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“Stop feeling sorry for yourself,” Joe said. “My family’s stuck somewhere halfway across the country, if not outside the country, and I don’t know when or if I’ll ever see them again. Deal with your shit and don’t wallow in it. ”
“You—” She bit back her angry retort, and took a deep breath. “I am. I will. I just feel—”
“Yeah, I know,” he said, more gently. “Lost. There’s a lot of that going around. ”
A phone was ringing somewhere, a harsh distant buzzing sound that brought Bryn up out of a restless light sleep in a strange bed. Her eyes snapped open, and for a moment she didn’t know where she was—a darkened room, with streetlights casting slanted shadows across the carpet through the blinds. The place smelled stale and unlived-in, and she finally remembered that she was in the safe house, a nondescript ranch house with a pathetic straggly lawn and secondhand furniture in the run-down rooms.
The phone was ringing down the hall, where Joe Fideli was sleeping. She heard him answer it, although she couldn’t hear what he was saying.
Exhaustion pinned her flat to the bed until she heard a light knock on her closed bedroom door, and she rolled out to swing it open.
“You’re dressed,” he said. He sounded surprised, although he was still in his clothes, too.
“Yeah, I figured we’d better be ready for anything. ” That, and being dressed made her feel less vulnerable. She’d spent way too much time in that paper jumpsuit. “You got a call. ”
“McCallister. ” Fideli didn’t sound thrilled, and that made her muscles tense in anticipation of the bad news. “Listen, I think you’d better sit down, Bryn. ”
That really didn’t sound good. She backed up without thinking about it, and eased down onto the bed. He stayed where he was, talking from the doorway. “He’s been tracking down your mysterious supplier, and he says he found him. ”
“So … that’s good news, right?”
“Yeah, I guess so. ”
“Who is it?”
“Some guy named Mercer. Jonathan Mercer. Sound familiar?”
It didn’t, but then it did. She remembered, far back at the beginning of this nightmare, that McCallister had mentioned the name Mercer…. “Mercer and Sams,” she said.
“They … created the drug. Right?”
“Sams offed himself after Pharmadene started the Returné trials; couldn’t take the guilt. Mercer’s been quietly working like a good beaver ever since, until about a week ago when he went on vacation. ” That last was said with air quotes. “He dropped off of Pharmadene’s radar. Translation: he had a heads-up that the big conversion push was coming from Harte, and he didn’t want to end up strapped onto a table with a bag over his head. So he bailed, and they’ve been ripping up streets looking for him ever since. That’s stirred up a lot of information, including the fact that apparently Mercer had been quietly setting up his own production line for Returné. ”
“He could ruin everything for them. ”
“The only reason he hasn’t so far is that it’s in his interest to keep this thing a black-market enterprise. They need to shut him down hard and fast. Mercer’s a bigger threat to them than any of us are, but he’s also damn smart; we all checked him out and found nothing on him until he bolted. ”
“Joe,” she said. Her fists clenched where they rested on her thighs. “Why am I sitting down? What are you not telling me?”
“Mercer wants to make a deal,” Joe said. “McCallister’s full resources and protection of his fledgling operation, in exchange for keeping you supplied with the drug. ”
That wasn’t so bad. It was for McCallister, obviously, but … “What else?”
This time, Joe just gave up and said it. “He has leverage,” he said. “He has your sister Annie. She never made it to the airport when she left your apartment, and he says he’s going to kill her if we don’t take a meeting and make a deal. We’ve got just under two hours. He wants you there. ”
Annie. Bryn sat frozen; she’d expected … Well, she didn’t know what she’d expected. She hadn’t thought they’d go after her family. She was used to thinking of her people as safely distant, away from all this … but Annalie had walked into the middle of it. Made herself a target.
And Bryn hadn’t seen it coming.
“Bryn? Still with me?”
“Yes. ” She stood up, feeling unnaturally calm and focused. “When do we leave?”
Joe cleared his throat. “That’s just it. We don’t. McCallister says it’s better to keep you out of—”
“Give me the phone, Joe. ”
“I can’t do that. ”
