The Doubt Factory

He guessed they’d have at least another day before it escalated. Williams & Crowe would work the case a little longer, hoping for a local police lead. By then, they’d probably find Cynthia’s car, and the note Alix had left, and that would drag the time line out a little more.…

  And then?

  And then Simon Banks, who had looked so smart and quiet and in control in the back of the courtroom, with his shiny, ever-present iPad, would discover there were some things he couldn’t control.

  Moses remembered the man from the trial. Monitoring everything for his clients, smug, knowing that he had already won. He remembered watching George Saamsi getting up to testify on the science of the drugs that had killed Moses’s father. Remembered the man testifying that the drug was proved safe. Remembered Banks, in the back of the courtroom, so calm and in control as he orchestrated witnesses on behalf of his client.

  Now, though, Simon Banks would finally understand everything. He’d finally understand that Moses didn’t give a damn about the man’s clients or the testing of rats. He cared that Banks was always at the trials. The fixer. Always present: An asbestos lawsuit. At the Azicort safety hearings in DC, with handpicked witnesses all demonstrating that there was no reason to believe Azicort caused comas. At a Food and Drug Administration hearing about bisphenol A… Banks was always there. The master puppeteer, pulling all the strings.

  Now we get to see how you like it when someone’s pulling your strings, Moses thought. Let’s see you dance, sucker.

  The sky in the east was lightening. Moses could just make out the ocean, and the sun beyond it, rising. He closed his eyes, letting the warmth of the sun seep into him.

  He was tired, but it was a good tired, the tired that told him he’d been pushing hard. Adrenaline still ticked in him from their near failure to hang on to Alix and all the final setup work they’d had to do after the grab, but now it was giving way to exhaustion. Still, he’d moved the plan forward. Taken another step closer to his goal.

  Day by day, his dad used to say.

  “You add up each small step and you get down the road. Little farther down the road each time… little steps. You just put your mind on those steps.”

  Moses remembered his father’s hands, huge, as he sat with Moses, working a jigsaw puzzle. Moses remembered how much patience the man had when Moses wanted to scream with frustration at the task.

  “Just keep testing the pieces. Don’t worry about the whole puzzle. Just keep working these little pieces,” his dad had said. “If you work all the little pieces, one by one, well, pretty soon, all those pieces come together, and then all those pieces add up to something bigger.

  “At the end, you got yourself a masterpiece.”

  Piece by piece. Moses was working the pieces, all right.

  And in tranquil, sleepy Haverport, Simon Banks was working his pieces as well. Trying to put together a puzzle he didn’t understand, trying to find the shape of a world that Moses was constructing for him.

  Moses closed his eyes and breathed deeply. His uncle had taught him to relax in the face of almost unbearable tension. “Let everything go. Let all the fear and worry go. Just commit, and smile, and don’t let anything rattle you. When you’re right where you’re at, feeling cool and comfortable in your own shoes, well then, people can’t help but go along with your program. You’re so friendly, so well-spoken, they got no problem with you at all. They love that they can trust you. They want to trust you. They want you to know they’re open-minded.…”

  Moses exhaled. Let it all go.

  Pretty soon, there would be more work. More problems to deal with. He’d have to take care of Cynthia, make sure she got props for the work she’d done. She’d turned her own self off and become someone else for almost a year. She deserved to be rewarded for that.

  When she’d started drilling for the role, no one had thought she’d be able to pull it off. And then, at some point, every time she’d spoken or turned her head or joked, she’d come off exactly like a Seitz girl. It had been creepy. They’d turned Cynthia into a chameleon. Some chick who chewed gum with her mouth open and lived in the sun-drenched Los Angeles sprawl had become something else entirely.

  They were so close, he could almost taste it.

  All the work of forging records, hacking school databases, building an identity that was credible… and then inserting Cynthia so perfectly into the school. Moses remembered talking on the phone with the headmaster, pretending his poor English, shutting down conversation so that Cynthia became the single point of contact… a nice, rich Chinese girl from a Chinese tech dynasty who could sit beside Alix on the first day of school and shadow her from class to class, and eventually become her friend.

  Moses had carved and shaped Cynthia into what he needed. From a girl who grew up in the back of a strip mall grocery store into someone who walked and talked East Coast like a natural, rolling so smoothly into Seitz that she didn’t cause even a ripple. She fit where he needed her to fit.

  He’d fit each member of 2.0 into the puzzle picture he was building, filing off the sharp edges of distrust and difference so that they could work together. He remembered pulling each one into the team.

  It had been such a simple beginning. Just him and Cynthia sitting in the back of the courtroom. Two kids who had lost their dads to heart attacks. He remembered running across Kook by luck. The girl from his uncle’s underworld, who knew how to build credit card cloners and liked to go crusading in her spare time. Kook had been the one who’d managed to tunnel through the labyrinth of industry associations and research institutes to Banks’s actual clients. And that had led them to more class actions and eventually to Tank. They’d flat-out rescued Tank. No way was Moses going to leave that kid in the foster system. And then came Adam, the one who had genuinely won his class action, but won too late. After the money couldn’t help his aunt at all.

  “Yo, Moses.”

  Tank, climbing up out of the trapdoor that he’d cut in the roof with a torch, after welding a ladder and catwalk to make the climb, so that they could all sit up here and see the world. The wreckage of old industrial America, the factory and its warehouses.

  Tank balanced on the roof as he walked over to meet Moses.

  “Hey.”

  Moses nodded to him. “What up?”

  “Your girl’s starting to move.”

  “She talking?”

  “Not yet.” Tank slapped down the visor on his welder’s mask and turned to face the dawn. Moses knew the kid was staring at the sun through the shield, staring straight at the ball of fire. Moses was struck again by how young the kid was. Tank was the one Moses worried most about involving in all this. Too silent. Too weirdly broken by foster homes. Now his hands did more talking than he did. Tank coughed, a muffled sound from behind his visor—the asthma that Azicort had claimed it could fix.

  “You should probably go down there,” Tank said. “For when she wakes up, right?”

  “Yeah,” Moses sighed, feeling the weight of his responsibilities.

  I didn’t ask for this, he thought.

  Except, the truth was, he had. He’d gone out and created it. Every bit of it. And now another piece of the puzzle needed to be fitted into place.

  15

  ALIX STIRRED GROGGILY. SHE HAD BEEN dreaming, dreams of music that pounded with a thudding urgency. Music that she was drowning in. Music hammering at her, swaddling her, muffling her. She was drowning in a deep blue ocean of music.

  A voice called to her from the bottom of the ocean.

  Alix… Alix… Alix…

  Something cold pressed against her face. She turned over and banged her head against something hard.

  Ow.

  She rubbed her head. Ow. She reached out, grabbing at the hard, cold thing in her bed.

  What the—?

  Alix opened her eyes, squinting against a blaze of light. Bars. Cold, rough iron bars. She sat up slowly, trying to get a sense of her surroundings.

  “Alix.”

&nbs
p; She turned.

  Him. Her stalker. 2.0. Sitting on the other side of the bars, perched on a short stool. Watching her.

  And all around her, bars. He had her in a cage, and they were both sitting inside a puddle of light cast by an electric lantern he had sitting beside him. A puddle of light that bled away into darkness.

  How the—?

  Cynthia.

  Cynthia was one of them. She’d walked right into the trap because Cynthia was one of them.

  Alix wanted to cry at the betrayal. Cynthia, who had seemed so harmless. Cynthia, who had chosen to sit right beside her on the first day of school. The good girl who turned out to like a little fun as long as it didn’t screw up her college admissions. The wonderfully mature girl that Mom had so approved of.

  Wonderfully mature.

  Cynthia, who had gotten them fake IDs to get into an over-21 club, and Alix had never thought to question how she’d gotten such good ones. She’d just been impressed at the things Cynthia could pull off.

  You are such a sucker.

  She’d been so starved for a genuine and empathetic friend that she’d walked right into Cynthia’s trap. She couldn’t help but think of everything that Cynthia knew about her.

  Her head was pounding. It felt as if someone were driving a spike into her brain. Alix put her hand to her head, hating that she was showing weakness to her captor, and then not knowing why she cared. She was weak. Of course she was weak. She was in a fucking cage, and she’d walked right into it.

  She wasn’t just weak; she was stupid.

  “Hey, Alix.” 2.0 had a bottle of water in his hand. He offered it to her. “You’re going to have a headache for a little while. Booze and sleeping pills, you know?”

  Alix tried to speak. All that came out was a croak.

  He was still holding out the bottle. It took a second for it to register with Alix. The bottle. The concern in his expression. A chance. A bare chance.

  “Yeah,” she croaked. She faked a wince of pain. Adrenaline began pulsing through her. She pressed her palms to her temples. “Horrible headache,” she said thickly.

  She reached out with a shaking hand for the water bottle. A trembling, grateful hand. “Please…” She let her arm sag a little. She was reaching, but not quite far enough to reach the bottle.

  He slid the bottle between the bars.

  Alix lunged and seized his wrist with both hands.

  Got you!

  She yanked hard.

  Unbalanced, 2.0 plunged forward. His face slammed into the cage. He yowled and tried to pull away, but Alix had both of her hands tight around his wrist now, and she wasn’t letting go. She knew she had only one shot, and she wasn’t going to waste it.

  She twisted his arm around. He was fighting now, reaching through with his other hand. He clawed at her. Alix jerked her face away from his reaching fingers. She fought to hang on, twisting his arm harder. Just a little more. In a second she could put him in real pain. Pull his arm out of its socket maybe. Force him to take the keys off his belt. Then she’d open the cage—

  He yanked back hard. Alix’s fingers slammed against the bars. She yelped as her fingers went numb. She gritted her teeth against the pain and held on. He yanked her against the bars again and again. It felt like her fingers were being smashed by hammers. He was terrifyingly strong.

  Too strong.

  With a sharp twist, he ripped free. Alix tried to recapture him but he was too fast. He jerked his hand clear. Alix lunged, jamming her arms through the bars, reaching for him. “Come here, asshole!”

  He leaped back. “Jesus Christ, girl! Goddamn!”

  Alix withdrew, glaring at him. Her body shook with adrenaline. She clenched her hands, trying to shake off the numb pain in her fingers. She watched him carefully, hoping she’d get another shot but knowing she wouldn’t.

  He was pacing in front of her, glaring. Massaging his wrist, then reaching up and touching his bruised face. Blood dripped from a cut on his brow, running freely, staining his eye. He pressed the heel of his hand to the wound.

  “I was trying to be nice to you,” he growled.

  “Fuck you!”

  His expression hardened. “That how you want to play it? We can play it that way.”

  A door opened, a searing rectangle of daylight spilling in.

  Alix gasped. With the light from the door, she could see that the room she was in was huge. A vast, black, echoing tomb. She spied high beams overhead, iron trusses, and nothing else. An empty warehouse space of some kind.

  Shadowy figures came dashing across the emptiness.

  “What’s going on!”

  A girl’s voice. For a second Alix’s heart leaped. Cynthia, she thought inanely.

  But no. This girl was short and vicious-looking, dressed in a black T-shirt and black jeans. She had a pierced nose and wide-bore tribal earrings and electric-blue hair. Black eyeliner, done heavy on her top and bottom eyelids, shocking against her pale skin. The Goth girl who’d helped grab her. The one from the rave. And with her the Latino boy, the feral little kid.

  Blue-Haired Goth looked from 2.0 to Alix. “You okay, Moses?”

  “Moses?” Alix laughed despite herself. “Your name is Moses? Like parting the Red Sea Moses?”

  2.0 glared. “Keep it up, girl. Keep it up and see what happens.”

  Alix shut her mouth, suddenly aware of how vulnerable she was. For a moment she’d felt powerful. Dangerous, because she could hurt him. But now she was acutely aware that she was the one locked in a cage and that there were three of them out there and they could do anything they wanted with her.

  The Goth girl was smirking, looking from her to 2.0. “What the hell did you do to her?” she asked.

  “I didn’t do shit! I offered her water for her headache.”

  The girl laughed darkly. “No good deed goes unpunished.” She reached up to Moses’s face, surprisingly tender. “Let me see.” Moses bent to let her inspect the cut. “I need better light,” she said. “Looks like you’ll have a nasty bruise, for sure.” She frowned. “Did she chip a tooth, too?”

  Moses touched his mouth, surprised, then gave Alix a cold look. “Guess she did.”

  Alix could see the glint of blood on his teeth as he spoke. He touched his lip again and winced.

  “Don’t let her grab you, Tank,” he warned.

  “I won’t.”

  The feral little kid was pacing around the perimeter of Alix’s cage. For a second Alix thought he might be worried about her, and she felt a flood of warmth for him, but then she realized he was actually inspecting the bars of her cage. His eyes went from one bar to the next, studying each join carefully. Finally, he nodded with satisfaction.

  “Told you I could figure out the welding,” he said to the Goth. “It’s way easier than rigging something to explode.”

  “Sure, Tank. You’re the Wizard of Welding. Good for you.”

  The kid laughed and started to say something, but his words were lost as his breathing took on a sudden rasp. He pulled an inhaler out of his pocket and took a quick hit. It was a routine movement, fast and efficient.

  “Wizard of Welding,” he said on the exhale, grinning. “I do like the sound of that.”

  The Goth girl smiled over at him affectionately. “Don’t let it go to your head, kid.”

  Alix didn’t like how they ignored her entirely. It made her feel like she was an animal in a cage.

  “Hey!” Alix said. “What is this? Why are you keeping me here?”

  To Alix’s frustration, they continued to ignore her. The blue-haired girl kept checking out 2.0’s wound. “You’ll be fine,” she announced. “You really are an idiot. First you let her bite you, now this?”

  2.0—Moses—examined the blood on his hands and eyed Alix. “Yeah. Girl’s fierce, all right.” His expression was unreadable, a blankness that made Alix feel more like an object than a person. It chilled her the way they talked around her or looked right past her but didn’t bother to talk to her. r />
  “Why are you doing this to me?” Alix asked again.

  “Come on,” the blue-haired girl said to Moses. “Let’s get you checked out. I really need better light.” She led Moses away. “Come on, Tank,” she called back. The short kid followed. As he left, he scooped up the electric lantern, carrying it swinging with him, casting shadows as he went.

  “Hey!” Alix shouted after them.

  “Hey!”

  They walked out the door.

  The door closed.

  The darkness was total.

  “You can’t just leave me here!”

  Her voice echoed in the blackness.

  She shouted again, “Hey!”

  Alix kept shouting for a long time, but the cavernous darkness swallowed all her calls for help.

  16

  ALIX SLEPT. LATER, BY FEEL in the blackness, she found the water bottle and drank from it, gulping. Convulsive. She kept the empty bottle. She didn’t know why. She wanted to think it might be useful as some kind of tool, even though she knew it wouldn’t be.

  Exhausted and demoralized, she slept again. When she woke, she felt groggy and had to pee, and it was still pitch-black. She had no idea how long she’d been asleep. It could have been hours, or days, or minutes.

  Alix shouted for help some more, but her voice just echoed back.

  “Hey! I’ve got to go to the bathroom!”

  She began to wonder if they had left her alone in the building. Maybe they’d decided to just let her starve to death. Maybe someday people would find her: stupid Alix Banks, the girl who’d walked right into the hands of the people who killed her.

  The pain in her bladder was unbearable. Alix shouted and shouted and finally gave up. She went over to one side of the cage, hiked her skirt, and peed in the darkness, relieved and horrified, hoping that her urine wouldn’t run the wrong way and soak her cage.

  She paced carefully to the far side of the cage. She tried to orient herself in the direction that she thought the door might be, and, leaning against the bars, she wrapped her arms around her knees and listened in the darkness.

  She wasn’t even really sure exactly where she was in Hartford. She’d never come to this area, and with Cynthia driving, it was hard to follow. The route had been twisty and confusing. Probably on purpose, now that she thought about it. God, she’d been stupid. Trusting Cynthia. Alix leaned her head back against the bars and kept running her situation over in her head, trying to figure it out. Trying to understand.