Dragon: Out of the Box (The Girl in the Box Book 37)

by Robert J. Crane

  “That's a very mature approach given your mutual antipathy,” Bilson said, nodding along. “I've met people like that before. Ones that just...they grate on me, you know?”

  Of course I knew. But to this, I just nodded.

  “What if there was a way for you to do your job but not have to answer to Chalke?” Bilson asked. He wasn't smiling, but he had a twinkle in his eyes. “Maybe you could work for someone who could give you a little more freedom to maneuver?”

  “I think she tried that with Willis Shaw up in New York,” I said, shaking my head. “Probably didn't work out the way she intended, thus our new arrangement.”

  “See, I think Director Chalke has been mishandling you,” Bilson said. “You are a valuable member of the government team. The natural leader for any metahuman response. Vital to the national security effort.” There went that gleam in his eye again. “I think you're wasted in the FBI. Once we get out of this, maybe we can talk to the president about finding a way to make your working life easier and more comfortable.”

  Easier and more comfortable? “Well, I wouldn't say no to that.”

  “All right, cool, we'll talk more later,” he said, and turned to climb the last steps to the next floor. “Remember, her name is Bridget Schultz. Been in the State Department for her whole career, basically.”

  “Okay,” I said, my forehead wrinkling as we came up to her door, which was just off the open staircase. The front of my head had started to ache, a slow, radiating pain starting from just behind my eyes. I put a finger to my temple and rubbed; the skin was tense on my scalp, and I started to wonder if I'd cinched my ponytail too tight with my meta strength.

  “Coming,” came a muffled voice from inside, then thudding, irregular footsteps. Someone bumped into the wall within, then hit the door. I frowned through the headache, because it sounded a little like Bridget Schultz was...well, drunk.

  After fumbling with the deadbolt twice she finally got the door open. The thunking of the bolt both times told me she'd left it unlocked, and clearly didn't realize that it was. When she opened the door, we were treated to the visage of a person who was clearly in the throes of some illness. Her blond hair was dyed, showing hints of gray at the roots. Her eyes were blank, floating over my face without a hint of recognition, then to Bilson's where they lit dimly. “Oh. Hello, Russell,” she said, in a very airy, distant voice.

  “Hello, Bridget,” he said, and leaned in to give her a hug in which he definitely kept his body as distant and rigid as possible. Whether this was because he feared a sexual harassment allegation from pressing against her red silken bathrobe or because of her illness was unclear, but I was banking on the latter by 60/40 or so. “How are you feeling?”

  She brushed a pale, spider-veined hand over her forehead as though mopping off sweat with her silken sleeve. She looked a little young to be developing obvious spider veins, but I supposed they occurred in all sorts of people. “Fine. I'm...fine.” She seemed like she lost her train of thought mid-reply.

  “Can we come in?” Bilson asked.

  Bridget blinked a couple times. “Oh. Did I invite you over today?” Her eyes were distant, scanning the horizons of her memory for something she'd forgotten.

  “Uh, yes,” Bilson said. “We came to talk to you about this China situation?”

  “Oh, well, come in, then,” she said, leaving the door wide and wandering back, thumping off a wall as she walked on unsteady legs.

  I looked at Bilson, he looked at me. I could tell by his querying, quasi-apologetic look that he had his doubts this was going to go anywhere, given the state of her, but he led and I followed him in, shutting the door behind me. As I closed the door, my skull started to throb.

  “Would you like some...some tea?” she asked, thumping into a countertop in the kitchen. The apartment was in bad shape; dishes were piled in the sink, some broken. I saw a sharp edge of what seemed to have once been a lovely dinner plate dotted with blood and piled in the stack. She turned, eyes not quite focused on either of us. Her pupils were dilated, lending credence to the idea she was on something, drug-wise. Charitably, I thought it could be to counter her current illness.

  “No, that's fine, Bridget,” Bilson said, and let an awkward chuckle be his shield as he launched into an uncomfortable topic. “I feel a little bad that I asked you for this meeting today. I had no idea you were so...under the weather.”

  “It's been...months of this,” Bridget said, head drifting side to side as if she were on a sailboat being buffeted by winds. “Doctors keep saying...they don't know what's wrong.” She let out a dry, pained laugh. “Not cancer, they say. But other than that,” she just shook her head, face going blank like she'd just done a factory reset. “What was I saying?”

  “Jesus,” Bilson muttered under his breath.

  Just then, I felt the pressure in my head go up a step, and I bowed my head forward, fingers against my face. I took a large breath, a huge intake of air sucked in through my nose to counter the – well, it felt a little like a brain freeze, really – and caught a whiff of something in the process.

  Blood.

  Ignoring the rapidly developing Category 5 headache spreading through my skull, I lifted my face. The overhead lights were off, but a window on the wall had a crack between the curtains that was letting in some light. It felt like someone was shining a searchlight on my face.

  “Something is wrong here,” I said to Bilson, the pain in my skull getting worse by the minute.

  “Yeah, she's suffering from early onset dementia,” Bilson said out of the corner of his mouth, not looking at me.

  “No,” I said, loudly, “there is something really wrong in this apartment.”

  He turned to look at me, and did a double take. “What...what is it?”

  I shuffled across the kitchen to Bridget, stopping just in front of her. She weaved unsteadily, almost falling over on the counter from my proximity. I took a long sniff–

  Yep. I didn't even need to get closer.

  “Call 911,” I said, narrowing it down as best I could around my splitting headache. “She needs to go to the hospital now.”

  “What is it?” Bilson asked, but cheers to him, he already had his phone and was dialing before he did so.

  I didn't bother to answer. I was prowling out of the kitchen now, following my skull rather than my nose this morning. It felt like someone had stuck an air hose in my ear canal and was adding pressure by the second. I ducked into a spare bedroom, shut the door, and felt a moment's relief.

  Opening it back up, I was assailed again, head back to splitting with pressure. It was like someone was chopping wood on the crown of my head now, that my eyeballs were being inflated and threatening to blow back into my skull.

  I shut myself in Bridget's bedroom and again, felt relief. I was having trouble thinking while I was out in the main area, but each time I went into a bedroom – boom. Pressure off, at least a little, like taking the tea kettle off the fire.

  Braving the main area again, I realized there was a bathroom. I closed the door without entering, felt nothing change, my head still threatening to blow off my shoulders. Old Faithful had clearly been placed in my neck by some magic I didn't understand. No, worse – Vesuvius. Mt. Saint Helens. The Yellowstone supervolcano. All three, maybe. My skull was suffering from the buildup of pressure, and if I didn't let it loose soon, maybe by running my head into the wall, I was sure I was going to die.

  But no. That wasn't it. Something here was the problem.

  I bumbled by an air vent, listening to Bilson in the distance talking to someone on the phone about sending an ambulance – no, two of them, now Now NOW! And felt the curious sensation of someone driving a railroad spike into my left ear.

  The one closest to the wall.

  To the vent.

  I turned, and my whole head was assailed by pain, rapiers in both ears. I closed my eyes. Felt pain in darkness.

  My fingers crept into the slats of the air vent, tightened. I rip
ped it free–

  And was confronted, when I opened my eyes, by psychedelic colors. And a dark duct that led two or three feet before disappearing in a turn.

  I looked down. There, on the duct floor, before it dropped down, out of sight, was a little black...something.

  Seizing it, I felt the pain, the pressure in my head threaten to explode everything. I turned it over in my fingers, cringing from it even as I forced my eyes open, looking for–

  Hey, a switch.

  I tried to flick it and failed. Four times. My fine motor skills were so pathetically enfeebled that I couldn't do shit.

  “Bilson,” I said, mouth full of cotton. “Bilth-on.” It was getting worse by the second.

  He was a distant blur of shadow, and I locked onto him, toddling to him on legs as unsteady as Bridget's by now. I held the little black blur on my palm out like an offering to a god. “Swish,” I said, pushing toward him. “Swish...switch...it...off...”

  I tumbled over at his feet, face going straight into the soft-pile carpeting. I cupped my hand by instinct, warring against dropping the black blur that was trying to kill me. Once I was safely ensconced in the carpeting, I opened my hand again, my face drooling into the soft pile.

  “Swish...” I said. My mind hurt, but was nearly blank. “Swish it...”

  A soft pressure on my hand released as he pulled the black thing from it. “Switch?” he asked, but he sounded like he was miles away, underwater, maybe.

  Then...like a sunny day coming as all the clouds blew away...the pain stopped.

  I enjoyed the pleasant sensation of the removal of the spikes from my ears for only a moment before my brain decided it had enough of this shit for today, and blessedly let me pass out.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  “What is this thing?” Bilson asked. The black “blur” as I'd thought of it was in fact a piece of electronic equipment no bigger than half a standard business card. It was sitting on the counter in Bridget Schultz's apartment between us as the paramedics chattered somewhere in the periphery of my (still) clouded consciousness, working to treat the occupant of this inadvertently murderous hellhole.

  I was not quite my best, but at least I was back on my feet, drool dried off my face and a couple dots of blood blotted out of my ear canals. “A sonic weapon.” I rubbed my forehead. “I think.”

  Bilson stared at it as though doing so might make it combust. “Well...why is it here?”

  Still rubbing my forehead, it took me a second to let his question permeate my melon, and another before I conjured an answer. “I have a guess, but I'd like to wait a minute before sharing.”

  “Why?” Bilson asked.

  A knock on the apartment door frame heralded the arrival of someone else. It was a nerdy guy in a suit, with a plastic case in his hand. “Agent Nealon? I'm Speer. Electronics division. You called?”

  “And you came, lickety-split,” I said wearily, pushing myself off the counter and to full upright position, like a grownup, functional human being. Which I did not feel like, presently. “Two things. First, we found this.” I nodded to the black device on the counter. “I think it's a sonic weapon.”

  Speer made a face. “That's not a thing we run into, really.”

  “Well, I'm not common,” I said, and tilted my head to indicate Bridget, who was being strapped to a gurney by paramedics. “And this woman worked for the State Department. Chinese division.”

  Speer's face went from funny to panicked in a heartbeat. “Oh. Okay. Well.” And he sidled over to me, snapping on a glove and pulling an evidence bag from his pocket as he came. Picking the device up gingerly, he bagged it, then labeled it with a black Sharpie. That done, he turned to me. “You're...you're sure it's a sonic device?”

  “Pretty sure,” I said, looking at Bridget again. “Based on her level of neurological deterioration.”

  “No, I want to stay here,” Bridget said to the paramedic, sounding like a child arguing with an unfair parent. “I don't want to go. Not out there. It's so...bright,” she whined the last part.

  Speer's face switched to near-panic, eyes widening and face paling. “Oh boy.”

  “Yeah,” I said, rubbing my face again. It didn't help make me feel any better.

  “Why the weirdness, guys?” Bilson asked.

  “I need this apartment swept for bugs,” I said to Speer, snapping my fingers. “That's the second thing. Took a minute to remember.”

  Speer gave me a look of concern. “How long were you exposed to this device?”

  “Less than five minutes,” Bilson said, thankfully answering for me. My perception of the passage of time while in the mouth of hell that was the sonic weapon had been all twisted up.

  I shrugged, nodded. “I'll be fine. Meta healing will take care of me. Worry about her.” I looked again at Bridget, who was now being wheeled out and crying softly, bound to the gurney. “And sweep this place, please. Any bugs, I want them documented, and the listening source found. Okay?”

  Speer nodded, opened his case, pulled out a weird-looking bug sweeper, and went to work on the kitchen while we were standing there. He finished that area in about a minute, then walked through the front door hallway before returning to us. “This section's clear. I'll get the living area next. Bedrooms last?”

  “Sounds good,” I said, and as soon as he was clear, I pulled Bilson toward the front door with a beckoning motion. He followed me, broad face full of curiosity.

  Once we were in the hallway, and out of the range of any undiscovered listening devices, I gently took his collar and pulled his head to me. He acceded without fighting the motion, and once my lips were by his ear, I whispered the answer to his question. “Sonic weapons have never been used on US soil before, and we only know of two cases where they've been employed at all. The first was at our embassy in Cuba.” I swallowed heavily. “The other was against a US diplomat...in Guangzhou, China.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  “So are we out of leads for the moment?” Bilson asked, at the wheel of his Maserati.

  “Yep,” I said, resting my head against the wonderful leather seats, just enjoying the smoothness of the ride. “Until someone from forensics gives me something, or Speer gets me a clue from the device, I think we're tapped out...for the moment.”

  “You need to get back to your office?”

  I started to shake my head, but it still hurt, so I said, “No. There's nothing I can really do there. I'd rather go home and rest.”

  “That sonic thing really took it out of you, huh?” Bilson asked, voice laden with concern.

  “Felt like someone was trepanning my head,” I said, not opening my eyes. The brightness of the world was a hell of a bother.

  “There's a conference room at my offices with comfortable chairs,” Bilson said. “You could chill there while I get some other business taken care of. I can have lunch brought in for you.” He quieted for a moment. “I'm just not sure you should be alone right now. There's still blood in your ears.”

  I dabbed my left ear, and it came away wet. “Okay. Fine. Whatever.” I didn't open my eyes. Didn't feel like arguing.

  We made it to his offices, and I followed him to the elevator. I didn't even remember walking into the conference room, or collapsing in a comfy leather chair. But I woke up in the chair, with the towel, a couple spots of scarlet suggesting whoever had put it there was a genius, because it kept it off the leather.

  Checking my phone, I discovered that I had no messages and that it was now after 1 p.m. My head still ached, but it was more a stuffy kind of ache, the remnant of a worse headache now gone rather than the fresh, my-eyeballs-want-to-bleed pain I'd experienced at Bridget's.

  Opening the door to the conference room, I found the offices bustling outside. I couldn't even remember what day of the week it was, but clearly it was a weekday because Bilson's political operation was in full swing. Rows of cubicles sat occupied, people working at computers or on the phones. I caught something about “donors,” and
I doubted they were talking about organs, the way Holloway had.

  “How are you feeling?” Bilson's secretary intercepted me no more than ten steps out of the conference room.

  “Muzzy,” I said, and it felt right, though hell if I could remember what exactly that word meant. If it was a word at all.

  She smiled, her face blurred under these bright lights. “Mr. Bilson left me instructions to show you right in to him when you woke up. Unless you need to use the ladies' room first?”

  “No, I'm fine,” I said, following after her. “Probably a little dehydrated, though.” I smacked my lips together and yeah, they were dry.

  “What would you like to drink?” she asked with great vivacity. “Coffee? Tea? Cola? Water?”

  “Water's fine,” I said as she opened Bilson's door. I walked in and she shut it behind me.

  Bilson was on a call, little wireless earbuds in both ears. He smiled and held up a single finger to me, then gestured to the chairs in front of his desk. I plopped down in one as he nodded, looking down, clearly immersed in his call.

  “Yes, Jonah, exactly. That's what we're looking for. Write the piece, send it to me, and I'll see you get paid handsomely for it.” He reached down and touched the screen, looked up at me and smiled. “Rough couple days, huh? Feeling better?”

  “Than when I was bleeding from the ears? Yeah.” I looked around his office, trying to note the various politicians he was posed with, and in what settings. Most seemed to be at formal events, Bilson in a tux or suit, the other players dressed likewise. A few were in other venues, though; fishing boats and golf courses seemed to be a popular choice.

  “Admiring the lifestyle photos?” Bilson followed my gaze to one of his pictures. “Ah.”