Adrenaline

“Sam Capra,” the buyer said. “There.”

Edward tore his stare away from the mound. He couldn’t tell if the Hapscomb boy was down or not. Sweat exploded down his ribs. He ejected the chip and slipped the new one in. The gun whirred, the match being made, the bullet given its own soul. The coding process would be done when the green light appeared.

He couldn’t wait. Edward raised the rifle and fired.

“Tell me!” I said, clutching her close. We spun, her fighting me.

“Daniel’s in—” and then she stiffened. I heard the impact of metal hitting flesh, and she fell in my arms.

“No!” I screamed. “No!”

“This hasn’t gone well.” Edward had to pick his words carefully or the deal would fold. “I think the governor took the bullet meant for the child. He covered him just as I fired. This isn’t a normal situation, since we’d usually strike without warning—”

He turned to his buyer and the knife flashed across his neck. Edward staggered, tried to close up the wound with his hand as the blood gushed. Pointless. He fell against the wall and thought, No no it hurts and I’m afraid I’m afraid—

The buyer stepped away from the spray of blood. He could see panic arising, not only from those close to the field but in a nearby section, where Edward’s second bullet had scored. No sign of Lucy. No sign of Sam Capra.

He collected the briefcase of DNA chips. Technology could always be refined. This demo might have been too extreme. Fine. Time was on his side. Resources were on his side. There were networks of rogue programmers, hackers, scientists, assassins, all eager to help him refine Bahjat Zaid’s prototype.

He had the chips, and the rest of the guns would arrive in the next few days. He could collect the shipment, and even if those prototypes were lost, he could re-create as many guns as he needed based on the gun he had. And he hadn’t transferred the funds. He folded the gun; it telescoped down into a wide metal tube which he put in his briefcase.

There were worse days.

He stepped out, the panicked crowd rushing pell-mell, and no one noticed him hurrying toward an exit with brisk efficiency. Thousands began to pour out of the stands, the police trying to effect an orderly evacuation.

He was close to the gate when he heard a voice say, “Hello, Howell.”

101

HOWELL KEPT HIS BAGS CLOSE TO HIM. His pinched frown told me he could feel the gun in his ribs.

“Move and I’ll kill you,” I said.

“So. Turning yourself in.”

“Don’t bull me. You’re the buyer.”

Howell took a deep breath. “Kill me and Mila dies.”

“She’d call that a fair trade,” I said.

He kept walking. So did I. I was careful to keep the gun under a fold of my jacket.

“You left your wife to die?” Howell asked.

“She’s not my wife anymore.”

“Ah.”

“Who are you?”

“Howell.”

“Who are you really? Who do you work for?”

“The Company.”

“No, you don’t. The Company hired Zaid to develop these guns. You would have gotten them without stealing them.” He’d used Edward to steal them. Of course. If the guns were stolen before they were ever delivered, then Howell would never be suspected. He’d chased me to keep me from tracking down the guns, or perhaps he’d hoped to double-cross Edward and steal them before he had to pay millions for them. Using me to see if I could locate the trail, do his dirty work.

“Part-time,” he amended. “I have another job. We can use a man like you.”

“Novem Soles. You asked me if I’d heard of it because you wanted to know if she’d talked. Not because you were on its trail. You were protecting Novem Soles.”

“Sam, that deal—”

God, everybody wanted to make a deal. I was sick of deals. “No. Where is Mila?” Now we were out of the gates, streaming into the parking lot.

“She’s being questioned. We want to know about you the same way you want to know about us.”

“You got Lucy to turn. She worked for you.” And that was worse. He’d used her. She’d gotten her orders from someone inside the Company. I believed her. She hadn’t known it was a bomb she’d planted in the London office until that final minute, when Edward left to make sure the detonator worked and she called me…

Howell gave me the equivalent of a shrug.

“Where is my son?”

“I don’t know.”

“Don’t lie to me. You will simply tell me where my son is.”

“Actually, I don’t know. Your wife handled all the arrangements for the baby broker.”

“That’s not what she said.”

“And you believed her?” Howell cleared his throat. “This is my car.”

We got inside it, him sliding over from the passenger side, me keeping the gun on him, sitting in the backseat.

“Yeah, now I do. You’re the asshole, Howell. You’re the king of the assholes.”

“I can make your troubles go away, Sam. I can clear your name. I can stop being your inquisitor and be your champion. We get rid of Mila. You forget about the guns. I can get the Company to say you infiltrated a dangerous group in Holland. We’ll say you were on a secret job and we expose your wife as the, well, traitor she is. Was.” He turned his flat stare onto me. “I can even help you find your child.”

“We’ll pretend, in other words, that it never happened.” His pet phrase he’d used with me in that distant prison where I had been the only inmate.

“Yes,” he said.

“No,” I said, and I shot him. The bullet sprayed through his heart and he jerked. The sound of the shot was loud but no one was right by the car then. Immediately afterward a group of Boy Scouts hurried by and they glanced at me and Howell sitting in the car. He stayed sitting up, his head down a bit like he’d decided to grab a nap, like the shooting, to use a phrase he favored, had never happened. I just got out and walked away from him, sifting into the crowd.

Let me go. Now I’d let it all go. Everything. All of it. Gone.

102

WHEN A COMPANY EXEC DIES in a baseball stadium parking lot, right after an elected leader is assassinated, the case gets taken from the NYPD and the Company takes over the investigation. The Company was most interested in the nano bullets and the gun, and the shipment manifest tied to a container of cigarettes.

The fifty people I’d seen on Zaid’s computer were indeed the kids and spouses of America’s governors. No one is targeting them now, and they sleep safe in their college dorms, their beds at home, their cradles. Including Bryant Hapscomb, shielded by his father’s body; the bullet couldn’t change course fast enough. Thousands attended the governor’s funeral. He died for his child, although the world believed him to have been the target. It did not occur to anyone that a thirteen-year-old boy was the real target, and that the governor simply threw himself on his child, covering him in the same millisecond that Edward pulled the trigger.

A few days after the shootings at the stadium, I sat in the Round Table’s New York bar, an elegant space called Bluecut, drinking a Boylan Bottleworks Ginger Ale, my favorite soda, waiting for Mila to show up. The bar sat on the edge of Bryant Park, not far from the hubbub of Times Square, and it was a beauty. Perfect Co