “You want to tell me what’s so critical you had to pull a stunt like that just to see me?”

  “Sir, we should get this car out of here. It wasn’t scanned properly,” a man at his side said—from his badge, he was some kind of high-level security officer by the name of Robinson. “Should I kill this dog?”

  “No need,” he said, and gestured to Jeremy. “Let the dog go. Outside the gates.” He gave Bryn an apologetic half smile. “I love dogs. I’d have it brought inside, but we really don’t have any facilities for animals, other than in the labs. I assume you don’t want it there.”

  “Hell no,” Bryn said. The idea of seeing the dogs, especially her dog, in those cages made her shudder. She watched Jeremy pick up Maxine’s crate and hold it at arm’s length while the dog barked and snarled, and walk it toward the fences where the other dogs had disappeared. “He should watch out. She’s in a bad mood.”

  “Mine isn’t doing too well, either, so why don’t you tell me what you want, Bryn?”

  “Do you really want to talk about this now? Right here?” Bryn asked. “Because I can promise you, there will be something I say that all these people aren’t cleared to hear.”

  Zaragosa considered her for a long second, then nodded and turned to Robinson. “Search and clear them, then bring them down to the conference room. C-17. I want badges on both of them, and two escorts each. Armed.”

  That seemed extreme, but Bryn could see his point; she and Annie had just obtained access by threat to what should have been a highly secure government facility. If he was taking them inside, he’d do it cautiously. That was only good sense.

  Of course, the safest thing to do would have been to shoot them in the heads and drag them back outside the fences to recover, but luckily, Zaragosa wasn’t quite as cold-blooded as Bryn herself was.

  Not yet, anyway.

  She and Annie didn’t resist the searches, although Annie made some smartly worded comments about hands in places she hadn’t invited them to go; Bryn, who’d recently undergone a cavity search by Patrick McCallister’s wife, didn’t much care. She listened to the lectures on security procedures, indicated her agreement, and got escorted to the elevator along with Annie and four armed personnel.

  She expected to go up to the executive offices.

  Instead, the elevator went down. Instead of showing the spacious atrium view, suddenly the glass walls were full of views of concrete. Bryn felt claustrophobia setting in, and a scraping sense of worry. “I thought we were going to a conference room,” she said. Robinson was one of the four security personnel, and he sent her a sideways glance.

  “You are,” he said. “C-17. It’s belowground.”

  It was part of the lab complex. As the doors opened on thick glass, white walls, familiar awful white walls, Bryn felt the worry turn to a sickening flood of dread and panic, but she breathed in slowly and tried to keep it at bay.

  They walked right past the white room with the drain, the one where she’d been confined to rot. It was sparkling clean. If anyone had died there, had their decayed flesh scrubbed off the tiles and washed away, there was no sign of it.

  This was not right. Bryn felt it stinging all over her, and the sharp, bitter taste of fear filled her mouth like acid. “I want to talk to Riley Block,” she said, and resisted a little when they tried to hurry her along. “Get her!”

  Robinson said, “No can do. Agent Block has been reassigned to another project.”

  “Reassigned?” Bryn repeated. “When? By whose order?” There was no way that would happen, unless Riley herself had requested it, or something spectacularly bad had blown up in her face, politically speaking—bad enough to need a scapegoat at the highest levels. Riley might hate the assignment at Pharmadene, but she’d never walk away from it—and the government wouldn’t let her, because they didn’t need more eyes on those top secret files than were strictly necessary. Riley was read in. She’d stay.

&nbs
p; “Sorry—don’t know the details, lady. Above my pay grade,” Robinson said, and led them past doors marked with lurid biohazard stickers, secured with keypads and scanners. Nothing was marked, except with numbers. He paused at C-17, which didn’t have any warnings on it, and keyed in a code to open the door, then ushered Bryn and Annie inside.

  This isn’t right, Bryn thought. Not right at all. She had a terrible, sickening sense of having made the worst choice of her life…and it was too late, way too late, to change it.

  To Bryn’s huge relief, it was a conference room, after all; she’d been half-expecting some kind of vivisection lab with autopsy tables. Or that furnace, that horrible furnace.

  This wasn’t the showroom conference room, either; it held a battered long table, some less-than-new chairs, and whiteboard walls with dry-erase markers scattered randomly over every surface. Some of what had been scribbled there remained ghostly on the surface, even after cleaning. Formulas. Equations. Molecular drawings.

  Zaragosa, already seated at the table, nodded to Robinson and said, “You stay, Pete. Bryn and—Annalie, right?—please sit down. The rest of you, outside.” Meaning that the three extra security guards were firepower, but not cleared all the way for the kind of conversation they were about to have. Robinson obviously was.

  Without asking, Robinson took the handcuffs off Bryn, and then Annie, and fetched them each a sealed bottle of water from a built-in fridge. He tossed one to Zaragosa as well, who thanked him and cracked the seal to drink, as if he knew they’d want some reassurance that it wasn’t drugged.

  It wouldn’t have mattered, frankly; she didn’t waste a second in unscrewing the top anyway. Bryn was shocked at how good the water tasted. She hadn’t realized how thirsty she’d been.

  Annie didn’t drink. She looked wary, pale, and terrified, and Bryn reached over and took her hand, drawing a startled flinch. “Hey,” she said. “It’s okay. We’re okay.” She turned her attention to Zaragosa. “I’m going to confess up front that I used you. I needed to get us somewhere safe, somewhere the people who were just holding me can’t reach. The only place I know is here, inside Pharmadene.”