No Escape (5 page)

Ten feet farther and the hallway turned right. They rounded the bend and came face-to-face with a large metal door. It was chained shut.

“That’s not an alarm,” Noa said flatly.

“There’s no point hurting me,” he pleaded. “You can’t leave. He’d never let you go.”

Beside her, the top box on the stack gaped open. Noa dug her free hand inside, then risked a glance: metal bedpans, nothing she could use to break a padlock. She was trapped. Noa fought the urge to scream in frustration. Out in the expanse of the warehouse floor, she’d stood a chance of escaping. Now, she was a rat at the end of a maze. At most, she had a few minutes before they found her.

“Take off your clothes,” she ordered.

“What? But—” he sputtered.

“Now!” She pressed the scalpel deeper into his neck.

A minute later, the doctor shuddered in his underwear as she stepped into his crocs and pulled the mask up over her face. Good thing he’d decided to stay—the Latino’s scrubs would never have fit her.

“It won’t work,” he said.

Noa frowned and responded with a double-fisted uppercut: a trick she’d learned the hard way, by being on the receiving end once. It connected with the doctor’s jaw and his head jerked back. He dropped hard, knocking over boxes on the way down. He didn’t get back up. “I hate negativity,” she muttered.

The Latino doctor suddenly darted out of the hallway, skidding to a stop in front of them. Noa reached into the box beside her.

“Jim?” he said, eyes widening as Noa raced toward him. As she ran she drew her arm back, then swung the metal bedpan as hard as she could. He shied away, drawing his arms up to protect his face. The bedpan made a loud, hollow sound when it connected with his temple. His eyes rolled back in his head, and he dropped to the floor beside the other doctor.

Noa dashed back down the hallway, pausing at the end. She was still clutching the scalpel in her left hand, but chances were the people she was up against had knives, maybe even guns. The warehouse was dimly lit, which worked in her favor. It was enormous, too, so the people searching for her would have to split up. The scrubs might fool them at a distance, but that trick wouldn’t work for long; they were sure to find the doctors any minute now. She had to find a way out.

Noa edged along, keeping to the shadows. Ten feet down the adjoining wall she spotted a gap: another hallway, about thirty feet away. It was a risk—she might get to the end only to discover that the door was bolted like the other one. But spending too much time on the warehouse floor was suicide.

She moved as quickly as possible toward the opening, hoping that at a distance she’d be mistaken for the blond doctor. The crocs weren’t exactly ideal: They squeaked against the raw concrete, and there was no way she’d be able to run in them. Better than being barefoot, though. At least her feet were finally warming up.

She’d nearly reached the corridor when someone shouted, “Hey!”

Noa slowly pivoted.

The guy facing her was large and lumpy; he looked like a kid had stuffed clay into an oversized security uniform, dabbing on a stubby nose and ears as an afterthought. There was a gun in his right hand.

“I already checked down there,” the security guard said, indicating the space behind her with the gun barrel. “Don’t waste your time.”

Noa nodded her thanks, hoping he wouldn’t find it strange that she wasn’t answering. He sauntered off toward the next hallway, the one where the doctors were stashed.

She was about to slip down the corridor when someone across the room hollered, “Stop her!”

Turning, Noa spotted the blond doctor standing at the edge of the opposite hallway. In the darkness, his bare skin practically glowed. His arm was extended, finger pointing at her accusingly.

The security guard swiveled back toward her with a frown. Their eyes met, then Noa spun and broke into a run.

Peter Gregory was bored. He spent most weekends at Tufts University with his girlfriend. But Amanda was swamped with a huge paper, and she’d told him in no uncertain terms to not even consider showing up to distract her. His parents were away in Vermont celebrating their thirtieth wedding anniversary at the type of pseudo-bed-and-breakfast they loved, an alarming amount of chintz the only thing that differentiated it from a regular hotel.

At first, Peter had been kind of psyched—a whole weekend to himself, no one to put up a front for. He could spend it online, monitoring the projects birthed by his brainchild, /ALLIANCE/. Yesterday, a Croatian member announced he was on the verge of tracking down the kid who posted a video of setting a cat on fire. That had been a particularly gruesome attempt to garner fifteen minutes of fame, but sadly not an unusual one. Peter had been checking all day, though, and there were no new posts. Hardly anyone on /ALLIANCE/ at all. Maybe everyone was busy logging rest bubbles on World of Warcraft, he thought with a grin.

Peter liked to think of these vigilante hackers as his minions. Since he’d founded the underground website a year earlier, it had snowballed. It turned out he wasn’t the only one ticked off by all the hypocrisy out there. They’d become a loosely knit community of hackers with a mission: to target Internet bullies, animal abusers, sexual predators, and everyone else who took advantage of the weak. Peter’s only rule was no violence. He saw /ALLIANCE/ as a way to wreak justice by pranking the bad guys, and so far, that hadn’t been an issue: After all, the people who counted themselves as /ALLIANCE/ questers could wipe out someone’s credit history or destroy their privacy with a few keystrokes. In the end, that was a lot more effective than beating someone up.

Peter had already made the circuit of the house a few times, absently flicking lights on and off. It was big, a four-thousand-square-foot McMansion, so that consumed some time. He ended up in his dad’s office. He plopped down in the Aeron chair and spun a few times, then propped his feet on the desk as he tilted back. Through the picture window beside him their lawn stretched away from the house like a rolling black tide, stopping at the street where it lapped at towering elm trees.

Saturday night, and he was home alone. There was a party at his buddy Blake’s house, but he wasn’t really in the mood. After going to college parties with Amanda, the high-school equivalent struck him as a lame waste of time. Still, there was nothing to stop him from having some fun. His dad kept a bottle of twenty-year-old bourbon in his lower right-hand desk drawer. He wouldn’t miss a few pulls.

Peter punched in a code and the bottom drawer popped open. Ridiculous of his father to think that a three-digit lock would keep anyone out. Peter shook his head as he uncorked the bottle. It was insulting, really.

He took a swig and leaned back. Someone had inscribed a note on the label:
For Bob Gregory, with sincere appreciation
. The signature was illegible; probably another jerk his dad had thrown money at to achieve some awful end.

His father was the reason Peter had initially started /ALLIANCE/. A self-described “do-gooder investment banker,” his dad was the kind of guy who insisted on driving a Prius with all the bells and whistles, but couldn’t be bothered to drop his Pellegrino bottle in the recycling bin. He’d make a show of tucking a five-dollar bill in a homeless guy’s cup if people were around, then go home and donate the maximum amount allowed to a campaign geared toward keeping that guy on the streets. And Peter’s mother was no better. As a high-priced defense attorney, she spent her time ensuring that Boston’s most lethal lowlifes never saw the inside of a prison cell. The two of them were perfect for each other, Peter thought with a snort. No wonder they’d made it thirty years.

It had been a while since he’d checked out what Bob was up to, Peter mused, scratching his chin with the mouth of the bottle. Couldn’t hurt to take a look.

A stack of papers and files filled the rest of the drawer. Peter dug them out and splayed them across the desk, then started flipping through. Mostly dull stuff: stock reports, investor statements, prospectuses from a variety of hedge funds. One file was thicker than the others. He recognized his father’s careful writing along the tab,
AMRF
in block letters. Peter frowned. He went through the drawer fairly regularly. This was a new addition.

He perused the papers inside the file: more quarterly reports, meeting minutes in some incomprehensible shorthand. His father was listed on the letterhead as both a board member and financial adviser. No surprise there—Bob always jumped at the chance to join a board roster, and “financial advisers” surely got some sort of kickback.

Peter took another tug from the bottle of bourbon, then eyed it. If he drank much more, Bob would be able to tell. Reluctantly, he replaced the cork.

He was about to tuck the various papers and files back in the drawer, rearranging the bottle on top of them, when his eyes alit on the line item “Project Persephone.”

That was pretty exotic for a financial company; they tended to have a penchant for testosterone-driven names like “Maximus” and “Primidius.” Peter scanned the page, but all he could tell was that whatever Project Persephone was, it consumed a hefty chunk of AMRF’s significant annual budget. As in, almost all of it.

Something about the name, though, struck him as familiar. Peter keyed up Bob’s laptop, typing in the password when the box appeared on-screen: his mother’s birthday, of course. He did a quick web search for
Persephone
, and realized where he’d seen the name before: When they studied Greek myths back in middle school. Persephone was the girl who got kidnapped and dragged down to Hades, but her mom cut some deal where half the year, she returned to live back on Earth.

Peter sat back in the chair, puzzled. His eyes fell on the clock across the room: nearly seven thirty,
SportsCenter
would be on soon. The Bruins had played a game earlier, and he wanted to see the highlights. He debated closing the drawer and going on with his evening, but something nagged at him. Peter sighed and ran his fingers back over the keyboard, instituting a basic search on AMRF.

A long list of organizations went by that acronym, including the Algalita Marine Research Foundation and Americans Mad for Rad Foosball. Skimming the list, none of them jumped out as the kind of company Bob would invest in. Peter hesitated, then decided to dig further. He shut down Bob’s computer and went to retrieve his laptop.

Twenty minutes later, he was pretty sure he’d found the right site. From the look of things, it was some sort of medical research company, although whatever they were researching was buried under a string of code names. He dug around some more, but the majority of the company’s files were locked behind firewalls that resisted his first attempts to throw a ladder over. Peter knew that given enough time, he could surmount them—in the past, just for fun he’d hacked unnoticed into the Pentagon, FBI, and Scotland Yard databases. The question was, could anything Bob was involved with possibly be worth the time commitment?

Probably not, Peter decided. With a yawn, he powered down the laptop.

A minute later, his front door was kicked in.

N
oa found herself in a corridor identical to the one where she’d left the doctors. She raced down it, the guard’s footsteps pounding behind her, joined by the sound of others giving chase. The crocs flapped against her feet, slowing her down. She finally gave up, kicking out of them as she hit the corner. No point keeping her feet warm if it meant getting caught.

She glanced back—the guard had just rounded the corner, huffing hard, his face beet red. Just ahead of her, another set of double doors. No padlock, but one of those red signs that warned of an emergency alarm hung above the exit.

Noa ignored it and pushed through. The alarm sprang to life, blaring in her wake.

Outside, it was dusk. Freezing cold air hit her immediately, penetrating her thin cotton scrubs. Noa quickly scanned the surrounding area: It was some sort of warehouse complex, battered-looking, dust-colored buildings lining a narrow road. The pavement was uneven and scored with potholes. No cars or people in sight.

Noa broke right, aiming for a narrow gap between the buildings on the opposite side of the road.

Behind her the door slammed open against the wall, and she heard the guard shout.

The space between the buildings was narrow, barely wide enough for a single car to pass. A few Dumpsters, but otherwise no signs of life. Noa tore by a set of doors identical to the ones she’d escaped through. Too dangerous to go back inside a building, though—she had a better shot out in the open.

The part of her brain that was geared solely toward survival was screaming at her to
go go go
… it was a familiar voice, and listening to it had gotten her through bad situations before. Noa shut down the rest of her mind and let it take over, pushing aside the other distracting thoughts flitting through. Like the possibility that there might be more kids like her in each of these buildings, laid out on cold steel tables with bandaged chests.