From there he’d driven back here. By then, night had descended, the heavens had opened up, and it was pouring. He’d parked the Volkswagen (untraceable to him) in Turner’s garage, which was near empty, most people having fled ahead of the storm. Still, it would be a few more hours before Turner would be deserted enough for him to kidnap Wu.
Kidnapping. He’d never signed up for that. What would Alfonso think?
Or Sammy?
Enough time to finish off what he still needed to do.
Using his phone, and a hacking program Blade had provided him six months ago, he’d accessed the Turner security network and disabled the nearby garage cameras. Then, using the same network, he’d located Wu’s room and confirmed that she was there because the nurses had entered her 8:00 P.M. vital signs.
Around this time, Wu’s sister, who they’d been tracking with the implant, had arrived at Wu’s room. That was when her signal had cut out in a burst of interference identical to Wu’s. Finney had noticed the signal change on his tablet and, agitated, ordered him to Wu’s room to investigate.
But Wu and her sister weren’t going anywhere soon, and he had other priorities now. His own ones. Finney had changed the rules on him, and had no way of knowing where Sebastian was. The sister could wait. So he’d first trotted through night and rain to Higdon Park (another preparation), and crept past the security guards huddled inside a tiny trailer, and into the construction zone (more preparations).
It’d taken him longer than he’d planned. By the time he was done, the interference had gone: disappeared at the same time the sister had left Wu’s room.
Interesting. He’d have to remember that.
At that point, he’d conferred briefly with Finney, who’d agreed that the interference was no longer an issue. He’d reassured Finney that he would send word when ready, and then had returned to his car to wait for Blade to make good on his (her?) word.
Which, as he took a sip of coffee from the Thermos, Blade did: a soft chime of his phone announced that Blade was ready to forward the completed hacking program, pending receipt of payment. Sebastian sighed and hit SEND, imagining the numbers in his bank account spinning down to zero. Several seconds later, the program arrived, with instructions on how to use it.
He read the instructions but didn’t open the program—not the right time yet. He didn’t quite know what he was going to do with it but felt confident that its value would soon make itself clear.
Assuming, of course, it worked.
Twenty minutes later, at 12:10 A.M., Wu’s 12:00 A.M. vitals appeared on his phone, indicating that Wu’s nurse had come and gone on her midnight rounds. Barring the unexpected, the nurse would not return for four hours.
It was time.
Back now into Turner: where, in an out-of-the-way broom closet, he again donned the guise of Robert Rodriguez, perioperative technician. He went to Wu’s room on the seventh floor and slipped unseen past a couple of nurses trying to wrestle some demented old hag in a patient gown back into her room. Goddamn, the mouth on her: filthier than the skateboarding kid.
He reached room 738. Wu’s room, according to the hospital network. The door was cracked open. He nudged it open and crept inside, his eyes soon adjusting to the semidarkness. He dropped to a crouch and glided toward the bed, the conduction gun in his hand.
The bed was empty.
No Wu.
He stood up and searched the room. No one there.
He dug his phone out and double-checked the room number—738. Yep. This was it, all right.
All of her stuff was gone—except for her glasses, which he found stuffed in a plastic bag underneath a blanket, on the empty bed.
Shit.
He glanced toward the door and checked his phone for the signal from Wu’s device. Still blocked, useless for tracking.
Shit!
Where could she have gone?
If he didn’t find her soon, he was as good as fucked.
SPENCER
The picture on his computer screen looked like ones Spencer had seen of the Milky Way from space, the way it could no longer be seen in the night sky unless you were somewhere like Antarctica, maybe, or out in the middle of the Pacific: countless tiny white dots, merging together into random bunches and blobs flung against a dark background.
“What is that?” Spencer asked, almost jumping out of his chair. He could barely contain his excitement.
“Hell if I know,” Raj said from the small frame in the upper right-hand corner of Spencer’s desktop computer screen, the only portion of the screen not occupied by Rita’s brain MRI. “Millions of tiny particles, clustered around her left tympanic membrane, vestibulocochlear nerve, and lateral brainstem. Very small. I played with the contrast settings to make them look bright white. Easier to see that way.”
Spencer pulled at his chin. “How small?”
“Each no bigger than a small protein. With some associated hemorrhage and inflammation. We’d never be able to see them unless I’d scrubbed the images with the latest version of our software.”
“What are they made of?”
“Not sure. Best guess: mostly organic, but with bits of synthetic material as well.”
“What are they doing there?”
“Hell if I know. Infection, maybe?”