Chapter 43 Mac, Eleanor, Nicole and Dimitri #2
The launch party is a tasteful event. About a hundred people are milling around between black tablecloth-covered high-tops and the low, circular tables where they’ll have dinner in about an hour, after the presentation.
The screensaver on the display has been cycling through a slideshow with the presentation schedule, pictures of smiling business executives on some kind of retreat where they had to wear matching green t-shirts, and stock photos of people working at computers.
Music drifts softly through the air from the speakers in the four corners—something jazzy and light that doesn’t compete with chatter.
People are dressed to impress, and there’s a buzz of excitement in the room.
“There he is. Up ahead. He’s the one with the blue tie. See him?”
I take it back. I’m not going to kill her—I’m glad she’s in my ear. Because even though I stared at his picture long enough to convince myself I had it memorized, he looks different in person. Way more tan.
I sidle up to the group, grabbing the tray to hold it with both hands when it starts to shake. “Champagne cocktail?” I interrupt politely.
The man and woman across from me take a glass and place their empties on the tray. Fred, who is in the middle of a story, is gesturing with his nearly empty flute. We’re trained to ask once and leave, but I can’t leave.
My heart is going to pound out of my chest. I hold out the tray towards him, the slightly fuller glass closest to him.
“Sir? Would you like a drink?”
Take it. Oh my God, take it. Please take the right one. That one. Take it!
He frowns at the interruption, then realizes what I said. For a single, suspended second, I have the completely irrational intrusive thought that I’m mentally pleading with him to take the right champagne flute so hard that he can actually hear me.
Then he launches back into his story, giving me the almost-empty and taking the glass closest to him. He drains half the flute in a single massive gulp, making a face at either the faint taste of sedative or the burning sensation of bubbles in the back of his throat.
My knees nearly give out with relief as I head over to the last person in the group to offer a flute.
“Tag, you’re it,” I whisper as Nicole takes a flute off my tray and gestures at me with it, a cheers of acknowledgment.
Nicole
If I have to listen to this absolute tool tell one more story about the kind of yacht he plans to buy after Safe-T Keeper goes live, I’m going to shove more sedative down his throat.
Luckily, I don’t have to.
Fred goes down like something out of a cartoon. He’s in the middle of his sentence, then he grimaces and shakes his head, like he’s trying to clear the sudden disorientation. Etorphine works pretty fast, and this guy can really shotgun a champagne cocktail.
One second he’s upright and slurring about how he doesn’t feel good, and the next he pitches forward. The woman he almost falls on screams, and a glass shatters at their feet as he knocks it out of her hand on the way down.
In the panic that ensues, I lift my voice and spring into action. “I’m a nurse!”
Tossing my skirts aside, I kneel down next to him. “Sir,” I say, speaking loudly and clearly. “Can you hear me? What’s his name?” I ask the group of people huddling over us with panicked expressions.
“Oh, nice touch. She’s a natural,” Wesley approves.
“Fred Harvey!” someone in the audience volunteers.
“Everyone, please give us space,” I say. Dutifully, the crowd immediately nearby takes a few shuffling steps back. I lean over Fred and tap his shoulders. “Fred, can you speak? Mr. Harvey? Can you tell me what’s wrong?”
Fred’s eyes flutter but don’t open completely, and he makes a garbled noise.
“Does anyone know this man? Does he have a medical condition?”
The crowd remains silent until someone pipes in, “Should I call an ambulance?”
I’ve seen it time and time again, and this was exactly what I told the group when we were forming the plan.
A crowd naturally defers to whoever seems the calmest and most confident in an emergency.
People won’t take initiative from me—he’s asking me if he should call an ambulance instead of doing it.
Normally, it would piss me off because in a true emergency, there’s no time to waste seeking approval.
Not tonight. Tonight, I’m glad for the hive-brain panic mentality. People won’t act for fear of doing the wrong thing.
“I’ll take him—it’ll be faster than waiting for an ambulance. Can someone call the emergency department at Ulysses Memorial?” I ask the crowd, trying to get ahead of the 911 calls by introducing an extra step. Of course I don’t really want that—Fred won’t be going to the hospital tonight.
Well, maybe… depends on how cooperative he’s feeling.
“I will,” a deep, Russian voice volunteers. Even after all this time, it sends a shiver up and down my spine and nearly makes me break character because I want so badly to smile conspiratorially at him.
“Tell them an adult man collapsed and is unresponsive. A medical professional is bringing him for treatment. This appears to be a medical issue with no observable trauma. No airway blockage or obvious bleeding…”
A concerned murmur goes around. I don’t need any more confirmation that I’m selling the hell out of this. I glance up, then do a double take at the tall, dashing waiter no one hired—just for effect. “You.”
His eyes widen as he looks over, phone still clutched to his ear as he makes his pretend call to the hospital. “Me?” he repeats.
“You look strong. Can you help me get him to my car? Call the hospital on the way.”
Pocketing his phone with a grim expression, he gently touches the shoulder of a man in his way, who looks back, then does a double take when he sees the size of Dimitri and scrambles out of the way.
My man leans down and slides a hand under Fred’s armpit as I take the other side. When we discussed this last night, he fought me tooth and nail.
You are pregnant, my med. You will not be lifting anything heavier than this glass of water until my milyy rebenok is born.
I looked that one up. Sweet child. It made me choke up a little.
But I argued that if he lifted a grown man into his arms like a baby, no one would ever stop talking about it.
It’s too memorable for what is sure to be one of the few things anyone talks about for the rest of the night.
Me? The bossy nurse who leaped into action?
They’ll forget about me. The massive, scarred waiter with the thick accent?
Yeah, he doesn’t need any more reason to burn his image into anyone’s memory.
To the casual observer, it would appear that the enormous, scarred server and I share the burden of getting the barely conscious Fred Harvey out of the ballroom of the Ulysses Grand, when in reality Dimitri is bearing the brunt of it.
People clear a path as we make our way through the automatic doors. Maintaining the ruse, I hurry to Dimitri’s SUV and get into the driver’s seat as he maneuvers Fred inside and slams the back door shut. He hops into the passenger seat, and I back out of the spot.
As I check the rearview, I can hardly believe my eyes. The hotel entrance is empty. No one at the party even followed us out. Either our act was that believable, or none of Fred’s coworkers cares enough about him to check and make sure two strangers aren’t blatantly kidnapping him.
We’re… we’re totally pulling this off.
Oh my God, is this what it feels like to be on the other side of things?
I think I finally understand why they do it. What a rush!
“It is easy to become too excited,” Dimitri coaches me calmly. “Remember to drive the speed limit.”
For some reason, it makes me laugh. Maybe it’s that I’m already kind of giddy because I can’t believe how well that went. I suppose I knew how thoroughly the guys plan everything, but it’s totally different to experience it firsthand. To be part of it.
I look over at him. “I love you so much.”
“I love you too, my med. More than my life. But not more than yours or that of our milyy rebenok. So please return your eyes to the road.”
I smile and do as he instructs.
Milly. That’s kind of a cute name for a girl.
Dimitri
I suppose it is human nature to reflect on the beginning when one is at the end. People often say that life is a journey. At the start of mine, I was a man who enjoyed tying someone to a chair and making him bleed while I pried information I wanted out of his lips. Sometimes with actual pliers.
But interrogation is not a skill I ever thought I would teach to someone else.
Fred sits in the center of what was once a large conference room, taped to an office chair and very effectively restrained. He woke some time ago and promptly exhausted himself and angered us all by proving that no one can hear him scream. Now, he is sweaty, mad and very afraid.
In our planning, we discovered that the building next to SmarTech is available for rent, making it the perfect secondary location, since it is empty, isolated, and we are close enough that Madison can access the SmarTech network wirelessly.
She set up some equipment I recognize from Wesley’s home office in this conference room, taking over the end of a long table.
But she is not at her station—she is on her feet, standing before our hostage, and the sharp crack of her slap rings out around us. She yells something at him in Spanish, and I must assume from her tone that it is an insult since I do not speak the language.
“Madison!” I admonish sharply.
She turns to me, shock plain in her expression that I would scold her when she is trying to be intimidating. But she does not need to be intimidating; she needs to be effective.
“You will injure your hand doing it that way. You must shape it to create a small cavity,” I explain, adjusting her hand into the proper position, cupped with a space in the center. “Then, when you slap, aim for the ear. If you can get enough force behind it, you will break his eardrum.”
Fred’s eyes go wide, and he flinches as she slaps him again, making a grunting noise of pain and dropping his ear to his shoulder to soothe the sensation in the aftermath.
“Oh, yeah, that’s way better,” Madison says approvingly, turning to Eleanor, who is watching with grim fascination. “You wanna try?”
Her eyes light up. “Ooh, yeah!”
Fred’s eyes narrow on her. “You’re making a big mistake,” he tells her, obviously zeroing in on the innocent appearance of her open face. “You… you don’t look like a killer. You don’t want to hurt me. Think about what you’re doing! This is torture—you’re about to torture someone!”
She hesitates and glances at Madison. “He helped create that software? Or, like, he knows what it does, and wants to make a profit off it?”
Madison nods.
“Then, yeah. I don’t feel bad about this,” Eleanor says, her tone full of a darker kind of purpose. She flexes her hand, then twists to wind up for her blow.
“Wait. You are supposed to ask him something first,” I remind her. “This is an interrogation.”
Eleanor stops, stumped. Then, she steps up to him and slaps him the same way Madison did, shaking out her hand as she demands, “What’s your password?”
“We don’t need him to tell us,” Madison says. “We’ve got his phone and his fingerprint. I bet he keeps all his passwords in that app on his phone.”
“Oh,” Eleanor says. She hits him again. “Where’s the Joker?” she demands in a low, garbled voice I have never heard before.
“That was a pretty good Batman, darlin’,” Mac compliments from somewhere in a nearby building where he is setting up his rifle.
She slaps him again, and a pathetic whimper slips through his lips with a string of spit that lands on the lapel of his suit jacket.
I chuckle, and Madison turns to me, shocked by the noise. “She looks sweet but is bloodthirsty. It is very amusing,” I explain.
Since they clearly have this interrogation under control, I go to Nicole, who is standing in the corner of the room, watching with her arms crossed and wearing a faintly amused smile.
I want to shield her with my body from the unpleasantness, but instead I stand next to her.
The only reason I allowed her participation was that she agreed to carry a gun and stay away from the danger.
She argued that Eleanor and Madison could not be left alone with this man Fred—she claims they rile each other up. It seems she was right.
“You’re going to miss this, huh?” she asks as I settle against the wall next to her.
“What?”
“Teaching. Doing something useful with all those skills you’ve got. Passing them on.”
I consider this. Once Wesley has taken the Gener-AI program offline and there are no more jobs to complete, there will be little reason to continue to train with the others. But I have enjoyed training with them very much, so I decide, “Da.”
For some reason, this causes Nicole’s eyes to fill with tears—an alarming occurrence that has become more frequent lately.
She assures me it is completely hormonally normal, but seeing her crying fills me with an anger that is pointless, with nothing to kill or destroy for making her cry.
She wraps her arms around my middle, hugging me gently, and murmurs into my shirt, “You’re going to be a good dad,” she says softly—too softly for the others to hear.
The praise warms me, and I must swallow down a thick feeling in the back of my throat. “I will not be passing this information to a child,” I say, confused about why she equates teaching Madison to burst an eardrum with being a father.
“No,” she agrees readily. “But you… you explain your point of view in this really complete and direct way. And you’re patient.
You’re gentle as a teacher—well, as gentle as I’ve seen you be,” she adds when I lift a brow at her.
“I don’t know if you know this about kids, but you kind of have to teach them everything.
So being a good teacher… it’s a really good thing. ”
I had not considered parenthood in this way.
The fear that has knotted my chest ever since I saw that pregnancy test on the bathroom sink loosens slightly.
Nicole believes I will be a good father.
I did not know how comforting that would be.
“I can do anything with you by my side,” I tell her, grabbing her hand and pressing a kiss to her palm.
Her smile is warm and soft, much like her.
“Did you ever think that you would go from being kidnapped to assisting me with one?” I ask her, smiling so widely that my scar pulls against the corner of my mouth.
She laughs, a deep, husky noise that stirs in my loins. “No. No, I didn’t. And I gotta say, it’s kind of a rush. If I weren’t already pregnant…” she gives me an ardent look.
“Yes. It is always good to practice,” I agree. She laughs again. “But first, we must end this.” I tap my earpiece to unmute myself. “Wesley? James?”
“Just getting into place,” James replies.
“I’m here,” Wesley confirms.
“Then I will meet you at the entrance.”