Paolo Bacigalupi - The Doubt Factory

“I don’t care how you handle it. I just don’t want him near my daughter ever again. Make it happen.”

Lisa hesitated, then pressed again. “We’ll need to address your daughter at some point as well.”

“I’ll deal with her.”

“We have clients who will need assurance….”

He gave her a cold stare. “I’ll take care of Alix.”

You’re in denial , Lisa thought, but all she said was, “Of course.”

Lisa pulled out her encrypted phone and dialed through to the response team. “Timmons? We’re on. Targets are in the building. Tenth floor. Mr. Banks’s private office. No. You don’t need to be that careful. We just want the girl. It doesn’t matter what happens to the other one, but nothing can happen to the girl. The other one… we don’t want to hear from him again. And we don’t want news. Just silence, understood?”

She waited, listening for the response. She turned back to Banks, who was still staring, transfixed, watching as his daughter and the boy who had turned her against him rummaged through his files one by one.

“We’re up and running,” Lisa said.

“How long?”

“Not long. Our people are very good. We’ll secure the building, then lock down the tenth floor. Then we’ll move in.”

Banks nodded sharply. “And it will be quiet?”

“By the time they’re done, there won’t be a trace of him. It will be like he never existed. None of this will have happened at all.”

“Don’t do anything to the boy in front of Alix.”

“The team understands.” She stood up. “We have a car waiting. You can be near the offices in fifteen minutes. You’ll want to be there when they bring out Alix.”

MOSES WHISTLED. “I NEED ANOTHERhard drive,” he said.

Alix handed him another terabyte drive. Moses swapped out the one that he’d just filled, and Alix dumped it into the duffel bag. It was more than she’d expected. Huge amounts of information, and they were still going.

“I think we ought to be going soon,” she said. “We’ve already been here for half an hour.”

Moses shook his head. “We’ve still got a lot here. You wouldn’t believe the stuff they have just on Azicort. Kimball-Geier has reams of studies that say Azicort causes comas if body-weight dosage goes off by much. And sometimes it happens anyway, and they still can’t figure out why. They’ve even got transcripts of emergency room interviews that they had investigators do. They know that this is happening. This is how Tank ended up in the hospital! They’ve known there were problems for years. They’ve been putting out studies blaming other drugs and patient diets—”

Alix interrupted. “We don’t have time for this, Moses. Just get all the info.”

“This isn’t just the smoking gun,” Moses protested. “It’s the whole smoking arsenal! Just the Azicort information is worth millions—maybe even billions—in class action lawsuits. I mean, you should see the nondisclosure agreements on this stuff. It’s amazing. Tank’s alive, but his sister died because they were hiding this….”

Moses went on, scanning documents. “It’s worse than I thought,” he kept murmuring. “They’re insane. When we broke into the safety-testing labs and stole Kimball-Geier’s rats, the thing we should have stolen was their test data. Azicort’s just a straight-up coma drug. That is, if it doesn’t just stop your heart completely…”

“That’s great, Moses, but let’s get this done and get out.”

“What’s wrong with you?”

“I don’t know.” Alix rubbed her arms. “I just don’t like being here. I thought we were going to get in and get out. Fifteen minutes, a half hour, tops. Time’s up.”

She went to the window and looked down, hoping that no one could see what was going on. That no one would think the glow of a computer screen was suspicious at 3 AM.

You’re being paranoid , she told herself. Lots of people work late in DC .

“Just hurry up,” she said to Moses.

“Okay, okay, but there’s terabytes here. BSP went full digital. All their old files are scanned. Everything. It’s a paper trail that goes back to tobacco.” He popped open a file. “Check this out. It’s like a treasure trove. I’ve got CEOs signing off on things that they’ve denied for years. It’s Eldorado. People could go to prison. There’s a ton of stuff on Marcea in here. With this, I might be able to file a civil suit. Wrongful death or something, and go after a CEO. I might be able to go after the actual people!”

“Not if we get busted trying to get it out,” Alix said. “So hurry it up, will you?”

Moses looked back at the computer. “This just takes time. I’d hook up more drives, but they’ve got only two USB ports on this computer. If I had Kook, maybe we could rig something faster….”

Alix wasn’t really listening as Moses rambled on about what Kook and the rest of the crew would have been able to do. She stared down at the street.

Were those shadows moving?

She squinted, trying to tell if she was seeing human forms down in the darkness, moving along the edges of the building. They didn’t look like regular pedestrians. She blinked and stared more closely. Maybe she was imagining them.

Or maybe not?

“Seriously,” she said, turning back to Moses. “We need to get the hell out of here.”

“Why are you so jittery all of a sudden?”

“I’ve got a bad feeling.”

Moses popped another hard drive in. “We’re good.”

Alix peered out the windows again, trying to see. The hair on her arms was standing up.

“I don’t like this,” she murmured. “I don’t like this at all.” She made a snap decision. “Okay, we’re wrapping up. It’s time. We’re going.”

“But I’ve only got half of it!”

“Better than none,” Alix said grimly. She yanked the hard drive out of the computer.

“Alix!”

“We’re going.”

She tossed the hard drive into the duffel. Moses looked like he was still going to protest, so she yanked the power plug out of the wall, too.

The computer’s screen went black.

“What are you doing ?”

“Making sure we get out in one piece.” She zipped up the duffel and grabbed Moses’s arm. “Come on!”

“Why are you so paranoid all of a sudden?”

“Like I said, I’ve got a bad feeling,” she said as she dragged him out of her dad’s office.

“You’ve got a bad feeling ? You know how long it’s taken me to get here, and now you want to leave just because you’ve got a bad feeling ?” His voice was rising, even as he followed her down the hall to the reception area.

Alix didn’t answer. All she could think was that something was terribly wrong. They’d done it wrong. They’d set it up wrong. Something…

By the time she shoved out through BSP’s main doors, she was practically running. She hit the Down button on the elevator. “Come on,” she whispered. “Come on, come on.”

Nothing happened.

Frowning, she hit the Down button again, then stared up at the glowing floor numbers.

L stayed stubbornly lit.

Alix pushed the button again.

Nothing changed.

Moses stood beside her, staring up at the unchanging floor number. “What was that you were saying about a bad feeling?”

From Alix’s perch by the windows, she could see shadows converging. Moses joined her, watching as more stealthy forms filtered toward the building. The elevators weren’t working anymore, and to their dismay, they’d found that the building’s fire stairwells were also locked down. They’d hammered on the doors, at first thinking they were stuck, and dashed around the entire floor of the building, hoping there might be some other escape, but now the reality of the situation was sinking in, and Alix found herself filled with an almost unnatural calm.