“Who is it, David? Who wants us all dead?”
“You’re looking at him, big girl.”
Nichole shook her head. “You report to somebody.”
“At least I’m not a mole.”
“Who do you report to?”
“A mole with a wet hole. Nee-COLE.”
She dug her thumbs in deeper. David gasped, but he continued speaking anyway.
“You’re out of your league, Nichole. Why do you think it’s been so hard for you to penetrate me? But I bet I could penetrate
“Tell me about Molly.”
“Oh. Yeah. Her.”
“Who is she?”
“Your guess is as good as mine.”
“Liar.”
Nichole removed her hands, then paced around the conference room.
“What about the lockdown? Tell me how to reverse it.”
“Since you’re giving orders,” David said, “let me give you one of my mine. A Big Mac. Two patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, all of that good stuff.”
Nichole drove a fist into his face.
It was an audacious move, David thought—punching someone in the face who’s already been shot in the head.
A bullet, lodged in the skull, could easily loosen and work its way into brain tissue, making him a drooling side of beef on a conference room floor.
Perhaps Nichole didn’t care.
Maybe the crack about the “hole” was a step too far.
Maybe it was his Big Mac order.
Thing was, David wasn’t trying to be difficult. Well, maybe a little, but it was mostly the truth: He was absolutely ravenous. He’d been starving for months now, the hunger inside him mutating into a constant, sentient, insatiable thing. Telling his stomach no would be like telling his lungs not to crave air.
He didn’t know how or why it had begun, but he realized that something was amiss when he drove home after work one night, pulled into a Bertucci’s off Huntingdon Pike, ordered two large pizza pies, fully loaded, along with three orders of garlic-and-butter breadsticks, then transported his bounty to his kitchen table and methodically consumed everything—every shred of dough, cheese, sun-dried tomato, shiitake mushroom, red pepper, black olive, and crumbled sausage—within an hour. No TV. No newspaper. No thoughts about the workday. Nothing to distract him but the pizza and breadsticks.
And at two in the morning, David had risen from his bed and eaten six Snickers bars he’d stashed in the freezer.
This had been in early June.
Since then, his binges had come at unexpected times—along with his sex binges. Always with hookers or strippers, in his car or the champagne rooms of allegedly upscale sex clubs. David had to call his bank to ask that his ATM max withdrawal be raised from seven hundred dollars to a thousand dollars. He never knew when the urge would overwhelm him, and somehow, seven hundred dollars just didn’t go far enough in the champagne rooms.
Nobody at work suspected; his employees didn’t usually make the rounds at suburban delis, chain restaurants, or brick-oven pizza parlors—or downtown strip joints or fetish clubs.
You couldn’t tell by looking at David, either. His frame was still finely muscled and compact—essentially the same as the day he entered freshman year at Penn. His metabolism, always efficient, had shifted into overdrive to accommodate the influx of calories.
His penis was raw, but even that seemed to heal quickly.
David began to suspect he was losing his mind.
It had been known to happen in this kind of business.
By late July David decided to purge himself of the hunger. It was stress-related, he’d decided, and he needed to detox his body and mind. After a few quiet inquiries, he settled on an ayurvedic spa in southern India, where a radical panchakarma treatment might be what he needed to shake the cravings. He’d booked the flights and the package and told Amy Felton to take care of things; he had suddenly been called away. It was monsoon season in India. Tourists avoided areas like south India this time of year, but for David’s purposes it was perfect. The harsh conditions were what he needed. As well as dinners of rice gruel. Intense early morning yoga sessions. Forced vomiting. Leeches. Pummeling. Herb steam baths. And finally, shirodhara, in which warm oil was poured over your forehead in a slow, steady, and potentially maddening stream. It was the panchakarma version of Chinese water torture, and it was exquisitely painful.
Fourteen days later—the required minimum stay—David emerged from the resort trembling but hopeful.
On his way home, he made a pit stop in Austin, and ate five pulled-pork sandwiches along with fries and enough frosty pints of Shiner Bock to require an extra night’s stay in an airport hotel to sleep off his drunkenness. In the morning, he consumed four egg-and-bacon breakfasts, with croissants and extra-strong coffee.
His hunger was bottomless. Hopeless.
A few days later, he’d received instructions.
And then he understood.
Somehow, his body had anticipated all of this. His labor of five years, building Murphy, Knox, needed to be destroyed. And he, along with it.
So it made sense. His body was merely trying to experience every last sensory detail it could before his eyelids closed a final time, and the heavy black curtain covered his face, and the data bank that was his brain flickered into nothingness.
Whether or not Nichole Wise cared if he lived or died, there was something more important. He didn’t care either, beyond finishing this final operation.
And the longer David kept them here, on this floor, the more likely that would be.
His need for one last success was as sharp as the hunger.
Ania’s palms and soles still burned and ached from racing down to the sixteenth floor of the north fire tower. But that was nothing compared with the pain of the return trip to thirty-six.
The events of the past thirty minutes had taken their toll on her body, already weakened from the soft years of living as “Molly Lewis.” She’d tried to maintain her core strength, and she had, to a large degree, thanks to regular visits to the franchise gym closest to their home. Paul had been very supportive, renewing her membership every year for Christmas, even though he’d allowed his own waistline and chin to lie fallow. In bed, he constantly complimented her body—its compactness, its suppleness. Paul would suggest positions, and she’d agree to them, just for the exercise. The trick was having him hold steady. Often, it was over before her heart rate even peaked. But this meager regimen was no match for the long hours in front of the plasma television, or the constant barrage of carbs and sugar and fat that were the main ingredients of the meals Paul preferred. Pizza. Chinese take-out. His beloved Polish potato salad.
As a result, her battle with Nichole Wise—not so much a battle as a chance to flex muscles she hadn’t used in a long while—left her more winded than she would have expected.
And the abuse she’d taken in the past ten minutes—hurtling her body down endless sets of concrete staircases, hoisting two male bodies on her shoulders, snapping a neck, enduring a beating with a lead sap—had weakened her severely.
Ania, what has become of you?
Ania, potential Olympic gold medal winner?
Ania, whose body was both the source of her greatest pain and the key to her escape?
But walking up the south fire tower stairs with the corpse of Ethan Goins over her right shoulder, endless staircase after endless staircase, every weakness pronounced itself.
