is she? Is she hurt?”
With the slow, nonthreatening movements of one trained to deal with irrational people, the nurse removed her wrist from his grip and then patted his hand. “She walked out of the emergency room on her own two feet, Mr. MacGregor. From what I understand, she was not injured. You’re lucky she got you here so quickly, though. You nearly bled to death on the way over.”
Gregor slumped back against the pillows, clammy with relief. She wasn’t hurt. But where was she now?
“The car you arrived in, on the other hand, was not so lucky.” She chuckled and moved around to the other side of the bed to check the readouts on the heart monitor and the amount of pale liquid left in a plastic bag hanging from a hook on a rolling pole. There was a length of clear tubing from the bag to his arm, a piece of white tape over the vein on the back of his hand where the tubing was attached with a needle. “Antibiotics,” she said, seeing his look. “Just to make sure you don’t get any infection from the wound.”
The door swung open. He and the nurse turned to watch Agent Doe, leaning on a cane, enter the room, followed by the two uniformed officers. The three of them sent him baleful glares.
“Well.” The nurse shot Gregor a meaningful glance. “My name is Lily. I’m on until nine o’clock. If you need anything, just push that red button on the remote beside the bed and I’ll be in momentarily.” She brushed past the men and let herself out, closing the door behind her.
Gregor said into the following silence, “Agent Doe. We meet again.” He glanced at the two unsmiling gendarmes. “Where’s my good friend Edoard? Our little reunion won’t be the same without him.”
Agent Doe’s knuckles were white around the curved handle of the cane. His jaw worked, but his cold, cold eye revealed nothing. “He’s at your building as we speak.”
There was a lump in the mattress the size of a cat that was pinching a nerve in his lower back, but Gregor refused to shift his weight to relieve the discomfort. “Oh?”
Doe grew a smile that would have looked at home on Hannibal Lecter. “Do you have any idea how long the prison term is for operating a bordello?”
So they’d found it. Gregor said flatly, “Five years to life. Or so I’m told.”
“Ah, but you are correct! Your lawyer must be very intelligent. Though not intelligent enough to dissuade you from engaging in such a reprehensible activity. Pity.”
Gregor did have an intelligent lawyer. A genius lawyer, in fact, who charged fifteen hundred dollars an hour and had drilled into his brain never,
“Actually, I only know that from television. It’s amazing what you can learn from those—”
“—crime shows,” Doe finished for him. “Yes, you said so before.” His ugly smile grew mocking. “You certainly do watch a lot of television.”
The two officers snickered. Gregor and Doe stared at one another, deadlocked in silent animosity, until Gregor made a motion with his hand.
“What happened to your eye?”
Doe stiffened. The smile leached from his face, and he shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “I am not after you, MacGregor, you should know that up front so you can make your decisions going forward accordingly.” In answer to Gregor’s plain expression of disbelief, he said, “I am after far bigger fish, and if you assist me in that regard, all charges against you will be dropped.”
“I thought you weren’t with the police. How can you have the authority to do that?”
Ominously, he said, “My organization is above the police.”
Gregor’s interest was piqued. “Is it now? And here I thought no one was above the law.”
“Enough money can put you above anything, even God Himself.”
Without explaining further and apparently tired of standing, Doe snapped his fingers and one of the officers brought him a chair from the corner of the room. He settled himself into it—lips pinched, legs stiff—and then waved a hand, dismissing them. They looked at one another for a moment before leaving the way they’d come. Gregor saw them take up position outside his door, noticed they both wore sidearms.
The police were acting as his very own armed guards. Even more interesting.
“Speaking of God, are you a religious man, MacGregor?”
Gregor blinked over at him and watched as Doe withdrew a cigarette from his inner coat pocket, lit it, and drew the tip into flame. His deep, satisfied exhalation sent out a cloud of smoke.
“I assume there’s a point you’re trying to make, Doe. Make it.”
Doe chuckled. “Neither am I, as it happens. But there are things we don’t understand in this world, wouldn’t you agree? Things beyond our comprehension? Things…you may have even seen yourself. In the very flesh.”
Gregor stared at him, giving nothing away.
“Have you seen the video of your quite spectacular arrival at the hospital? No? Hmm. Well, it’s actually not that interesting”—his one good eye, icy blue, peering at him from behind round spectacles, grew positively arctic —“when you compare it to the video we retrieved from the security cameras at your building. Amazing system you have there. State of the art, I’m told.”
“Doe—”
He leaned forward in the chair, suddenly intent, all humor vanished. “Did you know what she was all along? Did you have any idea what you were really dealing with?”
Gregor leaned back into the pillow, silent, and Doe struggled to his feet. From another pocket he removed a cell phone and held it up between two fingers. “A copy of the feed. It’s been edited. I thought you might enjoy the highlights.”
He touched a button and then edged nearer to Gregor, holding the phone out. He took it, gazed down at the small square screen, and found he could not look away.
In all his life, he’d never seen anything move like they did. They’d crawled up the building’s exterior glass walls—literally crawled, like lizards—and entered from the roof. From a dozen different perspectives he saw the assassins running, jumping, bounding, all so quickly their movements were just an on-screen blur. He saw himself and Eliana in the stairwells, the chase in the parking garage, the horrifying impact with the metal door. He saw the Ferrari vanish into the distance out of camera range, but not before he saw, edited from a dozen different angles, five grown men morph into snarling animals and give chase.
Panthers. They turned into panthers, impossibly huge and black.
His skin crawled.
Doe removed the camera from his cold fingers and smiled at the look on Gregor’s face. “Exactly my reaction. I think we’re going to have to build a lot more zoos.”
He returned to his chair and finished his cigarette in silence while Gregor lay back against the pillow, suddenly exhausted. He stared at the ceiling, his brain on an endless replay loop. Men with guns; panthers. Men with guns;
“As I said before,” Doe murmured, stubbing out the cigarette on the plastic arm of the chair, “it’s not you we want. We want her. We want
She’d been right about having many enemies, Gregor thought as he watched a fly march across the ceiling tiles above. Her own kind wanted to see her dead, this crazy German bastard wanted to stick her in a zoo…she was going to need more guns.
Gregor turned his attention back to Agent Doe. He smiled, humorless. “I think I just realized I have a terrible case of amnesia. Who are you again?”
Doe shook his head, disappointed. “Why would you protect them? Why would you risk imprisonment? They’re only animals, MacGregor.” He said the word
“So are we,” he said, his voice hard. “So are we, Doe, but some of us are better animals than others. She told me what you did to her. She told me about the tests, about the torture. So what does that make
Doe stared at him for a long, long, moment, scrutinizing Gregor’s face from his one visible eye. “I am a patriot,” he finally said. “A protector of our way of life and of our race.”
