I spun the wheel around, breaking hard. The Expedition skated a few feet in the original direction of travel, then completed the U-turn as the wheels regained traction.
“That’s him.”
Nick hit the siren as I swung the Expedition into the empty oncoming lane, accelerated beyond the Camry and swerved back into its path.
The cab’s driver hit the brakes. Its wheels locked and the Camry slammed into Nick’s side of the SUV, blocking his door.
I climbed out of the Expedition, pulled my sidearm, and edged around the front of the stationary SUV.
The shotgun-side rear passenger door opened and Daland emerged, both hands high over his head.
“Down,” I barked. “On your knees!”
Nick had climbed over the seats and was now covering the taxi cab’s driver, who had stepped out of the Camry, both hands in the air.
Daland dropped to his knees, shouting, “Easy with the guns! I’m unarmed.”
I stepped toward him. “The hard drive. Where is it?”
“What hard drive?”
The taxi driver turned toward me, all panicked and jittery. “He threw something out the window as we turned out of Church.”
Daland lowered his head, then turned toward the taxi driver, his face tight with anger. “They watch everything you do, every website you read, every keystroke you tap in. They know everyone you talk to, everything you buy. They own you. And you’re no one. Imagine what they do with people who matter.”
I held my position as Nick moved to cuff Daland. “Save the rant for your Twitter feed.” I gestured at the taxi driver. “Show me.”
He led as we jogged back toward the junction with Church, our footfalls crunching in the snow.
The radio squawked as I called it in. “Target secure, repeat, target secure. We’ll meet you back at the house. And tell the pizza guy his car is safe.”
The snow was falling heavier now and sticking to the ground with purpose, but it didn’t take long. We found the hard drive, half-buried in the snow, by the base of a fence.
I brushed some snowflakes from my face, enjoying the sharpness of the freezing air as it hit my lungs.
It was good to be done with Daland. It always felt great to close out an assignment successfully. We’d done our part. From here on, the ball was in the DA’s court. Right now, though, that familiar euphoria was tainted by something else, a foreboding about what I needed to get back to.
I looked up at the snowflakes, watched them cascade down onto my face which tingled under their gentle, cold stings, and shut my eyes.
The season, I sensed, really wasn’t going to be particularly jolly.
2
Boston, Massachusetts
Dr. Ralph Padley was a creature of habit, or so he liked to tell himself.
To his wife, colleagues and students, he was a massive control freak with borderline OCD-and, more often than not, just a massive pain in the ass.
This last year, though, his finely-orchestrated life had been thrown into chaos by something over which he had no control. That, combined with the absolute dread he felt at knowing that his days were now quite literally numbered, had only made him even less bearable.
The only person other than Padley who knew the origins of his near-pathological need for control was the psychoanalyst he had been seeing once a week for over a decade. When Padley was eleven-fifty-eight years ago almost to the day-he had failed to save his seven-year-old brother from drowning in a swimming pool during a family holiday at his grandparents’ place in St. Augustine, Florida. He blamed himself. After all, he was the older brother who was supposed to take care of his younger sibling. His sense of guilt, according to his shrink, made psychological, if not emotional or practical, sense, but Padley couldn’t help it. His nascent personality was more significantly affected by the fact that his parents concurred with his sense of guilt and decided he was indeed to blame. The failure of either parent to restart their son’s heart-and both were family doctors-had seeded an idea that would later flower when Padley selected his specialism after his initial four years of study at Harvard Medical School.
Before the prognosis, before he’d started losing weight and his skin had taken on a jaundiced tint, Padley had stuck to a rigorous routine. Nowadays, as well as the regular weekly appointment with his shrink and Sunday mornings in church, he went swimming four times a week, attended a concert of classical music once a month and made love to his wife every other Saturday. This last routine suited his significantly younger third wife very well, as it meant she always knew when she’d be free to nip next door and unleash her libido on one of Boston’s leading theatre critics, who despite a host of effete mannerisms and other evidence to the contrary-enough to convince Padley that his neighbor had zero interest in his wife-was most definitively not gay.
Padley was a Professor of Medicine (Cardiology) at Harvard, a post he’d held since 1985. As a surgeon, he’d saved many lives. He’d also taught many others who’d gone on to save even more lives. Over the years, he’d taken no small dose of solace in knowing that. He’d always considered it some kind of atonement for the other work he did, the work only a handful of people knew about.
The work that had the exact opposite effect on its subjects.
It had all started when he was his early thirties, at a time he was deep into some potentially ground-breaking research in the field of cardiovascular pharmacology. His declared aim was to create a next-generation drug that could maintain a stable cardiac rhythm-a “pacemaker in a pill” that would, within a generation, render both pacemakers and beta blockers obsolete as interventions for heart attacks.
The world of medical research being as secretive and competitive as it is, Padley kept his work to himself. Five years and hundreds of lab rats later, however, his experiments took a wrong turn and he ended up creating the very opposite of what he was looking for.
The discovery first confounded, then terrified, him.
For a while, he struggled with what to do about it. He considered destroying any evidence of his work and forgetting about it. He knew the latter would be impossible and came close to doing the former several times, but he also found that impossible. The potential for his discovery was simply too powerful to ignore. He decided on another tack. Being a staunch patriot at a time when his country was embroiled in hot and cold wars all over the globe, Padley contacted the CIA. They promptly dispatched someone to interview him and turned out to be very, very interested.
The understanding was simple. He would be paid handsomely to continue to work covertly on perfecting his discovery and its delivery methods while carrying on with his official work at the university.
Not long after, the scope of his secret work was broadened.
He’d led a double life ever since. Compartmentalizing his life like that didn’t present a problem for someone as maniacally organized as he was. It was actually quite a thrill to feel part of a covert, select group of people who were doing great things for their country. He enjoyed the meetings he was called to attend and, despite not knowing much about a couple of members in that group-not their real names, not a thing, in fact, about their lives-he’d felt a strong sense of kinship with them all and, by extension, with the agency.
Over the years, both lines of work had progressed successfully. Some ground-breaking research into hearts grown from adult stem cells had eventually put him squarely back on the medical map. Padley had found a way to grow cells that were capable of maintaining a stable electrical charge, without which even the most perfect artificially grown heart simply wasn’t viable for use in a living human being. He resolutely failed to see the irony that someone with no sense of humor had spent his entire professional career to date working with what had been christened the “funny current”, that is, the current that spontaneously occurs in the sinoatrial and atrioventricular nodes of the heart. Or to put it more simply, as he did to his students with a tone as patronizing as it was lacking in self-awareness: the electrical current that provides life to everyone in the lecture theater unless they’re wearing a pacemaker.