CHAPTER TWENTY ONE
"Talk about good timing," Novak said, already opening his door and stepping out.
They caught up to him halfway across the lot, their footsteps loud against the quiet of the near-empty lot at this hour.
He didn’t realize someone was rushing up to him until they were about ten feet away.
And when he did turn to face them, Sloan didn’t look surprised to see them.
He also didn't look much like the man Rachel had spoken to the day before, or on the phone earlier in the morning.
His voice on that call had climbed and cracked with anger, sharp enough that she'd half expected to find him rigid with it now, still furious about surveillance vans and business consequences and everything else he'd accused her of not understanding.
But now, he looked like someone who'd aged five years since sunrise.
His shoulders had a slight stoop to them that hadn't been there in his office two days earlier, and the skin beneath his eyes had gone the color of a slight bruise.
Even his walk seemed careful, like a man who was sure there might be a land mine around him somewhere.
"Dr. Sloan," Rachel said.
For a moment he just looked at them, his bag still hanging from his shoulder. "Agent Gift. You’re here early.”
“We needed to speak with you.”
“Why not just call?” he said. “You proved very early this morning that you don’t mind calling at all hours.”
“This is more of a face-to-face thing,” Novak said.
"We had a fourth death this morning," Rachel added. "A jogger named Holly Greer, found in a park in the middle of her morning run."
Something moved behind his eyes, quick and involuntary. "Same as the others?"
"Not the same technique, no. We believe her death was a total accident. Nothing is confirmed yet, but she was on steroids and only two days away from reaching her peak. We’ll need verification from the ME but for right now, there seems to be a decent chance she wasn’t murdered.
However…we have no idea how the killer will react to this. Or the media, for that matter.”
“This is…God, this is getting out of hand,” he said. His voice was thin, little more than a whisper.
Rachel kept her voice even, watching him carefully for whatever came next. "We need you to shut the app down today, before anyone else dies."
She expected the same voice from the phone call, the same climbing outrage about surveillance and business and everything she didn't understand about the damage she was doing to his company. Instead, Sloan exhaled slowly, and something in his posture seemed to give way.
"Maybe you're right," he said.
Novak's eyebrows lifted slightly. "That's not what you said a few hours ago."
"A few hours ago I was angry, and I hadn't had time to think past the anger yet.
" Sloan shifted his bag to his other shoulder, looking past them toward the building rather than at either of them directly.
"I've had time now, and you're not wrong. Pulling the app, at least until this is sorted out, might be the only responsible thing left to do at this point. It would certainly do less damage to us than another body turning up with our logo strapped to their wrist." He frowned and said, “I know it must seem monstrous to people who are paid to save lives, but…we do have a multi-million dollar company here, a company that employs nine hundred people across the globe. It’s why these decisions can’t be made lightly.”
“Well, if you agree…then do it,” Rachel said.
"It's not that simple." He said it quietly, without the defensiveness she'd expected from him.
"Nine hundred employees, Agent Gift. And their families.
I have investors who'll pull funding the second I admit publicly that the product might be dangerous, whether or not it actually is.
I have a legacy I've spent twenty years building, and pulling the app doesn't just pause it.
It ends it. Even if we get it back up and running in a day or so, that sort of thing sticks.
Nobody trusts a resurrection in this industry.
You kill the app, you've killed the company, and every person who works for me is out of a job because I decided it was the responsible thing to do.
" He sharpened his focus and then said, “All because you are unable to find a killer.”
"People are dying, Dr. Sloan." She decided not to take the bait of him trying to shift the blame.
"I'm aware of that." His voice cracked slightly on the last word and then it softened when he added, "I'm more aware of it than you might think."
Rachel waited, watching him work through something before he said it out loud. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
He said nothing at first, simply looking to the sky as if trying to figure out if it was going to rain later today. When he leveled his eyes back to her, she saw a profound sadness that had not been there five seconds ago.
"I'm sick," Sloan said finally. "Terminally ill.
Pancreatic cancer." He chuckled in a dry, defeated sound.
"My own doctors missed it for years, because I didn't fit the profile they were looking for, and by the time somebody finally ordered the right scan, it had already spread too far to do much about.
" He said it without emotion, and she wondered how long he had been practicing it.
"That's why I built Apogee, not for the watches or the app store money.
Of course, I had started long before my diagnoses, but the diagnosis…
that's what lit the fire over the last two or three years.
I wanted to build something that could see what medicine missed in me.
Something that wouldn't need a doctor's hunch to catch what was coming before it was too late to matter. "
Neither Rachel nor Novak spoke. It felt almost rude to interject when it was clear that this was something he needed to get out.
"Ever since I learned of Pike…it seems to have just exploded inside of me," Sloan went on, his voice thinner now than it had been even a minute earlier.
"The stress, I mean. I haven’t eaten. I slept like shit last night even without your call.
My oncologist tells me stress won't kill me any faster on its own, but I don't think she's accounting for what it's like to watch something you built become this weird sort of silent monster.
" He looked at Rachel directly for the first time since they'd started talking.
"And no, I’m not telling you so you'd feel sorry for me.
I told you because you asked me to make an impossible decision, and I thought you should understand what it's costing me to even consider it. "
Rachel held his gaze, aware that the conversation had just taken a very unexpected turn.
And maybe not one Sloan had expected. He had access to every prediction the algorithm generated, while also having a countdown running out on his own body.
Meanwhile, he’d watched strangers cross a finish line that medicine had already told him he'd never reach himself.
It wasn't hard to imagine that costing him something — a resentment, buried and maybe even unexamined, toward everyone who lived long enough to hit the peak his own doctors had missed until it was too late to matter.
"I understand what it's costing you," she said. "I do, genuinely. But that doesn't change what I'm asking of you."
"No," Sloan admitted. "I don't suppose it does."
"Shut it down today. Do it voluntarily, or I go to a judge as soon as this conversation is over and get a court order.
And once that happens, it's not a quiet business decision anymore between us anymore.
It's a headline about a federal court forcing a health app offline because the FBI thinks it's connected to four deaths.
That's a very different story than the one you get to tell if you make this call yourself, on your own terms.”
Sloan was quiet for a long moment, his eyes moving somewhere past her shoulder, toward the building and whatever waited for him behind those glass doors. She supposed if he had a bit more energy, he may have bristled at this order, but as it stood, he only gave a small shrug.
"Do what you feel you need to do," he said.
He didn't wait for a response. He turned, adjusted the bag on his shoulder, and walked the rest of the way across the lot toward the entrance. He walked slowly, almost deliberately, until the doors slid open ahead of him and swallowed him from view.
Rachel watched the doors close behind him before she turned back toward the car. "That wasn't what I expected."
"Which part?"
"Any of it." She started walking back to their car, trying to properly compartmentalize the bit of heartbreak she was feeling for the man. "I thought he'd fight us on this. Instead he agreed the app should come down, and then told us he's dying, and still won't pull the plug himself."
"Doesn't exactly clear him," Novak said.
"No," Rachel said. "It doesn't. If anything, it gives him more reasons than anyone else on that list. He's the one person who could see every prediction whenever he wanted, and he's watching people reach a finish line he'll never get to cross."
"I hate to do it to him, but we're going to have to get that court order, aren't we?"
“Yeah. I think we do.”
And as she pulled out her phone to call Anderson, she almost felt guilty for what she was about to do.