by Greg Dragon
“No? Look at me!” Jamie spun around, sending a spray of water from her hair. “Look at me! Look at what they’ve done to me! Don’t you see?” She pointed at her leg.
“It’s healing,” Angel said, resisting the demand and instead kept her eyes locked on Jamie’s. “You’re getting better.”
“Better?” she shrieked. “You just don’t get it! I’ll never be better!”
“Listen, Jamie, I didn’t want to say it before. I didn’t want to scare you. But there are some very bad people out there looking for us, and they might come here.”
“Here?” The girl barked out a laugh. She turned to face Angel, and there was something dark and dangerous in her eyes. “Here or there or anywhere. It doesn’t matter where I go. The dark man will find me. He told me. Don’t you see? I’ll never be able to escape!”
“Yes, you can. We’ll go to the French Embassy. We’ll leave the country.”
“You’re not listening! He’ll find me. I’m like a candle to a moth now.”
She’s hysterical.
But the look in the woman’s eyes wasn’t madness. If anything, they seemed to possess a fierce clarity, an absolute certainty of what was real. It sent a shiver down Angel’s back.
“Just stay here,” Angel told her. She stepped toward the door. “I’ll go find you some clothes. We’re leaving.”
“They’ll kill you, too.” She didn’t move to stop her, just watched her go. “As long as you’re with me, you’re in danger. The dark man will get you, too.”
Angel pulled the curtain closed on her and hurried for the door. I already am in danger, she thought.
The cooler air in the hallway felt like a refreshing slap, and she welcomed it into her lungs. She hadn’t realized how tight her chest had been. Then she stepped toward the trash containers.
“How am I going to find anything useful in this mess?”
She grabbed a bag and squinted through the partially transparent plastic, then tossed it aside. She repeated this until she reached the bottom of the can, then moved onto the next. It was all just useless trash.
From out in the hallway, she heard someone speaking Chinese in a loud male voice. She peeked past the edge of the wall and gasped when she saw two men standing at the front. Both were wearing jeans and dark windbreakers. No guns were in sight, but the bulge beneath their jackets told her they were carrying.
“Peters,” she heard one of the men say, along with a few words in Chinese. “American. Jamie Claire Peters.”
Chapter Twenty Nine
Angel snatched a pair of hospital smocks hanging on the hook on the wall, along with a laboratory coat, then stepped back into the shower room. She found Jamie just inside the door, her gown wrapped around her and her hair dripping. “They’re here!” she whispered.
“Who?”
“Americans. At the front looking for you. We need to go now! They have guns!”
Jamie’s face blanched. All of the earlier bluff and bluster was gone, as if she’d only half-believed the things she’d been saying just moments before. Now she looked like a scared little girl. “You brought them here!”
“Not now, Jamie! Those men are in the hallway right now, and in another minute or two they’re going to find out you’re not in your bed and— Vite! Vite! What are you waiting for? Hurry up and put this on!”
But Jamie just stood there with a stunned look on her face. The smock fell to the wet floor and began to soak up water.
Angel snatched it up again and began to pull it over Jamie’s head. “Is there another way out?”
After a moment’s struggle, the girl began to dress herself. Angel could see her trying to think. “I don’t know! The front—“
“Too risky! Can’t just walk right past them. There has to be another way!” Angel thrust her arms through the sleeves of the laboratory coat, then drew her hair into a bun behind her head before tying it with a strip torn from a towel pulled from the laundry hamper. It might be enough to fool a person for a moment or two, long enough to buy them a few seconds before they realized she wasn’t Chinese.
But Jamie shook her head. “It won’t work.” She stopped getting dressed.
Angel saw that she was right; her smock was too small, and it was stained with something dark that might have been tea or wound exudate. And with the hospital gown hanging out the bottom, she’d draw more attention than deflect it.
“I’ve got an idea.” She pulled Jamie out the door into the alcove. “Get into a hamper. You can hide. I’ll push it out.”
Jamie shook her head. “And what about you? They’ll see you, stop you. You don’t speak Mandarin. They’ll know right away you don’t belong in this place. Give me the lab coat.”
“I don’t have time to—“
“You’re right. You don’t. Now climb inside the hamper. At least I look a little Asian.”
She turned to an attendant who had come out of the showers and was staring at them, a young girl of maybe fourteen with large brown eyes and a port wine stain mark on her neck. Jamie told her something which Angel couldn’t understand. The words came out in a tumble, tripping over each other and sounding almost as if she were scolding the girl. But the girl nodded and pointed further down the hallway.
“Get in the hamper!” Jamie whispered. “She says there’s a door to the outside back there, where they take the trash.”
Angel stepped over the side of the hamper and transferred her weight inside. The flimsy fabric bag stretched beneath her feet, but it didn’t tear. She crouched down as low as she could, and Jamie covered her in wet towels, soiled sheets, and dirty gowns. The smell was horrendous.
Once more, Jamie spoke in Chinese. Several seconds passed, and Angel began to worry that she had left without her when she heard her ask if she was ready. “I sent one of the girls out to check. One of the men is still at the front. The other just went into the ward. We need to go now!”
The hamper tilted on its uneven wheels and began to roll. One squeaked; another rattled. Jamie grunted as she pushed it out of the alcove and into the hall.
Somewhere nearby Angel could hear a man shouting, his voice growing louder and more terse. It was joined in alarm by a second male voice. Then a woman tried to answer, but she was shouted down. The cart rattled along, and the voices grew further away.
“What’s happening?”
“Shh!”
Then came the sound of running feet and the squeal of rubber soles on the wet floor. The door to the showers slammed open somewhere behind her. The men’s voices turned into hollow echoes.
As soon as the door shut, Jamie began to run, grunting against the effort of pushing the hamper. Angel felt it start to turn, then slam into the wall. Jamie let out a pained cry.
“Jamie?” Angel whispered as loud as she dared.
A hand reached down between the dirty laundry and grabbed Angel’s arm and pulled. “Hurry!” Jamie grunted. “We don’t have much time!”
Angel nearly fell climbing over the side of the cart. They were in another alcove at the very end of the hall. Opposite them was a metal door, which had been propped open. Beyond it stood a sort of storage space. The walls were gray-green and grimy, stained with rivulets of lime and rust. The floor was covered in soggy garbage. Full trash and laundry bins lined both sides.
“Back door,” Jamie said, pointing. A sign warned them to stop.
“The alarm—“
“I doubt there is one. More likely the door will be chained from the outside. That is, if we’re lucky.”
“If we’re lucky?”
“The building’s old, the hinges rotten. Together, we should be able to break through. We better hope so anyway.” She started to head over to it. Angel noticed that she was wincing and holding her side.
“You’re hurt.”
“Just pulled a muscle. Nothing I won’t recover from. Come on!” But a spot of blood began to bloom beneath her fingers as she clutched at her side. She was tearing holes in her own skin with her fingerna
ils again.
Just as Jamie had said, the latch was rusted through and useless. Angel expected the door to snap against a chain, but there was none. In fact, it yielded easily, swinging wide open against the force of their combined weight and banging against a rusted metal railing.
They stepped out onto the landing, blinking against the sunlight just as a loud bell began to clang. The sound echoed down the street and into the building behind them. Through the clamor came a distant shout.
Jamie pulled Angel out of the way, then swung the door shut and wedged a board beneath the handle. She gave it a hard kick just as someone slammed against the other side of the door. The two women jumped back against the railing. Jamie turned to Angel, and grabbed her. This time, her grip felt weak and shaky. “Please tell me you have a car nearby.”
Chapter Thirty
Alvin Cheong stood with his back against the door and slowly peeled off his gloves. It was always a relief to do so, and so rare outside of the safety of his own home. But it was an unusually warm day, and the shut-up windows and turned-off air conditioning made the apartment hot and stuffy. The backs of his hands itched terribly, but he resisted the temptation to scratch them.
He looked around him appreciatively. The apartment was well-appointed, simply and tastefully adorned with high-end materials and furniture, though perhaps a tad messy: a tumbler on a side table, its contents long since drained or evaporated away; a crystal ashtray beside the stove, the twisted stub of a hand-rolled cigarette in it. He didn’t need a closer look at it or a sniff to know that it wasn’t tobacco. His report had already told him that the apartment’s renter occasionally got high.
Then there were the pieces of clothing placed randomly about, a trail leading from the couch to the bedroom door — a shirt, a pair of black stockings, a brassiere — though he got the distinct impression that the pattern signified nothing of an erotic nature, rather a careless lack of attention. A light jacket was folded casually over the back of a chair in the kitchen.
He noted that the table contained only two chairs. One was pulled out, the other tucked in. The one that was pulled out had a stack of papers on it four inches thick.
He let his eyes wander about the place as he stepped carefully around the edges of the room, his gaze jumping from one object to the next, to whatever drew it. He tried to block out the noises from the surrounding rooms, the men conducting the detail work. He focused instead on the apartment as a whole, how it was set up, how it was decorated, trying to understand its occupant more fully. He tried to block out any thought of what the men might find during their search, hoping to avoid anything that might color his impressions of the woman’s home.
But no matter how hard he tried, his thoughts kept coming back to that nagging question: Was Angelique de l’Enfantine more than they thought she was?
To be honest, he didn’t know what to expect from this intrusion. Proof, maybe. Evidence that she was exactly who she said she was and nothing more. Evidence to the contrary.
A laptop sat on top of the bar. It had been shut when they entered, but it was now open and turned on. One of the tech guys had managed to gain access and was cloning it onto a flash drive for later analysis. While the disk copied, he sifted through the stack of mail on the counter, zipping open an occasional envelope using a small device in his kit and quickly scanning the contents before replacing them and resealing it. He looked over as Cheong approached and gave him a quick headshake.
The order to recruit Missus de l’Enfantine had come from higher up in the 6X food chain. Cheong had no idea how high, nor exactly why someone had specifically requested that he bring her on board. With the few hours notice he’d been given the other day, he’d barely had enough time to gather a minimum of background information about her before sending his man to intercept her in Seoul, and even less time to prepare a recruitment strategy.
But clearly it hadn’t been enough prep time, had it? He’d been caught off guard on at least one detail, and it angered him that his aides had provided him faulty information on such a basic point as the woman’s current marital status. He hoped his discomfiture during their dinner meeting hadn’t shown. Regardless if she noticed or not, he’d wasted no time chewing out the individual responsible for feeding him the incorrect data. He hated being seen as anything but in complete control, especially when just a little more digging would have easily ferreted out the truth.
Well, he’d taken pains to rectify that, and any other potential insufficiencies since then. This was just another step in that process.
In a way, that singular, seemingly innocent, error had piqued his curiosity. He wanted to understand why his bosses picked her to be the one to investigate the category III global threat events which he and his team worked so diligently to identify, the sort of events which they believed were preparatory to category IV, or extinction-level, disasters. After all, he could easily come up with a list of a half dozen or so other investigative reporters with equal or better credentials. What made this particular one stand out?
A little more digging had rewarded him with some intriguing possibilities. First and foremost was her former husband — scratch that, her estranged husband — David Eitan. The American-born and educated scientist had impressive early career credentials: a doctorate in synthetic biology from Princeton, a genius fellowship from the MacArthur Foundation at Stanford. But after abandoning a failed start-up just prior to his marrying Angelique and launching a second one on her family’s money, he seemed to have faded into obscurity in recent years. His company’s website, SynGencia Bio, was still active, but it was little more than a landing page and some investor information. There wasn’t even a contacts page, and cached versions going back no further than two years ago provided nothing else.
The last scientific publication in Eitan’s name was four years old, a methods paper on the development and intracellular introduction of reprogrammable gene-editing molecular scaffolding. Based on his citation score, the article had received scant attention. Apparently, the technology was of little interest to either the academic or tech sectors; it was probably too undeveloped to even be considered for potential medical applications.
By all accounts, it seemed that the man had simply flamed out.
Even so, Cheong needed to make sure, which is why he’d sent his best man to dig up more on him. Eitan’s last known address was here in Manhattan, but though the apartment was current on its rent, a quick visit told them it hadn’t been occupied in months. Instead, a clue led them to DC. Cheong was eager to get the update on the man’s status, if only to set his mind at ease.
Then there was her father, Gaétan H. de l’Enfantine, a self-made multimillionaire in the high tech industry. His niche had been internet security systems and protocols, firewalls and local area intranet codex structure and multi-layered protective algorithms. His company, which had been sold off a few years after Angelique left for medical school in the States, had developed a novel method of iterative learning that allowed servers to recognize typical user activity and distinguish it from those attempting to access it for malicious purposes. The technologies had been incorporated by private companies and government systems around the world, and next-generation protocols based on his original specs were still employed in many places, including the International Alliance of Internet Service Providers, a grandchild of the original ARPANET.
Both Gaétan and his wife, Sophia, had died tragically in a car accident in St. Moritz during the summer between Angelique’s second and third years of residency at Stanford Medical Center. The tragedy had so shaken her up that she’d immediately dropped out of the program. It was about this same time that she met David.
As far as Cheong knew, the woman’s parents were both buried on the family estate in Lyon, which was his next destination after this. Angelique had moved back there about a year after the tragedy to study journalism, and now occupied the house alone, maintaining a small staff of occasional helpers to keep the place clean and stoc
ked. She split her time between there and here in Manhattan.
Finally, there was Angelique’s brother, Jacques. Of all of the people close to her, he was either the most mysterious, or the least. Seven years her junior, Jacques had attended university in Saint-Étienne to study literature, but after receiving his baccalaureate and a brief residency in Paris, he simply fell out of sight. All Cheong’s men had been able to find on him were some medical records from the local hospital in Lyons that indicated he’d suffered a terrible accident some two years after their parents’ deaths. But other than a couple brief notations of follow up visits in the ensuing weeks, there were no more records, at least none that his men could hack from the national health network.
Strange, Cheong thought, how the people in her life have a tendency to disappear.
The sound of the laptop lid closing drew him out of his thoughts. The technician stood up out of his chair and shook his head again. “Nothing obvious here,” he said. “But we’ll analyze every single file, her search history, her accounts, ghost files. If something comes up, we’ll get it to you ASAP.”
One by one, the other team members emerged from their various searches and assembled around Cheong. He still hadn’t donned his gloves, not yet willing to sacrifice this small pleasure just yet. Instead, he buried his hands into the pockets of his jacket and listened to their reports. They found nothing suspicious. By all appearances, the woman was single and a freelance journalist, just as they’d thought. But they still had several hundred photographs of every inch of the apartment on their phones to analyze.
Cheong checked the clock on the kitchen’s microwave. The entire operation had taken them eight minutes. “Where’s Tom?”
They turned to find the last team member slipping up the darkened hallway toward them. He extended his hand, as if to offer Cheong the object in it, though the exchange didn’t happen. “Found it at the bottom of the bathroom trashcan.” He rotated the prescription bottle in his fingers so that the label faced up.
