in his underwear. Which he is no longer wearing. And there's a missing window on the twenty-third floor. Shall we talk about it?'
They went up to the newly installed Vault Type Room on the nineteenth floor and Smith signed them in. Then they authenticated each other and locked the door. The blue-suiter waited outside, which was a relief to Mike-but only a temporary one. 'Do we know where he went?' he asked as soon as they were seated around the transparent conference table.
'Not a clue.' Smith inclined his head toward Pete. 'Dr. James is going to shit a brick the size of the World Trade Center as soon as he finds out, which is'-he glanced at his wrist-watch-'going to happen in about thirty minutes, so it is important that we are singing from the same hymn book before he drops in. Unless we can find our runaway first.' The colonel grinned humorlessly. 'So. From the top. How would you characterize Client Zero's state of mind last time you spoke to him?'
I'm not on the spot, Mike realized with an enormous sense of guilt-tinged relief-because it meant someone else was going to catch it in the neck. 'He seemed perfectly fine, to be honest. A bit stir-crazy, but that's not unexpected. He wasn't depressed or suicidal or excessively edgy, if that's what you're looking for. Why? What happened?'
Colonel Smith shook his head and shoved his voice recorder closer to Mike's side of the table. 'Summarize first. Then we'll go round the circle. Treat this as a legal deposition. Afterward I'll fill you in.'
'Okay.' Mike recounted his last meeting with Matthias. 'He was asking about his Witness Protection Program status, but-' Mike stopped dead. 'You said he took a lift down from the twenty-third-floor window. He was on the twenty-fourth floor. With no direct elevator between them. How'd he get downstairs?' Through two security checkpoints and four locked doors and then downstairs in an elevator car with a webcam and a security guard?
'Later,' Smith said firmly.
'Uh, I'd like to register a note of caution here. Did anyone see Client Zero move between floors twenty-four and twenty-three? And was there any evidence that he left the building by one of the ground-level doors?'
There was a pregnant pause.
'I'd have to say that we don't know that,' said Smith. His eyes tracked, almost imperceptibly, toward the door outside which the blue-suiter with the gun would be standing guard.
'Oh.' Oh shit, thought Mike.
'I'm betting he got riled up and broke out,' said Smith, his voice even. 'How he managed that is a troubling question, as is why he chose to do it right at this moment. But he's a smart cookie, is Client Zero. Just in case he had outside help, we're going to full Case Red lockdown. Nobody goes below the tenth floor without an armed escort until we've clarified the situation.'
'He can't have evaded our monitoring completely, even if he managed to bypass the guards.'
Smith's pager beeped for attention. He glanced at it, then stood up: 'I'm going to deposit this, then take a call. Back in ten minutes.' He disappeared through the door, taking the voice recorder and leaving Mike and Pete alone in the windowless room with the glass furniture and the vault fittings.
'He got stir-crazy,' said Mike.
Pete looked at him.
'What am I not hearing?' asked Mike.
Pete coughed. 'After your last meeting I dropped in on him. He was pissed-you said you'd been called away-'
'By Eric, he can confirm it-'
'Well sure, but Matt didn't see it that way, he thought you were bullshitting. He was worried. So to get him calmed down I tried to draw him out a bit about why he came over to us. I mean, you've been doing all those grammar sessions and he was getting bored, you know?'
'Okay.' Mike leaned back to listen.
Pete got into the flow of things. 'He had this crazy paranoid-sounding rant about how he was a second-class citizen as far as the bad guys are concerned, on account of how he can't do the magic disappearing trick-well, I'll buy that. And then something about a long-lost cousin turning up and destabilizing some plans of his. Seems she grew up on our side of the fence, worked in Cambridge as some kind of tech journalist. They rediscovered her by accident and she made the wheels fall off Matt's little red wagon by snooping around and stirring up shit. So Matt tried to persuade this Helga woman to get off his case and she-she's called Miriam something here, something Jewish-sounding-'
Can't be, thought Mike. She can't be the same woman. The idea was too preposterous for words.
Pete stopped. 'What is it?' he asked.
'Nothing. So what happened? What went wrong with Matt's plans?'
'She wouldn't blackmail-he said she wouldn't play ball, but that's my reading-and there's some stuff about her discovering a whole other world where the Clan guys have got a bunch of relatives who don't like them and who were paying Matt to look after their interests-he's always been a bit of a moonlighter-and the upshot is, he had to cut and run. He's still pissed at her. He came to us because he figured we'd protect him from his former associates.'
'Uh-huh.' Mike nodded. Miriam-what was her other name? 'What's this got to do with the time of day?'
'Well.' Pete looked embarrassed. 'I asked him how he thought it had worked, and that was when he got agitated. Said you'd told him something about him being in military custody now? So I tried to get him calmed down, told him it wasn't what it sounded like. But he wasn't having it. And at about five in the morning he went missing. Do I have to draw you a diagram?'
'No,' said Mike. He sighed. 'I knew this military thing was a bad idea.'
'Yeah, well. Which of us is going to tell Smith?'
They found the colonel at the security checkpoint by elevator bank B, talking to one of the guards. He didn't look terribly happy. 'What are you doing here?' he demanded.
'I've got a hypothesis I'd like to test, sir. I think Matt may still be in the building. Did we catch him leaving?'
'That's what I was just ascertaining,' said Smith. He glanced around irritably. 'Get me…' He snapped his fingers, searching for a name-'Sergeant Scoville, mister.'
'Sir.' The guard pulled out his walkie-talkie and began talking to someone.
'So.' Smith pointed a bony finger at Mike. 'Explain.'
'Client Zero is no dummy. He knows he's upstairs. He decided he wants to take a walk. We can be fairly sure he can move between floors but he's not on camera, so either he's been holding out on us-and I don't believe he's got what it takes to hack our sensors-or he's gone to ground. My bet is either under the false floor or over the suspended ceiling, probably on the twenty-third but possibly on the twenty-fourth or twenty-fifth floors. He probably ran into the security zone on the twenty-second and bounced. Now he'll be waiting for an opportunity to go elevator surfing or a chance to slip outside while we're distracted.'
'Okay. Now tell me why he's doing this. Where's he likely to go?'
Mike glanced at Pete. 'I think he's breaking out because he thought he was looking at a comfortable relax-a- thon in the Witness Protection Program, and a new identity afterward, with us to protect him from his former associates. Unfortunately, once Dr. James switched him to military custody we lost track of the WP program and his new identity, and he finally twigged that he was one step away from being given the whole unlawful-combatant treatment. As for where he's going-I bet he's got his own spare identity stashed away, from before he decided to come in. It won't be as good as what we could have given him if we'd kept him in witness protection, but it beats being a ghost detainee.'
'Right.' The guard offered Smith his handset. 'Jack? Our current best guess is that the target's still in the building, above the security zone on ten. My top priority is, I want you to secure the entry zone and the lobby. Nobody leaves the building even if a Boeing flies into the top floor: our target may try to provoke an evacuation so he can escape in the crowd. I want a security detail to start on floor ten and work their way upstairs, one level at a time, until they get to the roof. They will need torches, floor-tile lifters, and ladders because they're going to check the crawlways and overheads, and they need to be armed because our target is dangerous. How soon can you get that started? How many bodies have we got up here anyway?' He listened for a few seconds. 'Damn, I'd hoped for
