Twenty minutes later, Cameron returned. As she pushed open the door and stepped inside, she said, “Don’t worry-it’s just me.” Puzzlement flickered across her face when she saw her belongings in piles on the floor. Then she noticed that Hendricks was sitting on her futon, the.45 he’d taken from Pappas aimed squarely at her gut. “Uh, did I do something wrong? Or are you delirious from blood loss? I saved your life, remember?”
“I remember,” he said. “But I think it’s time that you and I got to know each other better.”
“Fine by me,” she said, the quaver in her voice putting the lie to her casual bravado, “but do you really think you need to point a gun at me to do that? I’m one of the good guys.”
“Who says I am?” He gestured to the papasan chair with his gun barrel, its cushion bare, its slipcover lying on the floor beside it.
“I do,” she replied, moving slowly toward it with her hands up halfheartedly and then sitting down. “But we can play it your way.”
He glanced at the laptop that sat beside him on the futon, a tricked-out custom job with more ports than Hendricks knew what to do with and a seventeen-inch screen. “I found your computer,” he said.
“Good for you. I wasn’t hiding it.”
“It’s a serious piece of hardware.”
“For a waitress who lives in a total dump, you mean.”
“For anybody,” he said. “Care to explain to me what I found on it?”
“Sure,” she said. “I think the word you’re looking for is nothing.”
“Come again?”
“I built that thing myself. It’s encrypted six ways from Sunday and requires a USB passkey to log on. That passkey is in my pocket. I could give it to you, if you’d like to boot it up and poke around.”
Hendricks frowned. “Later, maybe. First, let’s talk about the dossier you’ve got on me.”
“What, the one in the dresser?”
“That’s right.”
“Oh, I’d hardly call that a dossier,” she said with exaggerated snootiness, as if mocking his word choice. “It’s just some clippings, really, of stuff I couldn’t find online and haven’t had time to scan yet. If you really wanna see what I can do, you should check out what’s on that baby,” she said, nodding toward the computer. “I’ve got a virtual corkboard of news pieces stretching back four years. Same with crime-scene photos and coroner’s reports. And then there’s the juicy stuff. I’m talking real-time data collection on every criminal organization in the country from a half a dozen federal databases-and Interpol too, obviously. Five separate regression analyses, both parametric and non-, that all feed into a weighted model designed to treat each according to its accuracy in predicting prior known movements-”
“Whoa. Slow down. Whose prior known movements?”
She looked at him like he was the kid in class who couldn’t be trusted with the paste. “Well, yours.”
“So you admit that you’ve been tracking me?”
“Yes, of course!”
“For how long?”
“I dunno…a few months now? But like I said, my data stretches back way farther than that.”
“Who do you work for?”
“Nobody right now. That’s why I’m here.”
“I don’t follow.”
Cameron cocked her head and regarded him quizzically. “You really don’t remember me, do you?”
“Should I?”
“I dunno. Four years ago, you saved my mother’s life. I thought maybe you’d recognize me.”
“I’ve saved a lot of people. Killed a lot of people too. You’re going to have to give me more to go on.”
“Cameron’s not my first name, it’s my last.”
It took a few beats, but eventually, it clicked. “Jesus. You’re Dana Cameron’s kid.”
When Hendricks met Dana Cameron, she was the head of bioinformatics for Veridian Laboratories. Dana was a brilliant programmer and had been a rising star in the male-dominated world of Silicon Valley before the pharmaceutical giant poached her to run its nascent division, which aimed to use rapid genotyping and next-gen computer modeling to tailor its promising new cancer drug to individual patients. The corporation’s executives pledged to give her a billion dollars to use however she wished in order to reach that goal.
When Veridian made the announcement, their stock soared. The scientific community heralded the decision as revolutionary. Bill Gates wrote in his annual Gates Foundation letter that the partnership could reduce cancer mortality by 80 percent in the next decade.
But the honeymoon was short-lived.
Six months into her new job, Dana discovered that the results of several in-house studies of Veridian’s new drug had been suppressed-studies that indicated the drug increased patients’ risk of stroke and cardiac arrest more than twentyfold. She made the mistake of giving her company’s CEO, Gavin Lockley, the chance to make things right and take the information public before she did. If the world found out about the studies, Lockley and Veridian stood to lose tens if not hundreds of billions, so he’d responded the way any shrewd businessman would: he’d hired someone to kill her. That’s how Hendricks wound up in her employ.
He remembered the job well, in part because the man Lockley had hired to kill Dana was a seasoned pro who’d nearly succeeded in his task before Hendricks finally finished him off, and in part because his clients were rarely as decent and principled as she was.
Hendricks set down his gun and smiled. “You were just a knobby-kneed kid with braces back then.”
“I wasn’t that young-I was sixteen!”
Hendricks was thirty-one. He didn’t have the heart to tell her that from where he was sitting, sixteen qualified as that young. “I seem to recall your parents called you Rosie.”
“Yeah. My first name’s Rosalind. My parents named me after Rosalind Franklin, the scientist whose research Watson and Crick ripped off to write their paper on the helical structure of DNA. Mom always said it was her way of reminding me that if I wanted something in this world, I had to fight for it. Dad used to joke that he went along with it because he thought that an old-lady name would scare off potential suitors.”
“How are they? Your parents, I mean.”
“Mom’s good, I guess. She’s in Geneva, working for the World Health Organization.”
“And your dad?”
“Wrapped his Benz around a tree on the way home from a bar last Christmas Eve.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Thanks. Me too. It’s not like I didn’t see it coming, though. He fell apart after the attempt on Mom’s life. Took a leave of absence from his law firm. Started hitting the bottle pretty hard. Thanks to Mom’s testimony at Lockley’s trial, Veridian’s stock plummeted, and Mom became the poster child for corporate transparency. She wanted to use her newfound fame to help people. Dad just wanted it to go away. They fought a lot. One night-after he’d downed half a bottle of Canadian Club-he got physical, so she threw him out. When the cops called to tell me he’d…” She swallowed hard and cleared her throat. “I hadn’t seen him in a year.”
“Cameron, what are you doing here?”
“What do you mean?”
“You know what I mean. What do you want with me?”
“I want to help you.”
“Help me what?”
“You know…do what you do.”
“Kill people?”
“Stop bad guys,” she corrected. “Look, in my research, I’ve learned everything there is to know about your operation. You were sloppy when you began. Reckless. Then, for a few years-starting around the time you saved my mom-you got careful, savvy. Lately, your MO’s changed. You’re playing offense, not defense, and you’ve become reckless again. My guess is you had backup for a while-someone who helped you identify clients and watched your back-and now you don’t. And given your recent hate-on for this Council or whatever, I’m guessing that that someone’s dead.”