Chapter 25

CHAPTER 25

“Because there’s no reason for you to go,” Kevin objected.

Kevin stood in front of the elevator doors, blocking the call button, arms crossed over his chest.

“Why not?” Daniel demanded.

“You’re not going to be a part of the offensive, Danny, so you don’t need to be a part of the preparation.”

Daniel’s lips mashed together into a scowl.

“It doesn’t hurt anything for him —” Alex began mildly.

“Except someone could see his face,” Kevin growled.

“You mean your face?” she countered.

“I’m smart enough to keep my head down.”

Daniel rolled his eyes. “I’ll ride in the trunk if you want.”

Kevin evaluated the two of them for a long second. “Are you going to let me focus?”

“What do you mean?” Alex asked.

Kevin closed his eyes; he seemed to be calming himself. He inhaled through his nose, then looked at Daniel.

“Here are my requirements for you to join us on this very boring, standard recon exercise: No one will speak of what happened this morning. I will not be forced to remember the nauseating things I witnessed. There will be no discussion that might allude to said nauseating things. This is business, and you will conduct yourself appropriately. Agreed?”

Daniel’s neck started to flush. She was sure he was going to mention the fact that if Kevin hadn’t broken in to a locked room in the middle of the night, he wouldn’t have seen anything. Before Daniel could object, Alex said, “Agreed. Appropriate businesslike behavior.”

Kevin glanced back and forth between them, measuring again. After a second, he turned and hit the call button.

Daniel gave her a Really? look. Alex shrugged.

“None of that!” Kevin commanded, though he still had his back to them.

“What?” Daniel complained.

“I can feel you two silently communicating. Stop it.”

It was a quiet drive in the average-looking black sedan. She didn’t know if it was Val’s car or something Kevin had acquired. It didn’t seem like Val’s style, but maybe she liked to be incognito sometimes. Alex appreciated the heavily tinted windows. She felt less exposed as she sat with her ball cap pulled low over her face and stared out at the still mostly sleeping city. They were early enough to beat the morning rush.

Kevin drove through a seedier section of town – more the kind of neighborhood she would have expected his hiding place to exist in. He pulled in at a storage facility that seemed to be mostly enormous cargo containers. There was no guard posted, just a keypad and a heavy metal gate with razor-wire coils on top. Kevin drove them to a spot near the back of the fenced lot and parked behind a dingy orange container.

The lot appeared to be empty, but Alex kept her face down and her walk unfeminine as they moved to the wide double doors that made up the front wall of the container. Kevin plugged a complicated sequence of numbers into the heavy-duty rectangular lock, then pulled it out of the way. He opened one door just a few feet and waved them inside.

It was black when Kevin pulled the door shut behind himself. Then there was a low click, and rope lights lining the ceiling and the floor glowed to life.

“Exactly how many Batcaves do you have?” Alex demanded.

“Just a few, here and there, where I might need them,” Kevin said. “This one’s mobile, so that helps.”

The inside of Kevin’s cargo container was tightly packed but compulsively organized. Like the barn in Texas, there was a place for everything.

Racks of clothing – costumes, really – were wedged against the wall by the double doors. She was sure that was on purpose – if someone got a glimpse inside while the doors were open, all he would see was clothes. A casual observer wouldn’t think anything of it. A more careful observer might think it was odd that uniforms for every branch of the military were hanging together, along with mechanic’s coveralls and several utility companies’ official garb, not to mention the raggedy components of a homeless man’s outfit hanging a few feet down from a row of dark suits that ranged from off-the-rack to high-end designer. A person could blend into a lot of situations with these clothes.

The props were in bins over the clothes racks – briefcases and clipboards, toolboxes and suitcases. The shoes were in clear plastic boxes underneath.

Beyond the costumes, deep floor-to-ceiling metal cabinets were installed. Kevin guided her through each; she took note of the things she might need. As in the barn, there was a space for guns, for ammo, for armor, for explosives, for knives. There were other things that hadn’t been in Texas, or if they were, they’d been better hidden than the rest. He had a cabinet full of various tech items – tiny cameras and bugs, tracking devices, night-vision goggles, binoculars and scopes, electromagnetic-pulse generators of various sizes, a few laptop computers, and dozens of gadgets she didn’t recognize. He identified the code breakers, the frequency readers, the frequency jammers, the system hackers, the mini-drones… She lost track after a while. It was unlikely that she would want to use anything she wasn’t familiar with.

The next cabinet was chemical compounds.

“Yes,” she hissed, digging past the front row to see what was behind. “This I can use.”

“Thought you’d appreciate that.”

“Do you mind?” she asked, holding up a sealed cylinder of a catalytic she knew she was almost out of.

“Take whatever you want. I don’t think I’ve ever used any of that stuff.”

She crouched down to the lower shelf and loaded several more jars and packages into her backpack. Ah, this one she needed. “Then why do you have it?”

Kevin shrugged. “I had access. Never look a gift horse —”

“Ha!” She stared up at him triumphantly.

“What?”

“You told me that was a stupid saying.”

Kevin raised his eyes to the ceiling. “Sometimes it’s really hard not to kick you.”

“I know precisely how you feel.”

Daniel moved to stand between her and Kevin. She shook her head at him. It was just banter. With the brief lecture on appropriate behavior out of the way, Kevin had shifted back to his normal self – something in between a serial killer and the world’s most obnoxious big brother. Alex was getting used to it; she didn’t mind him as much anymore.

Grumbling about silent communication, Kevin stalked back to the ammo cabinet and started filling a large black bag with reserves.

“First aid?” she asked.

“In the knife locker, top shelf.”

There were several zippered black bags over the knives, some of them about the size of a backpack, others smaller, like shaving kits. She couldn’t reach any of them, so Daniel pulled them down and she combed through them on the floor.

The first smaller bag she opened had no medical supplies – instead, there were little packets of documents neatly rubber-banded together for easy sorting. She quickly pulled out a Canadian passport and glanced at the ID page. As she’d expected, there was a photo of Kevin with a different name – Terry Williams. She glanced up. Kevin had his back to her. She grabbed two of the packets and stuffed them into the bottom of her backpack, then zipped the bag closed.

These particular items wouldn’t be of any help to her, but she had to be prepared for other outcomes. She peeked at Daniel; he wasn’t paying attention to her, either. He was looking at the array of knives with a disbelieving expression. It made her wonder how long he could survive on his own with what he’d learned so far.

Alex pulled open one of the bigger bags but wasn’t thrilled with what she found inside. It was a fairly basic kit, with nothing that she didn’t already have. She checked the next bag, then the last. Nothing that wasn’t in the first.

“What’s missing?” Kevin asked.

She jumped slightly; she hadn’t heard him approach. He must have read her disappointed expression.

“I’d like access to some decent trauma supplies, just in case…”

“Okay. Grab up whatever else you want here, and then we’ll go get some.”

“Just that easy?” she asked skeptically.

“Sure.”

She raised one eyebrow. “We’re going to walk into a medical facility and ask to purchase some surplus?”

“No!” He made a face implying the stupidity of her suggestion. “Haven’t you ever heard the phrase It fell off a truck? You got some of that knockout stuff on you now?”

“Yes.”

“Then hurry, so we can get out there before all the trucks have finished their deliveries.”

Alex’s backpack was now stocked with ammo for her various appropriated guns – the SIG Sauer, the Glock she hadn’t abandoned, the shotgun, Daniel’s rifle – and her own PPK. She’d taken two extra handguns from the stash, because you never knew, and ammo for those as well. From the tech case she’d grabbed two sets of goggles, some trackers, and two EMP generators of different sizes. She wasn’t sure what she would use any of them for, but she might not have time to get back here if there was an emergency. While she shopped through his gear, Kevin reset the lock so that the usual birth-date code would let her back in.

Or Daniel, if things really went south.

“So, what are my options for chemically incapacitating another human being?” Kevin asked when they were back on the road. Alex drove this time.

“Let’s see… do you want airborne or contact?”

Kevin gave her a sidelong look. “Which do you recommend?”

“Depends on your approach. Will the target be in an enclosed space?”

“How would I know? I’ll be improvising.”

She huffed out a breath. “Fine. Take both. Daniel, can you grab the perfume bottle in the outside pocket of my backpack? It’s in a Ziploc bag.”

“Found it,” Daniel said after a minute. “Here.” He passed it up to Kevin. Kevin turned it over in his hands.

“Looks empty.”

“Mm-hm,” Alex agreed. “Pressurized gas. Now,” she said, stretching her left arm across her body and holding her hand toward him. “Take the silver one.”

He pulled the ring off her third finger, and then his eyebrows mashed down in surprise when the tiny clear tube and attached rubber squeeze pouch came out one after the other, like a couple of handkerchiefs from the sleeve of a mediocre magician. His expression turned skeptical.

“What’s this supposed to do?”

“See the little hatch on the inside? Swing it open. Be careful.”

Kevin examined the tiny hollow barb, then looked at the little round rubber bag. It was quiet enough to hear the faint sound of liquid sloshing inside.

“Hold the pouch in your palm,” she directed, pantomiming as she explained. “Put your hand down hard on your target.” She gestured to Daniel, who obligingly held out his arm. She grabbed his wrist – not violently, just forcefully. “The subject will feel the prick and try to pull away automatically. Hold on. If you’re doing it right, the liquid in the pouch will be expelled through the barb.” She released Daniel when she finished.

“And then what happens?” Kevin asked.

“Your target takes a nap – for an hour, maybe two, depending on his or her size.”

“This thing is tiny,” he complained, holding the ring between his thumb and forefinger and staring through the hole.

“Sorry. I’ll try to have bigger hands for you next time. Put it on your pinkie.”

“Who wears a pinkie ring?”

She smiled. “I think it will suit perfectly.”

Daniel chuckled.

Kevin shoved the ring onto his littlest finger, but it made it only over his first knuckle. The pouch barely reached his palm. He’d need more tubing if he ever wanted to hide it in his sleeve. He frowned at the apparatus for a moment, then suddenly grinned. “Neat.”

Daniel leaned forward and gestured to the rings Alex still wore. “What do those other two do?”

She lifted her right hand, wiggling her ring finger with the gold band. “Kills you easy.” She held up the middle finger of her left hand with the rose-gold band. “Kills you hard.”

“Oh, hey!” Kevin said in sudden realization. “Is that what that girlie slap back in West Virginia was about?”

“Yes.”

“Damn. You’re one dangerous little spider, Ollie.”

She nodded in agreement. “If I were taller or you were shorter, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

“Well, I guess that was your lucky day.”

She rolled her eyes.

“Which one did you try to hit me with?”

She held up the middle finger on her left hand again.

“Harsh,” Kevin commented. “Why don’t those rings have all the extra stuff?” He waved his hand so that the tube and pouch swung beneath his hand.

“Be careful,” she warned. “That could detach.”

Kevin caught the little bag and cradled it in his palm. “Right.”

“My other rings are coated with venom. A little goes a long way. Just one drop of cone snail venom is enough to kill twenty men your size.”

“Let me guess, you keep cone snails and black widow spiders as pets back home?”

“No time for pets, and really, black widow venom is on the very weak end of the damage scale. No, I used to have access to a lot of things. I studied cone snail venom briefly because of the way it targets particular classes of receptors. I was never one to waste an opportunity. I kept what I could and I’m careful with my supplies now.”

Kevin looked down at the ring he wore again, considering. It kept him quiet, which Alex appreciated.

She chose Howard University Hospital, because it was a level-one trauma center and she knew her way around the facility – unless a lot had changed in the past ten years.

She did a slow loop around the buildings, scanning for camera placement and police presence. It was not even seven a.m., but there were plenty of people coming and going.

“How about that one?” Kevin asked, pointing.

“No, that will mostly be linens and paper goods,” she muttered.

“Take a break before you do another lap; we don’t want to be noticed.”

“I know how this works,” she lied.

She drove a few streets west and stopped at a small green space. A handful of joggers were doing their rounds, but it was otherwise fairly empty. They waited in silence for ten minutes, then she pulled out and drove a wider circle, staying two blocks out from the roads around the hospital. Eventually she spotted something promising – a white truck labeled HALBERT & SOWERBYSUPPLIERS. She was familiar with the company and was pretty sure they would have usable goods on board.

She tailed the truck into a loading area behind the main building of the hospital. Kevin was ready, fingers already wrapped around the door handle.

“Just drop me behind them, then wait a block up,” he told her.

Nodding, she slowed to a brief pause just behind the truck, too close for Kevin to be seen in the mirrors. Once he was out, she reversed a couple of feet and then drove away at the exact posted speed. She glanced into the truck from under her hat as she passed; there was only a driver, no passengers. Still, there were plenty of people in scrubs and maintenance uniforms on the sidewalk. She hoped Kevin could be unobtrusive about this.

She braked at the stop sign on the corner, wondering how she was supposed to wait here when there was no parking. Before she could decide, she saw the white truck coming up behind her, one car back. She drove ahead slowly, goading the car between them to pass, then letting Kevin pass, too. She could see the driver – a very young-looking black man – leaning against the passenger-side window with his eyes closed.

“Well, there aren’t any cops following him… yet,” she muttered as she began following.

“Will it hurt the guy?” Daniel asked. “What Kevin stuck him with?”

“Not really. He’ll have an awful hangover when he wakes up, but nothing permanent.”

Kevin drove for about twenty minutes, first putting some distance between them and the hospital, then seeking the right place for the transfer of goods. He decided on a quiet industrial park, pulling to the back where there were several empty loading spaces near closed, roll-down access doors. He backed into one and she parked next to him, on the lee side, where she would be invisible to anyone entering the lot.

She yanked on a pair of latex gloves, handed another to Daniel, and shoved a pair into her pocket.

Kevin already had the back door of the truck open. She handed him the extra gloves, then boosted herself up onto the floor of the cargo hold. Everything inside was secured in opaque white plastic bins, stacked high and anchored to the walls with red nylon cords.

“Help me get these open,” she instructed. Kevin started pulling the bins down and removing the lids. Daniel climbed in and followed his lead. Alex went behind them, sorting through her options.

Her main worry was being shot. It seemed the most likely fallout from an offensive action. Of course, she couldn’t rule out being knifed or beaten with a blunt object. Still, she was very happy when she found a bin with blowout kits; each had tourniquets, gauze impregnated with QuikClot, and a variety of chest seals. She started a pile, adding different kinds of closure strips and gauze packs, dressings and compression bandages, chemical heating and cooling packs, resuscitation kits, a few bag-valve masks, alcohol and iodine wipes, splints and collars, burn dressings, IV catheters and tubing, saline bags, and handfuls of sealed syringes.

“You planning to start your own field hospital?” Kevin asked.

“You never know what you might need,” she countered, then added in her mind, You might be the one who needs this stuff, idiot.

“Here,” Daniel offered, turning one of the half-depleted bins upside down and dumping what was left into another. He took the now-empty bin and started organizing her pile inside.

“Thanks. I think I’ve got everything I want.”

Kevin secured the bins to the wall, then wiped down the door. She followed him again until he found a place to leave the truck and driver, behind a small strip mall. He quickly cleaned his fingerprints from the cab, and they were on their way.

When they got back to the apartment, Raoul the housekeeper had been and gone, and Val was lying across a low sofa watching a big-screen TV that Alex could have sworn was not there yesterday. It was playing a black-and-white movie.

Today Val wore a pale blue jumpsuit with short shorts and a plunging neckline. Einstein lay on the sofa beside her with his muzzle on her arm. She was petting him rhythmically, and he didn’t get up to greet them as they came through the door. He only pounded his tail against the sofa when he saw Kevin.

“So, how did all the spying go?” she asked lazily.

“Just boring groundwork,” Kevin said.

“Ugh, then don’t tell me about it. And don’t leave any of that new stuff in here, either. I don’t want the clutter.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Kevin agreed docilely, and he headed back to Alex and Daniel’s room to add to the storage pile.

“I’ll get you hooked up on my computer, Ollie,” he said as he stacked. “You can watch the playback from the cameras I’ve got on Carston. And you can listen – there’s a bug in the car and a directional mike on the office. The car has a tracker, too, so you can follow his movements for the past several days.”

Alex exhaled, already exhausted by the mound of intel to assess. “Thanks.”

“I’m starved,” Daniel said. “Anyone else for breakfast?”

“Yes, please,” Alex said at the same time that Kevin answered, “Hell, yeah.”

Daniel smiled and turned for the door.

Alex watched him walk away, then realized that Kevin was watching her watch Daniel.

“What?”

Kevin pursed his lips, as if he were looking for the right way to express himself. He automatically glanced at the bed – still rumpled; Raoul had not been allowed in here – and shuddered.

Alex turned her back on him and went to retrieve her own computer. She’d want to move the important files onto it.

“Ollie…”

She didn’t look up from what she was doing. “What?”

“Can I…”

She held her computer to her chest and turned to face him, waiting for him to finish. Unconsciously, she squared her shoulders.

He hesitated again, then asked, “Can I ask you some questions without getting any specific or graphic answers?”

“Like what?”

“This thing with Danny… I don’t want him to get hurt.”

“That’s not a question.”

He glared, then took a deep breath, forcing himself to relax. “When we finish up here, where do you go?”

It was her turn to hesitate. “It… well, it kind of feels like a jinx to assume that I’m going to survive. I honestly haven’t thought about what’s next.”

“C’mon, this isn’t that hard,” he said disparagingly.

“It’s not what I do. You handle it your way, I’ll handle it mine.”

“You want me to take care of Carston, too?”

“No,” she growled, though if his tone hadn’t been so condescending, she would have been tempted. “I’ll take care of my own problems.”

He paused, then asked, “So… what? Do you think you’re just going to tag along with us after?”

“That wouldn’t be my first choice, no. Going with the theory that I’m still alive then, of course.”

“You’re a real pessimist.”

“It’s part of the way I plan. Expect the worst.”

“Whatever. Back to my point – if you go your own way, what about Danny? Is it just Good-bye, thanks for the laughs?”

She looked away, toward the door. “I don’t know. That depends on what he wants. I can’t speak for him.”

Kevin was silent long enough that she finally had to look back. His face was uncharacteristically vulnerable. Like always, when his features were allowed to relax, he looked a lot more like Daniel.

“You think he’d choose to follow you?” Kevin asked very quietly. “I mean, he just met you. He barely knows you. But… I guess he probably feels like he barely knows me, too, at this point.”

“I don’t know what he’ll want,” she said. “I would never ask him to make that choice.”

Kevin focused on the air a few inches above her head. “I really wanted the chance to make things up to him. To set him up in a life he could live with. I was hoping, after a while, we could be brothers again.”

She had an odd urge to walk across the space between them and put her hand on his shoulder. Probably just because he was still looking like Daniel.

“I won’t get in the way of that,” she promised. She meant it. Whatever was best for Daniel, that was the main thing.

Kevin stared at her for a minute, his face hardening and turning back to normal. He blew out a huge sigh. “Well, damn it, Ollie, I wish I’d just left that Tacoma thing alone. Millions of lives saved – really, what does that add up to in the face of my brother sleeping with Lucrezia Borgia?”

Alex froze. “What did you say?”

He grinned. “Surprised that I know the appropriate historical analogy? I did pretty well in school, actually. I’ve got just as many brain cells as my brother.”

“No, about Tacoma. What do you mean?”

His grin shifted to confusion. “You know all about that – they gave you the file. You interrogated Danny —”

She leaned toward him, unconsciously clutching her computer more tightly against her ribs. “This is about the job you did with de la Fuentes? Does the T in TCX-1 stand for Tacoma?”

“I’ve never heard of TCX-1. The de la Fuentes job was about the Tacoma virus.”

“The Tacoma Plague?”

“I never heard it called that. What’s going on, Ollie?”

Alex yanked open her computer as she climbed onto the foot of the bed. She pulled up the most recent file she’d worked on – her coded case notes. She scrolled through the list of numbers and initials, feeling the bed shift as Kevin put one knee on it, leaning to read over her shoulder.

It felt like a long time since she’d written these notes. So much had happened, and the thoughts she’d attached to these brief lines were faded.

There it was – terrorist event number three, TP, the Tacoma Plague. The letters danced in front of her eyes, only some of them resolving into words in her memory. J, I-P, that was the town in India, on the Pakistani border. She couldn’t remember what the name of the terrorist cell was, only that they originated out of Fateh Jang. She looked at the initials for the connected names: DH – that was the scientist, Haugen; OM was Mirwani, the terrorist, and then P… The other American she couldn’t remember. She pressed her fist to her forehead, trying to force her recall.

“Ollie?” Kevin said again.

“I worked this case – years ago, when the formula was first stolen from the U.S. Long before de la Fuentes got hold of it.”

“Stolen from the U.S.? De la Fuentes got it out of Egypt.”

“No, it was developed in a lab just outside Tacoma. It was supposed to be theoretical, just research. Haugen… Dominic Haugen, that was the scientist.” The story came back to her as she concentrated. “He was on our side, but with the theft, the situation became too sensitive for him to continue where he was. The NSA buried him in a lab somewhere under their control. We had the terrorist cell’s second in command. He gave up the location of the lab in Jammu that was successfully creating the virus from the stolen blueprints. Black ops razed the lab. They thought they had the biological-weapon aspect locked up, but there were members of the cell who slipped through. As far as I know, the department was still working with the CIA on hunting them down a couple of years later… when Barnaby was killed.”

She looked up at him, the wheels in her head spinning so fast that she felt physically dizzy.

“When the CIA called you in, when they burned you – you said there were issues you were trying to track down. What were they?”

He blinked fast, reminding her of Daniel again. “The packaging on the vaccinations – the outside was in Arabic, but the inside packaging, the original labels – everything was in English. And the name, too: Tacoma. It didn’t make sense. If de la Fuentes had wanted them translated, he would have had it changed from Arabic to Spanish. I wanted to trace the virus back. I was sure it hadn’t originated in Egypt. I figured there had to be an American or a Brit working with the developers somewhere. I wanted to find the guy. You’re saying this thing started in Washington State?”

“It’s got to be the same thing. The timing’s right. We get some info about this virus, suddenly they start watching me and Barnaby. Two years later – around the time de la Fuentes got his hands on it, right? – they murder Barnaby. That has to be the catalyst. That’s why they killed him and tried to kill me. Because the virus was out there again, and if the public found out, we knew something that could connect it back…”

Barnaby had never told her what had triggered his paranoia, why he’d decided they needed to be ready to flee. She looked at the letters on her screen. DH, Dominic Haugen. It was unlikely that the bad guys would leave Haugen alive if they’d felt the need to erase her and Barnaby. Had Haugen been the first to die? Probably in some totally normal, expected way. Car accident. Heart attack. There were so many methods to make it look innocent. Had Barnaby seen some notice of Haugen’s death? Had that been the tip-off?

She wanted to do a quick search online, but if she was right about this, then Haugen’s name was sure to be flagged. Anyone inquiring into his death – no matter how anonymous the method – would be noticed.

Who was the P? She couldn’t even be positive she had that letter right. It had been a fleeting mention. Something short, she thought, something snappy…

“Ollie, the packaging… it looked… professional? Is that the right word? It wasn’t something put together in a makeshift lab somewhere in the Middle East.”

They stared at each other for a moment.

“I always thought it was a stretch,” she murmured. “That someone could actually fabricate the virus from nothing more than Haugen’s theoretical design. It seemed the equivalent of winning the terrorist lottery.”

“You think they stole more than notes?”

“Haugen must have done it – actually created the thing. If there was a supply that large, if the vaccine was packaged up so neatly… they must have been producing it. So working on weaponized viruses wasn’t just Haugen’s weekend hobby. It was a military project. There were hints of that… something about a lieutenant general’s involvement. No one wanted to follow up on the American side of things. They kept us focused on the cell. Usually they let us ask the questions that naturally followed… but I remember, this was different. Carston fed me the questions he wanted.”

“So we got burned on the same case,” Kevin said darkly.

“I don’t believe in that big a coincidence.”

“Neither do I.”

“Who are they protecting?” Alex wondered. “Whoever it is, he’s got to be calling the shots. Which means he knows about both of us.”

“Which means we’ve got to get to him, too.”

They stared at each other again.

“Alex? Kev? Guys? Is this place soundproofed?”

Alex looked up slowly, her eyes not totally focusing on Daniel walking through the doorway.

“Is something wrong?” Daniel asked in a quieter tone as he took in the tableau. He hurried to the bed and put one hand on Alex’s shoulder.

“Just putting a few things together,” Kevin said grimly.

Daniel looked to Alex.

“We need to add another name to our list,” she told him.

“Who?”

“That’s the problem,” Kevin said.

“Let me think,” Alex said. “If I didn’t know the answer to that question, they wouldn’t be trying to kill me.” She glanced up at Kevin. “I know this is incredibly nonspecific, but did you ever hear a name beginning with a P involved with this on your end?”

“A P? I’ll have to think about it, but not offhand. I’ll go through Deavers’s calls again, see if I can turn anything up.”

“I’ll work on it while I go through the Carston stuff.”

Kevin nodded, then looked at Daniel. “I hope you came in here because there’s some food ready. Got to feed Ollie’s big brain so she can figure this out.”

They set their computers up on the big kitchen island and started into it while they ate. Val and Einstein hadn’t moved, but they were watching the shopping channel now. Daniel pulled a stool up beside Alex and looked on as she scanned through the video of the front of Carston’s very respectable-looking town house. She fast-forwarded through the downtime when no one was in residence, simultaneously listening to Carston’s phone calls on her earbuds. Carston was careful – his work conversations were vague, never naming any person or project specifically, and since the office calls were recorded on an exterior microphone, she could only hear his side. He used so many pronouns it was impossible to follow. She could tell only that there were a few hes and hims that were getting on Carston’s nerves in a bad way and that at least one project was not going well. He sounded stressed. That could have been because of what happened in Texas and the e-mail to Deavers. Did Carston feel in danger? Did he think Kevin knew about him? He would have to play it safe, just in case. Carston didn’t get to where he was now by not being paranoid enough.

His house had an alarm system, ornamental bars on the first-floor windows, and exterior cameras. Some of the footage Kevin gave her appeared to be from those cameras – he must have hacked into the system. The street wasn’t ideal – lots of close neighbors, lots of activity on the street both morning and night. A plethora of witnesses.

“You have to break into that?” Daniel muttered as she pulled up yet another camera angle of the barred windows.

“Hopefully not.”

Alex pointed to the small woman who was walking up the front stairs. She had several paper grocery bags weighing her down as she stuck her key in the door and unlocked the dead bolt. From this angle, Alex could see as she paused in the doorway and punched in the code for the alarm. Her hand covered the keypad; there was no way to read the sequence.

“Housekeeper?” Daniel asked.

“Looks like. And she does his shopping.”

“Is that good?”

“It might be. If I could get a new face so I would be able to follow her around a bit.”

“What about me?” Daniel asked. “I haven’t been on the news in a while.”

“Daniel, we haven’t watched the news in a while,” she pointed out.

“Oh. You think they’re doing the bad-guy story now?”

“It’s possible. We should check it out.”

“You want the news?” Val called from the sofa in the adjacent room.

“Um, not if you’re using the TV now,” Daniel said politely.

“There’s another one in the cabinet to the left of the fridge, two over,” she told them.

Daniel walked to the indicated cupboard and pulled the door open to reveal a television screen recessed into the space. The door rolled back into a side pocket.

“Sweet,” Kevin muttered, glancing up from his own computer for half a second.

Alex went back to her research while Daniel flipped through channels until he found a twenty-four-hour news network. He set the volume low, then came back to sit with her.

Alex didn’t hear Val get up, but suddenly the blonde was leaning over her shoulder.

“That looks really dull,” she commented.

“Well, adding my mortality into the equation spices it up a bit,” Alex told her.

“Did you say you needed a new face?”

“Um, yes. See, the bruises and bandages make me too memorable.”

“And being memorable isn’t a good thing in your case?”

“No.”

“I could do that.”

“Huh?” Alex asked.

“Give you a new face.”

Alex turned to give Val her full attention. “What do you mean?”