Girl Fights Back (Go No Sen) (Emily Kane Adventures) (15 page)

“Hello, Emily,” the man said. “It’s
good to meet you finally.”

“Those aren’t plaid pants,” she
replied coolly.

“That’s not an orange ball cap,” he
said in an aggressive tone.

“You’re not the man I spoke to on
the phone yesterday,” she said decisively and stood up from the table. “I’m
tired of playing games. Let me know when you guys are serious about talking.”
She turned to go.

“Wait! Wait.... He’ll be here in a
second,” said the man in the red pants, clearly flustered. Just then, a tall
gray haired man in a tweed jacket carrying books in a backpack walked over and
sat down. He waved the first man away. He clearly had a similar idea about
camouflage on a college campus.

“Well, it really is good to meet
you, Emily. I’ve heard a lot about you,” he said in a voice she couldn’t help
but recognize.

“I don’t know if the feeling is
mutual,” said Emily. “Where’s my father?” she asked as urgently as she could.
The man looked at her very carefully. He seemed to be trying to read her, and
she didn’t feel her sunglasses presented any obstacle to his gaze. She took
them off and looked directly into his eyes. She wanted him to see the full
depth of her irritation with him. What he saw in her eyes was a dark fury
simmering as if at the bottom of a deep pit. He was a little taken aback and
imagined he was seeing something like what his men encountered a bit more
directly yesterday on the road out of Deerfield.

“I don’t know yet. But maybe we can
still help each other,” he said. Emily was mollified. At least he wasn’t lying
to her... yet.

“I don’t know how I can help you.
Or why I should try. How do I know it wasn’t you who burned down my home?” she
asked pointedly.

“Well, it wasn’t. But I don’t know
how to convince you if you won’t take my word for it,” he said. He took a deep
breath before continuing. “But, okay, I’ll go first. I’ll trust you. We found
the burned bodies of three of my agents at the estate. We don’t know how they
got there or why they were killed. But they were supposed to meet with Michael
Cardano earlier that day in DC.” Emily gave an audible gasp for his benefit.
“So you
do
know something,” he said.
“Were you there?”

“No!” she said vehemently. “Well,
not exactly. I was camping in the woods behind the estate. My dad was supposed
to try to find me. It’s a game we play.” Burzynski couldn’t conceal a wistful
smile. “From where I had set up camp, I could see the estate buildings. I was
watching for my father with binoculars. I didn’t see him come home.” She tried
to simulate a catch in her voice.

“What else did you see?” he
pressed.

Emily gulped and said “I saw a lot
of shooting, and then the house was on fire. I didn’t see how it started. There
were at least two groups of people. Some guys in suits were shooting from the
area around the house. A whole lot more guys in black military style uniforms
coming out of the woods on the north side were shooting back. I didn’t wait
around to see how it ended.”

“How were you able to see the guys
in the black uniforms at night?” he asked warily.

“It was a full moon that night, and
the damn house was on fire! There was plenty of light,” she replied testily.

“Sorry, I just had to be sure.”

“Great! You’re testing me. You
obviously have nothing to tell me. There’s nothing more I can tell you. Unless
you find my dad, please leave me alone,” she said angrily. She stood up as if
to go.

“Wait. Don’t go just yet.” He
paused and looked her up and down. “You’re holding something back.” She stood
silently, wondering what he was thinking of. “You must know what happened to
Cardano and the rest of the estate staff,” he continued. “Were they there
during all this?”

“I have no idea. By the time I was
watching, there was no sign of them. And there’s still no sign of them. I’m on
my own trying to hold things together. I don’t need you bothering me anymore.
You obviously have no information for me,” she said, now in genuine anger.

“I’m sorry. I really am. I’ll be in
touch if I find out anything about your dad,” he said as he stood up and
abruptly walked off.

Emily watched him for a while. But
she decided not to follow him. She was not likely to find out anything about
him that Michael couldn’t simply tell her, and she wanted to preserve the
impression that she was naive. It wasn’t easy to know just what to make of
Burzynski. He didn’t seem deceptive, and he didn’t say anything she knew to be
a lie. Also, his sympathy with her plight seemed genuine. But she had to remind
herself that he was trained in the art of deception. He may just have been
better at lying than she was at detecting his lies.

Back in Newcomb Hall, the crowd of
students had thinned out a bit. She went into a quiet restroom on the second
floor to modify her outfit, on the off chance Burzynski’s people were still
tracking her. She took off the hoodie and stuffed it into her backpack and
pulled out a sleek leather jacket. Looking very stylish, a quick check in the
mirror, a few final adjustments, and she noticed a tall, blonde woman enter
behind her. Too old and too focused to be a student, probably not a member of
the faculty either, for analogous reasons. She looked very fit, as if she had
been through a rigorous training program.

Emily turned to leave, and the
woman reached out to her shoulder as if to squeeze by in a confined space. It
would have passed for an innocent gesture, except that the restroom was quite
spacious. A glint of something shiny, metallic in the woman’s hand caught her
eye. A quick, almost instinctive impulse: a quick upward block of the wrist and
a sharp blow to solar plexus. The woman staggered backwards, then gathered
herself to lunge once more at Emily, this time with no attempt to conceal her
aggressive intentions. Now the needle in her hand was easy to see. She held a
syringe and meant to inject her with something. Emily slapped the woman’s hand
towards her own chest, kicked her quickly in the right knee and as she fell to
the floor kicked her a second time hard on the side of her head. The woman went
spinning into the corner of an open stall face down. Emily leapt on top of her,
controlling the hand with the syringe by twisting her wrist back and up behind
her..

“Who sent you?” she hissed into her
ear.

The woman, groggy and disoriented,
didn’t answer.

“What’s in the syringe?”

Again, no answer, but she groaned
from the pain in her wrist and the throbbing in her head. This woman was very
tough. She was struggling hard not to admit how much pain she was experiencing.

“Fine,” Emily said menacingly.
“Let’s stick it in you and find out.” Emily moved the needle closer to the
woman’s ribs.

“No! No, no, no, please, no,” she
pleaded, suddenly wide eyed and alert.

“Who sent you?” Emily asked again.

“I can’t tell you. They’ll kill
me,” she pleaded. Emily gave her wrist a slight twist. She knew the pain must
be excruciating. “I can’t...” A tear ran down her face. Emily jabbed her
slightly with the needle. “No! please, don’t kill me.”

“What’s in it? Poison?”

“Yes,” she admitted.

“Who sent you?” she hissed once
again. “Don’t worry. I won’t tell anyone you told me,” she added with a sneer.

“I can’t...” Emily jabbed her a
little deeper. The woman let out a muffled shriek. Tears were now streaming down
her cheeks. “Don’t kill me. You’re not a killer. You can’t do this.”

“Why not? You had no hesitation
about sticking it in me.”

“You’re right,” she confessed, and
went limp. “I’m sorry.” The woman took a breath and uttered the name Emily
already knew well enough: “Meacham.”

“Why?”

“He doesn’t want you talking to
Burzynski.”

“I don’t
know
anything
. That’s
what I told that other guy. Why can’t you people leave me alone,” she said in
genuine exasperation. “How did you find me here?”

“We followed Burzynski.”

“How many are with you?”

“Two men, downstairs.”

Emily removed the syringe from the
woman’s hand, squeezed it out into the toilet and threw it across the floor.
The woman breathed a sigh of relief. She twisted the woman on to her side,
pulled her face upwards and stared into her eyes for a long moment. The woman
flinched, terror written across her face.

“You came here
to take my life. I preserved yours. Don’t try me again,” Emily whispered into
her ear. She stood up, picked up her pack and walked out of the restroom. There
was no one waiting for her outside.

The woman lay still on the floor
for a few minutes gathering her thoughts. She was a trained professional
operative. She knew she was a good fighter. She had faced fearsome adversaries,
had killed before. She was angry, with herself, with Meacham, with everyone.
She would have liked to believe the girl got lucky. But she knew better. She
had deflected her attack effortlessly, thrown her aside like a rag doll. She
never had a chance. Strangely, the one person she wasn’t angry with was the
girl. She could have tried to console herself with the thought that she must be
a trained professional too, especially considering the magnitude of her skills,
and that she was completely unflustered by her attack. But when she glanced
into her eyes, she didn’t see a pro. At the bottom of those black eyes she saw
a placid, innocent spirit. A profound sense of shame welled up inside her,
something she hadn’t felt in several years. There was also something else in
the girl’s eyes, a quiet fury, a storm of unimaginable force seemingly held in
perfect equilibrium. The combination was intoxicating, and terrible.

She could no
longer fathom how Meacham could conceive of harming this girl. What possible
purpose could it serve? Whatever it was, its moral repugnance stank in her
nostrils. She had long been aware that both Meacham and Burzynski were
operating outside any lawful authority. They were each making a bid for power
in the covert operations community. Agents like her had gone along for the
ride, in part for the thrill of it, but mainly because they had their own
ambitions to gratify. When she tried to pick herself up off the floor her head
throbbed—the girl must have hit her harder than she had realized. She
threw up in the toilet next to her. After a few more minutes, once she was
finally able to stand, she took a few uncertain steps over to the sinks and
threw some water in her face. She tried not to look at herself too closely in
the mirror. At least there were no visible bruises yet. Nothing to explain to
her team. She would merely report that the girl had somehow eluded her.

Emily walked to the other end of
the hall, down another staircase and then back towards the food court. She saw
two men in dark suits loitering conspicuously by the staircase. They must be
Meacham’s men, she thought. She walked right past them, out the front entrance,
and then crossed over to the Admissions offices in the adjoining building. She
picked up brochures and application forms. There was even time for a
conversation with one of the admissions counselors about various programs
offered in the history department. Even Emily was surprised at how easily she
could shift gears: one moment a death struggle with an assassin, the next a
convivial chat about college possibilities.

A quick step across campus brought
her to the library a good fifteen or twenty minutes before the guys were likely
to get there. She found a terminal nestled in a lonely spot among the stacks
and called Michael to discuss the events of the morning. He was stunned by the
news, and astounded yet again by the resilience of this surprising girl. As
horrifying as the attack was, it suggested Meacham either did not know about
the mutation, or more likely had no idea of Emily’s relationship to Yuki. There
was certainly cause for relief in that.

“Please don’t tell my Mom about any
of this, okay?” Michael understood. Nothing would be gained by telling her
about dangers she could do nothing to protect her daughter from.

“She’s right here. I’ll put her
on,” he said to indicate his assent.

Yuki grabbed the phone hungrily and
peppered her daughter with questions. She wanted to know every detail of her
life, every desire, every sorrow, every joy. She hoped it would keep all her
anxieties about her daughter’s safety at bay.

“I’m calling from the university
library in Charlottesville. I came to check it out and to get admissions
materials.” The news was both stunning and gratifying. The sheer ordinariness
of what Emily was doing in the midst of her situation was amazing. At the same
time, Yuki had long dreamt of helping her make choices like this one.

“Is that where you want to go? What
will you study?”

“I don’t know yet, Mom. I wish I
could talk it all over with you. But we have so little time.” Yuki sighed. She
felt so cut off from the life of her child, so deprived of the joys of
motherhood, and yet so relieved to hear about her resolve.

“Honey, we have to talk about all
of this. There’s so much to consider. We have to find a way.” The two of them
stretched out the call as long as they dared, and she promised to call again
soon.

Emily found the guys waiting for
her lounging across the front steps of the library. Although they’d enjoyed
wandering around campus for the last hour, looking at dorms, the gym, the main
quad outside the Rotunda, they were pretty bored by this point. More urgently,
Wayne looked hungry.

“Hey, guys. How long you been
here?” she asked, clearly relieved to be able to put the events of the last
hour or so behind her.

“Not long,” said Danny. “How about
you? Did you talk to the admissions people?”

“Yes,” she said truthfully, and
glad to be able to speak the truth again. “Plus, look at all the stuff they
gave me,” she crowed waving a large envelope in front of them.