"You"re not the first to suggest it. You ready to hit the town?"

"Ready as I"ll ever be."

He was tense. Really tense. It looked good on him; made all his manly muscles and lumps stand out, even though they were squeezed in close by the black ribbed sweater that fit him like everything else he owned: perfectly. I knew it was new. I knew he"d gone through my bag and taken money while I was asleep. So long as he didn"t go nuts with it, I didn"t mind. It was only money, after all. It"s not like I didn"t have more of it stashed all over the place, and what was I going to do? Lecture him on the evils of petty thievery?

When we"d bolted from the Poppyc.o.c.k Review he"d been wearing not much more than some glitter and a smile. His next set of duds came off Peter Desarme, but I didn"t a.s.sume he"d pulled the rest of his wardrobe out of his a.s.s...or from wherever he tucked his- Never mind. I retrieved my wandering thoughts from the gutter.

We reached the car, and I adjusted all the mirrors and seat so I could drive without feeling Cal"s b.u.t.t-print beneath me. Even if I was only imagining it.

On the other side of the neighborhood we found office buildings of a bland and utilitarian nature, though here and there were older structures in brick or stone. We parked Cal"s rental two blocks away in a lot between two office buildings that were almost fully dark-save a few pinpoints of light where the last unfortunate souls were chained to their desks, working late. We liked that particular lot because it was almost entirely devoid of light, and running low on other cars, too. These two details were possibly related, or possibly not. There"s no telling in D.C.

Murder capital of the nation. Or so I"ve heard.

And, I supposed, I"d already done my part to contribute to the beastly reputation of the place. One new murder so far, but the night was still young.

I closed up the car, took my go-bag and slung it around my chest, and watched Adrian feel himself up-checking for equipment, supplies, structural stability, whatever. It was worth watching.

Between him and Ian, I was getting more eye candy in a week than I"d enjoyed in years. Different brands of candy to be sure, but you didn"t hear me complaining about it.

I hadn"t been able to scare up much in the line of building schematics when it came to Major Bruner"s office, which was kind of surprising. Government buildings are often their own little forts, but private industry structures-like the one where this guy"s office was located-tended to be a little easier to crack. But all I could find out indicated that it was owned by some California company registered to someone named Jeffery Sykes. I could hardly turn up a d.a.m.n thing about the offices, conference rooms, storage facilities, or s.h.i.t-even the vending machines. Nine times out of ten, the vending-machine companies are an easy back door to places like that. Somebody from c.o.ke or Pepsi has to restock the soda machines, and usually a rep from Starbucks or Folgers is keeping tabs on the coffeemakers.

Almost every actively used building everywhere has a thousand and one ways inside.

I wished I had more time to research and familiarize myself with a few of them, but it was like I"d told everyone earlier: They already knew we were coming. We needed to act before they knew we"d arrived.

I filed the name Jeffery Sykes away for future investigation. Anyone who makes a building that airtight is up to something. You mark my words.

Anyway, without a good mental layout of the building, Adrian and I paced around the block once or twice, quietly discussing our next move. It didn"t look complicated, but looks could be deceiving. We agreed that the route of least resistance and most discretion would probably be the roof, and I left him for a few minutes to scout for cameras. I found three, which meant there were probably twice that number.

But the funny thing about cameras is that, half the time, at least a few of them aren"t working. This time, only one of the cameras was totally dead, but hey, I"d take it. Two of the others I adjusted very, very slightly-so slightly that whoever monitored them (if in fact anyone anywhere was doing any monitoring) probably wouldn"t notice the change...but my tweakings created a blind spot at the back north corner.

I retrieved my partner-in-crime and trusted him to scale the corner without a whole lot of whining about it.

He wasn"t quite as swift and effortless about it as I was, but that couldn"t be helped. He was only human, after all. But for being only human, he did a d.a.m.n fine job. We were even able to skip the creaky gutters and fire escapes, because Adrian took the corner rock-climber-style.

I approved.

And in a moment, I was beside him on the roof-crouching down to hide behind the topmost ledge. Before we left the hotel we"d had a conversation about hand signals and keeping quiet, and G.o.d bless the man, I didn"t have to reinforce or reiterate a bit of it. He was a professional from toes to top, all business. All ready to work in silence.

I loved it. Even though, if you"d asked me a month earlier if I"d enjoy working with a partner, I would"ve laughed in your face. But I liked this guy. He knew how to behave and he knew how to keep his head down.

It flicked through my mind that he might make a formidable vampire.

But it only flicked. I shook my head to loosen the thought and let it go.

While I was wrestling with my distracting thoughts, he was finding an entrance and taking a small prybar to it. That kind of can-do att.i.tude was just what I wanted to see, so I joined him and gave the low, half-sized door a nudge that flipped it quietly open.

It wasn"t a stairwell. That would"ve been too obvious. This was a maintenance chute that allowed electricians and roofing workers to go down below the surface for repairs and renovations. I wasn"t 100 percent positive there would be an outlet down into the main body of the building, but I a.s.sumed that should we hit a dead end, we"d find a thin spot where we could cut our way down through the drywall.

Sometimes you have to wing it.

I knew for a pretty safe fact that Adrian would be happy to wing it with a flamethrower if he could"ve snuck one inside. As it was, I didn"t know how far I could really trust him once we reached the office. I didn"t believe he"d do anything dumb, but I had every confidence that he planned to wreak some havoc...if those two things can be mutually exclusive.

Like I said, I wasn"t sure.

But he knew how to move and he didn"t mind getting dirty. That much was clear when we ducked down through the maintenance chute and found ourselves stomping in old mold-smelling insulation that may once have been pink, but was now only some pale, ghastly shade in the dim ambient light from the sky outside.

My feet sank into it and I shuddered at the texture-like cotton candy spun out of gla.s.s-but I extricated my boots and found some support beams to stand on instead. I had a feeling I"d be picking that s.h.i.t off my clothes for days.

Adrian was rustling through his satchel and retrieving a pair of night-vision goggles, which he"d also acquired on my dime and without my official commendation. G.o.d knows I didn"t need them, but I was glad he had them. We both needed to be able to see if we were going to rely on each other at all.

We hunted, pecked, tiptoed, and ducked our way through the ceiling crawl s.p.a.ce-a narrow band between the top floor and the roof. It was just about high enough to allow a midsized dog to walk upright; Adrian and I, being somewhat taller, either went down on all fours or crouched painfully along, hunkering through the near pitch blackness.

I took the lead, and I led by instinct...and by virtue of my copious experience.

I headed east, toward the place where I"d perceived a main stairwell while we were outside checking the place out. If there was going to be a hatch of any kind, dumping into the building"s main corridors, it would probably be somewhere over the stairs. I had no idea why this tended to be the case, but there you have it. I"m sure an architect or an engineer could lay it out for me, but I can honestly say I don"t much care. As long as the generality would hold true, just tonight. Just this once.

It did. Sort of.

Before long we found ourselves atop a promising trapdoor that flat refused to open. So I pulled the long, slim saw out of my bag and went to town, cutting through whatever was keeping the thing from dropping and letting us out. I ended up cutting all the way around, in a full square; and when we finally got the thing to open, I understood why. Someone had plastered over it.

No matter. It was open, and we dropped down-me first, landing light on my toes, then bracing myself to catch Adrian or at least lend him a hand. It was a solid twelve-foot drop to the steps below, and while it didn"t bother me in the slightest, I didn"t want Adrian to break an ankle.

Much to my delight, he didn"t make a manly show of refusing the a.s.sistance. He lowered himself through the hole, hanging by his hands, and allowed me to support his feet and knees, then his thighs and his midsection, as he slipped down onto the landing between the sixth floor and the fifth.

I"m not saying I didn"t cop a feel, but I will will cry plausible deniability. cry plausible deniability.

And furthermore, I will add that he was a G.o.dd.a.m.n magician to get that whole package tucked. I suspect a s.p.a.cetime portal. Or at least I would would suspect it, if I weren"t denying everything. Which I am. suspect it, if I weren"t denying everything. Which I am.

He flashed me a look that said at the same time, Hey, I felt that Hey, I felt that...and I choose to believe it was accidental. For now I choose to believe it was accidental. For now.

But no time to dwell on the pleasantries. Soon we were inside.

We had no way of knowing how well the building"s interior was being watched, but I"d given him a crash course on how to avoid and disable cameras, and he knew to stay back and let me go first. Not because he wasn"t awesome, but because I was smaller and faster, and when I turned on the vampire speed I could even kick up a pace so mighty that most cameras wouldn"t detect me at all-or if they did, I"d only turn up as a blur. I can"t move that fast for very long, but I"m deadly at a sprint and I had some serious sprinting to do.

We didn"t know where Bruner"s office was.

So it was Adrian"s job to scan for guards and neutralize them in whatever fashion he found most satisfying, and mine to dash from hall to hall in the six-story building, looking for a nameplate or some other indicator that we"d found the b.a.s.t.a.r.d"s headquarters. When I found it, I"d send a psychic call over to Adrian-who could apparently hear them all right if I focused hard enough, though he couldn"t reply. (We"d tested it out a little, since it worked that one time in the Poppyc.o.c.k Review.) We"d meet back at the stairwell, near our entrance hole, in ten minutes.

He headed down. I stayed up top and worked my way from wing to wing, then went down to the next floor and so forth. I kept myself low and thanked heaven that the lights were all turned down or turned off altogether, with the exception of a few safety lights in the stairwells. I ducked from corner to corner, sweeping the rows of doors with my eyes and trying like h.e.l.l to read as fast as I could run.

I wasn"t finding it, and it was making me mad.

I was down to the third floor and I had about five minutes left on the clock when Adrian hissed at me from somewhere below. He waved to gesture me into the stairwell (where we"d already established that there were no cameras), and then he p.i.s.sed me right off.

"His office is on the fourth floor. Room four fifty-one," he whispered.

"I"ve already checked the fourth floor and I didn"t see his name anywhere," I insisted. "How do you know that"s where his stuff is?"

"Because," he said with a flap of his hand that meant he"d found it somewhere over there, "there"s a receptionist desk near the elevator on every floor. Receptionists keep directory sheets."

"Oh. I should"ve thought of that," I said. "Nice work."

"Thanks. But I"m sure you would"ve found it eventually."

"How very kind of you to say so," I told him, with an undercurrent of irritation that told him I suspected sarcasm on his part. He didn"t disabuse me of the notion. He only started climbing up to the fourth-floor entry door.

I said, "Let me," in order to reestablish my dominance.

I gave the door a careful yank and dashed down the corridor to the camera at the far end. With a twist of my wrist, I re-aimed it to record a corner of wallpaper. It wasn"t a permanent solution or even a very good one, but it"d do for the moment. If we were lucky, no one was watching and no one would notice for a few minutes. Anyone who saw the viewing area change might"ve a.s.sumed that a screw or a bolt had given way, and the camera had merely dropped off its mooring. Because he (or she) sure as h.e.l.l wouldn"t have seen me charging toward it.

Unfortunately, the moment I moved the camera I felt like I"d turned over an hourgla.s.s. Whereas before we were only being sneaky and taking our time, now we"d done something that could reasonably draw attention.

Now we had to work fast.

"Let"s find this office and get the f.u.c.k out of here," Adrian suggested.

I didn"t have any other plans, so I agreed. I looked at the nearest door and saw the number 443, then said, "Okay, so it"s on that side of the hall, evens, odds. It must be down there."

I pointed. He nodded.

And then we heard it. Not a footstep, not a creaking door. Something worse. That G.o.dd.a.m.n static of a communication device. Faint, but not very distant.

Adrian and I looked at each other. We looked at room 443, which was the wrong room, but the nearest room.

My partner froze beside me, only for an instant. His second instant was devoted to blocking me, like he was tougher than me and could protect me or something. Must"ve been years of ingrained training, I guess, because there was no way he was tougher than me. One of us could take a couple of bullets and keep on ticking. One of us couldn"t.

I shoved back, almost smashing my shoulder through that little window on the door. The whole thing whapped open and we toppled inward just in time to dodge the first wave of fire from the north end of the hallway.

They tore around the corner-suited men, at least. Not commandos, in case that mattered. Their guns were shiny and blazing, and their aim was none too bad. I felt a bullet"s hot breath graze my leg as I flew half backward, half sideways, totally dragged by Adrian, into the office.

He swung a leg around and kicked the door shut behind us, as if that"d slow them down longer than a big old sheet of construction paper might. "They"re on to us!" he declared.

"No s.h.i.t, Sherlock!" Though to his credit, he didn"t ask anything dumb like "What do we do?" I was the one who blurted out that particular question, even as I was looking around for something big and heavy to block the door.

G.o.d bless him forever, he was already bringing down a floor-to-ceiling filing cabinet like a lion on a wildebeest. It toppled down in front of the door, but not so fast that I didn"t see a swarm of shadows through the frosted gla.s.s. The gla.s.s broke. Either the cabinet nicked it or the sheer weight and shake of its falling rattled the thing apart in its frame.

I followed his lead and nabbed the other big-a.s.s cabinet and yanked it down, then shoved it into place. It was huge and st.u.r.dy; the pair of them would"ve done the French Revolution proud so far as improvised barricades went. But there were two main problems in our cute little plan.

One, they wouldn"t hold forever. Two, we"d shut ourselves inside. And we weren"t even in the right office, so it wasn"t like I could pull a repeat performance of the Holtzer Point smash-and-grab.

We were locked in, several offices over from the one we needed, and armed men were outside trying to extract us. And they were prepared to do it the hard way. The harder the better, I suspected.

"We have to get out of here," I said.

"And into room four fifty-one" he said, amending the obvious.

"At this point, I"d settle for just "out." We can try again, come back later. Maybe-"

"Maybe what?" He almost shouted it at me, which was totally unnecessary. "Come back sometime when they don"t expect us? Because it"s pretty f.u.c.king obvious they expected us, Raylene!"

"Fine!" I shouted back at him. The guys outside were trying to ram the door, but since they didn"t have much room to back up in the narrow hallway, they weren"t getting a lot of leverage out of it. Mostly they were making a whole lot of noise. "Fine, they were expecting us! Nothing I can do about it now now, okay?"

He was already ignoring me, which was fine. I wasn"t saying anything important anyway. His eyes scanned the ceiling hard, and my eyes joined them. "What are our options?" he asked, but he wasn"t really asking. He was preparing to catalog.

"Window," I pointed out. Smallish, but the only obvious way outside. It was also a way in inside, but I wasn"t prepared to worry about that yet. One thing at a time. "Two vents."

"I can"t fit through those," he said, and in saying that, he said plenty. He looked at me evenly.

"I"m not sure I can, either...," I began, but I was already doing the mental calculations.

"You can. You have to. Give me your gun, and go for it."

"What?" d.a.m.n. I was getting good at asking stupid, timestalling questions when I already knew the answers. "You want to stay holed up in here alone?" I whispered it fiercely, despite the ruckus of the men trying to force aside the cabinets. Lucky for us, the barriers had almost interlocked in their falling-and it"d take something pretty significant to move them...at least it"d take real work to move them quickly. Still, we didn"t have long. It wouldn"t take more than a few minutes for them to figure out they could get at us from another angle. Or, G.o.d help us, it wouldn"t be much trouble to phone someone for explosives. They could take out half the floor if they wanted us that badly, and I had a feeling we were pretty badly wanted.

"I"ll hold them off. You go over to four fifty-one and take everything you can."

"And then what?" I demanded. "I can jump out a window. As far as I know, you can"t!" can jump out a window. As far as I know, you can"t!"

"I"ll figure out something. Go! We don"t have all night."

I jammed a hand into my Useful Things Bag and pulled out the .22, which was all I had on me since I tend not to rely on these things. He looked at it like I"d handed him a straw and a spitball, rolled his eyes, and shooed me over to the vent while he took up a defensive position to the left of the door.

Wasting more time wouldn"t get us anywhere. I crammed myself between the big office desk and the wall, and used my weight to shove it under the larger of the two vents. It was only larger by a marginal value, but it"d have to be larger enough to hold my big a.s.s, so that"s what I went for. Forget the screwdriver; we were well past discretion here. I punched my hand through the slim metal grille and ripped the whole thing out of the wall, then without even looking-without even hanging out, calculating my width of a.s.s versus the opening now before me, or anything that might await inside that filthy s.p.a.ce-I lunged up and over and squeezed myself up into the metal chute.

I did some quick, thoughtful fiddling and realized with relief that I"d entered facing the right direction, because there was no f.u.c.king way I was turning around.

Down in 443, things were hot in a bad way. Behind me as I wriggled I heard all the commotion as the men in the hall rallied, smashed, and shoved. I could also hear someone squawking into a mouthpiece or a walkie-talkie. I caught the words "exterior window" and "demo team" and I didn"t like any of it. Backup never bodes well.

There was nothing I could do but squirm faster and try to trust Adrian, who was surely one of the most competent mere mortals I"d met in years. He had a (small, girlie) gun, he had his wits, and he had...I don"t know. Maybe a silver bikini under his commando-wear, for all I knew.

I counted, dividing by two and guessing at which office would be the right one. My first pick was clearly wrong; I almost let myself down into an empty room that was in the process of being remodeled.

So I went with my next hunch and elbowed my way out of the vent, then caught it before it could hit the ground with a clatter. I"d have to be quiet. The action in the hall was escalating. More people had been called in, and people were shooting again-though I couldn"t tell what or whom they were trying to hit.

A set of burly, dark shadows went hustling past the office door with its frosted-gla.s.s window inset. No one even glanced inside. Everyone was focused on the maniac holed up in room 443.

I wished that maniac well and dropped myself down quietly...onto a rolly-wheeled office chair that nearly sent me skating smack into a wall, but didn"t quite.

Recovering with haste but precious little dignity, I took a look around.

Room 451 didn"t have Bruner"s name affixed to it anyplace that I could see-even in the reverse letters on the other side of the gla.s.s-so I felt somewhat better about having missed it the first time around. Instead, upon the pane had been painted the legend OFFICE OF EXPERIMENTAL BIOENGINEERING RESEARCH OFFICE OF EXPERIMENTAL BIOENGINEERING RESEARCH, which I thought was tacky, if more or less correct. It took me a few precious seconds to pa.r.s.e it because hey, I don"t read backward very well, okay?

But I knew I was in the right place.

The office was nothing to write home about. In the center squatted a desk covered with two large phones, a beige desktop computer, and one of those big paper calendars that you treat like a place mat, and behind the desk was a wall of dull gray filing cabinets, two of which had their handles either broken off or rusted off. On the floor beside the desk was a wastepaper basket that had, alas, been freshly emptied. And stuck between the far right filing cabinet and the wall was a duffel bag that turned out to be full of clothes...the kind of clothes a man keeps around when he occasionally spends the night at the office-socks, underwear, a clean shirt, and a shoe-polishing kit. The polishing kit struck me as a little a.n.a.l-retentive, but who am I to judge?

Something kept me rooted to the spot, staring at the certificates of commendation that were framed on the walls and wondering what kind of man could do the kinds of things he"d done. Did he not understand that the undead were people, too? Or did he disagree? Had a vampire bitten someone he cared about? Was he just a psychotic f.u.c.ker who would destroy anyone he fancied?