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She glanced round to see the gunman by the fire exit, pistol in hand, aiming at her. More people screamed and scattered as he shot again. The bullet flew past, inches away from her face. She looked around in desperation. She was growing weaker. Darkness gnawed at the edge of her vision.
She saw a city bus slowing as it headed south through the intersection with Central Park West. She ran for the corner, some fifty yards away. Fleeing passers-by provided her with some cover as they scattered in every direction, shouting and screaming, and the gunman struggled to get a clear line. Jessie made it to the corner and slammed her fist against the side of the bus as it was starting to pull away from the stop. The driver stepped on the brake, bringing the vehicle to a jarring halt.
Jessie ran to the passenger doors as they opened on a rush of air.
“Go!” she yelled, climbing aboard.
The driver, a bearded man in his fifties, looked perplexed, but that quickly gave way to shock when he saw her condition. He was about to say something when a bullet burst through one of the side windows, shattering it, before embedding itself in his windshield, creating a pocked crater of frosted glass.
“Go!” Jessie commanded once more, but the driver had already hit the gas. She was flung into a passenger’s lap when the vehicle lurched forward.
Sirens sounded in the distance. Jessie gasped out an apology to the passenger who’d caught her and rolled into the empty seat beside him. She eyed the gunman from the relative safety of the departing bus.
“Central control,” the driver said into his radio, “shots fired at the intersection of Central Park West and Seventy-fifth Street!”
He brought his dispatcher up to speed. Even though Jessie wanted to listen, the words didn’t seem to make any sense. Her body felt numb and distant from her; she just wanted to rest. People were fussing over her. Was someone tying a tourniquet?
She wasn’t interested in them or their frantic words. She kept what little focus she had on the gunman hurrying away from the intersection, west along 75th Street.
The last thing she heard was someone say, “She’s losing a lot of blood,” but she didn’t know which of the blurry, increasingly distant faces had uttered the words. Her vision was going. A few seconds later, her mind went blank.
CHAPTER 6
THE SUN WAS shining as brightly as ever but Los Angeles had lost its luster. Justine steered her black Mercedes S65 into the parking garage beneath the Private building on Wilshire Boulevard. She’d taken Jack to the airport the previous evening and had returned to her empty apartment with a feeling of foreboding. As far as the world was concerned, Jack epitomized the action hero. No one else saw him as she did: The moments he drifted back into his memories and the pain of the past was written on his face; the nightmares when he spoke indistinct but fearful words; and the terrors from which he woke screaming, but with no recollection of the horror that had prompted them. Even though they didn’t live together, they were not often apart. She knew him better than anyone else did, but realized she would never fully understand him. He would rush headlong into danger when others would shy away, confront it without hesitation. Three murders and adisappearance in Beijing suggested Jack was going into danger there, and Justine could not help but worry about him.
She pulled into her parking space just as her phone rang and she saw Rafael Lucas’s name flash on-screen in the center of the dashboard.
“Rafael,” she said when she answered his call. “I’m just parking so we might lose signal. Can I call you back?”
“Sure,” he replied. He still had more than a trace of a Spanish accent, a legacy of his upbringing there in the region of Cantabria. “If you’re not with them, you might want to loop in Sci and Mo-bot.”
He was referring to Maureen Roth, Private’s tech guru, and Seymour Kloppenberg, the agency’s forensics expert.
“I’ll see if I can get hold of them,” Justine replied, but the line had already gone dead. She took the elevator up to Private’s offices on the fifth floor, emerging into the lobby where Michelle and Dewayne, the two cheerful receptionists, normally sat, but Justine was early and the pair weren’t in yet.
She found Mo-bot in the computer lab on the fourth floor. Maureen Roth, known to everyone at Private as Mo-bot, was a technology genius. Her tattoos and spiky hair suggested a cool, aloof rebel, but she had the warmest heart, and many at the firm, Justine included, thought of her as their second mom, someone they could go to with any problem. The rest of Mo-bot’s team weren’t in yet, so the lab was otherwise empty.
“Morning, sunshine,” Mo-bot said, turning her attention away from lines of code. “I hear Jack has gone to Beijing. What a tragedy. Those poor people.”
“Yes,” Justine agreed. “It’s awful.” She was silent for a moment out of respect for their fallen colleagues before continuing, “Rafael Lucas wants to talk to us. Says we should loop in Sci.”
“I’ll call him,” Mo replied as she hit the speaker button on the phone on her desk.
“Hey, beautiful,” Sci said after a couple of rings.
Private’s chief criminalist, Seymour Kloppenberg, was nicknamed Dr Science—or Sci for short. He ran a team of twelve forensic scientists who worked out of a lab in the basement of the building. He was an international expert on criminology and consulted for law-enforcement agencies all over the world, ensuring Private stayed current with the very latest scientific thinking. A slight, bookish man, Sci dressed like a Hells Angel biker, which often unsettled the agency’s more conservative clients. He enjoyed restoring and customizing old motorbikes, and Justine thought that right now she could hear a powerful engine idling somewhere in the background.
He and Mo-bot had been among Jack’s first hires and their mutual professional respect had evolved into a deep friendship.
“Flattery will get you nowhere,” Mo-bot replied. “And we don’t have time for your forked-tongue smooth talk. Rafael wants to speak to us.”
“No problem.” Sci adopted a more serious tone immediately.
The idling engine noise fell silent.
“I’ve got Justine with me. I’ll call Rafael.”
“Hey, Sci,” Justine said as Mo-bot dialed the number. It rang a couple of times before he answered.
