The Oracle Year(78)

Someone appeared in the doorway—an older woman, something like a sharp suburban grandmother.

“Will Dando?” she asked, eyes cast in the Oracle’s direction.

“Yes?” he said, and then he cringed with his whole body, as if realizing that he had just made some sort of a gigantic, unfixable mistake.

Will Dando? Leigh thought, trying to process.

“Pleased to meet you,” the woman said.

The woman lifted her hand. She held a little black object, a bit larger than a deck of cards. Her hand clenched, and two darts shot out into the Oracle’s chest, attached to the object by long, curling wires.

The Oracle—Will Dando—fell to the ground, his limbs convulsing. Leigh leapt to her feet, looking desperately to either side for somewhere to run.

A moment of sharp, invasive pain in her stomach, dwarfed a moment later by agony in an entirely different category, juddering through her muscles.

She fell to the floor and landed facedown in the thick carpet, narrowly missing cracking her head open on the coffee table. She felt water dripping down from the table onto the center of her back. Her vision dimmed.

“Bring them both,” she heard the woman say.





Chapter 31




Will opened his eyes. He was lying on his back on something soft. Fading in above him was a rapidly moving hallway; dark-green-on-gray-striped wallpaper and a beige ceiling rushing past on either side, illuminated by brass light fixtures on the walls.

He tried to sit up and found that he couldn’t. He could lift his head, although something was pressing down on his forehead, keeping it from moving more than an inch or so. He peered down his body, seeing straps across his chest, his waist, and over his wrists and ankles.

Men in light blue, short-sleeved shirts hovered above him. He decided to ask them about the straps, but found something in his mouth. A little exploration by a very dry tongue suggested that it was a thick piece of cloth.

Pain. It felt like every muscle in his body had been occupied with holding up something very heavy for six or seven hours without a break. The pain was localized somewhat around two small spots on his chest. An image came to Will’s fogged mind: he was standing on an olive carpet, looking down at two long wires extending out from his chest, curling like overstretched Slinkys. And with that came the rest.

Will cried out against the gag in his mouth, but the resulting noise was muffled, barely audible even to himself. The men on either side of him were dressed like paramedics, might even be paramedics, and they were rolling his gurney down the hallway of the Waldorf. An IV bag dangled from a hook on a pole above him, but as far as Will could tell it wasn’t connected to his body. Will caught a glimpse of a room number as they passed—1904. They hadn’t yet left the floor where he’d been taken.

I must only have been out for a few minutes, he thought. What was that thing? A Taser, I guess? And that woman.

He tried to fight through his rising panic. Someone had figured out that Will Dando was the Oracle, and they’d known where to find him. But the only people who had known Will was at the hotel were . . . Hamza and Miko.

Will could see it in his head. Somehow, the name Will Dando had been connected to the Oracle, and whoever had done that had simply . . . well, they’d probably just googled his address and headed on over. If his arm hadn’t been strapped down, Will would have punched himself in the face.

Hamza had been after him for months to move into a new apartment, someplace with more security, more room, an address they could hide behind one of the shell companies Hamza had set up—somewhere with a doorman, at the very least, but he hadn’t wanted to take the time.

Will envisioned the older woman and her cronies breaking through the door to his apartment in much the same way she’d broken into the hotel room. Hamza would have been there, and probably Miko by then as well.

Will began, involuntarily, to think about the methods the woman might have used to get his location out of Hamza—or Miko and her unborn baby, for that matter.

And then, another idea, just as unpleasant.

Hamza and Miko weren’t the only ones who had known where he was. Leigh Shore had known too. She’d set him up.

The paramedics rotated Will’s gurney and pushed it into a waiting elevator. A second gurney rolled into the elevator, directly to Will’s right. He turned his head as far as his strap would allow and rolled his eyeballs to the point where they began to hurt with the strain. On the other gurney, her eyes wide and locked on Will’s, restrained and gagged, lay Leigh Shore.

I guess she didn’t set me up, was his first thought. His second: I’m so sorry.

The elevator doors opened and the paramedics pushed both gurneys out. Will’s view changed to a low ceiling of smooth concrete and long fluorescent lights. The parking garage.

A quick glimpse of the rear doors of an ambulance—white, with orange and blue stripes and a logo for New York Presbyterian Hospital. The doors opened, and Will felt himself being loaded headfirst into the back of the vehicle. Alone.

A nasty thought—Leigh wasn’t the Oracle. They didn’t need her.

He wondered if he’d gotten her killed. Selfishly, foolishly . . . gotten her killed, all because his ego was getting a little bruised by bad press.

Will heard the front doors of the ambulance open and close and felt the shift as the two paramedics got in. The vehicle started up, began to move. A second later, he felt the gag being removed from his mouth. It was replaced by a straw, which Will sucked at involuntarily, before the thought to wonder what he was about to drink made it from mind to mouth.