Half Life (Russell's Attic Book 2) (12 page)

He sprawled to the carpet in an ungainly heap and shot me a look that was half fear and half loathing. Then, with a wince of pain, he edged back from me a few feet in a crab walk until he was against the wall. “What do you want?”

“I want to talk about Warren’s daughter,” I said.

His eyes hooded with the same cagey expression he’d displayed at Arkacite, and he didn’t say anything.

I drew my gun.

He choked, his feet skidding fruitlessly against the floor as if he could push himself through the wall and back outside.

“Tell me,” I said.

He wet his lips, then burst out, “Warren’s the person you should be asking. Maybe he knows it’s worth more than his useless hide to tell you.”

That was not the response I had expected. “Tell me what?”

Lau was a terrible liar. His eyes skittered across his dropped briefcase by my feet.

“Stay where you are,” I said. Keeping my gun on him, I crouched down to turn the briefcase toward me and pushed at the hasps.

Lau’s eyes bugged out when he saw what I was doing. “No,
don’t—!”

He was too late.

On top of the papers was a thick sheaf of some sort of project reports. My eyes skipped down each page, but the language wouldn’t connect into meaning at first, the headings just black words on a white page—

Subject’s reactions to isolation from human contact—

Subject’s fear response—

Subject’s reaction to pain stimuli—

A strange buzzing filled my senses and the papers hit the floor as I descended on Lau. He tried to stumble up and get away but I slammed him against the wall, my hand on his throat and my gun in his face—he choked and gurgled against me—

My finger squeezed against the trigger, not quite enough to trip the hammer, but close. “You’re experimenting on her,” I whispered. “A little girl.” My skin felt too tight, the mathematics too sharp, razor edges of vectors and forces singing to me of the pathetic fragility of one worthless human life…

Lau’s brownish complexion had paled to the color of parchment, his skin slack against his bony face. “It’s not what you—!”

I moved before I had considered it. The math felt red with rage as my hand blurred and I whipped the Colt against Lau’s face before he could react to it coming.

His head cracked against the wall, and his body sagged suddenly, a dead weight collapsing against me. I stepped back and let him tumble down in a heap, his limbs smacking against the floor. He would be painfully bruised when he woke up, in addition to the head injury. A jagged laceration had opened across his cheek where I’d pistol whipped him. Blood trickled down his limp features.

My right hand twitched against the gun. I still wanted to kill him.

A child. They were doing this to a
child.

I forced myself to take a deep breath. Then another.

I slid the gun back into my belt. I picked up the scattered papers and returned them to the briefcase, trying not to look at them, revulsion crawling through me as I touched the pages. I forced myself to check the computer, but it was so spartan it was obvious he used his work computer for almost everything.

I picked up the briefcase and left.

I didn’t look at Lau again. I knew what I would do if I looked.

C
HAPTER 12

I
WAS
half an hour away from Lau’s place before I realized I didn’t know where I was going.

I stopped the car in a red zone and sat gripping the steering wheel. My breath scraped in and out. I was having trouble remembering anything after leaving Lau’s building.

I should have killed him, I thought.

Or maybe I should have taken him. Interrogated him. Found out everything about Arkacite, used him to break in and rescue a scared five-year-old girl who had done nothing wrong.

My phone jangled in my pocket.

“What!” I yelled into it, without looking at the ID.

I heard an indistinct shuffling. “Hello?” asked a tremulous female voice.

“You called
me,”
I said. “Who is this?”

“Pilar Velasquez. From Arkacite.”

“Oh. Yeah.” I tried to pull myself together, to sound something less than hostile. “What do you want?”

“I…” Her voice hitched, and I suddenly realized what the noises I was hearing were: she was crying.

“What happened? What’s wrong?” I demanded, too fast. After what I had just learned—

“I lost my job,” she burst out, and started full-on sobbing.

I had to strangle back the urge to take her fucking head off. On the scale of one to important, Pilar Velasquez getting fired didn’t even
register.
And why the hell was she calling
me
about it? “So what?” I snapped.

“I’m in big trouble,” she hiccupped. “I’ve got rent due in less than a week and my car payment right after that and I—I don’t have any savings—but that’s not why I called. I, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to dump on you, only you asked, and it only just happened, and I don’t know what to do…”

I didn’t have time for this. “Get to the point.”

“It’s, it’s Denise. I found out—she’s not dead.”

“Oh,” I said. “Yeah, I know.”

Silence. Even the crying had stopped. Then Pilar wailed, “You could have
told me!”

“Sorry,” I said, with no sincerity. “I didn’t think of—”

“You didn’t—? I was depressed all night about this! I got
fired
because of it!”

“They can fire you for that?”

“Well, I was talking about it at work today; I asked a couple other people if they knew she’d passed—I wanted to do something, like, I don’t know, a company memorial or something, and then Mr. Lau called me into his office and asked where I had heard that and asked who I’d been talking to about Denise and then he accused me of corporate espionage and—and—”

And fired her. I thought of Lau lying unconscious and bleeding on his floor at home. Too bad for Pilar I hadn’t done that this morning.

“And I also wanted to tell you, before I left I ran the program thing your friend sent me,” Pilar added, sniffling. I started to demand,
What program?
, but she ran right over me. “I wasn’t sure I was going to—I mean, it seemed like kind of a shady thing to ask me to do, you know? But when they fired me I just figured, what the heck, right? What are they going to do, fire me again?”

By that point my brain had caught up with my mouth. “Uh—thanks,” I said, the word coming out only a little too firmly.

Pilar hesitated. “You
did
send it to me, right? I didn’t just unwittingly commit real corporate espionage against my former employer? Because I’m pretty sure they can arrest me for that—”

“You’re fine,” I said. It wasn’t a lie; Checker had broken me out of jail before in less than half a day, so if Pilar did get arrested we could get her out of it. “I’m going to call you back in five minutes.”

I hung up over her sputtering protests and dialed Checker.

“Why didn’t you tell me you sent her a program?” I ranted, before he’d finished answering. “That was you, right? Tell me it was you.”

“Hang on, slow down! I assume you’re talking about the lovely Miss Velasquez? Yes, that was I, and I
would
have told you if you had been speaking to me at the time. In fact, I distinctly remember leaving you a voicemail about it, which apparently you didn’t listen to—”

“What did you have her do? Are you getting anything useful?”

“Hold your horses! I had her run a script that Trojans me in behind their firewalls. And yes, it worked. I just need some time to—”

“We don’t
have
time on this! They have a little girl.”
Subject’s reaction to pain stimuli…

“I was
going
to say I just need time to figure out their system. You know, Pilar might be really helpful, if she’s willing—she can give me the Cliff’s Notes on how all the departments are set up so I don’t have to keep on looking everything up; this company is absolutely Byzantine—”

“Done,” I said. “I’ll send her over to you.”

I hung up and dialed Pilar again. “Hi,” she said. “Is everything okay?”

“You just lost your job, right?” I said. “Do you want a few hours of work?”

“Uh…yes?” The word was a perfect blend of hope and skepticism.

“My friend who sent you the program wants some help figuring out the ins and outs of Arkacite. I’ll pay you cash. What’s your standard hourly rate?”

“Uh—I don’t know—I guess, well, I was making seventeen an hour at Arkacite—”

“Done,” I said. As far as I was concerned that was abysmally cheap; the woman was lucky she didn’t have that job anymore. “I’m going to text you an address. Go straight over; this is time-urgent.”

“I—uh—okay,” said Pilar. “Listen, I don’t mean to be rude or anything, and I really appreciate it, but, uh, this isn’t, like, illegal or anything, is it?”

“They kidnapped a little girl,” I reminded her.
Subject’s fear response…
“Does it matter?”

“Well—it does to me, a little. I don’t want to go to jail.”

“You
won’t.
Besides, running the script for us in the first place was probably way worse than giving us the lowdown on the company will be. If they want to jail you, they’ll jail you for that. Now will you help us or not?”

She made an unhappy squeak.

“You met Liliana. For God’s sake, her father just wants her back.”
Subject’s reactions to isolation from human contact.
“Jesus Christ, we’re not asking for a lot!”

“Okay,” said Pilar in a tiny voice.

“Good. I’m sending you the address now.” I hung up and forwarded her Miri’s apartment, making a mental note to tell Pilar that if anyone from the Mob found her and put a gun to her head, I would kill her myself if she told them anything.

On second thought, maybe she was right to be nervous about being associated with us.

C
HAPTER 13

I
’D BEEN
too hasty, I realized.

Checker and Pilar would find out where Arkacite was holding Liliana, but I would still need a way in. Albert Lau might be able to help give me that.

I pulled a U-turn in the middle of the street, ignoring the horns that went off around me, and headed back to his condo. I parked the sedan illegally this time and pounded back up the stairs.

Lau was gone.

A dark stain on the carpeting showed where his head had been, but the flat was empty. He’d run. I stood staring for a few minutes, my thoughts scattered, wondering what I should do next.

He wouldn’t be good at staying hidden, I felt sure. People used to being on the grid rarely were. He would use a credit card, or keep his cell phone, or feel the need to see his girlfriend. Or maybe he’d gone to the cops. Regardless, Checker would be able to find him eventually, if I asked him to, but I wasn’t sure it would be worth it. Tracking him down would take time, time I could use to find a way into Arkacite without him.

I was a dumbass for letting him get away, though. I’d been too impulsive. Too emotional.

A worse thought struck me. What if Lau went back to Arkacite? What if he warned them I was coming for Liliana? What if they moved her somewhere we couldn’t find, locked her away in a hole in the ground—or worse, cut their losses and destroyed the evidence? They had already somehow erased the paper trail of her existence; would they consider murder to be going too far?

My stomach folded in on itself, and I leaned a forearm against the wall, feeling dizzy. I swallowed against a tight throat and fumbled my phone out of my pocket.

I’m coming over. Find me a way into Arkacite tonight. I don’t care what it takes.

I sent the message to Checker and found my way back down to the car. The math still felt too sharp, angry and distracting, making it hard to see straight.

I drove to one of my storage units, where I exchanged my stolen ride for a clean one and packed the trunk full of any equipment I might need for the night. Then I headed to Miri’s. It was late in the evening by the time I arrived, the sun low on the horizon.

I buzzed in at the gate, and Pilar met me at the door to the apartment. “Hi again,” she said. She seemed to have calmed down, though her makeup was still slightly smeared.

“Hi,” I tossed over my shoulder as I pushed past her. “Checker? Give me…”

I trailed off in the middle of demanding an update. The bright, cluttered apartment had been covered in printouts, as if someone had decided to play a practical joke by coating every object with paper.

“Hey,” said Checker, lifting his head from a laptop. He gestured at the snowfall of paper. “We ran out of desktop space. Computer desktop space, I mean. I think I might owe Miri a new toner cartridge.”

“Did you find a way in?” I asked. That was all I cared about. I’d brought in the reports from Lau’s briefcase but couldn’t force myself to look at them again; I added them to one of the stacks.

Checker and Pilar exchanged glances. “Well—”

“Tell me what’s going on!” I slammed home the security bar on the door behind me, too hard, and Pilar jumped.

“Maybe you should sit down for this,” said Checker.

“Checker, so help me God—”

“We found out where they’re keeping her,” he blurted out. “Or rather, Pilar did—” He looked for her again, but she had edged away from me to hover in the kitchen doorway. “Cas, stop being scary for one second; this isn’t our fault! We’re on your side here!”

“Then tell me what you found!”

“They—they’ve got her in a lab!” He held my gaze, nervously, defiantly.

“I know that,” I said. “What lab?”

His jaw worked, and his expression would have been funny under other circumstances. “I—Zeus, we were so nervous about telling you, what with your thing about kids—”

“
Which lab?”

“Rightly so, I guess,” he muttered to himself. “Pilar’s the one who deserves the credit, so stop making her think you’re going to eat her. She’s a real-life Super Temp—get out of the way, Donna Noble—and, uh, anyway, we found it; it’s in a sub-basement. There’s no other reason they’d be sending kids’ toys there.”