He walked briskly down to the end of the hall. There were two offices there, facing each other. The door to one
office bore a brightly colored sign that proclaimed it the home of a graphics company. The other door was blank, and a quick try of the knob showed that it was locked tight.
Lynch knocked on the blank door, just in case anyone was inside. The last thing he wanted was to barge in on someone who’d want to know how Lynch got in without a key. He waited for an answer, and passed the time by looking casually around for passers-by or security cameras.
Once Lynch felt confident that no one was inside the office and no one was watching, he produced a set of lockpicks from his pocket. The door opened in no more time than it would have taken with a key. Lynch entered the office, and quietly closed and re-locked the door. No need to be interrupted without warning, after all.
Even a glance at the space was enough to confirm what the receptionist had told him. The room had been stripped bare, without a stick of furniture or forgotten knicknack to indicate that anyone had ever been here at all. Lynch suspected that the space had sat unused and untouched since the day the after-school program had cleared out. That might have been bad news for the landlord, but it was good news for Lynch, since it increased the chances that potential clues could still be waiting, undisturbed. The thought was enough to make Lynch thankful for the City’s extravagantly high rents.
Doors from the main room led to two smaller rooms that made up the rest of the suite. Lynch stuck his head inside each of them in turn and looked around. One was a bathroom. The other was a small inner office. Each was as empty as the main room.
That alone was enough to intrigue Lynch further. Typically, when businesses vacate their space, they leave things behind, whether it’s unneeded supplies or just stray scraps of packing materials. But this place had been cleaned out from top to bottom. Several hypothetical explanations ran through Lynch’s mind. It was possible that the building simply had a very thorough cleaning staff, who had scoured the space after the center left. It was possible that whoever ran the program was compulsively neat. But the more interesting possibility was that the center was a front, and that the people behind it didn’t want to leave any clues behind.
That would fit neatly with the receptionist’s telling him that the center had only been here for about one month.
Lynch could imagine the political pressure that the New York Police Department had been under to close the Cheswick case quickly. With the national focus that the case had gained, the City government wasn’t going to want to look inefficient in front of the State or the Feds. Given that, he could readily imagine that no one had looked too much further after the drug angle came to light. After all, a roomful of witnesses had seen Cheswick throw himself out the window of his own accord. The circumstances of Cheswick’s death fit perfectly with a bad trip or a case of DT’s. They probably never even got as far as checking into the background of the center itself.
But what if the center had been a fake? What if it had been set up for one purpose, and one purpose only:
To lure Senator Martin Cheswick to his death.
Once again, Lynch didn’t have any hard evidence to back up any of his theories. It was all just conjecture at this point—conjecture that would be hard to prove. He suspected the name on the lease would prove to be phony, and he somehow doubted that whoever owned the center left a forwarding address. The empty office seemed to leave things at a dead end.
Still, it was only empty to the casual observer. No matter how hard the prior occupants might have tried to cover their tracks, it was likely that they had missed some tiny clues that could tell the tale. Finding those clues would mean combing every square inch of the office space in painstaking detail.
Lynch had the time. •
Two hours later, Lynch had combed through a three-foot-wide swath of the tightly-knit carpet that stretched from one end of the main room to the other. He earned the fruits of his labor in a sealable plastic bag: three stray hairs that carried telltale DNA, some vaguely familiar metallic scrapings from the baseboard moulding that he couldn’t quite identify, and a few other tiny clues that might yield something under further analysis.
That was one pass down. Three more, and he’d finish the room. Then he could go on to the others.
Lynch didn’t mind the monotonous work. Years of intelligence work, sitting for hours in the back of disguised vans or piecing his way through mounds of data in search of the one golden needle in the haystack, had taught him the value of both patience and persistence. But the cramped muscles in Lynch’s back also reminded him that he wasn’t as young as he used to be.
He decided to stand up and stretch for a minute before getting back to the search. As he rose, his face passed by a heating vent, set in the wall about a foot above the floor. Something caught his eye.
Lynch kneeled back down to study the vent more closely. No, he hadn’t imagined it. There was a funny shadow at the edge of one of the openings in the vent.
Lynch tried to reach the tiny object, but his fingers were too big to fit through the grating. He took out a pocket knife, opened the blade, and used it to probe inside the vent. It took several tries, but eventually, he succeeded in bringing the object far enough forward to grasp it with his fingertips. It was a slender black tube, less than an inch long and only a couple of milimeters in diameter. The front of the tube was open, covered by a tiny disc of glass or transparent plastic. The back was connected to a thin cable covered in black rubber insulation that led deeper into the vent.
Camera, Lynch thought. With a fiber-optic cable.
He tried giving the device a gentle tug, but there wasn’t enough slack for the cable to extend more than a centimeter past the vent. In fact, it was only by keeping a tight grip, with his fingers pressed against the metal of the vent, that he could keep the cable extended at all L he let go, it would have snapped back far enough into the vent that he wouldn’t be able to reach it anymore.
This was no ordinary after-school program, he thought. Is it still active?
Are they still watching?
The best way to find answers, he figured, was to remove the cover of the vent and see what was inside. Without releasing his left hand’s grip on the cable, Lynch used his right to close the blade of his pocket knife. That was easy enough. The next step was trickier, as he tried to open the knife’s screwdriver blade with one hand. It slipped off his fingernail to snap shut twice. The third attempt seemed to be working better, though. The screwdriver had just barely managed to clear the body of the knife, when Lynch was startled by a voice.
A voice coming from inside the vent.
“Well, well. John Lynch,” the electronically-disguised voice said with a sigh. “You know, I left this here in case anyone came snooping. But I never imagined it would be you.”
It’s a camera, all right, Lynch thought. And a speaker.
“Although I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. You never could keep your nose out of other people’s business.”
It’s someone I know. Who—?
Lynch never got to finish the thought. Because that was the exact moment when a high-voltage charge surged through the vent. Every muscle of Lynch’s body constricted in pain as the shock sent him flying.
Lynch landed hard on the floor.
He wasn’t moving.
“Now, I suppose I’ll have to deal with your brats, too, before they come looking for you,” the voice continued.
There was another sigh.
“Life is just so complicated sometimes.”
CHAPTER 7
“Y ou’re hired,” said the man in the suit.
I “But... don’t you want to see my resume?”
“Oh, sure. You’re hired.”
Kat got up from her chair and picked up her bag.
“So, when would you like to start?” the man said. His voice had the vague, detached quality of someone speaking from far away in a daydream. “You could start no
w, if you want. We could get you set up now and you could get... y’know, started. When would be a good time for you to start?”
Kat gave him an icy stare. “Oh, I don’t know,” she said, with an edge in her voice. “How about never? Is never good for you?”
She spun on her heel and stormed out of the office, slamming the door behind her. She didn’t even slow down when she heard the glass in the door shatter.
In fact, Kat didn’t slow down long enough to put on her coat until she was out of the building and nearly three blocks away.
Kat stood on the street comer and growled under her breath. She was already well past the point where she’d had enough of this nonsense. Half of her interviews so far had gone exactly like this one. If it wasn’t computer whiz-kids barely older than herself who couldn’t get over being in a room with someone who was (as one of them put it) “even hotter than Lara Croft,” then it was balding, paunchy personnel directors mired in mid-life crises. Kat had neither the desire nor the intention to take a job where
her chief qualification was as someone’s fantasy object.
Yet, in the other half of her interviews, Kat kept facing the exact problem that Ms. Mickel had predicted back at the employment agency. The long and the short of it was that Kat had no relevant work experience. In fact, other than summers at the Kwikee Burger back home, she had no work experience at all. She hadn’t finished her degree, and hadn’t even made it halfway through the coursework for her major in computer science by the time I.O. whisked her away from school.
Finally, and perhaps most ironically when you considered her age, a lot of the computer knowledge Kat had acquired at Princeton was already growing outdated. The technology was changing at light speed. The evolution was racing forward so quickly that, over the course of the time she’d spent with Gen13, new generations of hardware and programming languages were already beginning to appear. They were displacing the stuff Kat had learned to take over the mantle of “cutting-edge.”
At her age, it wasn’t easy for Kat to think of herself as obsolete. But when you put it all togther, it didn’t exactly position Kat as the ideal candidate for a job.
Kat stood there for a bit, just watching the steam that came from her breath in the winter air. When she felt a little more calm, she hiked up her sleeve and looked at her watch.
One-thirty already? she thought with surprise. Where’d the day go?
Kat took out her schedule of interviews and checked it again, even though she had it virtually memorized. A glance confirmed that, as she had thought, her next interview was nearby, and it wasn't scheduled to start until two o’clock.
Kat decided to take advantage of the opportunity to grab a little lunch and recover from the blur of waiting rooms, interviews, circling and crossing out want ads, and dropping off resumes. She wasn’t especially familiar with the neighborhood down here in Tribeca. The area was harder to navigate than the bulk of the City that stretched uptown. The streets down here had names instead of sequential numbers, and some of the streets veered off at odd angles instead of maintaining a boxlike grid like most of Manhattan. Even down here, though, Kat knew that it was difficult to throw a stone in Manhattan without hitting a deli of some kind. Sure enough, when she looked around, she discovered one less than a block away.
Kat walked inside and headed straight for the salad bar. As she rummaged through the bar and made her selections, Kat took stock of her situation.
Clearly, finding the right job wasn’t going to be as easy as she had hoped. In many ways, searching for a job felt a lot like an endless series of blind dates, complete with all the nervousness and potential for rejection that analogy implied. And just as in blind dating, there was no way to know how long the process would have to continue before she found “Mister Right.”
Kat’s hand stopped halfway toward the bin of sliced tomatoes, hovering above the salad bar as she was struck by a troubling thought. What if she never found the right job? There were no guarantees that she ever would. Would she just have to give up? If not, what would she wind up having to settle for?
There was no way around the fact that the search was going to be hard. She’d known that from the start, much as she’d tried not to think about it. The real question was whether the ultimate payoff would be worth it. Unlike most of the other people searching for jobs out there, Kat didn’t really have to work. Mister Lynch covered the living expenses for all of Gen13, and gave each of them a generous weekly allowance besides. She had a gorgeous place to live, and more than enough pocket money for her modest needs.
But, as Sarah had pointed out to the others, that wasn’t why Kat was looking for a job. Kat didn’t need this for the money. She needed it for herself. And that, she realized with a deep sigh, wasn’t something that was going to go away anytime soon.
So yes, she figured, the search was worth it. It wasn’t going to be easy, but it was worth it.
Kat paid for her salad and took it outside to sit on the bench at a bus stop while she ate. She sat alone on the comer, fighting to eat her salad before the wind blew too much of it away. The solitary, outdoor meal wasn’t the most lavish she’d ever eaten, nor was it the most enjoyable. After spending hours mired in the looking-for-work grind, there was a big part of her that wished she could be off with her friends instead.
Kat wondered what the others were doing right now. She bet it was something fun.
Roxanne lay on her stomach, sprawled sideways across her bed. She was dressed now, but that wasn’t the most distinctive thing about how she looked. No, the distinctive thing was her eyes, which were puffy and red with tears.
Despite all the things Roxy did to make herself appear older—the attitude, the cigarettes, the tank tops and miniskirts—she was still, in many ways, not much more than a little girl. Roxy worked hard to project a tough outer shell, but most of it was an act—a mask to protect the sensitive, insecure soul beneath.
What’s wrong with me? she asked herself.
Roxy tried so hard to get close to people. She really did. But time after time, it always turned out the same way: Just when it looked like she’d succeeded... just when she’d start to feel comfortable ... the other person would push her away.
She thought about how hard she’d worked to land Grunge as her boyfriend. For the longest time, no matter what she did, it seemed like he barely realized she was alive. Or if he did notice her, it was more like a friend or sister thing than hearts and flowers. He was too interested in silicone babes with bodies like blow-up dolls ... and brains to match.
Then, one day, for no reason at all, it just clicked. Everything fell into place, and Grunge looked at her like he’d never really seen her before. And all of a sudden, Roxy’s unrequited love wasn’t unrequited anymore. The harps were playing. The angels were singing. Roxy was walking on air—and without even using her powers.
Except that it took less than a day for Grunge’s wandering eye to start wandering again.
It wasn’t that he’d been unfaithful to her. For one thing, no matter how much Grunge might like to window shop, Roxy knew that he wouldn’t ever take things that far. He was a dog, sure, but he wouldn’t do that to her. And besides, he knew full well that, if he ever did take it too far, Roxy would make sure that it would never be physically possible for him to do it again.
But even if all he was doing was looking, it still hurt. It hurt to see Grunge drooling over every other woman on Earth.
Because it meant Roxy wasn’t enough.
And while Roxy never imagined that Kat had it in her to hurt someone like that, it was starting to look like the same kind of thing was happening all over again. After all these years of feeling alone, after all these years of praying for someone who would stand by her side no matter what, Roxy discovered that she had a sister. Okay, technically, she was a half-sister, but still—a sister! The nicest, sweetest, kindest sister anyone could ask for. At last, Roxy had someone to confide in, someone who’d never turn her away.
O
r so she thought. Because that’s exactly what was happening.
No matter what Kat said, Roxy had a hard time believing that the timing was coincidence. No sooner had Kat discovered that Roxy was her sister, than she suddenly decided she needed to get out of the house more.
Roxy stopped herself. No, she admitted silently, that’s not fair.
Okay, so maybe Roxy wasn’t really the reason for
Kat’s job hunt. But even so, the fact remained that Kat wasn’t satisfied with her life. She was out there looking for a job because she didn’t feel like she had enough in her life otherwise. Despite having a newfound sister, Kat didn’t feel there was enough in her life to keep her interest.
And that meant Roxy wasn't enough.
Not that she blamed Kat. Kat had brains up the wazoo, and a wazoo that didn’t quit. She was smarter than Roxy, prettier than Roxy, stronger than Roxy, nicer than Roxy...
So, realistically speaking, what did she need Roxy for?
It wasn’t the first time it had happened to Roxy. Growing up, Roxy had never known her real father, Alex Fairchild. Roxy was bom of a one-night stand, and if her father ever even knew she existed, he didn’t care enough to want to see her. Not even her own father needed her.
Still, there was one person that Roxy knew loved her more than anything, and that was her stepmother. The two of them might have been dirt poor, but her stepmom— her Momma—never once put her own needs before Roxy’s. She did whatever she had to do to make sure that Roxy was fed and clothed and had a roof over her head.
And how had Roxy repaid her? With nothing but problems and bad attitude. With twenty-twenty hindsight, Roxy cringed as the arguments kept replaying themselves in her mind.
“I understand how you feel, honey, but— ”
“No, Momma! There’s no ‘but!’ You always do that. You just dismiss my feelings! You don’t care how I feel!”
“How can you say that? Of course I care about how you feel! ”
“Yeah? Then why is there always a ‘but?’ Why is it always 7 know, but... ? ’ Why can't you just listen to me for once?”
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