“Um, three doors to the left, down the hall.”
“Thanks.”
“Who are you guys again?”
Ian ignored him and walked to the office. He opened the door and pulled out his pistol. The office was empty. He went back to the lawyer he’d spoken to before.
“She’s not in. Do you know where she is, by chance? I’m her brother-in-law.”
“Oh, you’re Tommy. Nice to finally meet you.”
“You too. Mandy talks about me, huh?”
“She told us about Ice Cybernetics and how you started it with Kickstarter money and all that. Very cool. Hey, I need some advice on something. If Kickstarter offers me money and then I change my mind, and I-”
“No offense, but do you have any idea where Mandy is? Sorry, it’s just I want to grab something to eat with her and catch up before I have to leave in the morning. She doesn’t know I’m here.”
“Oh. Well, whenever we have to work late, her and some of the girls go down to Ah Shucks. It’s a bar and grill next door.”
“Right, I saw it coming in. Thanks for your help.”
“Hold on,” he said, standing and minimizing the browsers on his desktop. “I’ll come with. I could use a drink.”
“Sure,” Ian said.
“No,” Katherine blurted out. “No, I don’t really… I don’t know. I just want to have a quiet dinner with Mandy.”
“Um, okay.”
“Okay,” she said.
Ian walked her out and back to the elevator. “If you ever speak up again without my permission-”
“I saved you the hassle of having to kill someone in a public place. So you’re welcome.”
Ian glanced at her and then stared forward again, until they were off the elevators. They went outside, where he spotted the bar’s white canopy over a green-striped door.
Ian stepped out front as two women were walking out. He recognized one of them and quickly spun Katherine around and put his arms over her waist, pretending to be whispering to her. He slowly took out his phone and checked Mandy’s photo. The picture was perhaps a few months old, but that was the same woman.
As the women were walking down the sidewalk, two men ran up from behind. One of them smashed what looked like a small bat into the head of the other woman and then into Mandy’s jaw. They picked up Mandy and dragged her to a van parked at the curb.
Ian laughed.
“Wow, today is not her day.”
Katherine wasn’t even smiling.
“Looks like someone else had the same idea,” he said.
Ian casually strode up to the two men. One had opened the back doors to the van, and the other was holding Mandy, who was unconscious. On the inside of the van were shackles and chains.
Ian grabbed the man’s wrist and jerked it away from his body before spinning it toward him and then snapping it in a direction it wasn’t supposed to go. The man screamed, and Ian thrust the tips of his fingers into the man’s eye, popping it out of the socket. He bashed his fist into the man’s sternum which knocked him back.
The other one swung at him with the bat. Ian grabbed it with both hands on the downward motion and slammed it back into his face. He kicked down into the man’s shin and then his knee before twisting behind him and smashing his face through the van door’s window. He opened the door all the way, almost gingerly placed the man’s head inside the van, and then slammed the door, again and again and again, until blood had spattered inside the van and his brains were laying there like jelly.
“Hmm,” Ian said. He pulled out the pistol and fired into the exposed brain. “Never done that before.”
Mandy was groaning on the warm cement. Ian pointed his pistol.
“No!” Katherine shouted. “Please don’t!”
“As you wish.” He tucked away the pistol, and relief washed over her face. In one violent motion, he knelt and spun Mandy’s head almost all the way around and then twisted it backward, separating the spine from the body at C2, the spine’s weakest point. Katherine was screaming as he ran to her, grabbed her, and pulled her back to the car.
20
Samantha watched the twinkling lights of the Midwest below her. In the dark, inside the gray military plane, she couldn’t really see that she was being held aloft by a machine, and she appeared almost to be floating above the surface of the earth.
Duncan sat next to her and listened to an audiobook on his phone. She watched him for a moment, thinking back to the proposal she had received in medical school, and wondered what her answer would have been if Duncan had been the one making it.
“I never get over planes,” he said, removing his earbuds. “That, with the power of our minds, we’ve been able to lift off the ground and sit back and fly. It’s an incredible accomplishment of the human mind, and no one appreciates it. They just complain when their flight is ten minutes late.”
“I think people have always been that way.”
He took a sports drink out of his gym bag at his feet and took a long drink before offering it to her. She took a few sips, then pulled out some aspirin and took one with a drink before handing the bottle back to him.
“How ya doing with everything?” he said.
“Good as can be.”
“Do you still get panic attacks sometimes?”
“They’ve been reduced. But I heard a loud crash the other day, just my mom dropping something, and it gave me one. Any time I’m startled. And I can’t go to bed without checking all the doors twenty times.” She glanced out the window again. “I’ve been seeing a psychiatrist.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I didn’t know how you would react.”
“Sam, someone tried to kill you. Not to mention everything that happened in South America and Oahu. You’ve been through some serious trauma. I would be surprised if you didn’t go to therapy. I went to a shrink for about five years a little bit ago.”
“For what?”
“Depression. It runs in my family. My grandfather and biological mother both committed suicide.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“It’s not something I talk about much. But anyway, I’m terrified of that, and so when I get even a hint of the blues coming on, I go to a shrink. Sometimes, talking is enough, but occasionally, I need meds.”
She placed her hand over his. “I’m glad you told me.”
He smiled awkwardly and took a drink of his bottle.
When her plane landed at Los Angeles Air Force Base, Samantha had been on the plane for three and a half hours, which was actually less time than she would have spent on a commercial flight. She and Duncan stepped onto the tarmac, and a warm gust of wind hit her. The sensation was both pleasing and ominous. The last time she was in this city, she was nearly killed.
A national guardsman in a jeep saluted Duncan, not knowing he was a civilian scientist working for the army, and threw their bags in the jeep.
“Sir, I’ll be taking you into the medical station.”
Sam climbed into the backseat, allowing Duncan the passenger, then the jeep started and peeled out from the tarmac, heading toward the city.
“Who’s in charge of the medical station?” Duncan asked.
“Lieutenant General Olsen, sir.”
Samantha asked, “Clyde Olsen?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She thought back to the time she had met Dr. Clyde Olsen. He had joined the army to pay for medical school and had decided that a career in the military suited his temperament better than one in medicine. “Medicine is guesswork,” he told her once, “but the military requires no guesswork. You do what your superiors tell you, and your underlings do what you tell them.”
The last time she had seen him was at a conference in London. He had gotten drunk afterward and invited her to his room, but she turned him down. So he’d picked up one of the other doctors at the conference, and they were arrested for having sex in the hotel pool after hours.
As the driver hopped on the interstate, she sensed something extraordinarily wrong. Not a single car was on the road. She saw no motorcycles or buses-nothing but military vehicles, particularly large trucks with people crammed in back.