“Hands up!” she ordered.

He raised his hands slowly above his head.

“Now,” she said icily, “I’ll ask again. Who are you?”

“I’d like to ask you the same thing,” he replied.

He tilted his head and gazed at her with an expression reflecting both respect and admiration. “What did you do to the frail, geeky graduate student we were told to keep tabs on?”

“What in the hell is going on here?” she demanded. “What is this all about?”

“I’m afraid I can’t tell you that,” he said. “I’m just hired muscle. Although apparently not as good as I thought I was,” he mumbled. “But the man you need to speak with is the man who wants to speak with you.”

“What’s your name?”

“Alan.”

“Okay, Alan. Is keeping me in the dark really worth your life?”

“Look … Erin,” he said. “I’ll happily tell you everything I know. I was told you were a science grad student named Erin, shown your picture, and told to keep tabs on you.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it. I wasn’t even told you had … skills.” He glanced down at his injured knee. “And that might have been a useful piece of information to have.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“I don’t know what else I can say. I do what I’m told. I’ve very well paid. And I’m kept totally out of the loop. The people I work for take their privacy very seriously.”

Something in his tone made Erin believe that this Alan, if that was truly his name, was probably telling the truth. If he was, further attempts to elicit information would be a dead end, and she had no idea how much time she had before these men were missed and reinforcements arrived.

So what now? She looked around hastily. She was in the middle of nowhere and couldn’t exactly blend into a crowd, either human or vehicular. They could track her cell phone and she was certain they knew the make, model, and license plate of her rental car. They also knew she was scheduled to fly back to Tucson at eight o’clock that night, so it would be a simple matter to watch the San Diego International Airport. All of this meant that if she tried to run, she wouldn’t stand a chance.

Which only left one thing. Offense. An audacious plan began to take shape in her mind. But she would need to get the two men by the helicopter away from it. And for that she would need a diversion. She would need Alan to cooperate.

Which begged the question: what was she prepared to do to gain this cooperation? Would she finish the job she had started and blow out his kneecap?

Even as she considered this she knew she wouldn’t, no matter what was at stake. Yes, she had skirted the law by testing the anti-psychopathy therapy. She had gone over to the dark side. And yes, she had been a little rough with these two men. But that had been in self-defense. She couldn’t just maim a man, no matter what. It wasn’t in her, and she found herself relieved to realize this.

“Okay, Alan. I need for you to do exactly what I tell you.” She lowered the gun and pointed it at his knee. “The second you cross me, I take out your kneecap, understand?”

She couldn’t actually do it, but that wouldn’t stop her from bluffing.

Now if only he didn’t decide to call her bluff …

“I’ll cooperate,” he said with a sigh. “But you should know you’re holding a tranquilizer gun. You aren’t taking out anyone’s knee with that. Please keep in mind that even when I pulled this weapon, you were never in any danger of being killed. Or maimed,” he added pointedly.

Erin glanced at the gun in her hand and swallowed hard. She had thought she was doing pretty well for an amateur. But not as well as she imagined. She made her way quickly over to Alan’s partner, keeping the gun—the tranquilizer gun—trained on Alan as she did so. His partner was still unconscious, although breathing, and she quickly found a 9mm Sig Sauer semiautomatic pistol and another tranquilizer gun. She removed the semiautomatic and returned to where she had been.

“Thanks for the tip,” she said. This time she raised the 9mm and pointed it at the man’s kneecap. “So let me try this again. Do what I tell you, or never walk again.”

Alan sighed. “What do you want me to do?”

“Call your friends by the helicopter over there,” she said, gesturing due north toward the helipad with her head. “Tell them you found me a mile to the north of them, but I managed to find a dug-in position and I’m armed to the teeth. Give them the location and ask them to assist. Whatever you have to do. If they haven’t jumped in a car and headed in the opposite direction from us within three minutes, I’ll carry out my threat.”

She couldn’t believe she was doing any of this. She was a graduate student. A scientist.

Yet somehow she felt able to channel strategy from some of the fictional characters she had read. She tended to gravitate toward thrillers in her reading, as long as they didn’t feature overtly psychopathic characters. It was true that many thriller villains were technically part of the psychopathic 1 percent, but this was okay as long as they were after money or power, and not serial killers or rapists out to torture and maim for the fun of it. This hit too close to home.

Good fiction tended to have considerable elements of truth in it, and while she had never experienced any situation remotely similar to the one she faced now, she had been introduced to countless such situations through novels and always found herself trying to think her way out of them along with the books’ heroes and heroines. As though she had been subconsciously preparing her mental faculties for this kind of trouble along with her physical ones.

So what was she forgetting? Was she making all of the right moves?

After a few seconds of intense thought, she realized she had forgotten something. If fiction had taught her anything, it was that credit cards could, and would, be traced by a group such as this. So hers would be useless.

She wasn’t a petty thief, but they had started this—whatever this was.

“Wait,” she said. “Before you call your colleagues, throw your wallet over to me.”

The man frowned but did as instructed. Other than a driver’s license, which identified him as Alan Smith, he had no credit cards or other forms of identification. She wasn’t surprised. She found a thick sheaf of twenties in his wallet and removed them. She tossed the wallet back to him. “Sorry about that,” she said. “Be sure to have your wealthy boss reimburse you.”

She rifled through his partner’s wallet as well and removed considerable additional cash, keeping the gun trained on Alan the entire time. Both men had been loaded, probably because they didn’t carry credit cards.

“Okay,” said Erin, nodding to the north. “Now call your buddies over there at the heliport and get them to leave.”

She slid the headphones for the parabolic listening device over her head, but only placed one of the two soft cups over an ear. The other ear she kept free. “I’ll be listening to both ends of the conversation,” she said. “So don’t try to get cute.”

The man glanced quickly from the headphones on her head to the large parabolic dish pointing toward the helipad. He nodded, almost approvingly, and the corners of his mouth turned up into the slightest of smiles. “I wouldn’t think of it,” he said evenly.

13

ERIN WAS BELTED in the backseat of the car so Alan wouldn’t think it was a good strategy to slam on the brakes, and made sure she was behind the passenger’s seat to maximize the distance between them. Alan’s partner had returned to consciousness, briefly, until she had shot him with a tranquilizer dart and left him in the church parking lot.

Alan had done a masterful job of getting the two men by the helicopter to leave in a hurry, but they wouldn’t be gone for long once they realized they had been misled. Fortunately, even taking winding roads they arrived at the heliport gate almost immediately. Erin crouched down even lower in the seat, the gun still pointed at the driver, as he entered the gate code on the metal keypad and the gate slid open.