The Six: Complete Series (22 page)

It was best to just go before his pain turned back to anger. She opened the door without another word. Under the new hair and intricately applied makeup, she was nearly unrecognizable.

The weather had taken a turn on the drive. A thin layer of fog and mist had taken over the street and the whirls of an oncoming storm appeared on the horizon. With her head down, she walked to the lab.

Back in the room, Irene had explained that she was not to use her real name. They gave her a fake ID badge that would get her through each level of security. According to her badge she was “
Amelia Matthews”
, a research scientist from Boston.

The lobby of Kipling was the one artistic part in the building. It had been designed by a donor who wanted to hire his struggling architect grandson. The ceiling was vaulted with gorgeous wooden beams that made it look more like a church than a lobby. On all sides were floor to ceiling panes of glass that filtered in soft light to every corner. Sometimes, after she’d visit her clients, Marie would stay in the lobby and let the warmth wash over her as she read.

As she stepped through the door, it was like walking back through time. Kipling used to be a place of peace and reminiscing and now she was paranoid just stepping towards the front desk.

“I need to sign in,” she said in a voice lower than her regular one. The secretary was young, probably new. She didn’t even look up as she handed Marie the clipboard to sign her name. Amelia Matthews was nervously scribbled on the wrong line. As hard as she tried to project absolute confidence, Marie couldn’t keep her hand from shaking.

The girl took a cursory look at the signature and waved Marie through the first of many doors.

All around her were frenzied awkward scientists who laughed at their own jokes and thought on a higher plane than she’d ever be able to. She walked with her head held high and her shoulders pulled back. No one recognized her as she turned the corner to the elevators.

Bag tucked under her arm, she walked into the first open elevator. It was empty, perfect. As she reached out for the lab, 6th floor, a pair of scientist in long white coats came in in mid-conversation.

“...speaking at the conference. He is such a bore. I don’t envy those people, eh?” the older man of the pair said. She didn’t dare look up as she quickly pressed the button and retreated to the back of the elevator.

“Absolutely. I can’t stand him,” a droll voice added. The moment she heard him speak, she remembered the hundreds of hours she spent with him. Her client, one of her oldest and most loyal clients, stood mere feet away from her. He’d spent more time with her than he had with some of his children.

She brushed her extensions over the sliver of face that would be visible to him. All she could do was hope and pray he didn’t look her way.

The floors dinged by as the elevator shifted and groaned under its age.

As the floors went up, the fear she felt when she left the car had gone away. Her entire life had been filled with stress, from morning to night. But now, in the moment when it she had all the reason in the world to be scared, she felt calm. As she let her sexy new look breathe in the elevator, she began to get a high she hadn’t felt in a while. There was a strange thrill in being found out that excited her.

She was a good girl, notoriously so. High school and college had been filled with studying and internships. After college she attended an endless series of graduate programs and got married to the guy next door. She was sweet and understanding, to a fault. Doormat was the phrase she would use if she wasn’t in such denial.

When the elevator finally got to the 6th floor, Hari, his colleague and Marie walked out into the dimly lit hallway. She had never gone up this far. The 6th floor was where the secrets were held. Even as a beloved therapist, she still didn’t have the chance to peek inside. Today Amelia was going to stroll in, kick ass and take names.

She followed behind Hari who was clearly part of the project she was destined to dismantle. He was twenty feet in front of her and hadn’t so much as looked back to recognize her. It was comforting to know she could slip inside and stay in character.

He swiped his card and punched in a code. Being a few feet behind, she spied what he typed. 4-7-3. The door clicked and he pulled it open. As soon as it shut, she went up to the card reader and swiped Amelia’s ID. It went through no problem. Three digits and she was in.

The lab was not unlike the ones she’d spent long hours in for med school. As much as she loved the chemistry side of medicine, that was never her passion. The first time she read a psychology book got her hooked. Suddenly carbon chains and pipets were far less interesting than behavior and brain wiring.

Scientists were not a hard breed to break down. Of all the people in the world, the ones that slipped into science as a career tended to be logical to a fault. They were fascinating in their intellect but, at their core, they loved order.

Marie hung the coat at her side and let her black dress do the talking. In the stilettos she had a different gait, like a jaguar on the prowl. She slipped through the door and straight into the heart of the lab. There was the murmur of employees talking in the distance and the hum of machines in every corner. Once she had her hands on the chemicals, she could work on breaking them down. But, she needed to know where she should be stationed, and who needed to be worked on to make that happen.

In her outfit, she felt a young man was her best bet. Steering clear of Hari, who had gone a different direction, she walked straight into the first station that held the ambitious graduate students. The first person she ran into was the perfect prey. He was short, skinny and intensely focused on moving beakers from one side of the counter to the other. Clearly bored, he’d be able to get here in the right direction.

Marie flipped her hair so it draped down her chest. She sauntered over to the boy and placed a hand near his next beaker. She let her lean into him as she spoke.

“Hello,” she purred.

He looked around the lab in bemused confusion. It seemed like he was waiting for his buddies to pop out and tell him it was all some elaborate prank.

“Hello?” he said. “Can I help you?”

“I was hoping you could show me around.” She let her fingers drift across the counter in front of him. The man seemed frozen as he still clutched the vial in his hand, suspended awkwardly in the air.

“Oh, um, yeah I guess so.”

One of her favorite psychology phenomenon was the unblinding trust people had in someone who projected authority. If she showed up in a police uniform or as a fireman, the majority of people would do whatever she said, no questions asked. If she acted like she ran the joint, it would easy to get this done.

“What’s your name?” she asked.

He carefully put his vial back and tucked the stool back under the counter. “Oh, Eric, ma’am.”

“Eric, could you show me around? I’m from the lab in Boston. They sent me to check in.”

The vagueness kept him moving. “Boston? How exciting,” he said. Eric was a sweet boy, probably still in college, and had a thick Southern accent.

“Oh yes. You should work in our lab when you graduate,” she said. His cheeks began to turn red as he walked out of his little enclave and into the proper lab.

“Yeah,” he said, “that’d be cool.”

The lab wasn’t full since it was mid-afternoon on a Friday. The few people inside were hard at work and their focus was entirely on the experiments and chemicals in front of them.

“So,” he said, “this is Claire and Roger.” A petite blonde and her handsome friend briefly waved at the guest before they went back to looking in their microscopes.

The lab techs that Eric introduced her to were all polite for the least amount of time it was socially acceptable before going back to work. She could have tap danced across the floor and taken off her shirt and garnered no more than a cursory glance from an intern.

The tour moved at a breakneck speed. Before she knew it, they had made their way to the back, where the amenities were suddenly much nicer and the scientists were even less interested in being spoken to. “We’re almost there with Memisol. They told you about it, right?”

“The Alzheimer drug?”

He nodded.

“Yes, of course. That’s what I’m here for.”

“I’m not on it,” he said, “but they’re saying it’s almost there. Pretty exciting, huh?”

“Thrilling,” she said.

***

Benjamin had worked on the phone for almost an hour. Everything he tried was blocked. He tried every button except for 1 which was the speed dial for the doctors. Milo sat next to him the entire time and watched his every move.

The hope of escape slowly faded with each error message that popped up on the tiny screen. Twice he’d asked to borrow it and see if there was back method to dialing out but the old man wouldn’t let him touch it. “I used to be an engineer” he kept saying, like that meant anything.

He was tired of watching. All Benjamin did was press the same buttons over and over again and got sent back to the same black restart screen. Then he’d go right back and press “5” again. It was like watching a chimp download an app. Milo’s patience had worn thin. “Benjamin, please. Just let me try something.”

The black eye Milo had given him was beginning to take shape. He didn’t mean to hit the old guy but he was acting crazy. Something needed to calm him down.

“I think I’ve almost got it,” Benjamin said as the phone angrily buzzed once again.

“Just stop, alright?” Dennis said. He’d taken to sitting near Simon who still had his back turned and was silent. It seemed to calm Dennis down so no one told him to move.

Benjamin didn’t let his grip wain. “There has to be a way to hack this thing. If it can just get it...” he pressed another button and the phone puttered and shut off.

It was first time it had turned off completely since Benjamin had taken it. Since it was the only source of entertainment in the room, all eyes had been on its dimly glowing lights. And now, the glow was gone.

“What’d you do?” Milo asked.

Benjamin pressed the buttons wildly but there was nothing to be done. “I don’t know.”

It sat there, flaccid and dark in his hands as he tried to pry at the back. “It was just working...”

“You broke it,” Milo said.

Dennis grabbed his side. “What if my stitches break now?”

Benjamin kept tapping it but it stayed off. “I don’t understand.”

Milo had had enough. This old man had been an engineer in a time when they used hammers and chisels to whittle blocks of wood into tiny figurines. He probably could barely turn on his phone at home, much less hack into an encrypted device and do anything with it.

There were footsteps coming down the hall. Benjamin immediately set the device on the floor and hid it behind his back. “Is that them?”

After two weeks, Milo had become a connoisseur of the noises that emanated through the building. If it was a single pair of footsteps then it was just someone walking in the medical wing which they figured out was located right above them. If it was two, then the two old men that brought them food and water were coming. But if it was the clack of heels or the thud of boots the big guns were coming to punish someone.

The footsteps stopped for a moment.

“Is it?” Dennis asked.

“Shh!” hissed Milo as he waited in the silence for another step.

He prayed that the next sound would the light shuffle of the nurse. At this rate, Benjamin was probably never leaving and the next one in rotation was him. His body still hadn’t healed from the burns. There was no way he could go back out there again.

Out of the silence came the thud. And then the clack.

They were coming.

The three of them all knew what those sounds meant. It didn’t need to be said. Dennis hid next to Simon and Benjamin sat with his back hovered over the damaged phone. Milo still stood in the middle of the room. There was no use in hiding from them.

“Where’d you put the phone?” Milo asked.

Benjamin pointed behind his back. “They can’t see it.”

“You should take it out. We can just say it was beeping or something. If you hide it, it looks like you were screwing around with it,” Milo said.

Benjamin complied and set the phone a few feet in front of him in a no man’s land where it was no one’s responsibility anymore. It sat there with its blank face taunting Milo. He stood under the lightbulb to get the last bit of warmth the room had to offer before they tore him out.

The steps grew closer and closer. Milo stood, resigned and ready to go. Frank told him about the second job. He said that it was never as bad as the first. Usually it was something gentle, like robbing a store or stealing a car. It was more a test of courage then immorality. He could steal a car all day. If they made him do what he had to do again, he wasn’t sure he had it in him.

The door opened up and the blonde woman stomped inside. She wasn’t her usual fake charming self. Her dress was tight, her boots went up to her knee and she had her hair in a high ponytail pulled within an inch of its life.

She stuck out her hand like she was expecting chewed gum from a naughty child. “Phone.”

They were here about the phone. Milo let out the breath he’d been keeping in.

Benjamin pointed towards the dysfunctional device in front of him. “There you go.”

She didn’t go to pick it up. Instead, she turned to Dennis who laid against the wall, still in pain. “What did I say about the phone?”

“Don’t call out,” he said.

“Obviously,” she responded. “What else did I say? Do you remember?”

One of the guards burst forward. “Or did getting shot knock a few brain cells out of that dumb head of yours?”

“Hey!” Dennis protested.

“You all heard me, did you not? None of you were supposed to touch that phone. It was for an emergency. I don’t want one of you dying on my watch, if I can help it. It was not a science experiment,” she said.

Simon lifted up his hood for the first time in hours. Through sleepy eyes, he spoke. “We didn’t touch it.”