Two Weeks' Notice

Chapter 9

Bryn was shaking as she got back in her car, with an unencrypted copy of the thumb drive tucked in her purse.…She felt cold, icy cold, even though the air was still warm and moist. As she drove toward Davis Funeral Home, she couldn’t seem to get warm even with the heater blasting on full. Her skin felt cool, pallid, and damp.

Of course you’re feeling bad, she told herself. It’s horrible. What’s on the video is horrible.

But she couldn’t help the feeling that it wasn’t just the idea of the death of those three people.…It was more. It was something shifting inside her, tectonic plates moving, friction building energy that had to release somewhere, somehow.

Bad things. Very bad things. Pharmadene employees were disappearing.

She knew where three of them had ended up.

Her nerves seemed all on edge now, the bright edges of things as sharp as blades. She had to fight not to flinch when someone blew a car horn at a light; she had an unreasoning, trembling impulse to get out, find whoever had done it, and beat him—or her—to a bloody pulp. Stop. Stop pushing me.

A sudden, tuneless noise startled her into hitting the brakes with a screech, almost causing the car behind to rear-end her. It was her phone. Had it always been that loud? That annoying?

“What?” she snapped as she hit the hands-free call button on the steering wheel. “What is it?”

“Bryn? It’s me.” Patrick. She sucked in a deep breath and tried to slow down her racing heartbeat. “I just wanted to be sure you’re okay.”

“Oh. I’m—I’m fine,” she said. She wasn’t, and she was starting to realize that, but she didn’t want to let Patrick know. “On my way to the office.”

“Did Manny help?”

“Not really, but at least he didn’t shoot me. Pansy did the work.”

“You got the files decrypted. And…?”

“We can talk later,” she said. She really didn’t have the stomach for talking about this, not now. “I’ve got to go, Patrick.” She hung up on him without waiting for another word. She knew he could sense how off-balance she was just now, and she didn’t want his sympathy, or his concern. She wanted to fight back to the place she’d been when she’d left the estate: strong. Energized. Ready.

Three dead. Three. And one she knew, had laughed and talked with. She felt responsible for him, somehow; he’d come to her for help in adjusting to his new unlife, and she’d let him drift away into the hands of his killers.

A horn blasted behind her, and she realized that she’d been sitting at a green light, staring blankly at it for long seconds. She hit the gas and drove too fast the rest of the way to the funeral home, parked crookedly, and had to take a moment to suck in deep, ragged breaths before she got out and went in.

The subdued smell of flowers hit her first; it was more pronounced today because someone had sent those damned daylilies for the main viewing room, and the sweet, musty scent made her throat tighten. The waiting room was empty for the moment, and Lucy looked up from her chair behind the reception desk to smile. “Well, hello, Bryn. I thought you were taking the day.”

“Sorry I’m late. My appointment ran long this morning. Anything I should be on top of?” This was good. Lucy was calm, professional, unemotional; dealing with her was always steadying.

“You had a couple of vendor calls. I put it all in the folder on your desk.”

“Where is everyone?”

“Joe’s out with the Chen burial. Ms. Kleiman is meeting with some new clients down the hall.”

Bryn smiled, just a little. “Isn’t she Gertie yet?”

“Not yet,” Lucy said. “That woman’s going to be Ms. Kleiman until she gets that stick out of her butt.” Gertie Kleiman was an older woman, newly hired, and she didn’t seem to have an informal bone in her body—which was fine most of the time, especially since Lucy steered the elderly clients her direction by design. “And I can’t be on any first-name basis with a woman who calls me ‘that colored girl up front.’”

“She said that?”

“On the phone. Not to me. I just heard it.”

Bryn sighed. “I’ll talk to her. Sorry, Lucy.”

“Not the first time I’ve run into it.” Lucy shrugged. “Oh, and William’s working downstairs. He’s pretty busy.” William was their new, very competent embalmer; all of them could, and did, pitch in, but William had a nearly flawless touch. He was the best Bryn had ever seen, with the exception of Riley Block.

“New intakes?”

Lucy’s voice dropped lower, just in case anyone strolled in. “Married couple sent over from Scripps Mercy. Car accident. The son’s coming over this afternoon; I had Mr. Fideli down for him, but if you want to take it…?”

“Yes, that’s fine. I’ll meet him. What time?”

“Four.”

“Thanks, Lucy. You’re amazing. I’m sorry about Kleiman. Tell her I want to see her before my four o’clock.”

“Okay. But don’t be too tough on her. I just want her to call me by my name, not my skin color,” Lucy said. The phone rang, but this time it didn’t startle Bryn quite so much; the funeral home’s lines were all muted to the lowest possible setting and the most soothing ringtone choice. Lucy turned to attend to that, and Bryn walked down the hall. She’d been hoping today would be a routine kind of thing, but already she had sensitivity training to deal with. The four o’clock would be raw and emotional, and that probably hadn’t been a good decision, either, but she needed to work.

Work kept her from thinking too much about herself.

The folder on her desk had a summary sheet on the top: schedule for the rest of the week, including a conference call tomorrow morning; phone messages from Bates Casket and one of the embalming suppliers; contracts to be signed. Bryn took care of those first and put them in her out-box, followed up on phone messages, and then kept herself busy searching her laptop for e-mails to and from Jason Drake, formerly of Pharmadene, formerly Revived. The last one she had was dated over a month ago, and in contrast to the warmer tone of previous e-mails, that one was a simple notice that he wouldn’t be able to attend her meetings anymore and was seeking counseling services inside the company. On reflection, it didn’t sound like him…but then, she could have been (and probably was) coloring things with her own interpretation, given what she’d discovered.

Bryn toyed with a pen, thinking, and suddenly realized something important. Jason was on Pharmadene shots. That meant he had to check in daily to get them. Unlike her own shots, remanufactured by Manny Glickman, the Pharmadene doses were administered in syringes that were fingerprint-locked to the technicians authorized to give them. Jason couldn’t have stockpiled any and self-injected.

More than that, the Pharmadene shots were regulated so strictly that if Jason hadn’t shown up for a shot, it would have triggered a red flag at the FBI.

Riley. Riley Block must have known about this—or, at least, known three of her Pharmadene addicts were missing. Son of a bitch. Zaragosa had been right not to trust her. She hadn’t mentioned it, hadn’t asked for help about it. Hadn’t given Bryn any indication at all there was something going on out of the ordinary—it had taken the Pharmadene CEO to do that.

Bryn picked up the phone, dialed part of Riley’s number, then slowly put the receiver back in the cradle. If Riley didn’t want her to know, there had to be a reason for it—one that Bryn wouldn’t agree with, either. Zaragosa had warned her not to trust her.

An ice-cold chill swept over her, and she stared blindly at her computer screen. What if they’ve had an order to end the project? That would, in fact, explain everything. The contractors, hired to abduct and destroy Returné addicts. Maybe Zaragosa didn’t know. Maybe Riley herself didn’t know. But sooner or later, Bryn had fully expected the government to tire of the expensive job of hiding the truth; this was a neat way to end their problems. Neat for everyone but those going into the incinerator, anyway—especially in a budget-cutting economy.

She couldn’t trust Riley, or Zaragosa, or anyone with government ties. They had to know these three had disappeared, and if there had been an investigation, surely they would have involved Patrick, at least.

Would Patrick have told you?

Yes. Yes, he would have. Bryn had no doubts about that.

Unless he is protecting you, or thinks he is.

God, this was a circular cycle of paranoia.…She could implicate everyone, and no one, but the only real proof she had was seven dead people at Graydon and video of three Revived—like her—burned alive.

Bryn took the thumb drive out of her purse and stared at it for a moment, then slotted it into a USB port. Maybe watching it again, blocking out the horror, she’d gather some little detail, some hint to follow. Tonight, she’d find out if Patrick knew anything.

Tomorrow, she’d go after Riley Block and find out what she knew about it. If it was the government cutting their very substantial losses, then they’d have a fight on their hands. A public and bloody one—the very last thing they wanted. If word of Returné hit the streets, things would go insane. Everyone would want Revival—for themselves, for a loved one. And that was a cycle that never stopped, and would destroy governments, crush economies, and lead to chaos like nothing she could imagine. People were genetically selfish, and they were panicky. A bad combination when something like this was dangled in front of them, a life preserver to the sinking ship of their mortality.

Bryn didn’t want to see that happen, and in truth she’d try her best to keep Pharmadene’s dirty secrets, but the threat was significant enough to force the government’s budget-cutting madmen off their backs.

Hopefully.

She lost track of time staring at the video files; even with the sound muted, the images made her feel trapped, mired in a nightmare. The calm efficiency of the killers was chilling; it said they’d done this, or things like it, so much that it was just another day on the job. That utter lack of empathy reminded her of soldiers at concentration camps and Rwandan butchers chopping up innocents. The human race, alive or Revived, was a terrifying thing.

Bryn flinched when she heard a knock at the door, and slammed the laptop shut on the video. She hastily put it away, pressed her sweating hands on the desk for a moment, and tried to still her racing heart. Wasn’t entirely successful. “Come in,” she said.

It was Gertrude Kleiman. She was a tall woman, with pale hair going imperceptibly gray; she wore it in a teased style that reminded Bryn strongly of her mother’s prom picture from high school. Not a warm person, but a competent one, and she dressed better than Bryn did—old money, the break room gossip said. Not that Bryn listened—much. “You wanted to see me, Miss Davis?”

“Please have a seat,” Bryn said. She’d never had to give anybody a dressing-down outside of her time in the military, and she figured it probably wouldn’t be wise to approach it the same way. “Would you like a glass of water?”

“No, thank you.” Kleiman—even Bryn couldn’t really call her Gertie—sat down primly on the edge of the chair, knees together and at just the correct angle. Not a wrinkle in her expertly tailored suit. She had dark blue eyes, and a very direct gaze. “Ms. Kleiman, I had a report that you’ve been referring to our office administrator in a less-than-appropriate way.”

“Meaning?” Kleiman said without even a blink.

“I believe the phrase was ‘that colored girl up front.’”

Now Kleiman blinked, as if that wasn’t at all what she was expecting. “Excuse me? I don’t understand the problem.”

“The problem is that she’d like you to refer to her by name, not by her skin color. She’s also not a girl; she’s older than I am. I realize that the phrase used to be appropriate years ago, but—”

“I was trying to be polite!” Kleiman said, and, if anything, looked more rigid and cold. “If you’d like me to say what I really think, I think that…that woman is taking great advantage of you. She’s hardly qualified to run something as complex as a business like this.…”

“Actually,” Bryn said, “I’m fairly certain I don’t want to know what you really think, and neither does Lucy. Lucy works for me, not you, and I’m the final judge of her performance in the job, as I am of yours, and it’s your job performance we’re discussing, not Lucy’s. So consider this a warning. If you use inappropriate terms toward any of my staff again, the next time we talk about this will be the last.”

“This is ridiculous! What I said was not in any way offensive!”

“In your opinion,” Bryn said. “And the point of something being offensive is that it was offensive to someone else. We’re done now. Thank you.”

It was a clear dismissal, and Kleiman took it that way. She also slammed the door on the way out, which was damned difficult, since the doors were on hydraulics to make sure they didn’t make a lot of noise. Impressive. Bryn sighed and called Lucy’s desk phone. “Incoming,” she told her. “Kleiman’s on fire. Let me know if she comes after you.”

“She comes for me, she’d better be wearing asbestos,” Lucy said. “Nope, she just passed me by and went to her office.”

“If you have any problems…”

“Come to you, yes, boss. Your four o’clock’s not here yet. I’ll ring you when he comes in.”

“Thanks.”

Bryn looked at the clock, stretched, and decided she was too restless to sit still for twenty minutes. She stood, put on her white lab coat from the closet, and took the back stairs down to the preparation area.

William Nguyen looked up as she came through the frosted glass door and gave her a big, warm smile. “Hey,” he said. “Busy day, eh?” He nodded down at the body lying on the table in front of him.

It was gruesomely damaged, but from the part of the face that hadn’t been mangled, the man was in his fifties, with short-cropped graying hair. There was another body on the second table, covered with a clean white sheet.

“Are these the accident victims?”

“Yeah, it was a nasty one—rear-ended by a drunk driver at a stoplight, pushed their car into a dump truck. The drunk must have been going about a hundred; the car looked like it already went through the cube crusher. This is Mr. Lindell. I’m just doing gross examination right now. I’ll e-mail you the general outline of what it’ll take, but if the son wants open casket, this is going to be a pretty intricate job.”

“Thanks,” Bryn said. “Just let me know as soon as you can. Hey, William…”

“Yeah?” He didn’t look up from his close analysis of Mr. Lindell’s cheekbone. “Damn, this is all splintered in here. Gonna be tough to find good anchor material for the reconstruction.”

“Have you had any problems with Gertrude Kleiman?”

“Nope,” he said. “Except she won’t talk to me.”

“Excuse me?”

“Never says a word. Even when she comes down here, she hands me paperwork, or picks it up, and leaves. If I say hello, she just ignores me. I don’t know. I just figured she was shy.”

“Huh,” Bryn said, which was about as neutral as she could make it. “Okay. Thanks.”

“For what?” He still didn’t take his attention from the dead man in front of him, gently palpating torn tissues.

“Just thanks.” For being cheerfully oblivious, she thought. But the idea that Kleiman was rude to him, too, made her burn. “See you later.”

“Yeah, see ya.” He finger-waved her off, and she went back upstairs, wondering exactly what to do about Gertrude now.

She didn’t have much time to think it over, because as soon as she’d hung her coat back on the rack in the closet, Lucy paged her to let her know her four o’clock had arrived. Bryn checked herself in the mirror—habit—and went out to greet him.

He was a tall young man, and he looked athletic, but when she spotted him sitting in the chair, he looked…unstrung, like a discarded puppet. He looked up vaguely when she stopped in front of him and said, “Mr. Lindell?” in her gentlest voice. “I’m Bryn Davis. Why don’t we go into my office.”

“Are my mom and dad here?” he asked, still seated. “Can I see them?”

“Please, come with me,” she said, and the persuasive, understanding tone worked; it got him up and moving with her. As she shut the door, he looked around her office with blank incomprehension, and she guided him to one of the two small sofas, with the table in the middle. She’d learned her lessons from the old owner, Lincoln Fairview, well; there were tissues in a wooden box on the table, and a trash can tucked discreetly just where a visitor would expect. All her materials were ready—pens, forms, iPad with photographs of options. She sat young Mr. Lindell down, fetched him hot coffee when he indicated he might drink some, and otherwise just listened as he talked for a while. He didn’t, thankfully, return to his request to see his parents; that was something she wanted to avoid at all costs.

“They said at the hospital it was instantaneous,” Mr. Lindell said. “That they never even knew.”

It most likely wasn’t true, but Bryn wouldn’t have said so. Not to him, not at a time like this. “I know it was very quick,” she said. “I’m so sorry, Mr. Lindell.”

“Eric,” he corrected softly. “I’m Eric. I want—I want to be sure I do this right, but I don’t know how. I’ve never—I’ve never even been to a funeral before. When my grandfather died, I was a freshman in college, and I couldn’t get back in time for the services.…” He seemed very pale, and much younger than Bryn had initially thought. “What happens now? What do I do?”

“Do you have any other family members who want to be involved?” Bryn asked. She felt sorry for him, for the vacant suffering in his face. He was maybe twenty, she realized—much younger than her, in every way. She’d gone into the army and seen death and brutality; the worst this man had seen might have been a drunken fistfight at a frat party.

Eric shook his head. “My sister’s off in Thailand on some kind of hiking trip. I can’t even reach her. It’s just me.” He suddenly took in a gasp of air and said, “I need help. I can’t do this. I can’t.”

It was like a cry, and Bryn reached out and took his hand in hers. Instinct. It stilled some of her own pain that still boiled inside. “I know,” she said. “And I’ll help you through this.”

It was the best part, she thought, of doing this job—seeing the relief in the eyes of those who sat on this couch, knowing they weren’t going through it alone.

In the end, she undercharged him for the funeral, because it just…hurt to do anything else.

The work did help, Bryn discovered when Eric Lindell finally left, paperwork in a folder for him to keep. It had been a long session, almost two hours, and the funeral home was quiet when she walked him out to his car. He seemed calmer now, and steadier, and as he was opening the car door, his cell phone rang.

His sister, calling from Thailand. Bryn watched him from the indoor window as he talked, and cried, and finally drove away.

Suddenly, she wanted to be back at the McCallister estate, with Patrick. Life is short. She was reminded of that every single day, here. I need to decide what to do about Kleiman, she thought. It was a thorny sort of administrative case—William hadn’t made a complaint, and Kleiman had taken the reprimand for Lucy’s complaint without too much grandstanding. Hard to dismiss her without incurring some kind of lawsuit, given the facts in hand.

Maybe she’ll quit, Bryn thought. That would be a nice solution for everyone—voluntary departure. And maybe pigs will fly. You don’t ever get off that easily, do you?

No. No, she didn’t.

It was the work of a moment to pack up the laptop and thumb drive, then another five to check the doors and windows of the building and set the alarm before exiting. She was locking up when her cell phone sounded, and she juggled it along with the keys. “Hello?”

“Bryn? Hi, this is Carl. I was—I was checking in to see when you were planning on having that support group meeting. I’d really like to be there, if possible.”

Crap. She hadn’t thought about the support group at all for days. “I don’t know, Carl. Let me make some calls and see if I can set something up. Have you spoken with your wife yet?”

“I—No. Not yet. Maybe if you would go with me to talk to her—I mean, having someone else there would be good, wouldn’t it?”

Only for Carl. His wife would probably find it intimidating and terrifying, given the situation. But that depended on her, and him. “I’ll call you back,” she promised. “Are you having any other issues right now?”

“I can’t sleep,” he said. “At all. I try, but I just lay there and think. I can’t shut my brain off. It’s like the nanites are making me do it. Did you ever feel like that? That they’re making you do things you don’t want to do?”

That was alarming, she thought, and leaned against the pillar. “Like what specifically?”

“I don’t know. Turn the car one direction instead of another. Think about—doing bad things.” He sounded positively strange now. “Nobody tested this stuff. They tested it on us. How do we know it’s not changing us, not making us dangerous? Do you know? Does anybody?”

All of a sudden, Carl sounded like the darkest voices of her id coming out of the depths, and it was spooky. She’d wondered these things herself from time to time; it was easy to fall into despair in this situation and imagine every random thing that happened as a symptom of a nonexistent disease. The deadly thing was that if Carl convinced himself he wasn’t in control, what would he do? What couldn’t he do?

“Are you thinking about hurting yourself? Hurting someone else?” She was not qualified for this, she thought in a sudden, angry fit of despair; no one had trained her, given her a diploma in how to manage dead people’s fears. Not even her own.

His hesitation made her nervous, but then he said, “No, not really. I’m just—I think a lot, and that must be the nanites, right? That they’re working too hard or something?”

“Carl, that’s why we have the group—because by talking out these things, we find out that what we’re feeling isn’t so strange or uncommon, okay? I’ve had the same sensations, the same thoughts. You can’t get better if you don’t reach out to people, and I’m glad you called me about it. If you feel that there’s something wrong, I want you to call the Pharmadene hotline and report it. They can check you out immediately. Understand?”

“Yeah.” He sounded better, a little. Calmer. “Yeah, I forgot about the hotline. Sorry.”

“It’s all right. You’re anxious, and that’s really pretty normal.” She laughed, a little sadly. “As far as normal exists for us, anymore.”

“Okay. Thanks for saying that you’ve had these thoughts, too. I thought—I thought I was out there in the dark, you know? On my own?”

“I know,” she said. “If you need me, call back. I’ll be here.”

He hung up after a polite decompression moment of good-night wishes, and Bryn closed the call and took a deep breath. It wasn’t the first time she’d had the same conversation. All of them fell down the rabbit hole sooner or later; not everybody was able to climb out.

When I get home, I’ll get the group schedule, she promised herself. She knew how important it was for people to stick together, talk, connect.

Exactly what Pharmadene and the government didn’t want them to do, of course. But screw that.

Bryn walked through the gardens, breathing in the roses and the rich, damp smell of earth, and was almost sorry when she reached the parking lot. Her car was parked next to two of the limousines, and she headed in that direction, half her mind on what she needed to do when she reached the estate. Show Patrick the vids. That was the first thing. He’d have some perspective on it, some insight she didn’t. And she needed him to share this with her, help her process that helpless feeling of fear.

That was just about the time that she became aware that something was wrong out here in the darkness beyond the glow of the garden’s lights.

Bryn felt that indefinable prickle at the back of her neck. Ambush. That was an instinct that never really went away, even after taking off the uniform…the feeling that a predator was watching you, waiting for a chance to strike.

She wished for a gun, but the fact was, she hadn’t come entirely unarmed. As she walked on, Bryn fumbled in her purse as if searching for her keys and closed fingers around the solid weight of a collapsible riot baton that accounted for about half the weight of the bag. She thought about her cell phone, but she’d already dropped it back in its pocket, and even if she managed to dial 911, it wouldn’t help; any possible fight would be over—in her favor or against it—before help could arrive.

She felt a breath of air, something moving behind her, and lunged forward into a roll, yanking the baton out of her purse and flicking it out to full extension as she came back to her feet. The purse smacked to the pavement, and in the orange glow of sunset over the ocean, she saw two men dressed in plain clothes—jeans, work shirts, no identifying marks—who were wearing ski masks. They fanned out immediately, trying to work angles; she kicked the purse under the car to prevent it from fouling her footing and backed up between the car and the limousine on the other side.

She didn’t speak.

Neither of them moved toward her yet. They were assessing her position, and finding it tactically sound. After a few seconds they exchanged a glance, and one of them reached down to his belt and tugged free a stun gun, the kind that shot out darts. She gasped and dropped flat, rolled under the limo, and slapped her hands down to halt her momentum, then squirmed and rolled toward the tail of the long vehicle. She slithered out just as the man with the stun gun knelt down to peer underneath. He was temporarily distant from his friend, and she scrambled to her feet, lunged around between the cars, and hit him hard enough on the back of the head to knock him forehead-first into the metal of the limo door. He left a sizable dent.

He dropped, and she kicked the stun gun under the vehicle.

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 because 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.