CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN.

The parking lot of the CHRISTUS St. Vincent Medical Center was a black page, the cars set upon it like characters from a metal alphabet. Empty s.p.a.ces separated the characters into words, and each row formed a sentence. Hospital staff and media people and ordinary visitors had cooperated with the parking lot in the writing of it, and they rewrote it over the course of the day, adding and removing vehicles, adjusting by make and model, by color and year, until finally, just before dawn, the editing subsided and the final message of the night could be read. The sadness of the world's parking lots was that no one was ever there to decipher it.

Almost never.

Olivia Skarsten leaned against the hood of a black sedan parked at the edge of the lot and considered the pattern laid out before her under the dim lights. The message came to her just as Rovil Gupta stepped out of the hospital's sliding doors. He saw her standing by his car and began to walk toward her.

"'The skin of the ground is cold,'" Ollie said. "'But the sun is coming.'"

"Pardon?" Rovil said.

"Nothing," she said. "Just something somebody told me. How's Lyda doing?"

"They gave her meds to bring down the fever, and something else to let her sleep," Rovil said.

They got into the car. "I'm staying in an out-of-the-way place," Ollie said. "If you could drop me there I'd appreciate it."

"Of course," he said. He asked for an address to punch in to the GPS, but she said she'd just direct him. They left the hospital parking lot and turned south.

"I'm going to go back to my hotel and sleep for a few hours, then start the drive home," he said. "I hate to leave Lyda, but I've been away too long."

"You've done enough," Ollie said. "Turn left at the light." Eventually they got onto Central Avenue and followed that under the interstate. The sky began to lighten above them. "You and I never got the chance to talk much," Ollie said.

He smiled. "I just a.s.sumed you didn't like me."

"I get that a lot," she said. "I don't have a spiritual advisor to remind me when I'm being too harsh."

"It is a great help," he said.

"Maybe we'd all be better off with a touch of the Numinous," she said. "Maybe not so much as you and Lyda."

"I wouldn't recommend that," Rovil said. "Then again, most substances turn toxic at extreme levels."

"Water, for example."

"I'm sorry?"

"Turn up here."

"Of course," he said. "Is your hotel nearby? It seems pretty residential."

The houses along the street were one-story brown boxes like miniature prisons. The front yards were desert rock and clumps of parched plant life.

"It was cheaper to get a house for a week," she said. "More like house-sitting. I found it online. Slow down ... okay, this one."

It was another rectangular brown home with a one-car garage and a few clumps of trees to provide some privacy. It had gotten terrible reviews online and was in no danger of being rented soon. An hour ago she'd disabled the amateurish alarm system and moved in. Rovil didn't think to ask how she'd gotten from the house to the hospital. The silver pickup she'd stolen was sitting in row three, one letter in the parking lot's little prayer.

Rovil put the car in park. "I'm sure I'll see you again," Rovil said. "I hope-" He noticed the pistol in her hands and raised his eyebrows.

The garage door began to open.

"Pull in," Ollie said.

"What are you doing? Where did you get that gun?"

"We'll talk more inside," she said.

She had him turn off the car and give her the keys. The garage door slid down behind them. Then she escorted him into the house and down uncarpeted stairs to the bas.e.m.e.nt. It was dim down there, but not dark: Earlier she'd covered the three narrow windows with cardboard and put fresh mini-fluorescent bulbs in the ceiling lights. The s.p.a.ce was unfinished, with a cement floor and walls bare to the studs. Most of the room was taken up with junk: boxes of dishes and plastic ice trays, an old-fashioned plasma TV, a stained loveseat, a toddler-sized carousel with three plastic horses upon a cracked base. Things you didn't bother to take with you. Ollie had decided that the family that had lived here had planned to make the bas.e.m.e.nt into a rec room, but then the young father lost his job, the marriage hit the rocks, and the woman and her child moved back east.

Ollie made Rovil face the wall, then crouched and quickly tied his ankles together with zip ties. He yelped and nearly lost his balance. She emptied his pockets, then helped him shuffle to the loveseat and drop into it. The gun was in her jacket pocket now.

"This is insane," Rovil said.

"It's pretty standard, actually. Hands together." She cinched his wrists. "One time in Syria I let the guy stay in bed. Figured, we're going to be here a while, might as well be comfortable."

"You're not going to torture me?"

Ollie grinned. "See, I knew you'd looked up my resume." She shook her head. "No, we're just going to talk."

"Then why are you tying me down?" He delivered this with a well-modulated tremor of desperation, not too over-the-top.

"Because you're a guy. You'd be tempted to try to overpower me or do something stupid, like yell for help. By the way, the house next door is empty, and the one on the other side is too far away to hear you. But if you do scream, I will gag you, and if you fight me I will have to hurt you. I don't want that. I'm not like the man you hired. He's got an antiquated way of dealing with people-Guantanamo Cla.s.sic."

"I'm sorry, I don't know who-"

"The cowboy, Rovil."

"The cowboy? But you can't think that I-?"

"Breaking your own fingers was a nice touch. Not that many people would have the commitment to the gag. But you were right to do it-just bandaging up your hand wouldn't have sold it."

"I don't know what you're talking about!"

"It's okay, Rovil. I know you feel the need to keep up the performance. But we'll all go home a lot faster if we can get past that."

He kept professing his ignorance, pretending shock and confusion. While he talked, Ollie arranged the s.p.a.ce. She placed a wooden chair a few feet in front of the loveseat. Beside it she set a small pile of rags, including a couple of pillowcases and bath towels that she'd cut into more manageable strips. Nearby was her black backpack, as well as a plastic bucket, a case of bottled water, a jug of Lysol, and a radio. Rovil didn't ask about any of the items-he just kept talking, reasoning with her.

She sat down in the chair and waited for him to stop babbling. "Can I ask a question?" she asked at last.

Rovil sat back. He breathed deep, then exhaled, performing his exasperation. "Sure."

"What do you like on your pizza? For later, I mean. I'd like to plan the menu."

"Why are you asking me questions if you're not even listening to the answers?"

"Oh, I'm listening," Ollie said without looking up. It was late afternoon. They'd been in the bas.e.m.e.nt for ten hours. She'd emptied the p.i.s.s bucket for him twice. So far he'd resisted the urge to s.h.i.t-he did not want to do that in front of her-but sooner or later it would have to happen.

And sooner or later she'd have to decide what to do with Rovil. They could not stay down here forever. If he did not talk soon, then she had only one other option. She'd been trying to decide if what she was contemplating was a sin.

She did not always believe in sin, or in G.o.d. For most of her adult life she'd considered faith to be something she'd left behind in her childhood with her high school track suit. Then, on a cold February day about a month after she lost her job as an intelligence a.n.a.lyst, she was surprised to find herself walking through the big wooden door of St. Patrick's Cathedral. A midday service was in progress. Ollie took a seat in a middle pew.

She hadn't been thinking of G.o.d, or religion, or the church-especially not the Catholic church. She was raised Lutheran, for goodness' sake. About the only thing she'd given serious thought to lately was suicide. Late at night, and often in the morning, and sometimes in the afternoon as well, she'd lie in bed, turning the idea over in her mind like a black opal. Admiring the way it gleamed. l.u.s.ting after it, like a woman saving up her money.

She stayed through the service to the end. Then she went back the next day, and the day after that.

She went only on weekdays, to the 12:10 service. Less than a dozen people would show up, old women mostly, a few tourists. (And Ollie thought of herself as a different kind of tourist.) They would settle into the pews one by one like lumps of cold dough, leaving plenty of s.p.a.ce between them. The air inside seemed only a bit less cold than the street. Before the service began, Ollie would stare at the votive candles flickering at the Virgin Mary's feet like spiritual pilot lights. Then the voice of the priest would call out and the voices of the old women would murmur in response, stirring the air. They would rise to sing, and the organ, a fortress of silver pipes, would bellow and thrum, vibrating her chest. Then she would kneel, resting her forearms on the back of the pew, and the old polished wood under her would seem to radiate like a lodestone charged from a hundred years of prayers. And sometimes (not every time, but often enough, barely often enough) something in her that had been numb and silent would slowly unclench, unfold, and fall away from her.

For a day. Sometimes only for a couple hours. But it was enough to get her through the winter.

"I've told you everything I can think of," Rovil said sometime later. "And you've got all my devices. What more can I give you?"

She was looking at his corporate slate at that moment. She also had his wallet and personal pen. Electronically speaking, she had become him. It had taken her less than fifteen minutes to get access to every bank account, mail service, and online drive he owned. The rest of the day she'd spent browsing, reading, and copying files. She found her own name in his personal contacts list. He'd discovered her last name, and had pasted in links to the few pages on the internet where her biographical information popped up.

More interesting were the custom fields next to her name, and the names of dozens of other people. He'd created over twenty attributes such as Loyalty and Intelligence, with scores for each. He'd reduced everyone to a character sheet from a role-playing game. Ollie had scored three or below on most categories.

"Only a one on scent?" she asked. "That's hurtful."

"I'm sorry," he said. "I never meant for anyone to see those."

"You've got Lyda and Mikala in here-everyone from Little Sprout-from when you used to take care of the rats."

"I did a lot more than that. I was a trained neuroscientist. In fact, I was the one who steered them toward the change that made One-Ten possible."

She looked up from the screen. Finally, she thought, a little ego. She'd been waiting for the real Rovil to show up. With very little prompting she got him to tell her the story of how he came to work for them, and how he almost-singlehandedly saved the company.

"And you only got five percent of the stock?" she asked, her tone sympathetic.

"Two percent."

"Ouch. You must have been p.i.s.sed."

He opened his mouth, then shut it. "I've made peace with it. My G.o.d has helped me-"

"Ganesh. Right." She flipped to a new page on the pen. "Hey, Landon-Rousse's stock price is up," she said.

"You don't say," he said flatly. He didn't like being interrupted.

"You have over five thousand shares in your ESOP," she said. "You should be happier." She'd been able to go surprisingly far into Landon-Rousse's network with Rovil's permission set. Most of the files were in plain text, but the encrypted ones with interesting names she'd outsourced to cracker services-paid for with Rovil's credit. Some of those decrypted files were already back in her inbox.

"Of course, a lot depends on the new product you're in charge of," she said. "'NME: Stepladder.' I like the code name rather than numbers."

"Please! This is all proprietary information!"

"I know, I know," she said. "Didn't sign the NDA. Did you come up with the name?"

He took a breath, then decided to answer. "I did, actually."

"Why not, it's your baby. That's got to be a lot of pressure, though, everybody depending on you to keep that stock price going up. No wonder the church scared you-they were going to give your drug away for free. Hard to compete with that."

"What do you mean, competing? They have nothing to do with each other."

She ignored the fake ignorance. "Stepladder, the Logos paper, Numinous..." She opened the backpack. "It's all NME One-Ten." She took out a large, white plastic bottle.

"Where did you get that?"

"Stole it from your apartment. You had boxes of them. I didn't think you'd miss one." She opened the bottle, shook one of the capsules into her hand, and showed it to him. It was robin's egg blue. "I've had people look at them," she said patiently. "You're not the only guy with access to a ma.s.s-spec machine."

He stared at the pill. "The substances are different," he said, angry now. "In key respects. Yes, there are some molecular similarities, but years of development went into Stepladder to make it marketable."

Ding, Ollie thought. Two points. She hadn't been a hundred percent sure that the pills in his apartment were for the drug he'd been working on. Also, the bit about the ma.s.s spectrometer was a complete lie.

"It takes six billion dollars to bring a drug to market," Rovil said. "Six billion on average. You know how much initial R&D costs, that first little idea? It's a tiny slice. It's all in testing, figuring out the right dosage-"

"Sure," she said. "You can't have it going off like a bomb like it did at the Little Sprout party."

"We've done extensive testing," Rovil said. "Our drug is completely safe when taken at the recommended dosages."

Ollie liked that "we." The ego was percolating at full strength now. For the first time since she'd known him he seemed to be fully in his body, fully alive.

"Can't have a drug that makes everyone schizo," she said. "Look at Lyda and Gil-completely insane."

"Exactly."

"But not you. I mean, not crazy in the same way," she said. "You're just a run-of-the-mill sociopath."

"I'm done with this," he said, and got to his feet.

"Sit," she said.

"Untie me, now. This has gone on-"

"Si-i-i-it," she said, and thumped a palm into his chest. He tipped backward into the loveseat. "Take a breath. Lyda figured it out, Rovil-you don't have your own personal Jiminy Cricket. Where's Ganesh? Nowhere. You've been faking it." Her hand was in the pocket of her jacket, reminding him of the pistol.

"Tell me what happened in Chicago," she said.

He shook his head. "There is no way for me to win, Ollie. In your state, anything I say will be taken as a lie. But if I try to guess what you want to hear, that will be taken as a lie as well."

"Just talk. I'll be the judge."

"You're in no condition to judge!"

"You were angry that they'd cheated you," she said. "So you decided that no one would get the buyout money. An overdose would queer the whole deal. Kind of shortsighted of you, though. Two percent is better than nothing."

"This is what you do," he said. "You take fragments and guesses and unrelated details, and you make up stories. This is your mania for pattern recognition talking."