Dark Time: Mortal Path (13 page)

Sounds like a waste treatment plant.

“I’ve always wondered what happens if the nurse drops the cup and stepped on the pills.”

Diane raised a finger as though lecturing Maliha. “Ah, a wasted dose. A PharmBots machine can prepare another cup, but we track all the lost medicine. Excess wasted doses can mean the nurse, or someone else at the station, is selling the drugs. Here, let me get you some product literature. They’ll help you get the terminology right when you’re writing your article.”

Diane went to a round conference table and retrieved some colorful brochures. While her back was turned, Maliha switched water bottles. She’d been careful to drink hers down to the same level as Diane’s.

“I’d like to see some PharmBots in action.” Maliha said, tucking away the brochures. “Mind if I take this with me for later?” She held the switched water bottle up.

Diane waved permission, and the bottle, tightly capped, went into Maliha’s briefcase, too.

“We have a demonstration facility on the second floor. When we’re finished here, I’ll have one of my assistants give you a tour.”

Maliha continued to ask questions of interest to her hypothetical readers, such as how pharmacists felt about the whole robot thing, some prominent clients, and costs. Finally, it was time to move into the real reason for Maliha’s trip.

First, she examined Diane’s aura, which was yellowish orange with a few swirls of brown and dull green that muddied the color. Diane was intelligent, but she used her intellect for gain and personal ambition, indicated by the brown. The presence of the unattractive green threw some deceit into the mix.

In other words, a typical aura for a person in her position.

“Diane, what can you tell me about the lawsuit?”

Leaping red flames appeared in Diane’s aura.
Anger, big-time.

A storm gathered in Diane’s eyes. She reached out and turned off the voice recorder.

“Is that what you’re here for? To splash that around the media? That’s not responsible journalism.

Nothing’s been released. Who hired you—MedSort? Bob O’Day’s just the type.”

“I don’t know any Bob. I just thought you might want to take the opportunity to get your side out to our readers.”

“I can’t say anything about it. My legal staff would be all over me. You know that, knew it when you waltzed in here.” Her voice had grown icicles. She grabbed the recorder off the desk and plunged it into her center desk drawer. “You won’t need this.”

Whirls of gray and dark green appeared in Diane’s aura.
She’s afraid of something and she’s being
deceptive.

“You don’t have to get riled up. I thought I’d be doing you a favor. What are you afraid of? Surely, your company has faced lawsuits before. Everybody in the health industry gets hit with them.”

“I want you out. You’ve deceived me from the start. Girl reporter, hah. Who’s paying you? What have you got to gain out of this?” She half rose in her seat. “I’ll sue the hell out of you.” Diane stabbed a button on her phone. “Larry, send security in here.”

Maliha played the role of indignant reporter and protested her innocence. Security arrived in less than fifteen seconds—
do they listen outside the door, or what?
—and escorted Maliha roughly from the building with warnings not to return.

She did return, though, during the still hours when the sun favored other continents with its light.

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Dressed in black, Maliha ran in darkness from her hotel to the PharmBots building. She wore a waist pack that carried everything she needed, including a handgun brought along in checked baggage. She was proficient with firearms, but had no love for them. And she’d yet to have a battle-axe or a throwing knife misfire.

The humid air had a velvety feel and carried the sweet scent of crape myrtle—summer didn’t give up easily in North Carolina. She approached the building, keeping to the shadows of trees that ran in rows through the parking lot.

Maliha pulled a launching gun from her waist pack and fired it at the band of steel that framed the third-floor southeast-corner window. Black 5.5 mm Vectran cord snaked toward the building, headed by a powerful vacuum cup. When the cup hit the metal, air whooshed out of it and it flattened against the steel band, creating a powerful seal.

Maliha moved up to the side of the building and clipped a cord with a foot strap to the launcher.

Slipping her left foot into the strap, she pressed the rewind button on the launcher. A small, silent electric motor pulled her up the side of the building. From a distance, she would have looked like a black spider rising on a silk strand.

At the third-floor window, she stopped the winder and clamped dual vacuum cups connected with a handle onto the glass. Gone were the days when she would just crash through the glass. Using a pen-sized laser cutter carefully calibrated for depth, Maliha incised a neat thirty-inch circle in the double-pane bronze glass, which she removed using the handle. No alarm had gone off when she cut the glass. Who needed an alarm forty feet aboveground?

Maliha lowered the circle of glass inside the room and leaned it against the wall. Then she kicked off from the foot strap with a powerful thrust of her leg, threaded her body through the opening headfirst, hit the floor, rolled once, and came to her feet.

The Black Ghost was in.

She waited to see if there was going to be any reaction to her entry. If there had been a guard outside in the hall at just the moment she hit the floor, the guard may have heard something. Waiting silently, she counted the seconds by the steady beat of her heart; after 120 beats she decided no one was coming.

Maliha assumed that Diane would have taken the laptop home, and she’d be searching for disks she could take with her, or attempting to copy data from the desktop’s hard drive. Instead the prize sat across the room from her, smugly displaying the Advanced PharmBots logo. She approached the laptop as if it were going to sprout legs and take off like a frightened antelope.

She took a small lamp from her pack, fastened its headband on, and flipped the switch. A bright, narrow beam illuminated her work.

There was no lockdown strap on the laptop. She lifted one corner warily with a gloved finger and saw that there was a small cable running out of the bottom and into a recessed area of the table, from which it dropped into the hollow leg of the table and disappeared into the floor. An alarm. If she pulled the laptop toward her or picked it up, the connection would be broken and an alarm would go off at the guard station.

Maliha removed her right glove and pressed her thumb, wrapped in a thin membrane that carried Diane’s print, on the biometric pad. She held her breath. Her fabrication woman, DeeDee Barnes, had told her the thumbprint on the water bottle Maliha had taken from Diane’s office wasn’t of the best quality.

Success was not guaranteed. It had cost Maliha several thousand dollars for the rush job and the personal courier service to Phoenix and back, the water bottle going one way and the print shield coming back. She could do this kind of work herself these days in her own condo, but preferred to leave it to DeeDee, who needed the money. When the woman died or became unable to do the work, Maliha would do her own fabrication.

She exhaled in relief when the computer displayed a desktop and said, “Welcome, Diane.” She put her glove back on, slipped a palm-sized, portable hard drive from her pack, and connected it to one of the laptop’s USB ports. She found that once into the laptop, the files on it weren’t password-protected or encrypted.

Very sloppy, but easy for me.

Maliha began copying all the information from the computer’s hard drive. While she waiting for the copying operation to complete, she went over to the display case and studied the Moche pots. She couldn’t be positive, but on close inspection, she thought they were authentic. One of the sculpted faces 44 z 138

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looked familiar from an article in an archaeological journal from a year ago about smuggled antiquities.

She was so absorbed in looking at the display case that she barely heard the click of the lock on the outer room, the waiting area where she’d mugged for the security camera. Her logon activity must have been reported—
that cable was more sensitive than I thought
—and noticed by an alert guard, who realized Diane Harvey wasn’t signed in to the building but her computer had been disturbed.

Maliha snatched up the portable drive and stuffed it into her pack. The copy process hadn’t completed, but whatever she’d captured, it would have to do. To get out of the room, she was going to have to make a jump for the climbing cord through the opening she’d cut in the glass. She ran toward the window, ripping the headband away and flinging the small light across the room. Then she yanked a Sig Sauer P226 from her pack. The familiar weight of the weapon was reassuring.

The office door opened. As she crossed the room, several red dots danced across her chest. At least three men had rushed into the room, weapons drawn. She could make out their silhouettes in the light coming from the hall, dimmed for the night. She lined up the glowing green dot on the front blade of her P226’s night sight with the two dots on either side of the rear notch, and squeezed off a shot. She’d tried for a shoulder hit, and saw the impact twist and drop one of the men.

Maliha narrowed her focus to her escape route. If she missed the cord, she’d have less than two seconds of time in the air to regret her clumsiness before introducing her face to the concrete.

Running across the room, she turned around long enough to fire off another couple of shots, then dived through the circle in the window. It had been big enough coming in, but with her hasty exit, it seemed like an opening she could barely slip through.

A bullet grazed her left shoulder and another hit her right thigh just as she launched herself at the open space. The glass shattered and spun out into the night in a shower of fragments. Tossing her pistol ahead of her, she had a fraction of a second to grasp the cord, obscured by the flying glass.

One hand—missed.

Her left hand found the cord and closed on it. Momentum swung her around the cord. She smashed into the side of the building.

A bullet came whizzing through the window opening.

She eased her grip on the cord just a little and began sliding down. Friction began burning away the palm of her glove. The ground was coming up fast.

She closed her hand tightly to slow her descent, and her palm felt as though she’d grabbed a hot poker. She came to an abrupt stop and let go of the cord for the eight-foot drop onto the glass pieces below her. She scooped up the P226 and took off running, her thigh wound protesting.

Bullets were coming down from the window, thudding into the ground.

She ran toward the trees on the parking lot. There was shouting, and suddenly bright lights were coming toward her—a car’s headlights. She swerved just in time, feeling the wind of the car’s high-speed passage. Tires screeched as the driver did a 180 to take another try at her, and a bullet flew past her head.

She aimed at the driver’s side and emptied the Sig’s magazine. The car careened wildly, increased speed from the weight of a dead man’s foot on the pedal, headed for the side of the building, and crashed. Heat from friction, gasoline vapor from the smashed tank, and oxygen did what chemistry predicted. Brilliant orange and white flames reached high in the air.

Gunfire from the window above reminded her to keep moving. Nearing the woods at the edge of the parking lot, she glimpsed something crouching under the trees and a quick impression registered.

Animal. Big. What?

Pulling her eyes away from the woods, she saw that two more sets of headlights were heading toward her. Any distraction meant she’d be smeared across the pavement.

Time to pour it on.

Maliha called on the burst of speed she still possessed, the supernatural speed of the Ageless, available to her only for seconds. A blur of motion, she ran directly toward one of the cars, she vaulted into the air, right foot landing on the hood, left on the roof, right on the trunk, and then back to ground.

She maintained the speed until she slipped under the canopy of trees.

Pausing to rest, leaning against the trunk of a tree, Maliha steadied her breathing. She recalled how effortless the speed had been as a servant of Rabishu.

A doe ventured out into the road ahead, followed by her spring-born fawn. Susannah maintained
her speed, judged the moment, and launched herself into the air, arcing over the two deer. The larger
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one startled as Susannah’s foot lightly grazed the fur on her back. It was an exhilarating moment.

Mindful of the lurking presence she’d seen in the woods, she made sure her movement remained quiet, tracking through the woods without so much as a snap of a branch. The swath of woods gave way to a park with a playground, and beyond that, a city street. When she was certain no one had followed her, animal or security guard, she called Amaro. As long as he’d followed her to town, she might as well hitch a ride from him. He said he’d meet her on a street corner nearby in a few minutes.

She assessed the toll. The shoulder wound was minor and would heal well. The embedded bullet in the back of her thigh hurt and was going to have to be dug out, but she’d had worse since becoming mortal. The skin of her left hand had been abraded by the rope, but the glove had taken the worst of it.

She’d left behind blood when she was shot, and blood and tissue from her palm on the cord. It wasn’t a clean operation. If Amaro couldn’t ferret out her information in police files and wipe it out, she’d have to give up being Marsha Winters and reinvent herself.

Should she have fought her way out? If she’d taken out the three guards who’d swarmed into Diane’s office—she could have—she might have made her exit in a more controlled manner. But extra time that helped her in the office would also have helped whoever was in that car that tried to ram her.