“Caitlyn James is waiting for you,” Rebecca told him as he entered. In the six years she had been his assistant, he had never beaten her to the office. He swore she had his car bugged. “And there’s a hearing at two P.M.”
“Great. And great. Please order ten dozen roses, assorted colors, and have them sent here.” He handed her Stacy’s card.
Rebecca’s mouth popped open. “Uh—sure. Sure. Right away. I’ll use the florist we—sure.” He watched, amused, as she pretended her boss had her send flowers to women every day. “Alrighty, then. Does that have anything to do with why you’re wearing yesterday’s Armani?”
“That’s classified, Rebecca.”
“Sure it is,” she snickered.
“How long has Caitlyn been waiting?”
“Forty minutes.”
“Great. Order a replacement of everything.”
“Already done.”
He opened his door—miraculously still hanging by the hinges—and observed the six-billion-dollar woman had twisted around in her chair and was looking decidedly sullen. “Finally,” she said by way of greeting.
“Good morning.”
“Okay, first of all, don’t crash my parties.”
“Fine, thanks, and you?”
“And second of all, don’t send other creeps to crash my parties either. And third of all, you having an out-of-control agent is not my problem, but I’m gonna look into it anyway. This does not mean I’m working for you. I’m just curious myself, okay?”
“No, I don’t think it will rain, but I wish it would, we could certainly use it.”
“Fourth, your coffee sucks.”
He sat down and thought about Stacy’s smile, which nicely offset her gorgeous dark eyes, her big, beautiful brown eyes with that charming tilt at the corners, then shoved Stacy out of his mind and focused on the matter at hand. “I’ve prepared a file for you—“
“By ‘I’ve’ you mean ‘my assistant,’ right?”
“Yes.” Odd. Stacy was back. He had banished her as he had banished every distraction for the last—er, how old was he?—and she was back. Was ten dozen enough? Perhaps he should double the flower order. It wouldn’t do to appear lacking. Not to a woman like that. She probably had a dozen men battling for her favors. “Take the plane to Paris.”
“Paris?” Caitlyn looked surprised and pleased, so he decided, cruelly, to let her be even more surprised when she got off the plane. “Oh! Okay. Well, I’d better get going.”
“Yes, you had better.” Odd. He had won, and all he could think about was this: were ten dozen flowers enough? “It was a lovely party, BTW.”
“What?” She looked alarmed and suspicious—and ridiculous, with black streaks in her white blond hair. He was positive that the last time he’d seen her the streaks had been red.
“Nothing.” He turned to the computer, fired off a quick two-word e-mail to Rebecca (”Twenty dozen”), then turned back to Caitlyn. “Were you aware that brown is the new black?”
His six-billion-dollar project rolled her eyes, which were the color of the deep end of a pool. “I told you not to come to my parties anymore, right?”
“Yes.” The problem with science for science’s sake—which was ninety-five percent of the reason O.S.F. was funded—was that the scientists insisted on inventing things. Like nanobytes. Then they wanted to skip animal testing—and, needless to say, testing on federal prisoners—and go right to clean-cut Americans.
“Don’t worry.” Then, when an experiment actually worked, he had to find a use for it. Thus, a former sorority girl and current barber was now on his payroll. If he thought about it too long, he might laugh. Stranger things had happened. “I got what I needed last night.”
“Because I really, really need for you to get that.”
“Yes, yes, I’ll never do it again.” He had always thought of Caitlyn’s fine good looks as an asset to O.S.F., but if she kept doing odd things to her hair, he was going to have to send her a memo. “Be sure to read the file, Caitlyn.” If past performance had been any indicator, he knew the more he emphasized something, the higher the probability that she would do the opposite.
She was a child, really. A beautiful child, but lacking in discipline and deportment. Now, Stacy was young, but she was charming and quite mature for her years, really had a grasp of—
“I think I may be in rather large trouble,” he announced.
“Dude, you’re only now figuring that out? You’re kidnapping women and infecting them with nanobytes, you’ve got a rogue agent killing people, and you’re crashing parties because you have no life.”
“Don’t call me dude,” he said. That was what Stacy called him. It was, like, her pet name for him. Mad he just used “like” as an adjective?
“How about if I call you jackass?”
“How about if you go away and let me work?” Caitlyn huffed out. Engrossed in paperwork, he didn’t even watch her go.
Chapter 16
Caitlyn finished the last paper airplane and sailed it across the cabin. Now the file was empty. Hee!
Okay, so, she’d have to read some of it to find out where the bad guy was, but she’d do that when they landed and the Spy Car was driving her wherever she needed to go. Hell, the Spy Car would probably take her to the bad guy, most likely. Then she’d neutralize him or whatever. She’d worry about that later, but one thing was for sure. She had to get that done before she shopped.
Not that she wasn’t dying to shop. Because she absolutely was. But if she shopped, all the ghosts of the people the bad guy had killed would just bother the hell out of her. So she’d get work out of the way, then enjoy her first-ever trip to Paris.
The copilot opened the door to the cockpit and stuck his head into the cabin. “Ma’am, we’re landing.”
She peeked out the window. “Already?”
“Yes, ma’am. Buckle up.”
“I’m buckled.” She looked out the window again and opened her mouth, but the copilot had ducked back inside the cockpit. “Well, shoot.”
She waited until they had landed and taxied, out of force of habit—though it would probably take a lot more than a plane crash to ice her—then unbuckled and stood. The copilot had come out again and gallantly held out a hand to help her out of her seat.
“Thanks.”
“No problem. We’re here, ma’am.”
“Uh, hello? I think you guys need to get new maps, pronto.”
“Paris, Texas.”
“Aw, shit.”
“And the Boss said to tell you it serves you right for not reading the file.”
“Aw, shit!”
“That’s why I had to plow through two hundred paper airplanes to get my coffee, isn’t it?”
“I hate him,” she said, looking out her window at the barren expanse that was the Paris, Texas, airport, “so much.”
“We all do, ma’am.”
“So the Waldorf…?”
“It’s the Wally Dorfman Motel. See, Wally’s the mayor, and he owns the place on the side, and—“
“I actually have no interest in this at all.”
“Oh.”
“There’s a car out there, right?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“It’s Caitlyn, okay? Stop with the ma’am. And the car is going to whisk me away somewhere.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“So I don’t actually need to read the file,” she finished triumphantly.
“If you say so, ma’am.”
“Oh, I say so. Thanks for the ride.”
She slouched down the steps to the tarmac, shamelessly eavesdropping on the pilot and copilot’s conversation.
“She’s a field agent, right?”
“Yeah, but she’s new.”
“Really new if she’s not reading the file.”
“Yeah, but, God, wouldn’t you like to tear a piece off of—“
Caitlyn stopped listening. On the tarmac below, waiting for her, was the same driver she had last t
ime.
“Oh, it’s you,” she said. The chip in her head obediently played back the conversation where the woman had told Caitlyn her name. “Sharon, right? Nice to see you again.”
Sharon smiled at her, and the wind ruffled her hair. Prematurely gray, Caitlyn thought. She needs a good rinse to cover it. Maybe Light Auburn #421. “Hi, Caitlyn. Well, here we go again. You gonna actually shoot this one?”
“Probably not.”
“Have it your way.” Sharon snickered as she held the door open. “We’re off to the Waldorf.”
“Oh, if only.”
“ … then I’m supposed to meet with this detective guy, Detective Johnson, and get the scoop from him, and then I guess I’ll use my incredible new brain to crack the case. I foresee nothing going wrong with this plan. At all.”
Sharon snickered. “I thought you didn’t read files. You’re sort of famous for it.”
“Well, I kind of scanned the papers before I made them into airplanes. It’s all up here.” She tapped her temple. “I just haven’t looked at it yet.”
“You can download information without knowing exactly what it is?”
“Sure. Like e-mail, I guess. You know, when you’re downloading something and you don’t know what it is. Good way to get a virus actually,” she added in a mutter.
“Hmf.”
“Sharon, we have to talk about this way you have of grunting instead of speaking.”
“No, we have to get to work,” Sharon said, pulling up outside the motel, which was painted a depressing shade of brown. “Luck.”
“What could possibly go wrong?” she asked glumly, slamming the car door. To punctuate her mood, it started to rain. This was apparently a rare and wonderful thing in Paris, Texas, but it was pretty damned common in Minneapolis, aka the Seattle of the Midwest.
She stomped through the lobby—no need to mess with the front desk, since the key to her room had been in the file—and down the hall to her room, popped the door open, and slung her purse on the small table in the breakfast nook.
ALARM ALARM ALARM ALARM ALARM ALARM AL
Too late, she realized she should have scanned the room for life signs. Well, she’d said, hadn’t she? She was not cut out for this job.
She heard a sound, but there was no pain. Instead, she watched the screen in her head fade to black, exactly like a television set.
So that’s what losing consciousness feels like, she thought, tipping sideways. It’s so, er, what’s the word? It’s on the tip of my tongue. Great, now I can’t think of it. Detached! No, that’s not it. Anyway, it’s very hit—
Chapter 17
“Awwwwwww,” she complained, sitting up and rubbing the back of her neck. “What did you hit me with, a taxi?”
“No,” her attacker said coolly. He followed it up with, “You’re not what I expected at all.”
She saw who it was and leapt from the bed. Truth be told, her neck didn’t hurt that much. Okay, not at all. But she kept rubbing it anyway, hoping for a sympathetic look. Or sympathetic oral sex.
“You! The guy from my party!”
The guy from her party frowned at her. Okay, so now she knew he had two expressions: a frown and a scowl. Progress! “First you crash my party, and now this? Oh, you’re gonna pay, pal. Through the nose.”
“We have to talk,” he said.
“Dude, I have to kick your ass! And then haul you to jail! Or kill you! I haven’t decided which! Am I shouting? It seems kind of loud in here.”
“Yes, you’re shouting. Now lie back down on the bed before you hurt yourself.” He tried to put his hands on her shoulders, and she shrugged him off.
“I’ll pass.” She rubbed her arms and grimaced. “I saw this TV special once on hotel rooms and how they, like, never wash the bedspreads, and let’s just say, my skin is crawling just standing on this carpet.”
He glared at her with his gorgeous blue eyes. He had retreated from the bed and was now standing directly in front of the door, so the first thing a visitor would smack into would be his back. Unless, of course, he punched them from behind, or whatever he did. She stifled a sigh as he said, “Let’s try to stay on track, shall we?”
“Okay. Let’s talk about how you creepily waited in my room and then clobbered me when I wasn’t looking.”
“I didn’t clobber you.”
“You did something!”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Pal: What. Did. You. Do.”
He said calmly, which was infuriating enough, “There’s a—a reboot spot, I suppose you could call it. It’s on the back of your neck. If someone applies just the right amount of pressure—“
“I’ll… what? Turn off?” She found the thought as appalling as she did horrifying. Nobody—nobody—at the O.S.F. had mentioned this little tidbit. “You turned me off?”
“More like shut you down for a minute. It’s painless and leaves no lasting damage.”
“I’ve got an off switch?”
“You’re shouting again,” he pointed out helpfully.
“Ugh! Ugh-ugh! And again, ugh!” She didn’t know what was worse, finding out she could be shut off by someone who knew what she was, or that he was so matter-of-fact about it. “Jesus Christ!”
“Let’s talk about the O.S.F.”
“Fuck a duck!”
“You lied,” he continued, inexorable as a Terminator.
That got her attention. She was a weird-ass cyborg freak with an off switch, but she was not a liar. “I never!”
“You said you didn’t work for them.”
“I don’t. It was just a one-time thing. I’m just here because—actually, it’s a really long story and there’s, like, no alcohol in this room, so I’m not gonna tell it. Not even if you say pretty please with sugar on top. So there!”
He blinked at her. She had the odd feeling that he was doing more than looking at her leggings and shirt. Then she realized: he was scanning her! Just like she did pretty much automatically these days; she recognized the look, penetrating and faraway at the same time. But that would mean—
She scanned him (Ha! See how he likes it!) and got exactly what she had gotten last time: his yummy measurements, but little else.
“You’d better not have X-ray vision, or if you do, you’d better not be using it.”
He didn’t say anything.
“I don’t get it.”
“Now, if only you had a ten-dollar bill for every time you’ve had to say that out loud.”
“Hey, there’s no need to be mean. Are you”—she hesitated—“like me?”
“No.”
“Oh, c’mon, seriously.”
“No one is like you, I think.”
“Okay, thanks, I think.”
“Am I cybernetically enhanced?” he prompted her.
“Who are you talking to?” she asked.
He frowned again. “The answer is yes.”
“But—” But the Boss had told her she was the only one. Gosh, the evilest man in the universe had lied to her, what a large fucking surprise. “But—” But if he was like her, that would mean—
“But when I scan you, I don’t pick up anything unusual.”
“That’s because I can block your scans.”
She digested that for a minute, then asked, “So, you work for the O.S.F.?”
His frown deepened and his eyes went all narrow and squinty. He was either constipated or super pissed.
“Okay, okay,” she said nervously. “Don’t have a stroke.”
“I never worked for Gregory Hamlin,” he said in a low voice that was nonetheless the most vehement tone she had ever heard. “I never worked for any of them. I was a slave.”
“Okay, okay, I believe you. Uh, who?”
“He’s about your height, slicked-back hair, everybody calls him the Boss?”
“Oh, him. Well, me neither. Yeah! We’re two lone wolves alone, er, together. Just you and me against the world, pal.” Now, why was that thought as horrifying as it
was exciting?
“Mmmm. Now, I know better than anyone how infuriating it is to be turned into something new against your will, but you simply must stop killing the members of the Wagner team to get your point across.”
She gaped at him. Well, she felt like doing that anyway. He was wearing a crisp white shirt, a blue tie the exact color of his eyes, and black slacks. Yumm. Oh, and probably shoes and socks, but frankly, she hadn’t been able to bring her gaze past his waist. He could be wearing pink rubber flip-flops for all she cared. “I’ve got to what to get my what and stop doing what?”
“This dumb act you’re putting on is really quite good, but it’s wasted on me. So—“
Finally, she got it. Normally, she wasn’t this slow, but it had been an odd day, and not even lunchtime yet. “I’m not the killer! You’re the killer!”
“Stop yelling.”
“I’m not yelling! It’s totally you! I just don’t know why,” she confessed. “But it doesn’t matter, because I’ve got to bring you in.” I guess. How does one bring in a suspect exactly? I know! I’ll wear him out having sex with him. No, wait, that’s a dumb idea. Or is it a great idea?
“I’m not the one murdering all those people,” he said impatiently. “You are.”
She laughed shortly. “Pal, I think I would know if I was going around killing people.”
“Look. I already told you, I understand. So if you’ll just—“
“Wait a minute. You understand? So… what? You’re going to arrest me and take me in, or whatever?”
“No. What jail could hold you, first of all?”
She buffed her nails on her shirt. “Well, that’s true.”
“And your position… it’s understandable. Not that I condone murder,” he said, fixing her with a frown, “or, not usually.”
“Well, color me comforted.”
“But I understand how you feel. I just think there are other ways to, ah, get your point across.”
“So, what d’you want to do?”
“I’ll take you into my custody, and there are people in my employ who can help you.”
“Uh-huh. And you’re doing this why?”