Off the Edge (The Associates) (20 page)

At two in the morning, real time, he spotted Laney heading into the lobby.

She’d twisted her thick, dark hair into a bun and donned slim eyeglasses. Another one of her sad little disguises. With her prim, dark shirt and skirt she looked like she was going for a clichéd librarian look, but then there were those knee-high nylons.

She settled herself down at the community computers and got to work. She seemed to be printing something out. He touched the screen. The bigness and sweetness of his feelings for her made him uncomfortable and he thought to force his focus away from her, just to get back under control, but he found he didn’t want to.

Activity in another sector finally distracted him. A small army of maids stripped the bedding off the bed in the honeymoon suite on the 17th floor. The bedding looked clean—why strip it off? Special request? Special treatment?

Macmillan’s heart raced. Was Jazzman about to arrive?

A bottle of scotch was set out next to two lowball glasses. Two champagne flutes appeared. Flowers were brought in. Did Jazzman travel with a female companion?

New activity on the rooftop lounge, which was a kind of open air patio at one end of the sprawling roof. It had been unused all this time, but here in the middle of the night, a crew was hosing down the tiles and setting up the bar. White canopies, presumably for shade during the day, were unfurled under the moonlight. The far end of the roof was just a lot of open space but the crew was clearing off equipment and setting up lights around the perimeter. Landing lights. A helipad. That’s where the weapon would go.

Macmillan sat up. Jazzman was on his way.

The rooftop bar. It was brilliant. If they got some live music going, it would be impossible to hear the negotiations. He glanced again at the honeymoon suite. It seemed a bit obvious for Jazzman to stay there, but Dax said Jazzman would want superior accommodations. Dax was always right about such things.

Dax also predicted that Jazzman would stash the codes and schematics somewhere in Bangkok as a kind of insurance policy before he sold the weapon. The buyer would get access to the information after Jazzman was safe.

But with this kind of surveillance, Macmillan would surely identify Jazzman before he made any deal. Once they had him, they’d do what it took to retrieve the whole package: the weapon, the schematics, and the codes.

A door creaked. Somebody was coming in the back way.

Macmillan sprung up from his seat and hurried back to the cell room, trying to keep the pressure on the balls of his feet instead of his toes. He snicked the door shut and clapped the leg irons around his ankles.

Quiet steps approached.

Laney.

Damn.

He shut his eyes and lay down. The outer door opened and closed, but there was no clinking of keys being taken off the hook. She wouldn’t be entering the cell. At least there was that.

“Back for more?” Macmillan said after he’d sensed her standing there a while.

“I need your opinion on something. Your professional opinion. I was reading your book some more, the part on how you can draw conclusions about a person’s mental state from his sentences and such...” She paused.

He opened his eyes. There she stood just outside the bars, clutching a sheaf of papers. “In the market for some bunk designed to hornswoggle folks?” he asked. “I have the best there is, you know. Once you’ve been hornswoggled by me, you won’t want it from anybody else.”

“I just need your professional opinion. I’m worried about somebody and I have his emails here...” Her quiet words were laced with desperation, papers clutched to her chest. The emails had been written by somebody she loved. Not Rolly, then.

That was Laney. A warrior for the people she cared about.

“If you valued my opinion you’d be long gone,” he said.

“Why do you care so much if I take your advice?”

“I need the people around me to do my bidding. It’s in the killer job description.”

“How about you just give me a professional goddamn opinion on something?”

A professional opinion. He’d give her anything. He flashed again on the medieval map. She would pull him right off the edge of the world if he wasn’t careful. “As you see, my business facilities in here are substandard. And you know what this means. Yet another star off for the Hotel Des Roses—”

“Shut up! God, I get that you don’t want me around, okay? I need your help.”

“I’m done helping you.”

She clutched the sheaf, standing at the edge of the patch of light cast by the bulb over the door. “These are emails from my brother, Charlie,” she said in a small voice. “He’s become…weird, and I’m worried about him. I want you to read between the lines like you do and tell me if you think he’s depressed or in trouble, maybe hiding something, or just what you think.”

He sighed as though bored, but really, he couldn’t tear his gaze from her, because she was standing there with her emails and her despair and her stockings and he was half in love with her.

“You know that stuff you said in your book about the Chinese amulet in the import store? How you can tell more about the place where it was made from the box it was shipped in and the way it was addressed, the packing material…”

“I’m familiar with it.”

“I know in your book, you’d run this on the computer,” she said. “Compare it to a giant corpus. And make those comparative tables of yours. But I’m pretty sure you can do it without.”

“Aren’t you the attentive reader.” He eyed the sheaf. It would take him an hour just to read through, getting the lay of the land. A proper analysis would take even more time. Did she mean to come back down for the results later? Tomorrow night? Like hell he’d give her an excuse to stay yet another day, and he had to get back to the console.

“Your professional opinion.”

“I can give you my professional opinion this instant,” he said. “My professional opinion is that you’re being a fool. Here you are, sensing trouble, and you come down here asking me to analyze emails? Get out of my sight.”

“Can’t you just read these?” She knelt and slid the thick sheaf into his cage, watching him warily, as though he might break his chains and come right through the bars. “Just tell me if you think there’s something wrong.”

“Something’s wrong.”

“You have to look at the letters.”

“No, I don’t. You wouldn’t be down here consulting with somebody like me if you didn’t know in your heart that something was wrong. You want me to give you some comforting explanation—
he’s just a bit blue; his favorite team is doing poorly
. Or,
he has a hurt finger, so it’s merely hard for him to type.
Well, there isn’t one. He’s your brother, you don’t need me to tell you when something’s wrong.” With his foot he shoved the papers back out, scattering them across the floor. “Furthermore, my professional opinion is that something in your environment tripped your instinct, but you’re looking for excuses not to leave, because deep down, you can’t bear to be alone. That’s what will get you caught in the end.”

She gathered up the papers.

“You’re a wet dream for a killer like me,” he continued, dying inside. “The kind of person I love to hunt.”

She looked disgusted when she stood again.
Good
.

“You’ll be somebody’s papaya very soon,” he added.

She looked like she was about to cry. She muttered under her breath—a colorful insult, no doubt, then she stuffed the sheaf of papers down deep in the garbage pail and stormed out.

Relief swept through him. Surely she’d leave now.

He shook off the leg irons—they hadn’t been locked—and he let himself out of the cage. He grabbed the emails from the garbage on his way out. She’d shoved them under some newspapers, but it was still conspicuous. He shadowed her up to the surface yet again. Even in his bare feet, it was painful to move so quickly.

When she was safely out, he brought the emails to the console room and hid them at the bottom of the office trash.

Nothing more was happening in the suite, but Laney appeared on the lobby feed, chatting with her friends at the front desk. At one point she moved behind the desk and discreetly returned the key. Trying to be sneaky, trying to keep them out of trouble. How had she lasted so damn long on the run?

He glanced at the trash can where he’d buried the emails, hoping her brother was okay.

Focus.

Macmillan borrowed one of the drugged guard’s phones and left a message with their mission leader Douglas about the activity in the honeymoon suite and the roof—they needed to get eyes on those areas from the outside if possible. After that, he went through the recordings, listening to the new arrivals speak and ruling them out. Three-thirty in the morning his downloads were done. She still hadn’t left.

The vaguely familiar-looking Indian businessman lurked in the lobby, as usual. At one point he buttonholed the bellboy. It was out of range of audio, but money passed between them. The bellboy seemed animated, frightened. The man made a beeline to the elevator bank. Hit the down button. Either working out or hitting the business services room.

He turned his attention back to the honeymoon suite. Still nothing. His mind whirled as he flipped through the feeds. There was something he wasn’t seeing. Something
more
.

What?

As a linguist and an Associate, Macmillan had always made his best discoveries when he’d stepped away from a problem. He stood and stretched. Checked the guards’ breathing. Took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. Finally his gaze fell upon the dustbin where he’d stuffed Laney’s sheaf of emails.

Why not.

He grabbed them and sat, riffling through. Emails in chronological order, all dated. He kept an eye on the consoles and set to work.

First he scanned over them as a group, getting a feel for the brother’s language, looking at pronoun usage and various points of markedness. The writing in the early letters seemed quite balanced, the words of a man in control. Laney’s brother cared a great deal for her.

There were bits of Laney’s letters included at the ends of Charlie’s letters; these he read for context, though he found it difficult to stay analytical; he felt like he was falling into her words, her reality. She described the bustle of Bangkok in bright, fresh terms, and seemed greatly concerned about the amputees who sold dried fish on the streets. Everything touched her—the dragons, the architecture, the people she worked with. Her sense of humor came into full bloom with her brother, but her despair and her longing for connection was keenest here, too, and Macmillan had the uncanny feeling that he was touching her across time and space. Certain texts used to do that for him, give him the sense of camaraderie with another soul. He’d thought that was gone from his life.

But this thing with Laney was more. He’d gotten used to having nothing to lose, but she was pulling him back into the frightening, beautiful madness of caring. He thought about that pretty butterscotch gleam in her eyes, but when you really looked, you got that they were the eyes of a rebel. She didn’t accept the presented surface; she plunged her poet’s fist right through.

Stop. Focus.

He forced himself to read on, and quickly decided that she’d been right to feel uneasy. Charlie sounded like a loving, conscientious brother in the earlier letters, but there’d been a shift about a month back. The later letters contained the right phrases—
I love you, sis,
for example, but it wasn’t the same. He spread out the two batches of letters. On the right he had the before-the-shift group, on the left he put after-the-shift. He took out a pen.

Layout and sentence length were similar in the two groups, but the earlier batch doubled the question and exclamation marks, mirroring Laney’s letters. The later ones didn’t. He circled instances. He then turned his attention to the function words—meaningless helper words:
will, and, up, or,
etc. He quickly crossed them out in two random
before
samples, leaving only the lexical words, those that carried meaning.

Macmillan turned his attention to the
after
batch, striking out the function words. On comparison, he found that the lexical density after the shift was markedly lower.

Low lexical density often indicated deception.

Something else: receive was spelled correctly in the
after
letters, but not in the
before
letters.

But that wasn’t the most troubling difference. There was a single space between sentences in the
before-the-shift
group; the
after
letters featured a double space between sentences. How had he not seen that right off? A double space was something somebody who attended school before the advent of word processors would use, or somebody who’d had an old-fashioned English teacher. It definitely wasn’t a habit you changed one day; particularly not going from one to two spaces.

It was then he knew: the emails had been written by two different people. She’d been emailing with an imposter for well over a month.

He went to the content. The earlier letters asked lots of questions.
How are the S’s treating you? Any sign of R? Are you getting any fresh air? Tell me your fave new food!
The later letters were controlling:
Stay put. You are so lucky to be in a safe haven. Such a comfort to know you are safe within those walls.

Was it that ex of hers? Rolly? Except the man wouldn’t have email access from prison. One thing was clear: the imposter wanted her to stay put—more and more urgently as time went on.

Somebody was coming for her. Rolly or one of his men.

But no, no, no…there was something else, something about the sentence construction. The new writer was trying to mimic the brother, even going so far as to lift entire phrases, but Macmillan felt something else in the sentence rhythm. Something familiar.

Damn.

He went back over, scanning for a different set of markers now. In two separate instances, the new writer used the word
that
with proper nouns when no article was called for.
That Brittany Spears is a whore
.
That Mayor O’Hannon will burn in hell.