Chapter Four

Juliette

Toulouse, France

Saturday, 12:29 p.m.

S he was strapped into the back seat. One man drove. One man sat beside her. Neither man wore a seat belt. Juliette hoped they'd be in an accident. Both men would be tossed from the car. Injured. Maybe even killed. She willed that to happen. Pictured it and prayed for it. But the car just drove farther and farther down the road.

Juliette had her head in her hands. The elevation of her blood pressure had made her head throb. She could feel her pulse beating in her temples. She focused on the tips of her boots to try to still the vertigo that swirled her around.

She wanted to focus on something that would pull her attention away from her current physical distress, so her system could calm, but she kept going back to the memory that came up when she saw the men's faces. It was startling to remember something that happened before the accident. Before the surgery. Something that was old.

Before these men showed up, all Juliette had was new.

Juliette had been at a conference. Wearing a black pantsuit, she remembered the teal colored blouse that she thought made her eyes look particularly bright. She had her lecture notes in her hand as she walked through the corridor, nervous but excited.

"Doctor, right this way," the man had said in a thick accent. He was the one driving right now. At the time, he had placed his hand on her elbow to steer her. And because of his accent, she hadn't thought anything of the gesture. Perhaps this man didn't know he shouldn't touch a woman without her permission.

They'd walked back toward the ball room, and then beyond. She'd spun and looked over her shoulder. Ballroom C. That was where she was supposed to speak. When Juliette heard a click and felt something hard at her ribs, she looked down. The man on the other side of her, the one who was guarding her now, had pressed a gun into her ribs. "Keep walking. Don't draw any attention, or I'll be forced to shoot you."

Wait. He'd called her "doctor," and she was going to give a lecture. That wasn't right. It couldn't be right. She had been a veterinarian's assistant before her accident. Her father had shown her a diploma and talked about how much she loved animals.

Why would she be seeing these images? Why did they seem so real?

Not just the faces but the voices.

On her grandmother's street, the man had spoken to her in Russian, and she had both known it was Russian and known what he was saying. True, in the past her father had told her that she'd studied Russian in high school. But that didn't explain the thing that she'd call a memory. And it didn't explain why this man sat there with a gun dangling between his knees.

In her memory, when she was wearing the black suit, he hadn't spoken Russian. He'd spoken in English. "Doctor, right this way." Maybe she had been with the veterinarian? Was there another person in the memory walking with them, someone else at gun point?

Had this man mistaken her at the time for someone she was not, and she was just too startled to respond? But she wasn't startled. Nothing had seemed wrong until they passed the ballroom door.

Why did he point a gun at her then?

Why was he pointing a gun at her now?

How would these men even know she was in the suburbs of Toulouse visiting her grandmother?

Juliette heard a truck pulling up beside them. Please, tip over. She sent out her thought waves. Or don't see us and push us off the side of the road. Hit us. Hit us! She thought so hard that the rat-a-tat-tat in her head became the booms of a kettle drum. Juliette panted so she wouldn't vomit from the pain.

They kept driving and driving.

Never turning.

The same highway. It had been hours now.

They had stopped for gas, and the men had switched places.

They brought her some ginger ale and salted crackers; she must have looked pretty green to elicit that response. Juliette knew these men didn't care a smidge about her comfort, they probably just didn't want to have to drive in a car full of vomit.

Maybe I should vomit? Juliette discarded that thought. She was fairly sure the men would retaliate, and her body couldn't handle much more. If she'd had her dog with her, would she be here? They'd probably have shot Toby there in the street. Toby would be dead. It was best that she'd left him at home.

Juliette leaned back and closed her eyes. She wondered if anyone would report that she was kidnapped from the streets of Toulouse.

She wondered if anyone would care.

Her dad? He was far away in America, right now.

He'd moved them when he took a job with DARPA. Something odd was making the U.S. diplomats sick, and he'd been brought home, so he could investigate and come up with a treatment plan.

Her dad was, after all, the foremost researcher in the world when it came to brain trauma. If it wasn't for him, if she'd been just any young woman who'd been in an accident, she wouldn't be able to function this well. She'd be in an institution somewhere. Juliette owed him everything for saving her from that.

Juliette remembered her father introducing himself to her. "Your name is Juliette DuBois. And I am David DuBois. Do you recognize me?" He was sitting by her bed when she came out of surgery. She had one of those flat memory-photos of him that she was able to pull up, but she'd been grateful when he'd labelled himself.

He'd had a photo of a woman. "And this is your mother. She died in the accident. Do you remember her?"

She'd reached for the photo and held it in her fingers. Her hand had moved up to the bandaged dome of her head, her fingers crawling along the seams of tape. She understood the concept of mother. And she wanted one there. Someone who would fold Juliette into her arms and rock her and croon that everything was going to be all right. That she was loved. That she'd get through this.

But when Juliette looked down at the photo, she'd felt nothing. It was like looking at a stranger. She'd learned very little about her mother from talking to her dad, that her mom liked wine and books, and walking at night. But the kinds of things her dad would think to tell Juliette weren't the kinds of things that Juliette had desperately wanted to know.

Was her mother gentle and encouraging?

Did her mom cuddle in bed with her when a thunderstorm blew out the electricity, and would she read to Juliette by flashlight to calm her? That was the kind of picture that Juliette had tried to paint for herself.

But the truth was, Juliette simply didn't know. She'd felt like a usurper. A puppet. A paid actor lying there in her hospital gown, staring at her mother's photo.

She'd thought that she should probably be filled with grief at her mother's passing. She had thought she should probably cry.

Her father.

He knew she was in France. At what point would he wonder why she wasn't in touch with him? They talked at least twice a day and, surely, he'd want to talk to her about seeing her grandmother for the first time, post-accident. Juliette's last-minute decision to come, after a price deal popped up in her email, meant she'd only had time to make a hurried call on the way to the airport. When her dad's answering machine picked up, Juliette left him a message that she was on her way to France where she'd start tracing through her past to try to regain some memories. Juliette asked if there was anything he'd like her to say to her grandmother or to send home to him. "Wish me luck! I think this is going to make the difference. I think this trip will change everything !"

He hadn't called her back.

Juliette was pulled away from those thoughts when she felt the car start to slow.

Bringing her head up, slightly, she peeked through her hair to see what was going on. Brake lights glowed red up and down the highway, and their car came to a crawl as the traffic slowed. She snaked her hand over her lap to unsnap her belt buckle, thinking she could just let it slowly retract, then maybe she could jump from the car. Surely, they wouldn't shoot at her in front of all these eyes.

The man beside her chuckled as he reached out and grabbed her hand, bending her fingers backwards. "This idiot thinks I'm going to let her jump out of the car."

The other man laughed in big guffaws.

Juliette pursed her lips, then turned to see what her guard was pulling from his pocket. When she saw it was a syringe, she fought. She kicked and bit, and flung her fists, but quickly the vertigo made her world spin too fast.

The stab of a punitive needle.

The tight grip of his fingers...