Two Weeks' Notice tr-2

by Rachel Caine

  Bryn made it to Lynnette’s small suburban home on the northern outskirts of San Diego in ten minutes, but she didn’t remember the drive. All she could hear was the sound of the crying, the shots, the silence. When she pulled in at the curb, she saw that Patrick McCallister had arrived ahead of her, in a nondescript dark sedan.

  There was another car already there—like Patrick’s, it was a dark sedan, and it had a government plate on the back. Bryn wasn’t too surprised to see the front door open and Riley Block step out. “You’d better come inside,” she said to them. “This isn’t a discussion we should have in front of the neighbors.”

  “Police?” Patrick asked as they crossed the threshold.

  “Called off,” Riley said. Up close, Bryn could see the lines of stress around her eyes, her mouth, although she was doing a good job of holding her poker face. “It’s just us chickens. Come on. She’s going to wake up soon, and I’ll need some help.”

  Riley had brought along another FBI agent Bryn didn’t know, but he was clearly read in on Pharmadene or he wouldn’t be here. He looked up and nodded as the three of them entered the Renfers’ living room, and Riley went to talk with him quietly in a corner.

  Bryn didn’t want to look, didn’t want to see, but she forced herself to do it. Two small bodies lay near the sofa. Lynnette was dead on the blood-soaked cushions, the phone still clutched in her hand.

  The husband, unrecognizable, lay with the shotgun fallen next to him. The place smelled like fresh hot blood, loosened bowels, gunpowder, and…obscenely…fresh cinnamon.

  “He saw her cut herself and heal,” Bryn said. “Last night. She told me. I kept telling her she had to bring him in. I told her that…” She felt…well, she didn’t particularly feel anything, at the moment. Just revulsion, with an edge of horror that only sliced when she looked at the bodies straight on. So she focused on the walls. Safe enough, until she saw the big, framed formal portrait photo. Lynnette and her husband, sitting with hands clasped. The two little girls in their laps.

  A simple, adorable family, glowing with happiness.

  The breath went out of her in a rush, and she felt her knees start to give. Patrick’s hand was right there when she needed it, bracing her elbow, giving her an anchor to cling to as the world began to drift dizzily away.

  “I was on the phone with her,” Bryn said softly. “When this happened. She was begging him not to…Why? Why would he do this?”

  She thought it was a rhetorical question, but Riley answered it. “He wrote a note on his laptop, time-stamped about thirty minutes ago. According to him, this was the only way. He thought some kind of demon had taken over his wife,” Riley said. “He didn’t want it to get into him and his girls. He was so scared he thought death was better.”

  For a long moment, nobody spoke, and then Patrick said, “She’s going to come around soon. It shouldn’t be here, looking at her kids.”

  Bryn moved in to help. She was politely but firmly pushed back. Riley and the nameless FBI agent picked Lynnette up by the shoulders and feet and carried her off to another room—the bedroom, hopefully.

  “You shouldn’t be here,” Pat said, and Bryn looked up at him, startled. “You should go. The FBI can handle this.”

  “No,” she said. “Pat, I was talking to her. And he killed her. He killed himself. He killed their kids.”

  “And there was nothing you could have done to stop it,” he said, and took her in his arms. She hadn’t even known she was shaking until she felt the warmth of his body against hers, and his hand cupping the back of her head. She squeezed her eyes shut and buried her face in the soft material of his suit jacket. “Lynnette was supposed to tell him, but she didn’t. You tried to help her, Bryn. Some people—some people just won’t listen.”

  She nodded, and after that precious moment of letting herself feel safe, she pushed back. She didn’t feel like crying, oddly enough; there were no tears in her, not for this. Just…silence. And a heavy feeling of inevitability.

  “She’s going to come back any minute now,” Bryn said. He was watching her with a complicated mixture of worry and exasperation.

  “You don’t have to be the one to tell her they’re gone,” he said. “Let Riley.”

  “It’s not that,” she said. “It’s just that Riley doesn’t understand how it feels to wake up…like this. It’s not the same.”

  She walked into the bedroom, and Pat didn’t try to stop her, even though she could tell he was tempted. Riley was sitting on the side of the bed, sponging blood from Lynnette’s face with a damp cloth; her eyes looked darker now, and the lines around her mouth deeper. The other agent had backed away to lean against the wall next to a dresser. A clumsy papier-mâché plaque behind him had two sets of small handprints, with names doodled on them in awkwardly shaped letters. That hurt so much that Bryn felt short of breath.

  She waited with Riley as the seconds ticked by, and suddenly, Lynnette’s bloody body convulsed, thrashed, and she took in a breath so deep it seemed to suck all the oxygen out of the room.

  And then she shrieked.

  It was a familiar scream; Bryn heard it in her head every day, that waking-nightmare sound they all made when they woke from death. Like the cry of a newborn, but filled with horror none of them could explain.

  It faded, and Lynnette opened her eyes. Riley put the cloth aside. There was still a wound in Lynnette’s head, but it was closing fast now, and Bryn could almost see the silvery flash of the nanites weaving together tissue and bone.

  Lynnette asked, “Ted? Where’s Teddy?”

  Bryn said, “He’s in the other room, Lynn.” She kept her voice low, warm, soothing. “Give it time. Try to stay calm.”

  “Teddy had a gun,” Lynnette said. “Is he okay? Is everything okay?” She reached out and grabbed Bryn’s hand with sudden strength. “Please tell me everything’s okay. I promise, I’ll talk to him. I’ll tell him everything.…”

  It was too late for that, and Bryn suddenly, horribly wanted to blurt that out. She was angry, she realized. Angry with Lynnette for bungling this, and angry at Teddy for descending into this hellish cauldron of lunacy. Maybe he’d been on to something about the demon possession, because she wanted so badly to lash out at those who couldn’t defend themselves.

  She fought back those cruel impulses, but it was tough, really tough, and she had to clear her throat before she said, “Lynn, just take a deep breath. Please. Just let the nanites work. You’ll be all right in a few minutes. Stay still. Riley’s going to give you a shot now to help you.”

  Riley already had the syringe lying out on the bed, uncapped, and now she picked it up and administered the dose of Returné with an expert flick of her wrist. It took only a second.

  Then she picked up a second syringe and injected Lynnette with that, too. Lynnette’s eyelashes fluttered, and her eyes rolled up to show the whites, and she stopped breathing.

  Dead, again.

  Riley nodded to her subordinate. “Get her stripped and in the shower. I’ll get some clothes for her. We have about ten minutes before she comes around again, and I want her clean, dressed, and in the car by then.”

  “What the hell are you doing?” Bryn blurted. The other agent pushed her out of the way, scooped Lynnette up, and took her into the bathroom. “Riley!”

  “She can’t stay here,” Riley said. “She’s going back to Pharmadene, where she can get the treatment she needs.”

  “And the bodies? You called off the cops, didn’t you?”

  “This will all be handled, Bryn. Now, you both need to go. I don’t have to tell you that this is a national security matter, do I?”

  “You can’t just cover this up and make her disappear! You can’t—”

  “I can,” Riley interrupted her, “and I have. This entire neighborhood is being evacuated right now for a gas leak. In twenty minutes, this house is going to blow sky-high. The only casualties will be the Renfer family.”

  There was a moment of silence, and then Pa
trick said, from the doorway, “You mean, including Lynnette. Right, Agent Block?” He had that flat, cold look in his eyes Bryn knew meant trouble. “She’s an inconvenient survivor, and you can’t depend on her to keep her mouth shut. What’s her future—quick decapitation? Fast-burning furnace? Or just let her decompose in the white room so you can chart her process?”

  If he was planning to ruffle her calm, he was disappointed. “She goes back to Pharmadene,” Riley said, without much emotion. “And you’re right. She can’t leave there again; she’s too high a risk. If she decides she wants to end her drug regimen, or chooses another method of…termination, that is entirely her choice; it’s one we give all the addicts. Frankly, if it was me in this situation, I wouldn’t want to go on.” She looked up then, but not at Pat—at Bryn, who felt a chill ladder up her spine. “Would you?”

  Bryn didn’t reply, but she knew if she’d been forced to do so, she would have had to confess that dying, however horrible, might have been better than living the rest of an immortal life with the burden of this on her conscience.

  The shower cut off in the bathroom. Riley went to the closet and combed through clothes (How do you choose an outfit for a time like this? Bryn wondered) and handed underwear, pants, and a shirt off to her colleague. “You should leave,” Riley said to the rest of them. “The clock’s ticking. You should be able to go without any questions being asked, but if you’re stopped at the cordon, give them my name.”

  Bryn said, “You can’t just—”

  “Can’t just what?” Riley snapped, and for a moment her shell of calm cracked through to white, furious rage. “Can’t clean up this mess? That’s all I do, Bryn. It’s my fucking job. Day after day. Night after night. I see the wreckage that Pharmadene left us with, and I get to sweep up the broken glass. So either get out of the way or grab a broom.” She paused for a second, shut her eyes, and then looked at Pat. “McCallister, get her the hell out of here. Now.”

  He stood still for so long that Bryn was convinced he’d do something, stop what was happening, try, but instead when he did move, he only crossed to Bryn and took her hand. “We need to go,” he said. “There’s nothing we can do.”

  “We can’t let them just abduct her—”

  “Bryn, we’re on thin ice as it is. You can’t fight this. Listen—listen to me!” She was trying to pull free of him, and get to Lynnette, and he grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her. Hard. “You exist on the government’s sufferance, and that can end anytime they want. Don’t fight them on this. Don’t. There’s nothing we can do for her!”

  “There should be!” she snapped, and broke free of him…but then didn’t know which way to go. Toward Lynnette, whose limp body, clothed now, was being carried out by the male agent…or to coldcock Riley Block, just for the hell of it.

  In the end, the choice was taken from her, simply because the FBI didn’t stick around for it. In the next breath Lynnette was out of the room, and Riley was a step behind, and it was just her and Patrick standing there, with Lynnette’s blood staining the bedspread in the outline of her head.

  And he was, as always, right. She didn’t have the power to fight the FBI on this, and Lynnette probably wouldn’t thank her for doing it. Still, she gulped in a few breaths, and said, “It isn’t right. What they’re doing.”

  “No,” Patrick said. “And we can discuss that all you want. But we need to leave. Now.”

  She knew that, but looking around the house, she felt a moment of disorientation, of utter loss. “Just a minute,” she said, and went to the plaster cast of the children’s handprints on the wall. She took it, threw another look around the room, and had no idea what else there was. A whole life—four lives—had been lost, and all she could think to grab was this one thing.

  She didn’t have the heart to look anymore, certainly not at the bodies cooling in the other room. In the end, she just walked out. She knew Patrick was worried about her, but she didn’t feel upset. She’d shut down. She just felt…distant now. Resigned, and oddly at peace.

  She got in her car, put the plaque in the passenger seat, and leaned out the window to say, “I’m going to work. See you tonight.”

  “Bryn—”

  She rolled up the window on whatever he was going to say and drove away.

  It wasn’t until she was in her office, holding the plaque in one hand as she tried to figure out where it should go, that the walled-off parts of her crashed in like a tsunami, and she had just enough time to put the thing down before she collapsed against the solid bulk of her desk.

  She was still crying when her phone rang. It was Lucy’s ringtone. Bryn gulped in air, wiped her eyes, and tried to clear her throat before she answered. Better to keep it short. “Yes?”

  “You wanted me to remind you about that vendor appointment this afternoon,” Lucy said. “Dang, you’ve got a lot of off-sites all of a sudden. What’s that about? Oh, and don’t forget you’ve got Mr. Chen’s interment tomorrow. In case your meeting runs long today.”

  “Thanks.”

  Even keeping it brief didn’t help, because after a second’s pause, Lucy said, in a totally different, concerned tone, “Honey, are you okay?”

  “Fine.” Bryn hung up, because she definitely couldn’t talk about any of this, not with Lucy, not with anyone. She didn’t need to be sobbing on the floor right now; it wasn’t helping the dead Renfers, or Lynnette, and it wasn’t helping her. Lucy rang back, but Bryn ignored it, went into the private washroom attached to her office, and ran cold water over her hands and face. Her makeup needed significant repairs. Doing that steadied her, focused her, and by the time she stepped out and locked her office door, she felt almost herself again.

  Almost.

  She turned and came close to running into Lucy as the woman strode toward her down the hall. She flinched. Lucy didn’t. “I know you didn’t just hang up on me, just because I asked if you were okay.” The other woman peered at Bryn closely, and despite all the makeup repairs Bryn felt suddenly very exposed and fragile. “You’re not okay. What happened?”

  “I…lost someone,” Bryn said. “Someone I was trying to help. That’s all. It was just…hard.” Even that much was tough to say without choking on the words, letting the memories flow out and overtake her. “I’m fine, Lucy. Thanks.”

  “Okay, then,” Lucy said, but she was still frowning just a little. “You sure there’s nothing I can do for you?”

  “Just tell Joe that I’m off to Pharmadene. I need him to stay here and cover the shop.”

  “He doesn’t like letting you go off by yourself. If I didn’t know better, I’d say he was kind of obsessed with you.”

  That was…funny, in a strange sort of way. “Trust me, he’s really not,” Bryn said. “His wife would kill both of us.”

  “Seen that happen. Hell, I think Mr. Chen might have, too, him dying on top of that hooker and all.”

  Bryn dredged up a smile for her, from some unknown storage compartment deep inside. “Joe’s got the address where I’m going. I’ll probably have my cell off during the meeting.”

  “You be careful,” Lucy said. “And if you don’t mind me saying so, stop off and have yourself a drink after. You look like you need one.”

  Boy, was that true.

  Chapter 4

  Pharmadene’s building was more like a corporate reservation: acres of land—mind-bogglingly expensive on the outskirts of San Diego—all surrounded by both an obvious fence and (Bryn was sure) more high-tech methods of security that were invisible to the naked eye. She had talked herself into feeling confident at the beginning of the drive, but as she rolled up toward the guarded iron gates (much thicker and more imposing than the last time she’d been here), she realized that she was trembling—fine little vibrations throughout her muscles, but most noticeably in her hands.

  Her body was sensibly telling her to run like hell. It, at least, hadn’t forgotten what it felt like to rot. Bryn took a swallow of lukewarm water from a bottle to combat
the sensation, and had her ID out and ready as she came to a stop at the guard station. The man on station there looked at her with professionally cold eyes, checked her ID, and checked the handheld tablet he was holding for confirmation. Then he had her press her finger to a scanner for print recognition before handing over a parking pass.

  “Go straight until you see the sign for visitor parking,” he said. “Turn right, take only the space number that matches this pass. Leave the paper on the dashboard and proceed directly to the security desk inside the building. Don’t make any stops along the way. You’ll be monitored.”

  He wasn’t kidding around, and neither was she; she followed the directions exactly, even down to making sure that she took the shortest possible path from her car to the glass-and-steel doorway. There, trapped between that door and another of bullet-resistant glass inches thick, she had to scan her fingerprint again before a cool female voice said, “Please proceed directly to the security station. Welcome back, Ms. Davis.”

  Bryn shuddered hard at the creepy fact that this place knew her.

  Inside was a vast atrium, designed to awe those who stepped inside; the central bank of elevators rose up at least twenty floors, and sunlight flooded down through the thick paned glass on top to glitter coldly from even more steel. The security station was made of that same burnished metal, about as comfortable as a morgue table…of which she had some experience.

  Behind the chest-high desk stood no less than four people, but three of them were stationed well back from the one who smiled professionally at Bryn, accepted her ID, and passed over a badge. It was marked as ESCORTED VISITOR. “You’ll need to stay close to your escort, ma’am,” he told her. “If you get too far away…”

  “I know,” she said. “Condition Red. Alarms go off. I get Tasered.”

  “Something like that,” he said, without much concern. “Ms. Harris will take you upstairs.”

  Ms. Harris was one of the three behind the counter, a black woman with a military-short haircut and the posture of someone who’d spent hours standing for inspection. She had a handgun, a Taser, pepper spray, handcuffs, and a number of other things that Bryn couldn’t identify at a glance. Ms. Harris was not chatty. Bryn said hello, Harris nodded, and that was the extent of their entire personal conversation all the way up to the twentieth floor. She couldn’t help but imagine Lynnette taking this same journey, but going down, down into the basement levels where all the labs were.