The Memory Collector Part 16

Where was he?

He held still and oriented himself. He was aboard Somebody's Baby.

He had an HK pistol in his hand. The cabin door was jimmied open and a drawer had been dumped on the floor. He was out of breath and his shoulder hurt, maybe from breaking open the door. He didn't recognize the pistol, but if it had been in the drawer, it would do. He ejected the magazine. It was full. He inserted it again and cleared the chamber.

He heard splashing outside, and a fearful cry.

He ran up the stairs to the deck. Bending over the rail, he saw a man in the water below, desperation on his face.

The guy was heavyset, and his forehead was bleeding. He struggled to the boat and slapped the hull, trying to get purchase. He sank under the surface and came up spitting.

Like G.o.dd.a.m.ned Chuck Lesniak in the Zambezi River, clawing to get back aboard the jet boat.

"Hang on," Kanan said.

He hesitated, then pulled off his denim shirt, stuck the HK and his phone in the sleeves, and set it on the deck. He knelt, reached down, and snagged the collar of the man's shirt.

"Calm down. I got you."

To his shock, the man shouted, grabbed his arm with both hands, and pulled him overboard.

Kanan hit face-first and plunged into water so cold that it burned. He came up gasping and saw the man's face. It looked like an out-of-control freight train.

The man was one of them.

He grabbed Kanan's hair and scythed his elbow around Kanan's neck like a wrecking crane swinging its claw arm. They went down together.

Knees, elbows, fingers, enormous strength quickening around Kanan's windpipe. They sank and twisted, legs locking. The man's grip was crushing.

The light dimmed. Below the surface the water was the color of coal slag. His lungs and bones and skin screamed at him. Air.

He fought the panic, brought up his knee, and reached into the side of his boot. His arm felt sluggish in the water. The night came at him from the edges of his world, gray and then black around the corners of his eyes, a tunnel, telescoping to a single point at the center of the big man's belly. He pulled the dagger from his boot.

He drove his arm forward, at the last gray point of daylight in the center of his vision.

The blade struck through cloth and skin, through fat and fascia and muscle, to the core. With a gush, the water warmed around Kanan's hand. The fat man relinquished his grip around his throat.

Warmth spread in the water. Kanan pulled the knife out and pushed the man away and kicked for the surface. The sun above was a dim pinp.r.i.c.k.

The pain in his lungs was intense. Unable to fight it any longer, he breathed. And his lips, his nose, his eyes crested the surface. Gasping, he sank back beneath the water. Kicked. This time he came up and stayed up, gulping oxygen. The slate gray hole at the end of the tunnel brightened and expanded to dark water and the gleaming white hull of the boat. He grabbed the mooring line.

A plume of blood was muddying the water.

No bubbles. The breath had already been expelled from the man's lungs and rolled upward to rejoin the atmosphere.

Kanan hung on the line. The blood spread around him in luxuriant swirls. He needed to get away.

Letting go of the mooring line, he swam through the frigid water to the far side of the sailboat. He dunked himself, again and again, washing off the fat man's blood. He climbed up the fixed ladder. On the deck he found his denim shirt. His phone and a pistol were wrapped inside.

He put on the shirt and stuck his phone in the shirt pocket. He worked the gun into the small of his back. He slid the knife back into the edge of his boot.

He hopped to the dock and walked, shivering, away from the sailboat. In the parking lot he saw a red Navigator. He had a set of keys in his pocket, and they opened the doors.

Teeth chattering, he stood by the Navigator and pulled off his denim shirt and the soaked Fade to Clear T-shirt beneath. His arms were covered with writing. Some of the ink had run. He found a Sharpie in the glove compartment and copied over every letter, slowly, until each word and name was vivid and sharp and black.

D. i. e.

He stared at the word. If he ever saw his family again, would they understand? Would "I did this for you" keep him from being ruined in their eyes?

He had a vehicle. He had a knife and a handgun. He wished to f.u.c.k he had any information.

He got in the Navigator and started the engine.

* 13 *

Phone to her ear, Jo paced the hallway in the radiology department at San Francisco General. Tang paced the other way, chewing her thumbnail. Ron Gingrich's girlfriend, Clare, leaned against the wall and watched them go back and forth like dots in a game of Pong.

Jo hung up her phone. "Still can't get hold of anybody knowledgeable at Chira-Sayf. I'm going down there."

Tang's face looked like a closed fist. "Take it to them. Find out what they're cooking up in their lab and whether Kanan is sprinkling it around. Don't take no for an answer. Attack, attack, attack."

"If you get any news about the MRI, call me."

Clare clutched herself tightly, like a little kid. "What's wrong with Ron?"

"I can't say for certain. Let's hope it's nothing serious," Jo said.

She left, feeling like a liar.

Forty minutes later she pulled the Tacoma into the headquarters of Chira-Sayf Incorporated. The company occupied a quad of sandstone-and-smoked-gla.s.s buildings in a Santa Clara business park. The birches were just beginning to leaf out. The parking lot was full of sleek new cars. CHIRA-SAYF was chiseled in a block of stone on the landscaped lawn. That spoke of permanence, or of a CEO with hubris and excess cash on hand.

Inside the main building, the atmosphere was cool, quiet, and minimalist. The receptionist told her to wait.

Jo looked around. No chairs, no place to sit. No plants, just an eso terically arranged rock garden. The only thing that offered hospitality was a rack of brochures: stiff, glossy promotional material about the company. Her Chinese acquaintances would have a field day with the feng shui of the place.

Jo paced. The air-conditioning hummed like a mantra. After ten minutes, she took a brochure from the display. Maybe she could fold origami while she waited. Create a paper menagerie of swans and field mice and nan.o.bots.

"Dr. Beckett."

At the sound of clicking heels, Jo looked up. A woman in her forties walked into the lobby, hands clasped. She had a square face, square figure, flyaway blond hair. And a look in her eyes like a beachcomber watching a rogue wave roll toward her.

Jo knew that when she told people, "Hi, I'm performing a psychiatric evaluation on your employee who's wanted by the police," it went down like a gla.s.s of nails. She smiled and extended her hand. "Ms. Calder?"

The woman shook, briefly, with just her fingers. "I believe my admin told you to speak to our H.R. representative."

Calder's voice sounded thin in person, and Jo caught the undertone of a Southern drawl. Jo put a note of bright certainty into her reply.

"It's better to go straight to the source, and Misty Kanan a.s.sures me you're it. I can talk to H.R. later."

Calder paused, seemingly baffled that she hadn't shooed Jo off. She cleared her throat. "Right." To the receptionist, she said, "She's with me, Jenny. Sign her in. No calls."

The receptionist eyed Calder sharply. Jo clipped a visitor's badge to her blue blouse and followed Calder down the hallway to a conference room. Calder closed the door and gestured for Jo to take a seat at the conference table.

"Ian Kanan isn't employed by Chira-Sayf," she said.

"Excuse me?"

Calder sat across from Jo and laid her hands flat on the mahogany tabletop. "He's an independent contractor. Chira-Sayf uses his services on a per-diem basis. Technically, he's self-employed."

The zipping noise in her head, Jo thought, was the sound of Calder pulling on a fireproof suit. One that would cover her a.s.s.

"Ms. Calder, I'm not here to interrogate you. Ian Kanan is missing and critically ill. I'm trying to find him."

"You're working for the police. I presume you're gathering information to use if you testify in court."

Against the company, she meant. She was skittish about liability, bad publicity, or something worse.

"And even if he were an employee, privacy laws forbid me from releasing personnel records without a subpoena," Calder said.

"I don't need his personnel records. I need to talk to people who know him and find out where he may have gone."

"The police warned us that Kanan might be violent. We're having to inst.i.tute new security protocols, bring in protection for the office and senior executives." Her eyes were narrow in her square face. She wouldn't quite look at Jo. "We don't know what Kanan might do. People are afraid."

"I understand. But I'm on your side. I'm trying to get Kanan off the street."

Calder pressed her hands against the tabletop and stared at the air around Jo's head as if seeing a halo or fluttering wings. "I don't think anyone's going to talk to you."

"No? Then let's talk about the company." Jo opened the corporate brochure. "What kind of nanotechnology work does Chira-Sayf do?"

"I don't see how that's relevant."

"Chip design? Medical applications?"

She flipped through the brochure. There were photos of techs in clean-suits working in sterile manufacturing conditions. Scientists in white coats. The CEO, Alec Shepard, posing on the corner of his desk. He was an expansively sized man in his late forties, with a penetrating gaze, a red beard going gray, and a master-of-the-universe smile.

The next page showed a laboratory someplace-red dirt, hot climate. Lions. Jo frowned.

Calder said, "I'm sorry, I can't reveal proprietary information."

Jo looked up casually. "Ian may have been poisoned. I need to know if he could have been contaminated in the course of his work for Chira-Sayf."

"Contaminated? He couldn't-that's not possible. Not because of work. He hasn't been in the office for almost two weeks."

"I know. He's been on a business trip to the Middle East and Africa. And I'm trying to retrace his steps to find out where and how he came in contact with a poisonous substance."

"But that could be anywhere. The world is dangerous. People want to steal our intellectual property. They want to steal the very materials we work with. One of our labs, people broke in and ripped the copper wiring out of the walls. Just hacked away at the drywall with crowbars and tore out the phone lines."

"Was that the lab in South Africa-this one?" She turned the brochure. "Have there been other thefts?"

Calder stared wide-eyed at the brochure. Jo kept a pleasant expression on her face, wondering what had set Calder clicking like a Geiger counter.

"It's irrelevant. That brochure's out of date." Calder held out her hand. "Here, I'll take it and get you some more current information."

"That's all right." Jo put it in her satchel. "Is Ian happy here at Chira-Sayf? Has he had any problems?"

Calder looked at the satchel like Gollum eyeing the Precious. "I'm sorry. I just can't tell you anything. Ian's unexceptional. I don't see him that often."

"I thought you were his supervisor."

Calder frowned as though she'd just tripped over a crack in the pavement. "Not his direct supervisor. As I explained, he's an independent contractor. He doesn't fit into our corporate structure."

"He's a lone wolf."

Her cheek twitched. "Kind of."

"Who did he work for before he came to Chira-Sayf?"

"I'd have to look that up."

Jo felt her blood pressure rising. "Ms. Calder. Did Ian's trip to South Africa last week put him in any dangerous situations?"

"I can't tell you anything about that. I don't supervise his trips overseas."

"Who does? Who should I speak to? The travel department? Engineering?"

"I'm sorry. I can't help you."

Jo lay her hands flat on the table and counted to ten, slowly. "In that case, I'd like to speak to Alec Shepard."

Calder stood up like she'd been goosed. "That's not possible. He's out of the office."

"Then I'll wait for him to get in."

"Dr. Beckett, you're wasting your time. You need to talk to Ian's friends and family to figure out what's... made him unbalanced. There's nothing more I can help you with." She walked to the door and opened it. "I'm sorry."

"Me too."

Calder escorted Jo out. When she got in the truck, Jo looked back at the building. Behind the blue gla.s.s Calder stood gripping her hands tightly in front of her, like a funeral director.

Jo found her phone and punched a number.