Melt (Book 7): Flee

by Pike, JJ

  Alice protested but Pottinger rode over her objections. “We can’t lose you to the mob. If your colleague is right, you’re essential to the team effort. It’s a long shot. I doubt anyone can stop this, but a long shot’s better than no shot at all.”

  He waved his corporal over and gave him his orders.

  They’d been saddled with an armed escort.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  “What do you think?” Jo had been moved to a smaller vehicle. No driver, no one listening in. The convoy which had been taking them to Fort Monmouth, an Army base that had been retrofitted to include no plastics of any kind, had been halted so she could talk to her team.

  “They’re both lying,” said Alex.

  “Is that why you stopped her?” said Sam. “Because she was lying?”

  Jo nodded. It was a tried and true technique: walk away when your mark is warming up to a big honking lie. “She’s playing the innocent just a tad too hard.”

  Alex nodded.

  Sam leaned close to the camera. “Which lie do we think is most important? We agree they were lovers?”

  Jo and Alex grunted their agreement.

  “His reaction says she knows something he doesn’t want us to know.”

  “Or not yet.” Jo held out some hope that the immunity deal would get Rayton to talk. “We have to give him immunity, right?”

  “Working on it,” said Alex. He raked his hands through his hair. When they’d met he’d had a head of jet-black hair. Now it was streaked through with gray and thinning at the temples. They were all going to be gray by the time this crisis was over. “Not sure how fast we can get that in place. I say we get her talking and let him sweat.”

  “Anything else you can tell me about them? Any leverage?”

  “Rayton’s legend checks out so far, but it’s early days. We haven’t been able to locate two of his handlers. One is dead, the other in the field somewhere in the Far East.”

  “Suspicious death?”

  “Meh,” said Alex. “Impossible to know. Overseas. Shoddy autopsy. Inconclusive report. They might as well have handed his body over to the local butcher and fed his hands and feet to the pigs.”

  Jo scrunched up her nose. Not an image that landed well. “Where was this?”

  “Manila in the ’80s.”

  Not her patch. She’d been in South America, not the East.

  “TOC says there was a cell working out of Manila. International smuggling. Wildlife and cultural artifacts, mostly. High profile case. You know how the public laps that stuff up.”

  It was a joke inside the agency: the things that caused the least harm to humans were the cases that garnered the most public outcry. Jo had a theory. Smuggling parrots and monkeys was far easier to talk about than smuggling young girls and boys. You could get on Facebook or Twitter and go to town about that poor, helpless chimp, but what would the neighbor’s say if you started railing about sex workers and how many fine, upstanding husbands had availed themselves of the company of a prostitute? Drug trafficking was another big hit with civilians: again, easy to talk about around the dinner table.

  “This handler worked with an operative who busted up an international art forgery ring. Their cover was blown and they were both disappeared.”

  Jo frowned. “Doesn’t sound like anything Rayton would have been involved in.”

  “Nah, we’ve got someone running it down, but I doubt it will go anywhere. You know how these things go: we hunt down friends of friends, eventually find some schmoe he had a drink with in a bar somewhere, and ultimately see that link we’re not seeing yet.” Sam was enjoying himself too much.

  Jo wanted to smack his face, he was so annoying. They tracked leads, most of which went nowhere, for the single thread that led them to answers. That was the nature of their work. He didn’t need to make it so…well…pointless. Most of the time they’d be running down blind alleys just like this one: finding a handler who’d been unceremoniously murdered; uncovering a lover who knew a smidge of information, even if she didn’t know it was important; stumbling on a genuine lead, like Fran Loomaye, who’d admitted she was involved in industrial espionage, whether she knew it or not. But it all added up to a profile and she wanted that profile to be as complete as possible. You never know which detail is going to be the one that pays off. She couldn’t school Sam on that, no matter how much she wanted to. They all had their parts to play. She needed to keep her eyes on her own paper.

  “What do we have on Fran?”

  Alex clicked a couple of keys and pushed a file to Jo’s laptop. “Squeaky clean record. No involvement with the Bureau…”

  “Too clean?” said Jo. “Does it look scrubbed?” She ran her eye down the intel they had on Fran. It didn’t amount to much. She’d been to grad school then gone directly to Klean & Pure. She was overqualified to be an executive assistant, but who wasn’t these days? Gen-Z-ers and Millennials (which was Fran? Jo couldn’t keep them straight) were forever complaining about the lack of job security. Here was a young woman who’d taken a decent-paying gig while she worked her way towards…what? What did she add up to?

  “Have we tracked down any family? Professors? Anyone outside of K&P who can vouch for her?”

  Alex shook his head. “That’s going to take a decade. Her home address was in Queens. That’s off limits. Probably a smudge on a map by now. She lived with an ailing aunt and an older sister. No record of either of them in the system. She had to pass a background check when she was hired on at K&P, so there are going to be records somewhere, with references, but we can’t get to them.”

  Jo looked at the clock in the corner of her screen. “It’s been long enough. They’re both going to be ready to talk. I’m going to keep them apart to begin with, then interview them together. I have to agree with Professor Baxter: getting solid answers about MELT is our top priority.”

  Sam rolled his eyes. “It’s a fool’s errand. The pictures we’re seeing from the field show a burn rate that’s beyond your wildest nightmare.”

  Jo hated his pessimism, but she wanted to hear everything he had to say.

  “If you’ve ever looked at a time-lapse series on the deforestation of the Amazon? It’s like that. Swaths of New York are collapsing. Every time MELT hits a power station it takes another massive leap forward. Reports are it’s traveling above and below ground. Electrical wires are its favorite food, but it’s fond of sewer pipes, too.”

  Jo had seen MELT in New Jersey, but it was on a small scale; just a laboratory going under. What Sam was talking about was entire neighborhoods being eaten alive.

  A rap at the window made her jump. It was Hoyt. She wound down her window.

  “We need to get moving.”

  “Great. I’ll take this vehicle, if that’s okay with you. I want time with Fran. Alone.”

  Hoyt nodded. “You don’t want a driver?”

  “I want to give her a false sense of security. I’m sure you’ve done this before, General. Don’t look them in the eye and they relax. We’re going to go at this from every angle. I’ll stop as soon as I get a break, hand her off, and ask you to bring Rayton to me. Can you do that?”

  Hoyt nodded. How bizarre to have a General as her runner. MELT made strange bedfellows of them all.

  Minutes later, Fran slid into the passenger side seat. “Am I in trouble?” she said.

  Jo started the car. “I hope not, but you need to tell me everything you haven’t told me so I can help you.”

  “I didn’t mean to do anything wrong.” She didn’t need to add in the tears. Those might work on the guys, but the smart move would be to suck it up and talk to her plainly.

  “What did Michael talk about with Professor Zhang?” said Jo.

  “Are your colleagues listening?” Fran shot a look at the laptop in the back seat.

  “No,” said Jo.

  They were. There was a camera in the phone holder on the dash, but if it made Fran feel safer not to know that half the intelligence community in the
Northeast was watching her eye movements—the way she brushed her bangs off her face, counting how many times she chewed her lip or nails, or fiddled with her earlobes—so much the better.

  “I knew it was wrong.” Fran took a deep breath. “But he convinced me that Alice was harming the company. I feel like an idiot now, but you have to understand just how persuasive he is. I don’t think of myself as easily impressed. It wasn’t the fine dining or expensive wines or the little gifts he bought me that made me trust him; it was the fact that he saw me. As in, really saw me. You have no idea what it’s like being an assistant…”

  Jo did. She’d played second fiddle…third, fourth, fifth fiddle…more than once.

  “They look right through you, even when they’re talking to you. Alice was a great boss most of the time, but then she’d have a bad day or Jake would be on her case about something and she’d bark orders at me like I was a robot or a slave.”

  “Back to Michael’s conversation with Zhang. What do you remember?”

  “Not much. It was short. Zhang said they had to reengineer MELT. Mostly it was what Michael told the soldier who caught him talking to Zhang that I thought would be useful to you.”

  “A soldier caught Michael?”

  Fran nodded. “He tried to arrest Michael, but Michael disabled him and we locked him in a closet.”

  “We?”

  Fran stared out of her window. “I didn’t know who was the good guy and who was the bad guy. Michael had just admitted he worked for the Chinese. He said he was CIA and he’d been following orders…”

  “He said he worked for the Chinese? Directly?”

  Fran nodded emphatically. “Yes. He said those exact words.”

  “What else?”

  “He said he had to find you and the professor because he’d been wrong.”

  “Okay.”

  “Then he ran. I followed him. We zigzagged through K&P’s compound and caught you at the gate.”

  “That was it? He didn’t say anything else about Zhang or MELT or how it had been weaponized.”

  “Oh. He said he was in charge of making sure it didn’t get out.”

  She’d skipped part of the story the first time through. It often went this way, talking to a witness. They remembered things in fragments, piecing it together as they went. Very few people who were telling the truth had a story prepped with a beginning, middle, and end. Fran might have shed crocodile tears to get the guys to go easy on her once she realized she’d messed up big time and had been the eyes and ears of a traitor, but she was sounding credible now.

  “Tell me more about Michael saying he was in charge of…what was it you said?”

  “He said he knew that MELT had been weaponized. By our government. In partnership with the Chinese. It had to be done overseas because it’s illegal here.”

  The pieces fit together. If this was true, if he’d been acting under orders, they might not get his immunity. People in high places were not going to want anyone to know that they’d greenlighted the production of a biological weapon.

  “His job was to make sure that version of MELT was never released.”

  “There were two versions of MELT?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you believe him?” Jo wasn’t going to give much credence to what came next. The deeper they got into the details the more likely it was Fran was going to see the rabbit hole for what it was and try to cover her own ass. Still, she wanted to test out whether the young woman had any loyalty to Rayton or if that was shredded beyond recognition.

  “I believed him when we were at K&P. He was the investigator who was going to save the day. Alice was selling industrial secrets to our enemies…”

  “But you didn’t look at her files? Even though you believed his story?”

  “I was scared I’d trip myself up when I was talking to her. I’m a useless liar. I didn’t want to put myself in a position where I could get caught out and blow his cover.”

  Well wasn’t that just a fancy piece of tap dancing.

  If it was true, Michael Rayton was some kind of Svengali. If it wasn’t, Fran Loomaye was psychologically brilliant. She’d fabricated a story that mostly, not entirely but mostly, put her in the clear. She had a reason for being there and doing what she did, but she had a level of plausible deniability that was going to be hard to unpack or disprove.

  “We’ll need to talk again.” Jo hit her brakes a couple of times so the car behind her knew she was going to do her stop-and-swap.

  She had Michael Rayton in her sights. She had to go in for the kill.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Betsy checked Paul’s vitals, even though she’d done precisely that not one minute earlier. She needed time to compose herself. Keeping her hands busy with tasks she knew by heart was one way to siphon off the multifarious reactions she’d had—no, was actively having—following Petra’s announcement.

  The young woman’s news had rocked the entire room. Mimi was laughing and kissing Petra, saying something about being spared and living long enough to become a great-grandmother.

  Sean was crying. “Happy tears,” he said.

  Aggie hadn’t responded. She was like Betsy. She kept her responses dialed down to “private,” so there was no way of knowing what she was thinking.

  Paul was stable. BP: 120/80. Perfect. Betsy held two fingers over his wrist and calculated his heart rate. All good. She lifted an eyelid and shone a light into his eye. Pupils responsive, though he was still out of it.

  Behind her, the celebratory talk continued. She still wasn’t calm enough to face Petra and pretend all was well when in fact it was far from it. Petra wasn’t ready to be a mother. Mothering took time and patience and love and dedication. Petra was a child. Worse, she was petulant and spoiled, giving herself over to any and all drama no matter who else might be pulled into the vortex of her emotional whirlwind. Betsy had spent a lifetime doing the opposite. It galled her to think of an innocent—a baby, who deserved to be protected from people like Petra, not forced to live under the same roof as them—being subjected to all those impossible highs and lows on a daily basis.

  She couldn’t say that. It wasn’t her place. Even though she was acting in loco parentis.

  What would Alice say? Would she be pleased like Mimi?

  What? Are you high or drunk or both, Betsy Asher? What mother would be pleased that her eldest daughter had thrown all caution to the wind and allowed herself to get knocked up?

  That wasn’t fair.

  Petra was an opinionated young woman who knew her mind. She might have been imprudent, but she hadn’t simply “let” something happen to her. She was no passive recipient. She was an active participant.

  Oh, goodness. Had that happened under her roof? Had Petra and Sean been sneaking off for some “alone time” while they were here, in her house, eating her food, pretending they were doing what they ought rather than what they’d prefer?

  Would Alice hold her accountable?

  Or was it allowed in the Everlee house?

  She couldn’t see Bill being okay with his daughter having sex in the family home.

  Then again…

  Modern families…

  What did she know?

  Perhaps it was okay? Alice and Bill might look at their daughter and see a young woman, rather than a large child, barely grown. They’d certainly been more tolerant of their children’s demanding quirks than many parents might have been. She couldn’t know what Alice or Bill might think.

  What was it, then? If she wasn’t worried about her friends’ reaction to their daughter’s news, what was eating her?

  It wasn’t that she necessarily disapproved of sex before marriage. She was a nurse. She knew these things happened.

  What was making her brain fire off in all directions?

  It wasn’t that she thought Petra would make a terrible mother (there was no way of knowing the future; Petra might make a wonderful mother, there was no way to tell, people change when they hav
e children). That wasn’t what was bothering her.

  Not really.

  She knew what it was.

  It was always the same thing.

  The bitter nut that festered inside Betsy was simple: she’d never know what kind of mother she herself would have been, because she had never been—and never would be, ever, never, ever; she’d never be—a mother.

  Everything she was thinking and feeling was predicated on that one toxic emotion: jealousy.

  She’d spent a full three minutes collapsing herself into that judgmental space where Bad Betsy lived. Bad Betsy who kept a fully stocked drinks trolley in her house as an act of sheer willfulness. All because she’d been denied the thing she wanted most.