Sometimes, Amy felt like the only adult in this company.
There were only two fire escapes in the building; both were accessible only from outside the office. The thirty-sixth floor was a square carved up into two separate offices; their company dominated the floor in a U shape. The remaining sliver was occupied by a local magazine called Philadelphia Living—shopping, restaurants, parties, and all of that good stuff. Amy was a subscriber, even though she didn’t know anybody who could afford the getaways, clothes, and jewelry highlighted in the magazine every month. It was lifestyle porn: You’ll never have it as good as this. Masturbate to the pages, if it makes you feel better.
She walked halfway down the hall that connected the conference room with David’s office, then turned left. A security door opened up directly onto a short corridor. Make a left again, and you’d be staring at the north fire escape door.
Which Amy was doing now.
Staring at it.
Should she chance it?
David had told them some wild things this morning. There was not much she could prove right now, except for one thing: that the orange juice and champagne contained some kind of poison, which had killed poor Stuart. Why would David lie about something like putting sarin in the fire towers?
Because it was silly, that’s why. Poison’s one thing; rigging a chemical bomb is another. This building has security up the wa-zoo. Like somebody wouldn’t notice a bomb rigged to a fire escape door? Somebody leaves a brown-bag lunch on a step in the fire tower and hazmat-suited Homeland Security folks would probably be descending on the scene within twenty minutes.
So if the very idea was ridiculous, why was she nervous about opening the door?
Go ahead, Amy.
Go ahead and do it.
She put her hand on the cool steel, as if she could sense by touch. Oh yeah, clearly there’s a sarin bomb behind this door.
The problem was, Ethan recognized the sensation.
His throat had closed up once before, halfway around the world.
Before coming to work for David’s company, he’d been in the military. Special Forces. Most recently Afghanistan, November 2001, as part of Operation We Think Bin Laden’s Here So We’re Going to Bomb You Back to the Stone Age, and he and his crew had been duking it out with some obscure Afghan warlord in the desert south of Kandahar. A warlord who just so happened to have a few canisters of ricin lying around. A skirmish went wrong; Ethan and his fellow gunmen found themselves tumbling into a medieval-era sandpit, and the warlord—some screw-head named Muhammad Gur—danced around the edge of the pit, throwing in his precious canisters of ricin, cackling.
Ricin, Ethan later read, was manufactured from the waste of castor beans. In weaponized mist form, ricin asks your body to stop making certain important proteins.
Okay, it’s not really asking. Ricin pretty much demands it. As a result, cells die. If not treated, the victim follows suit.
All Ethan knew was that his throat was closing up.
He’d been hit the worst out of anybody. He could have sworn that Muhammad Gur jerk had been aiming for him personally. Luckily, Ethan’s colleagues blasted their way out of the pit and dragged Ethan across the desert, looking for help. But when somebody looked down and saw Ethan frantically pointing at his throat, it quickly became clear that he might not make it to the medical supply tent.
A tracheotomy is a quick but complex procedure. In an emergency situation, you find the Adam’s apple, slide down a bit until you feel the next bump—the cricoid cartilage—then find the little valley between the two. Congrats, you’ve found the cricothyroid membrane. That is where you cut: half inch horizontally, half inch deep. Pinch the sides so that the incision opens like a fish mouth, then insert the tube. Don’t have a tube? Use a straw. Or the plastic tube of a ballpoint pen (with the ink stem removed, of course).
Out in the desert south of Kanadhar, Ethan’s savior had a Swiss Army pocketknife and a plastic straw. Saved his life.
But here, inside the fire tower at 1919 Market Street … Ethan was pretty much screwed.
Suffering from a serious Muhammad Gur flashback, Ethan stumbled backwards and imagined, if only for a few seconds, that he was trying to cling to the side of that medieval sand pit. Actually, it was a set of concrete stairs, leading down to the half landing between the thirty-sixth and the thirty-fifth floor.
Ethan tumbled down them. Backwards.
Every step hurt.
But not as bad as the agony in his throat.
This felt worse than ricin.
Castor beans his ass.
This was something else.
Amy stepped back from the door. She thought she heard something on the other side. The pounding of feet? People? Maybe security guards? Cops? A black bag crew? Someone dispatched to clean up their presumed-dead bodies?
Never mind. It could be help.
“Hello?”
She caught herself before pounding on the door. Just on the off off chance that the door was indeed rigged; she didn’t want to set off any kind of bomb accidentally.
“Hello! Can you hear me?!”
Ethan recognized Amy’s voice immediately. Her sweet voice. He wished he could answer her.
Still, he was strangely pleased that she’d come looking for him. So much so, Ethan was even willing to forgive her the French martini thing.
Hello! Can you hear me?!
Yes, honey, I can.
I wish I could tell you to come on in. But for one, my throat is sealed up tight, and for another, I’m thinking you’d receive a face-blast of the same chemical agent if you walked through that door.
Instead, Ethan found himself scrambling through his bag, searching for a pen.
Amy wanted to open the door, but worry gripped her hard. Even an off off chance was still a chance. She didn’t want her life to end just because she ignored a warning. The warning of a man who—until just a few minutes ago—she considered the smartest guy she’d ever worked for.
But what if help were on the other side?
Help would have answered. Wouldn’t it?
The inner office door behind Amy opened.
Molly stood there, tears streaking down her face. Looks like she didn’t go to the bathroom after all, Amy thought. She must have been wandering around the office in a daze. It was understandable. How often did you shoot your boss in the head?
Amy felt bad for Molly, even if she had been part of David’s plan from the beginning. She’d said it herself: She knew the phone lines had been cut. Their cells disconnected. She even claimed to have seen the packages of sarin.
But who knew what David had done to her? She must have been too terrified to do anything but obey.
She certainly looked terrified now.
“Are you okay?” Amy asked redundantly.
Molly shook her head. No. No, I’m not okay.
“Come on.” Amy opened up her arms.
Whatever was behind the north fire tower door would have to wait.
David Murphy had taken bullets before. Once in West Germany. Another time, the Sudan. Never a head shot, though. And this one felt fairly serious. Just the ricochet effect alone—the slug jarring his skull, transmitting aftershocks to the rest of his skeletal structure—was enough to make him want to roll over and go to sleep. Anything to stop the aching. He just felt … wrong.
Molly was a damn good shot.
Never would have guessed.
When his bosses sent her six months ago, David assumed he was being reprimanded. David loved salsa and wasabi; here was a woman who was plain vanilla yogurt. Nondescript hairstyle, mousy features, no build whatsoever. You could iron a shirt on her chest. David had carried on a bit with his previous charge, and it had gotten in the way—in the opinion of his handlers. It wasn’t as if David had forgotten about the network of hidden cameras throughout the floor; he just thought his handlers wouldn’t care.
David was wrong. They presented him with grainy black-and-white photos of a particula
rly steamy tryst on a lazy Tuesday afternoon. Dress pants were bunched up around ankles; skirts were hiked; lipstick smeared; hair mussed. His handler told him this was behavior unbecoming someone of his stature. Told him the object of his affection was being moved to a station in Dubai. Molly arrived the next day.
Sometimes, David thought about his previous charge. Thought about Dubai. They had built a fake ski resort right there in the middle of the desert. He wondered if she ever had the opportunity to enjoy it. He’d promised her they’d go skiing sometime.
But Molly didn’t look like she enjoyed skiing.
She didn’t look like she enjoyed much of anything.
His employers had a strange idea about staffing.
David had been brought in during the early, tentative days; his special blend of charm and ruthlessness carried him to the upper echelon of the fledgling intelligence organization—but not to a hiring position. That operation was always performed by other people. People David had never met.
David wished he would, someday. Just so he could slap them silly.
Look at Molly. Okay, okay, subtract the act of gross insubordination where she shot her own boss in the head. Still, she was trouble. David’s charms were totally ineffective on her. She had no discernible sense of humor. It wasn’t clear if her beard of a husband—some paunchy dork named Paul—was a real love interest, or if Molly skipped through Lesbos’s groves. David was totally unable to handle her.
Oh, she listened. Textbook support personnel.
But he couldn’t play her. That vaguely troubled him.
And look how it had all turned out.
David stared up at the ceiling and wondered how much longer he’d be conscious. Maybe it was his imagination, but he swore he could feel the blood throbbing out of the little hole in his head.
Yet, except for the paralysis that had washed over his body, he felt oddly normal. As if he could just snap out of it, and sit up. Which was so not going to happen.
David wasn’t that delusional.
Amy ushered a shaking Molly into her office and closed the door. She needed to calm this one down now, even if Amy ended up calling David’s bosses and had her hauled in for debriefing. Operations were one thing; this was a broken human being here. All Amy knew was that one minute, her boss of five years was threatening to kill everyone in the room, and the next, Stuart had keeled over, and the next, David’s secretary of six months was shooting him in the head. It was too much.
She wished she had somebody calming her down.
Be the adult. Be the adult.
“Are you okay?” Amy asked. “Sit down. Let me get you some water.”
“I’m okay,” Molly said. She continued to stand, but looked around Amy’s office nervously, as if bracing for a wild animal to leap out from behind a desk and pounce.
“Sit down, Molly. Nothing can hurt you in here.”
“I know, I know. I’m okay. I promise.”
Amy wished Molly would sit down and just drink some water already. Her office was hot. It was always hot. The windows faced the north, and the early morning sun always seemed to beat the cool air pumped from the building’s ductwork. Fetching Molly a Styrofoam cup of water would give Amy a few moments in the chilly kitchen, a chance to wipe a paper towel across her forehead and neck and, more important, give her a moment to think. With David gone—and oh, how that was a weird euphemism to use, considering the man was lying in the conference room with a bullet in his head—Amy was technically in charge. And she didn’t have a single idea what to do next.
The Department handbook didn’t cover stuff like this.
She also wanted desperately to find Ethan. While he could act like a schoolboy, he was excellent in crisis moments. Whenever she had an office meltdown, she could walk over to Ethan’s office, close the door, and sink into his blue beanbag chair—a ridiculous holdover since college. Ethan would ask her what was wrong, and no matter the answer, announce that it was time for “creamy treats.” Some guys keep a bottle of booze in their lower right-hand drawer; Ethan kept Tastykakes. Ethan gave her the two things she needed to settle down: a patient ear and a hit of sugar, enriched flour, and partially hydrogenated vegetable oil.
But there was no time to find Ethan now. Because Molly didn’t want any water, or to sit down.
“We need,” Amy said, “to find a way to call in support.”
Support: the euphemism for David’s bosses. As David’s second-in-command, Amy had been given the phone number and code key to use in case of emergency, such as David’s untimely death. Backup would descend upon 1919 Market Street. Hard drives would be secured. Order would be restored. Only if Amy could find a working phone.
But Molly didn’t seem to be listening. She lowered her face into her hands.
God, this couldn’t be easy for her. She wasn’t a high-level operative. She knew what they all did, to some degree. But Molly didn’t know how dangerous this game could be.
Amy put a hand on her shoulder.
“You’re going to be okay,” Amy said, even though it was a blatant lie. The woman had pulled a gun out of a white box—it may even have been a cannoli box from Reading Terminal Market—and shot her boss of six months in the head. That was decidedly not okay.
Molly surfaced from her palms. “Amy?”
“Yeah, sweetie.”
“I’m going to enjoy you the most.”
Amy watched one of Molly’s delicate hands shrink into a tight little fist. Then it smashed her in the eye.
She staggered back. Confusion set in before the pain. Wait. What had just happened?
Did Molly Lewis just punch her in the—?
Again.
And again.
Left hook, right jab. Classic boxer combo.
Amy’s head buzzed with pain, now, finally, radiating from her skin deep into her skull. Her butt bumped up against the front of her own desk. She needed to keep standing. She needed to start defending herself. That much was sure. But what was going on here? Amy lifted a hand, but Molly slapped it aside and then jabbed her in the throat.
Amy started choking.
She slid to the side and put her hands to her throat, as if she could undo the damage manually. But Molly had done something. Something very bad. Amy couldn’t even scream.
Two minutes before, Molly had been alone in David’s office. Everyone had scattered to the rest of the office, to see if their boss’s crazy talk was actually true. To see if the elevators would come. If the dial tone would be there. If their cell phones would work.
Of course they wouldn’t.
Molly had helped David disable them all.
David, a week ago, promised, “You help me; you and I walk out of here. We’ve got new identities waiting for us.”
Later, Molly had found the memo. The faxed hit list.
With her name on it.
Liar.
So she decided to cut a deal of her own.
Molly walked down the hallway and into David’s office. In the corner, where the south-facing windows met with a solid oak bookcase, was a security camera obscured by the wood and dry-wall. It had been positioned so that it could scan not only the entire office, but the face of David’s computer screen. David knew this. It was company policy.
Molly looked up at the security camera and flashed it a tight little smile. She held up her left hand, palm out.
And raised her index and middle fingers.
It wasn’t a peace sign.
It was an announcement.
THE MORNING GRIND
Management is nothing more than motivating other people.
—LEE IACOCCA
Thirty-five hundred miles away …
… in Scotland, near the sea, in a quiet section of Edinburgh called Portobello, a red-haired man in a black T-shirt and neatly pressed khakis crossed the street. He was holding a pharmacy bag stocked with tissues and Night Nurse. He’d felt awful all morning. Maybe a solid dose of medicine would head it off at the pass. Summer colds wer
e the worst.
This summer, too, was the worst. Freakishly warm for Edinburgh. Plus, there was a hot, greasy drizzle in the air, which did little to cool it. By the time he returned to the flat, he reckoned, his T-shirt would be soaked with sea mist and sweat, and he’d have to change. He kept only a small valise of essentials; he didn’t bring piles of T-shirts like McCoy, his surveillance partner, did. The man packed like the Apocalypse was around the corner.
The red-haired man, who called himself Keene, had almost reached the bottom of the road when he bumped into a man walking his dog. Wee thing—the dog, that was. It had only three legs. The owner had two, but looked haggard, if finely muscled.
“Sorry, mate,” Keene said.
The man just smiled at him. And not in a particularly warm way.
Keene stepped out of the way, then watched the little three-legged dog titter and bounce after its master. A lot of work, walking uphill in the drizzle with only three legs.
Upstairs, Keene embraced his partner. His lip brushed against the stubble on his cheek; he could smell the intoxicating aftershave. Then Keene told him about the dog.
“I’ve seen that dog,” said McCoy. He was American. He’d barely turned to face Keene. Instead, he was focused on a bank of computer screens: a desktop and three laptops. “It creeps me out.”
“I’m putting on some tea,” Keene said. “Would you care for a cup?”
Some tea and Night Nurse might make the afternoon tolerable. Keene planned on asking McCoy to take over for the next few hours. Keene had been at it through much of the morning. His eyes felt like there were grains of sand floating around in there.
“No, but you can fetch me a can of Caley.”
“Sure.”
McCoy was a drunk.
“Did I miss anything?” Keene asked.
“You missed everything.”
“What do you mean? Nothing’s supposed to be happening in Dubai for at least six hours.”
“No, not there. Back in America. Remember? The Philadelphia thing?”
Severance Package Page 5
