Amanda's Eyes (28 page)

The room and all of us in it were
blurry now, but I fought the instinctive urge to try to blink it all back into
focus.  Wasted effort, and it might make him wonder.  “Absolutely.  We caught
her red-handed, and she’s been unloading like a dump truck ever since.  Clients,
hits, methods.”  Each individual nerve ending in my body was tingling.  I managed
to keep that energy out of my voice as I delivered the coup de grace.  “That’s
why we have to be in Philly by seven.  She’s ready to name the entire crew. 
Claims the who’s who of the Ferrymen
will rock my world.”

The monster leaped out at me so
suddenly, I almost fell out of the chair.

“Did you see anything?”

“Hmm?”  Reaching into my pocket to
toy with Conover’s business card, I mumbled a distracted, “Excuse me,” when my
shoulder collided with a heavyset man wearing a Santa hat and unwieldy
bracelets of shopping bags.

Baker and I were back on Congress, about
three blocks from the parking garage.  The crisp kiss of the breeze, the velvet
softness of a purple-blue twilight, and the multi-colored glow of a street lit
up like a Christmas tree registered peripherally.  My feet were on autopilot,
my brain in high gear.

“I said did you see anything?”

“What?  Oh.  Yeah.”  The question
was what to make of it.

“Well?”

“Hmm?”

“For the love of—”  He grabbed my
arm and hauled me back on the curb, yanking me out of the path of a half-ton
delivery truck.  Breaks squealed and horns blared as Baker spun me around and jumped
on my case while my heart did the close-call two-step.  “Wake up!  We didn’t go
to all this trouble so you could wind up a hood ornament for Tri-Am Parcel.”

“Sorry.  I’ve been trying to make
sense of it.”

“What’s the problem?  Did he … it …
look different this time?”

“Still your basic Grim Reaper, but his
expression bothers me.”

“How so?”

“That’s what I’ve been trying to
figure out.  He seemed ….”  I pictured gory, yellowed teeth stretched in a
rictus grin.  Eyes alight with unholy satisfaction.  “Smug, almost triumphant.” 
I shook my head.  “I can’t get a clear read on it.  It was almost like he was
gloating because he knew something we didn’t.”

“He knows plenty we don’t, but we’re
catching up.  You think the BioWep connection is on the level?”

I nodded as we started walking
again.  “Could be.  Remember what you said about Sadie knowing how to bait the
hook?  Same goes here.”

“Best way to reel you in is give you
something legit.”

“Something plausible, anyway.  But if
BioWep
is
involved, he only gave them up because he was sure giving them
up wouldn’t hurt him.”

“He expected you to bite hard and
run with it.”

“Yeah, but we didn’t.  Instead, we threw
Sidorov into the mix.  The meet didn’t play out the way he planned, so why the
grin?”  I turned it over and over in my mind as we walked.  “I don’t like it,”
I decided, as we climbed into the van.

“And I’m starting not to,” Dennis
said, shifting into reverse.  “Let’s get out of here.”

We spent the next thirty minutes zigzagging
through Austin, then lifted into the outbound tier of Texas One South.  We
climbed to fifteen thousand feet on a beeline for the safe house.

Baker checked the rearview display
for the umpteenth time.  “Still no sight of a tail, human or otherwise.”  He
leaned back in his seat.  “Maybe the Ferrymen are on their way to Philly.”

“Maybe.”

As the distance between Conover and
us grew, I should have been able to relax.  We were forty short minutes away
from home free.  Or as free as you can get when you’re in protective custody,
anyway.  But the miles made no difference at all.  That feeling of wrongness
clung like wet mohair.

“The trip wasn’t a total waste,”
Dennis offered.

“No, but we didn’t hit a bonanza,
either.  We gave him Sidorov, a leak he can’t plug, and he dangled BioWep, a
poisoned apple we didn’t taste.  I would have to call it a draw, at best.”

Then why the crocodile smile? 
It didn’t make sense.

“So we keep nibbling at him,” Dennis
said, “eat the bear one bite at a time.”

“And hope nobody dies while we’re
chewing.”

“Conover has you zeroed in, at least
for now.  I’ll get Hell’s Boatmen don’t get back to business as usual until you’re
taken care of.  Lucky for us, his guys are oh-for-two on pest control.”

“So far.  Let’s hope their slump holds.” 
I leaned my head against the seatback, closed my eyes and replayed the vision,
still digging for the root of my uneasiness.

Smile like that says, “Gotcha!”  What
makes him think so?  Dennis says nobody is following us.  Conover can’t be
tracking us, because he had no way of knowing which car was ours.

Maybe the grin was because he bought
the Philly yarn and was planning to get there ahead of us.  He would have to move
fast, but he’s got the resources.  He could arrange an uncomfortably warm
welcome in no time.  Glad we’re flying west while he’s looking the other way.

Then again, Conover didn’t get where
he is by being stupid or trusting.  No way he would bet his whole setup on
information he hasn’t confirmed.  Besides, that was
not
the smile of a guy who had
spotted his chance.  He looked way too complacent.  Like we were already in the
bag.

Conover hadn’t been able to find me,
so he got me to come to him.  Golden opportunity, right?  Maybe his last chance
to swat the gadfly.  But if he wanted to save his fairy-godfather cover and
protect the Change a Life Laundromat, he had to get rid of me in a way that
couldn’t be traced back to our visit.

Variation on the Yanos hit?  Be easy
to do.  Slip a designer biotoxin in the food, one with that delayed release
feature to create a comfy interval between time of death and our visit to
Change a Life.  End of story, right?  Except he would need samples of our DNA
to work with.  Getting mine wouldn’t be impossible, but he would have had no
chance to get Dennis’s ahead of time.

Besides, Conover needed information
from us.  He wanted to know what I got from the courier, how much Sidorov had
already told me, and how much I had shared with CIIS and/or my editor.  He also
wanted us to give him Tanya, so he could shut her up permanently.  All of the
above required live input from both Baker and me.

I cycled through the vision again,
freeze-framing the bogeyman’s victory leer.  Between one heartbeat and the
next, the answer hit me like a brickbat.  All those flawlessly executed hits. 
Every detail nailed down, every contingency covered.  Of course Conover wasn’t
the trusting type.  Of course he was tracking us.  But he hadn’t known about
the van, so the device had to be planted on either Dennis or me.

My brow furrowed.  But when?  And how? 
Apart from shaking hands, nobody had so much as brushed against us.  Nobody had
given us anything, either, except ….

My eyes popped open and my breath
caught as my gaze crawled down the right side of my vest.  I stared at the
lowest pocket, before gingerly reaching in with thumb and index finger to fish
out the cream-colored rectangle embossed with Conover’s name and the number of
his private line.  My fingers were icy.  The business card wasn’t.  It was warm
and getting more so.

“Dennis—” I croaked, but he wasn’t
listening.

“What the hell?”  I turned my head
to find him frowning at the readouts.  “We’re off course.  Must be a glitch in
the navigation software.  I’ll switch to manual control.”

My eyes danced between him and the
card.  “No.  It’s Conover.  He’s doing this.”

“
What?
”

I held up the card and started to
explain, but the words shorted out between my brain and my tongue.  My hand and
arm, which suddenly weighed about a thousand pounds each, dropped into my lap. 
I watched helplessly as Dennis blinked and shook his head.  He shook it again,
slowly, before slumping in his seat, head lolling towards me.  Brown eyes met blue
in a flash of grim but fading awareness.

Our gazes were still locked when my
vision dimmed, and a last shot of adrenaline set my already racing heart slamming
against my ribcage like a trapped bird.

Darkness swallowed me.

The closer I swam to the light, the more
reluctant I was to get there.  I couldn’t
see
the light yet, but I
sensed it drawing nearer and understood
a very bad thing
was coming with
it.  I couldn’t remember what.  Didn’t want to find out, but apparently, I wasn’t
going to have a choice.  The comforting darkness was rapidly receding, like a
wave that tosses you ashore then ebbs out from under you.

I came to in spite of myself but
kept my eyes closed, instinctively playing possum while I fished around in the
mental murk, groping for the source of a nameless and growing dread.  I chased
memories through the foggy corridors of my brain, catching them one by one,
struggling to put them in order.

The visit to Conover.  Charon with a
victor’s grin.

Dennis: 
What the hell?  We’re
off course.

Conover’s business card, locking
stares with Baker as darkness closed in, not knowing if we were dying or ….

Oh, my God!

My stomach clenched like a fist,
pushing bile up my throat.  I forced myself to breathe through it.  Panic was a
luxury I couldn’t afford.

Okay, the good news was, I was
alive.  I suspected Dennis probably was, too, mainly because Conover wasn’t a
bonehead.  Nabbing an active-duty CIIS agent would be like getting his hands on
the other team’s play book.  He would want to study Baker cover to cover, and
that would take a while.

The bad news was, Conover had us,
which meant there was even worse news in store.  Since I wasn’t dead already, I
figured we had called it right.  Charon wanted a chance to interrogate me
before he ferried me over to the south forty and a shallow grave alongside
those South American construction workers.  But our conversation would have to
wait until I was awake, so I kept pretending not to be, hoping to buy some
time.

I checked in with my body, cataloging
aches and pains from the top down.  Piercing headache, the kind you might get
if someone shoved a knitting needle into your right temple and out your left.  Cotton
tongue.  Dry, mildly scratchy throat.  Nausea.  Okay, no serious damage so far.

I didn’t feel any restraints around
my wrists or ankles.  That was a relief until I realized I couldn’t
feel
my wrists and ankles.  Couldn’t feel my hands, feet, arms, or legs.  It was
like they weren’t there.  I blanked for a second, then I remembered.

A tiny black chip.
 
“Designed to block select
signals from the brain….  Quadriplegia similar to that caused by spinal cord
injuries.”

This time, the fear hit me like a
freight train.  I couldn’t breathe. 
OhGodohGodohGod!

Still feigning unconsciousness, I willed
myself to move—a toe, my pinky,
anything
!   I strained until my heart
hammered in my ears and a fine sweat broke out on my forehead.  Forget it.  I
might as well have been buried up to my neck in sand.  Conover could do whatever
he wanted to me,
whatever he wanted
, and I wouldn’t be able to lift a
finger to stop him.  A primal scream, ninety percent terror, ten percent outrage,
boiled up my throat, but I gritted my teeth and locked my jaws to hold it in. 
Started to hyperventilate, got dizzy, and came close to passing out.

Came even closer to losing my mind.

Eternity passed, but I eventually
burned through the panic and crashed, wrung out and breathless.  My heart was
still skipping a beat now and then, so I focused on my breathing and waited for
my pulse to regulate.  Meanwhile, I clamped an iron lid on my imagination and fought
to harness the power of positive thinking.

I told myself any chip that could be
surgically implanted could be surgically removed.

I pictured my family’s faces and
promised myself I would see them again.

I reminded myself over and over and
over again that while my body might be paralyzed, my brain wasn’t.  Right now,
my mind was the only weapon I had, so I damned well better hold onto it.

Inch by inch, I clawed my way back
from the edge.  Not that I wasn’t still scared.  I was terrified.  But I was
determined to control the fear, instead of letting the fear control me.  No
more freaking out.  Winston Churchill would have been proud.

I finally calmed down enough for curiosity
to get a word in edgewise.  Several words,  as a matter of fact, starting with
every reporter’s standards:  
who, what, when, where, why, and how?

The
who
and
why
were
obvious
.

When
remained a mystery.  No telling how
long I had been out.

I had a leg up on
how—
the
business card—and could make an educated guess on the general
where. 
Dripping
Springs, because Conover would feel next to invincible back at the ranch.

But the specific
wheres,
the
most immediately critical
wheres
, I had yet to figure out.  Where on the
ranch was I?  Where was Dennis?  Where was Eagan?  And last, but certainly not
least, where was Conover?

If the answer to that final question
was
three feet away, cranking up the ultrasound
, all other
wheres
were irrelevant. 
So, step one, open your eyes and find out if you’re alone.

Except the decision wasn’t nearly that
simple.  Being awake when the opposition thought I was out cold wasn’t much of
an advantage, but I would take any break I could catch for as long as I could
hold onto it.  In other words, I had no way of knowing if opening my eyes would
get me in more trouble than I was already in.

I was stuck in neutral, unable to
decide what to do, until I belatedly remembered I might be able to tell whether
or not I had company
without
opening my eyes.  When I hadn’t been able
to see, I had developed a fairly accurate radar system.  Did it still work? 
Would I be able to
feel
Conover’s presence, or the absence thereof?  Might
as well give it a shot.  Mentally crossing my fingers, I focused on making my breathing
slow, deep, and regular and tuned in to my senses.

Judging by the reddish glow behind
my eyelids, the lights were strong and directly above me.  The air on my face
was cold and clean. 
Cold, bright, and sterile.  Like an operating room. 
Ruthlessly
quashing a fresh squirt of panic caused by the simile, I concentrated on my
other senses.  I didn’t smell anything.  Hadn’t Conover been wearing cologne?  Yeah,
I remembered thinking the scent was all wrong for a fiend.  Lightly floral
instead of acrid brimstone.

I listened hard.  It was quiet.  Deathly
… no strike that.  Let’s say eerily quiet.  No muffled opening and closing of
doors, no subdued voices or distant footsteps, not a whisper from the HVAC
system.  The overhead lights didn’t buzz.  The only breathing I heard was
mine.  I stopped for a minute to make sure.

Ninety-nine point nine percent convinced
I was by myself, I slitted my eyes, waited for them to adjust to the light, and
shifted them from side to side behind the screen of my lashes without turning
my head.  Listened some more, checked my inner radar, then sighed quietly in
relief and opened my eyes all the way.  Lifting my head, I craned my neck for a
looksee.

The room’s only occupant was me, lying
prone on a gurney in an eight-by-ten space painted wall-to-wall,
floor-to-ceiling, bare-bones white.  There were no windows and only one door, with
a control panel set in the wall next to it.  A black leather armchair sat about
four feet away, facing the left side of my gurney.  I didn’t see a camera, but belatedly
figured there had to be one and immediately wanted to kick myself for not
thinking of that before I gave my game away.  Hoping to recoup my losses, I let
my head fall back and closed my eyes.
  See?  I passed out again. 
Meanwhile,
my mind raced.

Realistically speaking, my future
looked brief and none too rosy.  Dennis was probably immobilized the same as me. 
Neither of us was wired to go down without a fight, but we had been trussed up
like chickens before we could throw our first punches.  Our only real option now
was to stall like crazy and hope Jack Eagan came through.

Well, maybe there
was
one
other option.  No atheists in foxholes, right?

God?
I messaged silently,
You up
there?  Can You hear me?  If You are and You can, maybe You could lend Iceman a
hand?  I don’t think we have a whole lot of time here.

I had no sooner made the suggestion
when I heard the door activate with a quiet hiss.  So someone
had
been
watching, and thanks to my camera blooper, he or she knew I was awake.  No use
pretending now, so I opened my eyes and watched Conover stroll into the room,
king of his castle and all he surveyed.  He was wearing the same outfit I had
last seen him in.  Okay, same day.  Or more likely, that night.  He wouldn’t
have rushed off on our heels.  Somebody might have noticed.

I eyed him warily as he ambled over
and sat in the armchair.  He leaned back, crossed his legs, and stacked his
hands on his knee.  “Let’s talk,” he said.

Never let them see you cry; never
let them see you sweat,
I
reminded myself staunchly.  But for once in my life, I wasn’t sure I could pull
it off.