Any Minute Now (9 page)

Flowering cherry trees, their buds just beginning to peek out, lined the gravel driveway on either side. Then the house loomed up, looking very large, very ornate, and very British. Inside, they were greeted by a woman who called herself Sister Margaret, a dour woman going on sixty, whose wiry, gray hair was tied back in a severe bun.

She walked them silently out of the entry, down a series of maze-like corridors, all of which had closed doors on either side. Behind one, Orteño heard laughter, behind another, sobbing. Eventually, they came to the conservatory—a large room filled with light streaming in through a pitched ceiling made of panes of glass. It faced the rear of the building. Flix could see a wide lawn sloping down to a set of four tennis courts.

“We used to have a pond there,” Sister Margaret said, “until one of the girls drowned herself. Then we filled it in.”

She reported this with the matter-of-fact tone of a talking head on TV. Orteño glanced at her, wondering whether she might be a sociopath. But his experience was with priests, not nuns.

Just then, Sister Margaret stopped and pointed to a figure in a chair near the left-hand corner. “Lucinda is just there,” she said.

Flix looked around. “No cops?”

“No FBI, either.” St. Vincent was studying his nails with the concentration of a manicurist.

If St. Vincent had meant to impress Orteño, then mission accomplished. Only someone very high up in the clandestine services could have pulled Lucy from the clutches of the FBI.

Sister Margaret cleared her throat. It was clear she had more pressing business elsewhere. “Take as much time as you need.”

“You have thirty minutes,” St. Vincent broke in.

Sister Margaret gave him the flicker of a humorless smile before she turned back to Orteño. “If there's trouble…”

“Why should there be trouble?” Flix asked. He could not take his eyes off his niece.

“If it comes to that, I'll handle it,” St. Vincent said. To Orteño, he said, “Go on now,” in a voice that was almost gentle. “Clock's running.”

Flix felt oddly light-headed as he approached Lucy, as if he had wandered off the Yellow Brick Road into the field of poppies in Oz. The last he had seen of her she was just an adolescent, now she was an adult. She was playing old-school solitaire with cards, rather than on a tablet.

When his shadow passed over her hand she looked up. He was startled to see no recognition in her face. She was shockingly thin, almost frail-looking. Her eyes were sunken deep in their sockets, the skin of her face stretched tight over her mother's pronounced cheekbones.

“Lucy, it's good to see you.”

Her head swung back and she returned to her game.

“Lucy?”

“I suppose I should know you.” Her voice was reedy, as thin as the rest of her. Her thick hair was lank, greasy-looking. A sickly sweet smell wafted off her every time she exhaled. “The truth is I don't.”

His heart plummeted. He sat down beside her. “It's Felix. Your uncle Felix.”

“So I have an uncle?” She spoke entirely without inflection, as if she had died and been reanimated by the power of the Institute of Mary Immaculate and the power of Christ.

“You must remember.” He leaned toward her and spoke low and urgently. “
Eres la hija de mi hermana.”
You're my sister's daughter. “Marilena's
niña
.” He felt perplexed, at sea. “
Seguramente te acuerdas de ella, tu madre
.” Surely you remember her, your mother.

“What makes you think I speak Spanish?”

Dios mío
, Flix thought. “Because,
guapa
, you're Mexican.”

She looked at him with those haunted eyes. “I'm the opposite of lovely. I'm a fucking mess.”

“But you
do
speak Spanish.”

They stared at each other for a moment, Flix desperately searching for even the smallest spark of recognition. Abruptly, he rose, crossed back to where St. Vincent stood like a sentinel beside the doorway.

“What kind of drugs is she on?”

“A cocktail of antipsychotics and tranqs.”

“Take her off them.”

“She had a break while she was being taken into custody,” St. Vincent said as if he hadn't heard. “She almost tore an arm off one of the cops.”

“She doesn't know who I am. Take her off all medication—”

“Felix—”

“—so I can talk to her. Otherwise…” There was no need to finish the sentence.

St. Vincent gave him a hard stare, then sighed. “To show my sincerity, okay?”

Orteño nodded, wishing he knew a Mayan curse he could put on this sonuvabitch. He should have paid more attention to his grandmother while she was alive.

St. Vincent gave the briefest of nods. “I'll talk to Sister Margaret.”

“Now.”

“Watch yourself.”

“
Por favor
.”

Orteño watched St. Vincent stride down the hall, then returned to his niece. “Lucy, I'm going to get you out of here,” he said as he sat down.

She stopped playing at once and stared at him with those dead-fish eyes. “When you get me out,” she whispered, “will I still be able to play solitaire?”

*   *   *

Charlie smiled agreeably.

Cutler, still clutching his aching knee, said, “How did you—”

“Oh, and by the way, boss,” Whitman cut in, “I'll expect ten grand to be deposited in my account by end of business today.”

“That was just a love tap,” Charlie said in that equable, almost bland, voice that belied what seethed like a volcano beneath her shiny surface. “I could just as easily have shattered your kneecap.”

Cutler eyed her as if he had just discovered a coral snake under a rock. She went back to the buffer, drew out a small plastic bag, which she brought and handed to Cutler. It held two chilled gel packs.

Cutler waved it away. “I don't need anything.”

“Unless you want your knee to swell up to twice its size you do.” She led them to a wooden bench, where Cutler sat and reluctantly put the gel packs on his knee. Whitman sat beside him, while Charlie stood between them.

Cutler pointed to the floor.

Charlie sat down, cross-legged, as if she might always be this obedient. Whitman had to laugh silently at that, also at Cutler's need to regain a measure of control over the situation.

“How in the world did you get those weapons through the metal detector?” Cutler asked now.

Charlie glanced at Whitman, who dipped his head. “Go on. Show him.”

She handed him the knife and the push-dagger. Cutler studied them, turning them over and over in his hands. “They're too light to be metal.” He peered down at her. “What are they made of?”

“A ceramic composite that's three times as hard and a third as brittle as ceramic alone.”

He frowned. “I know all the cutting-edge manufacturers worldwide and I've never seen anything like these. Where did you buy them?”

“She didn't,” Whitman said.

Cutler grunted his frustration. “Explain, please, and not both at once.”

“I made them myself,” Charlie said. “I make all the weapons I use myself. Those items I do buy, I modify until they're no longer recognizable.”

“You modify them. Why?”

“So they can do what I want them to do,” Charlie said. “Which is a lot more than what the manufacturers had envisioned.”

He snapped his fingers. Having recovered from his shock, he was all business again. “Example.”

“You're holding part of one,” she said. “My mobile.”

“You mean it functions as a phone, as well?” He recited a nine-digit number with an area code that, so far as the public was concerned, did not exist. He watched her like a hawk as she rose, stepped back four paces, and punched in the numbers one by one. A moment later, his mobile rang.

“Put the mobile down, face up,” Charlie said.

“What?”

Whitman rose. “Do what she says, boss.”

Cutler set the mobile down on the bench.

“Now place the gel packs on top of it,” Charlie said.

Cutler looked from one to the other. “What the hell is this?”

“Please,” Charlie said, her tone more insistent. “I only have a twenty-second window.”

“For what?”

Whitman stepped in, took the gel packs off Cutler's knee, dropped them onto his mobile, and, taking him firmly by the elbow, moved him back to where Charlie stood, cool and relaxed as Sinatra had been onstage.

The instant they were far enough away, Charlie pressed her mobile's touchscreen, and something terrifying happened. The gel packs shivered, then burst into flame. Cutler looked so astonished Whitman thought he was about to have a heart attack.

Charlie went over and stamped out the fire before any alarms could go off, then she turned to Cutler. “Imagine what would have happened if your mobile had been against your ear.”

“Assuming she passes the vetting process, you have your ten thousand,” Cutler said to Whitman. “She's worth every penny.”

“The bet was Charlie's. The ten large goes to her.” Whitman grinned. “Call it a signing bonus.”

 

8

What Dr. Paulus Lindstrom lacked in the tradecraft of spies he more than made up for by a finely honed sense of self-preservation. In this, in particular, his Asperger's was a help rather than a hindrance. Part of that was because his vigilance was entirely internal. He was required to neither ask other people for assistance nor to wonder how his actions or words might affect those around him.

Freed from these restraints, which he found painful, he was able to revel completely in his element. His talk with Valerie had made him feel like a spider to which flies were, sooner or later, going to approach.

For the first several days after he came under discipline, nothing out of the ordinary happened. In fact, he was so immersed in the latest fruit of the Mobius Project that when something interrupted his daily schedule it tended to throw off his intricately timed day. Which was why he tensed up whenever Omar Hemingway showed up for his chatty version of an update. Today, however, someone other than Hemingway entered his lab. He introduced himself as Luther St. Vincent. Lindstrom read something dark and distasteful in his eyes, and quailed inside. He did not like this man at all. In fact, something about St. Vincent frightened him.

“I'm here for an update, Doctor,” St. Vincent said without even a pretense at politeness.

“Where is Mr. Hemingway? He's my liaison with NSA.”

“Not anymore, Doctor. As of this moment I have taken over the Mobius Project.”

A ball of ice formed in the pit of Lindstrom's stomach. “I'll have to call Mr. Hemingway's office.”

“Do that, Doctor.”

But as Lindstrom reached for the phone, St. Vincent leaned in, looming over him. “However, I wonder whether that's the best course of action.”

Lindstrom froze, the receiver halfway to his face. “What do you mean?”

“Loyalty. Service. Obedience.” St. Vincent smiled an icy smile. “These are the qualities NSA looks for in its stringers.”

“Yes?” Lindstrom was completely terrified now. Hemingway had never spoken to him in this manner.

“What largesse has been given you, Doctor, can be taken away.” He snapped his fingers, causing Lindstrom to start. “As quickly as that.”

Lindstrom blinked heavily, his version of a spit-take, and then the LED bulb went off in his head and he remembered every word, every intonation, facial expression, and bit of body language in reference to his recent conversation with Valerie Revere.

With these matters foremost in his mind, he arranged his face in what he could only hope was a smile, though he had no real way of knowing, and said, “What you want and what I can provide may be two very different animals, Mr. St. Vincent.”

St. Vincent regarded him for a moment before he burst into laughter. “You really are an odd duck, Doctor.”

“There is nothing odd about a duck,” Lindstrom said, a slight quaver in his voice ruining his facsimile of a smile. “Unless, of course, you are referring to the Madagascar pochard, the world's rarest duck.”

“A Madagascar pochard,” St. Vincent repeated, as if he had just fallen down the White Rabbit's hole.

“Indeed. By 1991, the pochard was considered extinct, until a flock of them was discovered in Lake Matsaborimena in northern Madagascar fifteen years later.”

“All very interesting,” St. Vincent said, “were I a conservationist.” His smile was all steel teeth. “Shall we press on, Doctor?”

“Ah, yes, you wish to know how the SUBNETS initiative is progressing.” SUBNETS was an acronym for System-Based Neurotechnology for Emerging Therapies. It had been begun in another section of DARPA as a way to help veterans overcome the stresses of combat: implanting electrodes in certain areas of the subject's brain, it was hoped, would alleviate chronic pain and depression, as well as PTSD. But, according to Lindstrom, that was dark ages stuff. Going forward, his idea was to devise “an implantable platform technology for precise therapy in humans living with neuropsychiatric and neurological disease, including veterans and active duty soldiers suffering from mental health issues,” according to the abstract he had submitted to the powers that be at NSA, and for which he received funding.

He waved a pale hand. “It's all in my weekly report. Or you can consult Mr. Hemingway's files.”

“My files now, Doctor. In any event, I'm not interested in what's in your weekly reports, nor am I interested in what you gab about with Omar Hemingway.” He stepped in closer, lowered his voice. “I want you to move forward on the Mobius Project.”

“What?” Lindstrom took a step back, as if he had been struck across the cheek. “My god, not here.” He looked around wildly.