Arch Enemy (16 page)

F
aced with the screen that was now addressing her, the reality hit Frieze. This was a trap, a trap like the one that killed Dominic Watson. She felt like the elevator walls were closing in around her.

“What the—” said Conley.

She looked around. She had to think fast. She tried the emergency button.

The reader changed from
9
to
10
.

“How many floors on this building?” she said frantically as she pulled out the receiver on the elevator emergency phone. It was dead.

“The buttons,” said Conley. “
19
.”

Then the screen read:

 

Y
OU
T
WO
H
AVE
B
EEN
V
ERY
I
NQUISITIVE
.

 

She shut the text out of her mind and focused.

“What do we know about what happened to Watson?” she asked, and then, answering her own question: “The elevator went all the way to the top floor and the motor kept going until the cables snapped with the force.”

 

N
OW
T
HE
G
AME
I
S
O
VER
.

 

Adrenaline pumped into her veins. Her body buzzed with energy. Time slowed down.

She looked at the elevator doors. No. No way to get the door open, no way to get out even if they could.

The reader said
13
, then
14
, as the elevator continued to rise.

“Shepard,” Conley was saying. “Shepard, come in, Goddamn it!”

There was no time to call anyone. Frieze looked up at the ceiling. Six panels, each with its own light fixture. And above that—every elevator had a service hatch.

“Conley. Help me out here.”

He gave her a boost and she put one foot on the railing below the mirror. She laid her hand on the crossbeam for the panels, testing its strength. It would hold.

 

T
HIS
I
S
T
HE
E
ND
F
OR
Y
OU
.

 

She then pushed up the panel on the right back corner. It wasn't screwed on and opened easily to reveal a mass of wires and smooth metal above. Wrong side.

She looked at the reader. It read
17
.

She climbed down and motioned for Conley to help her up on the other back corner. He pulled her up again and she pushed up the panel to find exactly what she was looking for.

There was the service hatch. She reached for it, but the handle was beyond her reach by inches.

“Push me up farther!” she said.

With a grunt, Conley lifted her another foot. She grabbed the handle and released the lock on the hatch. She pushed it open, then held onto the sides as she strained her biceps to pull herself up with Conley's help until she was sitting on top of the elevator.

The whirring of the motor echoed, closer and closer. She looked up and saw a fast-approaching girder. On instinct, she lay supine, flat against the elevator.

The car crashed into the side beams, a din of metal against metal. Frieze was in the gap above the car, her nose inches from the crossbeam that held the motor. It was roaring, straining the cables. Metal groaned as it bent, practically in her ear.

“Conley!” she yelled out. “Come on!”

She didn't have to tell him. He was already lifting himself onto the railing in the elevator car.

The first cable snapped, swinging back against the metal roof of the elevator like a whip.

She moved over in the cramped space under the girder to give Conley room to come out.

Then the second cable snapped. This time its edge sliced into her left arm.

“Augh!”

She didn't even look at the wound. No time for that now.

“This is not going to hold!” she yelled over the motor. “Grab onto something!”

Conley held onto a supporting beam. She reached out for another, but her arms weren't long enough. She inched her body along the surface as the elevator jerked. She smelled the burning of the engine.

The last cable gave out.

As the elevator let loose, Frieze reached out and grabbed the crossbeam. The car plummeted, leaving her legs loose and kicking in air, a sudden weight on her arms.

A roaring wind filled the tunnel in the wake of the plunging box. There was a crash, and Frieze flashed on the image of her body down there, crushed by twisted metal.

She turned to look for Conley and was relieved to find him hanging beside her.

“How you doing there?” she asked, breathless.

“I'd rather be somewhere else.”

They clambered along the central I-beam. Frieze, being closer, reached for the service ladder, and once she had a firm hold, activated the door-opening mechanism. It slid open to reveal a carpeted office on the nineteenth floor.

Frieze eased off the ladder onto the floor and Conley followed close behind. She checked the gash on her arm. It was deep, but she'd survive.

Then she turned her attention to the office into which they had emerged.

The scene had frozen at the moment they had stepped out. Every single person was staring at them. A secretary, phone in hand, mid-dial, a man with a coffee mug half-raised for a sip. All eyes were on them.

“I suggest we get out of here,” Conley whispered to her.

“Okay,” she said. “On one condition.”

“What's that?”

“Let's take the stairs.”

“P
roblems,” was the first word out of Lincoln Shepard's mouth.

Lily swore to herself that she'd make him regret it. “What is it this time?”

The heat was still suffocating, even in her black tank top. Shepard was reclining deep in his chair, resting his red All Stars on the War Room table. Lily wondered that Bloch never gave him an earful about treating Zeta headquarters like his bloody living room.

“This guy is more paranoid than we thought,” he said. “Our device has been disabled. Given the patterns of its final transmission—the data went all screwy—I'd say he ran his clothes through an electromagnetic field generator. Fries any electronics stuck in there.”

She sat across from him, legs crossed. “Do you think he knows?”

“My guess is he does this every day. A preventive measure to fry any bugs that might have been put there. Paranoid bugger.”

“This is going to make things hard.”

“Which is why I have something new for you.” He swung his feet off the table and laid out two pieces of equipment he pulled from his pocket. It was a matching set in black plastic—one about the size of a pack of cards, and the other one tiny, squarish, about the size of a dime and with a protuberance that connected to the data slot on a cell phone.

“You still have to get your hands on the phone,” he said. “But you don't have to have it for as long. Thirty seconds is all it takes. And all you have to do is attach the tiny bit to the data jack. Just the transmitter. The real work is done by this little baby here.” He patted the card-sized device. “They connect wirelessly. Instead of a full data dump, which is what we were going for before, it'll install a little bug that'll reroute the phone's backup to us.”

She palmed the devices and examined them.

“Think you can do that?”

“I'll manage.”

She called him from her Porsche as she drove out into the evening traffic.

S
imon and Alex were sitting up against opposite sides of his bed in his room, with pillows against the hard frame, legs overlapping in the middle. They were immersed in their online search. Alex had at least ten tabs open on her browser.

“Here he is,” said Simon. “Adam Groener. Assistant football coach at the university. There's not much about him online, but he's been at the university for a long time, it seems. I found an article from when he was hired . . . twelve years ago.”

“I'm looking for the guy from last night,” Alex said.

“I didn't get a good look at him,” said Simon.

“Well, I did,” said Alex. “I'm not always the best with faces, but I've been learning to force myself to pay attention to the particular features. He had a square face, with a forward-jutting chin and deep-set eyes. His cheekbones were wide and just a bit salient. His brow ridge was pretty heavy, which makes him look just a little like a Neanderthal, but his eyebrows are not particularly thick. Light brown hair, hazel eyes.”

“That,” said Simon, “is pretty specific for someone who's not the best with faces.”

“Thanks,” she said with a smirk. “I try.” She scrolled through photographs from the football team website and found a group photo. She then scrutinized each of the faces until she found what she was looking for. “Look,” she said. “This is him, there near the middle.” She swiveled her computer on her lap and showed him the photograph.

“Are you kidding me?” said Simon. “You don't mean Matt Klingensmith, do you?”

“Who?”

“Star cornerback on the team.” He typed something on his computer. “Everyone thinks he's a shoo-in for the NFL when he graduates.” He turned the screen for her to see a feature article about him entitled
Springhaven's Football Wunderkind
. “Alex, this guy is a big deal on the team. I mean, if even
I've
heard of him . . .”

Alex navigated to his Facebook profile and searched through the latest postings. “He's not shy about drinking,” she said. “Kind of a party animal, actually. The kind of guy that could get out of control. Doing something like that could be a real black eye for the team. Simon, are you thinking what I'm thinking?”

“The assistant coach is covering up his players' bad behavior.”

“This is it,” she said. “I think we have our case.”

“Are you kidding? Alex, this isn't a game. It's criminal behavior. Like, felony-level. You need to go to an authority with this.”

“Oh yeah? Why haven't they done anything yet? Plus, they won't believe me anyway. I have no evidence except what I saw.”

“Katie—”

“Won't talk,” Alex interrupted. “She's been avoiding me ever since I went to see her at the health center. Plus, nothing actually happened to her. And even if they do a tox screen and find whatever he gave her, how do we draw that connection?”

He pressed his lips together and ran his hand through his shaggy hair. “But it would show that a crime has been committed. It would put the right people on alert.”

“Honestly, Simon, I don't trust the university to do the right thing in this case. Not for a second. I mean, at least one official is complicit in covering it up. Who's to say there aren't others?”

“If that's true,” said Simon, exasperated, “what do you think
you
can do about it?”

“Find our evidence and then make this very,
very
public.”

Simon shut his computer. “Alex, I think this is going too far.”

“
Too far
? Simon, what did you think this was all about? Homework? A hobby? It's about getting up and
doing
something.”

“There's a difference between doing something and getting ourselves expelled, or worse. And then there's Katie. There's a reason she didn't want to talk. We're just going to make it worse for her.”

“We'll keep her out of it.”

“Whatever we do, she's going to be a part of it. If you go poking around this particular thicket, they're going to think she blabbed, even if she didn't.”

“Well, what about the next girl? It could have been me. It could still be, if we don't do anything about it.”

“Don't try to manipulate me,” he said. “You're not that good at it. Yet.”

She put her hand on his arm. “Simon. This is important to me. It could be the most important thing I've done in my entire life.”

Simon screwed up his face. “Fine. I know it'll bite me in the ass, but I'll help.”

C
onley drove his black Camaro Coupe south on I-93 while Frieze examined the wound on her arm. The elevator cable had torn her shirt to shreds. She had at least two deep cuts, but it was hard to assess the extent of the injury.

This wasn't her first time seeing her own blood, or even the first time sustaining damage like this. Still, it made her woozy. The pain fueled a conflagration of rage inside her.

“I'm going to nail the Hornig people.”

“It wasn't them,” said Conley. He wasn't looking at her, which meant he was ashamed. He was hiding something.

“What?”

“Trust me. Whatever she's hiding, it's not this. Hornig had nothing to do with what happened to Watson or to us. Not directly, anyway.”

The bastard. What did he know that he wasn't telling her? “Then who did?”

“It's complicated.” His handsome face was blank. As usual, she couldn't get anything past that wall.

“Whatever.” She wasn't in the mood. There would be a reckoning. Later. Now, she was bleeding. “Do you have anything I could use to—?”

“First aid kit in the glove compartment. How's the cut?”

One thing about that man: he paid attention when it mattered. “I'll survive,” she said, opening a packet of gauze.

“That was some quick thinking back there.”

“Yeah.” She wasn't eager to relive it. Instead, she focused on cutting what still held together of the sleeve of her shirt.

“Seriously,” he said. “I probably wouldn't be alive if it weren't for you.”

She poured rubbing alcohol over the wound, winced, inhaling through her teeth as she cleaned away the drying blood with gauze, exposing her quivering flesh. Fresh blood welled up from the cut. “Don't mention it.” Then she added: “Really, don't.”

She opened another packet of gauze and held it against the gash as she rolled the bandages around it as tight as she could.

Conley pulled off the highway somewhere near Quincy.

“Where are we going?”

“We have a safe house set up for this kind of situation,” he said. “More than one, actually.”

They were driving into a middle-class residential neighborhood, all ranch-style houses and minivans. Not the first place you'd look for a clandestine intelligence operation's safe house.

“What? I need to go into the office and file a report. I don't have a moment to—”

“We can't afford to be visible right now. You especially, since it seems they know you by name. If you go where you're expected, they're going to try again until they succeed. The only thing that saved us this time is that we knew how Watson died. Do you think they're going to make the same mistake next time?”

“I'm in the FBI,” she said. “I don't run from a cheap threat like—”

“The organization behind the attempt on our lives is far more dangerous than the FBI. No offense, but the Bureau won't save you.”

He turned into a single-story house that stood out for being built out of bricks—better, she supposed, at resisting gunfire. He pulled the Camaro into the garage and punched in a code on a keypad at the door, which unlocked with a beep.

Conley held the door open for her.

On the inside, the house was furnished just as a rented house might be. Cheap pine furniture, upholstered with rough chenille. Walls whitewashed and bare. Old brown carpeting. Impersonal and depressing.

Frieze was sticky with blood, smelling of iron. First order was to wash her hands. The pipes hadn't been used in a while, and it took a few seconds after she opened the faucet before the water in the bathroom sink sputtered out, and yet a few more for the brown rust to turn clear. She washed her hands and arm and examined her face in the mirror. Somehow she had gotten blood on her face and neck, too.

After washing up as best she could, Frieze emerged from the bathroom. She felt light-headed, as if, having done everything there was to do at the moment, her mind found its opportunity to check out.

She collapsed onto the scratchy couch.

A strange euphoria crept up on her. When faced with death, it had a way of coming into sharp focus. She was alive. It was beautiful. It was a miracle. Colors grew more vivid and her whole body tingled with sensation. Even the sting of the gash on her arm felt glorious.

And the world itself seemed transformed. Usually, being alive was usually just a background fact, like sunlight, and everything around her receded into the background, all but whatever was relevant to her current objective. But now, she was noticing
everything
. The colors and the texture of the faded furniture, the cracks on the walls and spiderwebs in the corners, the way the sunlight that peeked into the room and projected onto the wall flickered as the wind outside moved the branch of a tree.

She was filled with the beauty and exhilaration of it. She was high on
being
.

Peter Conley came out of the bedroom, where he had been washing up in the second bathroom.

“You're going to need stitches on that paper cut.”

Frieze couldn't take her eyes off him.

“What?” he asked. “Do I have something on my face?”

Without breaking her gaze, Lisa Frieze got up and kissed him, running her hands through his hair. Startled, he settled into the kiss, putting his arm around her waist.

She was breathless when she broke away from him.

“Lisa, I—”

“Shut up.” She pressed her lips to his. This time he leaned into it, pulling her in close.

She tugged at his shirt, breaking the buttons, fumbling in her haste to open the last ones without breaking from their kiss. He reached behind her and undid her bra through her shirt with a swift practiced motion.

She ran her lips over his neck, kissing him, tasting his skin salty with sweat. She pulled his shirt down off his shoulders, revealing his lean and sinewy upper body, scarred by past violence, and the tattoo of the cougar on his arm, curled and ready to pounce.

She gasped as he kissed her ear, grabbing at the skin on his back and feeling the movement of his powerful muscles.

Every touch, every scent, all her senses were magnified by their near death. With Peter Conley, she lost herself in a whirlwind of sensation, in a state of grace of being alive.