Reflex (24 page)

Angie eyed her. "Was that man looking for you?"

"What makes you think that?"

"Well... you smiled but you held your breath all the time he was here."

Perceptive.
"Ah. Well, I'm not sure who he was looking for."
Which really is true, if disingenuous.
"I wish I had a kid like you."

Maggie looked startled. "What? Broken?"

Millie shook her head. "Smart. Beautiful. Funny."

Maggie wrinkled her nose.

A nurse came to the door and said, "Maggie Peterson."

Maggie blinked her eyes. "Gotta go." She turned the wheelchair with the sip/puff controller.

"Nice meeting you, Maggie." She watched her roll to her mother, then both of them follow the nurse back into the clinic. She pulled out some tissue from her purse and blew her nose. She sighed deeply and asked herself if she was sure she wanted children. The answer was a resounding affirmative
even if they're
broken.

She lifted her magazine and pretended to read again, checking the room. Another woman eyed her before going back to helping with the board game. Just curious, Millie judged. A man, seated by the children with leg braces and crutches, eyed her more circumspectly with most of his attention to her stockinged legs, where they crossed at the knee.
A different kind of curious.
But not one she had to worry about.

Millie ignored both of them and instead checked the office hours posted on a small plastic sign on the reception desk. Today the clinic would close at five. If they took appointments all the way up to closing, she could hope the last of the staff and patients would be out the door by six-six-thirty at the latest.

She was tempted to wait until Maggie came back out.
She'd be leaving, anyway.
Instead she memorized the corner she sat in, then walked back out into the public hallway in the manner, she hoped, of someone seeking a restroom.

She was back at seven, appearing in the corner where she'd talked with Maggie. She was dressed in what she thought of as ninja chic: black tennies, black jeans, black turtleneck, black gloves, and masked, á la ninja, with a black tee-shirt, her eyes peaking out through the neck hole, the tee-shirt's sleeves tied behind her head.

She felt absolutely ridiculous.

"And so, Sheila, is Joe responding to your requests for more emotional connections?"

"No, and I must tell you that I'm having trouble trusting a therapist who wears a mask. Why are you wearing it?"

Why indeed? Well, the answer was video cameras. She wasn't expecting any here in the neurologist's office but from what she'd seen of Bochstettler and Associates, there were more cameras around than tie-dyed tee-shirts at a Grateful Dead concert.

She went looking for a window and was surprised to see that most of the examination rooms, even though they were on the outer wall, didn't have windows. She finally located a floor to ceiling glass wall in a staff break room and found herself with pretty much the same view of the BAd building as she'd had on the roof above.

She lifted the binoculars.

The scene was the same but the video cameras stood out now. They weren't really any more visible. She was just more sensitive to them, now.

There were two at each upper corner of the building. There were four pylons set eight feet inside the fence corners with two cameras each. On two of the inner corners of the atrium, at the roof line, two more cameras tilted down into the courtyard.

But there really didn't seem to be anything surveying the rooftop.

That I can see.

Couldn't be helped. If she wanted to get into the building, she'd have to risk it. It wasn't as if they could stop Millie, even should they spot her.

Don't get cocky. Davy had a lot more experience with this than you and they caught
him.

It was this thought that led her to check for
other
observers on a different roof. The one directly above her.
The FBI had a reason for being on that roof.

She went up the stairs quietly. She found the door shut completely with no sign that the alarm had been disabled. Its little LED was shining brightly. She jumped past it and peeked around the elevator machine stack. No figures crouched or sat at her old watch post but there was something. She walked closer and laughed to herself.

A weatherproof video camera mounted on a sandbag-anchored tripod pointed down at Bochstettler and Associates. A coaxial cable snaked from the camera housing to an antennaed box sitting back from the edge.

They
were
watching. Just not in person. It took her only a few minutes of scanning with the binoculars to find the Verizon phone van parked in an alley a half a block away from the BAd building.

What to do? What to do?

If she jumped onto the roof, she'd be in clear view of the FBI camera. It was dark over there, but she'd bet the camera was low-light capable. They wouldn't be able to tell who it was, but they'd be able to tell that
someone
had appeared on that roof out of nowhere.

She studied her intended destination again. Then bent down and unscrewed the video cable where it entered the antennaed box.

All they can tell is that their camera went dead.

She jumped into deep shadow, crouched on the gravel against a dormant air-conditioning unit. She stayed there, moving only her head, trying to see if any of Bochstettler's cameras were pointed across the rooftop.

She figured she had at least ten minutes easy before the FBI could get back up on the roof and see what happened to their camera. Longer if they had to hunt up someone with a key.

She duck-walked to the edge of the roof overlooking the inner courtyard. At night, with the interior hallways lit and shining through the open doors into the offices lining the top floor, she could see through the reflective glass easily. She picked one of the offices on the opposite side, top floor, and studied carefully, through the binoculars.

This was a harder jump. It was one thing to jump from one gravel rooftop to another. The temperature and wind and slightest whiffs of distant exhaust were the same. There was something about the world on the other side of the tinted glass that seemed unreal. She exercised her imagination picturing her own clinic back in Stillwater as a model for the hushed feeling of a controlled-climate building. Her first attempt, however, put her there, in her own office, and she heard the receptionist, on the phone, in the other room, clearly working late. She returned to the roof. Her next try succeeded.

She was in a large office that actually wrapped around one of the interior corners. Clearly a power office, with almost a living room suite of furniture at one end of the L-shaped room, a large conference table at the bend, and an isolated massive teak desk at the other end. She took a deep breath through her nose and noted some of the details of the carpet and the three abstract paintings on the wall, then looked at her watch.

Only four minutes had passed since she'd disconnected the camera. She jumped back, to the rooftop of the medical building, and reconnected the cable loosely.
An intermittent.
If anyone diagnosed the unit, they might think it a simple loose connector and not active sabotage. She heard the elevator motors whine and jumped back to the big corner office, her heart pounding.

Out of the frying pan...

She settled against the wall, in the darkest corner, and listened to the sounds of the building.

There'd been four cars in the parking lot and she would bet at least two, if not more, belonged to security guards. Probably more—someone had to be monitoring all those cameras. There was also the possibility that those cameras outside the building might have some brethren within. She heard the distant sound of a vacuum cleaner.

All right. They aren't
all
security.

She looked around the room, checking, in particular, the corners at the ceiling, searching for cameras and motion detectors.

But, they can't have the staff cleaning and the alarms active at the same time.

Millie did not like the contents of the desk. They were laid out with a geometric purity that was almost sterile.
Or anal.
There were no files in the desk's file drawers. The only papers were blank stationery. There was a networked computer, a sleek black thing with a large flat screen, and a matching keyboard and mouse underneath on a silently sliding shelf.

She turned it on but found it password-protected on the hardware level, not even proceeding to boot. She considered just taking the entire thing with her.

Surely someone could get at its contents?

The distant vacuum cleaner had stopped and started several times but now it sounded louder. She gave up on the desk and tried the two doors at the end of the office. One led to a smaller office, possibly an assistant's, and the other was a large coat closet, two umbrellas and dark raincoat hung from the rod and on the shelf above was an attaché case in gold anodized aluminum, a Halliburton case, the kind that screams "steal me!" Her heartbeat, slowly settling after the tension of her initial arrival, shot up again. But the case wasn't locked and it was empty except for a crumpled sticky note stuck in the corner. She unfolded it but there was only a ten digit phone number in the 508 area code followed by the letters "egc tt 9/2 2:30."

She stuffed the note deep into her jeans pocket, carefully, making sure it didn't stick to her gloves as she withdrew her hand. She peeked carefully outside the door. The vacuuming came from a lit office three doors down. Each of the doors had a nameplate set beside the door. She glanced at the wall beside her. The plate said, "N. Kelledge, CEO."

The vacuum cut off and a small Hispanic woman in green coveralls backed out of the lighted office carrying a trash can. Millie jerked her head back into the office and jumped away.

She returned to the Aerie tired and frustrated and in need of a bath. Since her unknown enemies had kicked in the hotel room door in Virginia, she'd been making do with sponge baths in the cliff house and, of course, the stylist in London had washed her hair when she'd cut and dyed it.

Dammit! Are they or aren't they monitoring the condo?

She felt like arriving there on foot, unlocking the door, and seeing what happened.
Who would arrive? The NSA, the people who kidnapped Davy, or are they the same?
She still believed that Anders had nothing to do with it but she wasn't confident that it wasn't some other part of the agency.

The thought of another bath interrupted decided her against the attempt. She looked through Davy's site tapes until she found one labeled
Ten Thousand Waves.

It was an hour earlier in Santa Fe and her ears popped painfully hard—the spa was at eight thousand feet. She walked up to the spa from the lower parking lot, following the footpath through the Japanese landscaping.

She'd brought a swimming suit since she'd expected to be using the non-reserved communal tub, but the last hour bath was starting in ten minutes and one of the smaller private tubs was available due to a cancellation. She shampooed and washed in the woman's shower room and wore the provided kimono to her assigned bath, an acrylic hot tub surrounded by shoji screens, except for its uphill side, which faced on scrub piñon trees trained by nature and twenty years of judicious care, into bonsai-like perfection. The New Mexico sky was studded with brilliant pricks of light and there was snow, in spots, under the trees.

She was glad not to use the bathing suit but the hot water and icy cold air made her long for Davy. The last time she'd been here with him they'd used the Ichiban room—which had included an indoor mattress. She ached at the thought. When she climbed out of the tub she was grateful for the cold air for more than one reason.

She checked out and jumped back to the Aerie the minute the receptionist's back was turned.

Underwear.
She had clothing enough in the Aerie because of her shopping, but her underwear supplies were depleted. There were clean panties and bras in Stillwater.

She jumped to the living room of the condo and looked around, nervously. It was quiet, as usual, but there was a strange tickle in her throat. She sniffed deeply through her nose. Again, she felt something odd in her throat. She thought that the weekly cleaning lady, Lonnie, must've changed the furniture polish she was using. Millie didn't like it.

The room was quite dark, only lit by the diffused glow of a streetlight shining through the drapes, but she could tell something was different at the front door. She took a step toward it and the room lurched, tilted oddly. She dropped to her knees, her robe opening where she'd been holding it shut.

The door had been taped shut, long strips of duct tape running around the sides and top and triple wide at the gap between door and floor. She twisted around and saw plastic sheeting over the fireplace.

That's odd,
she thought, almost dreamily. Her lungs felt heavy. Convulsively, she stabbed her nails into her bare thigh, raking, knowing the feeling of calm was an artifact. It was the lack of sensation, the lack of response from her nerves that finally awoke in her a sense of urgency.

Inhalation anesthetic.

She flinched away.

She felt the gritty limestone texture of the bare rock of the Aerie floor on her knees, then her cheek, and then nothing.

For two days Davy let the servants wait upon him, jumping down to the beach twice a day, and losing himself in the DVD collection. He tried not to think. Not of Brian Cox, not of escape, not of his captors, not of Millie. For a period in the morning and in the afternoon, he performed for Dr. Conley, jumping to and from specific locations in the courtyard as Conley measured, recorded, and speculated.

He was not surprised to learn that there was no increase in local radioactivity when he jumped. Nor any other electromagnetic fluctuations. However, an Infrared Imaging Camera, when he jumped from the shade of a wall to a sunlit portion of the courtyard, showed a slight increase in temperature at his departure site and a slight drop at his destination. It was the barest tenth of a degree change.