The first column, that Carston had been lying in order to lure her to her death, was beginning to seem more and more unlikely. Still, she had to stay alert. This whole story could be fiction. All the evidence and coordinating departments and separate analysts with their differing writing styles and the photographs from around the world—it could be a very detailed, elaborate setup. Not a foolproof one, either, since they had no way of knowing she wouldn’t just walk away from it.
But why would Carston have all this info prepared if he’d hoped to get her to a prearranged meeting? They could have killed her easily there without all this window dressing. A ream of blank paper was all you would need if you expected your mark’s brains to be on the pavement before she could open the briefcase. How quickly could this kind of thing be thrown together? She’d given him no time to manufacture it on the spot with her early arrival. Who was Daniel Beach in this scenario? One of their own? Or an unsuspecting civilian Photoshopped into the exotic scenes? They had to know she would be able to verify some of this information.
They’d offered her a plan of action in the final file. In five days’ time, with or without her, they would pick him up during his regular Saturday-morning run. No one would miss him until school began again Monday. If anyone did happen to look for him, it might appear that he’d taken a little holiday. If she agreed to help, she would have two days to get the information they needed, then she would be free to go. They hoped she would consent to keep in some form of contact. An emergency e-mail address, a social network site, the classifieds even.
If she didn’t agree to the job, they would do their best without her. But trying to leave the informant physically unmarked would be slow… too slow. Failure was hard to contemplate.
She almost salivated at the thought of all the goodies waiting for her back at the lab. Things she could never get her hands on out here in the real world. Her DNA sequencer and polymerase chain reactor. The already fabricated antibodies she could stuff her pockets with if the invitation was on the up-and-up. Of course, if Carston was for real, she wouldn’t need to steal those things anymore.
She tried to imagine sleeping in a bed again. Not carrying a pharmacy’s worth of toxins on her body at all times. Using the same name every day. Making contact with other human beings in a way that left nobody dead.
Don’t count on it, she told herself. Don’t let it go to your head and impair your judgment. Don’t let hope make you stupid.
As pleasant as some of her imaginings were, she hit a wall when she tried to visualize the steps she would need to take to make them happen. It was impossible to see herself walking back through the shiny steel doors into the place where Barnaby had died screaming. Her mind totally refused to construct the image.
The lives of a million people were a heavy weight, but still an abstract idea in many ways. She didn’t feel like anything could push her hard enough to get her through those doors.
She would have to go around them, so to speak.
Only five days.
She had so much work to do.
CHAPTER 4
This operation was murdering her nest egg.
That thought kept circling in the back of her brain. If she lived through the next week, and nothing changed in regard to her working relationship with the department, she was going to have serious financial issues. It wasn’t cheap changing lives on a triannual basis.
Just acquiring disposable funds in the first place had been a major procedure. She’d had money—the salary had certainly been a factor in her choice to do the job in the beginning, and earlier than that, she’d inherited a decent insurance payout when her mother had died. But when you work for powerful paranoids who probably note it in your file when you switch toothpaste brands, you can’t just withdraw all your money and put it in a shoe box under the bed. If they weren’t planning to do anything to you before, you might have just given them a motive. If they were, you just made them decide to accelerate their plans. You could try withdrawing all your money on the way out of town, but that limited your ability to pay for any advance preparations.
Like so much of it had been, it was Barnaby’s scheme. He’d kept her in the dark about the details to protect the friend or friends who helped him set it up.