The phone buzzed. I stared at the blinking light, then picked up the receiver and waited. “Hello?” an uncertain voice asked.
“It’s Bill, Rikki. Go ahead.”
“Oh! Well, someone said Karen was in a conference?”
Before I could ask where, a harsh voice near Rikki demanded who she was talking to. “Uh, you better come down?” she said.
The voice sounded like Gregory’s. I slammed down the phone. He’d double-crossed me. I went into the main corridor. Two employees gave me a curious look. Gregory was not going to leave me to my own devices up here, I was sure of that. I turned right, away from the central stairway, and went in search of an exit. As I reached the end of the corridor, a voice yelled at me, “Hey! Stop!”
I tried an unmarked door. To my relief, it gave onto a concrete stairway. I plunged down the stairs. They ended in a stale vestibule on the first floor. To my right was a door that would take me back inside. In front of me was a door labelled, EMERGENCY EXIT. ALARM WILL SOUND.
This counted as an emergency. As I reached for the door, I had the bizarre precognition of hearing the fire alarm go off before I touched it. But the head-splitting bell was real enough. It propelled me out the door.
In front of me was a small walk, landscaped with grass and low bushes, and beyond them a strip of parking spaces. The main lot was around the corner of the building. I sprinted down the walk.
As I turned the corner, the first thing that caught my eye was a woman running for her car. At the same instant, I saw Gregory near the building entrance, speaking frantically into his cell phone. The woman was about five foot six, with straight brown hair that fell to her neck. She had to be Karen.
I followed Gregory’s line of sight and my blood ran cold. A maroon sedan was speeding into the lot. Karen reached a white Honda and dug for her keys in her bag. The sedan screeched around the corner. I raced across the asphalt, entirely underestimating the car’s speed. The next thing I heard was the shriek of tires. The sedan was in a skid and coming right at me. At least Pratt, or his partner, had been nice enough to hit the brakes.
I dove out of the way and rolled into a gap between two cars, still one space over from Karen. Propelling myself under the car, I scraped along the pavement. Tires squealed behind me. I popped out on the other side and knocked on Karen’s passenger window. She gaped at me, terrified, from behind the wheel.
“I’m a friend of Sheila’s!” I shouted over the scream of the fire alarm. The maroon car had blocked Karen’s exit. I motioned for her to get out. “come with me!”
Either I had an honest face or she made a quick calculation between the lesser of two evils. Karen sprang from her car. We dashed in parallel rows away from the sedan. “Sheila was a friend of mine,” I repeated, yelling across the space between us. “I’ve got a Scout over here.”
We slowed in the lane between parked cars. The fire bell ceased abruptly, leaving us in a gaping silence. Karen kept her distance, eyeing the line of trees at the end of the lot and the boulevard beyond it.
A car door slammed. The head of Pratt’s partner bobbed among the glittering cartops.
“They’ll catch you if you run,” I warned. “They were hired by Dugan at LifeScience.”
That did the trick. Without saying a word, she joined me, angling across the lot. The maroon car peeled out, coming our way. The Scout was a few spaces over, in the last row of the lot. Karen and I met at the passenger door. I jerked the keys from my pocket, sorted frantically, and fumbled the right one into the lock.
Karen climbed in. Pratt’s partner was hurrying across the last bit of pavement as fast as his stomach could shake. There was no time for me to get to the driver’s side. I pivoted and stood inside of the passenger door, pulling it most of the way closed. My posture relaxed, as if I was going to surrender to the fact the man had caught me. I gauged his approach: six feet, four, two…
I swung the door out as hard as I could. Twenty pounds of steel hit him square in the stomach and sent him sprawling to the ground. He gasped for breath. I caught the door on its way back and dove into the jeep over Karen’s lap, into the driver’s seat. She slammed the door shut and hit the lock. Again I fumbled with the keys, trying to will the tiny tip into its slot in the ignition.
By now the maroon car had arrived. It blocked my rear exit. I heard the partner gasp something to Pratt. The next moment Pratt was at my window, pounding on the glass.
“Open up!” he commanded. “Open up!”
I turned the key. The engine cranked, and cranked, and cranked. Please don’t be ornery, I pleaded.
“I’ve got mace,” Karen said.
It was the first time I’d heard her speak. Her voice was clear, pragmatic, and perfectly calm. I stared at her. She gave a little nod. Her hand was in her bag and had already closed around the canister.
“I’m going to roll down the window and duck,” I said.
She nodded again. I held my arms up in surrender to Pratt. He’d just cocked his elbow to smash in the window. “I’m opening!” I shouted.
I rolled the window down fast, inhaled, and ducked away. Karen leaned across me and gave Pratt a quick shot. He screamed and staggered against the car next to me. I rolled the window back up.
I pressed the gas pedal to the floor and cranked the ignition again. At last the engine roared to life. Over my shoulder, I saw that the partner had regained his breath and was getting into the maroon car behind us. I didn’t intend to wait to find out if he was going for a weapon.
Only one direction was open. In front of me was a high curb and a tree, about ten feet tall, newly planted on the grass embankment between the parking lot and the boulevard below. I gunned the engine and pushed the tires, in first gear, up to the curb. More gas, and they jumped it. Sad to say, the little tree wasn’t much of a match for the Scout. It cracked and went down. When my rear tires hit the curb, the jolt shot both Karen and me up out of our seats.
The Scout skidded down the grass slope. I held on to the wheel, pumped the brakes, and wrestled the jeep to the right to avoid the cars parked along the street below. Now I found myself driving down a narrow sidewalk, one wheel still angled up on the grass bank. Luckily, this was not the kind of place where people actually walked.
As soon as I found a break in the row of parked cars, I bounced down between them. When traffic was clear, I swerved onto the boulevard. I knew the maroon car would be coming out of the lot to head us off. I crossed two lanes and hit the median at an angle, jerking the left wheel up to help it over the curb. Again we were thrown into the air and pitched from side to side as the other three tires dealt with the median. Something scraped horribly on the curb as I came down into the opposite lane.
“Ouch,” I said, but still managed a smile to myself.
The Scout had come through. I accelerated and we headed away from BioVerge.
“Who are you?” Karen asked in that same steady, purposeful voice.
I looked over at her. My smile disappeared. She still had the mace in her hand, and it was pointed at me.
21
“Sheila tore the pages out of her diary because she was afraid. At least, that’s my theory.”
Karen Harper paused to lift a cup of coffee to her lips. She sat across from me at a small tottery table in a cafe in downtown Santa Clara. Her blue-jeaned legs were crossed. Her finger curled around the handle. The cup was perfectly steady.
I sat facing the door of the cafe, just to be on guard. Chances were, though, that Pratt had not been able to track us through ten miles of surface streets.