Right Through Me (The Obsidian Files #1) (23 page)

He wanted to play with the quick and dirty toys right now.

He looked out the back of the parked truck. Brenner was out in the gravel pit, setting up two extremely realistic dummies that Mark had found in Kitteridge’s vault. They even had fake blood pumping through surgical tubes and artfully simulated soft tissue and organs. A young woman dummy, and a child dummy, a girl about the size of a five-year-old. The little girl dummy held a doll, a detail which he found perversely kinky. Those Obsidian pricks thought they were so fucking cute.

Brenner had finished getting them in place. Now he just stood, staring at them. There was a sickly gray green pulsing in his sig around the level of his liver. Dread.

Mark’s anger flared. Sloppy design. Brenner should have no emotions aside from an eager desire to serve his controller. Mark had to burn those feelings out of him.

There would be plenty of opportunities for that coming up real soon.

Mark approached him, savoring the moment. He could have used the pain setting on the freq wand from a distance, but it was more fun up close.

A long, hard zap broke the pattern of colors in the slave soldier’s sig into a muddle of disoriented agony. Better. Softening him up.

Mark gave Brenner a moment to recover as he looked over the settings on the amplifier. The one he was most intrigued with was the last option. TOT. DES
.

Total destruction. At his fingertips. He liked it. Felt right.

Mark pointed at the female dummy. “First target,” he said. “Go.”

He pointed the console at Brenner, and pushed the TOT. DES. button.

The effect was immediate and violent. Brenner threw back his head and roared like a wounded bear. He leaped at the female dummy, knocked it to the ground, and proceeded to rip its limbs off. Then its head. Realistic high-pressure blood spurted out of the breached fake arteries, drenching him.

After he’d torn off all the limbs, he began to claw and bite the tissue away from the skeleton.

Mark was so enthralled by the spectacle, he let it go on for a while. Lydia had warned that leaving the soldiers on total destruction mode for too long would compromise their function, but Brenner needed a good hard whack to get him into line.

Brenner clawed and gnawed at the bleeding shreds of the dummy like a maddened dog. He would just keep at it indefinitely until Mark told him to stop, or until the target was pulped.

He pushed the stop button. Brenner rolled over onto his back, gasping for breath.

When the slave soldier’s sig once again looked more or less human and he’d struggled back up onto his feet, Mark pointed at the child dummy.

“That’s your next target,” he said. “Go.”

He pushed
TOT. DES. and
Brenner roared again. Then he staggered, and stopped. He stood there, swaying. His arms swung around, fingers clutching and fisting, seeking a target to strike and rend but remaining motionless
. Three seconds. Five.
Ten.

Mark cursed under his breath. Bullshit implant and stim design. Worthless turd was resisting his programming. If Mark pushed too far, he’d trip the autodestruct and Brenner would be toast. A huge investment of energy down the drain.

He stopped the amplifier, pulled out the freq wand and set it to maximum pain.

He let Brenner scream and writhe for a good ten minutes. He’d almost ceased to care if he damaged the guy. He had to learn his lesson, or else he’d be useless anyway. So why the fuck not? Better to just have at. Get it out of his system.

He let Brenner catch his breath after his punishment, sweating and shaking, and then gave the man a rousing kick to the ribs. He pointed to the child dummy.

“On your feet,” he barked. “Again. That’s your target. Go.”

He pushed the button and Brenner leaped on the little girl dummy with a hoarse roar. He began to tear it to pieces, yelling the entire time, but his hoarse bellows no longer sounded triumphant. They sounded desperate.

Mark observed carefully. After a while, he concluded that as long as he functioned, Brenner could suffer as much as he liked. His inner conflict was irrelevant as long as the programming held. And it seemed to be holding. So it was all good.

He watched with enjoyment as the process ran its course. The bloodsoaked, howling Brenner reduced the child dummy to something unrecognizable as human. Skull crushed, bones shattered, tissue torn apart. Almost liquefied. It was enough.

Mark lifted the console and stopped him. A strange silence descended. Even the bird and animal sounds were gone.

“Go down to the creek,” Mark told the slave soldier, pointing to the nearby gulley. “Get cleaned up. There are fresh clothes for you in the back of the truck.”

Brenner got to his feet. “Callie.” His voice was scratchy and ruined.

“She’s not here,” Mark said. “If she were, I would tell you to kill her. And you would do it. So shut the fuck up. Go clean up.”

Brenner was looking at the ground. Mark realized that the slave soldier was staring at the doll that the researchers had shoved into the girl dummy’s hand.

It was a baby doll, drenched with blood. Now missing an arm and an eye.

Brenner lifted his head, and fixed his eyes on Mark. His blue eyes shone weirdly bright, their color only heightened by the slimy fake blood that covered his face.

Brenner’s gaze was pure concentrated hatred.

It didn’t bother Mark. Hate was good. Hate was fuel.

He should know.

Chapter 17

Cold, bracing air rushed in when the car door opened. They were at Noah’s house again. She’d come full circle. She got out, squinting in the white light from the overcast sky. Glimmering gray lakewater and evergreens. It smelled good.

Her legs wobbled for a moment when she tried to stand. Adrenaline aftermath.

Noah offered his hand to walk to the house. She took it, entwining her fingers with his, comforted by the warmth of his touch. The lethal war machine she’d just seen in action had been locked away somewhere deep in his psyche.

The guy was a walking contradiction.

They reached the door and went in, making their way into the big kitchen. Noah switched gears, going into alpha-male domestic mode. She was fine with that.

Strong coffee and a ham and cheese sandwich grounded her a little. She was starting in on her second cup when Noah sat down opposite her, silently waiting.

She struggled inwardly for a few minutes as she sipped her coffee. Her first instinct was to stay silent, which seemed like the only way to protect him and herself. Although she’d never in her life met a person less in need of protecting than Noah Gallagher.

What a weird and excellent rush that was.

The urge to resist his curiosity was still there, but it was mostly habit. The desire to tell him the truth was getting stronger by the second.

“I’m not sure where to begin,” she said at last. “But I do want to talk.”

“Good.”

“OK.” She stared down into her coffee as she chose her words. “Last night, you made some guesses about me. You pretty much nailed every one. I do come from near Boston and yes, I’m an artist. I also make theater costumes and masks—that’s how I got started at Bounce.”

“That fits.”

What did he think it fit? His calm expression gave away nothing.

“Anyway, I used to have a much more lucrative job with a company called GodsEye Biometrics. My boss, Dex Boyd, bought a small firm that did everyday biometric security—you know, retinal scans, iris scans, voice recognition, even fingerprints. Old school stuff.”

“If you say so.”

“Dex developed a brain-based system and hired me to train new clients in its interface. So that’s how I started. I loved the work. But all that’s gone. GodsEye can’t exist without my boss, Dex Boyd. He was murdered eight months ago.”

His eyebrows went up. “So then. Security. Biometrics. Don’t tell me, let me guess. Somebody wants you to open a vault for them. Right?”

She gave him a startled look. “Ah . . . how did you figure that out?”

“It’s not much of a leap,” he said. “What’s in the vault?”

“Don’t know,” she said. “Not my business to know. It belonged to this woman named Lydia Bachmann. The CEO of a weapons manufacturing firm. I was her coach.”

He frowned in perplexity. “Coach? For what?”

“I didn’t explain the system yet,” she said. “Dex Boyd developed biometrics for vaults and safes using brain waves patterns generated while visualizing a sequence of images. Clients who weren’t good at visualization struggled with it. Dex was always looking for staff to demonstrate the interface and work on it too, make it more user friendly.”

“How did he find you? Is he an art school alum?”

“No,” she said. “We connected through a mutual friend.” She looked at him warily. “I was in a mental institution at the time.”

He didn’t answer for a several seconds. His voice was gentle when he finally spoke. “Huh. That came out of nowhere.”

“Yeah.” She looked down at her clasped fingers. “All my life, I’ve had this thing. I used to call it a problem, but I’ve trained myself not to. If I imagine something, I actually see it. As if it were real and solid. Right in front of me.”

She looked up at him. He said nothing, but his eyes urged her on.

“It was odd, but nobody really noticed it until after my mom died,” she continued. “I saw her everywhere. I freaked everyone out. It took me a while to sort out what was real and what wasn’t.”

“Can’t have been easy.”

“No. But I—well, anyway, my Aunt Linda took me after Mom died. Nice lady, but not very imaginative or open minded. I got older, and when it kept happening, I scared her a couple times. Ended up in the psych ward more than once. Antipsychotic drugs stopped my visions, along with everything else. They have a lot of side effects.”

She tried to read him. His expression was neutral, but she sensed how intently he was listening. That focused amber glow in his eyes made her catch her breath.

She wouldn’t react like that if he were judging her. She hoped.

“How did this GodsEye guy find you?” Noah asked.

“A friend that I’d met in the psych ward had heard about Dex,” she said. “She thought it could be an opportunity for me. ‘Put your crazy to work for you,’ she said, or something like that. Made sense to me, so I contacted him. Dex invited me to come in. He’d designed a new test to measure the capacity of the visual center of the brain, and I placed in the top one percent. He offered me a job on the spot. I worked for him ever since. Software development, research, coaching.”

Noah nodded thoughtfully. Her slight smile in return faded as a wave of grief clutched at her throat. It took her by surprise. She wasn’t used to feeling much of anything besides fear lately.

Noah slid his hand beneath hers on the table, fingers open, as if he hardly dared to squeeze. Just warm, gentle contact. No words.

She didn’t dare speak. Starting to cry would mess her up.

“You miss him,” he said finally.

She gave him a tight nod. “We trusted each other,” she said. “I was lucky to have him in my life. We were very close.”

Noah didn’t ask the question, but she could feel it hanging in the air.

“Not like that,” she clarified. “He was thirty years older than me, and in a wheelchair with degenerative arthritis. Plus, I think he was gay, though it never really came up.”

“Ah.” She sensed him relax. “More like an uncle, then.”

“Exactly,” she murmured. “A benevolent uncle.”

There was an awkward silence.

“Anyhow, it was a dream job. I made pretty good money, and Dex gave me flexible hours so I could go to art and design school and rent a cool little studio. I did freelance art design too. It was awesome. I loved my life,” she finished, a little wistfully.

His fingers curled around hers and gave them a brief, encouraging squeeze. “I can see why.”

“OK. So how did I end up here? I know you want to know.”

“Yeah, I do.”

“Months ago we got a new client, Mark Olund. He requested me as a coach but it turned out he didn’t need coaching. He got the interface on the first try. I offered to refund the fee, but he refused. Then he started coming on to me during our sessions.”

“Happens.”

“Well, I didn’t want it to happen. I mean, it was flattering, but I just wasn’t feeling it. He was smart, good looking, and he had to be rich to afford a GodsEye vault, but he made me tense. It just didn’t seem
. . .”
She shook her head.

“What?” he demanded.

She shrugged. “Real,” she said. “It was all shiny and pretty and . . . nothing.”

“Good,” he said, with rough emphasis.

“So one morning, I’m reading online about a murder and theft in Chicago. A security expert murdered his client and stole a lot of money and some art pieces. One of them was a brooch worn by French royalty in the seventeenth century. Priceless sapphire the size of a golf ball. There was a picture in the article. Very beautiful.”

He nodded. “OK.”

“So that evening, I did my last coaching with Mark. He’d requested that we do it in his own apartment rather than our open workspace in the West Village. It was odd, but he made the request through the main office and paid the premium fee for a home coaching. That was an extra that we offered for problem clients like Lydia, which wasn’t Olund’s case, but I figured he had the right to use the services we advertised. And he’d always been polite to me. Flirtatious, yes, but nothing scary. I thought I was a good judge of character. So I went.”

Noah’s thumb was stroking her palm. Slow, soothing circular movements. She realized that her hand was shaking.

She tried to make it stop, but the agitation came from deep inside.

She braced herself and went on.“So anyhow. We do the session, and afterwards, he insists on offering me a glass of wine. While he was out of the room choosing a bottle, I wandered around. There was a door open to a room with a table heaped with stuff. All kinds of things. Antiques. Extremely valuable. Made of gold, encrusted with jewels, just piled up and tangled together as if it were junk. But it was genuine. I have an eye for that kind of thing.”