Angel Face (15 page)

In chains on his knees, the dashing doctor could have been one of Caravaggio’s religious martyrs, a human landscape of naked light and shadow.

It was a good thing he’d gone quiet, because she would certainly have hurt him—and not even intentionally—if she’d tried to use the knife now. It was useless in her hand. She was fairly useless, too, spinning like a top. He didn’t get the credit for that, though. She was battling a fever, numbing fatigue, and wet heat. She’d had no food since that morning and didn’t want any, but she should probably force herself to eat and regain some strength. She couldn’t let him find out that she was weakening.

A dragonfly whirred through the hut, iridescent jade, and landed on her hostage’s blindfold. He jerked his head and nearly toppled himself but said nothing. Sweat sheened his temples, tiny pearls that would soon be tracing the strong bones of his face. The smell of trapped anger was powerful. It burned like locked brakes. But maybe he was weakening. There was one way to find out.

She drew deeply from the very pit of her belly, and then did it again, all in an effort to conquer her light-headedness. Someone had taught her how to do that, she was virtually sure. She was also becoming aware of something else: A part of her had ice for blood and was totally fearless. But that part of her was locked up with the
horrors of the erased months, and to release it would have been too dangerous. Since that time, she had held everything at bay with a few words, but she couldn’t do that any longer. She would never get through this without the fearlessness.

The knife blade came to life as she reclaimed her grip on the handle.

“Let’s see now, what comes after the shirt?” She pretended to ponder the issue. “Pants maybe? I’d hate to think what the mosquitoes are going to do to your bare—”

He chewed a word into dust.

“Excuse me?”

“I said we’ll do it your way. Ask your questions.”

“And you’ll answer them?”

“I’ll answer them. What do you want to know?”

“I want to know what
you
know about Angela Lowe.”

“Angela Lowe is you, right?”

“Just tell me about her.” She had begun to shake again, and even gripping the knife didn’t help. There was a price for unlocking the power hidden in her psyche, and she would have to pay it now. She unlocked everything.
Tell me what Angela Lowe has done, every sickening detail. Tell me who her friends are, if she has any, and which one of them wants her dead. Is it Brandt or Sammy? Is it Silver? Or someone she doesn’t even know, a ghost she erased? Tell me if there’s any hope for Angela Lowe, because she’s breaking, Doctor. She’s breaking faster than you are.

“I have one condition,” he said.

“You don’t get conditions.”

His head came up defiantly. “Then cut off my clothes and gut me with that knife, or whatever it is you plan to do, because I’m not saying another word until you take off this blindfold.”

It flashed through her mind that he wanted to see who and what he was dealing with. That would give him an
edge, and it wasn’t the kind of concession she should make, especially at his suggestion. She also had another kind of flash, one that allowed her to imagine that he might want more intimate contact with her, contact only the eyes could make, but that was ridiculous.

Gut him?
she thought, marveling at his choice of words. She had to believe he was bluffing. He didn’t think she was capable of
that
kind of violence. She
wasn’t
capable. Even with a crucial part of her past missing, she knew she had never done anything like that and never could. It was almost as if he were talking about another person, someone not even human. Someone had been lying to him, she realized with true astonishment. They were trying to make him think she was a monster.
Someone was lying.

A drop of perspiration trickled and ran. She blinked, and her eyes felt the sting. Her gait was unsteady as she walked over to him and her hand wavered. A warning whispered in her head, but not soon enough to stop her. She shouldn’t be using the knife.
Someone might get hurt.

The blade hissed near his ear, and he jerked back. His blindfold fell away, and Angela saw that he was bleeding. She thought she’d cut him, but it wasn’t pain she saw in his gaze, it was confusion, rage, and disbelief. He was staring at her as if his eyes were playing tricks on him. Blue eyes, she realized. Excruciatingly blue. Like the earth from a million miles out.

“Who the hell are you?” he whispered.

Angela’s dizziness returned with a vengeance, tilting her in space. What was he talking about? Who did he think she was? He had searched out every detail of her face that day at his house. He’d stared until she felt as faint as she did at this moment. And strangest of all, he’d looked as if he were falling in love with her, or half in love with her already. She hadn’t imagined that. But now he didn’t seem to recognize her. How could that be?

* * *

T
HERE
were no signs of global warming inside the Cognitive Studies lab. Sammy Tran could see his own breath. The weather in his own personal squirrel cage was a frigid ten degrees lower than usual, and the worst part was, he couldn’t find his earmuffs. It felt like there were icicles hanging from his ears and a few other extremities.

Hell, that wasn’t the worst part. The worst part was she was gone.

Angela Lowe was still missing, and he hadn’t been able to think about anything else. His work was going to hell on him, and that was why he’d lowered the temperature. The chill would distract him. He was desperate to keep his mind off his own infantile preoccupations and focused on what he had to get done before the sun came up again. He’d never taken Angel Face to her limits. Tonight that would change.

Tonight he would blow the circuits on this video game he played for a living and prove that she could do everything that had been claimed and more. The program was addictive. The pure power of it thrilled him. He could control people’s brains, their behavior. No one got to do that, not even God, if you believed in free will. No one but a lab rat named Sammy.

He didn’t care about the glory. He didn’t even care about the power really. It was success, the intoxicating rush of success. Who would have believed it possible to control nearly every aspect of human behavior with the click of a mouse? That you could reduce humanity to a hard science?

Sammy brushed his palm with the spines of an overgrown butch haircut. The hair made him look like a sea urchin, but he liked the way it tickled his skin and stimulated the sensory cortex. He had news for the nonbelievers. He could regulate emotion, modulate motivation, and/
or make people as horny as toads, if he chose. He could not only read minds, he could change them.

He could also drive an innocent to the very brink of butchery. And he could stop her. Now that was power.

Naturally there would be outraged hordes, decrying the morality of what Angel Face could do. But Sammy couldn’t be concerned with that right now. He had to be concerned with making her work perfectly. That was his job.

He had his hand poised on the mouse, ready to increase signal strength to the deep limbic system, when he heard papers rustling. It sounded like someone had opened a book. He left the program running and got up from his desk. It was a short walk down the hall to the next cubicle, and an even shorter trip in his mind because he knew exactly what he would find.

Her cubicle was an empty shell, not a sign of life there except for the books that were piled in stacks and wedged between cheap metal bookends. As always, there were one or two left lying open, as if she’d meant to get back to them but was interrupted with something more interesting. One would think she did nothing but read. Read and whisk imaginary hair from her face. He was always kidding her about her overactive cingulate, and how she was just one step away from obsessive-compulsive disorder.
Pretty soon you’ll be counting cracks in the sidewalk, Angela.

She’s fine, just taking some time off
. That’s what he’d been told.

Bullshit!

He kicked the back of her lab chair savagely, smashing it against the countertop. Anywhere else the sound would have exploded, but in the vacuum of the lab, it barely registered. Just like his life. Nothing registered. Nothing made a sound.

Where in hell is she? And how could I have let her disappear from right under my nose?

I
T
wasn’t just the bloody knife in her hand. Jordan had no idea who he was dealing with at this point. She wasn’t the frightened female in the
San Luis
mission or the guarded professional who came to his home, and certainly not the innocent in the picture. She was flushed with purpose and hot for some kind of action. Maybe a confrontation that would give her an excuse to carry out her threats. Hidden in her deceptively soft brown eyes was a wildness that made him think she must be high on something.

Who the hell am I dealing with?
The teenager in the video had been desperate, but this was a different kind of desperation, and he didn’t know what to make of it. Having a man restrained and helpless had obviously empowered her, and if that was her game, then maybe she
was
capable of killing, simply for the feeling of power and control it gave her.

God, he didn’t want that to be true. Even tied up at knifepoint, he didn’t. Maybe he was hallucinating because of the head wound. His skull throbbed, and his eyes didn’t
want to focus. Worse, the haunting cries that emanated from the jungle were beginning to sound human, like some tormented soul in need of rescue.

“What did you hit me with?” he asked. “I could have a concussion or a skull fracture.”

“You could, but it’ll have to wait.”

The cords in his jaw tightened. “For what? Until I’m unconscious?”

“Until you answer my questions. You could be bleeding to death, and I wouldn’t give you a Band-Aid—”

“I
am
bleeding to death.” The blood was running into his eyes, that’s why he couldn’t fucking focus. The insanity of it hit him, and he wanted to laugh. She’d knocked him out, tied him up, cut off his clothes, and stuck him with a knife, and he was trying to give
her
a break? Who was crazy here? Just let him get out of these ropes and they’d see how tough she was.

It hadn’t been easy tracking her down, and if it weren’t for Jordan’s Doctors Without Borders volunteer work, he would have been lost once he hit Mexico City. Fortunately, he had some experience with the area, and with Mitch’s help, was able to make arrangements for transportation—such as it was—and accommodations.

Mitch had scrounged him a copy of her driver’s license photo, which Jordan used to find the taxi driver who took her to the
autobus
. He made the trip to
San Luis
the same way she did, by kamikaze bus, and once there, he bought himself a junker pickup, and greased a few more palms, one of which had belonged to a mission worker, who loaned him the priest’s robes. The hood had come in very handy, and Jordan had known the local
policia
would be less likely to interfere with a man of the cloth.

Right now, his captor was nonchalantly wiping the blade clean on her shorts. He watched in mute disbelief as she snapped her wrist and stuck the knife deep in the wooden floor at her feet. It was vibrating like a musical
saw. He was a surgeon, and he couldn’t have done that without amputating a toe.

“I nicked you when I cut off the blindfold,” she announced. “Scalp wounds bleed like crazy, but you’ll be fine. You should know that,
Doctor.”

Crazy bitch, smug bitch. Take your pick
, he thought. At least she was sweating, too. It wasn’t rolling down her face in sheets like it was his, but her throat was moist, and her clothes were starting to catch and cling to her body when she moved. Her thin cotton blouse was getting especially friendly with the curves of her breasts, which moved so freely he wondered whether she was wearing a bra. If ever a woman needed support. She wasn’t big, but she was jiggling, and it was damn distracting. He kept waiting for it to happen again when what he really wanted was some satisfaction. A pound of flesh . . . or several pounds . . . he wondered how much she weighed. That’s how many pounds he wanted.

A wail of anguish ripped through the hut, followed by a chorus of answering wails. Howlers. They were living up to their names, and Jordan could totally relate. The jungle was a cacophony of barks, squawks, shrieks, and hooting. Birdy would have had a field day imitating them. But there was one particular sound that disturbed Jordan. As far as he knew, only one kind of animal roared like that, roared incessantly: a big cat.

“You can’t keep me tied up like this.” It was his voice of unimpeachable reason. “My kneecaps are ground chuck by now. My wrists and ankles have gone dead, and gangrene is nasty stuff, in case you didn’t know.”

“Gangrene takes days to set in.”

“Not when you’re hogtied and left to rot in a steam bath.”

It was true enough, although it cut no ice with her, obviously. She was looking at her fingernails, totally bored with his whining. The sun was low in the sky now,
and it had been morning when she’d knocked him out. That was at least five hours ago, but she didn’t intend to let him go. She was going to run with this ball until she scored, and she just might not let him go then, either.

So be it,
he told himself. She wanted to play for life-and-death stakes, and he did that better than most, maybe even her. He’d made his reputation saving lives. She’d made hers taking them, but that would keep it interesting.

“What do I know about you?” His voice had gone intentionally cold. “I know they call you Angel Face, and that you get your kicks by seducing doctors and killing them. It’s some kind of sick revenge for what your father did to you, and it gives you the illusion of control.”

She was already shaking her head. “That’s not true. None of it is true. My name is Angela Lowe, just as you said, and I work for a biotechnology firm. I’ve never killed anyone—”

“You killed your father. I’ve got a videotape.”

Her flushed face was suddenly chalky. “A videotape? Where did you get that?”

“The CIA. You worked for them as an informant.”

“No, never.”

“You weren’t an informant?”

“Not for the CIA. It was the biotech company, and only because they blackmailed me.”

“It says in your dossier that you wiped your own memory because you thought they were going to kill you for what you knew. You were trying to erase some biowarfare secrets given you by a source named Adam, but you threw out the baby with the bathwater, and now there’s a period of time missing, possibly as long as a year.”

“Adam?” Her voice fell to a whisper. The constant whine of the insects drowned her out. He imagined them as big as birds. Maybe they were birds.

He watched her carefully, aware that he might have found a chink in the armor. At the very least, he’d struck
a nerve. “How can you be sure you didn’t work for the CIA, unless you were bluffing about wiping your memory?”

She was watching him now, perspiration beading on her skin. If he was right, she was trying to decide how much he already knew and how much it was safe to reveal.

“I wasn’t bluffing,” she said. “I’ve been tested, hypnotized, regressed, drugged, everything. It’s all gone. I can remember nothing about the last year I was an informant and very little about the time I spent down here. What do you know about Adam?”

She’d barely taken a breath, but he let the question hang. “You might have worked for the CIA and not remember?”

“I don’t know.” A tense pause. “It’s possible.”

She’d lost the fiery color that made him think she was high, but he was even more certain now that something was wrong. Her skin was pale and clammy, and the blouse stuck to her breasts like paper. She was even showing some signs of septic disorientation, which could be triggered by fevers that cycled between heat and chills. If she’d suffered an accident, he would have guessed shock. But there was also the possibility she’d contracted something, a tropical bug. Before he could diagnose her, he would have to get close enough to check her body temperature.

“How did I kill them, the other doctors?”

She spoke from the door of the hut. Apparently she’d been drawn there by the sun, which had set the darkening sky ablaze as swiftly as if a match had been struck.
Everything happened fast here,
Jordan thought.
The cycles were intense and instantaneous. Life was not revered or held precious, but neither was death. They were both just events, facts of existence.

As she turned back to him, waiting for his answer,
Jordan understood that things could be both beautiful
and
unspeakably brutal in the jungle. Her question had not been an admission of guilt. She was asking for information, but he wondered about the jungle inside Angela Lowe. Inside himself. Inside everyone.

“You did it with ventricular defibrillation paddles,” he told her, “the same way you killed your father. And last week, my colleague, Dr. Inada.”

“I don’t know a Dr. Inada. I’ve never heard of him. You must believe me.”

He picked up the urgency in her faint voice and wanted to help her. It was a reflex. He’d wanted to help her when all he had was the snapshot of a desperate girl. He was even struck with the fanciful thought that there might be people you were born wanting to help, and meanwhile, you just went on living, waiting for them to appear in your life.

“Kensuke Inada died at California General of massive heart failure,” he told her. “I found him in a storage room, lying beside a v. defib unit. He had one of the paddles in his hand.”

She came toward him, but only as far as the knife in the floor, where she stopped in obvious distress. It seemed to mark a place beyond which she wouldn’t go unless forced by extreme circumstances.

“You said
last week
? You think I killed someone last week? Then why didn’t you call the police and turn me in?”

Jordan could have given her the CIA’s reason, that she was a threat to national security, but that wasn’t his reason. Maybe he was still in denial about who she was and what she’d done. He’d been trying to save lives ever since Cathy Crosby’s death, but he couldn’t save this one, and he shouldn’t even try.

And yet, as he took in the twists of scarlet that had returned to her cheeks and the deadly weapon at her feet,
he wondered if there was another reason. Maybe he had a fascination with the fact that she could kill him, and maybe he thought he deserved it.

“Why didn’t you turn me in?” she repeated.

Her despair tugged at him. It mingled with his own and made his breath burn. “I don’t know.”

The pain in his knees forced him to his haunches. He dropped down and swayed forward, and a dizziness engulfed him that couldn’t have been timed better if he’d planned it. He had a concussion. He was going to black out.

“Is something wrong?” she asked.

He shook his head and plunged into spiraling free fall. “God,” he whispered. The cut had started to bleed again. He could feel it trickling down his cheek and into his mouth, and the heavy metallic tang made his stomach roll with nausea. He must have been quite a sight.

He closed his eyes, and the hut did a revolution in space. When he opened them, it flipped again. The next thing he felt was a cool washrag against his forehead. She’d crossed the barrier and was mopping his brow. He didn’t know whether or not he’d blacked out, but he was still sitting up.

“Stay awake,” she urged. “I think you have a concussion.”

“You
think?”
He would have laughed except for the pain.

“Is your stomach upset? Would it help you to eat?”

The thought of food made his gut churn, but it was one way to keep her close. “I haven’t eaten since yesterday.”

“I’ll get you something when I’m done here,” she murmured and continued to bathe him. The rag soothed his face and throat with cool, sweet water. It ran the breadth of his shoulders and down his arms, and then she wrung it out and started on his chest and belly, stroking with the dark wings and arrows. The faint growl that formed in his
throat was a sound of relief and raw, animal pleasure.

A moment later, she’d propped his head against her shoulder and was concentrating on the blood that had caked near his eyes and mouth. When she was done with that, she pushed him lower, against her breasts, and began to clean the swollen mass on the crown of his head. He swallowed a hiss of pain. It was tender as hell back there, but he didn’t want her to stop, not under any circumstances.

“Don’t fall asleep,” she reminded him repeatedly.

He had no such inclination.
What guy in his right mind would want to miss a minute of this?
When she was done with the head wound, she gently scrubbed at his hair and neck, and then started down his back. By the time she got to his armpits, she’d won him over totally.
How could this woman kill anyone?
he was asking himself. She had the gentlest touch, the gentlest nature he’d ever encountered. He could have kissed her breasts they were so soft. It was like nuzzling into dandelion fluff or downy clouds. If he did drift off to sleep, he would dream about brushing up against her nipples, feeling them against his cheek or his lips. God.