Hello, Gorgeous! Page 2

  She grinned—for the first time in days.

  Too bad for them.

  Later, Stacy was never quite sure what had happened on that side street. Her brainy, funky pal—God, Caitlyn had always been the coolest—had started talking to herself, then knocked her down. And before she could get up—heck, before she could roll over—Caitlyn was on the bad guys. She Sydney-Bristowed all over their asses and wasn’t even out of breath when she finished!

  And the funny thing—the extremely weird-but-cool thing—was that the bad guys were moving in slow motion compared to Caitlyn. It was like being an extra on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Which kind of sucked, now that she thought about it, because she never pictured herself as the extra type, more like the supporting actress. Not the star, but important to the star, like Willow on Buffy or Elaine on Seinfeld.

  Anyway, one of them flew almost all the way down the street and ended up flat on his back, right next to her. She got up in a hurry when she saw blood trickling out of his ear, and by then the other ones were down too.

  And they looked bad. Like Colin Farrell in that too-cool S.W.A.T. movie. They were all scruffy and muscular and dressed in dark clothing and heavily armed—she counted three holsters on one of them. Empty holsters. Eh?

  She turned and saw Jimmy walking toward her, her arms full of guns. “Sorry about that,” she said, not sounding even a tiny bit sorry. “I wanted you down in case they got to their guns. I’ll buy you a new skirt, okay?”

  “Okay,” she said automatically. “um, this guy’s bleeding. Out his ear.”

  Caitlyn peered down at him, then blinked and—weird!—it almost looked like she was reading something. Except there wasn’t anything to read. “It’s okay,” she said after a few moments. “He’s got a concussion, but nothing’s broken. He’ll be out for a while, that’s all. Serves them right anyway,” she added defiantly. Almost—weird!—tearfully. Jimmy never cried. Not even that time when she got a B- on her trig final. Boy, that had been a tough day. “Besides, no means no, right? I mean, I don’t have to work for anyone.”

  “Okay, Jimmy.”

  Caitlyn threw the guns down in a temper. They clattered to the street like ugly maracas. “I mean, jeez! I didn’t ask them to fix me, did I?”

  Stacy shook her head. “Nuh-uh.”

  “So they saved my life—big deal! What, now I’m a—an—an indentured servant for the rest of my life?”

  “Doesn’t seem like a great idea.”

  “Damn right! Shit! Shit on toast!”

  “Yuck,” Stacy said, which (whew!) made Caitlyn laugh. And thank God, because for a moment—a teensy moment, but still—she had been almost… what? Scared? Of Caitlyn? Not too stupid, because Jimmy was just about the nicest, coolest, sweetest—

  Her friend stopped laughing and looked at her in a new way. And new, Stacy was starting to think, was bad. Very, very bad. “Look, Stace, you get home, okay?”

  “Okay.” Impulsively, she added, “You come with me, okay? Stay over for a while. We can stay up late and watch Ocean’s Eleven—the George Clooney one, not the icky old one—and I’ll call in sick tomorrow and we can hang out. It looks like you—like you could use a break. What do you say, Jimmy?”

  “I say, don’t call me Jimmy. It sounds like the best deal I’ve heard all damned month actually. But I can’t.”

  “Why can’t you?”

  “I have to go see somebody first,” she replied, sounding pissed all over again as she nudged the closest S.W.A.T. guy with the toe of her boot. “You go on. I’ll get rid of the guns.”

  “Are you sure…?”

  “Just go.”

  “Well… okay. I—I’m glad you’re better anyway.”

  “Oh, I’m better all right,” she said morosely, bending to pick up the scary guns. “Better than ever. Too bad for me. But too bad for them, so that works out okay. You know?”

  “Okay. I—g’night.”

  Stacy went home and took two Ambien, but it was hard to drop off just the same. She wished Caitlyn had come home with her, but a tiny part of her—this was so lame it was hard to admit to herself, and she could never have said it out loud—was glad she hadn’t.

  Chapter 3

  Caitlyn drove up on the lawn, plowed through the snow, parked on the freshly shoveled sidewalk, got out of her Intrepid, and marched over to the glass doors. She slammed her palm down on the touch plate and, big surprise, the doors unlocked.

  There was nothing on the outside of the big glass building to indicate what it was—just the address, 2118, in four-foot-high numbers—on the inside. The security guards stood behind their granite desk when she entered, but neither came near her. Good for them.

  “Evening, Miss James,” one of them said.

  “Is he in?” she asked.

  “Uh, yeah. Top floor. He’s—“

  “Don’t say he’s expecting me.”

  “Well,” the other guard said apologetically, “he kind of is. Did you really take out an entire extractment team by yourself? Because that’s—“

  She had already stomped across the black marble floor and was in the stairwell, and didn’t hear the rest. Damned if she was going to be trapped in one of their stupid elevators. She’d seen enough TV movies to know that was a bad idea, thanks very much!

  Instead, she took the fifteen flights in about sixty seconds and popped out in the hallway, not even out of breath.

  Okay, so. There were some benefits. And it beat being dead. Mostly.

  But still. No meant no.

  She was in an area she thought of as done up in Expensive Boring Office. Dark wood, dark carpet, light blue water cooler. The desks were also dark wood and looked like they’d been mass-produced and then delivered on the same day. The place smelled like paper and coffee grounds.

  “Ah, Miss James! The Boss has been expecting you.” It was always like that, just like that… The Boss. You could hear the capital letter. “Some coffee? Tea?”

  “No.”

  “He’s finishing up right now with the senator from Wisconsin—“

  “At nine o’clock at night?”

  “The Boss works long hours,” the secretary said with weird pride, “but if you’ll—“

  Caitlyn kicked the door in. It was easy. It shot off its hinges and slammed into the thick carpet. It sounded like a woman beating a rug—whumpf! And it was so easy. That was, in a lot of ways, the scariest part of all that had happened to her. Been done to her. How easy it was to use it. The technology. It was exactly like using her own muscles, her own brain. She had never been able to see where she stopped and the nanobytes began.

  “Caitlyn James to see you, sir,” his secretary said, peeking around her and not missing a beat.

  The senator—a tall, good-looking woman with dark hair coiled on top of her head, shot up from her seat, and papers went flying.

  “We’ll pick this up tomorrow, Nancy,” the Boss said. “I’m afraid I’ve got a scheduling conflict right now.”

  “No doubt,” she said, leaving the file and picking her way past the door.

  “Love your hair,” Caitlyn said as the senator passed her.

  “What can I do for you, Caitlyn?” the Boss said, sitting back down and folding his hands on his immaculate desk blotter. He was short, in his forties, but powerfully built through the shoulders. He was dressed in a black suit—a good one, probably Italian—and his hair was the same shade, slicked back from his forehead. His eyes were the color of dirty ice, and his eyebrows were so light as to be invisible. As a result, he looked like a mean egg.

  “You can die slowly, coughing your guts out in a part of the world that hasn’t heard of morphine.”

  The Boss blinked slowly, like a lizard. “I’ll get right on that. I take it our team earned your enmity?”

  “You’ve earned my en—my em—you’re the one I’m pissed at!”

  “Caitlyn, Caitlyn,” he sighed, shaking his head as if over a daughter missing curfew. She hated that. The fatherly thing. So lame. If
he’d been her father, she would have had a Clorox cocktail before she hit puberty. “We’ve been over this before. You work for the O.S.F. now.”

  “No, I do not. I already told you. I’m not going to work for you guys. I don’t even know what O.S.F. means.”

  “Office of Scientific Findings. And yes. You do. We own you.” He smiled, revealing very white teeth. “Want to see the receipt?”

  “Drop dead, you bloodless bastard.”

  “Such a lack of gratitude, considering that we saved your life. Three times, if the reports are correct. And they always are.”

  She was silent, thinking, I never asked you to. Never, not one time. The question was, would she rather be dead than under the Boss’s thumb?

  And here was what kept her up nights: Could they undo what they had done? Push a button from H.Q. and zap all the nanobytes into oblivion?

  Could she go on if they did that? Go back to being normal? As normal as she had ever been anyway?

  Annoyingly, he was still talking. “Caitlyn, dear, we’ve spent a fortune on you. A bloody fortune. If we traded you, we could get Alaska in exchange.”

  “So? I didn’t ask you to save me. You were snooping all the channels, looking for a guinea pig. Some no-nothing loser—“

  “Don’t be so hard on yourself, darling.”

  “—to tinker and fiddle with and—and change.”

  “For the better, which you seem not to have noticed.”

  “Don’t expect my goddamned gratitude, you snake. Just because you’ve souped me up a bit, I’m supposed to do your dirty work? Fuck you.”

  “Yes, so you’ve said. However, free will—at least in the O.S.F.—is an illusion. We work for a higher power here, Caitlyn. Your—how did you put it? Your indentured servitude is necessary so millions of Americans can enjoy their freedom. When you think about it,” he added, sighing again, “you seem awfully selfish.”

  “Pal, you haven’t seen the least of it.”

  “Think of the havoc you could wreak on terrorism if you only applied yourself.”

  “Think of the havoc I could wreak on your lungs if I only applied myself.”

  “This attitude of yours… I’ve given you time to see things in a more mature and, shall we say, less stupid manner—“

  “Blow me.”

  “It’s too bad.” He pressed a button on his desk. She could hear a hissing sound, like a snake caught in the ventilation shaft.

  Warning. Warning. Unidentified gas in the vicinity.

  Analyzing: three parts gas to one hundred parts room air. Dispensing nanobytes to lungs to facilitate oxygen extraction.

  “I hope, after you’ve rested, we can begin anew. With a fresh attitude. This tiresome squabbling is getting us nowhere. Really, it’s—why are you still conscious?”

  “Oh, I’ve been holding my breath,” she said. It had been surprisingly easy. “I can do it until I need to leave, which is right now.”

  “Hmmmm.” He pushed another button, and the hissing stopped. “Just as well. Some of that was going to float over here, and I didn’t want to go to the trouble of finding my mask in this mess.” He indicated the piles of files. “Caitlyn, I’ll be honest with you—“

  “After you just squirted knockout gas at me? And who does that, by the way? It’s like I’m trapped in a bad episode of The Bionic Woman!”

  “Oh, it is not! Stop being so dramatic. Just last week I knocked out the Speaker of the House. Now, be fair. When have I ever misled you?”

  “Go on,” she grumbled.

  “Very good. You are the first of your kind, a fully functioning cybernetic organism who has retained your humanity. More, you are a human cybernetic organism, and thus you are held back only by the limitations of your own mind.”

  He seemed to expect her to say something, but she had no comment. Frankly, she wasn’t quite sure where he was going with any of this.

  “Simply put,” he continued, “we don’t know your limits. I suspect you don’t either. You shouldn’t have been able to analyze the gas so quickly, but you did. You shouldn’t have been able to disarm our team so quickly, but you did. And this with no formal training! Needless to say, the fact that you are more than you were is a tremendous validation of our work. The nanobytes we—“

  “Infected me with.”

  “—placed within you are now as much a part of you as your heart, your lungs, your delightfully annoying personality. We need you, Caitlyn. We must have you, in fact.”

  “I think I liked it better when you were spraying gas.” That was nothing but the truth. His honesty was horrifying. It was awful to find out someone you couldn’t stand would do anything to hang on to you.

  “You were very expensive, but that’s not the least of it. There are men in this world who make me look like the late, lamented Mister Rogers. Men who would gut and rape your friend Stacy and then sit down to a steak dinner. Men who would do that on a global scale if given the chance. We have to stop them. We need you to do it.”

  “But I—I never wanted to be a spy. I don’t know anything about it and I don’t think I’d be good at it. Seriously, Eggman, you don’t want me.”

  “Well, we have you. And you know more than you think. You won’t give off ‘spy vibes,’ for want of a better phrase, so you can go places many of our operatives can’t. Who will suspect a comely, giddy twenty-five-year-old of being a government assassin?”

  “Twenty-four,” she said automatically. Then, “Whoa, whoa. I’m not killing anybody, pal. No way.”

  “I’ll let you decide that,” he said generously, “when the time comes.”

  “You’re scaring the shit out of me.”

  “I’ve been known to have that effect on young women.”

  She shuddered. Ick! “What if we make a deal, O short, dark, and evil one?”

  “I’m listening, O annoying, tall, and orange-haired one.”

  “One job. Just one. Pick your biggest badass, and I’ll go after him. Take him out, stop him from blowing up the world, bitch-slap him, whatever. And then we’re quits. You saved my life, I saved your job. We’re even. We’re done.”

  “That sounds fine.”

  “What? Really? It does?”

  “Yes.”

  “Huh. According to the chip in my head, you’re telling the truth.”

  “I’m sure this isn’t the first time you’ve heard voices in your head.” He rose and extended his hand. She shook it, ignoring the urge to squeeze until bone splinters appeared and he screamed and screamed. Maybe next time. “Welcome aboard, Caitlyn. We’ll be in touch.”

  God help me.

  Part Two

  Chapter 4

  Caitlyn walked into Magnifique, noting with approval that every seat had a butt in it. She had used her inheritance to buy it as soon as she got out of college, and it was one of the most popular hair salons in St. Paul. It was her sweetheart, her baby. She’d been away too long.

  And she figured the quickest way to get back to normal was to, well, be normal. Which meant getting back to Mag’s day-to-day running, pronto.

  “Jenny,” she said, and the receptionist waved, turned her head to the left, and tapped her headset, which was so small, Caitlyn never knew if she was on the phone or not.

  “ … uh-huh… yes, we’ve got you down for next Saturday at two o’clock… uh-huh… yep, highlights, lowlights, and a cut… well, we’ll see you then.” She punched a button on her console and smiled up at Caitlyn. “Hey, chief. What’s up?”

  “We’re overbooked again, that’s what’s up. Bad, bad jenny.”

  “Oh, come on. You’re the one always complaining when there isn’t ‘a butt in every seat.’ “

  Caitlyn was momentarily startled when the chip in her head reported Jenny’s blood pressure and pulse, but she rallied quickly when it pointed out that Jenny was mildly stressed. “We are not Northwest, Jenny. Stop double-booking.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She knew the younger woman was appropriately cowed,
so she didn’t push. “And the highlights look great.”

  Jenny smiled. “I’m a walking ad for this place, and you know it.”

  “I do know it.” Jenny really was. Small, skinny, with shoulder-length blond hair (and red highlights now) and greenish blue eyes, Jenny was ridiculously pretty, one of those women who always looked effortlessly “done.” Which, of course, was not why Caitlyn had given her the job, but it certainly didn’t hurt. “Where’s the mail?”

  Jenny reached beneath her desk and withdrew a box, which was overflowing. Caitlyn eyed it with distaste. “Paperless office, my big white butt.”

  “Chief, if we could just go one workday without talking about your butt…”

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  “And here comes your ten o’clock.”

  Caitlyn turned in time to nearly get knocked off her feet by the exuberance of her client’s greeting. “Caitlyn! Thank God you’re here! I was worried you were still out!”

  “Hi, Karen.”

  “Not that I have a problem with any of your girls, but you really get me! And I’ve got a signing tonight! And as you can see, the situation is dire!”

  “It’s not that bad,” she replied, inspecting the other woman’s roots. Karen was, unfortunately, both a close talker and incapable of communicating in a normal speaking voice. The combination meant Caitlyn usually bent back a good six inches when Karen was chatting, and eventually clawed for the Advil. “We’ll neaten up these ends for you, and that’ll make a big difference.”

  “Great! Let’s do it!”

  “Okay.” Caitlyn waited while Karen hung up her coat, then walked her over to the chair. Caitlyn throne/home-away- from-home was in the perfect location—she could do heads while keeping an eye on the others, observe Jenny’s phone manner, and know when the mail showed up. Also, the drawers were wide and deep, and stored many things.

  “Let’s get started. What do you think about covering the gray and maybe lightening up this brown with some goldish highlights?”’

  “I think that sounds great! But anything will be a vast improvement!”

  “Oh, cut that out. You’re too hard on yourself.” Karen was an attractive, plump thirty five, but she disliked looking her age. “Tonight’s the signing?”