THE tiny refrigerator was stocked with Thai takeout, bottled iced tea, and fresh fruit, compliments of Mitch Ryder, but Angela couldn’t make herself sit down and eat, even though she should have. Her stomach was empty, her thoughts were mired with fear and guilt, and that quiet voice of certainty in her head had deserted her. In its place were howler monkeys from the jungle, shrieking warnings.
A remote sat atop the TV. She clicked on a news channel, knowing she wouldn’t listen. Maybe the noise would help distract her from worrying about what could go wrong. “Give up what you can’t control. Mental battles are wasted effort. You’re only fighting yourself.”
Another bit of wisdom from her anonymous mentor? She couldn’t seem to absorb anything right now. There were times when the entire world shouted at you to do the right thing, and you still did the wrong one. It was a question of perception, theirs versus yours. Everyone had a blind spot, a crucial truth they couldn’t see. Or wouldn’t.
She returned to the desk, drawn by the silent phone. It was too early to expect a call from Jordan, but the waiting was already unbearable. Meanwhile, he’d warned her not to leave the room under any circumstances or call out unless it was an emergency. If she needed anything, she was to contact the desk and have them get it for her. But all she wanted was to call her apartment and get her messages. Surely he hadn’t meant that. They’d been accumulating since she left for Mexico, and if anyone from SmartTech had called, she needed to know. It would help her know what to expect.
She turned away with a sigh, aware that she had to do something. Right now, her idea of torture was exactly this: being stranded in a sterile hotel room, waiting for disaster to happen. She was somewhere in Long Beach, but other than that, she had little sense of what was going on. She didn’t even know how much danger they were in, but her mind kept filling in the blanks with gruesome details.
The room wasn’t big enough to pace, and eventually she found herself in the bathroom, confronted with her own stumbling dread in the mirror. This was the face of an angel? Then how could it have been the cause of so much pain and devastation? She didn’t understand what Jordan saw when he looked at her, what they all saw, or why this horror kept happening. Her agitation was so great it made her want to crawl out of her own skin.
“Rain, rain, go away,” she whispered.
There was some transformation taking place inside her. She could feel it, another tiny fissure in the barrier that walled her off, but this one was deep. Poison fumes were seeping through the crack, forming nightmarish figures, all of them male. There was a knife in her hand and she was stabbing at bodies, sprawled bodies, all of them seemingly dead. But it was the screaming that horrified her most. These weren’t cries of pain. And it wasn’t the victims. It was her. She was crying for justice, for blood.
A sound caught in Angela’s throat. It was mute agony. This was what she’d been afraid to tell Jordan. It was what she’d been desperate to keep at bay, the revenge fantasies. Desperate because she loved them, because they fed her twisted soul. She was cursed, fatally cursed. She had the face of an angel and the mind of a monster, and the man who raised her had done this to her. He had made her into a creature as demented as he was. Her legacy was terrifyingly violent nightmares, impotent rage, and a desperate need to be anybody but who she was.
“Do as you’re told, and no one will get hurt.”
Angela picked up a washrag and began to scrub at her face. Moments later, she’d scoured away all traces of makeup and yanked her hair into a tight knot. Laughter burned her throat, but she couldn’t release it. It wasn’t until she’d completely obliterated the face that other people saw that she could stop the rout. This was no angel. This was a freak. She looked like a freak of nature, and that was exactly what she wanted.
When she went back to the phone and lifted the receiver, her anxieties had been replaced by a numbing sense of mission. The number she dialed was her own. There were three voice mail messages, two from Mona Fremont and one from Peter Brandt. Mona reminded her she’d missed a session and then called again the next day, urging her to make another appointment. The psychiatrist had sounded almost frightened.
The next message was from Peter Brandt.
“Angela, don’t under any circumstances go to the lab,” he warned. “It isn’t safe. Come to my home. Come here as soon as you can. We have to talk.”
The call had come in that morning, and something in his tone raised Angela’s hackles. It was a quality she’d never heard before. Peter Brandt was lying.
FOG was rolling in low over Long Beach harbor, thick, sodden waves of it. It looked like a silvery comforter that had drifted down to settle upon the earth. Jordan pulled the jacket around him and was glad to have one. It wasn’t unusual weather for the beach, even in the summer, but tonight of all nights, he wanted visibility.
There were things that had to be cleared up. Had to be said.
The low tide gave off pungent, sinus-clearing smells that were rank with seaweed and dying marine life. He could make out row after row of sailboat masts and a cruise ship, festooned with banners advertising harbor brunch cruises. Across the way, there was a yacht club and restaurants, all set against a fuzzy skyline dominated by the majestic Queen Mary.
He was curious why the agent had chosen this area to meet, but the obvious answer was the weather. A fog bank drove even the diehards away from the beach. They wouldn’t be disturbed here. Jordan checked his watch. He hadn’t been waiting long enough to be concerned yet. Firestarter was only ten minutes late, but something about this place gave him the creeps. Heavy fog dampened everything, even the noise level. It was too quiet.
He’d spotted a pay phone nearby, and the urge to call Angela had been strong. But he had nothing to tell her yet, and the only thing that could reassure her now was information. He’d made the call to Firestarter when they landed in Los Angeles. And then he’d made one other call from a pay phone at the airport, aware that it was risky, but he’d wanted to let at least one person at California General know he was back.
He’d decided against calling anyone on the administrative or nursing staff, and he’d avoided his colleagues as well, including Steve Lloyd, the second man on his team. There would have been too many questions he wasn’t ready to answer. All he wanted to do was check on his surgery schedule and his patients. Unfortunately, he hadn’t been able to get through, so he’d left a message and hoped to God he hadn’t chosen the wrong person.
Up to now, he’d barely allowed himself to think about what was happening at the hospital. He’d gone from one extreme to the other; hyperresponsible and believing the place couldn’t run without him to disappearing from its corridors with barely a wave good-bye. How the hell had that happened? And what the hell was he doing in a foggy harbor meeting CIA agents? He hoped his valve team was handling things, especially Teri Benson. And he hoped Judy Monahan had made it.
He had no idea how his sister was doing, either. Or the damn bird.
He’d been gone less than a week all told, but it felt like years. It also felt like he might never get back. He gave a symbolic shudder and looked around, wondering where the hell Firestarter was. That’s what a foggy night did to you. It set you up to think that something had to go wrong.
TERI Benson’s bad day got worse that night. She hadn’t been able to leave the hospital after the valve replacement surgery. She’d had a full day of following up on patients, evaluating new intakes, updating charts, and putting on the best performance of her life. She had to pretend that everything was fine while her guts were being eaten out by maggots and fanged insects.
Conducting evening rounds was the worst. By then everyone knew of her humiliation at Steve Lloyd’s hands, including the students she instructed, and they were pointedly silent. It was as if they were embarrassed for her, and that had nearly destroyed her. But she’d kept up, kept on, while they talked about her behind her back. Did they think she couldn’t hear the whispers, the laughing?
The ent
ire Cardiac Care Unit was having a field day at her expense.
By the time she got home that night, she had a prioritized list of ways to butcher Steve Lloyd like a squealing pig. Plotting his death and the disposal of his parts was the only thing that made her feel human. She’d planned to write the list down and expand on it when she got home. She’d planned to wallow in blood and gore, but she was robbed of even that satisfaction.
Waiting for her in her voice mail box was more bad news.
Jordan Carpenter was back.
He’d left an odd message asking her to check on his surgery schedule for the following week and make sure that whatever couldn’t be reassigned was rescheduled. He also wanted her to look in on his postop patients and see that they were getting the care they needed. But he ended by swearing her to secrecy. He needed a few more days to finish his business, and meanwhile, no one else was to know he was back.
What the hell was he up to? Some new breakthrough? He would probably win the Nobel for this one, lucky bastard. The very idea enraged Teri. How many women had ever won the Nobel or any other prestigious award, for that matter? Medical science was just one more old boys’ club. Women weren’t encouraged or recognized and never had been.
Jesus, I hate them all, she thought.
But it was Carpenter she hated the most. There had been others at other hospitals, but he was her nemesis at California General. If he’d given her the respect and support she deserved, Steve Lloyd wouldn’t have dared to treat her like an idiot child. None of them would.
Moments later, standing in her modestly furnished, discount-house wonderland of a living room with the cordless phone at her ear, Teri called the service that Carpenter used. His message had caught her off guard, but it could be this was the opportunity she’d been looking for. In fact, he might have blundered right into her hands by choosing her to confide in.
She was the only one who knew he was back in town.
Maybe it was Jordan Carpenter who was the idiot child.
ANGELA had no trouble getting into the SmartTech labs. No one had changed the parking lot’s combination code, and her ID was accepted when she swiped it at the door. Of course she wasn’t requesting entry into the high-security areas or any of the clean rooms. All she had to do was get to the glass bubble without anyone spotting her.
She’d been inside the lookout tower many times, which was how she’d come to think of Peter Brandt’s office. The issue now was how to search his room without being spotted by the night shift. She wasn’t greatly concerned about the security guards or the surveillance cameras. She knew how to avoid those, but like most labs, SmartTech had researchers who didn’t go home except to visit. Angela was one of them. She knew what it was like to be so involved that even an act of God or nature couldn’t have made her look up from her computer screen. With luck, none of night shift would look up, either.
What startled her most was the state of her boss’s office. It was hermetically clean. His desk was neater than she’d ever seen it, which was an immediate red flag. This was not Peter; he was a brilliant slob.
It was a good-sized room, and to avoid being seen, she had to go over most of it on her hands and knees. When that became painful, she pulled off her backpack and switched to a crouch. But she found nothing that would tell her what Peter Brandt had in mind when he left the message on her phone. The place had been wiped clean, not unlike her memory.
She wasn’t able to gain access to his voice mail or E-mail, but she did break into a locked file cabinet, using the wire handle from one of the Thai takeout cartons. That turned out to be a dead end, too, although she hadn’t expected anything else. Security was tight at SmartTech, and Peter would never keep anything compromising in a locked cabinet. This one contained personnel folders, which appeared to be routine job application and evaluation forms, including her own.
Frustrated, she settled back on her haunches to think through her next move. If she didn’t go back to the hotel, she might miss Jordan’s call, but the waiting had been maddening. It had pushed her to the edge, and she couldn’t risk that.
She stared at the credenza against the wall, but there was no voice telling her what to do this time. Only as she rose to get up did a ribbon of white leap out at her from the blur. She wasn’t even sure what had caught her attention, but as she scanned the credenza, she spotted what looked like something jammed in the shredder. There was a glass window that revealed whether the machine was full. This one looked empty, except for that ribbon.
She gingerly pried the teeth loose with the same wire handle that had opened the file drawer and then she coaxed free the handwritten note jamming the works. It was riddled with teeth marks but mostly legible. She didn’t recognize the handwriting, but the message was chillingly blunt.
“If you don’t take care of the matter we discussed, I will.”
That was all she could make out, but she knew in her gut the words referred to her. There were times when you just knew, and this was one of them. The rest of the note had been shredded and dumped, except for the paper ribbon she’d spotted, which had one mangled initial that looked like a capital letter, an F or possibly an S.
Angela stared at it in confusion. It was part of the signature, and the first name she thought of was Sammy. But he would never write such a threatening note to his own boss. Her psychiatrist’s last name started with an F, but Mona had nothing to gain by Angela’s death. And there was Silver, who lived on a cocoa plantation half a continent away. Silver had said she visited the States frequently. She was away on some kind of trip when Angela was sent to the mission by Pedro.
Angela’s mind began to spin. She tried to get to her feet and was nearly knocked over by the force of her thoughts. They were whirling so furiously she couldn’t get her balance. She was reeling. That cold and deliberate machinelike persona was gone.
What was Adam’s real name? She had to find out Adam’s real name. Maybe he wasn’t dead after all? She’d begun to shake, and her heart was beating too hard. The agent had told Jordan to kill her. Someone wanted her dead. Or they wanted Angel Face dead, whoever Angel Face really was, and they just thought she was Angela. Could it be a bizarre case of mistaken identity? There were so many possibilities, Angela couldn’t make any sense of it. She still didn’t understand why anyone would want to frame her. Why not just kill her if they wanted her out of the way?
She found her backpack and crept from the office. There was an emergency exit stairway where the sweep of the video camera fell slightly short. She had never consciously thought much about the company’s security measures during her time here, but she’d obviously been paying attention on some level.
“Angela!”
Her name came sailing down the corridor, straight at her. She was on the first floor now, but she couldn’t turn and run the other way. It was Sammy, and he was rushing toward her. She halted, not knowing what else to do.
“Angela, where have you been?” He scrutinized her as if she’d been in an accident and was standing there bleeding right in front of him. “Are you all right? What’s happened to you?”
She remembered her reflection in the bathroom mirror, the pinched expression, the chalky skin, and frozen eyes. She had scrubbed herself raw, and that must be what he saw now. The blue jeans and man’s T-shirt she’d changed into were large and ill-fitting
“I haven’t been well,” she told him. “I just came in to pick up some things, and I have to go.”
He blocked her way when she tried to get around him. “I’ll go with you to your office,” he insisted. “There’s something you have to see.”
There was only one thing Angela had to do, and that was get out of the building, but if she brushed him off and headed for the exit, he would surely report her, even if only for her own good. If he knew anything about her situation, then he probably thought she was breaking down again.
“Come on,” he said, waving her with him. “You won’t believe this.”
“Sammy, what is
it?” She wasn’t going anywhere until he explained.
“Your study. I filled in for you.”
She followed him into her cubicle, startled to see her equipment going full blast. “What are you doing on my computer? Running my study data?”
He looked startled. “Someone had to do it, Angela. You’ve been gone for days. And while I was at it, I checked your E-mail, too. There was one marked Urgent from someone named ‘runninwyld.’ You probably ought to take a look. She wanted you to meet her.”
“What?” Sammy was right. Angela couldn’t believe it. Without her password, he would have had to hack into her E-mail account. That was frightening, but she didn’t have time to confront him. She had to get out of the building!
“Wait, Angela, look, look at these images. This dude’s brain is about to explode.”
Now he was pointing at her computer screen. There were multiple images up there, a SPECT, an MRI, and an EEG, all of the same brain and all showing abnormal amounts of activity. Angela had never personally witnessed this phenomenon before, but it had a name: firestorm.
“My God, who is that?” she whispered, but she knew. She knew.
“He may have gotten too much juice,” Sammy said. “I hope to hell somebody’s got him in a straitjacket.”
Angela wasn’t sure whether Sammy meant the radioisotopic solution the subjects drank or the constant bombardment of electrical and magnetic signals, but it sounded like something had gone wrong with the study.
She broke for the door, terrified that Sammy would try to stop her.
“Hey, come back!” he said. “Where are you going?”
This time she listened to her impulses and kept running, but she couldn’t block out Sammy’s voice.
“For Christ’s sake, stay away from him! He’s dangerous! Stay away from Jordan Carpenter!”
Angela kept running, running and praying no one would seal off the lab before she got out. As the sliding door rolled shut behind her, she sprinted for the corridor. Terror drove her faster and faster. She was afraid to look back and see if Sammy was behind her, but she knew she couldn’t let him catch her. She no longer trusted him. How had he known about Jordan Carpenter?
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