Rachel Caine - Terminated

Back at the airport, Bryn showed it to the others, and Joe and Patrick and Riley all geared up to accompany her. “I don’t think we need SEAL Team Six,” she protested. “C’mon, she’s a scientist. Manny could take her.”

“Probably,” Manny agreed. He was working another crossword—and, she realized, that was probably to deal with general anxiety. This was hard for him, being on the move without any good way to seek solid cover. Even the plane probably gave him bad feelings of exposure. But he was hanging in there, and playing it as cool as she’d ever seen him, except in the middle of a crisis. Pansy was being a helicopter girlfriend, though—hovering. Obviously worried about him, and just as obviously hoping nobody would notice.

Manny looked up over his glasses, straight at Bryn, and said, “Take the firepower, you idiot. We’re not playing for pickup sticks. You know what’s at stake.”

She did, and she bowed her head to acknowledge it. “I rented a truck,” she said. “It should get us out there and back in about two hours, maybe less. Keep the pilot close, we might have to leave fast.”

“We’ll be ready,” Liam promised. He, she noticed, was conspicuously armed with what looked like a nine millimeter pistol tucked snugly in a shoulder harness. It gave him a dangerously piratical edge. Annie, on the other hand, was looking stormy; she was sitting on the edge of her seat, elbows on the table, and frowning. Liam, not too subtly, had his hand on her shoulder, pinning her in place. He smiled and said, “Don’t worry, we won’t eat all the snacks before you return.”

“There were snacks? Damn,” Bryn sighed, and she was only half kidding. “Okay, let’s roll if we’re rolling.”

The SUV was a monster of a thing, not too late-model but it had the look of a truck well suited to its surroundings. If vehicles could evolve, this one definitely had, and as she set out from the airport down a partly muddy, partly snow-clogged road, it seemed to handle the terrain easily, if not comfortably. That was probably the springs in the seats, which had long ago given up the fight.

Patrick was hanging on to the strap, which was probably wise, considering the bouncing, and simultaneously studying the map she’d marked, though how he could do it and not be motion-sick she couldn’t imagine. The town of Barrow fell away within minutes, and the Alaskan tundra stretched on in a blotched, mostly white expanse. “Glad it isn’t winter,” he said. “The snow would be impassible without plowing paths.”

On Bryn’s left was the distant curve of the bay, and beyond that, straight north, would be . . . well, she supposed, a pole. Strange to think that this shore here was, in a way, what people liked to mark as the end of civilization . . . at least until you crossed the pole and came down on the other side. She’d put on her sunglasses, so the sun’s glitter on the snow wasn’t as bad as it could have been, but within just a few miles she understood why it would blind people. The constant, unyielding glitter . . . beautiful, but deadly.

“Slow down,” Patrick finally said, and released the safety strap to point to the left. “Should be some kind of trail that way—yeah, right there. Turn.”

If he hadn’t directed her, she would have missed it, because it was less a road than a vague depression in the landscape. Snow had covered it for about a foot, and buried all traces it existed . . . except for a snow-covered mailbox burdened by another layer of white. Beneath, it was painted a shocking Day-Glo yellow, probably because it would have otherwise been regularly missed.

Bryn slowed, and without being asked, Joe bailed out of the back, jogged over, and checked the mailbox. Empty. He got back in the SUV, and Bryn followed the barely visible curves of the trail up a hill . . . and at the top, she spotted a snowy roof.

She stopped. Joe and Riley exited to check the perimeter, and to keep watch; she and Patrick then drove the rest of the way up. The chill was penetrating through the windows, and she hadn’t really noticed until now. “Is it getting colder out there?”

“Yeah,” Patrick said. “Getting on toward sundown in the next couple of hours, and we need to be back in Barrow before it’s dark or we’ll have hell finding our way. This isn’t country for tourists.”

No kidding. She couldn’t imagine how dark it would be out here, and how forbidding. Getting stuck or stranded could be a death sentence.

“Got an approach planned?” he asked her. Bryn shook her head and brought the SUV to a stop in the dirty packed snow of the cabin’s front yard, such as it was.

“I don’t think planning’s going to help,” she said. “I have no idea what to expect from her, so I’m going to play it by ear. And be as honest as I can. I—I think she deserves that. She’s not part of this.”

He nodded, whether or not he agreed with her, and it moved her to lean over and give him a very quick, but very warm, kiss. He smiled. “Be careful,” he said. “I’ll be out here.”

“My last line of defense?”

“Something like that,” he said. “Or you’re mine, which is probably closer to the truth. I just have to love the powerful women.”

“Flirt.”

“Guilty.”

She moved quickly up to the cabin’s front door; the glow of lights in the windows guaranteed, she thought, that someone was home—and probably watching, because having a strange vehicle drop by in this remote expanse was likely worth noting.

The door opened on her knock, and she was facing the business end of a double-barreled shotgun, held very competently by a woman who’d probably grown up with it. The smile was gone, but the face was the same as the picture on the blog. Kiera Johannsen, in the flesh.

“Don’t mean to be rude,” Johannsen said, “but who the fuck are you, and why are you on my porch?”

Bryn slowly raised her hands. Her skin felt very exposed to the wind whipping across the snow, and she shivered as it found ways inside the neck of her sweater, under the parka she’d worn open. “Bryn Davis,” she said. “You don’t know me.”

“Damn right I don’t.”

“Calvin Thorpe sent me.”

That made the woman blink and take a step back. The shotgun, though, didn’t come down. “Why would Cal send you? Where is he?”

“He’s dead,” Bryn said. “I’m sorry. He was killed in an explosion in California.”

“Oh,” she said blankly, as if she hadn’t understood. And maybe she hadn’t. “Oh.” The second time had weight to it, and emotion. She sagged a little, as if she’d received a jab to the ribs and couldn’t quite get her breath. But she didn’t look surprised. “You came all the way here to tell me that?”

“No,” Bryn said. “I came because Dr. Thorpe said I could trust you. He left something with you to hold, and I need it. It’s important.”

It was the wrong thing to say, because the woman’s light blue eyes seemed to catch fire, and her face tightened. So did her aim. “I don’t know you. You show up out of nowhere and tell me to hand something over? Why would I do that? How do I even know that Cal is really dead?”

“Ma’am, I’m sorry. I wish I had time to tell you everything, and explain all that happened, but . . . there just isn’t a way I can do it. I was with him when it happened. He wanted me to do this, and I intend to do it, because it’ll save lives. That’s what he wanted to do, in the end. Save lives.”

For a few seconds nothing changed, and then Johannsen shook her head, as if shaking off a bothersome fly. It wasn’t the no that Bryn was expecting, though. “That sounds like him,” she said. “He believed . . . he believed science could save everything. Everyone. I told him he was a dreamer, you know. But he said he’d proved me wrong. He said—you know, he got drunk once and said one day, he’d cure death.” She shook her head again. “He was a fool sometimes. Science can repair, but it can destroy just as fast. I kept trying to make him understand that.”