Terminated

Chapter 12

Bryn had to wonder whether Patrick found this as surreal as she did—sitting at the breakfast table in the big granite-countered kitchen while the man they’d been dead set on capturing made them iced tea. With freshly sliced lemons. “I saw you on the security cameras,” he said. “I’d have gone out to let you in, but I was afraid you’d think that was confrontational.”

He set Bryn’s iced tea in front of her, then Patrick’s. She gave Patrick a little shake of her head to tell him not to drink yet, and took a deep mouthful. Cold, tangy, and good. She waited for any ill effects, but nothing came.

“So—you’re on the board of the Fountain Group.”

“Yes.” He put his glass down, and his easy expression shifted to something serious. “At least I was, until very recently. Until I discovered exactly what they were doing in their . . . processing centers. I’ve resigned now, and I can assure you, I had absolutely no idea of the cost overruns associated with the research. If I’d known, I’d have taken aggressive action to rein in that kind of reckless behavior.”

The stunning cluelessness of it made Bryn sit there, staring at him, unable to think how to even begin. Finally she said, “You were concerned about the costs,” she repeated. “What about the—ethics of what you were doing?”

“Ethics?” He said it as if the word were untranslatable. Maybe it was, in his world. “Look, this is about budgets, isn’t it? I told you, when the true costs were uncovered, I just found it all unacceptable, and I simply could not sign off on the expense of turning it into the expanded program. That’s all. I know you’re here from the auditors, but—”

“Auditors,” Patrick said, and pulled his sidearm. He put it on the table between them with a heavy thunk on the wood. “You really think we’re auditors.”

Bryn watched his eyes go blank and wide, and his knuckles whiten around his glass. He didn’t make a move. Finally, he licked his lips and said, “What is this?”

“It’s a gun,” Bryn said. “I can give you make and model, if that’s what you’re asking. But I think we need to rewind this conversation again. Why exactly did you quit?”

“I—I told you! I found out there were significant costs that weren’t being accounted for, and it was bound to come out. I wanted to be on record as having nothing to do with it. . . . What’s going on? Why are you carrying a gun?”

“More than one,” Bryn said, and showed him hers, concealed under the jacket. “You’re talking about numbers. We’re talking about lives. The Fountain Group is killing people, Mr. Reynolds.”

“Dr. Reynolds,” he said, in an automatic sort of way as if he corrected people all the time. He did strike her as an academic more than a businessman, she thought. Someone with his head in the ivory-tower clouds. “I have no idea why you would say a thing like that, Miss Davis.”

“Bryn,” she said. “Since we’re all friendly, Dr. Reynolds. And I say that because I’ve seen it. I’ve seen the experiments. I’ve seen the damage. I’ve seen the death. And you were part of it.” His clueless confusion was making anger knot tight inside her guts. How could he—how dare he sit there with his iced tea in his smug little mountain getaway and tell her that he had no idea? She had a sudden, unsettling impulse to grab him by the throat and squeeze, out of blind fury.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” he said, and slowly rose to his feet. “I think you’d better leave.”

“I think you’d better sit your ass down,” Bryn snapped. “Anyone else in the house besides your kids?”

“No. My wife is traveling. She’s—” He sank back in the chair, even though she hadn’t made a move for the gun. “Are you going to kill me? Please, not my kids, please—”

“We’re not here to kill anybody,” Patrick broke in. Speak for yourself, Bryn thought.“Dr. Reynolds, you must have been aware of the pharmaceutical research being conducted under the Fountain Group’s direction.”

“Of course I was. The research is vital to national defense. But I didn’t know the cost. . . .”

“You mean, in helpless dementia patients being used as human petri dishes to grow nanites?” Bryn said. “The entire staff of Pharmadene killed and revived to ensure corporate loyalty? That cost?”

She expected him to get more upset, but oddly enough, he relaxed. He sat back in the chair, sighed, looked down, and shook his head. “I only learned about Pharmadene after the fact, and that had nothing to do with us, nothing at all. We were merely investors in the project. Once Pharmadene imploded, we took over the intellectual property, and it immediately became clear the potential was vast, so we made arrangements with the military to continue the technology in a very tightly controlled manner. There’s nothing wrong with what we did.”

They all sat in silence for a moment. Bryn couldn’t come up with a reply, not one that didn’t involve physical force. It took Patrick to say, in a tight but calm voice, “You mean you see nothing wrong with conducting illegal experiments on nonconsenting patients. Or destroying them when you’re done.”

“You fail to see the bigger picture.” Dr. Reynolds leaned forward now, earnest and eager. “Those people were dying in a horribly useless way; I know, my own father suffered from Alzheimer’s. But this drug, our drug—it gave them a chance to be useful.”

“Useful,” Bryn repeated. Her throat was so tight it hurt. “They were incubators. I was there. When you were finished with them, you dumped them in incinerators. Don’t you get it?”

He flinched and looked away. “You just don’t understand the potential,” he said, but his voice was fainter now. Less certain. “We can cure everything with this, ultimately. We can stop the suffering of billions. Wipe out disease completely in our lifetimes.”

“You can create a sterilized crop of controllable creatures who aren’t human any longer. Want to see what you’ve accomplished, doctor?” Bryn’s hand blurred to the side, and she picked up the gun and aimed it at Reynolds before Patrick could stop her. “Want to really see what you’ve made? Because I can show you. I can show you, your kids, and any other living thing in this house. And you will not enjoy it.”

“Bryn.”

She knew Patrick had said her name, but it only registered as a blip, a vague shadow. Her focus was a needle-sharp arrow pointed right at Reynolds. He seemed to be the only thing she could focus on.

A predator’s instinct.

“Bryn. Enough.” This time, Patrick’s voice, and his hand on her wrist, broke through. She blinked and sat back, but she didn’t give up the weapon. “Take a good look, Doctor. This woman was murdered by people associated with Pharmadene; she was brought back. Doesn’t she seem grateful?”

“But hasn’t it made you better?” Reynolds asked urgently. “You won’t get sick. You can’t be injured badly, or for long. You can’t be killed except by . . . extreme measures. It’s what humanity has always wanted—health and survival, a guarantee in a hostile world.”

“You have kids,” Bryn said. “Two kids.”

“Yes.”

“Well, I won’t,” she said. “Ever. I always wanted kids—two, maybe three. I always wanted a daughter, especially. And you know what I have now? Nothing. A future of survival. Of being twisted into some shape that isn’t human anymore, because you wanted to play God. You want that for them? Don’t you want them to have a life, not a . . . a living death?”

“I want them to be safe,” he said. “That’s what any parent wants for their children. They should become adults first, of course; they have to reach full maturity or the nanites will simply repair them to a permanent childhood. But yes, that’s what I want for them. A future without disease and decay and death. And you know what? Ask any parent who’s watched a child suffer, and they will agree with me.”

How in the hell could a man look so reasonable, so compassionate, and be so wrong? He was endorsing torture and murder, and he didn’t seem to get it.

She wanted to force him to face it, in all the wrong, bloody ways that the nanites seemed to foster. It was all she could do not to pull the trigger and shatter his skull all over the nice, clean kitchen.

And then eat his brain, some part of her whispered, and she gagged on that image.

“You’re going to help us stop it,” Patrick said.

“I won’t.”

“You don’t have a fucking choice, Doctor.” He took the gun from Bryn’s hand and stood up. “Thanks for the tea. Now you’re going to show us to your office, where you’ll give us all the information you have on the Fountain Group, who’s involved, where they are, and anything else you can think of mentioning.”

“Or what?” Reynolds actually crossed his legs and settled back in his chair, and sipped his tea. As if he didn’t have a care in the world. “Or you’ll kill me?”

“Yes,” he said, very calmly. “I’ll kill you quietly, and bury you somewhere your kids won’t see. You’ll just . . . vanish. Maybe the cops will find your rotting corpse, maybe not, but either way, your big, fancy dream ends here, today. You can end with it, or live to see your kids grow up. Your choice.”

“You wouldn’t.”

Patrick gave him a long, still very calm look, and Reynolds flinched and set down his tea. No longer looking all that confident. “Let’s go to your office,” he said. “I really don’t want your kids to be involved, and neither do you. Right?”

When Reynolds didn’t get up immediately, Bryn helped him with a hand under his arm. His muscles tensed, and for half a second he must have thought about trying to yank free, but then good sense prevailed. She walked him—with his tea—out to the wide living room that had a breathtaking view through the windows of a tree-filled valley and river.

“It’s upstairs,” he said. The three of them went up as a tight group, and just before they made the turn Bryn saw the kids’ door open up, and a small face peer out in worry.

“Everything’s okay,” she told the boy, and smiled. “Your dad’s just helping us for a minute. You just stay in there, okay?”

He nodded and shut the door. She hoped he wasn’t—as she would have been at that age—curious enough to try to sneak up and observe what was going on. Better keep an eye out, she thought.

Reynolds kept his study locked up, which was probably wise, and it required a key code to get in. No way to know if what he punched in was the real number, or a secret alert code that would sound alarms yet stay silent in the house . . . probably the latter. She knew Patrick would think of it, too, so she didn’t bother to say it.

“You go with him,” she told Patrick. “I’ll stay out here and keep watch.”

He nodded, probably also understanding that Reynolds’ smug, brazen attitude made her want to rip his throat out—and that was something she was more than capable of doing, even at the best of times now. Reynolds wasn’t inspiring her better angels, not at all. Better if she worked off her tension by watching for unwelcome visitors, and keeping the kids from snooping.

At least we’re remote out here, Bryn thought. She took a moment to look around the house, and something struck her as odd. It was . . . perfect. Movie-set perfect. In fact, even the books seemed artificial, like the sort of things bought by the yard by a set designer, not things people chose for their own reasons. Normally, looking at someone’s bookshelf could give you a sense of who they were, what they believed in . . . even if the person was widely read, there was still some sort of a core to it.

But this . . . It was random books, shelved for appearance and not content.

Bryn left the hallway and went into the first upstairs bedroom. It held a bed, all the normal furniture one would expect, and even a bathrobe draped over the bedpost . . . but when she checked the closet, the clothes were the same as the books—mismatched and not even the same sizes.

The drawers in the bathroom were all empty.

It was a movie set. There were only things set out in plain view.

And these people . . . these people were actors.

Bryn caught her breath on a gasp, whirled, and ran to the kids’ room. She tried the knob. It was locked. She shattered that with a kick.

No kids. There was a room that looked like a department-store illustration of a room a kid would like, with two twin beds.

The window was open. The kids were gone.

Jane stepped out from behind the closet door, smiling. She looked great, in her serial-killer-crazy kind of way. . . . Her smile was lovely, but her eyes were almost totally blank. “If you’re looking for the Stock Theater Kids, we’ve taken them offstage,” she said. “Welcome to the show, Bryn. You’re a natural. You played your part perfectly.”

She was holding a military-quality MP5, a Heckler & Koch machine pistol that Bryn knew would cut her in half at this distance. Wouldn’t kill her, most likely, but it would damn sure put her down for the fight. Jane wasn’t pointing it, but it was an easy swing up and left on the strap, and boom.

So she stayed very still. “Using kids,” she said. “That’s low, Jane. Even for you.”

Jane shrugged. “They’re Revived,” she said. “Not really much risk for them, even if you went Cannibal Queen on them.”

That shook Bryn, deep down, the idea that someone, somewhere, had decided to Revive children. But then, of all the situations where desperate, bereaved people would have paid to have their loved ones brought back, children were the most probable.

And the most awful, because those children would never progress beyond that age. Ten years old, forever. Their brains and bodies were developmentally stalled, and before too long, the child inside would stagnate, twist, become something else, like fruit left too long canned on a shelf. Her revulsion must have shown, because Jane laughed. A hollow kind of a sound, one without any real humor. “Weird that we agree,” she said. “I wouldn’t have done it, either. And we both know there’s not much I won’t do, right? But even for me, there are limits. I might kill a kid, but I wouldn’t be that cruel to one.” Bryn must have twitched, or looked as if she was thinking about killing Jane bare-handed, because Jane’s right hand moved and brought the machine pistol up to a dead aim. “Ah, ah, let’s not fight, sweetheart. I’m enjoying the moment.”

“Where’s Reynolds?”

“Oh, that’s really him upstairs,” Jane said. “He volunteered—of course, we told him it really was all about internal matters, hence his audit spiel. Didn’t see any reason to alarm him with the full details. He set up this place a long time ago, on the off chance Calvin Thorpe decided to turn on us . . . and it’s his only known address, these days, though of course he doesn’t live here. We caught you on facial recognition in California, and an alarm tripped when someone started looking for an address—not either of you. Nice subcontracting, by the way. But still, two and two equals four in this world.”

“Is Reynolds one of the Revived?” Bryn asked. Jane cocked her head a little and raised her eyebrows. “Just wondering.”

“Most of the Fountain Group have taken the treatment.”

“That what they’re calling having a plastic bag over your head and suffocating to death, then crawling out of hell?”

“Well, you know the medical profession. They never tell you the nasty stuff about the procedures ahead of time.” Jane leaned against the wall and gave the room a quick, unimpressed look. “Looks like catalogs had an orgy in here, don’t you think?”

She did. That was actually almost funny, and Bryn had to suppress the smile, but she knew Jane would see the impulse, the micro-twitch at the corners of her mouth. And that made her angry. She did not want Jane to make her laugh. That was more of a violation than Jane making her bleed. “So,” Bryn said. “What now?”

“Now, kiddo, I kill you—temporarily, of course—and go upstairs to get Patrick. If I can take him alive, I will. If not . . . hope you had Paris. Ah, ah, don’t do that. Just don’t.” Jane’s eyes sharpened focus, and the tremor of Bryn’s hand toward her pistol was the focus. “Go for that gun and all this goes south very fast.”

“You just said you were going to kill Patrick.”

“Of course I will, but I’m not cruel. I’d put him into the Revival program. And unlike you, he’d get the right dose of nanite programming, so he’d stay . . . compliant.”

“And me?” Bryn asked. “Because you damn sure know I won’t be compliant.”

“Yeah, I damn sure do,” Jane agreed. “Tell me, have you felt the hunger yet? Gotten your teeth into living skin? Felt the rush of the hunt?” Bryn was silent, and Jane gave her a slow, intimate, greasy smile. “I see you have. Impressive, isn’t it? That human beings could engineer that kind of savagery in, and call it progress. But then, we’ve always been capable of that kind of cognitive dissonance. Killing for God, for the master race, always some kind of bullshit to ease our consciences. Sit down, Bryn. Right there on that model-home bed. Then take your weapons out, two-finger touch—you know the drill. Kick them over to me.”

Jane could ramble, but she was never distracted, and Bryn knew it was a fool’s errand to assume differently. She walked to the bed, sat down, and took off her jacket. Then she pulled the sidearm from its concealment, using two fingers, and dropped it to the primary-colored throw rug. After a second’s hesitation, she added the knife from the small of her back, too. Then she kicked them both across the room toward Jane’s booted feet. She was hoping Jane would take a split-second’s attention from her to pick them up, but Pat’s ex was wiser than that; she just kicked them onward, toward the far wall. “Facedown on the bed,” Jane said. “Hands laced on your head, ankles crossed. Any struggle, and you get a bullet in the skull.”

There wasn’t much choice. Jane was too good to make a careless mistake. She’d chosen the bed instead of the floor to avoid having to alter her center of gravity so much, and to make it that much harder for Bryn to react fast; mattresses and springs were designed for comfort, not for precise motion. Any attack she’d try to mount would flounder, and she would die.

So Bryn, seething with fury, silently got on the bed, turned facedown, laced her fingers together on the back of her head, and crossed her ankles. Only when she was still did Jane approach and dig a knee painfully into her back, then drag her wrists down and zip-tie them firmly.

The bony knee went away, thankfully. “Up,” Jane said. “Slow.”

It wasn’t as easy with her hands pinned, but Bryn rolled over and put her legs out, and leveraged her way to a sitting position on the edge of the bed. “What now?” Bryn asked, without getting up. “You march me into an oven somewhere? Problem solved?”

“You’re the kind of problem that doesn’t get solved any other way,” Jane said. “Take that as a compliment. Up.”

Bryn shook her head. “Why should I?”

“Bitch—” Jane checked herself as she started to take a step closer, and a slow, demented smile spread across her lips. “You’re buying time for Patrick. You think he’s going to figure it out.”

“Why not? I did.”

That wiped the smile from Jane’s lips, and she activated a hands-free radio with a tap on the choke-band around her neck. “Who’s got eyes on McCallister and Reynolds?” She continued to stare straight at Bryn as she listened to the reply. “How do you know they’re still there? . . . Shit. Get somebody in here to watch this bitch.”

That sounded promising. Bryn kept her attention close on Jane, but there wasn’t any kind of a slip she could take advantage of. . . . Jane stayed very still until another soldier—dressed in the same nonuniform rugged clothing that Jane favored—came in the door and took up a position with his MP4 at the ready and trained on Bryn.

“Watch her,” Jane said. “She makes a move, even a wiggle, you shoot her in the fucking head a whole lot, understand? Bryn, you play nice, now. I’m going to see what my beloved hubby’s up to.”

“News flash, you’re still divorced!” Bryn called after her. “And he still hates you!” She gave the soldier guarding her a full-on eye roll, bringing him into it with the motion. “Bet he’s not the only one in this house. So do you hate her guts or are you just terrified of her? You can pick both.”

“We’re not chatting,” the guard said. He was handsome, in a vacant kind of way—close-cropped brown hair, steady dark eyes, a square, strong chin, and some impressive cheekbones.

We already are chatting, Bryn thought. “Suit yourself,” she said aloud. “But she is such a bitch. You really can’t deny that.”

He didn’t, and she saw a little bit of a relaxing of his shoulders.

“Are you, you know . . .” She lifted her eyebrows. He frowned at her. “Revived?”

“Shut up,” he said. “I told you, we’re not chatting.”

“I only ask because she’s got a bad habit of killing people and bringing them back, for fun. I know. She did it to me about”—Bryn thought for a second—“ten times, more or less, in the space of about a day. That’s not counting the torture. There was a lot of that. Have you noticed? She’s got a taste for it.”

“Shut up.” She’d rattled him; she saw it in the muscle jumping in his jaw. Jane spooked him. Not surprising; she spooked everybody, sooner or later, or at least Bryn would assume she did.

There was a thump, a loud one, on the wood above their heads. Her guard glanced up, a single involuntary movement, and Bryn didn’t, because she’d been pretty sure that would happen.

She launched herself at him in a blur of speed, crashed into him in a crush of flesh, bone, and spraying blood from where her skull met his nose, and the two of them rolled to the floor, tangled up in a messy knot. His gun went off in a roaring burst, and the bullets tore by close enough to leave heat trails and powder burns on her skin, but somehow, she was able to keep the barrel off target just enough to matter.

Just enough to roll them over to where Jane had kicked her knife. No easy job of it, but she nicked the plastic zip tie enough to make it possible to pull her hands apart with one violent tug. She picked up the knife on the next roll over it and jammed it straight into the guard’s chest.

His eyes went wide and blank, as if he were struggling to understand, and she twisted, ripping his heart wide-open.

Game over, at least for a while. She was hurt too—strains, a broken rib or two, and her head hurt like mad from the impact with the guard’s skull—but she’d live. She controlled her impulse to groan and roll away, and instead tugged the knife free and gave him a few more fatal wounds to worry about, including leaving the knife buried in his eye socket. Sawing through bone with this particular knife would be time-consuming, and she couldn’t afford the effort—but the knife in the brain would keep his nanites plenty busy, particularly if the knife was still in place.

More thumping from upstairs.

Bryn rolled to her feet, staggered, pushed away the damage, and ran for the stairs.