Two Weeks' Notice

Chapter 4

Pharmadene’s building was more like a corporate reservation: acres of land—mind-bogglingly expensive on the outskirts of San Diego—all surrounded by both an obvious fence and (Bryn was sure) more high-tech methods of security that were invisible to the naked eye. She had talked herself into feeling confident at the beginning of the drive, but as she rolled up toward the guarded iron gates (much thicker and more imposing than the last time she’d been here), she realized that she was trembling—fine little vibrations throughout her muscles, but most noticeably in her hands.

Her body was sensibly telling her to run like hell. It, at least, hadn’t forgotten what it felt like to rot. Bryn took a swallow of lukewarm water from a bottle to combat the sensation, and had her ID out and ready as she came to a stop at the guard station. The man on station there looked at her with professionally cold eyes, checked her ID, and checked the handheld tablet he was holding for confirmation. Then he had her press her finger to a scanner for print recognition before handing over a parking pass.

“Go straight until you see the sign for visitor parking,” he said. “Turn right, take only the space number that matches this pass. Leave the paper on the dashboard and proceed directly to the security desk inside the building. Don’t make any stops along the way. You’ll be monitored.”

He wasn’t kidding around, and neither was she; she followed the directions exactly, even down to making sure that she took the shortest possible path from her car to the glass-and-steel doorway. There, trapped between that door and another of bullet-resistant glass inches thick, she had to scan her fingerprint again before a cool female voice said, “Please proceed directly to the security station. Welcome back, Ms. Davis.”

Bryn shuddered hard at the creepy fact that this place knew her.

Inside was a vast atrium, designed to awe those who stepped inside; the central bank of elevators rose up at least twenty floors, and sunlight flooded down through the thick paned glass on top to glitter coldly from even more steel. The security station was made of that same burnished metal, about as comfortable as a morgue table…of which she had some experience.

Behind the chest-high desk stood no less than four people, but three of them were stationed well back from the one who smiled professionally at Bryn, accepted her ID, and passed over a badge. It was marked as ESCORTED VISITOR. “You’ll need to stay close to your escort, ma’am,” he told her. “If you get too far away…”

“I know,” she said. “Condition Red. Alarms go off. I get Tasered.”

“Something like that,” he said, without much concern. “Ms. Harris will take you upstairs.”

Ms. Harris was one of the three behind the counter, a black woman with a military-short haircut and the posture of someone who’d spent hours standing for inspection. She had a handgun, a Taser, pepper spray, handcuffs, and a number of other things that Bryn couldn’t identify at a glance. Ms. Harris was not chatty. Bryn said hello, Harris nodded, and that was the extent of their entire personal conversation all the way up to the twentieth floor. She couldn’t help but imagine Lynnette taking this same journey, but going down, down into the basement levels where all the labs were.

Down was where the white room was located, where (in the bad old days) Pharmadene had watched Returné victims decompose and recorded every single moment of it. Bryn was on those recordings. She hadn’t gotten far enough to be sluiced down the drains, but far enough that the memory made her shudder, no matter how much she blocked it out.

Was Lynnette in the white room? Or would she choose some other way to go?

The doors opened on more glass, more steel, and expensively abstract art. All the people sitting at desks looked busy and as glossy as the surroundings. Harris marched her directly down the hallway, past closed doors to one with yet another security scanner. Harris handled that on Bryn’s behalf. Beyond lay a sea of pale carpeting, more art, tamper-resistant windows, and a desk and some waiting areas.

Ms. Harris shut the door behind her. Bryn walked across the rug to the man sitting behind the desk. She was trembling even more now. The last time she’d been in the executive offices of Pharmadene, she’d been meeting with a VP who’d been shooting for this very CEO position…and it hadn’t ended well for her. Bryn had spent the next few days locked in the white room, dying. As Lynnette might be now.

Not something she could put out of her mind or convince her body wouldn’t happen again. Something in her was shrieking in a raw, half-mad voice to get out of here.

The assistant at the desk—younger than she would have expected—looked up from typing on his keyboard and checked her badge. “Ms. Davis,” he said. “Please take a seat. Mr. Zaragosa will be with you in a moment. Coffee?”

Bryn had a sudden flashback to her own meeting with Carl this morning, the taste of coffee, the sound of Lynnette screaming, and said, tightly, “No, thank you.” She wasn’t eating or drinking anything in this place. Her palms were sweating. Holding a cup would only show off the unsteadiness of her hands, anyway, and she didn’t need the distraction.

He nodded, picked up the phone, and spoke into it quietly. After he’d hung up, he went back to the keyboard, and the white noise of key clicks was a subdued, even soundtrack as Bryn sat down in one of the uncomfortable modern chairs. There was an old issue of the company newsletter on the table—three months old, probably the only one produced after the fall of the previous administration. Curiously, the magazine didn’t mention how most of the employees had been callously murdered and Revived by their bosses, but it did have perky “happyspeak” articles about how much the company cared. Corporate values. What a crock of shit.

She was glad she hadn’t accepted anything to drink. Even with her stomach empty, the articles made her nauseated.

The interior office door opened with a sudden rush of air, and Bryn forced herself to wait a beat, then replace the reading material neatly before she got to her feet to greet the oncoming chief executive officer of Pharmadene.

“Raymond Zaragosa,” he said, extending his hand. She took it, feeling a little off-balance now, because he wasn’t what she’d expected. “Jeremy, hold my calls, would you? Ms. Davis, please come in. Thanks for making the trip. I’m sure this is the last place you’d like to be today, given the history.”

He was on target, of course, but as she followed him into the inner sanctum, she found herself considering Zaragosa himself, not her potentially dire situation. He wasn’t corporate poster-boy material, for one thing: graying hair, yes, but not recently cut; his suit looked nice enough, but he hadn’t bothered with tailoring. Added to that, he had a stern, lived-in face with lots of character lines. No nonsense.

“Have a seat,” he said. “Sorry about the modern-art furniture. I hate this stuff, but it comes with the office, and I’m not wasting taxpayer money on redecorating just because I think it’s uncomfortable.” He didn’t indicate the chair in front of his desk, but instead one at the round meeting table in the corner, decorated with a speakerphone and piles of folders. “First of all—and let’s just get this out of the way—I know coming back here must have been traumatic. If there had been any other way to ensure secure transfer of information, I wouldn’t have dragged you back to this place. I know what happened to you here.” There was compassion in his expression, and it seemed genuine.

Bryn tried to smile as she said, “Thank you, but I’m fine.” The second that his gaze lingered on her let her know he recognized the lie but was prepared to ignore it. “Let’s just get down to business, if you don’t mind.” She thought about asking about Lynnette, but the fact was, he wouldn’t have any personal information. Not about that. They’d keep him away from the disagreeable parts of the Pharmadene equations.

And besides, he was already talking. “First of all, I’m FBI, and yes, I’m fully qualified as a field agent, but my focus is on white-collar crime,” he said. “Forensic accounting. That’s why they brought me in here to try to autopsy the Pharmadene books while I administer the shutdown process. Most of what I found is totally aboveboard; like all major corporations, they had to have yearly audits from reputable vendors. But what happened this past year was completely out of the ordinary. I’m sure the plan was that by the time the audit requirement came around, they’d control a large enough chunk of the important people”—given finger quotes—“that they wouldn’t be at any risk of discovery. All that should have come to a stop when Irene Harte and her contingent of corporate rebels was taken out, but the thing is, some of these suspicious financial activities haven’t stopped, and I’m hitting a stone wall. If I take it through official channels, my fear is that word will leak before we can really nail down what’s going on. So. You’re our…black ops team, I suppose. For lack of a better term.”

“You know that it’s a condition of my continued freedom to do whatever work the FBI wants me to do,” Bryn said. “It’s not as if I really have a choice.”

“I know about your agreement. And I also know that Pharmadene continues to dispense, out of the refrigerated stockpiles, a limited quantity of Returné to selected individuals. You’re one of them.”

And, in fact, she wasn’t using her store directly; she gave it to Manny Glickman, who tinkered with the formula, stripping out all the “extras” that Pharmadene’s genetic engineering had put into it. Those extras would have allowed Pharmadene’s in-the-know executives—those that had survived, anyway—to control her in a real and immediate way, and it was something she never wanted to experience again. Certainly the government knew of the built-in Protocols by now. She could never take that chance.

But she merely said, “Yes.”

Zaragosa shook his head. “I know this sucks, Ms. Davis, and I wish there was a better answer for it, but please understand, I believe that the people receiving these payments are probably involved in the illegal manufacture and sale of Returné. Neither of us wants to see that continue. It’s a drug that has no real upside, not for anyone.”

“What about the cancer cure it was intended to be?”

“We’re working it back to that, but the revival drug itself…we’ll never manufacture it again. It’s just too dangerous. The formula has been wiped completely from servers, backups, everywhere.”

She really doubted that, although Zaragosa probably believed it. No way was the government going to just delete that information; there were secret backups, secret labs probably even now working on the formulas. Dangerous things didn’t get incinerated; they got archived. Like smallpox. Just in case.

“What do you have so far on tracing the payments?” she asked. Zaragosa pulled out a folder from the stack and thumbed through it, then handed it over to her with one page pulled out to the front. It looked like a flowchart, but it was incredibly complex—the payments went to a shell company, split, flowed a dozen directions, all of which bounced to other accounts all around the world. “You do realize that my skills aren’t exactly accounting-related, don’t you?”

For answer, he produced another, handwritten sheet of paper. She somehow had no doubt that he’d written it himself. On it was an address in Los Angeles and a short message: CAN’T PUT THIS ON RECORD. WE ARE BEING MONITORED 24/7, EVERYWHERE.

She glanced up at his face, and saw the intensity there. He wasn’t kidding. He didn’t trust his own people.

“As you can see,” Zaragosa said, “all I can tell you is that although the payments look legitimate, they are definitely suspicious just from the care that’s been taken to reroute and conceal them. I would start with the apparent front company, if I were you. But please, be careful. I can’t guarantee that this won’t be dangerous.”

He meant that; she could tell. She nodded, closed the folder, and tucked it under her arm. “I understand,” Bryn said. She stood up and offered her hand. “I’ll call you when I have something.”

“My card,” Zaragosa said, and reached over to pull one from a stack—except the one he pulled out had writing on the back, she could feel that without even turning it over. She nodded, tapped it once, and slid it into her jacket pocket. “Call anytime.”

“Am I free to go now?”

“Of course. Jeremy will walk you out. I’m sorry I can’t go myself, but I’m scheduled for a conference call in just a few moments. My thanks for being so understanding of our dilemma.”

She nodded and the assistant’s arrival at the door derailed any possible reply she might have come up with. There was a lot going on here, and a lot she couldn’t understand…but she trusted Zaragosa, maybe unreasonably so. If what he had scribbled out was true, there was a grave problem within Pharmadene—a crippling problem for the FBI that they probably didn’t even trust their own technical people to investigate. There were cameras everywhere in this building, and it wasn’t hard, if you were inside the system, to keep track of everyone’s computer activity, read messages, monitor digital phone calls. There was no privacy, especially if they had people bugged at home, too.

Pharmadene had always had oppressive, intrusive security, but it ought to have been turned off by now, or at least be under the FBI’s control.

That it wasn’t was a sign that things were still very, very dangerous.

So of course, they throw me right in the middle of it, Bryn thought. She slipped Zaragosa’s card in her pocket. The temptation to read what he’d put on the back of it was very, very strong, but she didn’t dare. High-definition cameras everywhere. She’d be sharing the contents of the note with anyone who cared to look.

McCallister wasn’t going to be any happier about all this intrigue than she was. That was somehow a little heartening.

Jeremy was about as chatty as Ms. Harris had been. He had a nicer suit than his boss, and there was something about his subtle, expensive aftershave that irritated Bryn; he seemed more like Old Guard than New FBI. She wanted out of the elevator, out of the building, out of the clinging slime of Pharmadene, but she had to patiently wait through the long drop to the ground floor, sign out, turn in her badge, fingerprint out, get in her car, fingerprint out again at the gate, before she finally achieved some kind of freedom. Nobody searched the folder during her exit interview, which she found curious until she saw the stamp on the outside. It had Zaragosa’s personal signature on it, and it said EYES ONLY, with her name listed.

She drove off the Pharmadene campus and five miles along the winding road until she felt it was safe, and then turned off into a large park and made sure to pull into the shade of a big, spreading tree. The place was mostly deserted. She opened the windows, turned off the engine, and first checked the folder over very, very carefully—not the contents, but the structure of the paper.

That was how she found the device, tiny as it was, embedded in the thick folder itself. It was certainly a tracker; it might do more than that, too. She couldn’t take the chance. She separated the contents of the file from the folder, then looked through each page, holding it up to the light for any telltale shadows. All she found were standard watermarks.

Bryn took the folder to the nearest recycling station and added it to a bin destined for shredding. Then she turned his business card over and read the back of it.

It read: Do not trust Riley Block.

The address he’d written out in longhand she kept in her pocket, along with the business card—which she also checked for a tracker. The rest of the paperwork would go into her safe at the office until she had time later to study the thick, dense information.

If they’re listening in right now, she thought, it’ll be silent as the grave.

It was only a little funny, once she considered it.

“You are absolutely not going alone,” Pat said, beating Joe Fideli to the punch by about one second.

They were sitting in Joe Fideli’s workshop, located behind his house. It was nine p.m., postdinner. Kylie, Joe’s wife, had seemed happy to have them as guests, though Bryn guessed she’d never be completely comfortable with Joe bringing his work home with him. For Bryn, it had been a delightfully relaxing experience, being back in a house that featured well-worn, comfortable furniture, chaos, and noisy children. Mr. French loved it, and she knew that leaving him to play fetch with the Fideli children would be good for everyone.

As nice as the dinner was, there was a great deal of relief being in the soundproofed, security-hardened workshop, too. For one thing, Joe had fine single malt scotch stockpiled here. Cask-conditioned sixteen-year-old Laphroaig. It lingered like sunlight in her veins, though the nanites in her bloodstream took care of any intoxication pretty fast, which sucked.

Together, the three of them had gone through her meeting with Zaragosa, the written notes, and the official paperwork.

And the two men were united in their opposition to her running the FBI’s errands.

“You’re seriously trying to tell me what I can and can’t do?” she asked Patrick, watching his face with full concentration. “Because I’m pretty sure you can’t, Pat. And neither can you, Joe.”

“Okay,” Joe immediately said, holding up both hands in surrender. “No arguments from me—you can do whatever you want. But I think what Pat meant was that it isn’t smart for you to go without backup. Right, Pat?”

Pat was staring her down, a frown deepening between his brows. “Maybe.” She reached over for the scotch and poured him another dram. “You could be walking into another meeting with Jonathan Mercer; he’s got his fingers in everything. And we all know how splendidly that’s gone so far.”

He wasn’t pulling punches, but he wasn’t wrong, either. Her first face-to-face with Mercer, one of the two inventors of Returné and an all-around madman, had resulted in a gunfight. Her second had gotten Joe Fideli put into the hospital with a punctured lung.

Her third time hadn’t been the charm. She’d gotten her brains mashed with a frying pan at the hands of her own sister while Mercer laughed. That sort of thing wasn’t necessarily fatal to her anymore, but it was damn sure one of the memories she could have done without.

“Neither one of you is quite as durable as I am,” Bryn said. “And if it is Mercer, it’s better if I get him myself without putting more people I care about at risk. It’s bad enough he’s got Annie. I can’t let you two go walking in there to end up the same way. He’d love to recruit the two of you to his army of the walking dead, with all your ninja combat skills.”

“I’m not a ninja,” Pat said.

“Speak for yourself, man.” That earned Joe a poisonously angry glance from Pat, and he toasted the two of them, drained his glass, and stood up. “Right. You two work this out between you and let me know when I’m needed. I’m going back to wash dishes before my wife kicks me out to sleep here. Feel free to not mess with anything. And lock up when you leave.”

“Good night,” Bryn said as he left, and then looked at Pat, eyebrows raised. “I didn’t think he trusted anybody enough to leave them here with all his toys.”

For answer, Pat pointed to the corners of the room, and Bryn saw the discreet glinting eyes of cameras. “He trusts us,” he said, “but that doesn’t mean he won’t rewind the video. Just in case.”

“Trust but verify?”

“Exactly.”

Joe had good reason to have such high security in his workshop—workshop being a euphemism for something between a well-stocked panic room and an arsenal that would give the ATF nightmares, if they had any inkling it existed. Joe Fideli had a past with some branch of the military, but he’d been working on his own for a long time, and that work involved serious and varied weaponry…neatly stored on racks, hung on boards, and packed in crates. The gleam of black metal and the smell of gun oil permeated the place. Bryn had asked him, straight out, if he was a mercenary; Joe had replied, without even a flicker of concern, that he was a military contractor. Which was probably a yes.

And in this, he had a lot in common with Pat McCallister, who’d also moved in the same circles in the military and afterward. Bryn still didn’t have a good inventory of his skills, except that they were wide, varied, and expert. He was probably checked out on all the weapons stored around here, for instance; she knew he was a deadly good shot, and had good hand-to-hand combat experience. More than that, though, he had contacts. Lots of them. Enough to solve problems that guns wouldn’t.

Pat’s smile faded back into seriousness, and he leaned forward, hands clasped between his knees. “Bryn, you cannot go into this alone. I’m serious about this. It isn’t safe.”

She mirrored his posture, just as intent, and said, “I’m serious when I say that as much as I appreciate your…concern, I can take care of myself. And I will. Clear?” The hiccup of a pause before she said the word concern was telling, and she knew it. The warmth didn’t leave him, but it banked itself down to a low simmer, and Pat leaned back in the chair, watching her with suddenly guarded eyes.

“Are we back to this?” he asked. “All of a sudden it’s just that I’m concerned? Are we just friends now?”

She didn’t want to have this discussion, not now, not here…not with the video evidence of it left behind on Joe Fideli’s cameras. She and Joe were tight, and he was trustworthy, but this was deeply personal business.

“I don’t know,” she said very evenly, although what was going on inside her was full of sharp edges and sudden drops. “Aren’t we?”

Pat shook his head, not to answer her, but just to indicate he was done with the conversation. She set her unfinished glass of scotch aside and stood up. “I’ll meet you back at the house,” she said. “We can talk there.”

He wanted to push it, she could tell, but he was just as private as she was about their relationship, whatever it was. “I’ll be up late.” He meant, Don’t go to bed without talking to me. She didn’t acknowledge that at all, just offered him a cool kiss on the cheek and left without another word.

Outside, the night air felt damp and heavy with mist. She went into Joe’s house through the back door—keypad lock, to which she had a code—and found Joe and Kylie in the kitchen finishing up the dishes. Without a word, Kylie handed her a towel, and she helped wipe down the damp china and put it away.

“So,” Joe said. “That was a short conversation.”

“Yeah.”

“Something you need to share?”

“I didn’t know this was an AA meeting, Joe.”

Kylie shot her husband a warning look. She was exactly the kind of woman Bryn would have expected to attract Joe, actually. Lovely, strong, intelligent, and sensitive. She reached over with a soapy hand and picked up the half-full wineglass sitting by the sink, which she finished off. “Cheers,” she said. “It’s not, so ignore my nosy-old-lady husband. Thanks for coming over. The kids love seeing you and Mr. French.”

“Mostly Mr. French,” Bryn said, but she smiled anyway. Right on cue, her bulldog wandered into the kitchen, panting. He flopped down next to Bryn’s feet, clearly exhausted, and gave her a piteous long-suffering groan, complete with puppy-dog eyes. “I think he’s ready to go.” She wiped the last plate and put it away.

Kylie dried her hands and hugged Bryn close, kissed her cheek, and whispered, “Be careful.”

“I will,” Bryn whispered back, then let go and hugged Joe, too. He didn’t bother warning her, and there was no cheek-smooching from him. It was like hugging a block of concrete. It always surprised her how densely muscled he was; he carried himself so casually that it was easy to miss. “See you tomorrow.”

“I’ll wear my best gun,” he said without a trace of irony.

Mr. French groaned again, heaved himself back to his feet, and followed her out to the car, where he jumped up on the passenger seat, turned around three times, and flopped down with a sigh that said, more clearly than anything, how run out he was. He didn’t even beg for the window to be down. By the time she’d driven to the end of the block and made the first turn out of Joe’s neighborhood, her dog was completely, utterly asleep. And snoring like a little old man.

Bryn rested one hand on his warm, short fur. He woke up long enough to twist around and give her fingers a sleepy lick, then fell right back to sleep. “Everything’s all right, dog,” she told him. He snored. “We’re going to be okay. I promise.”

She wasn’t talking to the dog, of course, not really. Apart from being asleep, Mr. French had total faith in her ability to make everything right. In his doggy universe, that was her job—to make him happy and safe, to keep the food and water coming, and to toss the ball.

Simple.

There were times Bryn ached to have that simplicity for herself, though she knew full well she’d hate it if it came. Life was never simple, and it wasn’t meant to be.

She took the long way home. She stopped at the beach to walk on the sand, shoes off, breathing in the mist and listening to the timeless, steady hiss of the surf. She wasn’t alone out there, but she could pretend she was; that was what all the other shadowy figures—sometimes entwined—were doing, pretending they were invisible, locked in their own private universe. Nobody bothered her, or even spoke to her, and after ten minutes she was chilled to the bone but only a little soothed.

The drive home was uneventful until her phone rang. Bryn hit the hands-free button on her steering wheel and said, “I’m on my way,” because she knew it would be Pat, checking on her slow progress.

But the voice that came out of the speakers wasn’t Pat’s. It was her sister, Annalie’s. “Bryn?”

Bryn steered hastily to the curb, put the car in park, and said, “Annie? Annie, where are you?”

“Bryn, I need you to come get me. Please come get me.…” She sounded desperately scared and lost. “I need to see Mom. I need to get home.…” In a much softer voice, her sister said, “I don’t know what’s happening to me.”

“Sweetie, where are you?”

“I—I don’t know. I think I’m dying. Please come get me.…” Annie was crying Bryn realized with a wrench; she sounded disoriented. “A boat, I think I’m on a boat. I can’t get out. I need help. Please—” Annie sucked in a sudden breath that sounded almost like a scream—it was so drenched with alarm—and then there was a soft click, and the call died.

“No,” Bryn whispered, and fumbled for her phone in her purse. “No, no, no, Annie, no…” She checked the number: CALL BLOCKED. She dialed Pat McCallister’s number. Her mind was clear, cold, and running very, very fast. When he picked up, she said, “I need you to pull my cell phone records and trace the call I got right before this. It was Annie, Pat. Annie called me. She said she thought she was on a boat.”

He was silent for maybe a second, and then said, “I’ll have the intel ready before you get here.” She didn’t doubt for a moment that he would have someone, somewhere, who owed him enough of a favor to make it happen.

“Pat—” The line was already dead. He hadn’t said good-bye.

Mr. French, who’d been woken up by the sudden stop and the emotion radiating out of her, whined in concern and licked her arm. She leaned over and hugged him, and said, “We’re going to find her, baby. We’re going to find my sister.”

He barked as if he agreed and settled down in the seat as she put the car in gear and headed home with absolute disregard for speed limits. God, if he’s decided she’s of no further value to him…Mercer was not a nice man. If he decided that Annie wasn’t useful, he’d dump her like a bad date. In Annie’s case, that meant no more shots, and no more shots of Returné meant a slow, agonizing, and gruesome death. She could already be far along the path.

He’s luring you, the cooler part of her brain warned her. That wasn’t just Annie being resourceful and getting her hands on a cell phone. He wanted her to call. He wants you to go rushing in to save her.

Maybe. But honestly, Bryn couldn’t see how else to play it. Annalie was her sister, and she’d been innocent in all this, a victim. There was no way Bryn could play it safe if there was even the remotest chance that Annie could be rescued and out of Mercer’s hands.

She also knew what Pat was going to say. She just didn’t want to hear it.