GEN13 - Version 2.0 (10 page)

Roxy walked over to the bar and picked up the list. “ ‘Digiworld?’ ” she read. “ ‘Mousetrap?’ ”

“Computer companies, souftds like. Maybe she’ll get lucky.”

Roxy stared at the paper. “Yeah. Lucky ...” she muttered quietly.

“Hi, Rox,” said Sarah, walking in from the other room. “There are still some pancakes left over, if you want to warm them up. Blueberry, your favorite.”

“Thanks,” Roxy said absently. “Maybe later. I, uh ... I forgot something I gotta do in my room.”

She looked away from her friends and hurriedly left the room.

Bobby and Sarah gave each other a curious glance. “Am I crazy,” Bobby asked, “or is everbody acting kind of weird today?”

“Everyone’s acting kind of weird today,” Sarah agreed. Then, she smirked and added, “But that doesn’t mean you’re not crazy.”

Lynch paid the cab driver and stepped out onto the sidewalk. He looked up at the Wall Street office building, and weighed it over in his mind. The towering edifice didn’t look like the sort of place where you’d be likely to find an after-school program. But then again, most people

probably wouldn’t have realized that there was a day care center in the Federal Building in Oklahoma City. That is, until some lunatic militiamen blew it up.

Lynch entered the lobby and walked past the guard station with a nod. He’d learned long ago that simply acting as though you knew where you were going was enough to avoid a lot of unwanted questions. He spotted the elevators out of the comer of his eye and walked purposefully into the nearest open car. Once inside, he pushed the button marked “17” and leaned back against the wall as the elevator rose.

The newspaper article had said that Cheswick fell from the seventeenth floor, but it hadn’t mentioned the room number for the center he’d been visiting. Lynch didn’t want to invite the guard’s attention by checking the building directory in the lobby. After all, he was hoping that the after-school center would be closed in the morning, during school hours. That way, he could let himself in and have the chance to look around undisturbed. As a rule, it was usually best not to give security guards advance warning of intended breaking and entering.

Besides, he figured the room would be easy enough to find.

On the latter point, at least, he was wrong.

Lynch walked the halls of the seventeenth floor twice, - but none of the signs on the doors sounded anything like an after-school program designed to keep children off drugs. There were a couple of unmarked doors, either of which could have been the right one. But there was no way to know which one it might be, or whether the program might be housed within the offices of one of the other companies on the floor.

Finally, Lynch put on his best attempt at a friendly smile, knocked on the door of an insurance company, and stepped inside.

The middle-aged receptionist put down a magazine and looked at him as though he’d just interrupted delicate surgery. “Yes?” she said, grudgingly. “Can I help you?”

“I’m sorry to bother you, but yes, I hope you can,” Lynch said, keeping his smile in place. “I heard there’s an after-school program around here somewhere ... ? But I’ve been looking all over, and gosh, I can’t seem to find it anywhere. Would you happen to know where it is?”

“ ‘After... ?’ Oh, yeah. There was one for about a month or so, but it’s long gone.”

“Gone?”    ' "

“Yeah, right after that senator took a header out their window. Bad publicity, I guess.”

“ ‘Header?’ Oh! You mean Senator Cheswick? That business with Senator Cheswick happened here?”

“Yeah, right down that way.” The receptionist pointed to her left.

“That way?” Lynch pointed in the same direction. “Yeah. End of the hall down there.”

“Oh, dear. How awful for all of you!”

The receptionist shrugged. “Politicians,” she said. “And the after-school program was only here for a month, you say?”

She shrugged again. “Who notices? Something like that, I guess,”

“Well, then, I suppose it probably wouldn’t have been right for my children anyway.-’

The comer of the receptionist’s mouth twitched into something that vaguely resembled an indulgent smile.

“Well, thank you so much,” Lynch said. “I’m so sorry to have taken up your time.”

“No problem.”

“Have a good day, now.”

Lynch walked back out into the hall, letting the door swing closed behind him. He took a deep breath. He hated adopting that particular persona; it was just too alien to him, and too much work to keep up the sunny facade. But it did have its uses, and this time around, it got him the information he needed.

He walked briskly down to the end of the hall. There were two offices there, facing each other. The door to one

office bore a brightly colored sign that proclaimed it the home of a graphics company. The other door was blank, and a quick try of the knob showed that it was locked tight.

Lynch knocked on the blank door, just in case anyone was inside. The last thing he wanted was to barge in on someone who’d want to know how Lynch got in without a key. He waited for an answer, and passed the time by looking casually around for passers-by or security cameras.

Once Lynch felt confident that no one was inside the office and no one was watching, he produced a set of lockpicks from his pocket. The door opened in no more time than it would have taken with a key. Lynch entered the office, and quietly closed and re-locked the door. No need to be interrupted without warning, after all.

Even a glance at the space was enough to confirm what the receptionist had told him. The room had been stripped bare, without a stick of furniture or forgotten knicknack to indicate that anyone had ever been here at all. Lynch suspected that the space had sat unused and untouched since the day the after-school program had cleared out. That might have been bad news for the landlord, but it was good news for Lynch, since it increased the chances that potential clues could still be waiting, undisturbed. The thought was enough to make Lynch thankful for the City’s extravagantly high rents.

Doors from the main room led to two smaller rooms that made up the rest of the suite. Lynch stuck his head inside each of them in turn and looked around. One was a bathroom. The other was a small inner office. Each was as empty as the main room.

That alone was enough to intrigue Lynch further. Typically, when businesses vacate their space, they leave things behind, whether it’s unneeded supplies or just stray scraps of packing materials. But this place had been cleaned out from top to bottom. Several hypothetical explanations ran through Lynch’s mind. It was possible that the building simply had a very thorough cleaning staff, who had scoured the space after the center left. It was possible that whoever ran the program was compulsively neat. But the more interesting possibility was that the center was a front, and that the people behind it didn’t want to leave any clues behind.

That would fit neatly with the receptionist’s telling him that the center had only been here for about one month.

Lynch could imagine the political pressure that the New York Police Department had been under to close the Cheswick case quickly. With the national focus that the case had gained, the City government wasn’t going to want to look inefficient in front of the State or the Feds. Given that, he could readily imagine that no one had looked too much further after the drug angle came to light. After all, a roomful of witnesses had seen Cheswick throw himself out the window of his own accord. The circumstances of Cheswick’s death fit perfectly with a bad trip or a case of DT’s. They probably never even got as far as checking into the background of the center itself.

But what if the center had been a fake? What if it had been set up for one purpose, and one purpose only:

To lure Senator Martin Cheswick to his death.

Once again, Lynch didn’t have any hard evidence to back up any of his theories. It was all just conjecture at this point—conjecture that would be hard to prove. He suspected the name on the lease would prove to be phony, and he somehow doubted that whoever owned the center left a forwarding address. The empty office seemed to leave things at a dead end.

Still, it was only empty to the casual observer. No matter how hard the prior occupants might have tried to cover their tracks, it was likely that they had missed some tiny clues that could tell the tale. Finding those clues would mean combing every square inch of the office space in painstaking detail.

Lynch had the time. •

Two hours later, Lynch had combed through a three-foot-wide swath of the tightly-knit carpet that stretched from one end of the main room to the other. He earned the fruits of his labor in a sealable plastic bag: three stray hairs that carried telltale DNA, some vaguely familiar metallic scrapings from the baseboard moulding that he couldn’t quite identify, and a few other tiny clues that might yield something under further analysis.

That was one pass down. Three more, and he’d finish the room. Then he could go on to the others.

Lynch didn’t mind the monotonous work. Years of intelligence work, sitting for hours in the back of disguised vans or piecing his way through mounds of data in search of the one golden needle in the haystack, had taught him the value of both patience and persistence. But the cramped muscles in Lynch’s back also reminded him that he wasn’t as young as he used to be.

He decided to stand up and stretch for a minute before getting back to the search. As he rose, his face passed by a heating vent, set in the wall about a foot above the floor. Something caught his eye.

Lynch kneeled back down to study the vent more closely. No, he hadn’t imagined it. There was a funny shadow at the edge of one of the openings in the vent.

Lynch tried to reach the tiny object, but his fingers were too big to fit through the grating. He took out a pocket knife, opened the blade, and used it to probe inside the vent. It took several tries, but eventually, he succeeded in bringing the object far enough forward to grasp it with his fingertips. It was a slender black tube, less than an inch long and only a couple of milimeters in diameter. The front of the tube was open, covered by a tiny disc of glass or transparent plastic. The back was connected to a thin cable covered in black rubber insulation that led deeper into the vent.

Camera,
Lynch thought.
With a fiber-optic cable.

He tried giving the device a gentle tug, but there wasn’t enough slack for the cable to extend more than a centimeter past the vent. In fact, it was only by keeping a tight grip, with his fingers pressed against the metal of the vent, that he could keep the cable extended at all L he let go, it would have snapped back far enough into the vent that he wouldn’t be able to reach it anymore.

This was no ordinary after-school program,
he thought.
Is it still active?

Are they still watching?

The best way to find answers, he figured, was to remove the cover of the vent and see what was inside. Without releasing his left hand’s grip on the cable, Lynch used his right to close the blade of his pocket knife. That was easy enough. The next step was trickier, as he tried to open the knife’s screwdriver blade with one hand. It slipped off his fingernail to snap shut twice. The third attempt seemed to be working better, though. The screwdriver had just barely managed to clear the body of the knife, when Lynch was startled by a voice.

A voice coming from inside the vent.

“Well, well. John Lynch,” the electronically-disguised voice said with a sigh. “You know, I left this here in case anyone came snooping. But I never imagined it would be you.”

It’s a camera, all right,
Lynch thought.
And a speaker.

“Although I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. You never could keep your nose out of other people’s business.”

It’s someone I know. Who—?

Lynch never got to finish the thought. Because that was the exact moment when a high-voltage charge surged through the vent. Every muscle of Lynch’s body constricted in pain as the shock sent him flying.

Lynch landed hard on the floor.

He wasn’t moving.

“Now, I suppose I’ll have to deal with your brats, too, before they come looking for you,” the voice continued.

There was another sigh.

“Life is just so complicated sometimes.”

CHAPTER 7

“Y ou’re hired,” said the man in the suit.

I “But... don’t you want to see my resume?”

“Oh, sure. You’re hired.”

Kat got up from her chair and picked up her bag.

“So, when would you like to start?” the man said. His voice had the vague, detached quality of someone speaking from far away in a daydream. “You could start now, if you want. We could get you set up now and you could get... y’know, started. When would be a good time for you to start?”

Kat gave him an icy stare. “Oh, I don’t know,” she said, with an edge in her voice. “How about never? Is never good for you?”

She spun on her heel and stormed out of the office, slamming the door behind her. She didn’t even slow down when she heard the glass in the door shatter.