Run (The Tesla Effect #2) (13 page)

Keisha and Malcolm waited patiently, watching as Beckett, frowning, tapped her pen nervously on the arm of the sofa where she sat. Finally, Keisha could keep silent no longer.

“Okay, look, are you still planning to go through with this?”

Beckett waited a beat, and then looked at Keisha, pausing for a moment, before she turned to Malcolm with the same serious expression.

“Yes, I plan to go through with this,” she said. “And I am trusting you both to keep your mouths shut.”

“Absolutely,” said Mal quickly.

“I have no problem with that,” Keisha said. “But I don’t really get it. Why you? And why outside of the agency? I mean, if they wouldn’t send you in, there’s a reason, right? Don’t you think they know what they’re doing?”

Beckett fidgeted for a moment, clicking and unclicking her pen and biting her lip. Malcolm and Keisha glanced at each other, surprised to see Beckett uncertain. Finally, she placed the pen gently on the coffee table on top of her pad with her scribbled notes. She took a deep breath, let it out slowly, thoroughly, placed her hands on her knees, and looked at the other two who sat across from her. She was the picture of serenity and confidence.

“I’m going to tell you some things about myself, and then you’ll understand.”

“Excellent,” said Malcolm, totally psyched to be in on the ground floor of getting some intel on Beckett. Keisha shot him a look, but he completely ignored her.

“You guys know I was raised overseas, in Asia, right?” When they both nodded, she continued. “My parents are missionaries. Very devout. They do not believe in material possessions, or self-gratification of any kind. They have zero tolerance for other belief systems. They believe in service to others—by which they mean proselytizing and converting—through which they serve God.”

Keisha swallowed, hard. Somehow, this was not going as she’d expected. “Well, that’s cool,” she said nervously. “My mom’s pretty into church.”

“Yeah, my parents aren’t ‘pretty into church,’” Beckett said, her voice terse and clipped and tightly under control. “Growing up, they dragged me from hovel to hovel. I had two sets of clothes, one to wear while the other was being washed and hanging out to dry. Sometimes I didn’t have shoes.”

“Holy shit, no
shoes
??” Keisha asked. “No wonder your closet looks like a Neiman Marcus catalogue now.”

Beckett smiled, briefly, and continued. “I was hungry—a lot. I was alone—a lot. My only friends were other little urchins in the alleys, and then we’d move on to save some other neighborhood, or region, or country, and I’d have to start all over. I learned to take care of myself.”

“I’ll say,” Malcolm muttered.

“And then my parents had a second child—another girl—and I learned to take care of her, too.”

“You have a sister?” Malcolm asked, taken aback. “I always assumed you were an only child. You know, doesn’t play well with others and all.”

Beckett smiled, liking his brutal honesty more and more. “Yeah, I do sort of give off that vibe. But yes, I have a sister. When I was eighteen, I left, came back to the states. Tried to convince them to let Rose—my sister—come with me, but they refused. I would have done it anyway, but—well, Rose is much more like them than I am, could ever be. She’s sort of the real deal, though. No one on the planet is kinder or more generous. Her faith is lovely, and her idea of serving others is about what they need, not what she thinks they should be.” Beckett sat, thoughtful for a moment, and then added, “I haven’t seen her since I left.”

“It sounds like it sucked, growing up that way,” Keisha said, genuine sympathy in her voice. “Like you didn’t really get a childhood. But I’m not following. What’s the connection here?”

“The connection is this,” Beckett said. “I know what members of One God One Truth believe. I know how they talk, and how they pray. I know how they dress, how they interact with each other, and with everybody else outside their group. I understand them.”

“You could pass as one of them,” Malcolm said quietly.

“Yes, I could.”

“And that’s why you’re going in. But why off-book? Wouldn’t it be better if the agency was in on it? You won’t have any back up,” said Keisha, sounding troubled for the first time.

“Well, I’ll have you two,” Beckett said, and it sounded like she was reassuring them. “We’ll have a communication system set up. And the agency not only doesn’t see this group as a problem, at least not yet, it would never think of me for a mission like this. They don’t know all that much about my childhood, just the basic facts—I always figured that if they knew they would assume I had some of that stuff hardwired in me, and I was too big a risk to be a field agent. Besides, I haven’t been with them long enough for them to consider letting me run an op like this on my own.”

There was silence, then, as all three of them were lost in their own thoughts. Finally, Keisha looked at Beckett. “I’m in,” she said.

“So am I,” said Malcolm.

“Okay then,” Beckett said, standing. “We’ve got some plans to make, some things to set in motion, a backstory to create for me, with a real trail that can be found when they come sniffing around to check on me—and they will.”

“So what are we talking here, sometime in the spring? Or, better yet, over the summer, after school lets out? I’ve got Calculus right now, and it’s kicking my ass. I can’t even think about finals yet,” said Malcolm

“No, Malcolm. Much, much sooner than that. I’ll be in touch.” And Beckett turned and walked out of the room without so much as a glance back at them.

“Whoa,” said Keisha. “That girl is heavy.”

“Yeah, she is,” Malcolm agreed. “And awesome.”

“True story,” said Keisha.

CHAPTER 15

Tesla sat calmly, for all anyone could tell, in one of three chairs placed side-by-side along the wall outside the door of her mother’s office. The mixture of dread and excitement she felt was hidden by her rigidly controlled expression, and the fact that she sat with her head slightly bent and propped up by her hand, as if she were in need of a nap and would rather be anywhere than waiting for an appointment to see one of her professors.

After calling the police and leaving an anonymous tip about the man she’d witnessed abusing that pathetic little girl, Tesla had felt better, more in control—enough so that she had decided to go back to campus and seek her mother out; find her in the physics building again and see if she could gain some proximity. Not exactly a detailed plan, but it was a start.

At first she’d sat in a corner of the main office, but within moments she had felt restless and inexplicably irritated—she needed to get closer. She’d gone down the hall where her parents’ offices were located, taking a seat some yards away, near other office doors, but slowly moving closer to theirs every few moments. A few students and an occasional faculty member walked by, but no one seemed to notice her at all. Almost before she realized it, Tesla was sitting right outside her mother’s office, with absolutely no idea what she hoped to accomplish.

“Are you waiting to see Dr. Petrova?”

Heart in her throat, Tesla looked up and to her left, knowing from the voice that had startled her beyond the ability to respond that her father was standing forty-two inches away and speaking directly to her.

Greg Abbott, dressed in khaki pants and a white dress shirt, open at the collar, stood looking at her with a slight, distracted frown on his face. Tesla couldn’t look away from his face, she couldn’t even blink, as she took in his mussed hair—thicker and curlier than it was now—or rather would be, in eight years—the bright blue eyes behind his glasses, the pens in his shirt pocket and the leaked ink stain just below them.

He raised his eyebrows, waiting for an answer, clearly impatient.

Tesla shook her head,
No
. She could not speak.

Her father turned immediately, the girl in the chair forgotten already, and knocked on the door.

“Come in.”

Her mother was in her office.

Greg Abbott took an audible breath, opened the door and walked inside, pushing the door back behind him, but failing to close it all the way. It swung back just a bit, leaving a gap of three and one third inches next to Tesla’s left ear.

The springs of an old, upholstered chair groaned in protest as Greg Abbott sat down, and then silence. Elbow on the arm of her chair, Tesla leaned eight degrees to the left, her hand supporting her head at the temple, in order to hear better, but her parents remained inexplicably silent.

“I thought we agreed we would each come into the office three days a week,” her father said, finally. “What are you doing here?”

“The Dean asked me to speak to prospective majors,” said Tasya Petrova, her voice soft and low, embellished with her faint accent.

“You could have said no. You could have rescheduled.”

“Why would I do that?” The tone of her voice had changed, a hint of challenge apparent.

Greg Abbott sighed audibly. “Tasya, I thought we settled this. We agreed. It’s your day to be home—who is with the kids?”

“Don’t lecture me, Greg. I had work to do here, and I made a decision to come in and do it, rather than sit at home waiting for Maximillian to wake from his nap. Tesla is at school, as you well know. One of my graduate students is at the house, studying and earning her rent money by babysitting.”

Greg Abbott did not reply, and Tesla held her breath until her mother spoke again.

“Nothing to say?” Tesla flinched at the anger, the faint sound of derision in Tasya’s voice as she spoke to her husband. “Perhaps you are disappointed that I did not just abandon my children, leave them alone with no one to care for them, like the unfit mother you think I am.”

“I have never said—nor have I implied—that you are an unfit mother.” Greg Abbott sounded bone weary, and as sad as Tesla had ever heard him.

“No, but you have certainly made your point—over and over again—that I should want more than anything to sit cross-legged on the floor with my children and stack blocks, that my passion for my work should have been replaced by my proper, motherly love that eclipsed everything else from the moment they were born.”

“Tasya, I’ve never said that! I’ve only tried to share the sacrifices we
both
should be happy to make now that we have them in our lives! They require time spent—playing with them, talking to them, caring for them. And that means a shift in priorities, for both of us.”

There was silence, then, after Greg Abbott’s impassioned defense.

“I love them as much as you do,” Tasya said after a moment, and Tesla could feel her stomach muscles clench at the pain in her mother’s voice.

“I know you do. I could never doubt that,” Greg said softly. “But I don’t understand why this is so hard for you.”

His wife answered, her bitterness clear. “I know you don’t. I see you, when you are away from the lab and talking to Tesla, singing to Max, and you are happy. But I am not you. My head is here, with the work. Have you forgotten how we used to talk, and dream, when we began this project? We are so close, Greg! The work is much bigger than you or me or these two small children—how do you not see this, feel it every moment of every day??”

“There is nothing bigger than you and me and these two small children. Nothing. And the project is progressing more than fast enough for me as it is—I have doubts that you’ve chosen to ignore. We should have published by now, opened this up to public debate—”

“Bullshit!” Tasya exploded in a fierce whisper that cut through Tesla, must have cut through her father, she thought. “Let them haggle over how many angels fit on the head of a pin on their own time. I have no interest in their minutia, their gods, or their doomsday scenarios. We are scientists, and what we’ve done here, what we’re doing, it’s—Greg, it will change everything!”

“I know,” he replied softly. “It already has.”

Tesla kicked the motorcycle into first gear and drove out of the parking lot. She’d abruptly left the physics department, her thoughts and emotions a jumble of contradictions. She felt a little sad, and unexpectedly angry at herself for feeling it. Surely sadness was a normal response to this totally abnormal situation, where she was able to glimpse some of the unrest in her parents’ marriage. Who wouldn’t find that sad? But even as she asked the question, a different voice—a much harder voice—told her this was weakness. Sentimentality was always weakness, and weakness, at least her own, apparently made her angry. And the anger seemed to encompass so much more than the argument she’d just overheard between her parents…it was less like a response to something specific than it was a lens through which she seemed to be viewing the world. The only thing she knew for sure was that the anger was real, and she needed to move, burn it up somehow, like the fuel that it surely was. This was an itch that could not be ignored.

Tesla didn’t have a plan, but whatever she did with this energy, this need, she intended to be satisfied.

Sam’s shift at Angelo’s was almost over, so she drove, expertly and a little faster than was strictly legal, to pick him up. The sun had dipped below the tree line, and the air had a distinct chill that made Tesla glad for the heavy armored jacket and gloves she wore. Sam was waiting on the curb when she pulled up, and for a brief moment Tesla waited for him to climb on back and wrap his arms around her waist, but his unflinching gaze made short work of that idea. She put the bike in neutral with her boot, kicked down the stand and scooted back on the long leather seat to make room for Sam up front. He climbed aboard and, without a word, drove away with Tesla’s hands sitting loosely at his waist.

He drove them off campus in the general direction of his house, but a half mile before the turn-off he veered north onto a busy, rundown street of small businesses whose neon signs advertised tattoos, nude dancers, and alcohol, among other items and services. When Sam pulled into a parking lot, Tesla was surprised, but said nothing. He shut off the motor and they both got off, Tesla’s messenger bag slung across her chest and sitting at her hip, as always.

“Hungry?” Sam asked.

“Yeah. I am,” she said, realizing it only at that moment. She hadn’t eaten all day.

“This place is a dive, but the burgers are really good.”

“Will they let us in?”

Sam raised an eyebrow. “Of course.”

“But it’s a bar.” Tesla frowned, having only experienced trying to get into one of the popular bars near campus with Malcolm, and failing when neither of them could produce an ID.

Sam grinned. “I know people. You’re on my side of town now.”

Tesla grinned back and followed him inside. The jukebox was blasting Skynyrd, the smell of old fry grease cloying and inescapable. There were a few people sitting in booths with cracked red leather seats patched with duct tape, but sixteen of the twenty-two patrons sat at the large, horseshoe-shaped bar drinking, talking and laughing loudly over the music.

“Bar or booth?” Sam asked.

That undercurrent of anger was still with her, an itch that pestered and teased. Something about the dimly-lit bar felt right and Tesla looked at Sam, her expression odd, her eyes, dark brown through the cosmetic lenses, slightly hooded.

“Bar.”

Sam found them two stools on the sharp curve, so they were turned halfway toward one another instead of side by side, and they climbed up and settled in.

A bearded bartender with a small hoop in each pierced ear and a somewhat weathered complexion tossed down two Budweiser coasters. “Hey, Sam. What’ll it be?”

Sam was clearly at home in this bar. Most of the patrons wore leather jackets, and Tesla noted several colorful tattoos, their edges visible from under the cuffs of jackets, or the necklines of T-shirts.

“Burger?” Sam asked Tesla.

“Yeah, I’ll have what you’re having. You know what’s good.”

“Two burger specials, extra bacon. Cheese fries.”

The bartender nodded and began to turn away when Tesla suddenly spoke.

“And beer.”

The bartender looked at Sam.

Sam shrugged. “And two drafts, Sully. Thanks.”

Sully walked away and Sam turned to Tesla. “Tough day at the office, dear?”

“Something like that,” she muttered.

“Want to talk about it?”

“No. Or think about it, either.”

Sully appeared with two iced mugs filled with golden lager and set them down on the coasters, the white heads of both spilling over just a little and pooling on the surface of the nicked and carved-up bar.

“Cheers, then,” Sam said, raising his glass.

Tesla picked up her mug, touched it briefly to Sam’s, and they both took a long pull of the cold beer.

It was good. Tesla liked the sharp taste, the feel of the heavy mug as she set it back down. She liked the sight of her leather-clad forearm resting on the beat-up bar, loud guitar riffs overriding the details of a dozen conversations competing for space. She felt anonymous. An actor on a stage. She saw herself in her mind’s eye older, more worldly, and that anger just below the surface beat a soft but persistent pulse in her veins.

She picked up her beer and drank. Then drank again. Sam took a sip of his and watched her, saying nothing. A new song began to play, and several people at the other end of the bar shouted in appreciation, moving toward a small open space near the juke box and beginning to dance as Hendrix’s unmistakable fret work, the notes bending and crying, filled the air, the baseline weighted with tragedies that had not yet happened.

Sam looked up, surprised, when Tesla drained her beer and put the empty mug down hard on the bar. Without a word she hopped down off her bar stool and walked to the dance floor. Two women and a heavy man with a beard, in their late twenties, maybe, were dancing, the women obviously drunk, the man watching them intently. Tesla ignored them and began to dance as if she were alone. Sam watched her as the song gained momentum, the lyrics inextricably bound up with the longing he felt, his discomfort with this dark-haired, dark-eyed Tesla who seemed like a stranger. But he knew her, he thought, he alone saw the pain on her face as she moved, eyes half closed, inky hair falling in front of her face like the disguise it was.

There must be some kind of way out of here…

Swallowing the last of his beer, Sam climbed off his barstool, walked slowly and deliberately to Tesla, put his hand on the small of her back and pulled her in close to him. She opened her eyes and looked at him, and neither of them smiled. The music pulsed, the guitar keened, grief and need, danger and unfettered excitement weaving in and out of the melody. She put her arm around his neck and they began to move together as the man who sat in a dark booth in the back drained the remaining whiskey from his glass and walked out the door unnoticed.