Under the Knife(22)

All these years he’d carried it.

Alfonso’s tag.

Screw it. It is what it is.

He’d known this job would be tricky when he took it. Whining now would do no good. He’d never blown a job. Ever. He goddamn wasn’t going to start now.

Besides: He had his sister to think about, and Sammy and Sierra. So he was all in, and he would make this work. Make it work for all of them. Their futures, for better or for worse, were tied up with Finney’s.

It was just him and Finney. From the beginning, Sebastian had been convinced it was the right way to go. More assets meant more help, but it also meant more opportunities for secrets to be spilled. And there were some big-ass, incriminating secrets involved here.

Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead. It had been Alfonso who’d introduced him to Poor Richard’s Almanac, which Sebastian thought was brilliant.

Even Benjamin fucking Franklin knew you couldn’t trust anyone.

Three may keep a secret …

Alfonso.

… if two of them are dead.

He could have trusted Alfonso.

Alfonso, who’d turned down a spot in Officer Candidate’s School after acing the qualifying exams because he’d decided that every officer is by definition a prick, and I don’t want to turn into a prick …

Alfonso, who’d died in his arms, in a shitty little hovel at the other end of the world, at the hands of a twelve-year-old boy.

He moved a few paces down the hall and, with practiced casualness, leaned against a wall, eyeing the women’s locker-room door.

He fingered Alfonso’s dog tag again and thought of the one he’d left hanging around Wu’s neck earlier that morning.





RITA


“You remember her, then,” Finney said in her ear.

“Yes,” she said. Surprisingly, she was starting to regain her composure. The physical evidence of Finney’s existence she now held in her hand was injecting a bit of reality into this unreal situation.

She placed the picture back in her locker. “Okay. I’ll accept for the moment that I’m not having some kind of psychotic break.” She glanced up toward the ceiling, as if he were some kind of ghost, or deity. “If you’re not in here, where are you? How are we having this conversation? Why can I hear you only in my left ear?”

“Let’s just say that I’ve altered your ability to hear in your left ear.”

“How?”

“Through a minor surgical procedure.”

“Is that where the blood came from? And the pain?”

“Yes.”

“What kind of procedure?”

“I’m not inclined to tell you.”

“Who performed the operation?”

“I’m not inclined to tell you that, either.”

She chewed on her lower lip. Did he do it, or someone else? Did I have to be naked for it? As far as she could tell, aside from her ear, and the pain in her head, nothing else had been … done to her.

“Why can’t I remember anything?”

“A side effect of the procedure.”

Situational awareness, lovely Rita. She needed more information.

“Did you give me … drugs? Sedatives?”

No answer.

“Okay. Is it like a cochlear implant, or something?”

“Cochlear implants are glorified hearing aids,” he said, as a teacher would to a slow student. “I’d never deal in something as clumsy as a cochlear implant.”

In spite of the circumstances, and her feelings of helplessness, his arrogance—the way he dismissed her question out of hand—rubbed her the wrong way. She was, after all, a surgeon.

Screw you, you condescending bastard, she thought.

Then another thought immediately surfaced: Can he read my mind?

The concept terrified her.

Impossible.

But was it?

Because here you are, lovely Rita, talking to this man inside your head.

The idea that he might be able to read her mind made her consider cutting off her left ear.

Seriously. In the hopes of removing whatever it was he’d put there, or at least doing enough damage to it so that it couldn’t work.

She knew that cutting off her own ear was not a thing a rational person would do. That it meant psychosis.

She didn’t care. She would NOT have him rummaging around inside there, dissecting her emotions, eavesdropping on her thoughts. So she coolly began to plan out the steps: disinfect the skin with betadine, numb it with lidocaine, incise it and the underlying cartilage with a scalpel—a number fifteen blade should do just fine.

After a few moments, he said, “Dr Wu? Hello? Did you hear what I said? Can you still hear me?”

She hesitated. Two possibilities here: Either he couldn’t read her mind; or he could, but was pretending he couldn’t. She decided, for now, that he couldn’t.

Probably.

She laid her ear-removal plans aside, and said, “But I’ve never heard of anything like this. It just doesn’t seem possible.”

“Do you recall what I do for a living?”

“I—well. Hmm.” She knew he was rich although she couldn’t remember why. Biotechnology, maybe? The biotechnology industry was big in San Diego.

“Suffice to say I have sufficient resources to develop and produce this kind of device,” he said. “As well as the intellect and experience to oversee its development.”