Desh opened his mouth to ask another question but closed it again as the waiter approached with their pizza. As he carefully placed it on the table in front of them, Desh reflected on everything Kira had told him. Her chronology of events explained any number of loose ends. And the central premise of his assignment, that she was working with terrorists on a bioterror plot, had become laughably implausible. And she had warned them about Smith and had risked herself to extricate them.
And although he tried to resist, her looks and personality continued to cast a spell on him. As much as he needed to affix his gaze solely on the entrance and stay alert at all times, he found his eyes inexorably returning to hers as they spoke. He needed to keep the Greek myth of the Siren sea nymphs firmly in his mind. Was he really being as objective in considering her arguments as he needed to be? Were there holes that he was failing to consider?
However much she explained away, he kept returning to the same place: the deaths surrounding her childhood were indisputable. Griffin had verified as much when Desh had been asleep on the hacker’s couch. And the evidence against her in the killing of Lusetti and her brother was airtight. As appealing as he found her and as artful as her explanations had been, it was still more likely than not that most of what she said was an elaborate fabrication.
27
They both hungrily ate their first piece of pizza in silence, after which Desh announced his plan to use the restroom and scout the mall once again. He spent a few minutes in the restroom scrubbing his face with soap and cold water, feeling reinvigorated as he did so, and then exited the restaurant.
Throngs of brightly colored shoppers of every description paraded through the mall in all directions, creating a random, ever-changing mosaic of humanity. Some race-walked as if on an urgent mission while others strolled leisurely. Some were empty handed while others carried soft-pretzels, ice cream, elaborate purses, or plastic shopping bags filled to the brim with recent purchases. A young girl pointed excitedly to a pair of shoes through a window as her mother looked on with an amused expression on her face. Desh envied them their untroubled innocence.
He pretended to look in a few store windows and wander through the mall for the next five minutes, furtively scanning the crowd as he did so, but detected nothing out of place and no sign of pursuit.
He returned to the booth to find that Kira was almost finished with her last piece of pizza and the waiter had refilled his drink. Kira eyed him warily as he sat down. “Any suspicious activity?”
Desh shook his head. “I think we’re probably in the clear,” he said. “If they haven’t found us by now, they’ll have moved on. They’ll never believe we’d do something as stupid as making sitting ducks of ourselves—literally—in the middle of a busy restaurant.”
“Stupid like a fox,” said Kira with a twinkle in her eye.
Desh smiled. He lifted a large slice of pizza and gestured to Kira. “By all means, continue,” he said. “You left off when your boss turned up dead.”
Kira gathered herself and resumed her narrative. “After the break-in, Morgan’s death, and discovering the listening devices, I became more secretive than ever. I routinely swept for listening devices and I performed all animal experiments in my condo rather than at NeuroCure’s facilities.” She paused. “I worked on both of my primary goals at the same time, but I achieved the leap forward in neuronal optimization first.”
“How long after the break-in?” he asked.
“About nine months.”
“I assume you tested it to be sure it worked.”
“Yes. I engineered a batch with an exceedingly short half-life in case there were complications. I was only in this state of super-optimization for about two seconds, but it was enough.”
“Enough for what?”
“Enough to be certain I’d succeeded. Those two seconds felt like five minutes. The first level of optimization is beyond description. The second level is beyond imagination.” Her eyes widened in wonder. “It was a transcendent level of thought. Awe-inspiring. So much so that I was afraid to ever try it again.”
This time Desh knew only too well what she meant. Once again, she had been afraid of the corrupting influences of untold power.