The FBI agent in charge snagged her. “What the hell happened here?” the man asked. “Why can’t anyone get access to a crime scene?”
Lisa shook her head. “Call your boss. I heard it’s a national-security thing. We’re supposed to keep things clear until we get an okay from higher up.”
“Goddamn private armies,” the man muttered, but he got on the phone.
Not a bad operation, overall, Lisa decided. The bodies were disappearing into ambulances, and the crime scene was becoming more and more muddied. In just a little while, all the events that had happened here would be gone. Swept away and forgotten. A small, personal family tragedy among the many larger tragedies that pummeled the nation every day. Not news at all. Maybe a few lines in the Metro section, and then gone for good.
She watched as Saamsi finally managed to get Simon Banks stuffed into a black town car and sent away.
That’s right. Nothing to see here. Move along, folks.
Saamsi was coming back across the lawn to her. He was frowning.
“Lisa?”
“Yeah.”
“Why is that man standing in the lobby in his underwear?”
“What?” Lisa whirled.
Timmons was stumbling out of the building, stripped down to his tighty-whities.
“What the…?”
“Gas.” He choked.
“What gas?” Lisa asked.
He knelt down and retched. “Didn’t… get up to the tenth.”
“What do you mean you didn’t make it up to the tenth? You were there. I talked to you!” She grabbed him and pulled him close. “You said you took care of it!”
“Not me.” He put his hands on his knees and gagged.
“What’s going on here?” George asked.
A cold finger of fear skittered up Lisa’s spine as pieces started clicking into place. “Where’s the ambulance?” she shouted, casting about wildly.
“What ambulance?”
“The one with the goddamn bodies in it! The one with the goddamn bodies!” She started pushing through the crowd. There!
The ambulance was driving slowly toward the curb. Lisa shouted, but in the confusion, no one was listening.
Lisa put her head down and ran.
For a second she thought she’d catch up. The ambulance slowed as it bumped down off the curb and into the street, and Lisa put on a burst of speed. The ambulance made a clumsy turn into its lane and Lisa caught a glimpse of the driver.
A kid?
It was a goddamn kid, barely tall enough to see over the steering wheel. An unruly mop of black curly hair puffed out from beneath the blue uniform cap of an EMT.
He was grinning at her.
“Stop that ambulance!” Lisa shouted, but it was no use. The kid flicked on the lights and sirens, and her words were drowned in a flood of emergency noise.
43
“HEADS UP, PEOPLE! DEATH BARBIE’S onto us,” Tank shouted into the back of the ambulance.
Cynthia cursed. “Already?” She was unzipping her EMS jacket, revealing a flak jacket that read SWAT. “Get them out of their bags,” Cynthia said to Kook.
“Kinda of busy saving our asses here,” Kook murmured. She was still in her own EMS gear with her laptop propped on her bloody knees. Her fingers left slick dark stains on the keys as she typed.
Cynthia cursed again. Everything was happening too fast. She went to unzip the pair of body bags, revealing the bloody visages of Alix and Moses.
“Romeo and fucking Juliet.” She scowled.
Kook shot her a dirty look. “Let’s have a little optimism here, all right? I’m trying to work.”
“Yeah. Optimism. Got it.” She started digging in her raid kit for syringes.
Optimism optimism optimism.
The ambulance was slowing. The front door opened, and Adam piled into the cab, still wearing his Williams & Crowe SWAT gear, and hauling a duffel bag. The ambulance accelerated again. Adam grabbed for support, nearly falling over as Tank gunned the engine.
“We’ve got Shortstuff driving?” he complained.
“I’ve got my license,” Tank shot back. “Quit whining.”
“Only because Kook hacked the DMV,” Adam muttered as he stumbled into the back of the ambulance. They bounced over another curb, and everyone grabbed for handholds.
“Watch it!” Cynthia shouted. “I’m trying to work back here!’
“Sorry!” Tank called back.
“What’s the rush?” Adam asked. “I thought you or Kook was going to be driving.”
“Death Barbie’s sending her troops after us any second,” Cynthia said.
“Already?”
“Can’t expect everything to go perfectly,” Kook muttered.
Optimism optimism optimism.
Moses’s zipper was jammed. Cynthia swore. “I don’t have time for this! Adam, get this open.” She turned and went back to rummaging in her raid kit while Adam fumbled and fought with the zipper. “Jeez, he looks terrible.”
“Just get him out of the bag more. I need a shoulder.” She finally found her syringe and uncapped it. Squirted clear fluid into the air. She took a deep breath.
You can do this.
“Are you sure this is going to work?” Adam asked.
Cynthia paused with the needle in her hand. “You’re asking now?”
“I’m just the muscle here. You’re the one who read all the drug studies.”
The ambulance squealed around another corner, and they all scrambled for support.
“Sorry!” Tank called before they had a chance to complain. “We’re almost to the Beltway!”
“Is it going to work?” Adam asked again.
“Just hold Moses still,” Cynthia ordered. “I don’t want him bouncing around while I stick him.”
Adam gripped Moses’s bloody shoulders. “Your hands are shaking,” he observed.
Cynthia shot him a glare. “No,” she said. “They’re not.”
She slid the syringe into Moses’s arm. Nice and easy. She pressed the plunger, and fluid flowed out of the syringe.
“How long is it going to take?” Adam asked.
“I don’t know. Probably a couple of minutes.”
“You don’t know? I thought you were the doctor here.”
“I’m pre-med, asshole. Anyway, no one would know. It’s all in the drug interactions and dose.” She was already fumbling for another syringe and popping the cap.
“Get Alix ready.”
Adam unzipped Alix’s body bag the rest of the way and got a shoulder exposed.
Cynthia paused, on the verge of sticking her. It was horrifying to see Alix inert and smeared with blood this way. Nothing like the girl she’d known at Seitz. She looked like some kind of corpse bride. So pale.
“Snow White,” Adam murmured.
“Cyn was thinking more Romeo and Juliet,” Kook said.
“Talk about pessimistic.”
“That’s what I said.”
Optimistic optimistic optimistic.
“Okay,” Cynthia said. “Let’s see if we can make Snow White wake up.” She buried the needle into Alix’s flesh and shot her full of drugs. She knelt back, waiting. In Cynthia’s mind, all she could see were long biochemical chains interacting. It should work, she thought.
Nothing happened. She checked Moses. No change. She pressed her fingers to his cheek.
Did he feel colder?
“Give them another shot,” Adam said.
“I don’t have any other shots.”
They waited, staring at the two inert and bloody bodies peeled out of black bags.
Two more casualties they could lay at the feet of the Doubt Factory.
44
ALIX CAME AWAKE RETCHING. She rolled over and nearly fell off the stretcher and then retched again. She blinked in the light. She was swaying. No, everything was swaying.
And swerving.
She was dimly aware of someone else gagging and coughing. The sound made her retch again. She blinked in the li
ght and found Cynthia and Adam peering over her.
“What the—?” Alix recoiled.
Cynthia straightened, smiling. “Welcome back from the dead, girlfriend.”
“What are you doing here?”
“We thought we’d kidnap you again,” Adam said. “You know, for old time’s sake.”
A sudden terror made her lurch upright. “Moses! Where’s Moses?”
“Here,” a voice croaked.
Alix whirled to find Moses lying beside her on a stretcher, looking wasted and covered with blood.
“Oh my God, what happened to you?” Alix ran her hands frantically over his body. “Where are you hurt?”
“It’s fake blood,” Cynthia said.
“For effect,” Adam added helpfully. “Needed to make you look good and dead.”
“But… but…”
Alix tried to take it all in. She was in an ambulance, half-zipped into a body bag, and she was covered with sticky blood. Her hands, her arms. Her hair was matted with it.
She stared around herself, trying to put everything together. Cynthia and Adam and Kook, everyone wearing SWAT and EMS gear. Makeup that made them look older.
Cynthia and Adam and Kook cracked up. “You should see your face,” Kook said.
“What am I missing?” someone called from up front. Tank?
“Nothing. We’re all good,” Moses called forward.
Alix whirled on Moses. “Is this another one of your damn pranks? Did you set me up again?”
“Whoa! Not me. Not this time.” Moses was slowly dragging himself out of his body bag. Unzipping it and then crawling unsteadily onto the ambulance’s bench. “This wasn’t my gig.”
“It was mostly Tank,” Kook said from where she was perched with her laptop and a pair of DJ headphones around her neck. “He was worried that Wonderboy here was going to do something stupid.” She looked up briefly from her laptop, frowning. “None of us expected you to be the stupid one, though. You about got the two of you killed.”
“You were following us?”
“What am I, an amateur?” Kook made a scornful face. “We bugged the factory before we left. Just had to listen in every once in a while. Sure enough, the stupid came up, just like Tank thought it would.”
“You were listening to us?”
“You and your sexytime.” Kook glanced up from her keyboard. “It would have saved me a lot of late nights if you would have just gotten to the talking instead of all that grunting and groaning.”
Alix could feel herself blushing. Moses looked uncomfortable as well.
Adam clapped her on the shoulder. “Don’t worry. I mostly made them fast-forward through the embarrassing parts. Straight people getting it on…” He made a face. “I mean, I guess it’s fine. If you’re into that kind of thing. But it would have made our lives a lot easier if you’d actually talked more about your plans while you were at the factory. We couldn’t get all the details we needed. We didn’t have time.”
“So… how did you know we’d be here now?”
They all exchanged glances. “Your brother.”
“Jonah?”
“We heard you saying to Moses that he knew about you both. We got the rest of the details we needed out of him.”
“But… he wouldn’t have…”
“Oh, he was a pain in the ass about it. He wouldn’t help unless he could come along.”
“He’s here?”
“God, no. Waiting in the van, as soon as we switch vehicles. He’s too useful to let anyone see him. As soon as we wrap this up, he’s going right back home to keep an eye on your dad and George Saamsi for us. That kid is a piece of work.”
Alix leaned back, stunned. Jonah. Of course. She should have known that he would never stay put. “I can’t believe…”
“Believe it, girl.” Cynthia was smiling. She gave Adam a shove and said, “Go up and drive before Tank gets us killed.”
Adam went forward. A second later the ambulance swayed as he took the wheel. Tank came back to join them.
The boy’s expression turned solemn when he saw their condition. “You made it,” he said to Moses.
“Thanks to you, I hear.”
Alix looked uncertainly from Moses to the small boy. They weren’t anything alike, and yet some part of them seemed almost as if they were twins. Older and younger versions of an experience she knew she would never fully understand.
Two orphans who had lost everything.
Tank scuffed the floor with a shoe. “Knew you were going to try something stupid.”
“I thought you were done with me.”
“Still family,” Tank said. He looked up. “You’re the only family I got.” His face looked stony solemn, and then, abruptly, the facade cracked and he lunged into Moses’s arms, wracked with terrified sobs. “I can’t lose any more family,” Tank said. “I can’t.”
Moses was taken aback. He wrapped his arms about the boy, feeling Tank’s shaking. “Hey, bro, I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I’m sorry, bro. Didn’t mean to scare you. Didn’t mean to scare you at all.”
Tank wiped his eyes. “Can’t lose any more, you know?”
“I know,” Moses said solemnly. “I get it. I won’t do anything stupid. I’m not going anywhere.”
“I still don’t get it,” Alix said. “How did you get us here? The elevator opened and—”
“We gassed you,” Cynthia said apologetically. “We gassed the Williams and Crowe guys who were coming up to get you, and then Adam took their place, and we came up and gassed you, too. After that, it was just about staging and calling up the reinforcements.”
“I got to shoot off some sweet guns, too,” Adam called back. “Don’t forget that!”
Cynthia pressed on. “By the time everyone else had gotten up there, you were dead, and they were focusing on cleaning up the scene. The only tense moment was when Adam had to meet up with the rest of the Williams and Crowe people who were stuck hiking up the stairwells. We were afraid someone would make him take off his SWAT helmet and get a good look at him before we could get your bodies out. But everyone was so freaked out by the other guys that we gassed that it was just a matter of wrapping you in body bags and pretending to be the friendly neighborhood ambulance association wheeling you out.”
“That was actually nerve-racking,” Kook said. “I wasn’t expecting your dad to be right at the doors when we came out with you. Lucky he was so focused on you. I thought he’d recognize Cynthia, even with medical glasses.”
“My dad was there?”
Cynthia nodded. “Yeah. I was just glad you looked as dead as you did. He was all over you. You never could have faked through that.”
“Was he mad?”
Cynthia looked at her incredulously. “He thought you were dead, Alix. He was a wreck. Crying and yelling at George Saamsi and Death Barbie. It was a mess.”
Alix swallowed, trying to decide how she felt about the news. Her father was stricken with grief that she’d died. Some part of her felt for his distress, but she couldn’t quite make herself feel sorry. He’d helped kill so many people, and he felt bad only now? Simon Banks cared only when the person dying was his own child. He didn’t feel bad about Moses’s parents or Tank and Azicort. Dad only felt bad when it was personal to him. Alix was interested to discover that she didn’t have much sympathy for him. Mostly, it felt right to her. Maybe now you understand, she thought.
“Where did you get the gas?” Moses was asking.
Kook smirked. “It’s Azicort.”
Cynthia was nodding. “When you absolutely, positively want to give someone a near-fatal coma, most doctors choose Azicort. We had a whole vat of the stuff from the rat raid. Tank rigged a blower. The only real problem was not knowing how much we were dosing you with.” She peered closely at them. “You seem okay, though.”
“The more I hear, the less I want to know,” Moses groaned.
A new fear gripped Alix. “What about the files? We left the files!”
“No! I got them!” Adam called from up front. “You can thank Williams and Crowe for that. I would have missed the bag, but it turned up while we were waiting for the bodies to get cleaned out. And seeing as I was so helpful, I volunteered to take it down to Death Barbie.”
Alix slumped back, relieved. “It worked then. We did it.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure of that,” Kook said. She had her headphones pinched between ear and shoulder, and she was typing madly on her blood-smeared laptop. “Our friends just put our description out on the police bands.”
Cynthia hurried over to listen in. “Hell.” Her face turned hard. “I didn’t think Williams and Crowe would risk involving outsiders.”
Kook motioned for Alix. “You got your phone on you?”
“I don’t…” She felt her pockets. “Yeah. Here.”
“You want to call Death Barbie?”
Alix’s skin crawled. “Why?”
“I’ve got an idea.” Kook’s eyes were positively glowing. “And it’ll be way better if she gets a call from the dead.”
“Okay.” Alix dialed.
Lisa picked up almost instantly. “Who is this?” Her voice was breathless.
“You don’t recognize my voice?”
“Alix?”
Her words were suddenly hesitant.
“Tell her to call off the goons or you go public,” Cynthia whispered. She and Kook were messing with the laptop.
“Go public with what?”
“Just tell her!”
When Alix relayed the message, Lisa laughed contemptuously. “You’re just kids.”
“Now play this,” Kook said, and held up her laptop.
“Hang on. I’ve got something for you,” Alix said.
Kook pressed Play. Alix heard a voice that sounded a lot like Adam’s issuing from the speakers.
A conversation back and forth.
“Come on. They’re just kids!”
And then Lisa’s clipped tones.
“Finish it. Clean up the mess.”
A pair of gunshots echoed.
Alix flinched involuntarily.
“It’s done.”
“Good. Now clean up the scene and get the hell out of there.”
Alix felt a sudden, cold rage.
She took the phone back. “Call off your dogs, Lisa, or I’ll send this to every single cop and every single news organization in the city. You might know how to bury some things, but I can make this go viral. If you keep messing with us, I guarantee I can make you famous, at least until someone who’s more important than you decides you need to disappear. It sounds like you people know a lot about making sure lips stay sealed. Your choice. Either you back off or I make you the top of the news cycle.”
The Doubt Factory Page 34
