“You found her? How’s she doing? Sorry — Clara, hey. Are you alright?”
“I’m fine,” she replies, laughing. “I just got shot a little bit.”
Josh laughs. “I can see why you like her, Boss,” he says.
“Thanks, asshole,” I say, laughing while avoiding Clara’s gaze. “Listen, you had any luck on our missing scientist yet?”
“There's no one of any significance that’s been reported missing in the last six months, sorry.”
“Try searching back eighteen months,” offers Clara. “Dark Rain will have been planning this for a long time, so it’s feasible this scientist has been in play a lot longer.”
“Huh, good idea,” I agree. “Also, Josh, Clara’s got a few locations of safe houses that Dark Rain use. Can you look into them, see if there’s any recent activity, et cetera?”
“Yeah, of course,” he says.
I give him the address details and ask him to ring me back if he finds anything. I hang up and the room falls silent again.
I like to know how something is going to end before I start it. I like to play out every possible outcome first, so I can prepare for anything going wrong. I hate surprises. Josh, along with everyone else, apparently, thinks I have OCD, but I just like being thorough and covering my ass.
This whole thing has been a disaster from the moment I entered Heaven’s Valley. I need an exit strategy. I need to stop Dark Rain from doing whatever the hell it is they’re doing. I know it’s not going to involve Uranium anymore, which is a small comfort, but if they have the numbers, the weapons and the token megalomaniacal leader with a grudge against the western world, nothing good is going to come of whatever they decide to do instead.
I also have the mob to contend with. Whichever way you look at it, Jimmy Manhattan has a point — I did go back on my contract by not fulfilling every stipulation of it. And I told them to shove it up their ass when they questioned me about it. That’s something I’ve never done before and in doing so I’ve broken the only golden rule in the world of contract killing… Nobody wants to hire someone who might not do what you pay them to. I know these were extenuating circumstances, but nobody else will ever know that. I can’t outrun Pellaggio’s far-reaching empire, or any bad press they put out about me.
I look over at Clara. She’s fallen asleep. I smile to myself and look at the clock on the wall. It’s the middle of the night and it’s been a long couple of days with very little respite. I sit back in the chair and put my feet up on the table in front of me. I rest my head back and stare up at the ceiling in an effort to stop my mind racing at a hundred miles an hour in every direction at once.
I close my eyes and take a deep breath, letting it out slowly.
At least the pain in my ribs is easing…
I startle myself awake, snorting a little. I’m still sitting with my feet up on the table. Outside, the sun is shining brightly through the blinds. I look around, a little dazed. I must’ve nodded off.
Where… oh yeah, Clara’s room in GlobaTech’s hospital — I remember now.
I look over at her bed. Empty… What?
I stand and check the time. I’ve been asleep over eight hours, Jesus!
I massage my temples and think for a moment. One thing at a time…
Now, I don’t know whether it was just because I got some sleep and I’m thinking more clearly now, or whether it was an epiphany or divine intervention or whatever, but in my head right now is a very clear and concise plan of how I can solve my current list of problems.
Excellent.
Right, now where’s Clara?
I pick up my phone from the table and check it. There’s a missed call from Josh a couple of hours ago. I ring him back.
“Josh, it’s me.”
“You sound half asleep. You alright?”
“Yeah, I nodded off in Clara’s room. I just woke up and saw your missed call. Clara’s gone from her room as well.”
“Uh-oh…”
“What do you mean, ‘uh-oh’?”
There’s silence on the other end of the phone.
“Josh…?”
“Well, I rang you and she answered,” he explains. “She said you were sleeping. I told her I’d had some luck and got a hit on both the missing scientist and one of the locations you gave me.”
“That’s good news, isn’t it?”
“I told her what I had and… I think she may have gone off on her own to rescue them…”
“What?”
“That’s why I tried ringing you back, but there was no answer.”
“What exactly did she say?”
“She said she’d go and check out the address. I said she should probably wait for you. She said she felt fine and wanted to go on her own. Said she felt responsible.”
“Ah, shit! What’s the address?”
“It’s a few miles from the hospital you’re in, so you’re gonna need a car. Listen, Adrian, I’m sorry — I had no idea she was basically a female version of you!”
“It’s okay, I just need to find her. I’ll ring you back.”
I leave Clara’s room and run down the corridor to the waiting room where I’d met Robert Clark a few hours ago. A couple of the soldiers are walking around, still dressed in their nondescript black and red fatigues. I walk over to one of them.
“I need a car,” I say.
“What for?” he replies.
I quickly explain why, strategically omitting any details about the scientist that Dark Rain has kidnapped. The soldier looks over at his partner, who shrugs back at him. He then reaches into his pocket and pulls out a set of keys.
“It’s the black Jeep out front,” he says, handing them to me. “Don’t scratch it.”
I take the elevator on the other side of the front desk down to the ground floor and run outside. The 4x4 is right outside the entrance. I climb in, start it up, and pull out of the semi-circle driveway. The tires screech as I hit the gas and navigate the light traffic on the street. I ring Josh again, putting him on speaker.
“Right, I’m on the road now — give me directions,” I say.
“Okay,” he replies. “Keep straight for another two miles, then turn right at the junction.”
“Will Clara be there by now?”
“Easily, yeah.”
“Shit.”
“Adrian, I’m sure she can take care of herself — you worry too much.”
“They sent a hit squad to shoot up an entire building, just because she was in it. And now she’s heading to one their safe houses to try to save a scientist who just became disposable. Plus, as far as I know, she’s unarmed.”
“All valid points. You wanna know about our missing scientist?”
“You’ve found out who it is?”
“Well, the search results were surprisingly narrow. Once I filtered by location, I was left with literally one name: Jonathan Webster. He’s a nuclear physicist who worked out of Columbia University in New York. He apparently went to a conference about fifteen months ago and never came back. He sent a note to his colleagues a couple of weeks later saying he was resigning from his position at the University. No explanation, and hasn’t been seen since.”
“Sounds like our guy. We sure he’s at this particular safe house?”
“Satellite imagery from the last three weeks shows regular movement at this particular address. Out of all the locations Clara gave us, there was only one other that showed any activity, but I ruled it out because it’s miles away on the other side of town, close to the state lines. It makes no sense to keep him there, plus this other place is in reasonably close proximity to the mine.”
“How the hell do you find this stuff out?”
“Trade secrets,” he says, clearly smiling smugly down the phone. “If I told you, I’d have to kill you.”