on his bruised arms. 'So you're gonna what? Kill them all?'
The toilet flushed, and then the sink water turned on again.
'Yup,' Walker said.
Chapter 68
Dolan had spent the last hour pacing laps around the pool table, his agitation sprouting more hydra heads than he could keep in sight. His momentum finally flung him off the table on a turn, propelling him through the double doors. A security man wordlessly stood his post outside. He shadowed Dolan down the hall like a bodyguard, his finger raised to his ear, seating the transmitter. His orders being updated? After a few paces, Dolan grew uncomfortable. When he glanced back, the guard dropped his gaze as if granting Dolan privacy. On the way down the stairs, it struck Dolan that the man now seemed more like a stalker than a bodyguard. He tried to convince himself that he was manufacturing the guard's tacit menace, transferring his anxiety onto something concrete.
Dolan stopped short when he entered his father's office and found it blanketed with open manila folders, Dean shoving papers through a shredder with uncharacteristic haste. Edwin abided Dean's pointing finger, retrieving and filing with a stiff-backed posture that infused each menial task with elegant rectitude.
Dean paused, then shot an accusatory glare at the guard, as if he were responsible for Dolan's appearance. Dolan made out the label on the report in his father's hands: X4-AAT SAFETY STUDY. Dean lowered it to the blades. A chuffing disintegrated it into snowflakes.
Dolan moistened his lips, looking around in bewilderment.
Dean said briskly, 'Nothing untoward is going on here. There are confidential documents that I don't feel comfortable having at the house. Not with the fallout from this afternoon and the investigation that's grinding forward. Your company's been set back enough by recent events.' Dean handed off an expurgated folder to Edwin, who promptly returned it to the file cabinet. 'Don't ask questions you don't want the answers to.'
'Sir, I do want answers. I'm entitled to know what's going on with Xedral. I've given seven years of my life to this.'
'And I devoted thirty-five years to building the business that under-wrote the lab in which you were working. So why don't we leave entitlement out of this? Every test tube you've touched since you were six, I bought.'
Dolan felt his outrage transmogrify into adolescent defensiveness. 'Not at school.'
'Right. A multiyear, seven-figure pledge to UCLA's biology department that commenced the day you matriculated. But the test tubes came out of the professor's pocket.'
'I got into UCLA on my grades, not your money.' Dolan picked up an empty folder, turned it inside out, and dropped it on the floor. 'What happened during the Xedral safety studies?'
A disgusted exhale. 'Nothing. Huang spoke to you. He told you himself nothing was out of the ordinary.'
'You own Huang.'
'I own everyone. Including you. Every lab station, every microfuge, every pencil.'
Dolan felt beaten down, diminished. 'You don't. Not me.'
'Oh? Your corporation is behind on its rent, Dolan. Or do you recall that your lease specifies a dollar a year?' Dean scowled at him, a rosy flush rouging his pallid cheeks. 'I can have Bernie retroaccount so hard and fast you'll be in debt to Beacon-Kagan until your children's children have children. I will ruin you.'
'You're actually thr-'
'I'm saying there is an empire at stake, Dolan. This-' Dean gestured to the loose papers, though there were few left; while they'd been arguing, Edwin had tidied up, even spraying sanitizer on and wiping the wooden surfaces. 'This is the mess and sweat of a corporation. You don't want this. You have a sinecure and unlimited funding. Few would complain in your situation. Tinker with your petri dishes and leave the business to us.'
'I've always been willing to leave the business to you. Just not the science.'
'It's the same thing,' Dean said with slow exasperation.
Dolan weaved a bit on his feet. The sanitizer's lemon scent coated his throat, soured his stomach. Dean indicated the guard with a flare of his hand, and the guard came off the wall and positioned himself a few feet behind Dolan.
Dean folded his hands at his stomach, the picture of reason. 'Here are your choices: You let me handle what needs to be handled, and you return to a top post at your own company poised to make one of the most significant advances medicine has seen in decades. Or you can be stubborn and obtuse and wind up teaching photosynthesis to snotty seventh-graders at Harvard-Westlake.'
Dolan's throat clicked drily when he swallowed.
'Now, if you wouldn't mind going upstairs'-Dean nodded at the guard-'I'd like a bit of privacy in my own office.'
Chapter 69
The lawn was overgrown. Not a noteworthy observation elsewhere, but Tim had never seen the grass without mow strips aligned as though they'd been measured off. The mailbox-stuffed. Four still-rolled newspapers on the doorstep. An unswept porch. He paused midway up the walk, his first hesitation about choosing to come alone. It wasn't until he rang the doorbell and heard the approaching footsteps that his brain gave voice to the concern that had been lurking beneath his thoughts-that he'd find his father dead in the house.
The doorknob turned, and then his father, a handsome man approaching sixty, peered out from the gap. Behind him the lights were off, the interior projecting gloom. His usually impeccable hair was disheveled, and he was unshaven. His stubble had grown in more white than black, a detail that Tim found inexplicably disconcerting. In his thirty-eight years, Tim had known him only to be immaculately composed. Never a stray hair, a stain on his pants, an unironed shirt.
In a rare show of restraint, Tim's father offered no wisecrack about the half-stitched gash in the side of Tim's neck. Instead he stepped back from the door, letting Tim enter-another break in protocol. He didn't even ask him to remove his shoes. The living room air was stale from thrown-out coffee grounds. The kitchen, normally museum meticulous, was strewn with dirty dishes. His father scooted two sealed VCR boxes over on the couch so Tim could sit, then took his favored La-Z-Boy opposite. All these years later, the picture frames on the mantel still displayed the stock photos they'd come packaged with.
Tim's palms were slick and his stomach roiled. He'd done zero-visibility oxygen jumps from thirty-three thousand feet without breaking a sweat, but his father's proximity still set him on edge. He reminded himself to offer up nothing-if given an inch, his father could unload oceanfront time shares in Wyoming. Tim wiped his hands on his jeans, taking in the boxes and papers piled around the living room. 'What's going on here?'
'You've got no right to ask me that.' Tim hadn't heard his father's voice in three years; it had picked up some hoarseness around the edges. 'What do you want, Timmy?'
'One of our fugitive's fathers, Pierce Jameson, has become a name of interest in our investigation.'
'Ah, Pierce. Yes, I've seen Walker's making a run to knock you off the tabloid covers. Is the Troubleshooter feeling neglected by his public? Upstaged as vigilante darling of the masses?'
The old chess match. Playing his part, the stoic straight arrow, Tim maintained an expression of impassivity. 'I know you've dealt with Pierce. I need to find some leverage on him. We're having a hard time untangling his finances. If I know you, you did your research before getting into bed with him. I thought you might know enough to give us a way in.'
'What about honor among thieves?' Tim's father's lips tensed-they both knew he'd snitched, double-crossed, and back-doored his way out of more jail time and soured deals than either of them could remember. 'And what do I get?'
'Nothing.'
'A characteristically vain proposition.' His father picked a speck of lint from his trousers, crumpled it into a handkerchief, then settled back and crossed his legs. The same regal bearing. A man with more grace than
