by Rachel Caine
The second attacker stared at her for a second, figured his chances of getting to the stun gun, and backed up instead. She held the baton ready. The guy she’d put down wasn’t unconscious, just immobile. If the second one had a gun, the fight was over.…
He didn’t. He did, however, have a knife. It was a nice one, matte finish combat model, and he obviously knew a thing or two about how to use it.
Bryn felt a bit underdressed. And wished she hadn’t gone with the heels for the office. Cargo pants and boots would have been…better. She considered for a second, then kicked off her shoes to stand barefooted and backed away. He moved forward, taking the bait, and stepped over his supine, weakly moving friend. For just an instant, he was off-balance and wrong-footed.
She instantly sprinted around the limo, up through the gardens, and shattered the glass window inset in the front door.
Lights blazed on, and alarms began to shriek.
She stood there, balanced on the balls of her feet, as the knife man stumbled to a halt a few feet away. “Five-minutes-or-less response,” she said. “You think you can get me, subdue me, get your friend, retrieve the stun gun, and be out of here by then? Because I’m going to make it hard.”
Out on the road, a passing truck slowed down, drawn by the lights and sirens. Others would be calling in alarms.
And he knew it.
He pointed his knife at her in a catch-you-later motion, backpedaled, and scooped up his woozy friend. The friend had the car keys, which delayed them further.
They left the stun gun and ran for a nondescript black sedan parked out on the side of the road, almost hidden in the shadows of the hill.
Two and a half minutes, and they were gone in a smoking shriek of tires.
Bryn kept the baton out. She was shaking too hard to put it away, and she badly wanted to sit down. Instead, she stayed on guard, tense as a guitar string, until the first flashing lights appeared below, and sirens climbed up to meet her.
Then she sat down on one of the ornate decorative cast-iron benches, collapsed the baton, put it down beside her, and tried to draw in a breath that didn’t shake. They might have been robbers, she told herself. Or garden-variety perverts. Serial killers. Any of that was preferable to what she thought they were really after. She couldn’t stop the visions: strapped down on a gurney, shot, shoveled into a furnace as her flesh and muscle sizzled off her bones, and screaming and screaming.…
“Ma’am?”
She’d somehow lost track of time, and the adrenaline that burst into her bloodstream made her shoot to her feet and simultaneously flick the baton out to its full, most dangerous reach before sanity kicked in, and she realized that she was planning to hit a police officer standing there with his hand on the butt of his pistol.
Bryn dropped the baton and raised her hands over her head. “Sorry,” she said, or tried to say, just as the shouts of down on the ground, down on the ground! deafened her, and one of the cops grabbed her, shoved her face down, and held her there as he kicked the baton away.
Well, she’d earned that. And as the cuffs snapped on her wrists, she didn’t struggle in any way.
In ten minutes, she told them her story, and in twenty, the police had found her purse and the stun gun both under the limo, just where she’d left them. They also found a dent in the limo’s passenger door where one of her attackers had banged his forehead, and some blood drops. And her shoes.
It still took another hour for the necessary repetitive interviews and paperwork.
“Sorry about that,” said the patrolman as he removed the restraints from her wrists. “Your security consultant is here to look at the damage to the building. We’ve verified your identity, Ms. Davis. Next time, leave the baton on the ground when the police show up, okay? Wouldn’t want any misunderstandings.”
Security consultant? She looked up and saw Patrick McCallister standing near another of the cops, chatting as if he didn’t have a care in the world. He smiled, traded a handshake with the man, clapped him on the back, and strolled their way. He stopped at the bottom of the steps and said to the cop, “Is Ms. Davis free to leave now?”
“She’ll need to come to the station and sign the reports.”
“Any injuries?” he asked—the cop, again, as if she weren’t even there.
“Not a scratch,” the cop said. “Lucky lady. Two against one, both armed. Could have gone real bad for her.”
“Lucky,” Pat agreed without any expression at all, and for the first time looked at her directly. “Very lucky.” He helped her to her feet. He’d brought her shoes over, and she stepped into them. Amazing, how much better she felt with footwear on—how much less vulnerable. “I’ll make sure she’s available for any additional interviews you need. Oh, and there’s a company on the way to replace the window, should be here any moment. Ms. Davis’s assistant director is on his way to supervise.”
Joe Fideli. Bryn could imagine how much fun that conversation had been around his home dinner table.…Honey, sorry, I have to go back to the office; there’s an alarm going off. If his wife didn’t believe by now that he was having an affair, they must have the best marriage in the world.
The cops didn’t speak to her again, or even look her way, now that she was someone else’s responsibility; she was relatively uninteresting in the course of the investigation, which of course wouldn’t go anywhere. They’d taken DNA samples from the blood drops, and maybe they’d get fingerprints from the stun gun, but it wouldn’t matter. These had been professionals.
And she had indeed been very lucky.
Patrick said nothing at all to her as he walked her over to his car. “You drove?” she said. “You’re not supposed to be using that arm for a couple of days. We can take my car and I can—”
“Get in,” he said, and opened the passenger door. His eyes met hers, and she swallowed all objections, slid into the seat, and fastened her seat belt as he walked around the back.
Even when they were on the road, he maintained strict silence until she finally said, “Who called you?”
“Joe,” he said. The word had an edge to it, like a thrown blade. “He gets an alert from the alarm on his cell. He knew I could get here faster.”
Of course Joe got the alert; she knew that, as she’d helped set up the system. Her brain felt slow just now, and bruised from all the day’s stress, even though the nanites wouldn’t let it bruise. Would they? No damage. No damage to her at all; she walked away clean and unhurt.
Every time.
“Please pull over,” she said softly. Pat didn’t respond, and suddenly she let it out in a full-throated, panicked scream. “Pull over!”
He steered to the shoulder of the road, and even before the tires had hissed to a stop, she’d popped her seat belt, thrown open her door, and stumbled out into the cool early evening. The stars glittered overhead in an unusually clear sky, and she stared up at them as she trembled and gasped for breath, feeling—she didn’t know what she was feeling, really, except it was overwhelming and painful, and it wouldn’t stop.
Patrick’s voice said from behind her, “It’s okay.” He wasn’t angry anymore; he sounded concerned. “Bryn, you’re all right. Deep breaths. In through your nose, out through your mouth. Close your eyes.” He put his arms around her, using both of them, and after a second of leaning against him, concentrating on her breathing, she remembered one of them should have been in a sling and not being used like this. “Relax. Relax. The fight’s over now. Ease down.”
“Sorry,” she said faintly. “I don’t know what happened.”
“You were running on adrenaline even before this, and you overloaded.” His breath stirred her hair, and he kissed the side of her neck, very gently. “I’m speaking from experience when I tell you that you’ll be okay, but you can’t run hot all the time. Gear down.”
Well, she was a machine, wasn’t she? Run by machines, anyway. The black humor of that tickled the back of her throat, threatening a laugh she couldn’t release bec
ause she knew it would sound like panic. Or screaming. Cars blurred by them on the road, blowing waves of cool air over them. Bryn’s hair ruffled in the wind like silk, and she closed her eyes, finally, and let that rushing sensation take over. Patrick’s body anchored her in place, and the wind stroked over her, soothed her, like the roar of the ocean.
It took long, slow minutes before she was better—or better enough to go back to the car, get in, and keep control of the still-high flood of emotion on the drive home. She didn’t quite freak out again when Pat asked, “Can you tell me exactly what happened after you left the house?”
She swallowed, tasted something metallic and dry in her throat, and wished she had water. Suddenly, she was burningly thirsty. “I got the thumb drive decrypted. I went to work. I closed up the building. Two men tried to jump me as I walked to the car.” Stripped down to that, it didn’t sound so bad, did it? “I got away.”
“One had a knife, one had a stun gun, you had a baton,” Patrick said. “Good thinking, breaking the window. Did you recognize them?”
“No.” She had, she realized, never seen their faces. “They wore ski masks. But they were professionals at this kind of thing, seemed like.”
“Do you think they know you have the files from Graydon?”
That was a perfectly reasonable question, but Bryn shook her head. “I don’t see how they could know that. Pansy Taylor is the only one who knows, besides the two of us and Joe.” It went without saying that neither Joe nor Pansy was going to talk. “Unless—” She had a sudden, blinding flash of the file that Zaragosa had given her at Pharmadene, with the tiny embedded tracking chip. “Unless they LoJacked the drive.”
She looked sharply at Patrick, who glanced back with the same alarm. “Do you have it?” he asked her.
“No,” she said. “Pansy has it. She gave me an unencrypted copy on a second device. Jesus.”
He whispered something under his breath in a language she didn’t even remotely recognize, and hit the hands-free call button on the car steering wheel. It took an agonizingly long moment for the call to go through, and of course, when it picked up, it was an automated message. Patrick waited through it impatiently and, as soon as the beep sounded, said, “Manny, Pansy, if you haven’t checked the thumb drive for trackers and bugs, do it now, right now. Call when you know. McCallister out.”
“You know, if I gave them something with a tracker in it…”
“Manny will freak the fuck out,” Patrick said grimly. “And move. And it may be days before we hear from him.”
“If ever,” Bryn said. She felt a rising tide of panic again. “He’d know I didn’t do it deliberately. Won’t he?”
Patrick visibly composed himself, and relaxed the tense muscles in his arms and back. “He won’t blame you,” he said. It sounded confident, but it was a lie, and Bryn knew it. “Pansy will calm him down.”
“Patrick, if they came after me, they must have gone after them first.”
“Address,” he said, after a short, dark pause, and when she gave it, he headed in that direction.
Chapter 10
The warehouse looked just the same to Bryn’s eyes, only now, at night, it was lit up like a spaceship. Manny must have paid a fortune, not just in electricity, but in halogen bulbs. Patrick drove up to the gates and got out to show himself to the camera.
Nothing happened.
Bryn tuned the radio to the AM channel she’d used earlier, but there was nothing but static. No voice, even an unfriendly one, to indicate there was anyone at all inside the warehouse.
Patrick pressed the button on the control panel and said, “Manny, I know you’re in there. Let us in. Please.”
Nothing. Not a whisper. Bryn got out of the car, too. There was little traffic this time in the neighborhood, so it was quiet enough to hear the low-level buzz of the lighting.
“Those two couldn’t have gotten in here, even if they did find the place,” Bryn said. “It’s Fort Knox.”
Patrick slammed his hand down on the control again. “Manny! Answer the goddamn radio now or I’m calling the police and telling them there are shots fired and a hostage situation inside. You can try to explain it to them.”
The static went on, and on, for what seemed like eternity, and then the speaker clicked and Pansy’s voice said, “I’ll meet you at the gate, Pat. Stay in the camera’s view.”
It took about ten minutes, and when Pansy came out, she was driving a big SUV, something with lots of power and thick, bullet-resistant glass—it looked like it was on loan from the Secret Service, or (more likely) a South American drug lord. Pansy was tiny in comparison when she hopped down from the cab and walked over. She was wearing a holster clipped to her blue jeans waistband, but it was empty. She held the matching semiauto pistol down at her side—ready but not threatening.
Bryn thought she looked incredibly tense.
Pansy said, “Two men showed up at the gates after you left, Bryn. They drove around, cut the fence, and got as far as the elevator, but they couldn’t hack the scanner. Gave it a damn good try, though. After they left, I looked at the thumb drive, and there was a tracking device built in—GPS enabled. We killed it, of course, but I’ve spent the last couple of hours trying to talk Manny down from running for Belize.”
“They came after me, too,” Bryn said. “But I didn’t have the drive anymore.”
“Then they were surveilling you before you got here. Once they realized we were a hard target, I guess they went for you first.” Pansy sighed and holstered her weapon. “These are not amateurs. If they’re advance for some kind of serious cleanup crew, we’re on the radar now, and they’ll be back for you, and for me and Manny. I’m sorry, but we have to move. There’s no choice.”
“Please don’t,” Bryn said. “I didn’t mean for this to blow back on the two of you—you have to know that.”
“I know.” Pansy looked grim, but also grimly determined. “Look, I like you. I trust you. But the fact is that I made the call to bring you here, let you in, and take something from your hands that compromised Manny, and that just doesn’t fly. Just because he likes you doesn’t mean he won’t walk away. And just because I like you doesn’t mean I won’t let him.”
“Promise me you’ll call when you’re settled.”
Pansy shook her head slowly. “I can’t,” she said. “Jesus, Bryn, Manny’s sliding over the edge with this thing. He’s scared, and I agree. Seven people dead already, plus the three on the video…mercs sniffing around the perimeter…These are not people he wants to mess with. He loves the intellectual puzzle of working with you, but he’s not going to take risks with our lives. Not for you.”
“Wait,” Patrick said, as she backed away from the still-locked gate toward her SUV. “Six months ago, before he started modifying the formula itself, he had a separate drug developed to block Protocols in the nanites. Is it shelf stable?”
“As far as I know,” Pansy said. “There’s a box of it in the back.”
“Then get me the box, and the formula for that, until he feels safe enough to get back in touch,” Patrick said. “It’ll do for now. Please, Pansy. It’s her life at risk, too, and she can’t run.”
She considered and finally nodded. “Stay here. I’ll be back in five.”
Pansy climbed back in the SUV and headed toward the warehouse building at high speed, leaving the two of them bathed in the cold, white lights. Bryn shivered. If her two assailants wanted her dead, it’d be as easy as pie to take a shot out of the dark right now. She and McCallister, both gone in a second.
But they didn’t want me dead, she thought, and it came as a bit of a shock somehow. She really hadn’t thought about that at all until this moment. They came with knives and stun guns as backup, but they started with bare hands. Didn’t they know she was Revived and that bullets wouldn’t do permanent damage anyway? Or was there some reason they didn’t want to do anything fatal, even then?
No, the only logical answer was that they didn’t know s
he was Revived. They just knew she’d handled the thumb drive, and they needed to know what she’d found. But they needed her alive to ask the questions.
They didn’t need McCallister, though. And if they were a containment crew, they’d rather him dead than a witness. That made her chest tighten up until she felt she couldn’t breathe. Come on, Pansy. Hurry. The longer they were exposed, the greater the danger to Patrick.
The black SUV came roaring back almost on cue, and Pansy must have pressed a control on the way, because the gate suddenly activated and rattled back before her arrival. She braked, parked, and came out of the truck carrying a good-sized brown box, which she handed over to Bryn; it weighed about fifteen pounds, maybe twenty, and Bryn carried it to the backseat of Patrick’s car.
“Here,” Pansy said, and handed McCallister a thumb drive—the silver one, Bryn thought, from Graydon. Then she handed him a second one, bright red. “The red one has the Protocol-blocking formula on it. The silver one is the one Bryn brought us. We don’t want anything to do with it. We’ve already wiped all the encrypted and decrypted files from our own system. We’re keeping nothing.”
“Pansy,” he said. “Don’t let him run away from us. Not all the way. She needs him.”
“I’ll try,” she said, and leaned forward to kiss him on the cheek. She hugged Bryn. “Stay safe.”
“You too,” Bryn said. “Both of you.”
The gate banged shut between them, and then Pansy was gone, heading back for the warehouse where Manny would be breaking down the lab, packing it up, feverishly heading for a safe place far, far away.
It might be the last time she saw either of them, Bryn thought. And she’d brought it on herself, by involving them in the Graydon murders.
Patrick touched her shoulder. “Let’s go,” he said.
As they drove away, the security lights around the building clicked off, shrouding it all in darkness, and Bryn thought, Good-bye.
She hadn’t really been prepared to feel so…lost.
Mr. French was standing guard at the front door as Bryn came in, and he gave a happy bark and rushed for her ankles, sniffing with great interest to see where she’d been. Whatever he smelled, it made him growl softly, then sneeze, then sit back on his haunches and pant happily, looking at her with the unmistakable expectation that it was time to pay attention to him.