“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.
