The farther we got from Maggie’s house, the dumber our makeshift plan looked… and the more obvious it became that there wasn’t another way. When the corruption seems to go all the way to the end of the world, the only good approach is through the front door with a gun in each hand. No one was going to help us take on the CDC, not with our resources and reputation, and not with the radio silence coming out of the White House. That meant we needed to play to our strengths, and our strengths came from lifelong training in shoving microphones at danger and demanding that it explain itself. It wasn’t much. It was going to have to be enough.
We stopped at a seedy motel in Little Rock, Arkansas, the night before we got to Memphis. They took cash and didn’t look too hard at our IDs. No matter how high-tech the world gets, there will always be places designed for people who are looking to slip between the cracks. This was one of them. The man behind the desk didn’t know who we were, and better, he didn’t want to know. Becks and I checked in together, letting Mahir and Kelly wait in the van until the necessary transactions had been completed. The man was disinterested. He was also a modern American, which meant he might have seen Kelly’s face on the news, and might well wonder what a dead woman was doing wandering around Arkansas with a couple of disreputable-looking types like me and Becks.
After the better part of two days spent driving down empty highways and eating out of truck-stop diners, all four of us smelled like road trip—that funky mix of stale corn chips, sweat, dirty hair, and ass that seems to show up any time you drive more than a couple hundred miles in one stretch. We had two rooms, which meant two of us could shower at once, after all four of us had cleared the blood test required to get inside.
Somehow, even though one room was supposed to be for the men and one for the women, Becks and Kelly managed to snag the first showers. It was like a magic trick. I asked “Does anybody want a shower?” and they were gone, disappearance punctuated only by the steady hiss of the water.
Mahir and I settle in the room where Kelly was taking her shower, again, just in case. We were too close to her home ground for us to want her left alone. The motel security could be worked around, and I didn’t trust her to shoot her way out of a paper bag if something happened while she was unguarded.
I sat on the edge of one of the two queen-sized beds, rubbing my face with one hand like I could wipe the exhaustion away. It never worked. “So the Doc says most folks get to work around nine. The janitorial staff arrives at seven. That gives us two hours to evade one of the best security systems in the world, get inside without taking any blood tests that would announce our presence, and make our way to Dr. Wynne’s lab.”
“Correct,” said Mahir. Paradoxically, he looked less tired than he did when he first arrived in Weed. The bastard. I hadn’t been able to get any real sleep in the van—too many years of training telling me never to let my guard down in the field—but he’d been out like a light every time he didn’t need to be working on something. The rest had been good for him. He was going to need it.
“Is it just me, or is this essentially fucking impossible?”
“If they haven’t changed the timing of the security sweeps since Dr. Connolly’s death, it’s going to be bloody difficult, but no, I wouldn’t call it ‘fucking impossible.’ Fucking impossible requires rather more in the way of, I don’t know, ninjas.” Mahir smiled. It was a small thing, half-buried in stubble and his own natural restraint, but it was there. “I’m not sure where one goes about ordering ninjas.”
“Same place you get the submarines.” I looked toward the bathroom door, listening to the sound of running water for a moment before I asked, “Does this shit ever end, Mahir? I mean, really, is there a point where we get to say ‘enough’ and let things go back to normal?”
“No.”
I blinked at him.
He shrugged, smile fading. “Your sister trained me, and she never stood for liars. No, Shaun, I don’t think this ever ends, not for us, not until we’re dead. Maybe not even then. You’re a haunted house pretending to be a man these days, and Georgia may be dead, but she’s still not out of the game, is she?”
Bet your ass I’m not, said George. Her tone was grimmer than I’d ever heard it.
Mahir looked at my face and nodded. “I thought not. You get distant when you’re listening to her. Either you’re truly haunted, or you’re the most reasonable madman I’ve ever known, and it doesn’t much matter either way: The end result’s the same, and she’s not going to be resting in peace anytime soon.”
“What if we all die here?”
“What makes you think we won’t find people of our own to haunt?” Mahir dug into his pocket, producing a slim nylon wallet. He flipped it open and passed it to me. “My wife, Nandini. Nan. You never once asked to see a picture of her. You realize that? You called at all hours of the night, you drove her mad with your nonsense, and you never asked me a damn thing about her.”