by Greg Rucka
She’d reached seven hippopotami when she heard the unmistakable sounds of first one body hitting the floor, then a second.
“Two down,” Steinberg said. “To the intersection, left, continue ten meters, second right.”
“Acknowledged.”
Jo edged the door open another few inches, slipped through, padding silently forward. She brought the MagSecs up in each hand and crouched lower, moving forward cautiously. She paused at the intersection, checking both directions before rounding the corner to the left, and found herself in an almost identical hallway to the one she’d just left, but with the addition of doors spaced semi-regularly along each wall. The doors were metal, unmarked, the kind that would slide open rather than push out on their hinges, and each of them was framed with a heavy rubber seal. The walls were as bare as they had been in the checkpoint, and a string of caged bulbs ran along the ceiling. There had been no attempt to conceal the surveillance cameras down here, either, and she saw two of the opaque black eyes hanging above, heard the thin hum of their motorized drives as they rotated, maintaining their automated vigil on the corridor.
A couple of the doors that she passed had small windows set into them, and Jo resisted the urge to straighten up and peer through them. She didn’t have time, and, frankly, she didn’t want to know what kinds of work pharmaDyne pursued deep in its bowels. She had a very strong suspicion that she wouldn’t like what she might discover.
At the second right she found the bodies of two more guards, one slumped against the wall, the other flat on his back. She paused, dropped to one knee, and set the MagSec in her left hand on the floor, freeing the hand long enough to check each guard’s pulse at the neck. Once she’d confirmed each was still alive, she picked up the pistol again and resumed moving forward.
The drugspy waited in front of another sliding door, this one blocking their progress, facing her. Jo caught a fragment of herself reflected in the tiny lens, and realized that Steinberg had seen her check the bodies.
If he thinks that makes me soft, screw him, she thought.
“Well?” she whispered.
“This leads to the cells,” Steinberg said. “Or, according to Ishmael, what pharmaDyne refers to as its ‘Discreet Clinical Trial Sector.’ It’s locked and I can’t bypass it. Wait here until he cracks the door, then go through. We don’t know which room the White Whale’s in, you’ll have to check them all.”
“You’re not staying with me?” She was surprised to feel a tingle of nerves spreading out in her stomach at the thought of moving on alone. She was mildly alarmed to realize it was the first true nervousness she’d experienced since they’d begun the operation.
“I’m eating the power on this thing pretty fast, Starbuck. Be a better use of the resource if I double back, try to neutralize any other security I encounter.”
Jo couldn’t find a flaw in the logic, and after a second of trying, nodded once, slightly.
“I’m still in your ear, I’ll hear it if things go sour, don’t worry.”
Jo thought about asking him what, exactly, that would sound like, but thought better of it. Instead, she simply nodded again.
The drugspy bobbed in the air for a moment, then rose to her eye level and stabilized, hovering on its tiny pocket of nullified gravity. Jo expected Steinberg to add something, but he remained silent. The sphere canted forward, moved past her with a gentle whisper. As it passed her on the left, Jo felt a tingle caressing her hand and arm, the distortion of Newtonian physics. The sensation passed, and the drugspy disappeared around the corner behind her.
Jo waited, again counting hippopotami. She’d reached forty-two of the beasts when the door in front of her hissed, parting down its center and withdrawing in two halves to either side of the corridor, revealing a second security checkpoint some four meters away. Seated at the console, where he’d been monitoring the cameras, was another guard.
This one was faster than the others, and that surprised Jo, and he seemed better trained, as well. Instead of shrieking or demanding an explanation, instead of reaching for a weapon, he immediately twisted in his chair, stabbing out with his left hand for the console and the alarm.
Jo leveled the MagSec in her right, feeling the heavy barrel rising, sluggish, in her hand. The pistol had a built-in scope, thumb activated, but there had been no opportunity to zero it, and it wouldn’t do her any good here and now if she had. She fired, heard the weapon’s distinctive click-hiss-bang as it spat out a single charged round. The panel beneath the guard’s left hand shattered in a shower of sparks and metal shards.
The guard tumbled from his seat, away from Jo, trying to free his own pistol from the holster on his thigh. She sprinted forward, hurdling the console. Once again the world had dilated, once again everything seemed to slow, and Jo had a moment in which she saw where her kick would land, knew it would work, and wondered if removing her shoes had, in fact, been a stupid idea.
She caught him in the face with her right heel, felt the smack of impact as she snapped his head back into the floor. She landed, spun, swinging the pistol in her left hand, preparing to use the overweighted barrel as a club, then arrested the move, seeing no need. If it hadn’t been her kick that had put the man down, it had been the secondary impact, when the back of the guard’s head had smashed into the concrete floor.
She didn’t see any blood, but knew enough to know that meant nothing.
“Starbuck?”
“Hostile down,” Jo whispered.
“Status?”
“I’m fine.” She looked up from the motionless guard, running her eyes over the console. Sparks were dripping from the shattered alarm panel. Apparently, her shot had also blown out the camera reception, because the eight tiny screens arrayed across the console were alternately dark or feeding her static. “Camera’s down, not sure which room he’s in.”
“You better get moving,” Steinberg said. “Ishmael reports the checkpoint fault has registered in the security command post. They’re trying to raise the guards, and when the guards don’t answer—”
“Understood. Starbuck out.”
Jo looked down the long corridor, gray and cold and silent, and again felt the chill from the floor eating into her feet. More doors were spaced irregularly along both sides of the hallway, more of the sliding variety, and she could see additional surveillance cameras mounted on the ceiling, quietly swiveling to and fro in their arcs. She turned her attention back to the sparking console, found the controls for the doors, and hit the release, praying that her shot hadn’t fused the cell doors closed.
Behind her, in a diminishing echo, she heard the sound of the door seals breaking, the hiss of pneumatics. She thought for an instant that perhaps she’d just done a very stupid thing, that there was no telling what had been locked away in the cells, then thought it was too late to worry about things like that.
Jo began jogging along the cellblock, slowing only as she passed each door, looking into the cells on her left and her right. The rooms, if they could be called that, were uniformly small, a bizarre blend of prison and hospital. There were no beds, but exam tables, instead. Most were without any sort of plumbing, but two had toilets and sinks. In three of the cells, she saw streaks of black and brown along the floors, walls, and ceilings, and hoped it wasn’t dried blood. The smell of urine and fecal matter was particularly strong from those rooms.
Jo heard a sound, almost plaintive, almost animal. She slowed, heard it again, located it as coming from the second to last cell. She approached cautiously, feeling her heartbeat beginning to quicken, and at last found Benjamin Able.
The cell was like many of the others, but leaned further toward the exam-room motif than away from it. A wheeled cart rested against one wall, three of its drawers open, an equipment stand beside it, a white towel covering its surface. On the towel, Jo saw a selection of surgical tools, scalpels and forceps and clamps. Puddles of dark brown stained the towel beneath each item.
Jo heard herself gasp in s
urprise. She didn’t know what she had expected, but she knew she hadn’t expected this.
Able lay flat on his back on the exam table, his arms and legs strapped to extensions that swung out from the surface, holding him almost spread-eagle. He was naked, and the bruises and swelling on his face made him almost unrecognizable from the file photo Steinberg had shown Jo during her briefing. An IV ran to his right arm, and sensor pads had been affixed to his chest and temples, apparently feeding biological data to the monitor that hung suspended over his head. Thin copper wires had been taped in a lattice across his torso and groin, and Jo could see the lines of burnt and charred skin beneath them.
“Ahab,” Jo murmured. “I’ve found the White Whale.”
Able started at the sound of her voice, then gasped in pain, falling back against the bed. He craned his neck around, and she saw the fear in his eyes, and the pain. Steinberg was saying something to her, trying to remind her of something, but she wasn’t listening to him anymore.
Jo tucked the pistols into the back of her skirt, began working at the restraints holding Able’s arms.
“I’m a friend,” she told him gently. “I’m getting you out of here.”
For a moment, Benjamin Able’s expression was one of incomprehension, his mind still ruled by his fear and his pain. Then the understanding reached him, and he sagged against his restraints. Jo gave him another reassuring smile, then had to look away, as Benjamin Able started to cry.
CHAPTER 9
pharmaDyne Corporate Headquarters—Cormox Streat, Vancouver, British Columbia September 28th, 2020
The first thing Hayes did that morning, even before he rolled out of bed, was to patch up with the dermal his father had left out for him on the nightstand the night before. It wasn’t that Hayes needed it, at least not desperately, not at that moment, but the derm was there, and he wanted to start the day off right.
Once he’d fixed, though, Hayes practically sprang from his bed, leaving Kimiko still asleep in the tangle of sheets as he strode to the window that overlooked English Bay. The sensor field responded to his approach, turning the glass translucent once more until he could look out over the water and the mountains and see the sun and feel its warmth against his bare skin. He took it in, feeling powerful, certain, and pure, feeling his own eagerness for the day ahead.
Still in bed, Kimiko whimpered, rolling onto her belly and pulling one of the pillows over her head. The movement tugged the sheets away from her body, leaving her partially exposed to the sunlight, and Hayes grinned at the sight of her nakedness, the memory of her body. He could see the slight impressions his fingers had left on her upper arms.
Hayes headed into the bathroom, started the shower, and only as he stepped under the spray did he realize he was humming. Some people, he knew, didn’t enjoy their work. Some people met every day with loathing and resentment, with nothing to look forward to, no sense of accomplishment or pride. But Hayes loved his work.
And on days like today, when a Carrington Institute spy would be begging Hayes to put him out of his misery before nightfall, he couldn’t imagine anything better.
His father had already left for work by the time Hayes was dressed and prepared to depart himself. He’d overslept, in part due to a late night with Kimiko, whom he’d been forced to avoid while she worked counterintelligence. With her operation closed and her target tucked safely away in a holding cell, Hayes had been finally able to indulge himself.
She was still in bed when he checked on her a last time before leaving the mansion. She’d looked sleepily at him from the pillows, kissed him hungrily in greeting, then done it again when Hayes had told her he expected to find her there when he returned.
He took the Bowman Hunter for the drive to work, disengaging the computer control and piloting the vehicle himself. . It was Bowman’s newest sport model, and Hayes knew the vehicle to be astronomically expensive, but then again, he hadn’t had to pay for it, so it didn’t bother him. Most of the new-model null-gravity vehicles were built to provide a smooth ride, in an attempt to reassure those still reluctant consumers that flight was now the only safe way to travel. Hayes liked the Hunter, however, because it let him feel the air. Behind the controls of the car, he knew he was flying.
Executive parking was on the rooftop of the pharmaDyne building, and Hayes slotted the Hunter into its bay beside his father’s more stately and distinguished R-C Supremacy. When he hopped out, Hayes lay a hand against the starboard flank, feeling for engine heat, and discovered it cold. He frowned, realizing that he was running later than he’d thought, and only then checked his watch. It was twelve minutes to noon.
He checked in with his father first, striding without slowing through the outer office and past the phalanx of secretaries who attended Doctor Murray. At the mahogany doors, Hayes paused, knocked, and entered.
The office was enormous, as befitted the CEO of pharmaDyne, built in a grand circle with a wall of windows behind the desk that afforded a view of Stanley Park to the northwest, and then Black Mountain beyond. Three of the floor-to-ceiling windowpanes doubled as monitors. One displayed up-to-the-second information from the trading floors in New York, Sydney, Tokyo, and London. A second was set to regularly cycle through the major newsfeeds, talking heads spitting out nuggets of the latest news. The third was tied directly to Doctor Murray’s own office computer, and currently seemed to be in the process of rendering some complex chemical equation that Hayes could never hope to understand, even if he had wanted to.
Doctor Murray himself stood behind the desk, a porcelain teacup in one hand, its companion saucer held in the other, apparently reviewing the process on the third window. Hayes saw his father shift slightly, catching sight of his son’s reflection as he entered the office, and Hayes saw the smile, and knew he had worked himself back into Murray’s good graces.
“Carrington, was it?” Doctor Murray said, focusing again on the chemical string that was folding and refolding itself on the window. “I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised.”
Hayes came closer, skirting the edge of the desk, to join his father. “He claims he hasn’t spoken to that old nut in a couple of years.”
“And you believe him?”
“No.” Hayes grinned. “I’ll get the truth before dinner, though.”
His father took a final sip from his cup, then set cup and saucer down on the edge of his desk. “Did this spy, whatever his name is, did he realize what it was he’d found, my boy? Did he understand what it was he’d discovered?”
Hayes shook his head, sure of himself. “No, Father. He just knew the data was yours, and that’s what made it important.”
Doctor Murray met his son’s eyes and gazed into them seriously, almost condescendingly. “I want to be sure about this, Laurent.”
“I’ll double-check, Father. I’d be happy to.”
“Please do so.”
“Is there anything else?”
Doctor Murray frowned, brought the manicured nails of his right hand to his throat, scratching at it lightly as he considered the question. “I’ve been thinking of our chances, my boy.”
“You’re the only logical choice to replace Master Li, Father.”
“And I agree, but it wouldn’t be prudent to explain that to the Board. As soon as you’re finished with this Carrington agent, I want you to start looking into the other candidates. Sato doesn’t concern me overmuch, he’s too unpredictable, and I don’t believe the Board will give him more than a cursory consideration. Waterberg has too many skeletons in her closet, as well; the Board certainly knows about that disaster in Iraq, and if they don’t, they soon will.
“But Sexton and DeVries, they may prove to be more problematic. Sexton is slippery, and he’s greedy, and I’d be surprised if he hasn’t already put a few of the Board in his pocket. DeVries, she’s an idealist, and the Board may respond to that, the idea of a sweet-faced blonde with stars in her eyes. We should take steps to ensure they do not damage our standing.”
; “You want me to dig deeper?”
“Quietly, yes. It would be damaging to the parent corporation if we were to lose either of them. And blackmail would give us a handle for the future, to use to keep them both in line once I’ve replaced Zhang Li.”
“I’ll get right on it.”
“After you’re done with the spy, Laurent.”
“Of course.”
“Good boy,” Doctor Murray said, and turned his attention back to the windows, dismissing his son without another word.
Hayes stopped by his office long enough to check his voicemail and messages before proceeding to the security center at the heart of the fortieth floor. He ran through the watchlist with the Duty Sergeant, a former Green Beret in his early forties named Beaumont who barely hid his annoyance at Hayes’s tardiness. Hayes didn’t much care for the man, and felt that it was reciprocated, but Beaumont did a good job of hiding it, and if nothing else, he knew his business—and more importantly, he knew his place.
There were eleven staff absences logged that day, seven of them personnel using accrued vacation time, two on scheduled sick days. The remaining two had called in that morning with excuses. Doctor Gabriella Zimmerman, a research scientist in Cognitive Pharma, had called in claiming her son was suffering from a burst appendix, and that she was staying with him in the company hospital. The second, Jesse Ekkert, worked in Clinical Selection, responsible for acquiring and vetting test subjects for R&D. He’d called, claiming to suffer from a fever and sore throat. A quick cross-reference showed this was his fourth absence in the last seven weeks.
Hayes ordered verification surveillance on Zimmerman, and told Beaumont to continue the already active surveillance on Ekkert. After his first absence, seven weeks back, Hayes had broken into Ekkert’s apartment on the day he’d returned to work, giving it a thorough search while authorizing a comprehensive review of the man’s financials. What he’d discovered was that Ekkert was receiving payoffs from Core-Mantis OmniGlobal in return for passing along data about pending trials. Since then, they’d been feeding Ekkert false data to forward to their competitor. Hayes suspected that it was only a matter of time before Ekkert either lost his nerve or disappeared to take a job with Core-Mantis, and he supposed that grabbing the man now would be the smart thing to do, but he didn’t, in the hopes that Ekkert would expose other Core-Mantis operatives working in the Vancouver theatre of operations.
