THIRTEEN

"Come away from the edge!"

 

At one end of the Aerie, framed, as most things were in the dwelling, by overloaded bookshelves, stood an entertainment center with a ten-year-old Sony TV, a standard VCR, a DVD player, and a specialty player for 8mm videotapes. Davy and Millie watched the occasional rented movie there, but its main purpose was as a repository of Davy's jump sites.

Early in his jumping career, he'd discovered that, unless he used a site on a regular basis, he couldn't recall enough detail to return there without some sort of memory aid. The result was several racks of thirty-minute 8mm videotapes with labels such as NYC: Central Park West by Museum of Natural History, Western Australia: Kalgoorlie-Boulder Train Station, San Francisco: Metreon, and Moscow: Tabula Rasa Night Club, 28 Bereshkovskaya Naereshnaya.

She was busy working her way through the places she had been, especially those in New England—those that might help her in the search for Davy. There was never more than a few minutes at the start of each tape—Davy didn't want to search through an entire tape when he wanted to recall a jump site and thirty minutes was the smallest commonly available tape size.

The image on the tape showed a classic Greek revival building in white stone with four Doric columns. Large golden letters adorned the frieze: QUINCY MARKET. The plaza before the building consisted of alternating ten-foot sections of flagstones and old brick. Bright blue market umbrellas stretched down one side of the building and people walked around in shorts. On the audio Davy's voice said, "Faneuil Hall Marketplace. The overriding impression is baking bread and other restaurant smells with a whiff of traffic exhaust."

This was enough to recall her last visit, an evening walk, idly browsing the stores. Davy had eaten a cookie from Kivert and Forbes and she'd bought a beeswax taper at Yankee Candle. It was last September and they'd been comfortably cool there when it was suffocating back in Stillwater.

She stopped the tape and jumped, appearing behind the column in the teeth of a cold wind that whipped around the corner of the building. The market umbrellas were gone for the season. She shivered and hurried inside the colonnade where she bought a calzone from North End Bakery.

This was the pattern. Watch a tape. Once she recalled a place well enough, she took the jump, then sat in that place—sampled it—until it was firmly fixed. This often involved food, perhaps a regional specialty: Italian in Boston, a street vendor hot dog in New York, a pretzel in Philadelphia, a polish sausage in Pittsburgh.

I'm going to get fat. But in truth, she merely tasted a few bites before it would cloy in the mouth. There was nothing wrong with the food but, ever since Davy went missing, she had had no appetite.

After acquiring several sites, she jumped to the Manhattan Kinko's, where she checked her e-mail. Anders had sent a message requesting a call. "And don't use your cell." He left a number. She jumped to Union Station in D.C. and used a pay phone.

"The second ambulance was found abandoned in Tiverton, Rhode Island, a small town across the Sakonnet River from Portsmouth. It sat for two days in the parking lot of the local hospital. Those who remember seeing it, thought it was there for a transfer, in or out. Finally a State Trooper put the FBI's bulletin and the ambulance's Vehicle Identification Number together and phoned it in."

"Northeast, again," Millie observed.

"Yes. The FBI went over it. There were no unexpected prints and several smudges made by fingers wearing rubber gloves, but, since latex gloves are routinely worn by emergency response personnel, this isn't conclusive. No one saw who had left the ambulance. They're widening inquiries, to see if the ambulance was spotted anywhere else in the state, but nothing, so far."

Millie replied thoughtfully. "But it was northeast, again, like the ambulance found at Logan, and it's not unreasonable to assume that it indicated at least a general direction."

Anders agreed. "But that's not the main reason I called."

"No?"

"I'm being watched—within the agency. And someone way above me is clamping down on the search for Davy. They've reassigned resources and discouraged continued monitoring of Bochstettler and Associates."

"Are you being monitored now? Are they listening?"

"No. This is a prepaid cell phone I acquired with cash and fake stats months ago when I was working a different case. It was a contingency phone that never got used. They've got your phone, though. You put the number on all those flyers so they'll have the ESN from your service provider. That's why I told you not to use it."

"Don't knock the flyers. They got me Ms. Johnson. They sucked in Padgett and Hyacinth Pope."

"I'll grant you Ms. Johnson. We can't be sure that Padgett and Pope weren't pulled in by other means. Whoever knew Davy was meeting Brian Cox probably knew we'd moved my surveillance of you from Oklahoma to D.C."

"More leaks from the NSA." She did not make it a question.

Anders didn't hesitate. "It might not even be leaks. The way this is going down, it might even be another part of the agency."

"The NSA kidnapped Davy?"

Anders was silent for a bit. "If not them, then someone with so much pull, they can influence the agency."

 

Millie returned to Boston—this time the unmarked circle of cobblestones to the east of the Old State House. She didn't need a videotape. It was her imagination that recalled the spot—not so much its actual appearance—a vivid visualization of the event it marked: the Boston Massacre. She'd read a biography of Crispus Attucks as a child and visiting the spot with Davy had fixed it forever in her mind.

She appeared in the midst of a tour. Several tourists gasped and one stumbled. She said, "Excuse me," and walked on.

She heard a voice behind her say, "Where did she come fr—" before it faded into the traffic noise.

She took a cab to the Boston South Station and caught a MBTA commuter train to Providence. She didn't think it was necessary to travel to Tiverton. She thought, like Anders, that it was just a place to dump the ambulance. But she didn't have a jump site in Rhode Island. Davy did, but she'd never been there so his tape was useless.

The train she took stopped seven times before pulling into Providence, but only took an hour and three minutes, total. She could've flown much quicker or rented a car, but these things required identifying herself, and she didn't want to be plugged into the system. The very thought of it made her feel as if electronic fingers were running through her hair and tugging at her clothing.

She shuddered.

In Providence she took a cab to the harborfront and drank coffee while walking briefly through the old buildings of the east side. She found an alleyway with a unique view of the waterfront and chose it as a site. She tried it a few times, jumping back and forth to the Aerie, then dispirited, found a bench overlooking the water.

It was perhaps fifty degrees but the sun was out and there was very little breeze. She settled in Davy's old leather jacket and scowled at the seagulls that settled expectantly before her.

What am I doing? Would any of this running around really help?

Well, it keeps me from going crazy.

She dropped the coffee cup in a trash barrel and walked west along the waterfront, toward the Radisson. A man turned the corner and ran toward her and she flinched before realizing it was just a jogger.

For a moment she'd thought—Well, I don't know what I thought. Maybe that they'd recognized me, even if this isn't where they supposed me to be. If she kept working the areas where Davy was likely to be found, someone, the NSA or BAd Boys or FBI, would recognize her.

Have to do something about that.

She went back to the Aerie and pawed through the tapes until she found a jump site in London. It was four P.M. there, but she found a hairdresser in Kensington High Street who was available and would do what she wanted and for U.S. currency.

She left, two hours later, her shoulder-length, straight brown hair gone, replaced by ash blond hair cut mannishly short. The stylist, a young woman with blue hair and several piercings, asked for Millie's phone number but was told, gently, "Tourist. Going back to the States today."

She then made it true by jumping to Albuquerque and visiting an optician on Eubank and Comanche. She knew the place because of time spent with cousins who'd lived in the adjoining subdivision—not because it was one of Davy's haunts—but she recalled it well enough to jump. She took the precaution of jumping first to the Aerie, to equalize her ears, before jumping to Albuquerque, a mile above sea level.

It was well she'd come west to the mountain time zone. She had to wait a hour for the optician to see her without an appointment and, as the woman insisted on dilating Millie's eyes, she had to sit in the waiting room with her eyes covered before her pupils recovered enough to try the contacts.

They had obviously improved the technology in recent years. The last time she'd tried contacts, in her teens, she'd been unable to insert them without epic struggles, or endure them, once they were in. She'd given up in disgust.

Now, a few blinks, and it was as if they weren't there. She agreed to the doctor's suggestion, continuous-wear disposables, designed to be worn for two weeks, day and night, then thrown away. They were green-tinted and when she looked in the mirror, she didn't recognize herself.

When did I lose so much weight? The past weeks had taken their toll. She'd noticed the loosening of clothing but, with her long brown hair framing and partially concealing her face, the extent of the change had gone unnoticed. Now, with cheekbones more pronounced and chin sharpened slightly, as well as the changes to hair length, hair and eye color, she looked like someone who might be related to Millie Harrison-Rice... but not closely.

Which is both good and bad.

One more level of change, she decided, was needed. Ala Moana shopping center in Honolulu was her next step. She looked up at the sun, shining down through the palm trees, still quite high above the horizon. I am in a perpetual afternoon. She shook her head and yawned. She was tired, her internal clock was still set six hours to the east, and though it was four o'clock in Honolulu, it was ten at night in D.C.

She hit the boutiques, buying things she didn't ordinarily wear: dresses, formal skirt and jacket combos, and pants suits. She tried to avoid anything too striking. Her goal was not to be noticed. But she wanted to not dress as she had in D.C.

At Hino's Hairstyles & Wigs she purchased a brown wig and had it shortened slightly, until, wearing it, she looked pretty much as she had before the attentions of the blue-haired stylist in Kensington High Street.

Her last purchase, from LensCrafters, was a pair of glasses right off the display rack, no prescription. "I know it sounds a little strange but I wear these frames when I'm not wearing my contacts." She showed them her prescription glasses from the purse. "But my clients trust me more when I wear glasses and I'm in long-wear contacts, now. I want a pair I can use over them."

The clerk assured Millie that she'd heard much stranger reasons. "There are people who want to look intellectual but are cursed with good eyesight. Also, actors. Women with older husbands. And then there's safety glasses."

These are safety glasses. She paid cash, jumped back to the Aerie, and slept.

 

She had the cab drop her after they'd passed the address.

The offices of Bochstettler and Associates were not, as she had originally supposed, in D.C. proper. Instead, they occupied a small, two-story office building off Interstate 395 in Alexandria.

It was a two-story brown brick building surrounded by a high wall of matching brick with a manned gate. Like alien flowers, bouquets of video cameras adorned the corners of the roof or stared down over the walls on thin pylons. The windows were narrow slits of mirrored glass and, combined with the wall, made Millie think of arrow loops set in the side of a castle keep.

She studied the building again from the roof of a six-story medical professional building a block over.

She'd taken the elevator up to five, a floor the directory showed had an internal medicine clinic, two oral surgeons, a chiropractor, and an acupuncturist. The waiting rooms were not combined and she had no problem following the exit signs to a stairwell door. The door to the roof had one of those electronic latches brightly labeled "Alarm Will Sound," but also contained a wire-reinforced glass window, so she'd been able to jump past without opening the door.

Now she could tell there was an interior atrium at Bochstettler and Associates that seemed deeper than it should be and that what the building lacked in windows on the outside, it more than made up in the interior courtyard, those walls being all glass, floor to ceiling. There was a single row of parking around two sides of the building that held sixteen cars and three limos.

The medical professional building she stood atop was the tallest structure in the vicinity so she felt confident of her privacy. Even the small bull's-eye window in the roof access door was on the other side of the elevator machine shack, so if someone looked out that window, they wouldn't see her.

She looked at the sun. The medical building was southwest of Bochstettler and Associates, so the sun was behind her and to the right. Binoculars are called for. Behind her she heard the whining of elevator motors in the machine shack and the massive ventilators, thankfully on the other end of the building, kicking in. She looked down at the gray pea gravel covering the rooftop tar. And a chair.

At B&H Photo in New York, she bought a pair of twelve-hundred-dollar binoculars—Canon 18 by 50 All Weather IS. The IS stood for image stabilization. The binoculars made the distant security guard, sitting in his glassed gate booth, look like he was just across a city street, and the slight whirring of the stabilization prisms held the image rock steady despite her unsteady hands. The binocular salesman, a nice Hassidic gentleman in black suit, hat, and long curling sideburns, warned her she'd need a tripod to hold it steady if she let the batteries run out, so she had extra double-As in the pocket of Davy's old leather jacket.

She felt guilty for spending so much on the binoculars so she only spent six bucks on a green plastic patio chair.

Three hours later, her butt aching, she wished she'd spent more on the chair.

She was careful to note that the sun was above and behind her, so the lenses of the binoculars wouldn't give off any telltale reflections. She also stayed between the roof's edge and a large rooftop ventilator, keeping her silhouette off the skyline.

The BAd Building, as she was thinking of it now (BAd Building, no biscuit!), had at least one floor underground. The atrium was one floor deeper than the surrounding grass. At this angle, Millie could see into both of the aboveground floors in the atrium and about halfway down the glass of the subsurface level as well. She cursed the angles. She was getting too much reflection from the windows to see more than occasional movement and too little reflection to see the bottom of the atrium.

There'd been some coming and going, as she watched, and now there were seventeen cars in the parking lot and the same number of limos as before, but one had left and another arrived. The security was tight. The gate wasn't opened until the security guard had inspected the passengers of the car and, once, he'd made one driver open his trunk before letting them enter.

When the new limo arrived, it stopped at the front door and a pair of security guards had come out to flank the car while its occupant, a tallish man in a nice suit, walked quickly inside before the chauffeur could get around the car. The chauffeur was left to shut the door before he got back in and drove the limo around to one of the parking places.

She cursed the man for not looking around as he'd walked in. The only distinctive feature she'd noted was slightly receding temples—nothing extreme—and the perceptible elegance of his suit.

The guards, still looking outward, backed toward the doorway and, only when the man was inside, did they turn and follow.

This was a big shot.

She wondered who he was and what he knew.

"What are you doing up here?"

She hadn't heard the door over the sound of elevator motors and she didn't catch the sound of the footsteps on the gravel roof until the voice was already talking.

She stood quickly and turned, nearly jumping away, but stopping herself in time. I'll have time to jump if I must. She stood slowly and looked around.

There were three people standing there. A tall black man in a gray suit, an older guy in maintenance overalls, and, in the lead, a well-dressed woman with short gray-streaked hair.

Millie blinked. It was Becca Martingale, the FBI counterintelligence agent.

Millie was wearing sunglasses and a baseball cap, jeans, and Davy's leather jacket. Since her hair was now blond and very short she wasn't surprised when Becca didn't recognize her. This was a good thing.

Time to go.

She turned her back on the agents, took a step toward the foot-high parapet, and looked down at the evergreen shrubbery clustered thickly at the bottom of the building seventy feet below. She froze. Fingerprints. The green plastic chair would certainly have hers, where she'd carried it from the store.

Becca misinterpreted her hesitation and said, "That's right. There's no place to go. Come away from the edge!" Millie glanced back at them. They were only ten feet away now.

She took a sliding step to the chair, hooked her arm through the armrest, and stepped back again, away from the agents.

"DON'T!" yelled the black agent, his arm reaching out reflexively.

She jumped, meaning to clear the foot-high parapet, but the chair threw her off balance and her heel caught. Instead of dropping, like she'd planned, feet first, she flipped over and plunged into the open space backwards.

It was remarkably like the first time, at the Aerie, when the anchor bolt broke free of its hole and she'd plunged toward the rocks.

She flinched back to the condo, too flustered to choose a destination. The chair banged into the carpeted floor, wrenching her arm, and she swore out loud, then shut her mouth hard. There was still the possibility of listening devices here.

I hope I was out of sight when I jumped.

She jumped to the Aerie before putting the chair down.

"What were they doing there?" she said aloud. "Could they have followed me?"

To get there she'd taken a cab from Dulles and she supposed they could've spotted her at the airport, but she really doubted it. She didn't look anything like the Millie they knew.

But they do know about Bochstettler and Associates. She nodded. That made sense—they'd gone to the roof for exactly the same reason Millie had. To watch the BAd building.

Well, that wasn't so scary, then. They were just following the case and they'd chosen the same surveillance spot. She'd been half afraid they were psychic.

And that means they weren't called off. She wondered if the FBI was less vulnerable to pressure from above. Or if it's inside the NSA and therefore not over the FBI. She had a chilling thought. Or they have been called off, but I'm now the object of their investigation. She bit her lip for a second, then shook her head. No, that went a bit too far toward paranoia.

But now they'd be wondering what on earth happened to the strange blond woman after she went off the edge of the building. She pictured them rushing to the edge, expecting to see and/or hear her impact the ground below, and then the surprise at seeing and hearing nothing. With any luck, they would think Millie's body hidden by the shrubbery and would waste more time poking through the bushes looking for it.

Next time I do something like that, I must see what I can do to provide a body to be found.

 

She was back in the medical professionals' building within the hour, wearing a long red wig and a knee length sweater tunic in green and black. The red wig went very well with her green contacts and she felt confident that she no longer resembled either the old Millie or the figure who'd dropped off the building.

On the sixth floor there was a pediatric neurologist whose suite of offices was on the side of the building facing Bochstettler and Associates. The waiting room held several children in powered wheelchairs and a few more in leg braces and crutches. Millie almost flinched away from so much pain, but stopped herself. There wasn't really any noticeable pain in the room—the pain was in her reaction.

Several of the kids were playing a board game, albeit with the aid of attending parents or home health aides to move markers, spin the pointer, and turn over cards. Two of the kids with crutches were giggling in the corner.

Just kids, she admonished herself. If they couldn't walk or even move from the neck down, they were still kids.

There was a reception window but the woman seated there had her back turned, talking on the phone while she flipped through a stack of medical records. Millie walked to the corner of the waiting room hidden from the receptionist, and picked up a magazine.

A girl, strapped into a standing wheelchair operated by a puff/sip switch backed away from the board game which she had been watching, and rolled over to Millie. She brought the chair to a halt with the front wheels inches from Millie's foot.

She had black bangs cut straight across the middle of her forehead and enormous blue eyes which, combined with the silver framework of her chair, made Millie think of a Margaret Keane big-eyed waif painting in a chrome frame.

"Hello," Millie said.

A woman, seated on the other side of the waiting room and reading a book, looked up. "Come away, Maggie," she said mildly.

Millie held out her hand and shook it side to side. "She's not bothering me." To the little girl she said, "My name's Millicent. And your name is Maggie?"

"Like the Rod Stewart song. Though I'm more of a pain in the neck than that woman was. And I don't pick up younger men." Maggie was able to move her head but her arms hung down, strapped to cushioned pads on the frame. "I don't pick up anything."

Millie had thought the girl seven or eight, but now considered revising that upward. "Why do you think you're a pain in the neck?"

"Well. What do you think?"

Millie tilted her head to one side and narrowed her eyes before finally saying, "Maybe you think your parents have to do too much to help you. Maybe you lose your temper sometimes and won't cooperate. Maybe you feel ungrateful, sometimes, despite all the stuff you have to have done for you. Maybe you feel no one can possibly understand what you're going through."

Maggie, who'd been smiling, frowned at this. "You're a psych, aren't you?"

"A family therapist," Millie laughed. "And you are a pain in the neck."

Maggie nodded, solemnly. "Told you."

"May I ask how old you are?"

She considered this for a moment, finally saying, "You may."

Millie waited for a second, then smiled. "Okay. How old are you?"

"Ten... in two months. How old are you?"

"Thirty-three... in one month." And ticking. "Why the wheelchair?"

"So I don't lay around like a throw rug."

Millie snorted, half involuntary laugh, half sob. "Did I say pain in the neck? I must've meant another portion of the anatomy."

"All right. Swimming pool. Deep dive. Shallow end. I was seven."

Now Millie wanted to cry, but all she said was, "Ouch."

"Could be worse. I can breathe by myself. Look at Christopher Reeve."

The door to the hallway opened. A man stuck his head in and looked around the waiting room. Millie tried not to freeze—it was the large black FBI agent who'd been on the roof with Becca Martingale. He saw him look toward her corner, then pass on. He spent more time studying Angie's mother than anybody else in the room, but then she was sitting by herself and she had brown hair, like Millie's real hair color. He pulled his head back into the hall and let the door shut.

Millie exhaled.

Angie eyed her. "Was that man looking for you?"

"What makes you think that?"

"Well... you smiled but you held your breath all the time he was here."

Perceptive. "Ah. Well, I'm not sure who he was looking for." Which really is true, if disingenuous. "I wish I had a kid like you."

Maggie looked startled. "What? Broken?"

Millie shook her head. "Smart. Beautiful. Funny."

Maggie wrinkled her nose.

A nurse came to the door and said, "Maggie Peterson."

Maggie blinked her eyes. "Gotta go." She turned the wheelchair with the sip/puff controller.

"Nice meeting you, Maggie." She watched her roll to her mother, then both of them follow the nurse back into the clinic. She pulled out some tissue from her purse and blew her nose. She sighed deeply and asked herself if she was sure she wanted children. The answer was a resounding affirmative even if they're broken.

She lifted her magazine and pretended to read again, checking the room. Another woman eyed her before going back to helping with the board game. Just curious, Millie judged. A man, seated by the children with leg braces and crutches, eyed her more circumspectly with most of his attention to her stockinged legs, where they crossed at the knee. A different kind of curious. But not one she had to worry about.

Millie ignored both of them and instead checked the office hours posted on a small plastic sign on the reception desk. Today the clinic would close at five. If they took appointments all the way up to closing, she could hope the last of the staff and patients would be out the door by six-six-thirty at the latest.

She was tempted to wait until Maggie came back out. She'd be leaving, anyway. Instead she memorized the corner she sat in, then walked back out into the public hallway in the manner, she hoped, of someone seeking a restroom.

 

She was back at seven, appearing in the corner where she'd talked with Maggie. She was dressed in what she thought of as ninja chic: black tennies, black jeans, black turtleneck, black gloves, and masked, á la ninja, with a black tee-shirt, her eyes peaking out through the neck hole, the tee-shirt's sleeves tied behind her head.

She felt absolutely ridiculous.

"And so, Sheila, is Joe responding to your requests for more emotional connections?"

"No, and I must tell you that I'm having trouble trusting a therapist who wears a mask. Why are you wearing it?"

Why indeed? Well, the answer was video cameras. She wasn't expecting any here in the neurologist's office but from what she'd seen of Bochstettler and Associates, there were more cameras around than tie-dyed tee-shirts at a Grateful Dead concert.

She went looking for a window and was surprised to see that most of the examination rooms, even though they were on the outer wall, didn't have windows. She finally located a floor to ceiling glass wall in a staff break room and found herself with pretty much the same view of the BAd building as she'd had on the roof above.

She lifted the binoculars.

The scene was the same but the video cameras stood out now. They weren't really any more visible. She was just more sensitive to them, now.

There were two at each upper corner of the building. There were four pylons set eight feet inside the fence corners with two cameras each. On two of the inner corners of the atrium, at the roof line, two more cameras tilted down into the courtyard.

But there really didn't seem to be anything surveying the rooftop.

That I can see.

Couldn't be helped. If she wanted to get into the building, she'd have to risk it. It wasn't as if they could stop Millie, even should they spot her.

Don't get cocky. Davy had a lot more experience with this than you and they caught him.

It was this thought that led her to check for other observers on a different roof. The one directly above her. The FBI had a reason for being on that roof.

She went up the stairs quietly. She found the door shut completely with no sign that the alarm had been disabled. Its little LED was shining brightly. She jumped past it and peeked around the elevator machine stack. No figures crouched or sat at her old watch post but there was something. She walked closer and laughed to herself.

A weatherproof video camera mounted on a sandbag-anchored tripod pointed down at Bochstettler and Associates. A coaxial cable snaked from the camera housing to an antennaed box sitting back from the edge.

They were watching. Just not in person. It took her only a few minutes of scanning with the binoculars to find the Verizon phone van parked in an alley a half a block away from the BAd building.

What to do? What to do?

If she jumped onto the roof, she'd be in clear view of the FBI camera. It was dark over there, but she'd bet the camera was low-light capable. They wouldn't be able to tell who it was, but they'd be able to tell that someone had appeared on that roof out of nowhere.

She studied her intended destination again. Then bent down and unscrewed the video cable where it entered the antennaed box.

All they can tell is that their camera went dead.

She jumped into deep shadow, crouched on the gravel against a dormant air-conditioning unit. She stayed there, moving only her head, trying to see if any of Bochstettler's cameras were pointed across the rooftop.

She figured she had at least ten minutes easy before the FBI could get back up on the roof and see what happened to their camera. Longer if they had to hunt up someone with a key.

She duck-walked to the edge of the roof overlooking the inner courtyard. At night, with the interior hallways lit and shining through the open doors into the offices lining the top floor, she could see through the reflective glass easily. She picked one of the offices on the opposite side, top floor, and studied carefully, through the binoculars.

This was a harder jump. It was one thing to jump from one gravel rooftop to another. The temperature and wind and slightest whiffs of distant exhaust were the same. There was something about the world on the other side of the tinted glass that seemed unreal. She exercised her imagination picturing her own clinic back in Stillwater as a model for the hushed feeling of a controlled-climate building. Her first attempt, however, put her there, in her own office, and she heard the receptionist, on the phone, in the other room, clearly working late. She returned to the roof. Her next try succeeded.

She was in a large office that actually wrapped around one of the interior corners. Clearly a power office, with almost a living room suite of furniture at one end of the L-shaped room, a large conference table at the bend, and an isolated massive teak desk at the other end. She took a deep breath through her nose and noted some of the details of the carpet and the three abstract paintings on the wall, then looked at her watch.

Only four minutes had passed since she'd disconnected the camera. She jumped back, to the rooftop of the medical building, and reconnected the cable loosely. An intermittent. If anyone diagnosed the unit, they might think it a simple loose connector and not active sabotage. She heard the elevator motors whine and jumped back to the big corner office, her heart pounding.

Out of the frying pan...

She settled against the wall, in the darkest corner, and listened to the sounds of the building.

There'd been four cars in the parking lot and she would bet at least two, if not more, belonged to security guards. Probably more—someone had to be monitoring all those cameras. There was also the possibility that those cameras outside the building might have some brethren within. She heard the distant sound of a vacuum cleaner.

All right. They aren't all security.

She looked around the room, checking, in particular, the corners at the ceiling, searching for cameras and motion detectors.

But, they can't have the staff cleaning and the alarms active at the same time.

Millie did not like the contents of the desk. They were laid out with a geometric purity that was almost sterile. Or anal. There were no files in the desk's file drawers. The only papers were blank stationery. There was a networked computer, a sleek black thing with a large flat screen, and a matching keyboard and mouse underneath on a silently sliding shelf.

She turned it on but found it password-protected on the hardware level, not even proceeding to boot. She considered just taking the entire thing with her.

Surely someone could get at its contents?

The distant vacuum cleaner had stopped and started several times but now it sounded louder. She gave up on the desk and tried the two doors at the end of the office. One led to a smaller office, possibly an assistant's, and the other was a large coat closet, two umbrellas and dark raincoat hung from the rod and on the shelf above was an attaché case in gold anodized aluminum, a Halliburton case, the kind that screams "steal me!" Her heartbeat, slowly settling after the tension of her initial arrival, shot up again. But the case wasn't locked and it was empty except for a crumpled sticky note stuck in the corner. She unfolded it but there was only a ten digit phone number in the 508 area code followed by the letters "egc tt 9/2 2:30."

She stuffed the note deep into her jeans pocket, carefully, making sure it didn't stick to her gloves as she withdrew her hand. She peeked carefully outside the door. The vacuuming came from a lit office three doors down. Each of the doors had a nameplate set beside the door. She glanced at the wall beside her. The plate said, "N. Kelledge, CEO."

The vacuum cut off and a small Hispanic woman in green coveralls backed out of the lighted office carrying a trash can. Millie jerked her head back into the office and jumped away.

She returned to the Aerie tired and frustrated and in need of a bath. Since her unknown enemies had kicked in the hotel room door in Virginia, she'd been making do with sponge baths in the cliff house and, of course, the stylist in London had washed her hair when she'd cut and dyed it.

Dammit! Are they or aren't they monitoring the condo?

She felt like arriving there on foot, unlocking the door, and seeing what happened. Who would arrive? The NSA, the people who kidnapped Davy, or are they the same? She still believed that Anders had nothing to do with it but she wasn't confident that it wasn't some other part of the agency.

The thought of another bath interrupted decided her against the attempt. She looked through Davy's site tapes until she found one labeled Ten Thousand Waves.

It was an hour earlier in Santa Fe and her ears popped painfully hard—the spa was at eight thousand feet. She walked up to the spa from the lower parking lot, following the footpath through the Japanese landscaping.

She'd brought a swimming suit since she'd expected to be using the non-reserved communal tub, but the last hour bath was starting in ten minutes and one of the smaller private tubs was available due to a cancellation. She shampooed and washed in the woman's shower room and wore the provided kimono to her assigned bath, an acrylic hot tub surrounded by shoji screens, except for its uphill side, which faced on scrub piñon trees trained by nature and twenty years of judicious care, into bonsai-like perfection. The New Mexico sky was studded with brilliant pricks of light and there was snow, in spots, under the trees.

She was glad not to use the bathing suit but the hot water and icy cold air made her long for Davy. The last time she'd been here with him they'd used the Ichiban room—which had included an indoor mattress. She ached at the thought. When she climbed out of the tub she was grateful for the cold air for more than one reason.

She checked out and jumped back to the Aerie the minute the receptionist's back was turned.

Underwear. She had clothing enough in the Aerie because of her shopping, but her underwear supplies were depleted. There were clean panties and bras in Stillwater.

She jumped to the living room of the condo and looked around, nervously. It was quiet, as usual, but there was a strange tickle in her throat. She sniffed deeply through her nose. Again, she felt something odd in her throat. She thought that the weekly cleaning lady, Lonnie, must've changed the furniture polish she was using. Millie didn't like it.

The room was quite dark, only lit by the diffused glow of a streetlight shining through the drapes, but she could tell something was different at the front door. She took a step toward it and the room lurched, tilted oddly. She dropped to her knees, her robe opening where she'd been holding it shut.

The door had been taped shut, long strips of duct tape running around the sides and top and triple wide at the gap between door and floor. She twisted around and saw plastic sheeting over the fireplace.

That's odd, she thought, almost dreamily. Her lungs felt heavy. Convulsively, she stabbed her nails into her bare thigh, raking, knowing the feeling of calm was an artifact. It was the lack of sensation, the lack of response from her nerves that finally awoke in her a sense of urgency.

Inhalation anesthetic.

She flinched away.

She felt the gritty limestone texture of the bare rock of the Aerie floor on her knees, then her cheek, and then nothing.