“You’re not here for drugs,” she said, because she was beginning to understand who Brody was. What he was.
“I said you know what I am,” Brody said. “Don’t mess with me.” He leaned down over her, close enough she could smell the dirt on his skin. “I came a long way to find you. I had to know.”
He reached up and took off his sunglasses. She had known already what she would see underneath, but still she gasped. His eyes were black from side to side. There were no irises, no whites, just featureless shiny black. Looking into them she felt like she was looking into a darkened room — anything at all could be in there. There would be no predicting Brody’s behavior, she knew. He seemed calm enough now, but he could erupt in violence at the slightest provocation. He was strong enough that if that happened, one little old lady was not going to survive his wrath.
“You shouldn’t be here,” she said. “How did you get out?”
“I’ll ask the fucking questions!” Brody shouted. He grabbed the metal bed frame underneath her and yanked hard, throwing the mattress, the box spring, and Dr. Bryant to the floor. She struggled with the sheets wrapped around her neck and arms and tried to scuttle away as he reached down with inhuman speed and grabbed her by the shoulder.
“No,” she screamed, as his fingers closed around her clavicle and crushed it into powder. Pain ran screaming up and down her body as her arm twitched wildly against the floorboards. “Please — please just — tell me what you want to know! I’ll tell you anything!”
Brody let her go. “That’s better.” He walked over to the door and shut it carefully. For a while he didn’t look at her. He stared down at his hands, at the floor. “That’s… better. Just everybody relax.” Was he talking to himself, as much as to her?
He sat down in the chair by her dressing table. He dropped into it hard enough to make it creak, as if he wasn’t used to fragile furniture. She supposed he wouldn’t be. “You left us there. You just left us.”
Dr. Bryant was in horrible pain, but she knew she had to do something. The telephone on the bedside table was useless. There was no way help could reach her in time. There was a pen, there, however, perched on top of the crossword puzzle she’d been working on before she fell asleep. She grasped it with her weak left hand and fumbled the cap off.
“You — you didn’t want us anymore,” Brody said, his anger back to a low simmer. Dr. Bryant knew that the comparative calm wouldn’t last. He rubbed at his hair and face with both hands. “I guess we didn’t work out, huh?” A nasty grin crossed his face. “I guess we just weren’t good enough.”
Dr. Bryant dropped the pen. She’d managed to scrawl a message on the wall next to the bed frame. Nothing complex, but enough that the right people would understand what it meant. Assuming the right people ever saw it.
“Brody,” she said, “It wasn’t like that. It wasn’t—”
“You said you were our mother! You stood up on the platform, and you shouted it through a loudspeaker. You were our mother, and you were going to take care of us! Make sure we were okay!”
“We did what we could,” she pleaded. “It wasn’t safe to — to get any closer. We sent you food, and clothes. Toys—”
“You’re pretty stupid for a doctor, huh?” Brody asked. He dropped to his knees next to her and smashed her across the face with a hand like a lion’s paw. “Stupid! Stupid! I know how to read, you stupid bitch! You gave us books. You gave us books so we could read. Did you think we wouldn’t figure out what a mother was supposed to be?” He struck her again and again. “In the books, the mothers hugged their children. They loved them! You never loved us,” he said, and his voice was a roar.
“It wasn’t safe,” she begged, in between blows. “It wasn’t safe — we couldn’t — we couldn’t — please stop! Please!”
Brody stopped hitting her across the face. For a moment he glared at her, his nostrils flaring. “This isn’t going right.”
She could only stare up at him. Blood ran down her face in streams.
“This isn’t what I expected. I thought I was going to come and talk to you, just talk. That I could learn something here. But I just keep getting frustrated.” He shook his head from side to side.
“Brody,” she managed to squeak out, “Brody, I’m hurt. I’ll… I’ll tell you anything. I’ll… I’ll be your mother if you want, just—”
“You know what I am. You know we don’t do well with frustration,” he said. Then he grabbed her by her hurt arm and threw her across the room to smash against the vanity table on the far wall. She just had time to see her own screaming face in the mirror before she crashed into the glass with a shattering, tooth-rattling noise.
Brody hurt her more after that but thankfully she felt very little of it. She was dead long before he was finished.
IN TRANSIT: APRIL 12, T+6:46
Partner?
Chapel thought maybe Hollingshead had meant the helicopter pilot. When he climbed on board, though, he saw that the pilot was an air force kid who couldn’t be more than twenty-five — and who had no idea who Chapel was, where he was going, or what his mission was.
Chapel pulled on a crash helmet and moved the integrated microphone around so the pilot could hear him. “New York City — as fast as we can get there.”
The pilot confirmed, and in a moment they were airborne. The chopper cut a wide arc around the Pentagon then slewed northeast, headed straight over Washington.
Chapel sat back in his seat and let his gaze wander over the landscape. He considered taking a nap. It was going to be a long flight and there wasn’t much he could do until they arrived. He was too keyed up, though. Too excited — and scared — and worried — to even think about closing his eyes.
Instead he could only let his mind race, thinking over everything he needed to accomplish, everything he could reasonably do to catch the detainees before they killed again. And about how it might already be too late for the first name on the kill list.
He was lost in his own thoughts when a voice spoke in his ear.
“Good morning, Captain,” a woman said.
It was the smokiest, most sultry voice Chapel had ever heard. It was like someone was stroking his ear with a velvet glove.
He glanced over at the pilot, then back at the empty seats behind him. Whoever this woman was, she wasn’t onboard.
“No,” she said, with a chiding laugh. “I’m not there with you.”
“Who are you?” he asked.
“Why don’t you go ahead and think of me as your guardian angel?” she suggested.
“What do you mean, guardian angel?” Chapel asked.
The pilot of the helicopter glanced over at him briefly, then shrugged and went back to flying the chopper. Apparently the pilot wasn’t hearing the voice in his ear.
That was probably for the best.
“Director Hollingshead asked me to keep an eye on you, cutie,” the voice said. “I work directly for him, normally, but for the next few days I’m all yours.”
“He mentioned something about a partner. What’s your name?”
“Well, my initials are NTK.”
He smiled despite himself. In other words, her very name was Need to Know. “So you’re the secretive type. I can handle that,” he told her. “Let’s just run down the list, shall we? What is your current location? What’s your rank? What’s your official job description?”