Where was that from?
He grayed out under the assault of pain and plummeting blood pressure, a dangerous moment or two of shock before his control reasserted itself and several functions kick-started, sealing off rips and fractures, cells swarming to repair, energy from small fat stores yanked out of storage and applied to the most critical wounds.
He was lifted onto a stretcher, ignoring the activity around him as he held to life with all the strength his violated, virus-soaked body could muster.
The mission. He had to remember the mission, but the image of the chestnut-haired girl with her wire-rimmed glasses, running and laughing as the police station’s front window shattered, wouldn’t go away.
That’s my mission. Finding the woman. But which one?
The blonde and her rasping, unhappy scent full of smoke-terror faded. The other woman—he found the name in a dusty mental corner as EMTs barked medical terms at each other, the sting of a needle in his arm and the jolt as the ambulance jerked into motion.
Frasier. Odd name for a woman. It’s Fray, she’d announced to the room at large, but don’t get attached to me, I’m not staying. Confident, rolling her chair back over his handler’s foot, the smell of her blotting out everything else in the world.
That was, he decided with relief, his true mission. The woman. Find her.
Now that he’d figured that out, everything became easier. He was vaguely aware of argument among the EMTs, which hospital, his vitals are stabilizing, get out the paddles, no, look at his heartbeat, he’s fine—
It didn’t matter. Agent Bay, short for Beta, had a clear goal in sight. In order to find her, he had to first become ambulatory. Afterward, he would utilize the avenue most likely to lead him to her. Possibly his handler. He would make that decision when he could think again. The primary aim was decided.
He settled himself to heal.
* * *
The arresting officer, a crew-cut corncob with big raw hands, did not manhandle her, at least. He frog-marched her toward a cluster of bright lights and dusty official vehicles, and she let him. She went quietly into a black trailer with far too few air vents attached to a black, diesel-grumbling SUV too clean to be part of the police fleet, handcuffs savagely tight only because the young officer was overexcited and soaking in adrenaline. This was probably the most TV-like event he had ever been part of, and the emotional arousal and sharp pepper of a clean male was pleasant insofar as it blotted out other smells. The kid, fresh faced in his dun uniform and spanking new crew cut, almost climbed into the trailer with her, but an older officer—county SWAT by his uniform—yanked him aside and began dressing him down. The van door slammed, sudden darkness only broken by the glowing furnace-slits of air vents. A diesel engine roared into fresh thrumming life, and she calculated the likely temperature of this little metal box by the time they reached anywhere air-conditioned.
The result was depressingly high. Even the horse trailers in this deadly hot part of the country were better equipped. Clearly she was of less value than an equine at the moment, or they judged any heat damage to her as acceptable. Or, most likely of all, they intended to transport her to one of Felicitas’s stations and put her in a holding cell.
Which was exactly what she was hoping for.
First priority: getting out of the cuffs. She wriggled, ignoring pain as ligaments stretched. He hadn’t taken her backpack, the excited little boy. Hadn’t even searched her for a weapon, perhaps assuming a woman wouldn’t be armed. Either way, he was in for some trouble when his superiors found out.
The entire trailer jerked, began moving forward. She thudded against the sidewall and slid down, no betraying sound wrung from her even though the pain was a bright red blossom. She strained her ears some more—nothing but wind against the side of the van, tires humming and her own harsh breathing as control over respiration slipped. The concentration needed to keep her breathing calm was better allocated to maximizing blood flow to aching areas as she applied pressure. Zip ties or duct tape would be better—the shearing force necessary to break either was relatively low, if one had time and some freedom of movement. But cuffs were not an insoluble problem; she had her right hand loose in short order.
The driver hit the brakes, and Trinity let herself continue forward until she hit the front panel, in case they were listening. No window there, either. The temperature had already ticked upward; she plunged her right hand into her backpack. Stupid, not stripping her of gear.
Her skin chilled, a reflex—it had been so close. If not for the blue sedan appearing out of nowhere, Eight would have caught her. No doubt he would see it as justice.
Moritz. That was her name. The civilian. Bronson had given the order to tie off all civilian loose ends, and Trinity had calculated the parameters herself. It had not been as easy as some of the others, since Eight had been extremely careful to cover his tracks. Unfortunately, Trinity was better at digging than most were better at burying.
Eight had been captured, Tracy Moritz—undoubtedly his complementary gemina even though the reports hadn’t shown any viral load in her yet—killed, and without Trinity, none of it would have happened. She had found the betraying wire transfers and noted the precise location of Eight’s emotional noise.
Trinity shook memory and fruitless unpleasant thoughts away. A few moments had the cuff off her left wrist as well, and the driver accelerated again. She had one foot jammed against a wheel well, though, and didn’t move much. She dropped the cuffs so they would clatter, a good cover for her real location, and reached again into her backpack, searching.
Her internal map calculated trajectory, what she could tell of speed and the layout of Felicitas. Sirens around them—the van had flanking protection. There was a thopping—a helicopter. It couldn’t be them, Division wouldn’t send these novices to collect her. At least, if Division was fully on-site, she would have restraints at wrists, ankles, knees and elbows, and probably be tranquilized to boot. She should know—she had generated, ordered testing and double-checked the transport protocols herself.
Perhaps there was an APB out—Division could have cast their net wide, but why on earth would they want to alert her or risk her going even deeper into cover? She hadn’t calculated that Eight would return to them, either, but perhaps they had refined the induction process and rid him of troublesome emotional noise.
If so, he probably wasn’t chasing her for revenge, merely to return her to Division’s fold. Which was small mercy indeed.
A frenzy of second-guessing was not helpful. She was in the dark with a rushing noise. The gleams from the slits in the walls were not good, either, because her eyelids were fluttering, making the sun’s glow a weak, uncertain strobe. It reminded her of things best left locked away in the darkest recesses of memory—first the greenness of the forest, then the induction table, cold and hard. The straps, rasping against ankles, wrists, elbows, hips.
The needles.
The van wallowed up a slight rise, Trinity still wedged between the front right corner and the wheel well. Struggling to keep from hyperventilating, to keep the fear-chemicals from flowing. Her fingers found the top of the pill jar; she squeezed and rotated, ignoring the ache in her wrists. It was only a little skin lost, and she had far larger problems at the moment.
The pills moved under her fingertips, tiny tabs; she tweezed one out and got the lid back on, palmed the pill to her mouth as the driver hit the brakes again. They were almost to the freeway—the slight rise in elevation and the pattern of turns told her as much. The flanking vehicles had peeled away, as had the helicopter noise.
Well. This is interesting.
She settled herself to wait as the pill dissolved. She had four left; it would have to be enough. After a few moments the potent chemical burn began, spreading down her throat, her arms and legs relaxing into the rhythm of the van bumping over indifferent pavin
g. She exhaled sharply, heart rate and respiration evening, and for the next two hours she was even more immune to physical pain or the creeping destabilization, her analytical capabilities given a boost and any other responses suppressed. She’d been told the pills worked with the virus, not against, and she consequently had much more control over their metabolizing. She still didn’t know what was in them, and the records she had managed to glance through hadn’t helped, either.
It didn’t matter at the moment. Now she could think, her eyes shut to close out distractions. Begin analysis. Eight is here. How long will being hit by a car slow him down?
Not very long. He’d tracked her this far; he wasn’t likely to let small problems like broken bones or internal bleeding get in his way. Any agent was possessed of near-miraculous healing abilities, the virus both aiding and allowing the body to supercharge natural recovery processes, taking care of its host. His only problem would be getting the bones set before they fused and he had to rebreak. Then, if he was conscious enough to see where they’d taken her, he would come to the police station and pick up her trail—which was, really, why she had let herself be captured by the corncob officer.
A holding cell she was fairly certain she could escape. Another agent was a completely different proposition. There was only a 13 percent chance Division had reacquired him and set him on her trail—a comfortingly low number.
Her name was Tracy Moritz. The pill hadn’t taken full effect yet. A queer, urgent, piercing sensation went through her, high on the left side of her chest, striking through ribs. Tracy Moritz. She’s dead, Trinity. You ran the numbers, you told Bronson.
What was that sensation? It was increasingly uncomfortable, to say the least. She breathed, filtering out the smell of diesel fumes and waiting for the dip-and-rise to the left that would tell her they had turned onto Blecher Street, the most logical route to the downtown station house. It was irrational to brood on the Moritz woman.
After all, she wasn’t Trinity’s first murder. Or her last. Certainly other hands had wielded the weapons and pulled the triggers, but it was Trinity’s analysis and calculations, not to mention planning, that had sent the teams out, given them protocols and analyzed returns. Bronson asked, the soulless machine that was Agent Three answered, and that was that.
She identified the sensation just before the dip-and-rise curve to the right of the interstate on-ramp. It was what others spoke of as “shame” or “guilt.” The induction was supposed to remove all traces of such things and leave only logic. As soon as she named it, the feeling began to fade under the pill’s cold, creeping clarity.
They were taking her north and west, onto the freeway instead of to one of the Felicitas station houses. Why? Trinity braced herself, cracked her eyelids and examined the bare interior of the trailer again. It was time to plan, and she unzipped the backpack a little farther. She might even escape this without giving her opponents a chance to shoot, but it would require careful thought.
How strange, she thought as her brain once again became the perfect machine, deconstruction halted for a few precious hours. My cheeks are wet.
She discarded the sensation as irrelevant and took a deep breath. Sooner or later, they would have to open the doors.
When they did, Trinity would be ready.
* * *
He almost missed the black SUV and the trailer, almost didn’t notice the one wrong detail. There was no APB out for his car, and that bothered him. Then again, jalopies with cracked windshields were common as the cold, and the hood wasn’t that bad, just scratched, and had anyone seen him hit the other agent? Cal listened to the scanner with half an ear—some jurisdictional borderlines being fought over, the dispatchers confused and given conflicting orders, everything snarling and tangling. In the middle of that came the news: the cop who had bundled her up and tossed her in a trailer had disappeared along with some of the out-of-towners, and the suspect? Gone, whisked away.
Felicitas being the size it was, a couple comments were made about all this juris-my-diction crap, and a gruff, brusque voice from someone high up on the local food chain leaning over a dispatcher’s shoulder came on to tell them to mind their goddamn mouths.
Cal listened while he drove, and his plan—to go downtown and spring her from a holding cell—evaporated like cheap beer. The Ford’s engine idled a little choppily as he waited at the freeway intersection for a lumbering oil truck to heave its way past, and the black SUV and trailer slid across his field of vision like a bad dream. He blinked, and there it was—good old Texan blue-black-red, instead of the scarlet and yellow of the New Mexico license plates. If he hadn’t been listening to the scanner, he wouldn’t have known to follow it, and if he hadn’t been paying attention, the plate might have gone unnoticed.
What the hell? Why...
To an agent, two and two didn’t always make four. Sometimes they made five or even eight hundred fifty-three, and this was one of those times. Cal wasn’t a planner, like Reese—he openly admitted as much. What he prided himself on, however, was being a tactical savant, quick to take advantage of any, well, advantage. Even one as simple as plain dumb luck.
I cannot be this lucky. Except he was, and he hit his left-turn signal. The light changed, he turned smoothly and stayed well back, hoping the rattling in the engine wasn’t a bad sign. That big wallowing SUV ahead of him would need a lot of fuel, especially when pulling a trailer and heading into the wind, and when they stopped, Cal could open up the back and get his hands on her.
Trinity. They’d called her Agent Three, Holly said, but she preferred Trinity. They did something to her, Holly said. She looks bad. And she’s... I don’t know, but she’s hurting. Inside.
The thought of that brave fragility—because it took guts to help Holly in the first place and even more guts to keep running—poured tension down his arms, and the steering wheel groaned slightly as his fists gripped. Just those few minutes in the hallway, under fire and smelling that wonderful, mouthwatering, absolutely drenchingly beautiful scent pumping out through her pores, had pretty much knocked him ass over teakettle. It meant the little swarmies in Cal’s bloodstream liked her, too, and that was a bonus.
She thinks you want to hurt her, Holly had cautioned, but that was ridiculous. He wanted to find her, that was all. The goddamn virus wouldn’t let him rest until he did. Reese was lucky, finding his girl so early in the game, and anyone could see Holly thought the world of him.
Was that what he was hoping for? He tried to imagine the unsmiling woman in the photographs trembling, looking up at her rescuer with those big dark eyes. In person, she’d been cool and efficient, but those eyes of hers could knock a man out into the black, and he could remember the thin gold hoops in her ears, her practical shoes, and the unconscious, beautiful grace as she slipped through a door and vanished after shooting that ass Bronson.
She shouldn’t have had to do that. Cal should have done it, because sure as Shinola, Bronson had sent the teams that killed Tracy, and directed every step of the game afterward.
And he’d seemed like such a hatchet-faced nonentity at the time. Maybe he’d just been the man on the spot, but sitting across the table from him during debriefs had given Cal the idea that Bronson enjoyed sending out kill orders.
There was a difference, Cal had finally decided, between killing when necessary and killing because you liked it.
Once they cleared the tendrils of Felicitas’s sprawled fingers, the freeway was a ribbon heading for the horizon. Cal turned the scanner down and drifted through heatshimmers on pavement behind the SUV and trailer, his eyes narrowed against the glare and the wind roaring through the windows, and spent a few moments wishing the windshield wasn’t so distinctively broken.
That brought up an uncomfortable thought: hitting the other agent with the car probably hadn’t killed him, any more than it would kill Cal himself. The program had been wound
down, but maybe they’d brought Black Hair in and given him the chance to round up strays? Not likely, with the Gibraltar virus mutating and the men who carried it suddenly getting hard-ons for very specific women. A twist like that made an agent go domestic and start prioritizing things like a girl and their own lives over things like orders, percentages and mission fidelity.
Or it could be that this agent was a new kind, since he smelled so off-kilter. Reese had theorized that they’d find a way to get rid of both the mutation and the emotional noise, or learn how to send the agents out to pasture in some way before the emotional noise became overwhelming. You could, theoretically, just keep agents away from women, but the simplest solution was often the most difficult to actually put into practice. Women were everywhere, civilian or military, and you couldn’t help but breathe them in.
Which brought up another consideration. If not for that fume of smoke and black metal covering Black Hair, he and the spectacled girl would have been complementary, and Black Hair would eventually be looking at just the situation Cal was in now.
That was Black Hair’s problem, though. Cal’s was sticking to that trailer and its cargo.
The SUV accelerated. Had they twigged to pursuit? Engaging them on the freeway was a bad idea. But no, it just settled back into a steady seventy-two miles per. Cal eyed the gas gauge, listened to the Chevy’s ailing engine under the roar of the wind and wondered if he’d had all the good fortune he was going to get for the day.
What do you say, Lady Luck? Give me one last hurrah? I’ve done all I can here.
Luck, like a woman, doesn’t stick around for those who don’t bother to do all they can to keep up. For those who do, though, she sometimes stretches herself to the limit.
Two hours later the engine was still making that noise, but the trailer, looming ahead of him like a whale in the light traffic around the much bigger urban sprawl of Cuartova, flashed its brake lights and slid to the right, majestically. There was enough traffic to keep Cal from being noticed, if he stayed with the flow.