Two Weeks' Notice

surroundings.

It shouldn’t have felt so full of menace, so much like being trapped in a nightmare. She couldn’t stop thinking about little Jeff, about the fragile courage on his small face. Bryn stared at the two police officers, willing them to turn and look at her, to see that something was wrong and approach her.…

A hand fell on her shoulder. “Bryn?”

It was Carl, her Pharmadene problem child, suddenly here and in the flesh. She blinked, and turned to face him. “What—what are you—” It didn’t matter. Didn’t matter at all. “I can’t talk to you right now.” She had no patience with coddling him right now. He was an obstruction, not an opportunity. It’d take too long to try to make him understand enough to use him as a messenger.

Carl looked pale, shocky, hunched as if he’d been punched in the guts. “Sit down for a second,” he said. Bryn ignored him and looked around for the woman she was supposed to meet. No one presented herself as a possibility.

Carl grabbed her arm, hard enough to bruise, and forced her to pay attention. “Bryn! Sit down!”

She bent her knees and sank into the chair, staring now at him. “What is this?”

He wet his lips. He looked terrible—really terrible. Gray, as if he was at least two doses down on Returné. “It’s not me,” he said. “I’m not doing this. I’m a pawn, just like, a pawn.…No, sit down! I don’t have a choice.” He spoke in a terrified hiss, and held her wrist when she tried to get up. “Sit!”

She slowly lowered herself back to the chair. “You’re in this with her.”

“No,” he said. He didn’t let go of her. His eyes were wild. “Just wait. Wait.”

Suddenly, she knew what was happening. Carl was under orders.

Protocol orders. He didn’t have a choice in what he was doing.

She didn’t know what he was waiting for until the two cops, chatting and joking with the barista, claimed their coffees and headed out the door. Bryn tried to catch their eyes, and tensed to grab one, but Carl’s desperation warned her that she’d better not try it.

Once the cruiser had pulled away into traffic, he let her go. “Go get a drink,” he said. “Go on. Get in line.”

“I don’t want any goddamn coffee,” she hissed back. “Where’s Jeff? Where are they holding him?”

He stared back at her and didn’t speak, just pointed at the counter. She grabbed her purse and walked to the counter. The register worker took her order and five dollars, and she moved to the other end, where the barista worked the machine and, in about a minute, put a cup up for her to take.

“You’re Bryn, right?” he asked. “Take it.”

The cup was empty.

She felt something blunt jammed low against her back, somewhere in the vicinity of her liver. “Drop the purse,” a man’s voice said—not Carl’s this time. “We’re going to walk very quietly toward the bathroom hallway.”

Bryn stared at the barista, hoping desperately that he’d do something…but he stared back at her without any expression at all. She glanced over at the man working the register, the other new employee. Same blank indifference.

They knew. More than knew. They were part of the team.

“Do you want me to start shooting some of these nice people?” the voice whispered in her ear. “Move it. Now.”

She did, but only to put a little distance between herself and the man herding her. She passed a woman seated next to the display of coffeemakers, beans, and grinders. She was sipping and reading a folded newspaper, which she put down as Bryn made eye contact. Help, Bryn mouthed.

The woman raised her eyebrows, looked past her at her captor, and then turned casually toward the center of the room. “Carl. Get up and lock the door and flip the sign. Do it now.”

No one in the coffee shop even moved other than Carl, who looked deathly pale now and very shaky. He did as directed. One of the other customers began pulling the shades down.

It wasn’t just Carl. It wasn’t just the baristas who were in on this.

It was all of them. The whole shop. God.

Her captor shoved her down into the chair opposite the woman. She was just…there. A soft, rounded face, dark hair, unexceptional but presentable. Even her clothing was nondescript. “So. You’re Bryn Davis,” she said. She reached down next to her and pulled a cell phone out of her purse, which she laid in the center of the table. “Let’s be clear. I know you can cause me trouble, and that’s why we’ve gone to these lengths. But you won’t cause any trouble, and this is why.” She took the phone and activated it, scrolled, and then faced it toward Bryn.

The same video setting as before—Jeff, sitting bound hand and foot on a box. Only now, his gag had been removed, and he was blinking into the camera’s spotlight. His jaw was set in an expression that Bryn recognized as being straight from his dad. Stubborn. “My dad’s going to kill you,” he said to the videographer, in a remarkably matter-of-fact tone. “But my mom’s going to kill you way more.”

The video shut off, but that was all Bryn really needed to see. “Fuck you,” Bryn said softly. “Fuck you for using kids.”

“Not just kids. Oh, don’t look at me like that, sweetie. I’ll use anybody I need to use to finish the mission. Now. We’re going to go into the bathroom, and I’m going to strip you naked and do the kind of search that requires rubber gloves inside of body cavities. Then you’re going to put on the clothes I brought.”

She gritted her teeth until she saw stars. “What happened to these people? The regulars in here?”

“They’re safely sleeping it off in the storage room.” The woman’s eyes weren’t any remarkable color, just a plain dull brown, but the expression in them was extraordinary. “Why, do you really care about them more than this precious little boy? That’s just sad, and if you insist on asking me stupid questions, we’re going to have a problem that gets little Jeffy hurt.”

“No,” Bryn said tightly. “No problem.”

She cast a filthy look at Carl as she got up, and he flinched. “It’s not my fault,” he blurted. “I didn’t have a choice.”

She did know; it just didn’t make it any better. “You know they’re not going to let either of us go now,” she said. “You know that.”

He nodded, but she could tell he didn’t actually believe it. He thought there would be a chance for escape, or mercy; he thought that he could clever his way out of it.

Bryn already knew. She’d seen it in the other woman’s dark, chilling eyes.

Twenty-four hours until the nanites begin to broadcast our position.

That didn’t matter. She needed to make sure Jeff was released unharmed. That was her primary, her only concern right now. Everything else—the pain that was sure to come, the eventual end of her life—all that had to be secondary.

She wouldn’t let this happen.

Bryn glanced into the tote bag of clothes that the woman thrust into her hands. “Not my color,” she said. “But I’ll make do.”

The woman’s smile wasn’t much warmer than her eyes. “Move it.”

The strip search was humiliating and efficient. Bryn’s clothes were bundled into a trash bag, and everything else—earrings, watch, necklace—went as well. The cavity search was unpleasant in every way possible, except that it was fast. It took a total of one minute to reduce Bryn to…nothing. No identity, nothing to call her own. Just a walking corpse.

Well, she thought, that’s not new, at least. Odd how that could be comforting at a time like this.

After that, it was simple. She put on the plain pants and shirt, and her captor walked her out the back door to a brown SUV waiting there—not a flashy bulletproof model like the one Manny Glickman owned, but the kind