Despite the mistakes Austin had made, despite the laws he’d broken, he had served faithfully in the special forces for fourteen years.
I laid my hand on his shoulder in honor of the service he’d given our country. He was just like so many people I know-a hero in one area of life, flawed and all too human in another. In the end, though, he’d died doing the noblest thing of all, trying to save another person’s life. And though I might not have taken the same steps he did, I respected the value he seemed to place on human life-clearing Building B-14 before starting the fire, planning his fires to avoid casualties. I wondered how I would have reacted if someone had sent me a video like that of Lien-hua chained in a tank. I could only imagine the things I would have been willing to do to save her.
As I was rising to leave, I saw the end of a cheap, prepaid cell phone jammed beneath the strap of his shoulder holster.
What?
“They contact me,” he’d said. This phone must be how!
Everyone else had left me alone with the body, so nobody was close by. No one else had seen the phone.
I slid my hand down, cupped the phone, and then slipped it into my pocket. Maybe, just maybe, this could lead us to Cassandra.
“I’ll find her, Austin,” I said, even though the corpse beside me couldn’t hear the words. “I’ll save Cassandra. I promise.”
I looked at my watch. I had only forty minutes to keep my promise.
Then I stood up to find Lien-hua.
54
During a short break, while Lachlan and Riker grabbed a smoke outside the studio, Tessa noticed the time and sent Patrick a text message that she wasn’t feeling the greatest, which was true, and that she would just grab supper on her own and then go to bed early, but that she’d see him in the morning for their walk with Dr. W. at 10:30.
Then Lachlan returned to the tattoo room to finish inking her arm.
He alternated between two different tattoo needles attached to two different machines. He used the narrow needle with his machine cranked to its highest speed to do the outlining, and then he used the wider needle to color in the main body of the tattoo.
All Tessa knew was that the wider needle hurt way worse than the outlining needle.
He’d laid out a set of tiny caps beside the sink, a different color in each cap.
Blue. Black. Silver. Gray.
Dip the needle in the water. Then the ink.
Then against her skin.
Repeat.
When he’d first started, every time he touched the needle to her skin it felt like a hot scratch. But as he worked on her arm, her skin must have started to swell or get numb because she couldn’t feel the needle anymore, just a dot of tight pressure.
“Now,” he told her, “I gotta go back and fill in the rest of the color on the tail feathers. The skin on the inside of your arm isn’t gonna be numb anymore. It’ll be even more sensitive than ever, plus with that scar… well, just be ready.”
She nodded.
Then Lachlan began to fill in the color, and she realized he hadn’t been lying about the tenderness of her skin.
No, he hadn’t been. Not one little bit.
After a minute or two of etching her arm, Lachlan said, “Hey, listen. I got a puzzle for you. This one usually takes people like a half hour or so to figure out. Should take you through to the end.”
“I like puzzles,” she said, trying to sound casual.
“Me too,” said Riker, who was pulling up a new playlist on the stereo’s digital display.
“OK,” Lachlan said. “So there’s these two guys rob a bank and they’re figuring out the cut, right? And the first guy says, ‘Hey, it’s not fair. You got way more money than me’-you know this one, Riker?”
“Naw, go ahead.”
“OK, why don’t we see who figures it out first, you or Serial-Killer-Stabber-Girl.”
“Right on,” he said.
“I suppose I can give it a shot,” said Tessa.
“So,” Lachlan continued. “Like I was saying, the first guy says,
‘You got way more than me. If I gave you one of these stacks of bills, you’d have twice as much as I have.’ But the other guy is like, ‘Dude, check it out. I planned the job, so quit complaining, it’s a fair cut. Besides, if I gave you one of my stacks, we’d have the exact same amount.’ So, question is, how many stacks of bills does each of the-”
“Got it,” said Tessa.
“-guys have.” Lachlan stared at her. “You didn’t figure it out already. There’s no way.”
“Give me a sheet of paper.”
Lachlan dug a pen and a yellowing sheet of paper out of a drawer and handed them to Tessa. She wrote something on the page, then folded the paper in half, gave it to Riker, and then set down the pen. “After you figure out your answer,” she said, “look at mine.
Then ask Lachlan which is right.”
“You heard it before,” Lachlan said.
“Puh-lease.”
“So you never heard it before?” said Riker.
“No.”
“You figured it out that fast?”
“You’ll have to wait until you unfold that piece of paper to find out.”
Riker looked at her slyly. “But what if I don’t figure it out until after your tattoo is done and you take off?”
Tessa felt her heart beating like a rabbit as she said the words,
“Then we’ll have to compare answers the next time we see each other.”
“Deal.”
55
7:25 p.m.
With his television tuned to Channel 11 news, Victor Drake watched Building B-14 crumble to the ground.
Hunter. It had to be Hunter.
But how did he know which building to torch?
Maybe Hunter had followed Geoff and the doctor last night, after they left the fire site and were returning the device to the base.
Victor could feel a migraine coming on. Not just any migraine either, a big one. Half an hour ago he’d gotten a message from Biscayne’s cronies that the Project Rukh Oversight Committee meeting was moved from Thursday at 2:00 p.m. to tomorrow morning at 8:00 a.m. A major league migraine.
His cell phone rang.
He answered it. “Yeah?”
