“Patricia,” he whispered under his breath, “what has become of you?”
Daylight. That was the first thing that Miriam noticed. That-and she had the mother of all hangovers. Her head felt as if it was wrapped in cotton wool, her right arm hurt like hell, and everything around her was somehow wrong. She blinked experimentally. Her head was wrapped in cotton wool-or bandages. And she was wearing something unfamiliar. She’d gone to bed in her usual T-shirt, but now she was wearing a nightgown-but she didn’t own one! What’s going on?
Daylight. She felt muzzy and stupid and her head was pounding. She was thirsty, too. She rolled over and blinked at where the nightstand should have been. There was a whitewashed wall six inches from her nose. The bed she was lying in was jammed up against a rough cinder-block wall that had been painted white. It was as weird as that confused nightmare about the light and the chemical stink-
Nightmare?
She rolled the other way, her legs tangling up in the nightgown. She nearly fell out of the bed, which was far too narrow. It wasn’t her own bed, and for a moment of panic she wondered what could possibly have happened. Then it all clicked into place. “Gangsters or feds? Must be the feds,” she mumbled to herself. They must have followed me. Or Paulie. Or something.
A vast, hollow terror seemed to have replaced her stomach. They’ll ‘bury you so deep,’ she remembered. ‘So deep’ that-
Her throat felt sore, as if she’d spent the entire night screaming. Odd, that. Maybe it was anticipation.
Somehow she swung her legs over the side of the strange bed. They touched the floor much too soon, and she sat up, pushing the thin comforter aside. The far wall was too close, and the window was set high up; in fact, the whole room was about the size of a closet. There was no other furniture except for a small stainless-steel sink bolted to the wall opposite the door. The door itself was a featureless slab of wood with a peephole implanted in it at eye level. She noted with a dull sense of recognition that the door was perfectly smooth, with no handle or lock mechanism to mar its surface: It was probably wood veneer over metal.
Her hand went to her throat. The locket was gone.
Miriam stood, then abruptly found that she had to lean against the wall to keep upright. Her head throbbed and her right arm was extremely sore. She turned and looked up at the window, but it was above the top of her head, even if she had the energy to stand on the bed. High and small and without curtains, it looked horribly like the skylight of a prison cell. Am I in prison? she wondered.
With that thought, Miriam lost what calm she had. She leaned against the door and pounded it with her left hand, setting up a hollow racket, but stopped when her hand began to throb and the fear swept back in a suffocating wave, driving a storm surge of rage before it. She sat down and buried her face in her hands and began to sob quietly. She was still in this position a few minutes later when the door frame gave a quiet click and opened outward.
Miriam looked up suddenly as the door opened. “Who the fuck are you?” she demanded.
The man standing in the doorway was perfectly turned out, from his black loafers to the ends of his artfully styled blond hair: He was young (late twenties or early thirties), formally dressed in a fashionable suit, clean- shaven, and his face was set in neutral lines. He could have been a Mormon missionary or an FBI agent. “Miss Beckstein, if you’d be so good as to come with me, please?”
“Who are you?” She repeated. “Aren’t you guys supposed to read me my rights or something?” There was something odd about him, but she couldn’t quite get her head around it.
Past his shoulder she could see a corridor, blurry right now-then she realized what it was that she was having trouble with. He’s wearing a sword, she told herself, hardly believing her eyes.
“You seem to be labouring under a misapprehension.” He smiled, not unpleasantly. “We don’t have to read you your rights. However, if you’ll come with me, we can go somewhere more comfortable to discuss the situation. Unless you’re entirely happy with the sanitary facilities here?”
Miriam glanced behind her, suddenly acutely aware that her bladder was full and her stomach was queasy. “Who are you?” she asked uncertainly.
“If you come with me, you’ll get your answers,” he said soothingly. He took a step back and something made Miriam suspect there was an implicit or else left dangling at the end of his last sentence. She lurched to her feet unsteadily and he reached out for her elbow. She shuffled backward instinctively to avoid contact, but lost her balance against the edge of the bed: She sat down hard and went over backward, cracking her head against the wall.
“Oh dear,” he said. She stared up at him through a haze of pain. “I’ll bring a wheelchair for you. Please don’t try to move.”
The ceiling pancaked lazily above her head. Miriam felt sick and a little bit drowsy. Her head was splitting. Migraine or anaesthesia hangover? she wondered. The well-dressed man with the sword sticking incongruously out from under his suit coat was back, with a wheelchair and another man wearing a green medical smock. Together they picked her up and planted her in the chair, loose as a sack of potatoes. “Oww,” she moaned softly.
“That was a nasty bash,” said her visitor. He walked beside the chair. Lighting strips rolled by overhead, closed doorways to either side. “How do you feel?”
“Lousy,” she managed. Her right arm had come out in sympathy with her skull. “Who’re you?”
“You don’t give up, do you?” he observed. The chair turned a corner: More corridor stretched ahead. “I’m Roland, Earl Lofstrom. Your welfare is my responsibility for now.” The chair stopped in front of burnished stainless- steel panels-an elevator. Mechanisms grumbled behind the door. “You shouldn’t have awakened in that isolation cell. You were only there due to an administrative error. The individual responsible has been disciplined.”
A cold chill washed down Miriam’s spine, cutting through the haze of pain. “Don’t want your name,” she muttered. “Want to know who you people are. My rights, dammit.”
The elevator doors opened and the attendant pushed her inside. Roland stepped in beside her, then waved the attendant away. Then he pushed a button out of sight behind her head. The doors closed and the elevator began to rise, but stopped only a few seconds later. “You appear to be under a misapprehension,” he repeated. “You’re asking for your rights. The, uh, Miranda declaration, yes?”
She tried to look up at him. “Huh?”
“That doesn’t apply here. Different jurisdiction, you know.” His accompanying smile left Miriam deeply unnerved.
The elevator doors opened and he wheeled her into a silent, carpeted corridor with no windows-just widely spaced doors to either side, like an expensive hotel. He stopped at the third door along on the left and pushed it open, then turned her chair and rolled it forward into the room within. “There. Isn’t this an improvement over the other room?”
Miriam pushed down on the wheelchair arms with both hands, wincing at a stab of pain in her right forearm. “Shit.” She looked around. “This isn’t federal.”
“If you don’t mind.” He took her elbow, and this time she couldn’t dodge. His grip was firm but not painful. “This is the main reception room of your suite. You’ll note the windows don’t actually open, and they’re made of toughened glass for your safety. The bathroom is through that door, and the bedroom is over there.” He pointed. “If you want anything, lift the white courtesy phone. If you need a doctor, there is one on call. I suggest you take an hour to recover, then freshen up and get dressed. There will be an interview in due course.”
“What is this place? Who are you people?” Finally Roland frowned at her. “You can stop pretending you don’t know,” he said. “You aren’t going to convince anyone.” Pausing in the doorway, he added, “The war’s over, you know. We won twenty years ago.” The door closed behind him with a solid-sounding click, and Miriam was unsurprised to discover that the door handle flopped limply in her hand when she tried it. She was locked in.
Miriam shuffled into the white-tiled bathroom, blinked in the lights, then sat down heavily on the toilet. “Holy shit,” she mumbled in disbelief. It was like an expensive hotel-a fiendishly expensive one, aimed at sheikhs and diplomats and billionaires. The floor was smooth, a very high grade of Italian marble if she was any judge of stonework. The sink was a moulded slab of thick green glass and the taps glowed with a deep lustre that went deeper than mere gilding could reach. The bath was a huge scalloped shell sunk into the floor, white and polished, with blue and green lights set into it amid the chromed water jets. An acre of fluffy white towels and a matching bathrobe awaited her, hanging above a basket of toiletries. She knew some of those brand names; she’d even tried their samplers when she was feeling extravagant. The shampoo alone was a hundred dollars a bottle.
