by Rachel Caine
“Stay with Annie. I’ll see if I can’t make this go away without too much trouble.”
Patrick took Annie’s arm and led her to the kitchen table, and as Bryn was leaving, he asked, “Do you like hot chocolate?”
Bryn was sorry to have to go, if it meant missing out on the hot cocoa. But she firmly shut the kitchen door on the other three, and—Mr. French tagging faithfully at her heels—went to the front door and swung it open just before Riley was about to deliver a wood-damaging knock with the blunt end of a very large flashlight.
Riley glared at her for a few seconds, then turned to her tactical team, waiting just behind her with weapons still hot. “Stand down,” she ordered, and arched an eyebrow at Bryn. “Unless you want to do it the hard way?”
Bryn silently stood aside to let her in. The team commander followed her inside and gestured for his other men to remain where they were. Well, Bryn thought, at least we don’t have to worry about my friends in the ski masks sneaking up on us just now.
What she did have to worry about was the boiling fury kept barely under the surface in the FBI agent’s body language.
“I suppose offering you coffee would be out of the question,” Bryn said, and got nothing, just a flat stare as she closed the door. “Okay. Shoot. Metaphorically.”
“You lied to me,” Riley said, and every word was individually sharpened and polished to a high sheen, and flung at high speed. “Do you really think your situation is that safe, Ms. Davis? Do you think that because you’re living here, you’re no longer subject to the terms of the agreement you signed? Because lying to me is a very, very bad idea and will have serious, painful consequences, not just for you, but for Mr. McCallister as well, and any of his associates who want to earn themselves an accessory charge.”
Bryn hesitated for just long enough that it was clear she wasn’t going to be bullied, then said, “Let’s discuss this somewhere more comfortable.” She turned and walked into Patrick’s office/library. After a pause, Riley followed, trailing her somewhat unnecessary bodyguard. He, at least, seemed amused, and, once they were in the library, took up an at-rest stance by the doors as Riley and Bryn crossed to the desk.
Bryn checked the computer quickly. Patrick had left the thumb drive plugged in, and she quickly copied the files with a fast swipe of her fingertips over the pressure-sensitive trackpad.
“Davis,” Riley said, and knocked knuckles on the wood of the desk. “Focus. What are you doing, checking Twitter? You lied to me.”
“About what?”
“I hope you’re not stupid enough to think I’m kidding, because in about five seconds you’re going to be in handcuffs, on your way to a location so secret that it’ll take even McCallister ten years just to find it on a map.” Riley visibly controlled herself, and then said, in an artificially even voice, “You said you didn’t find anything at Graydon’s offices. That was a lie. Go on, ask me how I know.”
“Manny Glickman,” Bryn said. “He called and told you. But the question is, did he tell you what it was?”
“He said you brought it to him, and he refused to have anything to do with it.” Riley sat back, arms crossed, eyes half-hooded but bright with challenge.
Bryn said, “I need to show you something.” She spun the monitor around and clicked play.
Riley started to object—she clearly wanted to keep momentum in the meeting—but when the video began, she stopped, frowning, then leaned forward. The frown deepened, and Bryn watched her closely.
She saw the almost imperceptible flinch as the shots were fired into Jason’s head, and then the gradual dawning of horror as the furnace began doing its grim work. But Riley didn’t ask for it to be turned off. She watched the whole thing, as if it were her sworn duty.
When it finally ended, Bryn said, “I have two more. They’re the same, except for the identities of the people being put in the furnaces. And from the length of time the screaming goes on, they’re all Revived. Now. Let’s start over. What do you know about this?”
Riley was silent for a few seconds, then said, “The coveralls the workers were wearing had a logo on them. Was it Graydon doing the dirty work?”
“Cleaning up,” Bryn confirmed. “Literally. And then they got the same treatment.” She smiled a little, but it wasn’t from humor. “The people in that office died from bullets in the head, then were burned when the bomb went off. I doubt that was any kind of an accident. I think it was done that way to send a message. Was that message meant for you, Riley?”
The bitter anger in the look she got spoke volumes. “Do you really think I spent the last six months of my life playing grief counselor, nanny, and Mother Teresa to a bunch of spoiled corporate-ladder climbers just to shoot them and shove them in a furnace? No, Bryn. It wasn’t me.”
“Not even on executive orders?”
“It may have escaped you, so I’ll spell it out slowly: I work in the FBI. That doesn’t stand for Federal Bureau of Incineration.”
“Tell that to the employees of Pharmadene that didn’t make it out of the Civic Theatre when it blew up.” Riley shook her head, but Bryn didn’t give her the chance to talk. “You knew, and you let it happen, because it was one of those necessary evils. So is that what’s going on here? Sanctioned murder, and a blind eye by your bosses? Because I swear to God, Riley, I will blow every whistle with every media outlet there is, including the Daily Shopper, if you don’t make it stop!”
Riley sat back in the leather chair. “If you threaten that kind of thing, you know I have to take you seriously. You don’t want that, Bryn. You really don’t. Because for starters, you disappear into custody. You, your sister, McCallister, Joe, Liam, Manny Glickman, Pansy Taylor, maybe even Joe’s wife and kids. It becomes a roll-up of everyone who has any personal knowledge of your status. Hell, even your staff at the funeral home. All confined to six-by-six cells. Do not mess with me. I don’t play chicken. I wring necks.”
The threat wasn’t anything Bryn hadn’t expected, but it still chilled her, because the look in Riley’s eyes was unyielding. She was right; the FBI couldn’t take risks. Her job was to walk a delicate line between the care of the people who were—not by their own choice—addicted to Returné and keeping the secret from getting out. It wasn’t by any stretch easy. And it required a certain level of unflinching, weirdly compassionate cruelty, too.
Mr. French, lying at Bryn’s feet, sensed the mood in the room getting even darker, and raised his head to stare at Riley. He gave her a low, rumbling growl.
“These people couldn’t just disappear,” Bryn said. “They reported in daily for shots. If any of them missed two days in a row, the alarm must have sounded. You must have known, Riley.”
“What I know, and when I knew it, is none of your business.” Riley stood, grabbed the thumb drive from the laptop, and yanked it free. “I won’t ask if you kept copies; of course you did. But I’ll just give you this one warning: stop. Agent Zaragosa asked you to do one thing: visit Graydon and see if it warranted a full investigation. You did. You found a massacre and a mystery. Your job’s over. The rest you leave to us. It’s our job to protect you.”
“And you’re doing such a great job.”
“Let me make it very, very clear,” Riley said. “Go back to selling caskets to grieving relatives. Take care of your sister—I understand she’s pretty fragile right now. And let it go. These killings died with Graydon. Understand?”
“Then who tried to abduct me tonight—Santa Claus?”
“We’re handling it. And we have the resources to shut them down, so let us do our jobs. Stop playing Harriet the Spy, or your next room with a view looks out on Guantánamo Bay.”
Riley stood up and stalked for the door, and her tactical team leader opened it for her, then followed her out. There were no good-byes. Bryn made sure they left, sealed the gates, turned on the security, locked the front door, and then went to the kitchen.
Liam was gone. It was just Patrick and Annie, and three empty mugs co
oling 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 war
mth 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.
