32

“She must have taken it from my jacket—”

“What were you doing carrying classified data?!” Xenopoulos demanded.  “Protocol states—”

“I know what protocol states,” Matt yelled, but then seemed to recover himself.  He ran a hand through his hair.  “Let’s not fight in front of the kids,” he nodded toward Neil and the two goons, who watched with rapt attention.  The goons immediately looked elsewhere, but Neil just grinned stupidly at Xenopoulos.  “I screwed up.  We can discuss it later,” Matt said.

“Fine,” conceded Xenopoulos.

Kendra was surprised at the capitulation.  Wasn’t Xenopoulos in charge?

“Neil,” Xenopoulos turned toward Kendra’s gangly colleague, who raised his gaze from the sexy spy’s cleavage to meet her eyes.  “Here is a check for the balance of your student loans.”

Xenopoulos held an envelope out toward Neil, but as he reached out for it, she withdrew it a little.  “In exchange for which you agree to keep silent about everything having to do with this day, and you will report to American Missile the morning after you receive your degree.”

Neil nodded.  “I will,” he said.

Kendra shook her head.  Neil sounded like the nervous groom at some kind of warped wedding ceremony.  As an only child, she tended to find pseudo-siblings among her acquaintances.  Kendra had come to think of Neil as an obnoxious sort of big brother during his many uninvited visits to her lab over the years.  Had she been completely wrong?

“How can you work for these people?” she asked him.  “You just saw them torture—”

“Uh, uh, uh,” Matt tutted, and raised the pain remote so that Kendra could see his thumb hover over the top button.

Kendra settled for throwing Neil a meaningful look.  He shrugged, and fixed his attention on the envelope he held.  Kendra had the sense that he longed to open it then and there.  She felt let down far more than was rational.  Matt wasn’t Shaggy, and Neil was not even a friend let alone a stand-in brother.

Matt jerked his head toward the door.  “Let’s go, Tanagawa, and just remember that I hold that pretty brilliant head of yours hostage.”  He slipped his hand, still holding the pain remote, into the pocket of his trousers.

Feeling like she was leaving her only friend, Kendra walked out of her lab.  She walked silently across campus, between Xenopoulos and Matt, who chatted and smiled enough that the three of them did not attract attention.

They sat three-across in the backseat of a town car that met them on the far side of The Commons.  The spies dropped all pretense of cheer, and argued about Matt’s handling of the vampire population curve instead.  For the most part Xenopoulos scolded him.  She was in charge after all.

“Look, drop it already!” Matt finally exploded.  “What’s the big deal anyway?  We have her now.”  He gestured toward Kendra, who also wondered why Xenopoulos seemed so upset.

Xenopoulos was red in the face and looked ready to burst.  She glanced at Kendra, and it was obvious that the spy couldn’t say what say what she longed to say in front of their hostage.

“Exactly,” she spit out after several moments of internal struggle.  “Think about that.  The two were completely separate as far as anyone but The Circle knew, and now…”  She grunted in frustration, threw up her hands, and let them fall to her thighs with a loud slap.

“Great, just great,” Matt shouted.  “Lecture me about security, and then let slip the name of—”

In one deft move Xenopoulos drew a gun from her purse and, arm outstretched in front of Kendra’s nose, pushed it against Matt’s forehead.

They rode like that for several blocks.  Kendra saw the driver glance back in the rearview mirror not once but several times.  The first time he just looked surprised and frightened, but by the third time he seemed desperate to escape.

Xenopoulos had seen the change too.  The instant the driver swerved left into an alley she aimed the pistol at the back of his head.  When the man dove out of the car, she blew a hole in the side of his head before he hit the ground.

“Take the wheel,” she hissed at Matt, who launched himself into the front seat in one smooth move, as if he’d done it a hundred times before.  Who practices that sort of thing?  The answers she came up with scared Kendra more than anything since the silver bracelet had hurt her so badly.  Corporate greed was one thing, government collusion quite another.  Her hopes of escape plummeted as Matt drove the town car smoothly out of the alley and joined the stream of traffic headed out of the city.

As they’d done every day since she arrived at American Missile, the goons locked her inside her new lab.  It held all her old equipment and more.  Kendra had at her disposal computing power that was the equivalent of the whole Stamford system, maybe more.  The gleaming white lab bench had been cut to her height.  The furniture was comfortable, the drawers in the bench didn’t stick, the lights neither buzzed nor flickered.  Everything was in order, yet Kendra could not think.  She missed her piled papers and texts, her Rube Goldberg alarm, and even the musty smell of the old physics building.

She really needed to think.  The latest attempt to recreate her jump to England 1593 had gone wrong even though American Missile supplied a woman with height and weight  similar to Kendra’s for the second attempt.  For her first try, she had used a guy with what Kendra had come to think of as AM’s standard goon build.  She suspected that the jumpers weren’t the problem.  Each had stood perfectly still on the little black circle that Kendra had painted on the floor.  The problem was that they remained in place when she hit the button.

In the days that followed Kendra adjusted every variable she could think of, but to no effect.  The jumpers, initially excited and nervous, grew bored and resentful.  The goon went so far as to light a cigarette while he leaned one hip against Kendra’s shiny new lab bench.  She yelled at him so loudly that Xenopoulos looked in, and promptly fired the guy.  He paled immediately.  Kendra wondered what the exit process consisted of at a place like American Missile.  They weren’t above murdering the people they hired.  Like me.  She shivered. 

Fear won’t help me think.  She calmed herself by remembering that the prospect of dying wasn’t new to her, not since she’d first jumped back to talk with Elle.