carried her, headfirst, into the bathroom. He held her upside down; her feet brushed the plaster ceiling.
‘Where is Frost? Where is it?’
‘I don’t know-’ she started to say, and then she saw the open toilet rushing toward her face. She managed a startled gulp of air before he drove her face into the shallow water.
Celeste struggled but he pinioned her legs with his own, her hands with one of his massive arms, and held her head at a precise angle and her face rammed against the porcelain. He’s done this before, she realized in shock.
‘You know! Tell me! Where is it?’ he yelled.
All she could do was keep kicking, make him fight to drown her.
The air exploded from her lungs as though seeking release and she choked, breathed the water, and then he let her go. She fell to the cold tile, spluttering, coughing, tasting her own blood from her lips.
‘Mrs. Brent? Are you well?’
The voice from the phone. Above her stood a fiftyish man, hair dark as coal, skin pale, with the biggest gun she’d ever seen pressed against Groote’s head.
FORTY-THREE
‘Why are we both dead men?’ Miles asked.
‘We know too much. Or rather, people think we know too much.’ Edward Wallace stepped aside and Miles walked into the house. He could see a back wall, dotted with photos. Of Allison. Wearing glasses, hair lighter in color, cut longer.
‘About Frost.’
‘Do you have it?’ Cautious hope lit Wallace’s eyes.
‘No. You do.’
Hope changed to surprise. ‘What?’
‘Allison hid the files on a server here. The day she died.’
‘Oh, Jesus. That explains it.’ Wallace sank against the wall.
‘Not to me, Doctor Wallace.’
‘I don’t have Frost.’
‘But you could access this system where she put the files-’
‘No. Listen, you have to go. Now. You can’t be here when Dodd gets here.’
‘Who’s Dodd?’ Miles remembered having heard the name when Sorenson spoke on the phone in Allison’s office: Dodd doesn’t know. And asking Allison who Dodd was as she hung up on him before she died. Dodd. The missing piece of the puzzle.
‘You can’t be here and you can’t know who he is. Please. Just go.’
‘No. Show me this system where she uploaded the files.’
‘I don’t have the Frost files.’
‘You erased them.’
‘No. I don’t know what happened,’ Wallace said. He set the gun down on the table, ran a hand through his hair, which stuck in clumps as though he’d run his hands through it in unending worry for the whole day.
‘Your wife asked me for help, Doctor. I didn’t help her in time and she’s dead, and the only way to help her now is to make sure whoever killed her doesn’t get away with it.’
Wallace’s half cough, half laugh was a strange sound in the quiet of the bungalow. ‘You. Stop them. I don’t know which side killed her, but you won’t stop them. Listen. Dodd could arrive at any time. We need to go.’
If you’re so afraid of this Dodd, why haven’t you already left? Miles wondered.
‘Dodd wants Frost. Why? Who is he?’
‘If I tell you – will you help me hide? Before they kill me the way they killed Renee.’
This didn’t add up, but the fear on the man’s face seemed real and defined. ‘These people killed your wife. Why don’t you just go to the cops?’
‘I – can’t go to the police.’
‘Explain.’
Wallace took a fortifying deep breath. ‘Dodd was in charge of the original Frost project.’
‘Hurley and Quantrill didn’t create Frost?’
‘No. They built on our findings. I was on the original Frost research team,’ Wallace said. ‘So was Renee.’
‘Why was she living as Allison Vance?’
‘She had no choice – being Allison was her cover story. Dodd forced her. He’s with the government.’
‘What agency?’
‘Dodd’s group is code-named Shaman. But you won’t see them listed on a congressional budget. They operate out of back rooms, with money cleaned through legit projects. He’s in charge of clandestine scientific research for the Defense Department.’
It clicked. Frost would be an immediate benefit to soldiers mentally devastated by the horrors of war. ‘So she was supposed to steal it for Dodd.’
‘Returning his stolen property.’
‘Why didn’t she just send it to Dodd?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Why did she send Frost to your server?’
‘I don’t know. I’d had no contact with her since she went to Santa Fe. Dodd forbade it.’ Wallace closed his eyes. ‘The – the people on Dodd’s team three years ago, we developed the initial version of Frost. I’m a neurobiologist – I worked on the beta blockers to prevent traumatic memories from consolidating. Allison was one of the psychiatrists. But our prototype drug didn’t work unless administered within two hours immediately following the trauma. One soldier in the test group, he went psychotic. When his long-term trauma didn’t go away… he killed the other patients in the testing. All of them.’ Wallace’s voice broke. ‘We brought those people there to help them, to cure them, and they all were murdered, one by one, in their sleep. Dodd ended the project and killed the research. Renee blamed herself.’
‘She knew about Frost. She knew what it was, from the beginning,’ Miles said.
‘After Dodd shut down the project, his team drifted into other work. Renee and I moved up to Fresno to open a PTSD clinic while I taught college and continued research. We kept a low profile, and then Dodd showed up at our house a few months ago. Quantrill had got hold of the original research – another researcher stole the original work and sold it to him – and managed to take Frost to the next level. Dodd found out – probably from the researcher who sold the data to Quantrill. Dodd can be… convincing. As in his way or it’s your funeral. That researcher died in a car accident. I don’t believe much in coincidence.’
Miles remembered the news account. ‘You had a hiking accident a few weeks back.’
‘Dodd forced us to quit our jobs and we moved up here for a lower profile. Renee went to Santa Fe to do Dodd’s spying for him… She called me late one night on the phone from her office. She missed me. Dodd must have been monitoring her office line; he sent a message as to what happens when his rules are broken. He came, asked me to go on a hike with him so we could talk, gave me a shove off a ten-foot bluff. Just enough to hurt, to rough me up. A warning.’
‘Nice.’
Wallace said, ‘Renee blamed herself for the Frost patients’ dying before; she never got over it. Dodd covered up the deaths, made the families believe the patients had died in a fire in the ward at a medical hospital in San Diego where we did the work.’
‘So Dodd wanted a new and improved Frost back. He made Allison his spy.’ She’d been a spy of sorts – just like him. Miles’s chest tensed; he remembered her words the last morning he saw her: I think I understand you better than you know.
Wallace nodded. ‘Memory research… it’s a small world. Quantrill couldn’t know that she’d worked on the original team. She had to see if his version of Frost had promise, steal it if it did, and then she could be Renee
