She couldn’t bring herself to look at her severed wrists. She could feel her remaining hand there, hanging by what felt like the thinnest strand of flesh. She knew it wasn’t good. Knew she was losing more blood than she should.
Didn’t matter. She would crawl with two good knees. Crawl faster than she was losing blood.
No, she couldn’t.
She was being stupid. She needed to tie off her wrists. Then continue crawling.
But how?
You can’t tie off anything without hands, can you?
She’d try anyway.
Nichole would be damned if she would pass out from blood loss before a final encounter with her nemesis.
Her boss.
She rolled over onto her back, then angrily ripped at her shirt with her teeth. Fine. Let him see me in my bra. As I squeeze my blood into his face. Let that be the last thing he ever sees.
Tastes.
Then the solution came to her:
Kitchen.
Electric range.
A dial that could be turned with her teeth.
Yes.
Keene needed to stop with the orange juice. He was drinking it compulsively now, and the acid was tearing up his stomach. The old habits were slowly creeping back. Only now with Florida’s best, rather than the smoky nectar of the Scottish highlands.
But what he was reading … well, it would have driven anyone to drink.
Keene had worked another source.
Keene’s second source was high-placed; it was rumored that she was the one who currently acted as a director of CI-6, or whatever you wanted to call their thing. She certainly knew enough. Keene never walked away from one of their conversations disappointed.
If this intel could be trusted, then “Murphy, Knox” was not what his good buddy McCoy had claimed it was:
A cover for CI-6 operatives. Fixers. Sleepers. Black baggers. Accident men. Killers. Professionals, mixed in with civilian support, to complete the illusion of a working financial services company.
Nope.
It was a financial services company.
Granted, it was a financial services company that was designed to infiltrate and destroy terrorist financial networks. Or for that matter, anyone whose finances needed destroying, international or domestic.
According to Keene’s second source, the funding worked both ways. Money poured out of Murphy, Knox, too. Funding training. Weapons. Research. Operations. Anything that you didn’t want attached to an official budget line? Simply run it through a guy like Murphy.
So why had McCoy lied to him? He clearly had to know this. He acted like he knew every intimate detail of that office.
And for God’s sake—why were more than a half dozen people going to die there this morning?
Jamie stared at the back of the chair he’d been sitting in about … oh, what was it? An hour? Two hours? Jamie was bad at noting the passage of time. Whenever he poured himself into his writing, it was as if the digital clock on his computer played tricks on him. He had an arrangement with Andrea during his parental leave: Every morning, he could devote some time to his freelance career, pitching stories to men’s magazines.
It was the only way, Jamie had explained, he’d ever be able to quit Murphy, Knox. Leave the Clique behind.
But by the time Jamie felt like real work was being accomplished, time was up. Chase needed his attention. Andrea needed a break. He was glad to give it to them. They were his family. His everything. But every minute away from his desk felt like another minute the dream was delayed.
And now this, stuck in the conference room with his half-dead boss, was like that. Being in that strange place where the clock seemed to be actively working against you.
“Jamie,” a voice said. “Are you there?”
God.
It was David.
Amy and Nichole had left clear instructions about what to do if someone—who was not Amy or Nichole—tried to enter the conference room: Aim for the head.
“I’m not going to kill anybody,” he’d told them.
“You want to see your kid again?” Nichole had asked.
“You can’t make me,” he said, feeling like a third-grader the moment the words left his mouth.
Nichole stuffed the third gun in his waistband.
“Do it for your family,” she said.
And then they’d left.
They had not told him what to do if David started talking to him. David, the man who started all of this when he tried to force everyone to drink poisoned champagne.
“Jamie … please.”
“Yeah, I’m here.”
“Could I ask a favor?”
“What?”
“May I have a cookie? I’m starving.”
As much as he wanted to ignore him, Jamie couldn’t. This was a man who’d been shot in the head, asking for a cookie.
Never mind that a man who’d been shot in the head shouldn’t be asking for a cookie.
A few weeks before Chase was born, Andrea purchased a children’s book from a store near work. “To start his library,” she’d said. It was called If You Give a Mouse a Cookie. Late one night, Jamie read the book. The point was cute and simple: Give a mouse a cookie, and he’ll want something else. And then something else. And something else still, until finally, you’ve surrendered your soul to a rodent.
Okay, maybe that wasn’t exactly the point of the book. But that’s what it felt like now. David would ask for a cookie. Then a gallon of milk. Then a gun. And then …
“Do you mind?” David asked.
“What kind?” Jamie heard himself saying.
“Anything but a Chessman.”
Of course.
Chessmen were for losers.
The conference table was frozen in time. Napkins with cookies stacked on top. Moisture-beaded bottles of champagne. Notebooks. Pens, some uncapped. Molly’s white cardboard bakery box—the one that had been holding doughnuts and a gun. Snipped string.
Jamie fished a Milano from the bag and carried it over to David, whose eyes were closed. Jamie knelt down next to him. His head swam with options. He had to proceed carefully.
If you give a boss a cookie …
“I have your cookie,” he said.
David’s eye fluttered open. “Thanks.”
“You want it?”
Jamie dangled the cookie above David’s open mouth. His boss looked, somewhat absurdly, like a baby bird, waiting to be fed a worm.
“Yes.”
“Well, not yet.”
David’s eyes narrowed. “Really.”
“First you’re going to tell me how to disable the lockdown so I can get off this floor.”
David smirked. “And then I get the cookie?”
“Then you get the cookie.”
Jamie felt like he was engaged in a real estate deal with a toddler. Maybe he could throw in a sippy cup, sweeten the offer.
“I like you, Jamie, I really do. You’re unlike anybody else in this office. I didn’t want you to come in this morning, but my bosses insisted. Said you had to go. I couldn’t understand it.”
“Then help me.”
“I still don’t understand it.”
“If I can get out, I can call an ambulance for you. You don’t have to die.”
“Especially with you having a newborn baby at home.”
“Goddamn it!” Jamie cried. “Tell me how to get off this floor!”
“I wish I could. But the answer is no. You’re going to die up here, just like the rest of us.”
Jamie felt his blood burn. He was overcome with the urge to smash his fists into David’s face, force him to cough up the secret code or pass key or the friggin’ Omega Project—anything to help him leave this building. Now.