We ended up three blocks away, sitting on a bench outside a Starbucks. Daria pulled her laptop from her oversized bag, then went through the papers to find whatever it was that she needed. I’d seen my share of hacker scenes in movies, but watching our smart, gawky investigator sitting on a park bench in January, computer balanced on her knees, made it seem way less cool.
I said, “Boss, we need to get off the streets, get some sleep, and get some clean clothes.” I hated that there was blood on me. It was like wearing a sandwich board with the slogan If you can read this, call the cops.
“Do we?”
Great. Annalise was pissed off enough that she was ready to go full homeless for the rest of the mission. Well, that was bullshit, and—
Daria interrupted us. “I’m working on that. I didn’t find that dongle—and I’m assuming you didn’t either, or you’d obviously have already given it to me—Serrac’s assistant is named Cheryl Anne Biggs. Her password was on her desk, her whole profile is stored on the Ten Bar servers, and I’m pretty sure those— Hello. They’ve put her browser history on the central server, probably to make it easy for them to check up on her. But that makes it easy on us, too.
“What do you know? They have an account at the hotel around the corner. I could make reservations for us on Serrac’s dime.”
“Later,” Annalise said. “Where’s Cheryl Anne Biggs?”
“A minute,” Daria said. She kept typing without looking up. “Has that building come down yet?”
I glanced back the way we came. There was no huge plume of dust rolling up the street. “I think we would have heard it.”
“Shitty shit-shit,” she said. “Think of all the data I could have gathered if I’d had more time at Cheryl Anne’s desk.”
“You can always go back,” I said. I didn’t mean to sound so sharp, but I didn’t like the idea that I’d fucked up our mission because I was afraid.
Ignoring my tone of voice, Daria said, “Pass,” without looking up. “Oh, right, I know what to do.” She typed frantically for a few seconds. “I knew it. Our girl Cheryl Anne has been shopping Amazon on her work computer and having things shipped to her home. Huh. What’s a whip chain?”
“It’s a thing in kung fu movies,” I answered. “Got the address?”
She read it aloud. “Photo, too, from the company website.” Whatever I might have expected from her name, Cheryl Anne Biggs looked like a boring, ordinary urban office drone. Her face was angular and plump at the same time. Her blonde hair was parted on the side and pulled close to her scalp. The sides were quite short, like those young Nazis who have been marching in the street. Come to think of it, Serrac’s people sported the same look.
I crossed the street to a little parking lot. There were a bunch of cars parked here, although it took a moment to realize there was a windowless bar across the street, and that the owners of these vehicles were probably there.
I’d lost track of time. I’d lost track of the day of the week. If this was a Friday night, the drivers might not come out until closing time. If it was a Tuesday…
I took out my phone. It was Friday, January 3, 2020, except it was a few minutes past midnight, so we were still living by Thursday-night rules.
If only I’d gone back for Serrac’s ride, we wouldn’t have this headache. I should have tossed the keys to Daria and told her to drive out of the garage, but I’d been too panicked to consider it.
There was nothing to gain by looking backward. I spotted an old Nissan Pathfinder with a little red toolbox on the floor in the back seat. One busted window and cracked ignition later, I was picking up Annalise and Daria and getting the fuck out of there.
This time, Daria took the front passenger seat. “This is like visiting a used-car lot and test-driving—”
Whatever she was about to say was drowned out by a loud, sustained rumbling. The Ten Bar office building was collapsing in on itself, finally. I hoped they’d gotten everyone out, and I couldn’t help but wonder what stupid personal items were being destroyed as hundreds, maybe thousands, of cubicles got pancaked.
Daria decided not to finish saying whatever she’d been planning to say. She gave me directions, and fifteen minutes later, we pulled into Cheryl Anne Biggs’s dark and empty street.
Her house was small and neat, but the front lawn needed mowing and a beer can had fallen into the garden beside the stair. The curtains were open but there was no light downstairs. One burned upstairs, though, in the front bedroom. A little sign in the front yard announced that the place was protected by private security.
“Can’t we do this in the morning?” Daria asked. “I think I’d be sharper if I had a chance to sleep and—get this—take a real shower.”
“No,” Annalise snapped. “The building where she works just collapsed, and we were seen running out of it. The cops are going to be knocking on her door by morning. Maybe sooner. We have to get what we need from this woman and then fuck back off into the night.”
It seemed like a bad idea to cut yet another lock and alarm wire, so this time I took out my ghost knife and sliced out the center of the door. It fell back into the house with a crash loud enough to wake up the neighborhood, and Annalise pushed by me to step through.
“Sorry, boss.”
She ignored me, glancing around before heading toward the stairs.
“It’s not a bad idea,” Daria said, stepping through herself. I followed, then lifted the door panel and tried to press it back into place. I managed to wedge it in, but a strong breeze would make it clatter to the floor again. Oh, well.
I followed the others upstairs. The stairs were newish and didn’t creak under my step. At the top, Annalise headed for the front bedroom. She waved Daria to the side, then opened the door.
Light flooded out of the room onto both of us as I came up close behind. The overhead light burned a garish yellow light, and lying there in the rumpled covers was the woman from the company photo, although her hair stood up in a long cowlick. She was sound asleep, even with the overhead light shining directly onto her face.
On the bedside table stood a mostly empty bottle of gin, and the cell phone beside it suddenly chimed as a text arrived. Then the phone rang with that annoying marimba ring tone that I’d always hated. Cheryl Anne must have really been putting them away, because she didn’t even stir.
I put my hand on Annalise’s shoulder and she let me move farther into the room. The first thing I noticed was the stink of juniper and dirty bedsheets. There were two more bottles in the bedroom trash, and the flatscreen TV mounted on the wall was playing an aquarium screensaver. There were photos on the bureau showing Cheryl Anne in her wedding dress standing beside a beefy bearded guy with enough gray in his hair that he could have been either her groom or her dad. I’d have guessed groom, based on the grin on his face.
No pictures of kids. No toys. No sex toys. No computer or correspondence. No beard trimmer, men’s shoes, or men’s clothes visible in the open closet. Tristan Serrac’s personal executive assistant had hit hard times, and I wondered how much of it was his fault.
The phone was still ringing. The caller was listed as Mom. Someone had heard about the building collapse, and in record time, too, considering the hour. I turned the phone off.
I looked between the bed and the table, then got down on the floor and looked underneath. There was a pump shotgun on the floor. I took it. Then I looked behind her headboard and saw a holster screwed into the wood and a handgun strapped into it. This time, I had to move carefully, but I managed to unsnap it and slide it away without touching the sleeping woman.
Common sense would tell you that a gun behind the headboard and on the floor would mean a gun beneath the pillow would be an unnecessary risk, but I checked anyway, slowly sliding my hand beneath the sweat-stained pillow while Cheryl Anne’s sweaty head rested on it.
I felt like a creep, doing this to a woman who was a complete stranger to me, even if she was the right hand to a guy I needed to kill. It didn’t help that when I was in prison, I’d met guys who did this sort of thing for fun. They’d talk about it in dreamy voices, acting like standing over an unconscious woman was the most amazing feeling in the world.
My hand closed on the little revolver under the pillow at the same moment Cheryl Anne’s eyes snapped open.
I yanked it away while she jolted in bed, pulling the covers up to her chin and opening her mouth to scream. Like an asshole, I pointed the headboard gun at her face. “Quiet.”
She gasped and went still.
“You’ll be safe,” Annalise said from the foot of her bed, “if you answer our questions. I mean it.”
Cheryl Anne stammered a bit before she could make a response. She looked at me and her expression became miserable. “No, I won’t. I’ve seen your faces. You’re not going to leave me alive after I’ve seen your faces.” Oh, right. I still had Yusuf’s blood on me.
“We don’t work that way,” Annalise said as I set the guns on the bureau. She glanced at Daria, who took her cue and stepped forward.
“I know this is scary and unexpected—and that my friend here needs a change of clothes—but bad things have happened, and we’re trying to stop it.”
“I recognize you,” Cheryl Anne said to me. “And her. Especially her. I know what my boss did to you—what he’s still trying to do. And now you want, what? Revenge? You think I don’t know that you’re looking for revenge? You think I don’t know that?”
“If that’s what you think,” Daria said in a soothing voice, “then you really don’t understand anything about us. We need—”
“No.” Cheryl Anne started shaking her head. “No no just do it. I know you’re going to don’t drag it out please please—”
“Something happened to you,” I said without quite knowing why. “Something bad that you can’t explain. Your boss was involved somehow, right? He asked you to do something or took you somewhere where you saw something.” She stared at me, her expression almost expectant. I hadn’t hit the mark yet. “Or someone did something to you.”
“It happened in his office,” Cheryl Anne said, as though finally given permission to talk. There was a little wooden stool by the closet door. I sat on it without being invited and turned my attention to her. She returned it, her shock and fear at our unexpected appearance reshaping itself around the story she was about to tell.
That she was dying to tell.
“They said afterwards that I’d be fine, but that isn’t true. After his trip to Oregon, Mr. Serrac was determined to hire a special consultant. The man he brought in… He could do things I’d never seen before.” Then, with no real conviction at all, she added, “With designer hallucinogens.”
“Right.” Annalise said. “LSD and shit.”
“I saw things,” Cheryl Anne said, letting the words fall out of her like this was a jailhouse group-therapy session. “Felt them, too, like I was being devoured at the edges, and every good part of me was being poisoned by shadows. That’s what they were. Shadows.” I glanced at Annalise and saw recognition in her expression, too. The corkscrew needles that had come at us in that cheap motel could have been described as shadows. This must be one of the guys we needed to kill. “Mr. Serrac had me set a meeting with a special consultant, a man who went by the name John Scarlet. Research tried to find out his real name, but they didn’t have any luck. All they found was a hand-me-down identity of a man who should have been 102 years old.”
“Describe him,” Annalise commanded.
“White Hispanic” was the answer. “South American. Around forty, broad shoulders, slender waist, wavy black hair. He wore a blue pinstripe with oversized lapels, and a fedora with a wide brim, which he tilted to the right. Probably it has another name, not a fedora, but it had that crease at the top and a wide band, if you know what I mean. Brown eyes, teeth so perfect they have to be fake, burn scar on his left hand and most of his right ear missing. At first, I thought he was hiding that last injury with his hat, but he really wasn’t.”
Annalise leaned forward and put her hands on the footboard of the bed. “I want to know everything about him, where he’s staying, what he’s been ordered to—”
I held up my hand, and she stopped. “Just a minute, boss.” I took a half-empty water bottle from the nightstand and passed it to Cheryl Anne. She sat up higher, pulling up her covers, and took a long pull from it. “Cheryl Anne, I’m going to take a wild guess here, okay? You tell me if I get it right. Your boss wanted to hire this guy, but he needed proof that he could do what he said, right? Your boss wanted a demonstration. And that’s when he called you into his office.”
Her eyes were wide and staring. “That’s exactly right. He had me stand by the door while Mr. Scarlet’s liquid shadow flowed into my mouth and eyes. That was the hallucination he fed me, anyway. It was supposed to be a brief demonstration, but I could feel that man’s poison moving around under my skin like—like worms. Mr. Serrac was supposed to call it off as soon as he was convinced, but he let it go too long. He was curious to see how those drugs worked, I think.”
“And when it was over…”
“When it was over,” she said, “they told me I’d be fine, and they said it in a way that made it clear that it didn’t really matter to them if I was fine or not. And I’m not.”
I put my finger on the cap of the gin bottle. “Is that why this is here?”
She looked down at her lap and didn’t look up again for a while. “Just before this all happened, I’d gotten my eight-year chip. Eight years sober. Bill was at six and a half. We’d met at a meeting—I was friends with his sponsor—and we relied on each other. But the day this happened, I walked out of the office in the middle of the afternoon and got falling down… If it had just been one day, that would have been manageable, I think, but I couldn’t stop. He tried to help me, but eventually he fell off the wagon too. After he’d worked so hard for so long. Now…” She raised her empty hands in a gesture of futility. “He wanted me to quit Ten Bar, but I think that would be more dangerous than staying—”
“Your job’s gone,” Daria said. Cheryl Anne looked up. “Serrac booby-trapped his office, and the whole building has collapsed. The cops are going to be here in a while, to ask you about the… the bomb your boss planted.”
“It wasn’t a bomb,” Cheryl Anne said. “He warned us not to open his office door. He said it would be dangerous, but I don’t think it was a bomb.”
“No,” Annalise said, “it wasn’t. But you know it was something dangerous. You’re going to make up some story for the cops, and you’re not going to mention John Scarlet or us. We’re going to deal with Serrac and his consultant ourselves.”
Most ordinary citizens, when they hear a line like that, would balk. Not Cheryl Anne. She’d worked for Ten Bar long enough to be promoted to the boss’s office, and she’d grown used to talk of dealing with people. What she said was “You’d do that for me?”
“No,” Annalise responded instantly. “I’d do that because it’s my job, and I love my job.”
Cheryl Anne nodded. “I don’t know where Mr. Serrac is. I know that will be your first question, and I wish I could give you a different answer. He’s in hiding, and he doesn’t trust me enough to reach out. He knows better.”
“Who would he reach out to?” Daria asked.
“Nobody. As far as I know, he doesn’t have any friends, and his family won’t even speak to him. The Christmas presents he ships to his daughters are returned to my desk unopened, and he tells me to throw them away. All he has is employees—people he calls killer drones, and not in a complimentary way—and clients. And at this point, he’s cancelled all the Ten Bar contracts except for one with a client he’ll only identify with a pseudonym. River O’Cash. He thinks that name is funny.”
“And you don’t know who that is?”
“I don’t have a lot of direct contact with the killer drones. I used to coordinate assignments, telling our contractors where to report and what they’d be doing, but that’s supposed to be above my pay grade now that we have the one client. Mr. Serrac does all his staff coordination personally, and I’m left twiddling my thumbs. I still hear things, though. There’s lots of grumbling about boring guard duty, and not long ago there was some sort of recovery operation at a crash site.”
“A plane went down?”
“Or a jet. They searched all through the Sierra Nevadas looking for something that came down in the crash. You know…”
She grabbed her phone and turned it on. Notifications started chiming, but she ignored them and found what she was looking for.
“There it is. The building where I work. A smoking ruin. The news says it’s possible terrorists, but they said that about stuff we’ve done, too. Okay. The servers had to be destroyed in that mess, but Tristan’s lawyer, Lester Birdwell, has an encrypted copy of the company’s most sensitive files. Excuse me, would you check the left-hand pocket of— Yes, that right there.”
Daria seemed to be reading Cheryl Anne’s mind, because she stepped over to a blue blazer draped on the back of a chair and fished a big, messy key chain out of a pocket.
Cheryl Anne was about to throw back the covers when she glanced at me, then Annalise. She decided against it, letting Daria cross the room and hand them to her.
“You guys are going to handle this, right? My boss, the one who drugged me and ruined my life… you guys are going to neutralize him?”
I nodded. “It’s what we do.”
She sighed and pulled a little plastic doohickey from the keychain, then slapped it into Daria’s hand. “Security dongle. If you try to open the file without this plugged in to a USB port, the file self-destructs.” She pulled off a slightly larger doohickey. “This is the security token. The number code changes every ten minutes, but even if you put in the code correctly, without the dongle—”
“The file goes poof. Got it. I’m surprised to see two separate pieces.”
Cheryl Anne nearly laughed. “I’m not supposed to carry both at the same time, but when you have three gimlets at lunch, shit gets lax. Just get that file from Lester Birdwell and do this job that you supposedly love so much.” She sighed. “And me?”
Maybe she thought one of us would shank her in her bed. I unloaded her revolver and gave it back to her. “You should call your mom back. She’s probably worried. Then get yourself a lawyer, because you’re wondering if your boss might have put a bomb in his office.”
She looked at me funny. “I said it wasn’t a bomb.”
“I know. I saw what was in your boss’s office. Get the lawyer and protect yourself. When the cops question you, get things wrong in a way that shows them you don’t know anything.”
“You’re really not going to kill me?”
“Not if you’ve been honest with us,” Annalise said.
Cheryl Anne nodded. The bleariness was gone from her eyes, and while she didn’t exactly look sober, she looked ready to face whatever the next few hours had in store.
Daria held her laptop open in one hand. “Ms. Biggs, do you hate us?”
“For breaking into my home in the middle of the night, scaring the shit out of me?” The emotion in her voice brought out her Southern drawl. “I should, but I don’t.”
“Good,” Daria said. “Then you won’t mind giving me Mr. Scarlet’s room number. I found the reservation request in your inbox, but it doesn’t list a room number.”
“It’s 306. He likes that number for some reason. And if you are already in my system, you might as well book rooms for yourselves on the Ten Bar account. I don’t have authority to book you more than three days, but that might be all you need. So. Are we done?”
Annalise glanced at Daria. “We are.”
I moved her phone to the edge of the stand, and she snatched it up as we headed out. The three of us hustled down the stairs and through the cut in the door. For once, we were back in the car and on the road without being chased away by the sounds of sirens.