Devil's Plaything - Matt Richtel [64]
“You know this already?”
“Just that much. How does it work? Is it a program that’s used in a lab, or that gets disseminated? Is it an algorithm? Is it used to measure neurological changes, or to actually cause them?”
“I don’t know much more beyond that. I can’t understand much of what’s in this file.”
“Can you e-mail it to me?”
“It’s a hard-copy dossier.”
“Dossier? From where?”
“I’m coming to that. You know that Biogen is in high-level merger talks with a Swiss company.”
“Go on.”
“Apparently, our government has been keeping tabs on Biogen and its various projects. This has caught someone’s attention.”
“Someone?”
“Regulator, I suppose.”
I pause.
“Nathaniel?”
“Chuck, respectfully, it’s hard for me to believe you have this kind of access. It doesn’t make sense you could know this much information, let alone get hard proof.”
“Nat, respectfully yourself, I told you I could be a good friend.”
I hear the engine of a car. It has turned into the lot of the building we’re in front of. Maybe it’s the Witch and Bullseye.
“Meet me in the city tonight,” Chuck says. “I’ll bring the file.”
He tells me the name of a restaurant in Noe Valley where he’ll be at 8:30 p.m.
“Hold on, Chuck.”
A car starts to come around the other corner of the building, heading at us. I realize what’s happening, just as Grandma says: “The bad man.”
The Prius has turned the corner. Its driver is the man with the hooded gray sweatshirt. He’s rolling down his window, barreling towards us. I see the car framed against the ash blue sky in the distance, an instant of slow motion. We are going to die.
And then I see the cavalry.
Speeding around our corner of the building hurls Samantha and Bullseye in their shiny Cadillac.
I expect to hear the pop of bullets and the shattering of glass in my window. But instead hear a violent crack. Bullseye ramming fearlessly into the right back of the Prius.
The Prius juts forward, slams into a bathtub, which redirects the hybrid’s momentum and causes it to spin in circles. The churning tires begin to spray dust and gravel, and then it, abruptly, comes to rest. In the dust swirl, I can make out little except the terrific dent to the back, illuminated by brake lights. The car lurches forward and turns our direction. I think I can make out the outlines of the hooded man’s face, and the bathtub-caused dent to the Prius’s crumpled right fender, as he flies past us and disappears around the end of the building. Gone.
I look up to see Samantha running towards our car. She’s wearing black tights and a puffy orange shirt, still dressed as a lioness. She reaches Grandma’s window, which I roll down.
“My father drove a Cadillac,” Lane says, calmly. “Maybe it was a Chevrolet.”
“Oh, Lane,” Sam says.
She helps Grandma step out of the car. I sprint around the Toyota’s front end and join them, taking one of Lane’s arms while the Witch takes the other. We hustle her to the Cadillac. Its right front bumper and that side of the hood has a crinkled dent that looks like a seismograph. The driver’s-side back door is indented by the bathtub it must have slid into after the cars collided.
Using the door on the other side, Grandma and I pile into the pristine black leather seats in the back. “I’m sorry, Bullseye, and thank you.”
Bullseye looks at us, makes some silent calculation, then starts to accelerate forward.
“Go after him?” he asks. But it sounds more like a statement than a question.
“Wait.” I pause him. I return to my defunct Toyota. From the back, I retrieve my ragged backpack and the laptop that contains the whole of my virtual existence. I climb back into the Cadillac and Bullseye drives off. We head to the on-ramp of Highway 101. The wrecked Prius is nowhere in sight.
“I need to borrow a car,” I say.
“Should we call the police?” Samantha says. “You’re a great investigative journalist but this seems to call for people with the power to detain, arrest, and punish.”
She’s right—about