Afterglow (25 page)

“All possibilities,” Rand admitted. “Dakota and I think all of this has been a demo. That dead waiter was paid to drop wafers with the drug into the champagne glasses. The liquid caused it to dissolve. It was a small dose—” He looked to Dakota.

“Less than a microgram,” Dakota explained, scooting back to lean against the padded headboard, “but more than enough to cause the uncontrollable reactions. That presents as sexual excess for the majority of people taking Rapture, but for others it will manifest as wild mood swings. Rage, fear, paranoia.”

“Shit. Yeah.” Ligg dropped into the chair. “That tall brunette bridesmaid couldn’t stop bawling, and the old guy with the white hair was on a rampage, tossing tables and throwing shit he shouldn’t have been able to even lift. It took three of us to restrain him long enough to tie him up.”

Rand leaned his shoulder on the bathroom doorjamb as they talked. Who’d countered his orders, and why? Someone who wanted him swinging in the wind alone with no backup? On the run from the authorities? It sounded a little crazy to him, but he figured it wasn’t paranoia if someone was really after him.

“According to the guy in the catacombs, manufacturing has barely begun.” Rand shrugged. “While they work out the production details, they’re giving firsthand displays of exactly what Rapture can do. These guys we were following are basically
salespeople
. The box you found in the waiter’s room was a traveling salesman’s sample case. We need the kingpin.”

Rebik half-smiled. “The stuff will practically sell itself. What else does it need to do besides make you horny?”

“The effects are dose-dependent,” Dakota told him shortly, clearly not amused. “In the realm of toxicology, we have several commonly used measures to describe toxic doses—”

“Cut to the chase,” Rand inserted before she went all chemist on them and no one understood more than a word in three. When Dakota was on a roll, it was sometimes hard to stop her. “They get the gist.”

She wrapped her arms around her up-drawn knees, but Rand knew her well enough to know she wasn’t relaxed. She wanted to find the manufacturer worse than he did. And he wanted the guy
bad
.

“A dose,” she told the two men, keeping it simple, “is the quantity of the chemical that impacts an organism biologically. When Rapture is made to be ingested, a very small amount—less than a microgram—is delivered on a soluble wafer. That would be your street drug. A
much
stronger airborne dose was inhaled at the bank. Strong enough to kill everyone who came into extended contact with it.”

“Holy fuck.”

Holy fuck indeed.

“The gas has a slight scent of roses, which wouldn’t be detectable until the toxins hit the air, and by then it would be too late.” Dakota’s ice-green eyes met Rand’s across the room. “As a weapon of mass destruction, Rapture would be unstoppable in the hands of a terrorist.”

IT WAS LATE AFTERNOON,
almost dusk, when Rand commandeered a pickup truck parked down a narrow, out-of-the-way side street a few blocks from their hotel. Once again, they switched license plates before heading south out of town. Dakota was getting good at popping them off and using her thumbnail to screw them back on.

He called Rebik and left a message when he didn’t answer. “Damn it to hell, now where are they?”

“On the way to the airport,” she reminded him mildly. The second bad guy had too much of a lead to catch up with him by car. Dakota had directed them to Innsbruck. From there, they’d rent a car to tail him. “Relax. They know you’re already pissed. I’m sure they’ll call you as soon as they land. Here, give me your phone, I’ll text them, and they can read it when they get there.” She texted the new coordinates, then shot Rand a sassy smile. “Want to add a love note?”

“I want to add a kick-your-ass-for-not-picking-up-your-phone note,” Rand said dryly. “Just tell them to call me ASAP.”

Dakota added the rest of the message and handed him back the phone.

“Where are
we
going?” she asked as he checked the rearview mirror. The guy in the catacombs was dead, and Rand’s men were following the other GPS coordinates.

“Rome. I have to talk to Paul.”

He always referred to his father by name. The two Maguire men weren’t what Dakota considered warm and fuzzy to each other. “Your father’s been incarcerated for two years.” She kicked off her shoes and curled her legs under her butt.

“Thanks for stating the obvious,” he wryly observed.

“I meant that he’s hardly in a position to be in the know, Rand. I think we should find a place to stop and rest for a few hours, and then catch up with your guys.”

“No. We’ve all wasted too much time. I’ll let them follow that lead. They’ll call when they have him. We can decide how to handle it from there. My father won’t know about the present application of Rapture, but like you, he knows this drug inside and out. He could have a puzzle piece you don’t know or don’t remember, and maybe he can give us a better, more direct lead. I’m sick of fucking zigzagging all over Europe like a pull toy. We need to get proactive and find a way in the back door.”

She opened her eyes and straightened. “I’m all for proactive and kicking some butt. What’s the plan?”

“I have a friend who’ll charter us a private plane on the QT. I don’t want to hit the large airports in case they’re being watched. With face recognition software, it’s not out of the realm of possibility that Interpol could be on our asses.”

She rubbed her hands up and down her arms as a shiver of foreboding chilled her. “No argument there. How many cars do we have to steal between there and here?”

“This one should do it. It’s only an hour’s drive to Fontainebleau. I haven’t spotted a tail. I don’t
think
the police are following us. If they were, they’d’ve hauled our asses in for questioning by now. But going to an airport and trying to take a commercial flight would up the ante.”

The roads were clogged until they broke away from the city and left the lights behind them. Eyes gritty, she curled on the bench seat, fixing her gaze on the hypnotic beams of the headlights as they traveled very fast through the gathering darkness.

Rand was a terrific driver, and she’d always felt safe with him. In a car, that was. Her emotions hadn’t been safe with him at all.

He surprised her with his next question. “How are your parents?”

“Golfing, comitteeing, and being normal,” she said with a smile, angling her body and stretching out her legs. “They’re going to Bora-Bora next month.” Charming people, her parents. Both college professors, they loved but didn’t understand her.

“What’s their take on this sixth sense of yours, or did you somehow manage to keep it a secret from them too?”

“Here’s an idea,” Dakota murmured, eyes still closed. “Let’s do our best not to make inflammatory statements until we’ve both had twelve consecutive hours of sleep.”

“Fair enough. How
do
Dr. North and Dr. North deal with their only child’s superpower?”

“They went through denial and isolation from my birth to age seven. Anger from eight to about twelve. Bargaining in my teens, claims of clinical depression—theirs, not mine—in my early twenties. They skipped right over the acceptance part of the program. No A’s for their daughter’s superpower, that’s for sure.”

“That sucks, Dakota.”

“They love me. They just don’t understand how I see the numbers. They just don’t get it. Or believe it. Or understand it. It’s not scientific or rational. I accept their issues, and we don’t ever talk about it.” She turned her head on the seat back. “In light of the connection between Zak Stark’s near-death experience and the advent of his skill, I think I had something similar when I was about two. I got encephalitis, and they told my parents that I’d died in the ER.”

She shrugged. “There’s no way of knowing if I’d had the GPS sense before that. I don’t ever remember
not
having numbers streaming through my head. I had no idea what they were.”

“What’s it look like?” The curiosity in his voice was a far cry from the disdain she’d been hearing in his tone since Monte Carlo.

“The numbers? They appear as a string, no indications of latitude or longitude, no north or south. Just a long string of numbers on a never-ending loop. I’ve learned to switch it on and off, because when I was younger I’d see dozens of numbers if I was on the playground, or if I touched anything and everything. Eventually I was able to sort the wheat from the chaff and focus on just one … stream. The numbers are bright, for want of a better word, and when I see them they’re superimposed over whatever is in my field of vision. Layered over everything.”

“Annoying?”

She shrugged. “Just my reality. I’ve never had it any other way.”

“How did you figure out what the numbers were?”

“My parents tried to pretend to themselves that I was a child prodigy instead of a freak, and that I was seeing some sort of mathematical equation that they never could figure out. But when I was five or six, our dog was stolen. I was devastated and cried for hours. Then I found his collar in the backyard near the fence, and the numbers changed almost immediately. That time when I told my father, he got out a map. One of my school friends had taken Snoopy, claiming the dog had followed her home. I never liked that girl.”

“They were still in denial, even though you started that early?” Rand shot her a quizzical look, then turned his attention back to the road. The trees lining the road were becoming more dense. Beech, oak, and pine, black silhouettes against the night sky.

“It took a couple more years and a bunch more ‘coincidental’ finds to bring them around to the fact that, like it or not, understand it or not, it was a part of me. They showed me how to use a map, and eventually my dad bought me a handheld GPS for a birthday.”

An oncoming car’s lights illuminated Rand’s face as she turned to look at him. He didn’t look annoyed, just curious. It was a start. “Did you go to Zak and ask for a job?”

“No. I hadn’t seen him since—” Since Rand had told her to go to hell. “For about a year. After I got out of the hospital.” She cleared her throat. “The lab fired me, and I was unemployed for a while. Then there was a string of abductions of high school girls about a year ago. Five girls were taken as they walked home from school in the space of a couple of weeks. As soon as I heard about the case, I went to the local PD and offered my services.”

“Let me guess—they didn’t believe you could do it, and/or they thought you were the one doing the kidnappings.”

“Both. But eventually I persuaded them to give me a shot, and they let me hold the last girl’s cell phone. I found her in Olympia within an hour.”

“Dead?”

Every now and then another oncoming vehicle’s lights would illuminate Rand’s face, making him look a little demonic, and grim. “No. Alive. My talent only works if the person I’m trying to track is still alive. The men had been holding her in a hunting shack in the mountains. The cops arrested both of the assholes and found the bodies of the other four girls buried on the property. The girl’s parents went to the press, Zak’s wife saw the newscast, and they contacted me. He and Acadia took me out to dinner and offered me the job.”

“A waste of your education, don’t you think?”

“I didn’t lose what I learned just because I do this instead of being a chemist. Actually, the two jobs can work well toge—why do you keep looking back?”

They were in the boonies between towns, nothing but fields and trees on either side of a two-lane road. A handful of vehicles traveled in either direction, lights on. The interior of the truck lit up as someone tailgated them.

She straightened, half-turning in her seat. “Is someone following u—” Oh, dear God. Rand had his gun in his hand. It looked huge and menacing. A quick glance at his face showed that so did he.

“For the last fifty kilometers.” His voice was calm, but she could read the tension in the lines of his body. Her pulse sped up as he slid down his window. Warm wind blew her hair around her shoulders, it smelled of grass and pine trees.

“Put your shoes on and tighten that seat belt.”

“I don’t want to sound like Pollyanna, but they’ll question us, we’ll explain the situation, you’ll show your credentials, and they’ll let us go—right?” She slipped on her shoes, and turned, arm braced on the seat back to look out the rear window. There were several cars’ lights behind them. She looked back at Rand, his features illuminated by the dash lights. She wasn’t sure he was even listening to her. Eyes narrowed against the glare in the rearview mirror, he looked intense and focused.

“Okay, yeah, we were at the bank, but surely all it’ll take is a few questions. They’ll know we aren’t
bank robbers
. Except—damn it. All those people died. So they’re not just going to
question
us, are they? They’re going to haul us off somewhere for serious interrogation.”

The thought scared her to death. The laws in Europe were vastly different from back home. Rand would know this better than she did, thanks to his father’s experience with the Italian police.

She started mentally tallying everything she owned, in the event it needed sold for her legal defense. There wasn’t much. She’d sold her condo and was in hock up to her eyeballs, thanks to a gazillion dollars’ worth of medical bills. She rubbed her arms through the thin windbreaker. “Are you going to stop?”

He had his gun hand braced on the lower curve of the wheel as he drove. “No sirens or lights. I don’t think that’s Interpol or the local cops on our ass.” His tone was grim, and he cast another glance in the rearview mirror. His thigh flexed as he applied more pressure to the accelerator. The car shot forward as if jet-propelled. Someone honked loud and long as they passed. The trees alongside the road whizzed by at blistering speed in their headlights.