Reflex (39 page)

"Good idea. I will."

And he pretended to, but his mind raced. On top of his list of concerns was,
why do they want a jump site inside the U.S. Embassy in Caracas?
If they just wanted to transport people back and forth to Caracas, his original site would do just fine.

It's about power. Somehow, it all comes down to that.
They'd had him rescue Roule in Nigeria. Now they wanted him to do something in an American embassy. Was there a connection?

He had to do something about Sojee. They could already apply a surfeit of pressure with the implant but, bad as that was, it was on him alone. It particularly worried him that Simons hadn't hesitated to reveal his face to Sojee.

They don't mean to release her.

And finally, there was Millie. Millie who had at least gotten out of the cliff house.

He thought about their claims that she was jumping and dismissed them.
They're confused about her, that's all, or they're not confused and just messing with me.
But how could he get a message to her? She needed to stay hidden, to keep out of their reach. Davy needed her to be safe.
It would be the last straw if they had her.
The breaking point, so to speak.

And there were several things that could break.

Hyacinth came to dinner with her hair down, wearing a backless silk sheath dress so sheer that Davy would have been able to see the most minute seam and texture of her undergarments... had she been wearing any. As it was, he was able to see the outlines of... other features.

He tried to keep his eyes averted, but he found his gaze straying to her chest every time his attention wandered. It didn't help that his hands had been there once.

She held her shoulders back, tightening the fabric across her chest.

Sitting erect.
Davy squirmed in his seat.
How ironic.

"Aren't you cold in that outfit?"

She looked at him and the corners of her mouth twitched up. "Parts of me."

He avoided further clarification.

She followed him when dinner was over and gestured toward one of the smaller formal rooms near the foot of the stairs. "Why not come into the drawing room and sit a while."

"Why?" Davy said baldly.

She blinked. "I just thought you might like to talk. You know—" she gestured vaguely at her upper body "—one cyborg to another." The dress covered her collarbone scar but the faint line on her lower neck was visible.

He followed her in, watching the muscles in her back and the outline of her buttocks shifting under the silk.

Run far, far away.

There was a small log fire on the hearth of the marble-faced fireplace. Hyacinth stood on the bricks with her back to the flames.

"Parts," said Davy.

She raised the rear hem of her dress and let the heat warm the backs of her legs. "Ah. That feels good."

There were footsteps in the hall and Abney came in to offer them drinks. Davy asked for tonic water. Hyacinth requested a double martini and turned around to face the flames. The firelight shone through the silk and outlined everything.

Davy swallowed and looked away. He perched tentatively on the arm of the sofa. After a moment Hyacinth went to the opposite end of the sofa, kicked off her shoes and sat, her legs curled underneath her. It was a long couch and Davy felt safe settling onto the cushions at his end, a clear gap of four feet between them. He kept his eyes on the flames.

"Where are you, David?"

"Now that's a good question," he said. "We're on the south shore of Martha's Vineyard. Before you narrowed it down, I thought maybe the Cape or Nantucket. Now I'm just trying to decide whether we're closer to Menemsha or Edgartown."

She blinked and for an instant sat naturally. "Is that part of your talent? Do you always know where you are?"

Davy shook his head. "You told me not to talk to the men who welded the plate in my room. You should've told them not to talk to me."

"They didn't talk to you."

"No, just to each other. It's a regional accent—very distinctive."

"And knowing it's the south shore?"

"Even Simons can't order the heavens. The sun still rises in the east—it sets in the west."

Hyacinth smiled slightly and looked back at the fire.

Abney came back in with the drinks. After he'd set them on the respective end tables, complete with lace coasters, he said, "Anything else, Miss Pope?"

Hyacinth said, "Close the door, please, on the way out."

"Yes, ma'am."

The double doors were heavy oak and when they closed they blocked the hall lights, leaving only the light from the fire. Hyacinth took a large gulp of her martini. Davy squeezed his lime into the tonic water and swirled the ice around to mix it.

"So, as one cyborg to another," Davy started, "What behavioral change did they want to bring about with your implant? They didn't need to keep you confined to one location, like me. So what is it that they keep you from doing?"

Hyacinth's slight smile vanished and her face twisted for a moment into an expression so different from her customary mask that Davy had trouble identifying the emotion. Then the mask dropped back into place and Davy doubted his own memory of the expression.
Maybe it was the firelight. Shadows, not flesh.

Hyacinth finally said, "Loose tongues."

"How the hell do you measure that? Is someone always listening to what you say, with a finger on the button?"

She shrugged. "Someone." She tapped her left temple. "It's a matter of conditioning. I don't know exactly how it's set off—there seems to be some sort of stress monitor but ordinary stress doesn't do it. After we recovered from the surgery the program took six weeks and half that time we were under drug-induced hypnosis. Seems like the rest of the time we were undergoing mock interrogations while vomiting or shitting ourselves. Make that vomiting
and
shitting ourselves."

Davy's imagination triggered a wave of nausea and he realized what the unknown expression on Hyacinth's face had been. "Yuck city."

Hyacinth looked away again. "Well, we signed up for it." She drained the rest of her martini and stood again before the fire, her hands outstretched to the flames.

Why is she being so forthcoming?
Besides the obvious. She was dressed for seduction but was it her own idea or was she under orders? How many handles did they need on him? He took another gulp of tonic and his legs and arms started to tingle. Against all expectations he felt the corners of his mouth tug up. He stared down at the tonic water.

"What did you use?" He asked.

Hyacinth was watching his face carefully. "Half a tab of ecstasy. Half a tab of Viagra. You've been depressed. It shows, you know."

"You think?"

He jumped to the beach. As he thought, the beach keys weren't enabled and he felt the warning spasm in his throat but he steeled himself to stay still in the chill and windy dark until the implant kicked in full force. His supper sprayed across the sand and then, as he flinched back to his room without volition, also across the rug. He was profoundly grateful that he'd remained continent but the smell was causing reflexive gagging. He stumbled into the bathroom, dropped to his knees, and vomited once more into the toilet.

His limbs were still tingling and his mood felt grossly at odds with the situation. He flushed the toilet and rinsed his mouth out before drinking a tumbler of tap water.

Back in the room he sopped up the worst of the vomit on the rug with a towel, then rolled the rug and dragged it out into the hall.

Let them deal with it.
As he turned to reenter the room he saw Hyacinth turn into the hall from the head of the stairs.

He paused and leaned against the doorframe. As she walked up the hall the walls seemed to vibrate around her, an undulation as if her personal gravity was so great that it warped space around her.
It's the drug. Don't invest her with any more power.

Hyacinth looked at the rug, then her nose wrinkled as the odor reached her. "Upset tummy?"

He snorted.

"Come back to the fire. It's nice and warm."

"And no doubt you have another drink for me."

She shook her head. "It wasn't the drink. MDMA tastes too strong to put in a drink. It was in your dinner."

"Oh, that makes me feel
so
much better."

Even with the smell of the vomit in the hall, the Viagra was starting to take effect. He shifted his stance. He told himself it was just the drug—but part of him didn't believe.

"Believe it or not, I did it to help you."

"Oh, yeah? I'm not seeing much benefit."

She stepped closer and reached toward him. "You haven't given it time."

Before her fingers could touch his chest, he jumped away to the drawing room. He was chilled both from emesis and his moment on the beach. He stood by the fire and warmed himself until he heard her high heels on the stair. She closed the door again as she entered and walked out of her shoes. She reached behind her neck and undid the clasp. The silk slithered off of her like some living thing and she stood there, four feet away, naked.

He wanted to run his hands over her skin, through her hair—all of her hair. He hated himself.

You can run, but you cannot hide.

And they had the ability to keep him from running, too.

He thought of Millie, trying to direct the thoughts of arousal toward her and her body.

I've got to draw the line.

He stood still and waited. When she walked up to him he didn't resist when she kissed him. Her hands wandered down to his thighs, stroking up, then around. He stooped and lifted her, one arm under her knees,
like Rhett carrying off Scarlet.

She gave a slight laugh and squirmed against him, playing with the nape of his neck.

He jumped to the boardwalk that led to the beach—the midway point where it stretched over the salt marsh and estuary. He shoved out and dropped her, staggering for a second as one of her hands clawed at his shoulder, but the warning tingling in his throat came and he let the reflex work, flinching back to his old friend, the green box, visible again on the floor since he'd removed the rug. He gagged once, but kept from vomiting.

He didn't know how cold the estuary was but it had to be below 50° Fahrenheit. The air temperature was within spitting distance of freezing. He counted to five, then jumped again to the same spot on the boardwalk, in time to hear feet pounding back up the boardwalk toward the house. He flinched back to the square again, then jumped downstairs to the kitchen and peered out at the courtyard through the little square panes of glass in the door.

At least she's not drowning.

Abney stuck his head out of the side pantry, his eyebrows raised. "May I be of assistance, sir?"

Davy looked at him. "Miss Pope is running up from the beach right now and will be here in less than a minute. She is soaking wet and very, very cold. She'll need a hot bath or shower." He looked out the window again and saw Hyacinth throw the gate open at the far end of the courtyard. Her arms were wrapped across her chest and she came forward at a stumbling run. "Oh, yes. She's naked."

Davy jumped away to his bathroom and returned with the plush terry cloth robe. He thrust it into Abney's arms. "Good luck."

After a while, the effects of the drugs seemed to fade, and he suspected he'd successfully vomited up a substantial portion of the dose with his supper.

Hyacinth didn't enter his room for two hours after he'd dropped her in the estuary. He suspected she'd spent most of the time in a hot bath. She was back in her traditional clothes, hair bound tightly into a bun, makeup gone. Her voice was strident.
"Did you think that was—"

He jumped away, back to the drawing room, where the fire had burnt to embers. This time, instead of following him, she put him "in the box." He felt the buzz in his throat and flinched back.

She was standing there, her mouth opening to speak, but he forestalled her.

"Don't you get it? I don't want you. I don't want you around me. I don't want you yanking my chain."

"Why didn't you say 'no'? Ever heard of that!
Just Say No.
Sound familiar? If I weren't under orders I'd shoot your dick off!"

"I thought I did—when we got back from Nigeria. Under what orders? To do what? To avoid shooting me or to seduce me? Were you under orders to make me more
manageable?"

She swung her fist at his face, but he jumped two feet to his left, still in the box. The missed blow turned her and he shoved hard on her shoulder, sending her staggering three steps back. "I'll drop you back in the marsh," he said as she recovered her balance and started back toward him.

Hyacinth stopped where she was and held up her hand. "I told you before—I don't have to touch you to spank. I can do it from another room."

Go ahead, do it!
Davy thought.
Counteract the conditioning.
His voice dripped with derision. "Talk, talk, talk."

She took a step forward, then took a deep breath and exhaled. The furrows around her eyes smoothed out and she smiled slightly.

He found that far scarier than her previous rage.

She turned away from him and walked to the door. Before she closed it, she said, "Have a good night."

They put him "in the box" several times an hour for the rest of the night. Finally, at three in the morning, after a ten-minute period in the box, he simply removed the blanket and pillow from the bed and lay on the floor, within the taped borders.

He didn't know if they kept turning it on the rest of the night, or not, but they didn't bother him.

Good thing. I would not submit tamely.

His back ached from sleeping on the floor. He dressed and jumped down to the breakfast room, only to find himself back in the room, gagging. He tested the border. He wasn't "in the box." He hadn't felt anything when he'd gone into the bathroom so he'd assumed he had his usual run of the house. He explored the edges of the room—again nothing—but when he walked a few feet out into the hall he felt the border effect, the tingle in his throat, the coughing, and some nausea. Backing into the room put him in the clear again.