Authors: Kyle Kirkland
A woman sat on the floor, legs crossed, hands resting on knees. The photochromatic windows of her bedroom were darkened to almost blackness. The only source of light came from a widescreen plasma TV covering nearly the whole of one wall; it showed an early morning scene from an 18th-century city. From the wall-mounted speakers came the sound of wagons—tumbrels—creakily rolling over stone streets. The wooden wheels slapped against the odd, irregular shape of the stones, fell into gaps and squeaked as they grinded their way along the ancient pavement.
And voices shouted and cursed
.
"
Mourez!
Mourez!
" Die! Die!
Cecily Sunday continued to sit motionless on the floor. Her eyes were closed.
The tumbrel was approaching its destination,
Place de la Révolution
. And then,
La Guillotine
. Cecily had traveled the route many times—in her imagination. Her left hand slid down her thigh and reached out to the side, where the knife lay. A big hunting knife with a blood groove and a razor edge.
She had no plans to use the knife. But she picked it up and felt the haft, caressed it with her palm and fingers.
At the end of her fantasy trip was the infamous guillotine, so liberally used in the bloodbath of the Reign of Terror.
La
Terreur à l'ordre du jour.
A daily dose of terror. It was one of Cecily's favorite historical periods.
She would make the final walk, attacked by angry people
—snaggly-toothed, unwashed, spotted and scarred by syphilis, pox, and tuberculosis—who would spit on her and curse her and kick her. And then at the end, on the scaffolding, a heavy blade loomed above. Sand was sprinkled everywhere, to soak up the blood lest the executioners slip and injure themselves.
To die a horrific death, in disgrace, betrayed by your people and your
—
The screen suddenly blanked. The bedroom lights came on.
Cecily's eyes opened. She blinked.
"
Message," said a synthetic voice.
The screen flashed again and text appeared. The voice began reading. But Cecily knew who it was from. Had to be; there was only one person who could rate a priority high enough to interrupt Robespierre and the French Revolution.
She got up. The lights brightened. Cecily Sunday was 36 years old; she was a small-boned woman, petite, pale, with shoulder-length auburn hair. Her movements were languid, as if she were actually making that last walk.
Just outside, in the office room of her apartment, Cecily could hear the printer working.
So. Kraig Drennan had sent some notes. She went to the printer and gathered the papers, glancing at them quickly. She started to put them down, then looked again, more closely.
Returning to her bedroom with the papers, she called up the map function of her computer and requested Medburg. She zoomed and shifted the view.
Then she smiled. Cecily Sunday had a weird smile. It was like a grimace, and people who didn't know her usually saw it with a sense of trepidation, as if they were seeing someone in pain.
This one could be easy, thought Cecily. And if she was right she could show up Kraig a little. Just a little, that
's all she wanted.
She smiled again. All the more reason to be merry.
Bethesda, Maryland
/ 3:10 p.m.
From her glass cubicle Lisa Murdoch watched the petite auburn-haired woman glide through the office area. She'd noticed before how Cecily seemed to glide when she walked. Weird. From her days as a high-stepper and baton-twirler in the high school marching band, Lisa knew that most people bobbed up and down when they walked, but Cecily Sunday had a gait like a ghost.
Lisa put on
a headset that was plugged into her computer. The screen showed Kraig Drennan's office, from the vantage point of a corner above and behind Kraig's desk. Kraig's head was in the foreground, and Lisa was surprised to see that he had a tiny, incipient bald spot. Lisa hadn't noticed it before because Kraig was much taller than she was. She grinned. Probably an ulcer working away at his innards too. Well, that was the life of the boss, wasn't it? At least an ambitious one like Kraig Drennan. To Lisa it seemed like he had a chip on his shoulder. Everybody knew where he came from, about his mother being in jail when he was born. Born behind bars!
In the center of the image were the Spartan chairs in front of Kraig
's desk. Other offices had space-age contour chairs, made with some sort of hard plastic; they were ergonomically designed, it seemed, to enforce the designer's notion of good posture. The chairs in Kraig's office were straight-backed, made of wood, and had two spindly arms and a thin bit of padding on the seat and back. The person he was interviewing would be directly in the hidden cam's view.
After a few seconds passed, Cecily Sunday was sitting in one of the chairs.
Lisa didn't feel any remorse for spying on the boss. What good was all that high-tech equipment if she and some of the other bold members of the staff didn't put the cameras and microphones to some kind of good use?
* * *
Cecily had walked in without knocking. Kraig was intently reading something on his monitor and didn't immediately look up.
"
I solved the case," said Cecily.
Kraig
's eyebrows shot up. "You did?"
"
Yeah. Man, it was simple." Cecily was smiling that grimacing smile. Her teeth were all still there, but not in great shape. The front ones were slightly discolored—pale ochre—and a few of the lower ones were crooked.
"
So fill me in," he said.
"
All you've got to do is find the most likely suspect," said Cecily, hooking one slender leg over an arm of the chair. She was so small that she fit into the seat with plenty of room to spare. "Find the most likely route of transmission, and trace it back to the most likely source."
Kraig shifted i
n his chair, his face showing discomfort.
"
I'm telling you this," said Cecily, "because you're just a desk jockey who doesn't know crap about real micro work."
The office flooded with cyan light.
Cecily laughed. "I knew I could do it!"
Kraig
's jaw muscles started working double time. In a few seconds the cyan lights died. "Okay," he said, sighing. "You've had your joke. I was prepared for something like that. You didn't get very far."
"
Too true. I was hoping to make it all the way to the reef. Where did you learn how to dive, anyway?"
"
I'd always wanted to learn but never got a chance until I started earning some money." Kraig's voice took on an edge. "Can we talk about the case now?"
"
Come on, Kraig. Lighten up. Everybody knows you're after the director's job. It's the most transparent thing in this whole office building, including the partitions out there in cube city."
Kraig appeared to struggle for control again.
Cecily grinned. "We'll be seeing cyan again in a second?"
With
white, compressed lips, Kraig said, "Nope."
"
That's too bad, because cyan is one of my favorite colors too. By the way, why are you having that Lisa girl spy on me?"
Kraig gave her a look of surprise
.
Cecily shook her head.
"Man, I should get really pissed at you guys."
"
She's not spying on you."
"
Oh, yeah? Is that right? That means she's spying on
you
."
"
She's not—"
"
Yeah she is. She kept staring at me through that glass partition—did she think I wouldn't notice? Then just before I walked into your office she slipped a headset over her ears. I'd noticed that headset as I walked past her cubicle, and it wasn't connected to the computer. And that got me thinking about what sort of device it was hooked into. She probably hid one of those little audiovisual communication things in your office somewhere. She wouldn't have had any trouble finding one—didn't Chet Vernolt order about a million of them?"
Kraig thought a moment. With all that equipment lying around, it was possible
. If Lisa was spying on him then he'd have to confront her, but he realized he had made a mistake too. "I assigned her to the case," he told Cecily. "I should have invited her to this meeting."
"
Good, Kraig. You're a good boss, you take the blame when your employees do something stupid." Cecily raised her voice. "I'm not like Kraig. Hear that, Lisa? If you're going to be my partner then that's the first thing you ought to learn."
Kraig walked to the door and leaned out. Through the transparent cubicle partitions he saw Lisa dictating something to her computer. She looked guilty as hell.
Well, reasoned Kraig, we spy on them too, don't we? Why else did Chet have glass partitions installed instead of opaque ones?
He waved, got her attention, and then beckoned with a finger. She bounced toward him and said i
n a perky voice, "What's up?"
"
When I asked you to keep an eye on Cecily, that's not what I meant."
Lisa attempted an innocent stare.
"If I look around my office," said Kraig evenly, "will I find something I shouldn't?"
"
It's in the paneling above your desk. I stood on your chair to install it. I guess I overstepped my bounds. I'm sorry."
She looked sorry, thought Kraig, but maybe that was just because she got caught. Y
et he couldn't work up much anger, and not merely because he feared Chet's physio alarms. Bounds overstepping had worked itself into the culture here.
Part of it was the nature of the job. Whereas the C
DC went around all goody-goody like Mother Theresa or Albert Schweitzer—"We're the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and we're your friends"—the Micro-Investigation Unit's broader scope included dealing with all kinds of potential terrorist threats. When tackling deliberate acts of unthinkable violence and devastation, even when such senseless terrorism was merely a remote possibility, the temperament of investigators tended to be a little less than saintly. And with the authority vested in a government agency responsible for national security, boundaries sometimes got fuzzy.
Another part of the problem was Chet Vernolt. But that, figured Kraig, was nothing that a new director couldn
't fix.
"
You still want to work on this case?" Kraig hitched his thumb toward his office. "With her?"
Lisa hesitated.
"You'll learn something," said Kraig. "Maybe a lot of things. A sign of a good worker is someone who can work with all kinds of people."
Lisa took a deep breath and stepped inside the office. Kraig followed her. Lisa nodded stiffly at Cecily and sat with obvious dist
ress in the chair beside her. Cecily glanced up and smiled an even more gruesome smile than usual.
When Kraig sat down beside his desk, Cecily said,
"Let's move on to the good news."
"
The good news?"
"
The bad guys. The good news about the bad guys. I found them. You heard me earlier?"
"
I thought you were kidding."
"
No way. This was easy. There's a little creek that flows through that area of Medburg. Moshatowie Creek. It also flows through a more well-to-do part of the state, which is upstream from Medburg."
Kraig leaned back. Flowing water was a splendid route of transmission. Or a terrifying one, depending on how you looked at it.
"Who?"
"
Little place called Vision Cell Bioceuticals. Two-man start-up company, launched five years ago. They have 40 employees now."
Kraig sighed.
"Two-
person
start-up, Cecily. Please. While you're under contract with the government you represent the government, and you have to use the appropriate language—"
"
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Whatever. The point is, their lab is in the next county, right on the creek. Nobody else is on that creek, no other biologicals, no chemicals, no high-tech. Everything else looks pretty benign. I suspect that whatever happened, it's accidental. Hard to believe it's deliberate. Why would terrorists pick a place like Medburg?"
"
Who says it's the creek?"
"
It's the place to start looking," said Cecily.
Kraig rubbed his jaw.
"There's one little problem with your theory." He flipped around the screen that was perched on his desk. "When you came in I was reading the M.E.'s report on the two bodies."
Cecily squinted at the screen. She leaned forward.
"Cause of death...unknown? What kind of report is that?"
"
The honest kind. The kind that says it's not known."