by Meg Gardiner
I smiled a goofball smile and walked toward the big unknowns. Telling him, for starters. Breathe deep, girl; get ready to blow him through the wall. I hitched my backpack higher on my shoulder and waved, striding toward him.
He spotted me and pushed off from the railing, looking puzzled. I was grinning like a clown and about to spew tears.
From my right a man approached. I saw a languorous stride and a head of cropped white hair.
“Kit.”
I stopped dead. It was my father.
He sauntered up, garment bag and computer case slung over his shoulder. His eyes were gunpowder black, restless and intent.
“Did you chase me down?” I said.
He set his things on the floor and cupped my face in his hands. “This is not lying low.”
He looked great—tan and hale, in a rawhide sort of way. He was wearing his oldest cowboy boots and a baseball cap with the logo USS ABRAHAM LINCOLN, CVN-72, the carrier to which my brother’s fighter squadron was attached. I felt blindsided.
“Mom told you which flight I was on.”
He kissed my forehead. “You need to start listening to your old man.”
Grabbing his things, he swept me under his arm and pulled me toward the exit. Ahead, Jesse angled through the crowd and coasted to a stop, flummoxed.
He extended his hand. “Phil.”
Dad shook it. “Thought I mentioned keeping a close watch.”
“And here I am.” He peered at me quizzically. “What is it?”
I leaned down and kissed him, running my fingers into his hair, letting my lips linger on his. He pulled back, wide-eyed.
“Tell me,” he said.
I wanted to leap on him, whisper it in his ear, and have him hold me and tell me it was good, we were going to be fine. I was petrified and tongue-tied and my father was right there.
My mouth hovered close to his. “Soon.”
Dad cleared his throat. When I straightened, he pressed me toward the door, boots knocking on the tile, and spoke to Jesse over his shoulder.
“You parked nearby?”
Jesse turned and pushed to catch up. “Across the street.” The automatic door opened and we headed outside into the sun. I said, “Why the urgency?”
Dad adjusted his Abraham Lincoln cap. “Things have changed.”
“What is it?”
He was holding me alarmingly tight. “Darlin’, I’m sorry. He killed Becky O’Keefe last night.”
The light went white and began to hum, drowning out the sound of traffic. Jesse’s voice barely cut through the noise.
“That’s not all. He stole her car, with her toddler inside. The little boy’s still missing.”
We crossed the street to the parking garage, Dad gripping me against the sunlight and noise.
“Becky’s husband was on the news, making a plea for the kidnapper to return the boy.” He shook his head. “God-awful thing. It’s your worst nightmare.”
“How did she die?” I said.
Dad didn’t answer. I looked at Jesse.
“Her throat was cut,” he said.
The light hurt my eyes. “Was she tortured?”
“I don’t know.”
He was grim. Special Agent Heaney’s statement came back to me: Coyote’s aim was to inflict maximum pain on his victims before killing them. The humming in my head intensified.
“Ryan’s only two years old,” I said.
The truck was parked near the entrance to the garage. Jesse unlocked it with the remote, the squelch echoing off the walls.
He touched my arm. “I don’t know that there’s much chance we can help.”
“Not much chance is better than no chance. And every minute that goes by . . .”
He nodded. “Right. Let’s roll.”
He got in, popped the wheels off the chair, and put them in the backseat. Normally he tossed the frame behind him as well, but add me and luggage back there and the fit got tight. He handed me a bungee cord. I lugged the frame into the truck’s cargo bed and lashed it down. Dad watched as if we were performing brain surgery with knitting needles.
“You have this down to an art.”
He looked disconcerted, and I couldn’t spare any emotional energy to worry about it. “Yeah. You ride shotgun.”
Jesse fired up the engine. I hopped in the backseat, Dad climbed in front, and Jesse pulled out, spinning the wheel.
Dad buckled his seat belt. “Did you bring a weapon?”
“Repeat that when I pull up in front of the security camera, please. Louder.” Sensing my father’s glare, he nodded at the glove compartment. “Locked in there.”
“Can you get much speed out of this truck?”
“Enough.”
I fought down a hoot. He could get speed out of a turnip. He glanced at me in the rearview mirror.
“Tell me?” he said.
High-wire trepidation pulsed through me again. I put my hand on his shoulder and shook my head. His mouth scrunched to one side. He paid and pulled into traffic.
“What are we going to get when we meet Maureen Swayze?” he said.
I got the Primacon Laboratories blurb from my backpack. “A heavy hitter. Degrees in electrical engineering and molecular biophysics from Columbia. Doctorate from MIT. Worked in the pharmaceutical industry before spending a decade in government research. Her publications include Nonlinear Protein Dynamics and Neurological Dysfunction: The Mathematics of the Random Walk.”
He eyed me in the rearview mirror at that one.
“Chemistry term, I think.” I leaned toward Dad. “She doesn’t sound like a fuel researcher to me.”
“She wasn’t. She was director of special projects, and her office covered a number of operations.”
I nodded. “I remember Swayze being at the high school after my class came back from Renegade Canyon. Red hair and a loud voice.”
“Your mom told me.”
“She remembers Swayze too. Says she’s a cold-faced bitch.”
He turned. The surprise on his face was genuine. “Your mother’s a woman of strong opinions. Often black-and-white.”
“Is she right?”
“Maureen’s a bulldozer and a pill, but that’s as far as I’ll go. Are you feeling all right?”
Jesse glanced in the mirror. “Yeah, your eyes are shiny and you look kind of dazed. Like you’ve been whacked with a two-by-four.”
No, it was a different kind of wood.
A snerking sound came out of my throat, equal parts shriek and laugh. “You aren’t kidding. Hard enough to hit a home run.”
They both turned and looked at me.
I pressed a fist against my mouth and waited for my nerves to crawl back inside my skin. Outside, billboards and palm trees and hotels and airfreight offices and nudie bars blared past in the unbecoming sunshine. Cars switched lanes at speed, darting like blowflies. Jesse followed another pickup through a hole in traffic, jinking across two lanes to beat a light.
I forced my voice to a normal register. “Will Swayze try to stonewall us?”
Dad frowned. “She was always on the up-and-up. She may have her own agenda, but I have to think she’ll tell us what she can.”
“There’s a little boy on the line now. She’d damn well better.”
Two years old. Taken by a stranger whose hands were wet with Becky’s blood. My God.
“Maureen isn’t the issue, though. South Star is,” Dad said.
“And now are you going to tell us about that?”
“Nonclassified elements.” He poked up the brim of his hat with his index finger. “South Star’s mission was peak soldier performance. Researching ways to keep soldiers operating at top physical and mental levels under extreme conditions.”
“How?”
“Revving them up. Strengthening the immune system, increasing endurance, and reducing the amount of sleep they need. Raising their pain threshold so they could keep going when they’re wounded.”
Jesse swung up the on-ramp onto the 405 and accel
erated into the freeway traffic. “So it was about creating über-soldiers.”
“It was about keeping our men and women alive on the battlefield. When you get sleep-deprived, you make mistakes and people can die. But if you eliminate the need for sleep, you can operate twenty-four/seven without losing your edge. You can send fewer soldiers into battle and risk fewer lives.”
“Swayze was engineering insomnia,” Jesse said.
“Essentially.”
“And studying ways to increase pain tolerance?”
He changed lanes. It was archetypal Los Angeles traffic: huge SUVs and BMWs and low-riders jockeying for primacy. Signs said, SLOWER TRAFFIC KEEP RIGHT, but nobody obeyed, because no Angeleno will concede that another driver has a faster car than his. Ever.
“Not pain tolerance,” Dad said, “pain threshold. Stopping soldiers from perceiving pain to begin with.”
“That’s called morphine,” Jesse said.
“You bet. Morphine was a terrific painkiller for riflemen at Gettysburg, and it’s terrific today, and it leaves you with a soldier who’s incoherent and incapacitated. But say you could eliminate the sensation of pain while leaving soldiers clearheaded. What if you could inoculate people against pain beforehand, so soldiers could continue fighting when they’re wounded?”
“South Star was developing a pain vaccine?” I said.
“Yes.”
Jesse shook his head. “Redesigning soldiers to be sleepless and numb. Unbelievable.”
“That’s a cheap crack,” Dad said.
“No, it’s just my experience that those things don’t tend to be so great.”
“It may sound cruel, keeping soldiers on the battlefield when they’re wounded,” Dad said. “But when you’re torn up with shrapnel and fifty miles from a medic, having your comrades evacuate you isn’t compassionate. It’s dangerous and it jeopardizes the mission. If wounded men can defend themselves and help the unit, it’s better all around.”
“Was this vaccine chemical, psychological, what?” I said.
“That was need-to-know. Best guess—neurobiological techniques, cognitive-behavioral psychology, cell regulation . . .” He shrugged. “But I have to presume that whatever South Star was investigating, something went wrong. Very, very wrong.”
Jesse wrung his hand on the wheel. “And instead of a supersoldier, it created a serial killer?”
“Or worse. Both.”
I leaned forward. “I spoke to Valerie Skinner this morning. She doesn’t have cancer. She says something’s digging tunnels in her brain.”
Jesse’s shoulders tightened. “Shit.”
Dad stared at traffic. His face was weather-beaten and his eyes remote.
“You don’t look surprised,” I said.
“I’ve checked into why some of your classmates have died, and Valerie fits a pattern.”
“Whatever this thing is, it causes neurological malfunction, doesn’t it?” I said.
He gave me a dark look. “Hold on. This is hard to hear.”
Sliding the key card into the door, Coyote entered the hotel room and stopped still. Anxiety pulsed beneath his skin. He drew sensory data: sights, sounds, smells. The suitcase stood in the corner, precisely parallel to the edge of the window. The filament ran from the handle of the weapons case to the leg of the desk chair. Nothing had been disturbed.
He closed the door, booted the laptop, turned on the shower, and stripped naked. Time was short. Unease was a metallic taste in his mouth.
The room was secure. But the mission was not.
He had chucked Soccer Mom halfway back to Hollywood, throwing her wig and clothing into a Dumpster. He had sloughed off her anima and returned to himself. He had, per protocol, stopped at an Internet café to check his e-mail and the news feeds before returning to base. When he did, he discovered that several trip wires had been set off.
Steam filled the bathroom. He stepped into the shower and the hot water began rinsing away the stench of the she-horse. Not cooked flesh, but the true stench of Becky O’Keefe, the odor of corpulence, of milk and meat and moistness.
The e-mail was bad, the phone call worse. His contacts had given him trigger phrases. South Star. Explosion. Details of his project were beginning to seep out—backstory, as they called it in Hollywood. Granted, his mission had become high-profile, thanks to the news jackals. But the trigger phrases should not have seeped into the knowledge stream.
There was a leak.
He soaped up and scrubbed. Removing trace evidence from his body was crucial. He had to avoid arrest: Arrest would derail the project. However, if it came to that, trace would be irrelevant. If the mission failed, he would suicide himself and take his captors with him. He ran the soap over his hair, lathering his scalp. The stench of the horse ran down the drain.
There was a leak. He needed to plug it.
He slid the soap over his body, suppressing the urge to linger. Things were unfinished. The trip wires had prevented him from completing his work. The child remained.
He had much to do. He ran through the list in his head. Becky’s car? Nobody was going to find it yet. He had given himself sufficient time.
The data? He would upload and cross-reference as soon as he finished washing.
The mother? The shower needled his chest and abdomen. He ran the soap across the raised tracks of the scar. And in a circle over his belly, feeling flat, smooth skin.
The mother, Becky the Mare, was drained of blood and stiff with rigor. She was gone.
The child?
Coyote circled the soap around his belly again and again. Steam cocooned him. The soap dropped from his slippery fingers. His hand continued circling his navel.
Cold water blurted through the showerhead. Coyote blinked. Feeling the sensation of skin rubbing skin, he looked down. His hand was circling his umbilicus. His fingertips were wrinkled. How long had he been here?
He slammed the showerhead sideways and shut off the water. He had things to take care of. Wrapping a towel around his waist, he stalked out to the bedroom, running once more through his list.
The car. The data. The mother.
The mother, the mother, something went with the mother.
No—the mother went. The mother was gone. That was the truth of the world. Hollywood, outside his window, was where his mother had gone. Stay here, K. I’ll be back tonight. In that hot, bright apartment near the hills. But she never came back. He waited, and he burrowed into a corner of the apartment in a nest made of her clothes, until the building super found him and called Social Services. But her going was her gift to him. It forced him to learn how to struggle and fight. Need built strength. Lack built strength. He had been more than ready for boot camp, for everything the army threw at him, for China Lake and the agencies he later served.
And now he was on his own again. Disavowed.
He rubbed the scar and picked up his amulet from the desk. The two were halves of a whole. The scar was born from the shrapnel in the amulet, as Coyote was born from South Star.
He felt a need growing, a thirst to latch on and nourish himself. A sound rose from deep in his throat.
He had a list, a schedule, but he was going to have to adjust it. He had to find the source of the leak. And he knew where to start looking.
He gazed out the window at the crawling gleam of Los Angeles. The craving to draw sustenance intensified, the desire to eat and eat and nourish himself until he was gorged. He threw the towel in the corner. Tossing the suitcase on the bed, he began to dress.
The car. The data. The mother.
And now, a leak. He had to take steps.
He pulled on a T-shirt and khakis, a button-down shirt and baseball cap. Mr. Hollywood Nebbish would serve today.
He was forgetting something. He could taste it on the air. Something about a child. A child seeking closeness to the mother. Becky’s child? He paused. The thought eluded him. Slamming the suitcase, he turned to go.
13
The blue-green Santa M
onica mountains cut the horizon ahead. Jesse closed on a gasoline tanker, doing eighty-five. Dad’s voice was flat.
“Three deaths are particularly suspicious. Phoebe Chadwick, Linda Garcia, and Shannon Gruber. In order: alcohol, anorexia, and pneumonia. All of them atypical cases.”
“Define atypical,” I said.
“Phoebe was a party girl who stumbled off a curb during spring break and got hit by a bus. She’d had a couple of drinks, but according to the toxicology report she wasn’t drunk. Turns out she’d been having tremors, her reflexes had gone haywire, and she was slurring her speech. She also thought light sockets could talk and that Katie Couric was stalking her.”
“Yow.”
Jesse flipped a look in his wing mirror and yanked the pickup into the fast lane to pass the tanker.
“Wilshire exit’s only half a mile ahead,” I said.
“I see it. You can stop clawing my shoulder.”
He swung the truck back across four lanes of traffic, swerved onto the off-ramp, and braked sharply around the corner onto Wilshire Boulevard.
Dad braced himself against his door. “And Linda Garcia, her anorexia came on like a fever and destroyed her in the space of months. Her father says it burned her from the inside out. By the time he carried her into the hospital she weighed sixty-nine pounds.”
“Damn.” I tried not to picture that. “And Shannon? Her obit reads pneumonia following a long illness, and Mom said aggressive breast cancer ran in her family.”
“It wasn’t cancer. They don’t know what it was.”
“How—”
He turned sharply. “I’ve spoken to all their parents in the past thirty-six hours. People I served with, worked side by side with, every one of whom has buried a child.”
My gaze broke from his.
Jesse beat the light at Sepulveda and we passed the Federal Building, towering on its lonely plot like a pillar of salt. Dad’s voice dropped back to flat calm.
“Shannon’s life turned into one solid panic attack. Her folks found her hiding in a closet wrapped in wet towels because she was terrified of dust mites. They nearly had her committed, until a psychiatrist shot her full of Thorazine and strapped her down so they could MRI her. They found massive abnormalities in her thalamus.”
