Page 17 of Heart of Danger
Just check out. Try pumping a corpse for intel, asshole.
So he knew all about breaking people down and?—
Fuck.
He couldn’t do it with this woman. Just couldn’t.
What the fuck was the matter with him? She’dfoundhim. Nobody could find him.
“Take it from the top,” he said. “Beginning to end. Soup to nuts. And make me believe you or I’ll MIB your medical degree out of you.”
She sighed. “Okay. My name is Catherine Young. Someone on your team—” she looked around the room, but the vidcams were invisible, “—maybe several someones, the ones who are listening to us right now, has googled me, I’m sure. So you know I am who I say I am, because you’ll have pulled up my driver’s license, my company ID, you probably have my high school picture.”
“Roger that,” Jon said quietly. “She’s good.”
She was. It wasn’t anything that argued in her favor.
“Go on,” he said.
She watched his face carefully. “I have always been interested in the brain. My PhD thesis was on dementing pathologies. Dementia is a very interesting pathology, the brain winding down. Understand it and you understand how the brain works in reverse. I worked at a research lab at the University of Chicago and published some papers on dementia. Millon Laboratories recruited me on one-year contract to examine some test subjects who were undergoing an experimental protocol. Some of the patients showed almost complete recovery of function. Millon will be looking at billions of dollars in profits if it comes up with a cure for dementia. There are over sixty million patients suffering from dementia worldwide. Around ten million new cases a year. That number is set to double in twenty years. So you can understand this is a huge priority for the lab.”
“But there was a problem,” Mac said. The basic interrogation technique was repetition. Have the subject repeat the story over and over again, and if there’s something that’s a lie, it will come out.
“Yes, there was. Functional and behavioral. I’ll spare you the technical details, but some of the patients…made no sense. Scientifically speaking. And I discovered that I was being followed.”
“Whoa,” Jon murmured in his ear.
“Followed?” Millon’s security system must suck if a civilian—a nerd to boot—busted them. “How so?”
She looked slightly uncomfortable, looked away. Lie alert.
“Heart rate increasing slightly, boss,” Nick informed him quietly.
Yeah, a lie was coming. On its way…
“I’m a scientist, which basically means I’m a trained observer. A couple of men, rotating. They thought that glasses or hats made a difference, but they didn’t to me. And my computer was hacked several times on the days I was studying the special patients. I keep a little trapdoor open, just in case. It’s called Red Hat and it is absolutely reliable.”
“She knows her computers,” Jon said in his ear. “Red Hat’s a really good sniffer. Not many people know about it.”
“And I set little traps.” She shook her head, long shiny hair rustling on her shoulders. “I can’t believe they fell for it but they did. I’d leave a stack of printouts on my desk then leave for half an hour. And sure enough—they’d have been moved. Not by much, once by only a tenth of an inch, but like I say, I’m observant. There was nothing in the printouts of any use to anybody. All my observations went into a highly encrypted thumb drive. They were really stupid and really easy to fool.”
All signs of lying were gone now. Whatever had happened between her and Millon’s security, she had only contempt for them. And she was telling the truth.
“Let’s get back to Patient Nine.”
“Yes,” she agreed, “let’s.”
“Do you have a description?”
“I do, of course I do. But I fear that the man I describe wouldn’t be recognizable to anyone who might have known him in his previous life. I’d say he’s lost about 40% of his body weight and he has had numerous surgeries.” Her lovely features tightened, a cloud passing over the sun. “The surgeries weren’t in his clinical file, which is unacceptable. I asked the administrative department and got nothing but crap runaround.” Those full lips pursed, her displeasure clear. “The records were lost, then at another office, then hadn’t been digitalized…it was always something. He’d undergone an extensive set of surgeries, at least five that I could count. It was right there on his body, plain as day.”
“Where?” Mac asked.
“What?” Her head whipped up, more shiny hair shifting on her shoulders. It was an amazing color, all natural. He’d been wrong to think it was just brown. It wasn’t. There wasn’t a chemical product on earth that could color hair about twenty different colors, from ash blonde to chestnut, going through the whole gamut of red. The ceiling light was right overhead and her hair was so shiny he looked away not to be blinded.
“What?” he said, instinctively.
“Boss,” Nick murmured in his ear. “Not a good time to go mentally AWOL.”
