In the cafeteria located a few floors up from the lab, she and Barnaby had let themselves be heard talking about a promising investment situation. Well, Barnaby had called it promising and worked to convince her of it. There was nothing remarkable about the conversation; various versions of it were probably taking place by watercoolers in several normal offices at the same moment. She played being convinced, and Barnaby loudly promised to set it up. She wired money to an investment firm—or a company that sounded very like an investment firm. A few days later, that money was deposited—minus a 5 percent “commission” to compensate those friends for their time and risk—in a bank in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in the name of Fredericka Noble. She received notification of this new account in an unmarked envelope placed in a copy of Extranodal Lymphomas at the county library. An Oklahoma driver’s license for Fredericka Noble, with her own picture on it, was also in the envelope.
She didn’t know where Barnaby’s drop was. She didn’t know what his new name was going to be. She’d wanted them to leave together—the vast aloneness of running was already part of her nightmares then—but he had thought that unwise. They’d both be safer separated.
More investments, more little envelopes. A few more accounts were created for Freddie, but there were also accounts and IDs for Ellis Grant in California and Shea Marlow in Oregon. All three identities were strong creations that would hold up under scrutiny. Freddie had been blown the first time the department found her, but this only made her more careful. Ellis and Shea were still safe. They were her prized possessions and she used them carefully and sparingly so as not to contaminate them by any association with Dr. Juliana Fortis.
She’d also started buying jewelry—the good stuff, and the smaller the better. Canary diamonds that looked to her eyes like nothing more than yellow sapphires but that cost ten times as much as their clear counterparts. Thick gold chains; heavy solid-gold pendants. Several loose gems she pretended to be planning to set. She knew all along that she would never get back half of what she paid, but jewelry could be carried easily and later converted to cash under the radar.
From a pay phone, Freddie Noble rented a small cabin just outside Tulsa, using a new credit card that would be paid from the Tulsa bank account. The cabin came with a sweet older landlord who sounded happy to bring in the boxes she mailed there—boxes full of the many things she would need when she walked away from her life as Juliana Fortis, everything from towels and pillows to her unset jewels to reflux condensers and boiling flasks—and collected his rent without commenting on her absence. She left a veiled hint here and there that she was planning to leave a bad relationship; it was enough for the landlord. She ordered supplies from library computers, giving an e-mail address she never accessed on her laptop at home.
She did everything she could to be ready, and then she waited for Barnaby to give the signal. In the end, he did let her know that it was time to run, but not the way they’d planned it.
That money, so carefully hoarded for so long, was now flowing through her fingers like she was some entitled trust-fund brat. One big spree in hopes of gaining her unlikely freedom, she promised herself. She had a few tricks for making real money, but they were dangerous, involving risks she could ill afford but would have no choice but to take.
People needed medical professionals who would break the rules. Some just wanted a doctor who knew how to oversee the administration of a treatment that was not approved by the FDA, something they’d picked up in Russia or Brazil. And some people needed bullets removed but didn’t want it done in a hospital, where the police would be notified.
She’d maintained a floating presence on the web. A few clients had contacted her at her last e-mail address, which was now defunct. She’d have to get back on the boards that knew her and try to get in touch with some contacts without leaving any new trails. It would be hard; if the department had found the e-mails, they probably knew about the rest. At least her clients understood. Much of the work she did for them ranged from quasi-legal to totally criminal, and they would not be surprised by occasional disappearances and new names.
Of course, working on the dark side of the law added other dangers to her already overloaded plate. Like the midlevel Mafia boss who found her services very convenient and thought she should set herself up permanently in Illinois. She’d tried to explain her carefully composed cover story to Joey Giancardi without compromising herself—after all, if there was money to be made by the sale of information, the Mob wasn’t exactly known for its loyalty to outsiders—but he was insistent, to put it mildly. He assured her that with his protection, she would never be vulnerable. In the end, she’d had to destroy that identity, a fairly well-developed life as Charlie Peterson, and run. Possibly there were members of the Family looking for her, too, now. It wasn’t something she lost sleep over. When it came to manpower and resources, the Mob couldn’t touch the American government.
And maybe the Mob didn’t have time to waste on her anyway. There were lots of doctors in the world, all of them human and most of them corruptible. Now, if he’d known her real specialty, Joey G would have put up more of a fight to keep her.