Jack put down the pen and paper. “Keep in mind I only have seven hours to live.”
Kelly tightened her lips for a moment, then continued. “The machines are tracking devices. They constantly feed information to a satellite: body temperature, heart rate, global position. And that information is relayed to a tracking station.”
“Sounds very Big Brother.”
“That’s one way of looking at it. But think about the possibilities of tracking criminals or terrorists. Another is—wait, you said you have children?”
“A daughter.”
“What’s her name?”
“I’m not sure I want to tell you.” Jack looked at the clock on the nightstand. It was 11:30 back in Gurnee. Callie was no doubt asleep, clinging to her pink bear, which was also a miniblanket. The thing looked like a mutant tree sloth, but she’d had it since birth and refused to part with it.
“Don’t be a baby. How old is she?”
“Callie’s four.”
“Well, imagine, God forbid, if some sick bastard grabbed Callie from a shopping mall one day. You’d have no way of finding her, unless the kidnapper was stupid enough to walk past a surveillance camera.”
The very thought of it formed a cold, dark knot in Jack’s stomach.
“With this system, it would take a second to pinpoint Callie’s position, and the police would be able to recover her minutes later. Abductions would become a thing of the past.”
Jack thought about this. “Unless the kidnappers got smart and learned how to turn these nanomachines off.”
“Not possible. There are too many of them. Self-replicating, using blood waste as raw material. All the benefits of a virus, none of the weaknesses. Except if they leave the body. With nothing to feed on, they die. But once inside, there’s no getting rid of them.”
“You seem proud of these things.”
“I worked in the lab that created them. That’s my job. Was my job, back in Ireland.”
“You don’t have the accent. Though you did slip and say ‘flat’ a short while ago.”
“I’m trying to blend in, boyo,” she said in a thick brogue. “But now you’re here. And now it’s only you and me and the Mary—you know what I call these things?”
“No, what?”
“The Mary Kates. You know … those blond twins? The Olsens? They’re just like these little things. They’re everywhere.”
So Kelly here has tiny machines named after a pair of barely legal blondes running around in her blood. Right.
“There’s one more special feature, and this impressed the shite out of everyone. The Mary Kates, you see, can not only track your location; they can tell us if there’s someone in the room with you. The abduction angle again. It’s meant to help rescuers pounce on the kidnappers, not the victim.”
“So right now, these Mary Kates know I’m here with you.”
“Yes. They detect you’re less than ten feet away from me. They’re picking up your brain waves and heartbeat. Very sensitive, these girls.”
“Fucking creepy.”
“Not as creepy as what I’m about to tell you. Remember?”
“What?”
“If the Mary Kates detect that I’m alone, they’ll travel to my brain and make it explode.”
12:42 a.m.
The bag was not as heavy as he’d thought. The average human head was about six pounds—two for the skull, a quarter for the skin, and three for the brain, and spare change for water and fat and such. But this Adidas bag definitely felt lighter than six pounds.
Maybe it was all the blood and brains that had spurted out.
Nice, huh?
Kowalski wondered how far he’d have to travel with it. A plane was out of the question. Homeland Security would x-ray his $19.95 bag and see Ed’s goofy mug staring back up at them. Most likely, CI-6 would dispatch someone local to recover it, analyze, do whatever they wanted with it. That’s DHS, folks. Keeping America Safe, One Decapitated Head at a Time.
He placed the bag on the floor of the backseat, propping it up on one side with a box of Kleenex and on the other with a hardback copy of a fitness book called
Ah fuck it. Katie would have laughed.
After double-checking his exit route on the Tribeca’s GPS system, he opened the garage doors and drove down the driveway to the street. He pulled Ed’s cell phone out of his pocket— he’d found it in Ed’s bag. Then he dialed the Hunter’s home number, helpfully written in pen on the kitchen wall phone. The home line was wired to his jerry-rigged gas-main detonator. Simplest thing in the world. One phone call, one massive basement explosion.
Kowalski pressed the Send button, appreciated the white-hot blast that blew out the first-floor windows and sent a booming echo rolling through the neighborhood.
Then he saw Claudia Hunter dive through a second-floor window, tuck and roll down the grassy hill on the side of the house, struggle to her feet, then take off behind her neighbor’s house. She was gone before all of the beads of glass showered the lawn below.
Holy crap.
Kowalski knew he’d gone easy when he was strangling her with the dental floss. But her pulse had been shallow; she’d been checking out. Apparently, she had other plans.
Kowalski popped out of the car, thought about it, then grabbed the Adidas bag from the backseat. No telling how long it would take him to run Claudia down. He wasn’t about to leave his objective behind to be recovered by some dumb car thief.
Up the driveway, behind the house, down the hill, Ed’s head bounced around in the bag.
Claudia was a fast runner, even in bare feet and a summer nightie.
After a few backyards, Kowalski paused to stash the bag in a child’s tree house. The structure was fairly complex, with two separate entrances and stained, smooth pieces that were too perfect to have been assembled by hand. The bag was slowing him down, and he didn’t want to damage the contents too much. Or leave it back in the car, where a curious cop might spot it.
Kowalski checked the ground for a weapon, saw what he wanted, picked it up, and raced after Claudia.
12:46 a.m.
So if I walk across the room, and you stay here on this couch, you’ll die.”
“In about ten seconds. Give or take a second.”
“You’re kidding me.”
“I’d say try it, but I’d rather you not. It really hurts.”
“Why is it ten feet? I mean, why not nine, or eleven? Is it ten feet exactly?”
“You know, it’s a bit hard to make careful scientific measurements when it feels like your brain is going to
