“Rendered inactive” was bureaucratic double-speak for “dead.” And that was how Adrienne preferred it.
“Terms accepted,” she told him.
“OSCAR?”
Sophia’s key slid from the lock of Tara’s cabin. The tabby usually came running to her, winding between her ankles before she even had a chance to take her coat off. Sophia clomped the snow off her boots on the rug inside the door.
“Oscar?”
No cat. Alarm twitched through her. Tara would never forgive her if she’d let harm come to Oscar. It had been two days since she’d been here, and the tomcat had seemed perfectly hale and hearty. He’d coughed up a hairball in front of the refrigerator, but Sophia had thought it was normal—she’d never met a cat who couldn’t throw up at will. She glanced at his dishes. Still full.
She peered underneath the couch, arthritic knees creaking. She opened the closet doors, peeked behind the fridge, and finally found a tight, furry gray ball under the bed. The ball didn’t respond when she spoke to it.
“Oscar.” She reached under the bed. Please don’t let him be dead. . . Her lips worked around a prayer as her fingers grazed his ribs. He was still breathing. One amber eye peered up over his spine, and Oscar mewed.
“Come here, baby.”
Oscar slowly crawled out, ears flattened, into Sophia’s arms. He worked his way under her open coat and jammed his head into her armpit. Sophia stroked him and cooed at him. He was acting like a cat who’d just been to the vet: frightened. She ran her fingers over his ribs, tummy, spine, and legs, finding no sore spots.
“What happened to you?” She stood slowly, holding the cat now permanently attached to her ribs. Her gaze swung around the room.
Something had happened that had terrified him. She saw the glitter of glass on the dresser. Gingerly, she plucked up the remains of a photo frame with a picture of Juliane and Tara inside.
Someone had been here. Of that much, she was certain.
She stared down at the broken glass on the surface, and her attention settled on a large shard. She blew out her breath, allowed her gaze to soften in the glare of sunshine on the glass. She breathed into the light, willing an image to surface.
“Show me,” she whispered. She didn’t have the dramatic talents of pyromancy the Pythia had, but she was not without her intuitive tools. Scrying was a more subtle art, but no less effective. “Show me who was here.”
The sunlight in the glass wavered, then resolved into a misty outline. An outline of a woman dressed in black with eyes as opaque as agate marbles.
Sophia sucked in her breath. “Adrienne.”
The image of Adrienne opened her hands. Sophia could see they were covered in blood and dirt. She was reminded of Adrienne as a little girl, when she had cut her hands on thorns pulling up Sophia’s roses.
Sophia recoiled from the image. She had to warn Tara.
Cradling Oscar, she crossed to the kitchen and punched Tara’s cell phone number into the phone on the wall. No answer. The phone rang until Sophia hung up.
She had to tell the Pythia. The Pythia could reach her.
With the furry lump under her arm, Sophia headed for the door.
“You’re coming with me, Oscar.”
The cat tensed, and one ear poked out.
“Don’t worry. The Pythia likes cats.”
The cat looked at her with a dubious eye, and ducked back behind her coat.
“WHERE ARE WE?”
Tara awoke with a jerk, blinking in the molten light. Afternoon sun slanted in the car windows, warm on her face. Maggie lay with her head on her chest, looking up at her with worried brown eyes. Maggie had bad breath.
Her arm ached, thumping in time to her pulse. Her fingers felt swollen and rubbery as she flexed them. Looking down, she could see her blouse had been torn open to her shoulder, and her arm had stopped staining the makeshift bandage of Harry’s tie with red. A small wound, but it still made her queasy. Maybe the radiation poisoning was still affecting her. Or perhaps it was the memory of older, more serious injuries that made her unable to stomach the sight of her own blood.
Tara remembered trying not to look at her bloody sleeve in the house, trying to focus on Cassie. She remembered the fear piercing her chest, her quickening breath, and the smell of blood, far too close. Her mind lapsed into panic mode, remembering; it had simply shut down once she was sure Cassie was safe, that Harry was back and had it under control.
She’d lost her edge.
Thank God Harry had been there, or the gunman would have invaded the house and Cassie might have been killed.
“North to Colorado. We’re going someplace safe.” Harry’s eyes scanned the rugged landscape before them: violet mountains, dense pine trees laced in frost, and stale, thawed, and refrozen patterns of snow clotting the needles.
Beside her, Cassie had wrapped her arms across herself, hands gripping her elbows, her fists white-knuckled. “You’re going to turn me over to them, aren’t you?”
“To who?” Harry’s eyes flickered back at her in the rearview mirror. “Why do you think they’re after you?”
“The people my father worked for. The ones he was trying to leave.”
“No. This is someplace that belongs to a friend. Somewhere off the grid.”
Tara struggled to sit up under a hundred pounds of wriggling dog. “Are you sure we aren’t being followed?”
“We had a tail for the first half hour. He’s gone, now.”
Cassie rolled her eyes. “Yeah. I have yet to recover from the car sickness.” Her grip on her elbows tightened. “So, where the hell’s my father?” Her tone was harsh, but Tara could see the fear in her eyes.
“We don’t know.” Tara answered her truthfully. “There was an explosion where he worked. There’s some evidence to indicate he was at the scene, but we aren’t sure if he was caught in it.” She paused to rummage in her bag with her good hand and brought out the watch. “Do you recognize this?”
Cassie clutched the piece of metal, running her fingers over its face. “Oh my God. That’s his watch.” Her face crumpled, and Tara thought she was going to dissolve. Tara reached forward to stroke her arm through the coat, and the girl didn’t pull away from the comfort of her touch. Maggie wriggled around to lay her head in Cassie’s lap.
“Who asked you to go to your father’s house?” Tara asked, wondering why DOD hadn’t better prepared her. Someone should have notified her, but the girl seemed to know nothing of her father’s disappearance. The alternative explanation was that she’d fallen into a trap set up specifically for her. Tara could see why DOD would want Tara for questioning: in Magnuson’s absence, maybe the girl would have information.
“Um. . . no one. My father left me a message, said he was going out of town for a while. For work, he said. He wanted me to come get Maggie as soon as I finished with exams.” She rubbed at her eyes with a knuckle. “It’s a long drive from Minnesota. After I got on the road, my roommate called my cell, told me that some guy from the military wanted to talk to me. I didn’t call back. . . I wanted to talk to my dad, first.”
“Do you remember the name? Was it Major Gabriel?”
“Yeah. I think.”
“Do you know what your father was working on?” Harry asked.
Cassie stared at her pale hands combing through Maggie’s fur. She was silent for a long time, and Tara could see she was weighing whether to trust them or not. Tara waited patiently. She saw Cassie’s gaze flicker to Harry’s bloodstained tie wrapped around Tara’s arm, back to Maggie lying with her butt in Tara’s lap. Tara didn’t push. She waited, letting the girl work out things on her own time.
“He was working on detecting dark energy,” she finally said.
“What’s that?”
“Only a small percentage of the universe is made up of what we’d call conventional, visible matter and energy. Actually, only about thirty percent of the universe is made up of that.” Tara could see Cassie falling back into more ease
as she spoke. She was her father’s daughter, and this was clearly her area of study; Tara and Harry were just undergrads to instruct. “Dark matter and dark energy are the stuff that physicists expect most of the universe is made up of. They can’t be detected through electromagnetic energy, or any other means other than gravity’s effect on them.
“Dark energy and dark matter are very sparse, very loosely distributed. No one’s had much luck detecting either one, even some guys up in Minnesota who are trying to see if any would randomly hit some super-cooled germanium and silicone they’ve set up deep in an old mine. It’s a theory, but it’s the best one we’ve got. And I don’t claim to understand anything near what my father was doing. I’m just a grad student. He’s been working with this stuff for decades.”
Tara rubbed her arm, winced. “So. . . what brought your father from Cornell to Los Alamos?”
“Particle accelerators can theoretically cause mini black holes and those might be able to draw some dark energy into their fields, just long enough for detection to take place. Cornell has a particle accelerator, but it’s not powerful enough to generate that kind of effect, nor would they be really inclined to let my dad poke holes in space to see what would happen.”
“I can see where that wouldn’t be popular.” Tara tried to imagine the damage to the annual alumni relations fundraising campaign that would be wrought by sucking freshmen into black holes. At the very least, it would probably put a dent in enrollment.
“Yeah. So the Department of Energy offered to let my dad experiment with the accelerator at Los Alamos. As I understand it, they were interested in the idea of dark energy to power some big stuff. . . aircraft carriers, subs. Dad was okay with that, and it seemed like it was going well. . . for the first couple of months, anyway.
“After he got there, he got really quiet. I got the impression they wanted to use his research for other purposes. Dad never said what they wanted, but he wasn’t happy about it.”
Harry’s cell phone began to ring, the ringtone Blue Öyster Cult’s “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper.” He fished it out of his pocket.
“Who’s that?” Tara already knew the answer, but she wanted to know if Harry would be straight with her. Harry’s ringtone evoked a Tarot card image in her mind’s eye: Death. A gaunt, black-robed figure surrounded by white roses foretold the finish of one life and the beginning of a new one. She wished she could pull out the notebook and cards from her purse to explore the sudden intuitive correlation.
“Corvus.” He gave a sheepish half smile. “As if it wasn’t obvious by the ringtone.”
“Are you going to answer it?”
He hesitated before clicking it on and pressing it to his ear. “Li.”
Tara could hear the indistinguishable murmur of a transmitted voice. The squawk did not sound happy. “Yeah. We ran into some trouble. A sniper was set up on the house. Tara got grazed. Magnusson’s daughter is fine. I’m taking them to a safe house.”
More murmurs. Tara could imagine his questions.
“I got the sniper’s plate. DCD-1397.” Harry made a face. “Sir, you’re breaking up. I’ll report back to you ASAP.” He snapped the phone shut, powered it off.
“Does Corvus know where we’re going?” she asked. It was clear Harry didn’t want to tell him. There was a seed of distrust between the two men, and Tara wanted to see how deep it had taken root.
Harry shook his head. “No. The fewer people who know, the better.”
He turned off the curving two-lane highway onto a dirt road without a marker. Dust rose in a cloud behind the car as he guided it into a thick maze of pine trees. The switchback trail was narrow enough for only one car to pass, and Tara tried not to think about what would happen if any traffic came in the opposite direction. It seemed Harry followed a trail deep into unknown territory. Tara had no map, no knowledge of how far they were from the nearest town.
She hoped she could trust Harry. She hoped he was truly taking them someplace safe, as he promised, and there would be no men with rifles waiting for them at the end of the winding road to nowhere.
CORVUS LEANED BACK IN HIS CHAIR. THE CELL PHONE DISPLAY played green light over his face as it powered down. He rubbed it carefully with an antibacterial wipe before he stowed it in his pocket. There was precious little light in this place, and each glimmer drew attention. His temporary office gleamed with metal and glass, a one-way window providing a view of workers milling in a data processing room, but there were no windows to the outside. Beyond the false window, the blue screens of computer displays glowed, compiling and sifting massive amounts of data, searching for some forgotten note or algorithm that would unlock the keys to Magnusson’s research.
All they’d found so far had been garbage. The only deciphered strings of data were references to old Star Trek episodes. The joke was on them. So far.
“Well?” Gabriel asked him. He scraped muck from the bottom of his boot onto the bottom corner of Corvus’s desk. Corvus tried not to show it bothered him, but couldn’t quite control the twitch under his left eye.
“Li and Sheridan have Magnusson’s daughter. She’s unharmed.”
Gabriel frowned, ran his hands over his buzzed short hair, and laced his fingers behind his head. The buzz cut showed the unevenness of his skull; Gabriel had clearly been in more than a few fights. “Those snipers you sent had shitty aim. Where are they now?”
“I’ve got enough of a cell phone signal to triangulate their current position. It’ll take some time, but we should be able to narrow down the general area.” Corvus stared with distaste at the crumbles of mud on the carpet and leaned back imperceptibly as Gabriel placed his grimy coffee mug on the desk. He more than suspected Gabriel did this shit just to piss him off.
“Do that.” Gabriel rested the top of his boot on the edge of the desk. “And when you’re done, I’ll send a more properly equipped welcome party than the one you put together. I hired someone special.”
Gabriel gestured through the glass beyond the door. The door opened under the gloved hand of a tall woman with hair the color of straw and eyes pale as agates. Corvus winced at the dust covering her leather coat, and his nose wrinkled. She smelled like winter and dirt and more than a bit of gunpowder.
“Corvus, meet Adrienne.”
Adrienne inclined her head. “Gentlemen.” She folded her hands primly behind her back and stood with one boot leaving dirt on his carpet. She had the lanky grace of a ballet dancer. “I’m pleased to be working with you.”
Corvus eyed her suspiciously. “She’s not military.” The stance was too casual, and she moved too fluidly.
Gabriel snorted. “Of course not. I use untraceable people for dirty work. Freelancers.”
Adrienne smiled icily. “I prefer the term ‘outside consultant.’ ”
“And you charge consultants’ rates.” Gabriel grinned. “I’ll be billing her to your department, Corvus. Look for a line item called ‘Miscellaneous project tools.’ ”
Corvus frowned. “What can she do that our people can’t?”
“I’m a tracker, Mr. Corvus.” Adrienne’s voice could frost metal.
Gabriel nodded. “I’ve worked with her before on cleanup details. Remember that independent film team that was caught in the avalanche in the Rockies last winter?”
“Those guys filming the documentary about old missile silos?”
“The very ones. Adrienne was the one we hired to find them.”
“None of them were found alive. That’s not a very impressive bullet point on a resume.”
“Exactly.” Gabriel leaned back in his chair, smiled as Corvus absorbed the meaning of the statement. He swiveled his chair to the young woman. “Adrienne, our tech department will fill you in on the subjects. You can deploy when ready.”
Her pale gray eyes narrowed in anticipation. “Right away.” She stepped briskly from the room, and Corvus thought she seemed a bit too eager to be under way.
Corvus cocked his head at her receding shadow. “Ar
e you sure that—?”
“She’ll get it done. She shows a lot of enthusiasm. I like enthusiasm.”
“That’s not what I meant. Do we have to. . .” Corvus struggled with the word. “Do we have to eliminate Li and Sheridan?”
Gabriel snorted. “You don’t get the luxury of a conscience, Corvus. Not after the things I know you’ve done.”
Corvus felt the blood drain from his face. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Gabriel picked up his coffee cup, took a swig out of it. “I did some checking up on you, Corvus. I know you’re an ambitious man. Ambitious enough to make sacrifices.”
“That’s true of anyone in my position.” Corvus steepled his fingers in front of him, pressing the tips together to keep them from shaking.
Gabriel leaned over the desk, letting coffee drip on the polished surface. Corvus’s attention was fixed on the droplets.
“But you made sacrifices of people around you. Of Dr. Sheridan.”
Corvus felt a twitch beginning around his left eye. He kept his face blank. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“You knew the Gardener had her. And you didn’t act. You left her there, because it served your purposes.” Gabriel smiled. “That’s cold, Corvus, even for someone like me.”
Corvus narrowed his eyes. “This, from a man sending snipers and assassins to shoot a twenty-three-year-old girl.”
“My way is quick. It’s painless. And it has to be done, for the sake of national security. It’s not lying buried in a box, bleeding out, for. . . how long was it? Hours? A day?”
Corvus shut his eyes and rubbed the bridge of his nose. He tried not to imagine, but the thought of Tara entombed in a pine box, in the dark, still haunted him. The image often surfaced in his dreams, and he awoke often to the scratching of fingernails on wood.
He’d seen the pictures: the broken glass, the blood ground into the wood, the bloody footprints leading into the darkness. He kept the complete file in his desk drawer, as if he someday might act on his knowledge. He never did. The file was never too far from his hands. Or his conscience.
“If that girl lets loose her father’s secrets, we could have an unaccounted-for WMD that could fall into terrorist hands. There’s no comparison to that and your little scheming ambitions, Corvus.”
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