Читать книгу Hello, Gorgeous! - MaryJanice Davidson - Страница 13

Caitlyn drove up on the lawn, plowed through the snow, parked on the freshly shoveled sidewalk, got out of her Intrepid, and marched over to the glass doors. She slammed her palm down on the touch plate and, big surprise, the doors unlocked.

There was nothing on the outside of the big glass building to indicate what it was—just the address, 2118, in four-foot-high numbers—on the inside. The security guards stood behind their granite desk when she entered, but neither came near her. Good for them.

“Evening, Miss James,” one of them said.

“Is he in?” she asked.

“Uh, yeah. Top floor. He’s—”

“Don’t say he’s expecting me.”

“Well,” the other guard said apologetically, “he kind of is. Did you really take out an entire extractment team by yourself? Because that’s—”

She had already stomped across the black marble floor and was in the stairwell, and didn’t hear the rest. Damned if she was going to be trapped in one of their stupid elevators. She’d seen enough TV movies to know that was a bad idea, thanks very much!

Instead, she took the fifteen flights in about sixty seconds and popped out in the hallway, not even out of breath.

Okay, so. There were some benefits. And it beat being dead. Mostly.

But still. No meant no.

She was in an area she thought of as done up in Expensive Boring Office. Dark wood, dark carpet, light blue water cooler. The desks were also dark wood and looked like they’d been mass-produced and then delivered on the same day. The place smelled like paper and coffee grounds.

“Ah, Miss James! The Boss has been expecting you.” It was always like that, just like that…. The Boss. You could hear the capital letter. “Some coffee? Tea?”

“No.”

“He’s finishing up right now with the senator from Wisconsin—”

“At nine o’clock at night?”

“The Boss works long hours,” the secretary said with weird pride, “but if you’ll—”

Caitlyn kicked the door in. It was easy. It shot off its hinges and slammed into the thick carpet. It sounded like a woman beating a rug—whumpf! And it was so easy. That was, in a lot of ways, the scariest part of all that had happened to her. Been done to her. How easy it was to use it. The technology. It was exactly like using her own muscles, her own brain. She had never been able to see where she stopped and the nanobytes began.

“Caitlyn James to see you, sir,” his secretary said, peeking around her and not missing a beat.

The senator—a tall, good-looking woman with dark hair coiled on top of her head, shot up from her seat, and papers went flying.

“We’ll pick this up tomorrow, Nancy,” the Boss said. “I’m afraid I’ve got a scheduling conflict right now.”

“No doubt,” she said, leaving the file and picking her way past the door.

“Love your hair,” Caitlyn said as the senator passed her.

“What can I do for you, Caitlyn?” the Boss said, sitting back down and folding his hands on his immaculate desk blotter. He was short, in his forties, but powerfully built through the shoulders. He was dressed in a black suit—a good one, probably Italian—and his hair was the same shade, slicked back from his forehead. His eyes were the color of dirty ice, and his eyebrows were so light as to be invisible. As a result, he looked like a mean egg.

“You can die slowly, coughing your guts out in a part of the world that hasn’t heard of morphine.”

The Boss blinked slowly, like a lizard. “I’ll get right on that. I take it our team earned your enmity?”

“You’ve earned my en—my em—you’re the one I’m pissed at!”

“Caitlyn, Caitlyn,” he sighed, shaking his head as if over a daughter missing curfew. She hated that. The fatherly thing. So lame. If he’d been her father, she would have had a Clorox cocktail before she hit puberty. “We’ve been over this before. You work for the O.S.F. now.”

“No, I do not. I already told you. I’m not going to work for you guys. I don’t even know what O.S.F. means.”

“Office of Scientific Findings. And yes. You do. We own you.” He smiled, revealing very white teeth. “Want to see the receipt?”

“Drop dead, you bloodless bastard.”

“Such a lack of gratitude, considering that we saved your life. Three times, if the reports are correct. And they always are.”

She was silent, thinking, I never asked you to. Never, not one time. The question was, would she rather be dead than under the Boss’s thumb?

And here was what kept her up nights: Could they undo what they had done? Push a button from H.Q. and zap all the nanobytes into oblivion?

Could she go on if they did that? Go back to being normal? As normal as she had ever been anyway?

Annoyingly, he was still talking. “Caitlyn, dear, we’ve spent a fortune on you. A bloody fortune. If we traded you, we could get Alaska in exchange.”

“So? I didn’t ask you to save me. You were snooping all the channels, looking for a guinea pig. Some no-nothing loser—”

“Don’t be so hard on yourself, darling.”

“—to tinker and fiddle with and—and change.”

“For the better, which you seem not to have noticed.”

“Don’t expect my goddamned gratitude, you snake. Just because you’ve souped me up a bit, I’m supposed to do your dirty work? Fuck you.”

“Yes, so you’ve said. However, free will—at least in the O.S.F.—is an illusion. We work for a higher power here, Caitlyn. Your—how did you put it? Your indentured servitude is necessary so millions of Americans can enjoy their freedom. When you think about it,” he added, sighing again, “you seem awfully selfish.”

“Pal, you haven’t seen the least of it.”

“Think of the havoc you could wreak on terrorism if you only applied yourself.”

“Think of the havoc I could wreak on your lungs if I only applied myself.”

“This attitude of yours…I’ve given you time to see things in a more mature and, shall we say, less stupid manner—”

“Blow me.”

“It’s too bad.” He pressed a button on his desk. She could hear a hissing sound, like a snake caught in the ventilation shaft.

Warning. Warning. Unidentified gas in the vicinity.

Analyzing: three parts gas to one hundred parts room air. Dispensing nanobytes to lungs to facilitate oxygen extraction.

“I hope, after you’ve rested, we can begin anew. With a fresh attitude. This tiresome squabbling is getting us nowhere. Really, it’s—why are you still conscious?”

“Oh, I’ve been holding my breath,” she said. It had been surprisingly easy. “I can do it until I need to leave, which is right now.”

“Hmmmm.” He pushed another button, and the hissing stopped. “Just as well. Some of that was going to float over here, and I didn’t want to go to the trouble of finding my mask in this mess.” He indicated the piles of files. “Caitlyn, I’ll be honest with you—”

“After you just squirted knockout gas at me? And who does that, by the way? It’s like I’m trapped in a bad episode of The Bionic Woman!”

“Oh, it is not! Stop being so dramatic. Just last week I knocked out the Speaker of the House. Now, be fair. When have I ever misled you?”

“Go on,” she grumbled.

“Very good. You are the first of your kind, a fully functioning cybernetic organism who has retained your humanity. More, you are a human cybernetic organism, and thus you are held back only by the limitations of your own mind.”

He seemed to expect her to say something, but she had no comment. Frankly, she wasn’t quite sure where he was going with any of this.

“Simply put,” he continued, “we don’t know your limits. I suspect you don’t either. You shouldn’t have been able to analyze the gas so quickly, but you did. You shouldn’t have been able to disarm our team so quickly, but you did. And this with no formal training! Needless to say, the fact that you are more than you were is a tremendous validation of our work. The nanobytes we—”

“Infected me with.”

“—placed within you are now as much a part of you as your heart, your lungs, your delightfully annoying personality. We need you, Caitlyn. We must have you, in fact.”

“I think I liked it better when you were spraying gas.” That was nothing but the truth. His honesty was horrifying. It was awful to find out someone you couldn’t stand would do anything to hang on to you.

“You were very expensive, but that’s not the least of it. There are men in this world who make me look like the late, lamented Mister Rogers. Men who would gut and rape your friend Stacy and then sit down to a steak dinner. Men who would do that on a global scale if given the chance. We have to stop them. We need you to do it.”

“But I—I never wanted to be a spy. I don’t know anything about it and I don’t think I’d be good at it. Seriously, Eggman, you don’t want me.”

“Well, we have you. And you know more than you think. You won’t give off ‘spy vibes,’ for want of a better phrase, so you can go places many of our operatives can’t. Who will suspect a comely, giddy twenty-five-year-old of being a government assassin?”

“Twenty-four,” she said automatically. Then, “Whoa, whoa. I’m not killing anybody, pal. No way.”

“I’ll let you decide that,” he said generously, “when the time comes.”

“You’re scaring the shit out of me.”

“I’ve been known to have that effect on young women.”

She shuddered. Ick! “What if we make a deal, O short, dark, and evil one?”

“I’m listening, O annoying, tall, and orange-haired one.”

“One job. Just one. Pick your biggest badass, and I’ll go after him. Take him out, stop him from blowing up the world, bitch-slap him, whatever. And then we’re quits. You saved my life, I saved your job. We’re even. We’re done.”

“That sounds fine.”

“What? Really? It does?”

“Yes.”

“Huh. According to the chip in my head, you’re telling the truth.”

“I’m sure this isn’t the first time you’ve heard voices in your head.” He rose and extended his hand. She shook it, ignoring the urge to squeeze until bone splinters appeared and he screamed and screamed. Maybe next time. “Welcome aboard, Caitlyn. We’ll be in touch.”

God help me.