Working Stiff

Page 24

She realized, as he said it, that he hadn’t ordered her to do anything. Not like before. And she didn’t feel that her will had been taken away from her.
You can choose to put the gun up and walk away.
Or she could choose to go with him.
He didn’t try to convince her one way or the other, just waited as the seconds ticked by. A distant wail of sirens made him stir, just a little, but he still stayed quiet.
Bryn relaxed her stance and put the gun back in the holster under her shoulder. “I need to understand what just happened,” she said. “You need to tell me. Now.”
He nodded. “Then please, let me help you.”
* * *
He drove her—to her surprise—to a familiar house, glowing with lights. She recognized the kid’s bike up against the hedge, and the leaning, weathered mailbox.
“Why here?” she asked.
“Because I don’t think you feel safe with me,” McCallister said, as he put the car in park and killed the engine. “Joe and his family have a … calming effect.”
“You bring a lot of people here?”
“No,” he said, then hesitated for a second before getting out of the car. “Never, in fact.”
Bryn pondered that as she followed him up the walk, and as he rang the bell. Joe’s wife, Kylie, answered the door, drying her hands on a dish towel; she blinked in surprise, then smiled in genuine delight and opened her arms to McCallister for a hug. “Patrick, you’ve been avoiding us,” she said. He stepped into the embrace, briefly, and then pulled back to glance at Bryn. Kylie did, too, and if her smile faltered just a touch, it quickly warmed again. “Bryn. Nice to see you.”
McCallister said, “I’m sorry to drop in on you like this, but—”
“But you need to see Joe?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“He’s out back in the workshop. Follow me.”
Kylie led them through the warm, comfortable house, past the playing kids (who stopped to wave, or to stare, or, in the case of the baby, to gurgle), and out the back door. She pointed to a structure twenty feet away across the yard. “Out there,” she said. “Pat, you know how to get in?”
“I know,” he said. “Thanks, Kylie.”
“Visit us for dinner sometime.”
“I will.”
His smile disappeared as soon as she closed the back door, and in its place was a moment of unguarded emotion. Sorrow, Bryn thought. She didn’t need to be told that McCallister dreaded bringing danger here, as much as he enjoyed the company. It was written all over his face.
“It’s this way,” he said, and walked across the yard. He held out a hand to stop Bryn as they approached the closed door of the respectably large wooden shed, and a motion-activated light came on to bathe the area in a mercilessly bright glare. “Wait here.”
She couldn’t see why, but she nodded, and then, just to test that she could, disobeyed him and followed him as he climbed the three steps up to the door.
He shot her an irritated look and shielded a keypad from her as he punched in a series of numbers … a long series, longer than usual for these types of locks. She heard a musical tone sound, and a click as the lock disengaged.
Then McCallister knocked. “Joe? Coming in.”
“Come ahead,” said Joe’s voice from within, and McCallister opened up and entered, with Bryn at his heels.
Joe Fideli was sitting at a desk that was absolutely loaded down with monitors, computer equipment, storage drives—and it took Bryn a second or two to realize that he was putting away a gun. A serious weapon, too, not a pistol but a semiauto rifle, which he put back on a rack behind him.
The man had more guns in here than an armory. In fact, Bryn was fairly sure that she couldn’t even identify many of them, and that was a statement, after four years of supply duty in Iraq. That wasn’t even counting the shelves of other types of weapons—knives, Tasers, throwing stars, and brass knuckles in tidy order.
“Close the door,” Joe said to Bryn. She didn’t do it—another test, to see if she could. She did feel a weird impulse to move, though, and that worried her. Badly.
McCallister stepped back and shut it, and the magnetic lock snapped closed. Only then did Joe truly relax in his chair. “So,” he said, and laced his hands behind his head. “Nobody looks happy. Were the drinks watered? I hear that place ain’t much for quality.”
“Someone invoked protocol on her,” McCallister said, and sat down in one of the other two chairs on the opposite side of Joe’s desk.
Fideli immediately straightened up and got serious. “Deliberately?”
“Apparently.”
“Which one?”
“Sapphire.”
“Crap. That means whoever our friendly leaker is, they know way too much. And now so does our supplier.”
“Excuse me,” Bryn said sharply, “but could we please talk about what happened to me?”
The two men exchanged looks, and McCallister nodded to Joe. “Seriously,” Joe said, “this is my job?”
“It is tonight.”
Joe sighed and opened up a drawer in his desk. He took out a bottle and three glasses, and poured liberal shots all around. He handed one to Bryn as he said, “Tell me how it happened.”
“I was … finishing my drink,” she said. “And then a man sat down and came on to me. He said I was going to get up and go home with him.”
“Just like that.”
“Pretty much.”
Fideli cast a look over at McCallister. “Any leads from him?”
“He’s been taken in by my guys, but I doubt it’ll go anywhere. According to what they’ve learned, he was paid to grab her and drive her to a drop point; he was told the protocol information, but I don’t think he knows who paid him, or why, or what was going to happen. And he was paid at a dead drop, in cash, no surveillance available on that area. Dead end.”
Fideli nodded, and transferred his attention back to Bryn. “And then what happened?”
Bryn felt herself blushing, and hated herself for it. “I … I said okay, I’d go with him. I didn’t mean to. I didn’t want to.”
Joe nodded. “Drink up.” He passed a glass over to McCallister, and sipped his own. Bryn tentatively took a taste, and almost choked on the rich, smoky liquor. Scotch. Serious Scotch. But it warmed the chilly places inside. “Go on.”
“He said it again, and said something about sapphire—”
“He specifically triggered the protocol,” McCallister said. “He knew what he was doing.”
Joe said nothing. He just waited for Bryn to continue, and she swallowed hard and did. “He made me go outside with him and get into the car. It felt like …”
“Like you had no control,” Joe said, when she paused. “You couldn’t stop yourself.”
“Yes.” It had felt that way right until the moment McCallister had broken the spell. “Please tell me it was some kind of a drug.”
“Afraid not, Bryn.” Joe turned his glass in slow circles as he watched her. “There’s a side effect to the drug you take, Returné. It has some fail-safes built in, and one of them renders you extremely susceptible to following orders. We call these fail-safes protocols. This one is Condition Sapphire. It was developed for military purposes.”
“You mean it could happen again?”
“It can happen at any time,” he said. “And it’s real damn dangerous, because it means that if someone orders you to reveal things, you won’t have a choice. You’ll just talk.”
“You said military. What kind of military purpose?”
“You could be given a covert assignment—like, say, an assassination—and you would carry it out without question. You couldn’t talk if they ordered you not to do so. Not even to save yourself,” McCallister added. “It’s the most easily perverted use of the drug we can think of, and we’ve been trying to find a way to turn off the protocols.”
“Wait. Wait just a minute. Who is we? You two?” Bryn laughed a little desperately. “The three of us don’t make much of a mastermind conspiracy, guys. I’m just saying.”
The two of them exchanged a look, and McCallister said, “For security purposes, I can’t answer that.”
“Which means it’s not just the two of you?”
“Bryn—”
“Why didn’t you tell me about this? Warn me?”
“Wouldn’t have done any good,” Joe said in a neutral, calm voice. “Warning you doesn’t mean you could do anything to prevent it. Once a protocol gets invoked, you’ve got no choice. And no resistance. It would have just made you paranoid, not safer.”
She downed the rest of the Scotch in a fiery burst, blinked away tears, and said, “You’ve got no idea how this feels. First I’m dead. Then I’m hooked on your stupid drug, and now I’m some kind of mindless robot zombie freak. What if he’d ordered me to screw him? Would I have done that, too?”
They didn’t answer. McCallister looked down into his glass, but she saw how tight the muscles were in his jawline, and remembered the raw burst of fury she’d seen in him. So that answer was definitely a yes, then.
“There has to be something I can do about it. Anything!”
“We’re looking into it.”
“So until then, if some asshole comes up and talks about sapphires, I’m a slave? That’s all you can do for me?”
“There may be something else,” Joe said. “Give me a day to look into it.”
A day. The prospect made Bryn shudder, going out into the world again with that kind of astonishing vulnerability. “I can’t,” she said. “I can’t wait that long. I need help now!”
“One of us will stay with you at all times,” McCallister said. “You’ll be safe, Bryn. And we will find a way to neutralize the protocol.”