Reflex (23 page)

She hit the boutiques, buying things she didn't ordinarily wear: dresses, formal skirt and jacket combos, and pants suits. She tried to avoid anything too striking. Her goal was not to be noticed. But she wanted to
not
dress as she had in D.C.

At Hino's Hairstyles & Wigs she purchased a brown wig and had it shortened slightly, until, wearing it, she looked pretty much as she had before the attentions of the blue-haired stylist in Kensington High Street.

Her last purchase, from LensCrafters, was a pair of glasses right off the display rack, no prescription. "I know it sounds a little strange but I wear these frames when I'm not wearing my contacts." She showed them her prescription glasses from the purse. "But my clients trust me more when I wear glasses and I'm in long-wear contacts, now. I want a pair I can use over them."

The clerk assured Millie that she'd heard much stranger reasons. "There are people who want to look intellectual but are cursed with good eyesight. Also, actors. Women with older husbands. And then there's safety glasses."

These
are
safety glasses.
She paid cash, jumped back to the Aerie, and slept.

She had the cab drop her after they'd passed the address.

The offices of Bochstettler and Associates were not, as she had originally supposed, in D.C. proper. Instead, they occupied a small, two-story office building off Interstate 395 in Alexandria.

It was a two-story brown brick building surrounded by a high wall of matching brick with a manned gate. Like alien flowers, bouquets of video cameras adorned the corners of the roof or stared down over the walls on thin pylons. The windows were narrow slits of mirrored glass and, combined with the wall, made Millie think of arrow loops set in the side of a castle keep.

She studied the building again from the roof of a six-story medical professional building a block over.

She'd taken the elevator up to five, a floor the directory showed had an internal medicine clinic, two oral surgeons, a chiropractor, and an acupuncturist. The waiting rooms were not combined and she had no problem following the exit signs to a stairwell door. The door to the roof had one of those electronic latches brightly labeled "Alarm Will Sound," but also contained a wire-reinforced glass window, so she'd been able to jump past without opening the door.

Now she could tell there was an interior atrium at Bochstettler and Associates that seemed deeper than it should be and that what the building lacked in windows on the outside, it more than made up in the interior courtyard, those walls being all glass, floor to ceiling. There was a single row of parking around two sides of the building that held sixteen cars and three limos.

The medical professional building she stood atop was the tallest structure in the vicinity so she felt confident of her privacy. Even the small bull's-eye window in the roof access door was on the other side of the elevator machine shack, so if someone looked out that window, they wouldn't see her.

She looked at the sun. The medical building was southwest of Bochstettler and Associates, so the sun was behind her and to the right.
Binoculars are called for.
Behind her she heard the whining of elevator motors in the machine shack and the massive ventilators, thankfully on the other end of the building, kicking in. She looked down at the gray pea gravel covering the rooftop tar.
And a chair.

At B&H Photo in New York, she bought a pair of twelve-hundred-dollar binoculars—Canon 18 by 50 All Weather IS. The IS stood for image stabilization. The binoculars made the distant security guard, sitting in his glassed gate booth, look like he was just across a city street, and the slight whirring of the stabilization prisms held the image rock steady despite her unsteady hands. The binocular salesman, a nice Hassidic gentleman in black suit, hat, and long curling sideburns, warned her she'd need a tripod to hold it steady if she let the batteries run out, so she had extra double-As in the pocket of Davy's old leather jacket.

She felt guilty for spending so much on the binoculars so she only spent six bucks on a green plastic patio chair.

Three hours later, her butt aching, she wished she'd spent more on the chair.

She was careful to note that the sun was above and behind her, so the lenses of the binoculars wouldn't give off any telltale reflections. She also stayed between the roof's edge and a large rooftop ventilator, keeping her silhouette off the skyline.

The BAd Building, as she was thinking of it now (BAd Building, no biscuit!), had at least one floor underground. The atrium was one floor deeper than the surrounding grass. At this angle, Millie could see into both of the aboveground floors in the atrium and about halfway down the glass of the subsurface level as well. She cursed the angles. She was getting too much reflection from the windows to see more than occasional movement and too little reflection to see the bottom of the atrium.

There'd been some coming and going, as she watched, and now there were seventeen cars in the parking lot and the same number of limos as before, but one had left and another arrived. The security was tight. The gate wasn't opened until the security guard had inspected the passengers of the car and, once, he'd made one driver open his trunk before letting them enter.

When the new limo arrived, it stopped at the front door and a pair of security guards had come out to flank the car while its occupant, a tallish man in a nice suit, walked quickly inside before the chauffeur could get around the car. The chauffeur was left to shut the door before he got back in and drove the limo around to one of the parking places.

She cursed the man for not looking around as he'd walked in. The only distinctive feature she'd noted was slightly receding temples—nothing extreme—and the perceptible elegance of his suit.

The guards, still looking outward, backed toward the doorway and, only when the man was inside, did they turn and follow.

This was a big shot.

She wondered who he was and what he knew.

"What are you doing up here?"

She hadn't heard the door over the sound of elevator motors and she didn't catch the sound of the footsteps on the gravel roof until the voice was already talking.

She stood quickly and turned, nearly jumping away, but stopping herself in time.
I'll have time to jump if I
must. She stood slowly and looked around.

There were three people standing there. A tall black man in a gray suit, an older guy in maintenance overalls, and, in the lead, a well-dressed woman with short gray-streaked hair.

Millie blinked. It was Becca Martingale, the FBI counterintelligence agent.

Millie was wearing sunglasses and a baseball cap, jeans, and Davy's leather jacket. Since her hair was now blond and very short she wasn't surprised when Becca didn't recognize her. This was a
good
thing.

Time to go.

She turned her back on the agents, took a step toward the foot-high parapet, and looked down at the evergreen shrubbery clustered thickly at the bottom of the building seventy feet below. She froze.
Fingerprints.
The green plastic chair would certainly have hers, where she'd carried it from the store.

Becca misinterpreted her hesitation and said, "That's right. There's no place to go. Come away from the edge!" Millie glanced back at them. They were only ten feet away now.

She took a sliding step to the chair, hooked her arm through the armrest, and stepped back again, away from the agents.

"DON'T!" yelled the black agent, his arm reaching out reflexively.

She jumped, meaning to clear the foot-high parapet, but the chair threw her off balance and her heel caught. Instead of dropping, like she'd planned, feet first, she flipped over and plunged into the open space backwards.

It was remarkably like the first time, at the Aerie, when the anchor bolt broke free of its hole and she'd plunged toward the rocks.

She flinched back to the condo, too flustered to choose a destination. The chair banged into the carpeted floor, wrenching her arm, and she swore out loud, then shut her mouth hard. There was still the possibility of listening devices here.

I hope I was out of sight when I jumped.

She jumped to the Aerie before putting the chair down.

"What were they doing there?" she said aloud. "Could they have followed me?"

To get there she'd taken a cab from Dulles and she supposed they could've spotted her at the airport, but she really doubted it. She didn't look anything like the Millie they knew.

But they
do
know about Bochstettler and Associates.
She nodded. That made sense—they'd gone to the roof for exactly the same reason Millie had. To watch the BAd building.

Well, that wasn't so scary, then. They were just following the case and they'd chosen the same surveillance spot. She'd been half afraid they were psychic.

And that means
they
weren't called off.
She wondered if the FBI was less vulnerable to pressure from above.
Or if it's inside the NSA and therefore not over the FBI.
She had a chilling thought.
Or they
have
been called off, but
I'm
now the object of their investigation.
She bit her lip for a second, then shook her head. No, that went a bit too far toward paranoia.

But now they'd be wondering what on earth happened to the strange blond woman after she went off the edge of the building. She pictured them rushing to the edge, expecting to see and/or hear her impact the ground below, and then the surprise at seeing and hearing nothing. With any luck, they would think Millie's body hidden by the shrubbery and would waste more time poking through the bushes looking for it.

Next time I do something like that, I must see what I can do to provide a body to be found.

She was back in the medical professionals' building within the hour, wearing a long red wig and a knee length sweater tunic in green and black. The red wig went very well with her green contacts and she felt confident that she no longer resembled either the old Millie or the figure who'd dropped off the building.

On the sixth floor there was a pediatric neurologist whose suite of offices was on the side of the building facing Bochstettler and Associates. The waiting room held several children in powered wheelchairs and a few more in leg braces and crutches. Millie almost flinched away from so much pain, but stopped herself. There wasn't really any noticeable pain in the room—the pain was in her reaction.

Several of the kids were playing a board game, albeit with the aid of attending parents or home health aides to move markers, spin the pointer, and turn over cards. Two of the kids with crutches were giggling in the corner.

Just kids,
she admonished herself. If they couldn't walk or even move from the neck down, they were still kids.

There was a reception window but the woman seated there had her back turned, talking on the phone while she flipped through a stack of medical records. Millie walked to the corner of the waiting room hidden from the receptionist, and picked up a magazine.

A girl, strapped into a standing wheelchair operated by a puff/sip switch backed away from the board game which she had been watching, and rolled over to Millie. She brought the chair to a halt with the front wheels inches from Millie's foot.

She had black bangs cut straight across the middle of her forehead and enormous blue eyes which, combined with the silver framework of her chair, made Millie think of a Margaret Keane big-eyed waif painting in a chrome frame.

"Hello," Millie said.

A woman, seated on the other side of the waiting room and reading a book, looked up. "Come away, Maggie," she said mildly.

Millie held out her hand and shook it side to side. "She's not bothering me." To the little girl she said, "My name's Millicent. And your name is Maggie?"

"Like the Rod Stewart song. Though I'm more of a pain in the neck than that woman was. And I don't pick up younger men." Maggie was able to move her head but her arms hung down, strapped to cushioned pads on the frame. "I don't pick up anything."

Millie had thought the girl seven or eight, but now considered revising that upward. "Why do you think you're a pain in the neck?"

"Well. What do
you
think?"

Millie tilted her head to one side and narrowed her eyes before finally saying, "Maybe you think your parents have to do too much to help you. Maybe you lose your temper sometimes and won't cooperate. Maybe you feel ungrateful, sometimes, despite all the stuff you have to have done for you. Maybe you feel no one can possibly understand what you're going through."

Maggie, who'd been smiling, frowned at this. "You're a psych, aren't you?"

"A family therapist," Millie laughed. "And you
are
a pain in the neck."

Maggie nodded, solemnly. "Told you."

"May I ask how old you are?"

She considered this for a moment, finally saying, "You may."

Millie waited for a second, then smiled. "Okay. How old are you?"

"Ten... in two months. How old are you?"

"Thirty-three... in one month."
And ticking.
"Why the wheelchair?"

"So I don't lay around like a throw rug."

Millie snorted, half involuntary laugh, half sob. "Did I say pain in the neck? I must've meant another portion of the anatomy."

"All right. Swimming pool. Deep dive. Shallow end. I was seven."

Now Millie wanted to cry, but all she said was, "Ouch."

"Could be worse. I can breathe by myself. Look at Christopher Reeve."

The door to the hallway opened. A man stuck his head in and looked around the waiting room. Millie tried not to freeze—it was the large black FBI agent who'd been on the roof with Becca Martingale. He saw him look toward her corner, then pass on. He spent more time studying Angie's mother than anybody else in the room, but then she was sitting by herself and she had brown hair, like Millie's real hair color. He pulled his head back into the hall and let the door shut.

Millie exhaled.