“Those days are over. From this day forth, should Ms. Nealon commit so much as a misdemeanor, I have instructed the Department of Justice to prosecute her with all the force of statute available. There will be no more murders at her hand, no more excuses why the most powerful woman on the planet cannot restrain herself in her dealings with others. We have offered her a low standard, and she has taken full advantage of it; now we will hold her—and in time, perhaps other metas with her abilities—to the highest standards. We declare, today, that we will no longer tolerate the chaos she brings to our cities, to our communities, to our country.” He looked right into the camera. “It ends today. Thank you,” he said to the reporters, and the bastards started applauding. He basked, for just a moment, and then he swept off, leaving an empty podium once more, and me in absolutely no doubt of where I stood.
There were people hunting me. Serious people. Stone-cold killers. They were going to try and put me in the ground, there was no doubt in my mind.
And now, if anything happened to any of them, the US government was going to try and arrest me and put me in jail for defending my own life. “Welcome to the new box,” I whispered to myself, listening to the voices of a hundred reporters outside my office, chattering like the herd animals they were, all saying the same thing—that my days as a free woman were drawing to an end.
23.
My phone started ringing a few seconds after the press conference ended, keeping me from hurling my phone, the closest thing at hand, into the television. This time I looked at the caller ID, and when I saw it was Jonathan Chang, my lawyer, I answered immediately. “I don’t mean to sound like a seventies song, but tell me something good.”
“Errr, hello to you, too, Ms. Nealon,” Chang said, in that calm, polite, even tone he regularly employed. Chang was the guy who had acted as the middleman lawyer between the person who had funded my operation here at this new agency, and he’d also been the one fighting my legal battles for me whenever they’d come up. Mostly they were trivial things, with one exception—the FAA, who had decided I was no longer fit to fly the friendly skies. “I’m afraid I don’t have any good news for you at this point, though.”
“Bummer,” I said, understating it. “Because I don’t know if you just caught that press conference, but—”
“I was apprised of its contents about an hour before the president went on air,” Chang said, sounding a little clipped. “Ms. Nealon … I’m afraid my firm can no longer act as the go-between for your employer and yourself.”
“What the hell?” I didn’t even think before asking.
“This doesn’t mean your employer is firing you, by any means,” Chang went on, sounding like he was reading from several pre-sorted talking points. “On the contrary, we’ve contacted your employer to tender our resignation as the firm of record in the matter of your new agency—”
“Uh, why?” I asked, then kicked myself for asking. “Wait. The publicity? I thought you lawyers love publicity?”
“Our firm does not particularly enjoy being in this sort of limelight, no,” Chang said, sounding vaguely affronted, like I’d called his mother a ho. “When we took this position as go-between—”
“Middleman. Middlemen? Middledudes,” I decided.
“You were certainly no stranger to controversy,” he went on, undeterred by my smartassery. “But obviously new information has come to light in that regard—”
“You mean the President of the United States calling me a murderer on national television?”
“He actually didn’t,” Chang said. “He was very careful in what he said.”
“So you’re leaving me because you can’t construct a libel suit?”
“We’re not leaving you, Ms. Nealon,” Change said. “We never worked for you. We work for your employer, and have contacted him with our notice of resignation, effective immediately, in this capacity. We wish you both the best of luck, and if we hear from your employer that he, too, wishes to sever connection with you—”
“Kick a girl while she’s down, huh?”
“Not many people want to actively associate with someone accused of what you stand accused of,” Chang said patiently. “And in case it is not abundantly obvious to you, let me spell this out in my last act as your lawyer—”
“You just said you weren’t my lawyer—”
“I advise you, but I don’t work for you,” Chang said.
“You can save it,” I said. “I get it. They’re all after me, and if I step out of line, they’re going to throw not just the book at me, but probably every single copy of the Encyclopedia Britannica that remains sitting on the bookshelves of old people without internet right directly at me.”
“Colorful,” Chang said.
“But accurate, no?”
“Very likely,” Chang said. “I also wanted to inform you that in addition to the letter we received from the Harmon Administration, we also received at updated notice from the FAA this morning, delivered in concert—”
“Like a symphony orchestra? Or was it a pop concert?”
“—informing us that the FAA is asserting federal authority over your traverse of airspace,” Chang went on, once again ignoring me, probably so he could get me off the phone faster. “They are contesting your state-based exemptions, but I need to warn you that in addition to these two letters, we also received another notice from Governor Shipley’s office—”
“This just keeps getting better and better.”
“—and she’s revoked your flight privileges over Minnesota, effective immediately,” Chang said, “once again, on the recommendation of the Harmon administration.”
“I feel like you could have delivered all that shit news more economically,” I said. “You kind of spread it out, then layered it, a round at a time, one atop the next. You should have just dumped it all out thusly: ‘Everyone says you can’t fly anymore—Minnesota, the FAA. Also, Harmon thinks you suck, we think you suck, and we don’t even want to work within a hundred mile radius of you anymore, crazypants.’ See? That took like five seconds.” I waited to see if he would respond. “Anything else? Say it quickly if you’ve got something.”
“I wish you the best of luck, Ms. Nealon,” Chang said stiffly. “I will be in touch if your benefactor has any message he wishes to pass along, once we hear from him.”
“Thanks a lot,” I said without much in the way of conviction, then hung up on him and deleted his number from my phone. Petty, maybe, but I didn’t answer unknown numbers, and if it was important he could leave a damned message in my mailbox. At least the press hadn’t found my cell phone number yet, though I was sure they would soon.
I dropped my phone back on the table and leaned back in my seat. This had certainly been a morning for kicking my teeth in. Not only had my lawyers dropped me, leaving me without a conduit to my mysterious employer, but I’d been denounced as a murderer on national television by the commander in chief, and my office was wrecked thanks to a human-turned-raccoon who was sitting right outside, and just outside the reach of the increasingly short arm of the law.
“Well,” I said to myself, because there wasn’t anybody else left to talk to, “this sucks.” And it damned sure did.
24.
Sitting behind a desk without anything to do may sound like a fun way to spend a day, but if idle hands were the devil’s play things, an idle butt planted in a chair was probably worse, because I still had the idle hands, too. I did sneak in and search Ariadne’s office for brandy, and unfortunately, McCartney, that shitlord extraordinaire, had broken it all over her carpet. I should have known by the smell, but apparently there wasn’t much left when he broke it, because it was a fairly small puddle. I’d gotten Ariadne the bottle when we’d started here, which meant she’d gone through almost the whole thing in six months or so. At work.
Then again, at the rate my day was going, I would have gone through it by lunchtime, so maybe six months for a whole bottle wasn’t terrible. Especially since she was wo
rking on financials and spreadsheets and managing fallout from the crap I did. That was probably worth a shot a day by itself.
I kept myself from sinking so low as to lick up the brandy from the carpet (mostly because it was now dry, and thus pointless and not at all intoxicating) and instead float-crawled on my belly back to the interior office where the news was muted, bottom of the screen scroll touting, “MAJOR REVELATIONS IN SIENNA NEALON CASE.” Now I had a case, and it wasn’t of something to drink.
I drummed my fingers on the table and stared at the ceiling. There wasn’t any décor on the walls because McCartney had ripped it all off. I was just lucky he hadn’t trashed the TV. Maybe he knew it would be the instrument of my misery and decided to let it survive. Or, more likely, he trashed the place in such a hurry that he just missed it.
I didn’t have a lot to go with at this point. I was basically waiting around for people to attack me, and it seemed like they weren’t eager to do that if they had to cut through a press scrum to do so. Probably something about witnesses. Or maybe I was just paranoid for realsies, and everyone who had wanted to make a run at me was done. Of course, the problem with that theory was that I’d be looking over my shoulder for the rest of my life wondering if someone was going to sneak up and shoot me in the back of the head with a pistol, but it was where I was at.
Everybody had dumped on me today. People had tried to kill me, my own government/previous employer had disgraced me in front of the world, even my scum-sucking lawyers had quit on me, and it was highly doubtful that anyone was going to come knocking to hire me now that I—
I blinked, sitting there thinking. Someone had already come to visit, and I’d forgotten. Timothy Logan, that little snake, had come to my office and prostrated himself to me, trying to hire me. I furrowed my brow in concentration, some of my anger with him past. What was it he’d said? That there was more going on with Palleton Labs than we’d known?
I didn’t have anything else to do, and my phone was charging anyway, so I decided to do a little research while I waited. I typed “Palleton Labs” into the search bar of my phone’s browser and waited. It would have been a lot faster to do the search on my computer, but McCartney had risen to a basic enough level of competence to trash it.
When the results popped up, I hit the first one, which was a basic press release about Palleton’s opening in Portland’s suburbs. I skimmed it, but it was pretty boilerplate stuff about ribbon-cutting and other associated bullshit, with a photo of some douchebag slicing his way through a ribbon with a comically large pair of scissors.
I stopped.
I knew that douchebag.
“What the hell is Edward Cavanagh doing cutting the ribbon for this place?” I asked, as though someone might just answer out of thin air. I looked down below, and sure enough, the caption confirmed it: “Edward Cavanagh and Palleton Labs inaugurate new era in biotech research in Portland.”
I picked my phone up and dialed immediately, and as soon as J.J. answered, I said, “Edward Cavanagh was tied into Palleton Labs somehow.”
“Why, hello to you, too,” J.J. said. “It’s such a pleasure to talk to you, Sienna.”
“Seriously, did you hear me?” I asked.
“I was just trying to remind you of manners,” he said.
“Fuck manners,” I said. “This is important.”
“We’ll just skip the part about speaking like a lady, then,” J.J. said. “Also, I needed my computer to boot, so … ah. Palleton Labs, yes, okay. I’m not seeing it on my list of Cavanagh-funded entities.”
“Yeah, but your list missed NITU in Chicago, too, didn’t it?” I asked. “Just search the internet for Palleton Labs and the first damned result that pops up is Cavanagh cutting the ribbon at that place.”
He was quiet for a minute. “Hmmm. Well. That’s interesting, isn’t it?”
I tried to control my anger, because getting mad at him was pointless. “This guy has been dead for over a year. How is it we’re still not clear on how many pies he had his fingers in?”
“Because we’re not health inspectors?”
“J.J.!”
“Because he was a billionaire, Sienna, with a capital B and lots of capital. You ever try and track a billionaire’s dough? Because I’ve tried, and if the Panama Papers proved anything, it’s that the governments of the world pretty much have no clue how to, either.”
“But this isn’t even that difficult!” I said, frustration pouring out. “I mean, it’s the first item in an internet search on the subject!”
“Yeah, but it’s not even in the first thousand on Cavanagh himself,” J.J. said. “Look, I wrote an algorithm to send spiders across the web searching for references to him—”
“You did what with spiders and webs?”
“I—never mind. The point is, I tried to track down all the places his money went, and I approached it from a few different angles, but Sienna—I’m one guy, and this dude had an army of people investing his money for him. They worked their asses off obscuring the trail of cash Cavanagh invested before he died, and I’m pretty sure someone came along ex post facto and did some mopping up, too. Probably employed through some law firm to keep a lid on his involvement with some of these smaller ventures so they didn’t get hit with negative press after what he did in Atlanta.”
“Someone talking about Cavanagh over here?” Augustus asked in the background.
“Yeah, Sienna found out that lab you guys hit in Portland was opened by Cavanagh,” J.J. said, stopping to explain. “You know, I’m just gonna put you on speaker.”
“Oooh, the plot thickens,” Augustus said, sounding like he was kind of windblown. I hate speakerphone.
“It’s actually still fairly thin, I think,” I said. “Because we have no idea what Palleton was doing in that vault.”
“Well, Cavanagh already figured out how to bestow meta powers and take them away with chemicals,” Augustus said. “And that guy he funded in Chicago was working on killing us all, so … what haven’t we covered on the bio research spectrum?”
“How to turn you all into phenomenal dancers?” J.J. asked.
“Pffft, I’m already a phenomenal dancer,” Augustus said.
“Phenomenal tap dancers?” J.J. asked.
“Shit, yo, Gregory Hines was like a hero to me in my youth,” Augustus said. “I took classes for six years.” There was a thumping noise that I presumed was him trying to show his stuff. “Well, I can’t really do it in these kicks, but you get the point.”
“My point,” I said, “is that we just keep getting more and more tiebacks to this guy, and he’s dead. How many biotech concerns did he touch in this country?”
“He is like the Midas of biotech crap we keep running across,” Augustus said.
“Or like the spider at the middle of this really big web, to keep with the earlier theme.” I couldn’t be sure whose voice that was, but it sounded a little like Abigail.
“Or like—”
“Enough with the similes,” I said. “Bottom line, I want to know what was going on at Palleton Labs. How do we find out?”
“Mmm, I could try and hack them, I guess,” J.J. said. “Give me an hour and I’ll give you a call back?”
I frowned. “Is it really going to take you an hour?”
“I dunno,” he said, yawning, “I’m kinda tired. Was thinking about taking a nap.” Abigail muttered something in the background. “Well, we were. Together, you know.” He paused. “You know, a siesta. Together. So we can—”
“If you make it any more obvious, J.J.,” I said, “you might as well just film it and put it on Pornhub for people to enjoy. Or not enjoy, as the case may be.”
“Oh, they’d enjoy it,” Abigail said.
“Oh. My. Lawd.” Augustus sounded pained.
“Do you really need this right now, like right now—or are you just bored?” he asked.
I blinked, holding in the explosion. Blowing up at him would be pointless, because really, what was I going
to do with this info? I couldn’t fly to Portland to follow up on anything he found, after all, unless I went commercial, and I was trying—oh so hard—not to alienate J.J., who was overall a good guy and a good worker and a helpful overall member of the team, even though he was trying oh so hard himself to step on my patience at the moment. “Hurry, J.J.,” I said. “Please.”
“Uh, oh, um … okay,” he said, probably taken aback that I was exercising politeness. “Bye, then.”
“Good bye,” I said, and let him hang up first.
I sagged back in my chair, trying to decide how I should have handled that. I could have yelled, could have screamed, could have done the normal Sienna thing and threatened violence.
But I’d done all that, for years and years, and where had it gotten me?
Sitting in an empty office, alone, with the only people I could count on half a country away and reporters lined up outside my door like piranhas, waiting to strip every morsel of meat from my body if they got half a chance. The federal government waiting, poised like an axe over the back of my neck, led by an ex of mine so pissed at me that I really believed he’d happily look me in the eye and gun me down.
What had gotten me here wouldn’t get me any farther, that much I knew. So I sat there, feeling pretty damned powerless, just waiting. The sun started to sink in the sky, shadows getting long on the walls, and I waited, hoping that someone would give me a way to save myself from sinking.
Prisoners (Out of the Box Book 10) Page 13