Skin Deep

by Brandon Sanderson

  It hit the window behind me. I paused, then began slamming my head back repeatedly, rattling the glass.

  Zen was beside me an instant later, grabbing me roughly by the shoulder and towing me away from the building. She glanced in the window—apparently saw nobody there—then threw me to the ground.

  “I am not a patient woman, Mister Leeds,” she said softly.

  I was tempted to give her the drive right then. But I held back, suppressing my worry, and my fear.

  Stall. Just a little bit more. “You realize this is all pointless,” I lied to her. “Panos already gave the information away. On the internet. Free, for everyone.”

  She sniffed. “We know that I3 contained his attempts to do that.”

  He did? And . . . they did?

  She pressed the gun down into my gut. Behind her, the window slammed open.

  “Leeds!” the security guard shouted. “You crazy man! Do you want to die? Because I’m going to strangle you . . . Hey! What’s up?”

  Zen met my eyes, then threw herself off me and dashed away around the corner. I leaned back as the security guard cursed, stretching out the window. “Was that a gun she was carrying? Damn it, Leeds! What are you doing?”

  “Surviving,” I said, tired, looking at my aspects. “Move?”

  “Now,” J.C. said.

  We left the shouting guard and made for my car. I scooped up my gun as I passed, and once out in the open, I didn’t spot any sign of Zen. I climbed in the back of the vehicle and told Wilson to go.

  I didn’t feel much safer when we were on the road.

  “I can’t believe she tried that,” Ivy said. “Practically in the open, without much proof that we even had what she wanted.”

  “She was likely told to bring us in,” J.C. said. “She’s a professional; she wouldn’t have moved this recklessly without external pressure. She reported to her superiors we might have something, then was told to recover it.”

  I nodded, breathing in and out in deep, desperate breaths.

  “Tobias,” Ivy said, taking over for me. “What do we know about Exeltec?”

  “Yol’s report included some basic facts,” Tobias said. “Biotech company much like I3, but far more . . . energetic, you might say. Founded five years ago, they soon released their key product—a pharmaceutical to help regulate the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease.

  “Unfortunately for them, a year later a rival company produced a much better alternative. Exeltec’s product tanked. The company is owned by ten investors, with the largest stakeholder—the one Stephen imitated on the phone—acting as CEO and president of the board. Together they stand to lose a great deal of money on this company. Their last three products have flopped, and they are under investigation for cutting corners in overseas manufacturing. So, in a word, they’re desperate.”

  I nodded, calmed by Tobias’s voice. I plugged the flash drive into my laptop, then started the footage at 10x speed and set the machine on the floor so I could watch it with half an eye. Tobias, often the most observant of my aspects, leaned down to watch in detail.

  In the front seat, Wilson and Dion began chatting about the youth’s home life. I felt the tremors from being held at gunpoint finally fade, and took stock. Wilson pulled onto the freeway; he wasn’t going anywhere specific, but knew me well enough to realize I needed time to put myself together before giving him any specific directions.

  Dion glanced in the rear-view mirror to get a look at me. He caught me looking back at him and blushed, then slumped down into his seat, answering Wilson’s questions about school. Dion had just finished high school, and was prepping for college in the fall. He readily answered Wilson’s questions; it was difficult to resist the affable butler. Wilson could handle me, after all. Compared to that, normal people were easy.

  “That must have been some event,” Wilson said to the young man, in response to an explanation of a recent race. “Now, if you’ll forgive the interruption, I should ask Master Leeds where it was he wanted to be going.”

  “You don’t know already?” Dion asked, looking confused. “But where have we been driving?”

  “Around,” I said. “I needed time to think. Dion, your brother lived with you and your mother, right?”

  “Yeah. You know Greek families. . . .”

  I frowned. “Not sure I do.”

  “We’re a tight lot,” Dion said with a shrug. “Moving out on your own . . . well, that’s just not done. Hell, I assume Panos would have stayed nearby even after he’d married. There’s no resisting the pull of a Greek family.”

  The key to Panos’s corpse might very well be at the family home. At the very least, going there would indicate to Zen that we were still looking for something, which might encourage her to postpone another confrontation.

  “Let’s head there, Wilson,” I said. “I want to talk to the family.”

  “I am the family!” Dion said.

  “The rest of the family,” I said, getting out my phone and dialing. “Hold on a minute.” The phone rang a few times before being picked up.

  “Yo, dawg,” Yol said.

  “I don’t think that’s a cool phrase any longer, Yol.”

  “I’m bringing it back, dawg.”

  “I don’t . . . You know what, never mind. I’m pretty sure our bad guys are Exeltec.”

  “Hmmm. That’s unfortunate. I was hoping it was one of the other two. Let me step out so we can talk.”

  “I wasn’t certain they’d even let you answer while on lockdown.”

  “It’s a pain,” he said, and I heard the sound of a door closing, “but I’ve managed a little freedom, since I’m not technically under arrest, I’m just quarantined. The feds let me set up a mobile office here, but nobody can get in or out until we convince them this thing wasn’t contagious.”

  “At least you can talk.”

  “To an extent. It’s a pain, dawg. How am I going to do press interviews for the new album?”

  “Seclusion will just add to your celebrity mystique,” I said. “Can you tell me anything more about Exeltec.”

  “It’s all in the documents I sent,” he explained. “They’re . . . well, they’re bad news. I had a hunch it would be them. We’ve caught them trying to slip in spies in the form of engineers seeking employment.”

  “Yol, they’ve got a hit man working for them.”

  “That one you mentioned before?”

  “Yeah. Ambushed me in an alley. Held me at gunpoint.”

  “Damn.”

  “I’m not going to sit around and let something like that happen again,” I said. “I’m going to email you a list of instructions.”

  “Instructions?” Yol asked. “For what?”

  “For keeping me from being killed,” I said, taking my laptop from Tobias. “Yol, I have to ask you. What is it you’re not telling me about this case?”

  The line was silent.

  “Yol . . .”

  “We didn’t kill him,” Yol said. “I promise you that.”

  “But you were having him watched,” I said. “You had his computer monitored. There’s no other way you’d just naturally have a record of all of the things he’d been doing in the last few months, ready to print out when I arrived.”

  “Yeah,” Yol admitted.

  “And he was trying to give your information away,” I said. “Post everything about the project online.”

  In the front seat, Dion had turned around and was watching me.

  “Some of the engineers didn’t like me getting involved,” Yol said. “They saw it as selling out. Panos . . . that guy didn’t believe in consequences. He’d have posted our research for everyone, so that every terrorist out there knew about it. I don’t get such people, with their wikileaks and their open sources.”

  “You’re making it very hard for me to believe,” I said, “that you didn’t just remove him.”

  Dion paled.

  “I don’t do things like that,” Yol snapped. “Do you know how much a mu
rder investigation can cost a company?”

  I really wished I could trust him. To an extent, I needed to. Otherwise, I could very easily end this mission as a corpse myself. “Just follow the instructions in my email,” I told him, then hung up.

  I ignored Dion and began typing an email while the feed from the security camera continued to play on the other side of my laptop screen. Audrey stood up behind my seat and looked over my shoulder, watching me type.

  “You shouldn’t be out of your seat belt,” Ivy said.

  “If we wreck, I’m sure Steve-O will imagine some delightfully gruesome scars for me,” Audrey said, then pointed at what I was typing. “Rumors to be spread? About Exeltec? This will make them even more desperate.”

  “I’m counting on it,” I said.

  “Which will put an even bigger target on our heads!” Audrey said. “What in the world are you planning?”

  I didn’t answer her, instead finishing up the instructions and shooting off the email to Yol. “Dion,” I said, still half watching the video on the laptop. “Is your family religious?”

  “My mom is,” he said from the front seat. “I’m an atheist.” He said it stubbornly, as if this were something he’d had to defend in the past.

  “Panos?”

  “Atheist,” Dion said. “Mom refused to accept it, of course.”

  “Who’s your family priest?”

  “Father Frangos,” he said. “Why?”

  “Because I think someone impersonated him last night when visiting your brother’s remains. Either that, or Father Frangos is involved in the theft of the corpse.”

  Dion snorted. “He’s, like, ninety years old. He’s so pious, when my mother told him I was taking after my brother, he fasted for thirty-six hours to pray for me. Thirty-six hours. I think the idea of intentionally breaking one of the commandments would kill him on the spot.”

  The kid seemed to have gotten over his fear of me. Good.

  “Ask him what he thought of his brother,” Ivy said from the back seat.

  “Seems he liked the guy,” J.C. said with a grunt.

  “Really?” Ivy said to him. “You deduced that all on your own, did you? Steve, I’d like to hear an opinion of Panos that didn’t come through Yol’s channels. Get the kid talking, if you please.”

  “Your brother,” I said to Dion. “You seem to really dislike the company he was working for.”

  “It used to be all right,” Dion said. “Before it went and got all corporate. That’s when the lies started, the extortion. It became about money.”

  “Unlike other jobs,” Audrey said, “which are never, ever about money.”

  “Your brother continued working there,” I said to Dion, ignoring Audrey’s commentary. “So he couldn’t have been too torn up about the changes at I3. I expect he wanted in on a little of that cash.”

  Dion twisted around in his seat and fixed me with a glare that could have fried an egg. “Panos cared nothing for the money. He only stayed at that place because of their resources.”

  “So . . . he needed I3’s equipment,” I said. “And, by extension, their money.”

  “Yeah, well, it wasn’t about the money. My brother was going to do great things. Cure diseases. He did things that even the others, traitors though they were, didn’t know about. He—” Dion cut off, then turned around immediately in his seat, and refused to respond to further prodding.

  I looked at Ivy.

  “Serious hero worship going on there,” she said, “I suspect that if you prodded, you’d find Dion was planning to study biology and follow in his brother’s footsteps. The philosophy, the mannerisms . . . We can learn a lot about Panos by watching his brother.”

  “So,” J.C. said, “you’re telling me Panos was an annoying little sh—”

  “Anyway,” Ivy interrupted, “if it’s true that Panos was working on projects even Garvas and the others didn’t know about, that could be the true secret Yol is trying to recover.”

  I nodded.

  “Stephen,” Tobias said, pointing at the laptop screen. “You’ll want to watch this.”

  I leaned over, then rewound the footage. Tobias, Audrey, and J.C. huddled around, all ignoring Ivy’s pointed complaints that none of us were bothering with seat belts. On the small screen, now playing at normal speed, I watched someone leave the bathroom in the medical complex.

  The cleaning lady. She pulled a large trash can on wheels, and approached the doorway into the coroner’s offices, then opened the door and went in.

  “Does nobody in this world care about security anymore?” J.C. said, pointing at the screen. “Look at the security guard! He’s didn’t even glance at her.”

  I froze the frame. The camera was positioned in such a way that we couldn’t get a good look at the figure, even when I rewound and froze it again.

  “Somewhat small in stature,” Tobias said. “Dark haired, female. I can’t pick out anything else. The rest of you?”

  J.C. and Audrey shook their heads. I froze the frame on the security guard. It was a different man from the one we’d met, a smaller fellow, who was sitting in the station and reading a paperback novel. I rewound to try to find where the cleaning lady entered the building, but she must have come in the back. I did catch the security guard pushing a button, perhaps to open the back door for someone who had buzzed for the lock to open.

  Fast-forwarding, we watched the cleaning lady leave the coroner’s offices and go into each room along the hall. Whoever it was, she knew not to break pattern. She cleaned the other offices quickly, then disappeared down the hallway, towing her large trash can.

  “That trash can could most certainly hide a body,” J.C. said. “I thought the guard said nobody went into those rooms!”

  “Cleaning staff is usually considered ‘nobody,’” Tobias observed. “And the door into the morgue itself would be locked. Liza said even the security guard wouldn’t be able to get in, so presumably the cleaning staff doesn’t go into that room, at least not without supervision.”

  “Does that drive have footage from other nights?” Audrey asked.

  “Good idea,” I said, searching and finding the two previous nights’ footage as well. We watched, and found that at around the same time each night, a cleaning person entered and engaged in a similar activity. But the trash can they brought was smaller, and it was obviously a different person. Female, yes, and with a similar build—but with lighter hair.

  “So,” Audrey said, “they replaced first the priest and then the cleaning lady.”

  “This should have been impossible,” J.C. said. “Protocol should have made it so.”

  “And what protocol is that?” Audrey said. “This isn’t a high-security facility, J.C. You spend year after year without any kind of incident, and of course you’re going to grow lax. Besides, the people who pulled this off were capable. Fake ID, knowledge of the times the cleaning lady entered and left. The uniform is the same, and they even cleaned the entire set of offices so nobody would be suspicious.”

  I replayed the footage of the thief, wondering if it was Zen herself. The build was right. What was it Audrey had said before? People are usually far less secure than the encryption strategies—or, in this case, security devices—they employ. This could have all been stopped if the guard had glanced at the cleaning lady. But he didn’t, and why would he have? What was there really in these offices that someone would want to steal?

  Just a corpse carrying a doomsday weapon.

  I stifled a yawn as we eventually pulled into a residential area. Blast. I’d been hoping to find a chance to squeeze in a nap while we were driving. Even thirty minutes would do me some good. No chance for that now. Instead, I replied to Yol’s return email, telling him that yes, I did want to make Exeltec more frantic and yes, I did know what I was doing. My next set of instructions seemed to placate him.

  We pulled up to a quaint white suburban house, rambler style, with a neatly mowed lawn and vines growing up the walls. A careful air
of cultivation helped offset the fact that this house—with its siding, its small windows, and its lack of an enclosed garage—was probably a decade or four past its prime.

  “You’re not going to hurt my family, are you?” Dion asked from the front seat.

  “No,” I said, “but I might embarrass you a little.”

  Dion grunted.

  “Come introduce me,” I said, shoving open the door. “We’re on the same side. I promise that when I recover your brother’s body, I won’t let I3 do anything nefarious with it. In fact, I’ll let you watch the cremation—with I3 getting no chance to lay hands on the body—if you want.”

  Dion sighed, but joined me in climbing from the car and walking toward the house.

  14

  “Keep watch,” I said to J.C. as we approached the house. “I haven’t forgotten that Zen is out there.”

  “We might want to call in some backup,” J.C. said.

  “More Rescue Rangers?” Ivy asked.

  “Time Rangers,” J.C. snapped. “And no, we don’t have temporal substance here. I was talking about real bodyguards. If Skinny hired a few of those, I’d feel a whole lot safer.”

  I shook my head. “No time, unfortunately.”

  “Perhaps you should have explained the truth to Zen,” Tobias said, jogging up. “Was it wise to let her think we have the information she wants?”

  Behind us, Wilson pulled the SUV away—I’d given him instructions to keep driving until I called him for a pickup. I didn’t want Zen deciding to apply a little interrogation to my servant. Unfortunately, if she was determined, simply driving away wouldn’t be enough to protect him. Perhaps I should have told Zen we didn’t have her information. Yet my instincts said that the less she knew about what I’d discovered, the better off I’d be. I just needed to have a plan in place to deal with her.

  Dion led us up to the house, glanced over his shoulder at me, then sighed and pushed open the door. I grabbed it and held it for my aspects, then slipped in last.

  The house smelled old. Of furniture that had been polished over and over, of stale potpourri, and of burned wood from an old hearth. The careful clutter offered a new oddity on each wall and surface—a line of photos in novelty frames down one hallway, a collection of ceramic cats in a shadow box near the door, a sequence of colorful candles on the mantel with a religious tone to them. The house didn’t look lived in, it looked decorated. This was a museum for a family’s life, and they’d done a lot of living.