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  “There’s a hall through there,” he said, pointing toward an interior door. “It’ll be about halfway down on the right, facing the back side of the building.”

  “What else is in this place?”

  “Two offices and a kitchen area, both on the other side of the hall and closer to the main entrance. The rest is unused. Deele rented the entire space but barely uses half of it.”

  “So we should be able to get to the lab without being spotted.”

  “Assuming no one’s in there,” he said.

  We moved to the storeroom door, which was locked. With a groan of irritation I noticed that, for security reasons, there was only a handle on our side. There was no way to pick the lock. This would slow us down for a bit if I took the hardware apart.

  “Hold on,” Peach said, pushing me out of the way.

  He wrapped one giant paw around the handle and, without even exerting himself, lifted up and snapped it right off. The pieces came away in his hand, exposing the latch inside.

  “You’re handy to have around,” I said in a low voice. “I’ve never worked with a circus strong man before.”

  I pulled the door open a crack and peered through. Light spilled into the hallway from several rooms up ahead. The door to the lab, however, was open, the room dark.

  I motioned with my head and tiptoed down the hall. The sound of voices came from farther ahead, but out of sight. In the background I heard low music playing, which so far had masked our entry.

  Another camera perched about halfway along the hallway, but, if my gadgets outside were doing their thing, they’d continue to broadcast an empty hall. In just a few quick steps we were inside the lab.

  I looked around. “Peach, this place is a goddamned mess. I couldn’t tell from your video feed, but Deele can’t be using it for any real science. There’s no way he’d risk billions of dollars on any work done in here.” I chewed on my lip for a moment. “It’s just a cover, in case anyone does a cursory inspection. But I’ll bet he is using it as a storage facility for some of his product. Otherwise why bother having it in the first place?”

  Voices got louder and we stood still. They faded, apparently going the other way, toward the building’s main entrance. We went back to sniffing around.

  “What about this?” Peach whispered, pointing to a cabinet before him.

  I walked over and looked through the glass doors. A lot of routine materials, including gloves, syringes, and a bevy of empty test tubes held in racks. But on the lowest shelf, tucked toward the back of the cabinet, another rack had a familiar look.

  The same types of vials I’d found in Houston. There were five of them, stoppered and sealed.

  “This could be some of the jazzy juice,” I said. “The malignant mix. The pestiferous potion. The—”

  “All right, I get it,” Peach said. He tried the handle to the cabinet, but it, too, was locked.

  “This, I got,” I said. The lock-picking set came back out, and within seconds I had the door open. Reaching in, I pulled the rack out and held it up to the dim light. To my untrained eye it looked similar to the junk I’d stolen in Houston, but who could tell?

  I handed it to Peach and relocked the cabinet.

  “Let’s not press our luck any more,” I said. I headed for the door, then took one last look back. A black binder caught my eye.

  “Here, take this,” I said, handing him the vials. After hesitating, I stuck my phone in my pack and handed that to him as well. “Start back for the car. I’ll be right behind you. If by any chance we get split up, make sure Gamez gets this to Quanta. That’s important.”

  He gave one nod, then moved down the hallway toward the storeroom. Just as he reached the door, I heard more voices. And one of them I knew for sure.

  At that very moment, Jason Deele popped out of an office. He couldn’t have ID’d me, but he certainly saw movement as I ducked back into the lab. I heard him shout for help.

  Shit. Now the black binder would have to be forgotten. I had to make sure Peach got away.

  I grabbed hold of a tray containing several large glass tumblers and beakers, and shoved it to the floor. The sound of breaking glass was probably enough to alert Peach, but, to make sure, I tipped over an entire table. That should’ve captured the attention of everyone in the building, and provided Peach enough distraction to get away.

  It brought the bad guys, that’s for sure. The first through the door was a man I didn’t recognize, but I put him down with a hard kick to the gut and a heel to his jaw. Then, turning around, I rushed over to the cabinet where we’d found the samples. With one large heave, I tipped it over and it crashed to the floor. It might take a while before they could sift through the mess and discover their samples were gone.

  After that three more men rushed in, including Conor Wood. He wasted no time trying to fight; he held his gun out straight, aimed right at my nose. I retreated a step and held up my hands with a slight smile.

  “All right,” Wood called out, and that brought Jason Deele from around the corner. He cast a quick glance down at the unconscious man on the floor, surveyed the damage in the room, then settled his gaze on me. It took him a few moments, then his eyebrows went up.

  “Well, it’s Mr. Ryan Thomas. Very far out of his territory.” He took very deliberate steps to come face-to-face with me. “I guess this means you don’t really work for D.M. Cash. Right?”

  “The bastards fired me yesterday,” I said. “I came down here to beg you for a job.”

  He smiled. “And then decided to destroy as many things as you could.”

  “I get clumsy when I get nervous.”

  Over his shoulder, Deele said to Wood: “Look around. Quickly. See who else might be with him.” Then he reached back and stopped his henchman before he could move. “And find out why this didn’t show up on video.”

  Wood bolted from the room. I had to believe that by this time Peach was gone, and hopefully he’d remembered the clamps on the junction box.

  From the hallway Jaclyn Stone entered the room. Her eyes immediately darted to the shattered cabinet strewn across the floor. She uttered a curse and knelt down next to it, careful to stay out of touch with the liquid mess. A moment later she looked up at me. There was absolute fury in her eyes.

  Deele scanned the debris. “Was this really necessary, Mr. Thomas? Of course, that’s not your real name.” Then his eyes narrowed as he faced me again. “A better question is: Who do you really work for?”

  “I’m actually a writer for a magazine called Pea Pod Monthly. I was hoping I could interview you for a cover story titled The Wonder Boy of Soy.”

  He merely stared, shifting his focus on me from eye to eye. Then Wood came back into the room and said, “He’s alone. Broke in through the storage room. And the video system seems to be working perfectly.”

  Deele finally broke eye contact with me and said to Wood, “I’m sure people know he’s here. Get him out, and take him to the alternate site. Search him first. I want to know if he’s wired or has any tracking device on him.”

  Wood put an iron grip onto my bicep and yanked me toward the door.

  The next few minutes were not fun at all.

  26

  The table reminded me of the kind you see in movie morgues. It was a cold slab of metal, and the restraints dug into my neck, arms, legs, and torso. Struck me as overkill, but then I didn’t know exactly what they had in mind.

  Oh, and I was nude.

  My clothes had been violently torn off during a hectic search. When my shirt fell in tatters, I’d watched the series-8 card flutter from the shirt pocket to the ground. When they gathered up the clothes and hauled them out of the room, the card was ignored. That meant Poole would at least be an audio witness to everything about to happen. Poor thing.

  I’d been driven to this building—wherever it was—after being bound, gagged, then crammed onto the floorboards in the backseat of a car. One of Wood’s pals, a guy I recognized from the airplane hangar in
Houston, sat in the backseat and kept a foot pressed down on my head for the duration of the drive. Once arriving at the soon-to-be torture chamber I’d been punched a few times to loosen me up before the search. Then off came the clothes.

  I was now freezing but couldn’t bitch about it with the gag still in my mouth. They left me alone for a long time.

  In these instances my mind often surfed around and through the various tough scrapes I’d encountered through the years. Being bound and gagged isn’t so frightening when it’s happened to you enough times. And I’m not counting the fun Friday nights after too much tequila.

  The worst had been near the end of an assignment in New Orleans. Much like this time, I’d given myself up so a Treasury agent could escape with her life. She’d bravely tried to reverse the roles, and I couldn’t exactly tell her why it was better for me to risk death than her. In the end I’d done the only thing I could do in the situation: I pushed her out of a slow-moving car. I’m sure it hurt like hell, but it allowed me to drive into the trap and allowed her to limp away.

  Those guys had eventually strapped me to an old, smelly picnic table of all things and gone to work on me with knives. I’ll spare you the details, which I remember in this case because I survived. Well, until right after I was rescued by one of the chunkiest sheriffs you’ll ever meet. He got me to a hospital before some of Q2’s specialists, the folks in Sanitation, arrived on the scene and got me to a secure location where I could upload. Then we pulled the plug and I invested into a new body. The whole thing was grisly, and them good ol’ boys had made sure I suffered plenty.

  For the record, I was back eight days later and took three of them out with shots to the head while they sat there eating gumbo, or crawdads, or something. Didn’t even mention the picnic table; just finished the job, even if I was a little behind schedule because of their backwater bayou antics.

  Thinking about old cases inevitably led to the ones that left me angry and frustrated. And those all had one thing in common. Well, one person in common.

  His name was Beadle. He was the only son of a bitch I could never seem to nail. And it wasn’t like I hadn’t had my chances.

  Beadle was the mastermind of masterminds, better suited for the planning of large crimes than the actual execution. He rarely made an appearance during his capers, preferring to wait behind the scenes after plotting every move like a chess master staring at the board. I’d faced him down more than once, though, including a recent case in New England.

  And he’d wriggled off the hook every time.

  Beadle was Moriarty to my Sherlock, the Joker to my Batman, Newman to my Seinfeld. And yeah, I was obsessed with catching him. During one of my sessions, Q2’s Dr. Miller once laughingly referred to it as my Beadle Mania.

  I hated to admit it, but that was funny.

  One of these days, I always told myself. One of these days.

  But it wouldn’t be today. Lying on the cold metal table with a tight gag quickly shifting from uncomfortable to downright painful, I figured I’d better prepare myself for the new body that would soon be coming my way. In situations like this what bothered me the most was the delay it would cause in my work.

  Of course, I’m one of the only people in the world to ever say that death put a crimp in their schedule.

  Noise behind me snapped me out of these thoughts, and a moment later Jason Deele came into view at my side. He looked down at me like someone surveying an insect they’re preparing to squash. And, given his psychopathic personality, that was probably an apt comparison.

  He tugged the gag out of my mouth and took a long, deep breath before speaking.

  “You’re not with D.M. Cash, obviously. And you’re following up in South America, which means you’re probably not FBI. I’m trying to think of who might employ a man of your talents, and coming up empty. Wouldn’t care to satisfy my curiosity, would you?”

  “Not buying the writer bit, eh?” I said, trying to work my jaw to get some feeling to return.

  He looked me over from top to bottom. “You don’t have the physique of someone who sits behind a desk. Not that it’s that impressive.”

  “Well, remember, it’s very cold in here. Besides, you won’t hurt my feelings; it’s just a rental.”

  Deele crossed his arms and looked down at something in his hand. It was the series-8 card. “James Frank,” he read. “Well, a man of a thousand identities. All of them phony, I’m sure.”

  He set the card on the table next to my shoulder. Then he took in another long breath.

  “Dr. Stone has picked through the mess you left behind, and she says some of her work is missing. Granted, most of it is a royal mess on the floor, but some of it has mysteriously vanished.”

  “Well, I was parched, so I drank a few beakers you had locked up. Please tell me it wasn’t dangerous.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “Probably wouldn’t sit too well with a human digestive system.”

  “I’ll bet it’s hell on soybean roots, too.”

  After a moment he chuckled. “I have no intention of satisfying your curiosity. I just needed time to see the full status of the property you destroyed. You had a partner or two, they got away, you didn’t. I’m not sure what your real occupation is, but I don’t believe you or they have any official business with either the government of Paraguay or the U.S. And, while you’ve been a nuisance, there’s nothing in their possession that changes anything with my business. So there’s no reason you can’t simply disappear.”

  “I can think of one very important reason,” I said. “I have one season left on Game of Thrones. You can’t leave me hanging, dude.”

  “Are you through with your act?”

  I grinned at him. “Jason, if you pull my string I can go for days. But since I get the feeling you’re planning something truly unpleasant for me, at least tell me a couple of things. I mean, I’m obviously not going to share it with anyone.”

  “Why should I?”

  “A going away present?”

  When that brought no reaction, I added: “Because even though you’re going to kill me, you have to admit I’ve been great company. Much more fun to talk with than Dr. Frankensoy.”

  He laughed despite himself. “Dr. Stone is a brilliant scientist, and for the time being she’s very useful. But yes, I’ll grant you she’s not the most entertaining conversationalist.” He put his hands behind his back and gave me a slight bow. “All right, what would you like to know?”

  Inwardly, I celebrated. Like most psychotic killers, Jason Deele couldn’t resist the attention. And every syllable I coaxed out of him could provide a helpful clue that was being transmitted by the series-8 card lying near his feet.

  “Why in the hell did you give up high-tech for goddamned plants?”

  He looked surprised by the question, and for a moment it appeared he wouldn’t answer. Then he leaned down close to me and said in a low, ominous voice: “People didn’t have to buy my gadgets or my apps. But they gotta eat.”

  “Fair enough. And yet you hold starvation over people’s heads. Why? You have more money than you know what to do with, and you’ve accomplished so much. Why this turn?”

  He actually seemed to consider the question. Once again I noticed his body grow rigid and his eyes expand. It was creepy. I was curious, wondering what physiological changes were actually taking place to produce this odd reaction.

  A moment later he blinked, then said, “Everything that came before was my childhood. Playing games. Creating games. I was 25 years old and still a child, building electronic playgrounds for other adult children. I grew tired of investing my time and energy into creating distractions. Creating diversions for people who were bored for the 17 hours a day they stared at screens.

  “So I sold my business and spent two years thinking about how I could transition from providing junk food for the mind into providing real sustenance. I’d conquered the world of mind candy and set my sights on conquering the world of real nourishment. The kind
that would still be necessary if all the world’s computers and phones went away.”

  He crossed his arms. “So I invested my time and money into finding someone who could develop the products I wanted. And instead of waiting for the world to gradually notice what I’d done, I decided to, um, hasten the outcome.”

  I scoffed. “You realize, of course, that Jaclyn Stone has her own agenda. You’ve hitched your wagon to the wrong horse.”

  “Look back through history,” he said. “No partnership is permanent. I’m not banking on this one being permanent, either.”

  “You’ll part ways? Or will she get the Culbertson treatment?”

  His eyebrows arched. “Ah, the bumbling fool from the USDA. I heard he turned up dead. Now how did that happen?”

  “He tried to put the squeeze on you,” I said. “And nobody squeezes the great Jason Deele, right?”

  He gave that an impatient wave. “In my younger days I would’ve tried buying my way out of that nuisance. But somebody like that doesn’t stay bought off anymore. They’ll always come back, looking for a refill, like it’s an all-you-can-eat buffet. Agent Culbertson was a greedy hog, and like someone once said: pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered.”

  I laughed. “And what do you expect is going to happen to you, Jason?”

  Leaning over me, he said, “I’m going to control the world’s food supply, Mr. Thomas. So no one becomes a pig or a hog unless they deal with me.”

  He straightened up. “Now, that’s enough talk. I’ve got things to do, and, thanks to your own little act of terrorism today, I’ve got a vacation cabin that needs my attention.”

  With that he moved out of my field of vision, and all I heard were hushed voices from somewhere in the back of the room. I began to prepare myself for the end. Well, the temporary end.

  I’d uploaded in the morning, so when I opened my eyes in the basement of Q2 in a new body, these last several hours of my life would be spliced out. I called it the lights-out period. My memory went from lying on a hotel bed, the blink of an eye, and then I was staring at the ceiling on a table, not too dissimilar from the one I was currently strapped to.