The Cure (18 page)

“If you mean the FBI, then I already know about it. You don’t have to fish around.”

The FBI? If her reasoning had been correct, she expected Fuller to have sent someone to visit the prison. But she wouldn’t have guessed this person would be able to impersonate the FBI.

“Great,” said Erin. “So, ah … what, exactly, do you know?” she said.

“The warden told me. The FBI is training someone to do what you do. So just to be sure he’s ready, they wanted him to conduct MRIs on the last five prisoners you saw the day you left. I brought them to him myself. Just this morning. He left about four hours ago.”

“Oh … good,” stammered Erin. “And did he have any problem doing the MRIs?”

“Not that I know of. I guess he’ll compare them with your results to make sure he’s doing it right, huh?”

“Exactly,” said Erin.

“You should feel proud, being the gold standard and all.”

“I do, thanks. I just wasn’t sure the FBI was going to tell you why they were there. I didn’t want you to think they were checking up on me.”

Alejandro laughed. “On you? I’d never think that.”

His absolute confidence in her integrity made Erin feel even more guilty about what she had done.

“Did you get a look at this guy’s credentials?” she asked. “I mean, was he really with the FBI? Or was he more of a consultant?”

“I don’t know. He didn’t show me any credentials. But he must have satisfied the warden. He was scheduled on very short notice.”

“Okay then. Well, thanks a lot, Alejandro. You have a great week.”

She returned the phone to her pocket and a sick feeling penetrated the deepest recesses of her gut. This call had really brought it home. Before, trying to elude shadowy, hypothesized surveillance seemed like nothing more than a challenging intellectual exercise. But it had suddenly become very real. Now the likelihood of the attack on Drake being a hoax was vanishingly small. Her logic had been correct. Fuller hadn’t made his final move until he had confirmed that the cure was real, that she wasn’t delusional. Whoever he had pressed into service as an FBI imposter knew his way around an MRI scanner enough to verify that the brains of the last few inmates she had seen suddenly read normal.

Kyle Hansen returned less than a minute later carrying a black canvas backpack, with a blue-and-red
A
stenciled on it proudly, his face flush from adrenaline. He took the chair he had occupied before and faced Erin. “Mission accomplished,” he said happily.

She congratulated him and then quickly filled him in on her conversation with the prison guard.

“Brilliant deducing,” he said. “This really cements it. You’ve connected the last dot from this Steve Fuller to us.” He paused. “And I think I found the guy watching us on this level.”

“How sure are you?”

“Not positive, but as confident as I can be. He’s one of the few people here who aren’t nineteen or fat old professors. Imagine a Navy SEAL trying hard not to look like a Navy SEAL.”

Erin paused in thought. “Did you drive here from Yuma?” she asked.

“No. I took a puddle jumper and then cabbed it from Tucson International.”

Erin thought about this. It didn’t matter, she realized, because even if he had driven, they would be watching his car.

“How much cash do you have?” she asked.

It took Hansen a second to adjust to this change of subject. “A few hundred, I think.”

“Well, sure,” she said playfully. “With all the shoplifting you do it’s no wonder you’re loaded.”

Hansen laughed.

“Two hundred is good,” she continued. “That’s plenty for cab fare. Or to bribe a student to become a cabbie for you.”

She quickly told him her plan. He tried to hide his anxiety, but he couldn’t quite do it.

“You sure you’re okay with this?” she asked.

Hansen nodded. “Look, Erin, too much is at stake for me not to be. I won’t let us down.”

Erin waited ten minutes until the precise time the classes currently in session around campus had ended and the students were released back into the wild. The next round of classes would begin soon. For a square mile around them, undergraduates, graduates, and faculty poured from buildings—as though these buildings were anthills kicked by a giant—and began swarming in every direction. Like a change of shift at a crowded factory, in just a few minutes throngs of young men and young women would be flooding in and out of the student union and the food court area.

Erin forced herself to wait three minutes and then said, “Let’s go.”

Without another word they rapidly approached the man Hansen had identified as the professional watching them. He had his nose in a textbook and barely gave them a glance as they approached, but Erin was confident Hansen had been right: this guy belonged in this particular food court about as much as a grade-schooler belonged rappelling down from a military helicopter. The man continued to ignore them until they both pulled up a chair on either side of him.

“We’re willing to come with you,” said Erin without preamble. “But I want your word that if we cooperate, we won’t be hurt.”

“I’m sorry, Miss, but I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“You’re really going to let this chance go by, just to avoid breaking cover?” said Erin disdainfully. “Really?”

The man stared intently at Erin for several seconds. “Okay,” he said. “It’s a deal. No one will touch you.”

With the last word of this confirmation that he was, indeed, the man they were seeking, Hansen pressed the Taser he had concealed in his hand—the one Erin had slipped to him before they had crossed the food court—against the man’s leg, and held it there until the man slid off the chair to the smooth floor, convulsing. Erin knew her martial arts reputation would have preceded her and that she’d be the focus of attention, so Hansen would have to wield the Taser.

She followed the man rapidly to the floor, hastily locating and removing his wallet and weapon, an H&K .45, and slipped them both into an open pocket in the black canvas backpack, just seconds after he completed his fall.

“Someone help!” shouted Erin, now playing the concerned citizen.

Dozens of pairs of eyes turned to witness her and Hansen kneeling by a muscular man lying on the floor. Hansen hit him with another long dose of electricity, using the backpack to shield the activity from onlookers, and the man convulsed yet again.

Dozens of onlookers gravitated toward the scene in a rough circle, like fish swimming to spilled food. “He’s having epileptic seizures!” shouted Erin. “Someone call nine-one-one.”

As phones began dialing, Kyle Hansen hit the man on the floor with several more jolts, once again under cover of the canvas pack.

“I’m gonna find a doctor,” announced Erin, lifting the backpack and quietly slipping away from the paralyzed man and into the crowd, with Hansen close behind. The second they were through the first wall of spectators, Erin handed Hansen a stolen shirt and hat from the backpack and they broke in opposite directions, slipping the shirts over their own clothing as they walked.

Erin slid her arms through the straps of the backpack, took a random exit far from where they had entered, and glommed onto a group of four girls who all sported backpacks of their own. She melted into the group as though she’d been part of it for years. “Do any of you know that guy in there?” she asked so they would continue walking and not question her presence in their midst.

“What guy?” said the girl closest to her.

“The guy having the seizures. Poor guy. None of you saw that?”

“No, we were just cutting through on the way to the dorm.”

Erin heard a faint siren off in the distance. “That must be the ambulance now,” she said for the benefit of her new walking companions.

Erin continued moving with the group and chatting about anything she could come up with, not once glancing around to see if she was being followed.

Ten minutes later she arrived at Apache, one of several nearby dorms, with the group of four freshmen. And none to soon. She suspected they had been very close to ignoring their manners and asking her to leave them alone.

As soon as they were through the doors she approached a different group of students at the far end of the lobby, telling them that she was late for an important meeting, and that if any of them had ready access to a car, she’d be willing to pay fifty bucks to anyone willing to drive her six miles—so she wouldn’t have to wait for a cab.

Within five minutes she was in the passenger seat of a car, on her way back to the Saguaro Inn. She checked the mirrors the entire drive but saw no sign of followers.

About halfway to the motel, she realized she was still carrying the dime-sized GPS tracking device she had planned to plant on Drake in her pocket. She shook her head, realizing that this plan had been made obsolete three realities ago, and tossed the tiny device out of the window.

As they pulled into the motel, Erin closed her eyes for just a few seconds, letting relief wash over her for the first time, and prayed that Kyle Hansen would have similar success and would be joining her shortly.

19

ERIN PALMER SAT
cross-legged on the bed, on top of a faded yellow-and-orange floral bedspread, while Kyle Hansen was parked on a small wooden chair that was in front of a cheap, laminated, particle-board desk.

“Well, no risk of anyone thinking of looking for us here,” said Hansen, making a show of looking around the room in mock horror. A slow smile came over his face. “Big risk of the entire motel being condemned or falling down around us.”

Erin couldn’t help but return his warm smile. He seemed more genuine than most people she had met, and charming in an unpolished way. Which was a good thing. After years of working with psychopaths, too much polish hit her the wrong way.

As she gazed into his eyes, a momentary image came into her mind of a naked Kyle Hansen holding her equally naked body in his arms and kissing her passionately, and she could almost feel the smoothness of his body against hers.

Where did that come from?
she thought.

Lisa Renner had been so right. Two years without sex—with little human contact of
any
kind—started to wear on the psyche. Which is why she had been intent on seducing her collaborator, Hugh Raborn, who turned out—maybe—to be an alien named Drake. It was a good thing she hadn’t met with him in San Diego, she decided, because even though she didn’t think of herself as overly choosy, she still insisted that the body parts of her sexual partners be 100 percent human. You just didn’t compromise on certain things.

Was she really so desperate, though, that she could switch gears from Drake to Kyle Hansen so quickly? In her heart, she knew the answer to this wasn’t desperation. In only a few hours she already found Kyle to be more appealing than any man she’d met in the past two or three years, including Drake. And working together to escape a dragnet and holing up together in a motel seemed to accelerate the bonding process, as did sharing any number of world-shattering, mind-blowing secrets.

Hansen had managed a clean escape from the student union in a similar fashion to her own, but his arrival at the motel had been thirty minutes behind hers. It was one of the longest thirty minutes of her life, and the suffocating, mind-numbing fear she had felt during this entire period was not due to what his capture or death would mean for her own prospects of survival, or any lofty cause, but was felt for him alone. This wait had exposed her emerging feelings more surely than a rational self-examination of her emotions ever would, as much as she refused to fully acknowledge it.

She wondered what he was thinking. Was he picturing
her
naked as well? She suspected that wasn’t an uncommon occurrence, even among men who didn’t know her. Only when she used makeup and disguise to purposely make herself look unappealing was she free from the male libido. Had she been more of a free spirit, had a psychopath never ripped her life away from the path it was on, she wondered what her life might be like. She wondered if she would enjoy the interest from men instead of wishing it would go away. She certainly wouldn’t be in the field she was in, doing the work she was doing. A veterinarian perhaps, working with the animals she loved rather than with human monsters she loathed. And she certainly wouldn’t be collaborating unlawfully with someone of uncertain … species.

“Any more messages from Drake?” she asked.

Hansen shook his head. “I ditched my phone. It was the one thing you forgot to tell me to do.”

“Oh. Right. Good thinking.” Erin raised her eyebrows. “Maybe you’ve read some thrillers, after all.”

“I’m not
that
lame,” protested Hansen. “Doesn’t everyone know that cell phones can be used to track people nowadays?”

“I guess so.”

“And Drake ditched his as well. And so did you. So it was an obvious thing to do.”

“So how are we going to connect with Drake?”

“We go to the designated location and he’ll contact
us
.”

Erin reflected on Drake’s text message. “So
SF
wasn’t San Francisco. But
CO
did mean Colorado, right?”

“Right. We need to get there. But let me explain more about that part of the message later. Right now, I’d love to finish our conversation.”

“Me too,” said Erin.

Hansen left the chair and slid down onto the worn beige carpet, sitting cross-legged with his back against the wall, facing Erin on the bed five feet away.

Erin decided the chair he had abandoned did look uncomfortable, although she was still sure the ones in Dean Borland’s office were more so, despite their far more welcoming appearance. The two of them both sitting cross-legged in a bedroom reminded her of slumber parties she had had as a little girl, only she doubted the air would soon be filled with delighted giggling, nor that the conversation would turn to who was the cutest boy in class.

“Where were we?” said Hansen, breaking Erin from her reverie.

“I believe we left off when I was saying that Drake had miscalculated. That his cure wasn’t the panacea he thought it would be.” Erin shook her head, almost imperceptibly. Had she really just used the word
panacea
? Maybe she had been in academia too long. “And you told me I didn’t have the full picture,” she continued. “
Yet again
.”