Jen retreated and then swung widely through the afternoon-quiet woods, finally approaching the building from the back. She crawled through the trees. The gray slab of concrete blocks was broken by a window covered with wire mesh. From the reflection of the glass underneath the mesh, the window seemed to be partly open.
If nothing else, she had to look through that window. And just maybe she’d find a way to slip inside.
She thought to lift herself up, then instead flopped onto the ground. She rolled onto her back. What the hell am I doing? And then there was a moment, the longest of all moments, as she gazed at the canopy of leaves. Against the backdrop of a deep blue sky, she made out a lifetime of greens: the shabby green of a long-trampled carpet, the springtime baby-green of a kiwi sliced in half, the brown-green of a croaking frog, jalapeños, July grass, lima beans, oak leaves, Christmas trees, a wedge of avocado.
Sensations flooded over her. She smelled the decomposing leaves and the earth alive beneath her. She caught the scent of pine tree bark. She heard it all—the rustle of a squirrel, the trill of a bird in a tree above, faraway cawing and nearby twittering, the scratching of insects and the zizzing of a million cicadas. She stretched her arms, both of them, as far as they could reach and grabbed handfuls of leaves and earth, and worked it between her fingers, crushing it, feeling the decomposing and beautifully alive earth as it threw off new smells. She felt the warmth of the sun as it cut through the trees.
And just as she felt it all and knew it all, it was gone.
Her time, she knew, had come.
She wiggled back deeper into the woods, rose to a crouch, and ran to her right so she wouldn’t be directly in front of the window when she came out from the trees. She crawled forward to the edge of the woods, rose again to a crouch, listened intently, and then bolted across the forty-foot clearing and reached the wall of concrete blocks. Don’t wait, she said to herself, and immediately worked her way along the wall. Just short of the window, she stooped down. She glanced at the wire mesh. It looked solid. Then she noticed on the ground near the window a patch of well-trodden earth covered with dozens of cigarette butts, as if workers had snuck out back for a smoke. Why out back? She reached up and gave the mesh a gentle tug, and it wiggled loose. She crawled forward under the window and raised her head in slow motion—movement is what caught people’s eyes—to peer through the mesh and the open window. She saw a room with bunk beds set close together, with thin mattresses, messy sheets, and crappy little pillows. Eight bunks. Sixteen people. Sixteen people could have worked here running lab tests or operating machines that packaged drugs with only one purpose: to kill people in a gruesome and unforgettable way. There were no clothes or bags; everyone was gone.
She carefully pulled the wire mesh away from the window and in one swift movement eased herself over the ledge into the room. She dropped down behind one of the beds. The floor was swept, but here and there litter had been left behind: a lone sock, a newspaper. A toothbrush. A cigarette pack. Odds and ends dropped during a hasty packing. She crawled to the newspaper. It was in Chinese. Sadly, she couldn’t read it, but all the photos were from China. She picked up the book: Chinese. The cigarette pack: Chinese.
Bring in workers who couldn’t speak English. Ones who wouldn’t gossip with neighbors or watch the news, especially if they weren’t allowed to have computers or phones with them. Ones who would be shipped home at the end of the job without any idea of what they had been doing.
Then she saw it. Under another bed and pushed against the wall. Small, almost flat, like a silver foil button. She wiggled forward, picked up the memory button, and slipped it into her jeans pocket.
She raised herself up. A door led into what seemed to be the washroom. Along the wall near the door were battered suitcases, small duffle bags, and a few cardboard boxes. She crept forward. Lifted a suitcase. Full. Nudged a duffle. Full.
She held her breath and listened. No sounds of sixteen or twenty people bustling in a room beyond the washroom. She listened even more carefully. She could just make out two people talking, a man and a woman.
Hunched down to the ground, she peeked around the corner. A row of sinks on one side, toilet stalls on the other. To the left, a door that she presumed led into the main area. To the right, a tiled opening, probably the showers.
She crept out. Looked to the right. Showers. And bodies. Eight, ten, sixteen of them. A stream of blood had trickled to the center drain but seemed to have stopped flowing. These men—from what Jen could see, they were all men—had been shot recently; the blood on the tiles and the walls still looked wet. But blood stops flowing once hearts stop beating. On the floor near them were two plastic gasoline containers, the type that farmers still used to refill gas-run machinery, and a plastic bucket. Coming from the plastic bucket were two wires. Her eyes followed the wire across the floor in front of the stalls and out the door.
And at that door now stood a man with an Uzi pointed at her chest. It was the Asian-looking soldier who had gotten out of the SUV.
“Real slow now.” His accent was Midwestern, his voice calm. “Flat on your stomach. Head away from me. Spread your fucking arms. One move and you’re as dead as them brothers of ours.”
She heard him step forward but knew he had kept his distance. Then he shouted, “Teko Teko, come and see what I’ve got for you.”
She heard his steps. All Teko Teko said was, “Wait a minute.” He was back in less than that, and he bound her hands behind her back with plastic zip ties. He wasn’t overly rough, but the ties were tight enough to tell her she would never escape. The two men lifted her off the floor. The Asian guy frisked her but didn’t find the memory button. Without a word, they marched her out into the main area.
It was a room perhaps a hundred feet across. The bigger area to her right had rows of tables with small machines. Farther off against a wall, a new-looking and brightly lit glassed-in partition had a filtered ventilation unit on the top. Where the van had pulled in, there was a packing area with stacks of folded-up cartons, rolls of bubble wrap, and an assembly table with large rolls of tape. In the open back of the van, Jen glimpsed dozens of jerry cans of fuel.
There was only one person at work, a white woman with a shaved head. She was laying wires like the ones coming out of the shower.
They weren’t going to empty the place. They were going to create an inferno.
“Where?” the soldier said.
“The fridge,” Teko Teko replied.
Teko Teko snatched a heavy metal chair with his free hand and dragged it alongside him. The harsh scraping sound caused the woman to look up.
“Keep working,” Teko Teko barked.
They yanked Jen into a walk-in refrigerator. It was cool, but not particularly cold. He pushed her into the chair, her hands still behind her back. She didn’t try to struggle as he strapped each of her ankles to a metal chair leg. Save your strength, she thought. He looped a strap around each arm and secured it to the metal pieces that joined the seat to the solid back, this time pulling them tighter than necessary.
Teko Teko took out his phone and punched in a number as he walked toward the refrigerator door. He spoke briefly into the phone. He turned to the soldier. “You and Delilah go have a look to see no one else is around. Casey’s expecting you. I want to be out of here in forty-five minutes.”
Teko Teko studied Jen. He nodded his head as if having a conversation with himself. He left the refrigerator and closed the door behind him with a thud. The handle made a deep kuchk-thunk as it locked.
It was absolutely dark. Blacker than any night she had ever known. Blacker than the bathroom her mother had locked her in once, twice, many times. And save for a soft electrical hum, it was absolutely silent. Instantly, the air was thin; she involuntarily started gasping for breath.
Don’t, she told herself. Don’t be silly. If he wanted you dead, you’d already be dead. She told herself that Les could be at the I-66 turnoff by now and would already be looking for her. Zach or Gabe would have told him the make of the car. He’d somehow get here.
She tried to stay focused on these thoughts. More than at any time since her suspension, she wished she had Chandler with her. To call for help. To reason with her. To keep her calm. To flood her with hormones to relax her. To be with her when she died.
God, there’s no air in here! It’s fine, it’s fine. Stay focused on Les.
She had driven for just over twenty-one minutes from the exit. Fastest at fifty miles per hour, slowest at fifteen. Say, thirty average; she’d gone about ten miles. So, Les’s search area … A tsunami of formulae and numbers hit her confused brain. Search area was either three-hundred and fifty or nine hundred square miles. But what difference did it make? The chance of Les finding her before something bad happened was infinitesimally small.
The door opened. Oh god, thank you, thank you. She blinked as her eyes adjusted to the light. Teko Teko brought in a second chair. He sat down. He held her gaze, and she willed herself not to look away. She stared past the geometric tattoos into his eyes.
“I have a few questions, Jen. I hope you will cooperate.”
“Why would I do that?”
“I hear you came by my office today. Why was that?”
“To talk to you.”
“About what?”
“Maybe give me a job.”
He didn’t laugh as she’d expected. “Then that’s the first reason you should answer my questions. You’re unemployed.”
“I’m suspended.”
“Oh, believe me, you’re out of work. I was told that they were supposed to lay charges today. Anyway, I’m serious. You’re smart. You’re capable. You take initiative. We can use someone like you. That’s option one.”
Jen thought frantically how to answer. She desperately wanted to reach for this lifeline. She told herself maybe it was true. She knew she was kidding herself.
“On the other hand, if you’re not interested,” Teko Teko went on, “let me give you a more compelling reason.”
Jen flinched involuntarily. Not much, but enough for him to notice.
“Don’t worry, Jen, I don’t believe in torture. No, the other reason is that as soon as we reach the highway, my colleague out there is going to touch her screen”—he pressed his finger down like he was touching the screen on his phone—“and start a fire like you’ve never seen before. All that will be left is burnt-out machinery. I’m not certain if that metal chair you’re sitting on will first heat up and fry you like a hamburger, or whether your clothes and hair will catch fire first. But in the end, little will be left of you. Outside, the authorities will discover some packets of street opioids. It’ll be written off as a drug lab. Believe me, Jen, you don’t want to be among the charred bone fragments they find. Crooked cop dies accidentally while destroying the evidence—that would explain why you were suspended. Your DNA will be found in what’s left of your bones and, even if they’re too incinerated for that, in the car you used, along with some more drugs. Let’s call that option two.”
“What do you want to know?”
“For starters, how you got here.”
“By—”
“Don’t get cute. I haven’t got time. Why did you follow me and why today?”
“I’ve been watching you.”
“Since when?”
“Off and on. I couldn’t do it more without getting caught. The last couple of days, I watched the Executive Office Building. I’d walk if you were walking or grab a car.”
“Where was I yesterday?”
“Right before thirteen hundred hours, you went to the White House. Then police headquarters. You had Mexican food for dinner.”
Teko Teko smiled. “You really should work for me. So you followed me out here?”
“An SUV picked you up at the FBI. I picked up a car. The SUV drove you to your town house. A van met you there. You put two suitcases in the car and drove out here. I followed you. You can check the car log. It’s parked—”
“We know where it’s parked. Why have you been following me?”
“That’s pretty obvious. I became convinced you guys or someone you work for was making the fake treatment that was killing people.”
“What gave you that idea?”
“You did.” She paused. “And your boss. Teena Archambault. You each used the same phrase, ‘People want it, people are going to pay for it.’ When you came to our station, you said that. And then I overheard Teena Archambault using the same words talking to friends at a private club.”
“That’s quite a leap. You concoct a drug-making conspiracy, all from a few stray words.”
“No, all because people were dying.”
“Still doesn’t explain it.”
“It seemed odd that you never said who you worked for. My synth implant figured out your real name and who you work for.”
“I hear he’s been retired.”
“Yeah, well, before he was, he dug up research from Archambault’s company about an early trial that led to this rapid premature aging. It started to fit together.”
After that, Jen pretty much stuck with the truth. Said none of the others in her unit knew what she was up to. “But I told the captain.” She was completely convinced that Brooks had been disappeared.
“Told him what?”
“That I suspected you guys and that I had figured out you worked with Archambault.”
“When did you tell him this?”
“Right before he was arrested.”
“Who else have you told?”
“No one. He ordered me not to tell anyone.”
“No one?”
“No one.”
“Jen, I have to say, you’re helping us check off a few boxes here. Do you know anything about his background? Your former captain?”
“No, not really.”
“What really?”
“That he came up through the ranks. That he was a crappy guy to work with, but he didn’t play favorites. I trusted him. Even though he didn’t believe me when I first heard the rumors about Eden.” And as she said this, she was convinced the captain had believed her. That he’d been pushing her off the case to protect the real Eden and the people distributing it.
Teko Teko smiled. “Eden. That was a nice touch on our part. Create a need for something that kills you in the most horrifying way we knew about. Apparently even research failures can be turned into an asset.”
Yes, she thought, but I started hearing the rumors way before you guys were spreading them. And I know you heard the rumors too.
He checked his watch. “I’ve got to admit, you did a hell of a job. Thousands of cops in cities around the world are on the trail of Eden, and as far as we know, not a single one has the foggiest idea what it’s about.”
“Where does that get me now?”
“You mean, can you work for me? You interested?”
“Why not?”
“I appreciate that. I really do.”
He walked behind her. She heard the distinctive sound of duct tape being torn from a roll and struggled futilely as he taped her mouth shut.
He came around to face her. “But I think we’ll go with option two.”