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In ten minutes, she told them her story, and in twenty, the police had found her purse and the stun gun both under the limo, just where she’d left them. They also found a dent in the limo’s passenger door where one of her attackers had banged his forehead, and some blood drops. And her shoes.
It still took another hour for the necessary repetitive interviews and paperwork.
“Sorry about that,” said the patrolman as he removed the restraints from her wrists. “Your security consultant is here to look at the damage to the building. We’ve verified your identity, Ms. Davis. Next time, leave the baton on the ground when the police show up, okay? Wouldn’t want any misunderstandings. ”
Security consultant? She looked up and saw Patrick McCallister standing near another of the cops, chatting as if he didn’t have a care in the world. He smiled, traded a handshake with the man, clapped him on the back, and strolled their way. He stopped at the bottom of the steps and said to the cop, “Is Ms. Davis free to leave now?”
“She’ll need to come to the station and sign the reports. ”
“Any injuries?” he asked—the cop, again, as if she weren’t even there.
“Not a scratch,” the cop said. “Lucky lady. Two against one, both armed. Could have gone real bad for her. ”
“Lucky,” Pat agreed without any expression at all, and for the first time looked at her directly. “Very lucky. ” He helped her to her feet. He’d brought her shoes over, and she stepped into them. Amazing, how much better she felt with footwear on—how much less vulnerable. “I’ll make sure she’s available for any additional interviews you need. Oh, and there’s a company on the way to replace the window, should be here any moment. Ms. Davis’s assistant director is on his way to supervise. ”
Joe Fideli. Bryn could imagine how much fun that conversation had been around his home dinner table. …Honey, sorry, I have to go back to the office; there’s an alarm going off. If his wife didn’t believe by now that he was having an affair, they must have the best marriage in the world.
The cops didn’t speak to her again, or even look her way, now that she was someone else’s responsibility; she was relatively uninteresting in the course of the investigation, which of course wouldn’t go anywhere. They’d taken DNA samples from the blood drops, and maybe they’d get fingerprints from the stun gun, but it wouldn’t matter. These had been professionals.
And she had indeed been very lucky.
Patrick said nothing at all to her as he walked her over to his car. “You drove?” she said. “You’re not supposed to be using that arm for a couple of days. We can take my car and I can—”
“Get in,” he said, and opened the passenger door. His eyes met hers, and she swallowed all objections, slid into the seat, and fastened her seat belt as he walked around the back.
Even when they were on the road, he maintained strict silence until she finally said, “Who called you?”
“Joe,” he said. The word had an edge to it, like a thrown blade. “He gets an alert from the alarm on his cell. He knew I could get here faster. ”
Of course Joe got the alert; she knew that, as she’d helped set up the system. Her brain felt slow just now, and bruised from all the day’s stress, even though the nanites wouldn’t let it bruise. Would they? No damage. No damage to her at all; she walked away clean and unhurt.
Every time.
“Please pull over,” she said softly. Pat didn’t respond, and suddenly she let it out in a full-throated, panicked scream. “Pull over!”
He steered to the shoulder of the road, and even before the tires had hissed to a stop, she’d popped her seat belt, thrown open her door, and stumbled out into the cool early evening. The stars glittered overhead in an unusually clear sky, and she stared up at them as she trembled and gasped for breath, feeling—she didn’t know what she was feeling, really, except it was overwhelming and painful, and it wouldn’t stop.
Patrick’s voice said from behind her, “It’s okay. ” He wasn’t angry anymore; he sounded concerned. “Bryn, you’re all right. Deep breaths. In through your nose, out through your mouth. Close your eyes. ” He put his arms around her, using both of them, and after a second of leaning against him, concentrating on her breathing, she remembered one of them should have been in a sling and not being used like this. “Relax. Relax. The fight’s over now. Ease down. ”
“Sorry,” she said faintly. “I don’t know what happened. ”
“You were running on adrenaline even before this, and you overloaded. ” His breath stirred her hair, and he kissed the side of her neck, very gently. “I’m speaking from experience when I tell you that you’ll be okay, but you can’t run hot all the time. Gear down. ”
Well, she was a machine, wasn’t she? Run by machines, anyway. The black humor of that tickled the back of her throat, threatening a laugh she couldn’t release because she knew it would sound like panic. Or screaming. Cars blurred by them on the road, blowing waves of cool air over them. Bryn’s hair ruffled in the wind like silk, and she closed her eyes, finally, and let that rushing sensation take over. Patrick’s body anchored her in place, and the wind stroked over her, soothed her, like the roar of the ocean.
It took long, slow minutes before she was better—or better enough to go back to the car, get in, and keep control of the still-high flood of emotion on the drive home. She didn’t quite freak out again when Pat asked, “Can you tell me exactly what happened after you left the house?”
She swallowed, tasted something metallic and dry in her throat, and wished she had water. Suddenly, she was burningly thirsty. “I got the thumb drive decrypted. I went to work. I closed up the building. Two men tried to jump me as I walked to the car. ” Stripped down to that, it didn’t sound so bad, did it? “I got away. ”
“One had a knife, one had a stun gun, you had a baton,” Patrick said. “Good thinking, breaking the window. Did you recognize them?”
“No. ” She had, she realized, never seen their faces. “They wore ski masks. But they were professionals at this kind of thing, seemed like. ”
“Do you think they know you have the files from Graydon?”
That was a perfectly reasonable question, but Bryn shook her head. “I don’t see how they could know that. Pansy Taylor is the only one who knows, besides the two of us and Joe. ” It went without saying that neither Joe nor Pansy was going to talk. “Unless—” She had a sudden, blinding flash of the file that Zaragosa had given her at Pharmadene, with the tiny embedded tracking chip. “Unless they LoJacked the drive. ”
She looked sharply at Patrick, who glanced back with the same alarm. “Do you have it?” he asked her.
