They had to convince Bertrand to help them. Her father planned to appeal to their history together—Betrand had been there since the beginning of Project Osiris when Anton Lorre had walked about in his own skin—but Cindy knew all too well that old friends could still turn on you. She and Patricia had been friends for forty years, and that hadn’t stopped the red-haired Amazon bitch from stabbing her in the back, or at least tying her to a chair and bruising her jaw.
Patricia had even had the nerve to play the “there’s good in you” card. As if Cindy’s essential goodness had ever been in question. True, she bent rules to make forward progress. But that didn’t mean her intentions were anything less than honorable. Her work was important. She was changing the world, and no one was going to stop her. Not even her once-best-friend.
“Let me do the talking,” her father said, clamping a hand down on her shoulder and shaking her loose from her mental meanderings, if not the anger that had risen in her. She glared at him, but he either didn’t notice or was completely unfazed by her rage. “Bertrand and I go way back,” he said. “He’s here as a personal favor.”
Cindy nodded and started toward the restaurant, summoning her most pleasant, if insincere, smile. It was time to make nice to the last government contact her father had. She had a backup plan of her own, just in case. It might be madness, but it was all she had. The only hope for both of them now.
Bertrand and Agent Mekai Davis, his assistant and bodyguard, were already inside. If they were trying for inconspicuous, they failed. Mekai Davis looked every inch the dangerous man he was—maybe even more so than when she’d last seen him. If he’d been wearing an earpiece, people would have thought the Secret Service was at the Roadside Bar and Grill. Beside him, the slender elderly man she knew only as “Bertrand” looked even paler and thinner than she had remembered.
The burly African-American man sitting with a decrepit-looking ninety-year-old white man didn’t exactly blend in among the farming families and church ladies sprinkled throughout the restaurant, but then again, no one was paying them obvious attention. Maybe they were too polite to stare in Indiana.
The two men had chosen a tall bar-style table in a back corner. Cindy grimaced. Not good seating for short people like her or for half-invalided people like her father, though it was shadowed, out of the way, and offered a good line of sight to all possible entrances. Her father lurched toward the table eagerly when Bertrand raised an arm and waved them over, and Cindy followed behind him, feeling like the surly teenager she appeared to be.
“Daniel.” The old man got down from his perch and greeted Cindy’s father with a handshake and half a hug. Cindy noted his face remained neutral, failing to match the forced gladness in the welcome. It was strange to hear her father addressed by that name, but it was the identity he’d been using in recent years, the name of the man whose body he now wore. It was probably as good a moniker as any. If by chance they were spotted, it was probably good to continue propagating that identity.
By wordless agreement, she and Mekai helped her father into one of the seats, hooking his cane on the edge of the table so it dangled between the chairs. Bertrand was more agile and got into his chair unassisted, though he groaned a little when he sat.
Mekai nodded to her before taking his seat, his face so serious she knew he had chosen the table to tease her, just as he used to make her struggle with the heavy doors at the compound. She wondered if it might be a sign of affection.
Still standing beside the tall table, she crossed her eyes at him, but he didn’t break character. Damn. He was good. And handsome, too. He had dark, radiant skin that glistened under bright light and made his pale brown eyes seem all the brighter in contrast. She had forgotten about the cleft in his chin. A man with a good jawline always had caught her eye. But Mekai was around thirty years old by her reckoning—too young for her or too old for her, depending on how you looked at it.
“Ms. Liu,” Bertrand said, leaning her direction. “I am glad to see you so well—and not a day younger than when we last met. I hear there was trouble in Indiana after we left.”
Cindy looked away from Mekai’s face and rolled her eyes at Bertrand. Trouble was an understatement. The whole disaster had cost them too much—in time, another laboratory, and the emeralds. But she wasn’t going to recount her losses for the man’s amusement. She smiled and thought again about the additional supply of emeralds back in Springfield. Right now, that storage unit might as well be on the far side of the moon for all the good it did her, but if she played her cards right, that might be about to change.
Since she hadn’t yet taken her seat, Mekai offered her a hand up, bowing exaggeratedly from his own seat. Ignoring him, she clambered up onto the tall stool beside her father’s and sat perched at its front edge so she could reach the support rail with her toes. She sat up straight, trying to look dignified.
Bertrand waved the waitress over. “Let’s get some lunch,” he said.
Cindy picked a sandwich at random and shoved the menu aside, eager to get to business, but Bertrand and Anton seemed unable to choose. They both asked the waitress lots of questions and dithered far too long before finally setting on chicken Caesar salads, the first thing both of them had mentioned. It was a reminder of how old her father actually was to see him and the near-centenarian Bertrand mirror each other’s behavior.
In her impatience, Cindy fought the urge to bounce in her seat and frowned when she caught Mekai looking pointedly at her swinging feet. The worst part about being young again was the lack of impulse control. Embarrassing.
The waitress left. Finally, they could get down to business.
Anton struck a regal pose, lacing his fingers carefully. “Thank you for seeing me, Bertrand. I know you’re going out of your way to help.”
Bertrand sucked in his cheeks as if he’d eaten something horribly sour. “This is the last time I can do this for you. The project is dead, and soon I will be, too. We’ve learned so much in our years together, but I’ve done everything I can for you.”
Anton Lorre nodded stiffly. Maybe from pride, maybe because he couldn’t make the muscles move smoothly. Cindy didn’t know, and she wasn’t sure how much she cared just now. She needed him not to blow this for them.
“I understand,” her father said in that rasping painful voice of his. He wiped the corner of his mouth with a napkin, even though they hadn’t had anything to eat yet, and Cindy knew he had probably caught himself drooling again. She’d thought that had been getting better.
“I can set you up with a small lab in Ohio,” Bertrand said. “We have a facility there that was shut down a few months ago and has yet to be reclaimed. It should do for your purposes.”
Cindy could hear the impending “but.” It hung there in Bertrand’s tone, the sad-sack expression on his face. This seemingly good news was going to come with bad news.
“I can’t help you beyond providing the lab,” he said. He looked away then, feigning interest in the non-existent view out the windows.
Cindy was confused at first. Wasn’t a lab what they had come to him to get? But she saw that her father had begun to shake violently. “Are you saying you will let me die like this? After all these years? My sacrifices?”
Bertrand’s eyes were watery but steady. He looked first at her, appraisingly, and then at her father. “All men must die, Anton. You’ve had more time than most get.”
“But my research.”
“Your work will live on, continued by other scientists. But I am finished helping you prolong your own life.” His tone had been imperious, but he softened it before going on. “It’s not as easy as it used to be, covering up the deaths, explaining away the bodies, keeping it all hidden. And I am old, sick, and officially retired. I want to live out my last few years in the peace of my own home, with my grandchildren annoying the cats.”
“You must excuse me.” Anton stumbled awkwardly out of the chair, grabbed his cane, and did his best to stalk to the restroom.
Bertrand sighed heavily. The agent at his side put a hand on his shoulder. “You knew he wasn’t going to take it well, sir.”
“True. I guess I had hoped he might be ready to let this madness go at last.”
Cindy’s gaze pinballed between the two men. That last hope was feeling pretty thin. “He’s not mad,” she said.
Bertrand smiled, though there was little mirth in the expression. “No, I guess you wouldn’t think so, Ms. Liu.” He took a sip of his coffee, then reached out for her hand. She let him take it, grimacing a little at the papery feeling of his skin. “But is his vision worth the lives of all the men he has killed to continue his work? Your father is a genius, but it has come at huge cost, a price we can no longer pay.”
Cindy pulled back her hand, thinking about that “we” and wishing she knew about who, exactly, Bertrand represented. She looked down the hall where her father had disappeared. “What if I can keep him going longer in this body?”
Bertrand was visibly taken aback. “His systems are failing. I see the signs in the way he walks. We’ve been through this many times before.”
She held up her hand in the space between them, flexing the fingers and waggling them. “I used to have arthritis, you know.” The old man raised an eyebrow, obviously interested. Cindy went on. “If I could get to some of my research, I know I could improve the formula, make the transformation more controllable.”
“I promised your father—he insisted you and your work were off limits.”
“That’s not up to him, is it? I’m not as young as I look, after all. I don’t need his permission to cut a deal.”
Bertrand smiled, an oily and smug expression that left Cindy feeling a little like she’d just bought a lemon from a used car salesman. “What would you need?”
“A ride, maybe a truck to bring the supplies back to the lab in Ohio.” She hoped she wasn’t going to regret this.
“Where to?”
“Springfield.”
The two men exchanged a troubled look. Mekai shook his head. “Things are hot in Springfield right now.”
Cindy crossed her arms over her chest. “What? You mean with the Department?”
Bertrand’s eyes widened. “Clever girl,” he said. “And what do you know of the Department?”
Cindy considered. She wondered what exactly her father had told them when he arranged this meeting. Anton Lorre could be maddeningly secretive, about his work and about what he knew. He’d managed to make the call to arrange this meeting while she was busy stealing the car and couldn’t hear what he said. If there were any advantage his secrecy gave them, she wouldn’t be the one to give it away. Let them think she knew more than she did.
“Let’s just say we’ve run into each other before.” She paused, taking a sip from her cherry Coke. “They have something I want.”
“We’re not prepared to take them on.”
“I’m not asking you to. All I need is a ride to Springfield. I can take care of the rest.”
“And the results of your research?” A gleam shone in the old man’s eye. Something greedy.
“I would, of course, share what I learn with my patrons.”
“And what about your father?”
“Oh, he’s going with me.”
“Are you saying you need his help?”
“No. I’m saying he needs my help, and I need a test subject.”
Bertrand smiled again, cold as a snake. “I like the way you think, young lady.”
“Has anyone ever told you you drive like an old man?” Cindy called from the backseat, frustrated.
Mekai Davis smiled into the rearview mirror, mischief in his eyes. “At least I look old enough to drive.”
Cindy kicked the seat and was rewarded with a grumpy glare from the agent. She was glad to get a reaction from him, even a negative one. He’d accepted the role assigned to him by Bertrand and agreed to transport Cindy and her father to Springfield to retrieve her research and supplies, then back to Ohio. But she had the distinct impression he didn’t like the arrangement. His silence seemed disapproving rather than merely professional and, for some reason, that mattered to her.
Or maybe she was cranky from too much time on the road. She had always hated traveling by car, especially on long trips. Slow and tedious, as well as confining. It was worse from the backseat where she couldn’t even control the speed or the music selection. Mekai had selected Mozart and, while that seemed to have pleased her father, Cindy was so bored she fantasized about manufacturing an EMP blast just to make the radio shut up.
She turned and looked at the window, watching for signs of where they were, but the landscape still consisted of miles and miles of unremarkable farmland. How big was the Midwest anyway? Patricia had grown up out here, which was hard to imagine given her love of city pleasures like theater and fine dining. Thinking of Patricia made Cindy angry and sad at once, so she pushed her complicated thoughts away and turned to study her father, asleep again in the seat beside her.
He looked pretty good for a man who had supposedly been dead for sixty years, especially now that her formula was regenerating some of his failing neurological connections. But his pallor was still terrible, greenish and hollow, and the faint mildewy smell that emanated from him disgusted her.
For all her own machinations and manipulations of the natural order of things, she found her father’s particular brand of experimentation macabre and disturbing. It was the stuff of horror movies, cutting into bodies and moving the parts around. In their weeks on the run, she had learned more of his story, as much as she could elicit from the annoying taciturn man. It was bizarre how he could both be a windbag and keep his secrets so close to his chest. He’d talk for hours and say nothing of importance the entire time.
Suddenly, Mekai started driving erratically, changing lanes three times in as many seconds and changing speeds. Cindy gripped the safety bar above her head to avoid being tossed into her father’s lap.
“What the hell are you doing?”
“We’ve picked up a tail,” he said.
Cindy unbuckled her seatbelt and sat up on her knees to peek out the back window. There was a long line of cars behind them, but that was no surprise on a major highway. She didn’t see anything suspicious. “Where?”
“The white SUV. Fast lane. Four cars back.”
She spotted the car. She didn’t see what was special about it. “What makes you think it’s following us?”
Mekai arched an eyebrow at her in the rearview mirror. “I can tell.”
Cindy blew her hair out of her eyes with a gusty, frustrated breath. “Yes. But how?”
Mekai met her gaze in the mirror again. He seemed to assess her for a moment before he answered. She met his gaze steadily, keeping her face serious and still. “He’s staying exactly four cars behind me no matter what I do. I’ve driven as slow as thirty-five and as fast as eighty-five in the past twenty miles and he’s sticking right with us, neither gaining nor falling behind.”
Cindy had to admit that was suspicious. She sat up on her knees and looked out the back window again. “Do you have binoculars?”
Mekai leaned across and pulled a pocket pair out of the glove compartment and tossed them back to her. Cindy unrolled them and peered at the man in the car. He was a short white man wearing large, mirrored sunglasses and staring resolutely ahead without expression. He didn’t look familiar to her. But why would he? If he was good at his job, she’d never have spotted him even if he followed her for months. Cindy sat back down.
“Do you think he’s Department?”
He gave a shrug. “Seems likely. They’re after you, aren’t they? You and Papa Frankenstein?”
Cindy mulled that over. She had believed, or at least hoped, that she and her father got away scot-free that night in Indiana. It was probably too good to be true, but desperation can make you believe unlikely things.
No one had followed them when they left, but it was entirely possible the van she stole
from the garage had been tracked. They made an eye-catching pair. There had been curious and chatty waitresses and gas station attendants everywhere they stopped. Clearly, she had underestimated the determination and capability of the Department.
“What are we going to do?” she asked.
“Why, lose them, of course.” Mekai turned the wheel sharply taking an exit at the last minute and earning the ire of at least three drivers he cut in front of as he rocketed down the exit ramp. He made three quick turns and pulled into the loading area behind a Qmart, pulling the minivan into a narrow space between a dumpster and a ramp, where clearly no one was supposed to park. “Come on,” he said. “Wake him up. We’re going shopping.”
“Shopping?”
“We’re going to ditch this car and pick up another one.”
That made sense—she had used the same strategy herself as she tried to stay under the radar the past few days. Cindy shook her father by the shoulder, but he just shifted in his sleep. Mekai stood outside the vehicle, scanning the parking area to see if the van had followed them in their crazy rush off the highway and through suburban sprawl to this shopping center. Cindy shook her father harder.
Mekai hissed at her through the open window. “Can you give him another injection?”
“Not without a place to work. It has to be used immediately, when fresh. What about you?”
Mekai was blank faced. Very purposefully, willfully blank faced.
“Don’t give me that. I saw you.” She remembered it very clearly. The silver vials in the case. The way her father’s face had bunched up in pain, then gone slack. “When you and Bertrand kidnapped me, I saw you injecting him with something. It seemed to give him better muscle control. What was it?”
“I think you mean when we rescued you and brought you in for your own safety. And you weren’t meant to see that.” There was a small twitch at the corner of his left eye, and Cindy wondered what it indicated. Guilt over his part in her kidnapping? Amusement? Suppression of something he wanted to say? She’d learn to read his face yet. Everyone had tells if you learned to read them.
Face the Change (Menopausal Superheroes Book 3) Page 12
