Gone Before Goodbye

Chapter Twelve

The alarm startles Sharon.

It is late, way past anyone rational’s sleep time, but Sharon is awake. She usually is. She requires very little sleep, or at least, she gets very little sleep. Her mind has a tendency to run too hot. It is hard to shut it off. At one point, someone had suggested meditation, but just the thought of clearing the mind or turning off her brain or whatever stupid-speak people use merely to describe this awful experience caused Sharon anxiety to the point of a near panic attack. She doesn’t buy it anyway. Asking any human to stop thinking is akin to asking them to stop their heart from beating. You can’t. Not really. Sharon understands that better than most. Most people could control their thoughts in one way or another. Or experience mental fatigue and exhaustion.

Sharon could not.

She’d been reading a novel in the leather chair in her bedroom. Cole is in bed. Oddly enough, while she can rip through journals and manuals and technical books, she reads novels slowly, leisurely, making sure every scene comes to life in full color in her head. This is the closest she gets to shutting down — distracting her brain with fiction rather than problem-solving.

Sharon sits up when she hears the alarm. Her bookmark has Edward Hopper’s The Sheridan Theatre on it. Sharon’s favorite painting. Maggie had bought it for her at the Newark Museum gift shop when they visited in May.

Sharon places the Hopper bookmark between pages ninety-two and ninety-three, closes the book, rises.

Her mind is a constantly whirring thing, her brain overheating — it makes life unbearable in many ways. It makes it impossible for a man to stay with her. To love her. Tad had tried. In the end it hadn’t worked. Her... Is it a condition? Hard to say. Everything is called a condition now. You shake your leg, you have some big diagnosis. Sharon doesn’t buy it all. Is she on the spectrum or autistic or something like that? Undoubtedly. Does it matter? She isn’t sure. But this is how she was built and so her “condition” (let’s just call it that for now) eventually drove Tad away. She hadn’t expected him to become bitter. That had taken her aback. But she knows — and not in a pathetic, needy, pitiful way — that she is unlovable. She could be a decent mom and daughter and sister. She could be a pretty good friend. But her condition makes her unworthy of true companionship or love.

So be it.

The alarm sounds again, jangling her nerves. Sharon is a cautious person. You have to be in this business. Every software or AI enhancement she creates has backdoors and security traps, even the ones she’s provided to the government. Especially those. She could destroy the programs at any time. She could see whether someone tampered with them...

...and she could see if someone tried to delete them.

That — Sharon can see immediately when she fires up her laptop to check the alarm status — is what happened here.

Someone has tried to delete the griefbot on Maggie’s phone.

This is not good.

It doesn’t take a genius to figure that out. Sharon had done as Maggie asked. Up until now, she has respected her sister’s desire for privacy. Maggie had gone up to New York City to see Evan Barlow. Barlow had offered Maggie some kind of high-paying but secretive work. Maggie had told Sharon that she couldn’t say more because it would violate HIPAA and privacy clauses. Fair enough. Sharon let it go.

Sharon accepted the financial good fortune that had come their way, even though she knew that there had to be a price to pay somewhere for it.

Is now the time to pay up?

Someone tried to delete the griefbot.

It couldn’t be Maggie. Maggie knows that she can’t do it alone. Sharon had wondered about that. She had built every app and software program so that the only way it could be altered, touched, or deleted in any way was via Sharon’s direct involvement. She’d wondered whether this whole griefbot testing thing had been a mistake. The power of this particular griefbot is both enticing and destructive, but when you think about it, when you really think about it, that’s true of every invention that makes an impact.

There is no such thing as a consequence-free discovery.

It is what man chooses to do with it.

Sharon is a scientist first. She sees things from that perspective, and again that makes her cold in too many ways. Still, Sharon remembers Tad’s long body on the couch, the way he would lie behind her and spoon her, and now that same man hates her and wants to destroy her.

So be it.

Perhaps she shouldn’t have pushed Maggie with the griefbot. Sharon had rationalized that it would help her sister deal with the grief. But had that really mattered next to Sharon’s blinding drive for scientific progress? Marc’s death had been so sudden, so brutal, so shocking, that transitioning with an experimental AI version could offer real comfort, Sharon rationalized. But at the very least, Sharon should have given Maggie the option of deleting the app on her own.

Now, staring at the alarm, Sharon wonders why someone would try to delete Maggie’s griefbot. She can’t come up with an answer, but one thing is crystal clear.

Maggie is in trouble.

Ivan Brovski shouts, “It’s time to go.”

Maggie looks at the griefbot and turns off the shower.

“I need to grab some clothes from the closet,” she calls back. “I’ll meet you downstairs.”

There is silence for a few long seconds. Then Brovski says, “I’ll be right outside the door. Please hurry.”

Maggie waits until she hears the door close. She peeks out.

He’s gone.

From her app, she hears the Marc griefbot say, “I’m putting a phone number in your link. I need you to call it.”

“There’s no service here,” Maggie says. “They’ve blocked it off.”

“I know.”

“How?” Then: “Have you been here?”

“Yes.”

“When?”

“Get a few hundred yards away from the house, and you should be able to call.”

“What the hell? Why didn’t you tell me—”

“No time for that now, Maggie. Here’s the number.”

She checks the screen. The phone number is not one she recognizes. Does it even matter? How can she call? And what will happen when she does? Ivan Brovski is standing right outside the door. Does she hope to, what, run through the door, surprise him, run outside?

So what’s her plan here?

She tests the bedroom windows. No special locks on them. She’s on the third floor, but there’s a short drop from the window on the far wall to the side roof. Snow is falling. She checks the closet. No heavy coat. One sweatshirt. She throws it on. It won’t be enough. Not with this cold.

But again, what choice does she have?

No more hesitation.

She pushes open the window, and a blast of cold shoves her back a step. She closes her eyes against the wind and swings her legs over the sill. Her sneakers scrape against the stone roof as she drops out the window and closes it behind her.

Oh man, it’s freezing.

The ground, except for the coil-heated part of the lawn, is blanketed with snow. She wonders how much time she has before Brovski starts knocking on the door. Not much, she imagines.

Time to move.

No way to go down the front. Not with the black-suited men still crisscrossing the lawn. She has to find another way. The wind is already biting her face. She can’t stay out here too long. The exposure will get to her soon.

Keep moving.

A plan... Well, not really a plan. Almost a plan. A bare sketch of a desperate, impossible idea comes to her.

Head to the back of the house, she tells herself.

The roof tile is slick, and she nearly falls before regaining her balance. She ducks low and starts half sprinting, half skating toward the back of the estate. With a shaking hand, she sees the battery on her phone is down to 4 percent. Shit. She hits send. No response. She hits send again and jams the phone back in her pocket.

She needs both hands to keep her balance.

Maggie tries to remember that weird house tour with Oleg Ragoravich.

Man, was that really only yesterday?

It is too cold. She should go back. Maybe the Marc griefbot is wrong. Maybe Brovski and Ragoravich don’t mean her harm. She did the work she’d been hired to do. People know she’s here. Or at least, well, when she thought about it, only one person knows: Evan Barlow. So if she vanishes now, if she is somehow thrown out of a helicopter into a deep hole, somewhere in the forests of Russia, what would happen to her? Would Barlow come forward? And if he did, so what? What could anyone prove?

But the griefbot had said it best: She’d done facial surgery on Ragoravich. Why? None of it had been to improve his looks. She’d known that right away. It was clearly done to disguise him. To change his identity. The type of surgery she’d performed would fool any facial-recognition program at, say, an airport or border crossing.

But still. Would they kill her?

She starts slipping as she reaches the edge, nearly sliding right off the rooftop. She claws her way to a stop at the drainpipe. She sits up, her legs dangling over the side of the roof. She stares down.

Way too far to jump, even with the snowbank.

There has to be a way.

There’s a fire ladder to her right. Perfect. She scooches toward it. When she reaches out and touches the top rung, she pulls her hand back. The metal is so cold it feels as though her hand might freeze-stick to it.

“Doctor McCabe?”

The wind snatches most of the sound away, but she knows it’s Ivan Brovski.

She has no chance. Not really.

Surrender? Is that her best option?

Ivan again, calling from the window: “Maggie?”

She lays flat on the roof. Her head hangs off the edge. She looks down. No one is directly below her. She turns her head to the right. Nothing. She looks to the left.

Two black-suited men. They have guns out.

What the hell is going on?

Maggie hears a shuffling noise from behind her.

Someone else has come out on the roof. They’re coming toward her.

No choice now. She pulls down her sleeves, so that the cuffs cover her palms. Makeshift gloves. She jumps on the ladder and starts down it. If her memory and geography are correct, she is over the indoor pool right now.

So what’s the plan?

She’d considered working her way back indoors and then finding a place to hide. The palace is huge, with lots of rooms. It could take a long time to find her. But then she remembered that the place was loaded up with CCTV. There is nowhere she can go without being spotted and found.

Including probably this roof.

So the only way is to keep moving.

She still has one idea though. A dumb one. A desperate one. But if the swimming pool is where she thinks it is, then so should be... yes.

The glass walkway is right where she hoped it would be.

She is on the third rung of the ladder when she sees cords of stacked firewood. Good, she thinks. That might help. She climbs farther down the ladder. When she’s halfway down, she looks up.

CinderBlock is staring down at her.

Maggie’s eyes widen as she watches him take out his gun. He points at her. Their eyes meet and Maggie can see in his casual, almost bored expression what’s about to happen.

CinderBlock is going to shoot her.

He isn’t going to shout out a warning. He isn’t going to call for her to halt or freeze or surrender.

He is simply going to pull the trigger.

Maggie sees it coming. By the time she hears the blast, she’s already pushed off the ladder. She falls backward. The bullet whizzes past her leg, clanking a metal rung below her. There was no time to look down before she jumped, so she doesn’t know how far the fall is. She tucks her legs in, braces herself, lands hard.

The momentum forces her into a roll through the snow. The cold bites her skin hard and deep, nearly paralyzing her.

Keep moving.

It’s a funny thing. When she first pushed open the bedroom window, she wondered when her military training would kick in. When would the calm descend on her? When would her heartbeat stay under control? When would she be cool and detached and analytical?

Nothing had prepared her for this.

And yet.

And yet the training had kicked in — it just hadn’t announced itself. It is a part of her. No, there is nothing routine or rote here. No, she’d never trained on how to escape an oligarch’s mansion via a window on an icy rooftop. But time has indeed slowed down for her. Here Maggie is, with a man firing shots at her from above, freezing in the snow, and she has something that resembles a strategy and even a plan.

Using the momentum from the fall and roll, she jumps behind the firewood just as the next shot rings out. When you watch someone fire a handgun on television, it seems like a pretty accurate weapon. It is not. The truth is, CinderBlock is now a good forty to fifty feet away from her. The wind is howling in his face. The cold is numbing his shooting hand.

It’s hard to be accurate.

He realizes it too. She can see him grab his phone to call in reinforcements. That gives her a chance to make her next move. She picks up a log from the firewood. It’s frozen solid. Solid enough? She will find out. She sprints at the glass walkway where Ragoravich had led her on his tour. There is a small spiderweb crack in one of the panels. That might help. She rears back with the firewood and hits the window crack as hard as she can.

The glass shatters.

She doesn’t look behind her. She doesn’t look up. A bullet strikes nearby and more glass shatters, raining down on her. She ducks and covers her head and jumps through the shattered window and into the walkway. Then she turns left as another shot rings out. In the corner of her eye, she sees a black-suited man round the corner and sprint toward her. Maggie clocks that he’s there, but that doesn’t change her plan.

She just needs to pick up the pace.

The door to the car showroom is unlocked. She hurries through it, shuts it behind her, throws the deadlock. The room is pitch black. It had been that way when Oleg Ragoravich brought her here. He’d hit the light switch on the left. She does that now. The lights boom immediately on in shade-your-eyes bright. Maggie doesn’t shade her eyes.

There’s no time.

She looks for the switch to open the huge garage door. Her plan is a simple one. Oleg Ragoravich has a car collection. When he offered her a joyride, he showed her that he keeps the keys in a certain car.

So that’s the plan. Get the showroom door open. Get in a vehicle. Drive out.

She finds the switch. The door is two stories high. It grudgingly starts to part like the Red Sea. It makes a lot of noise. It moves too slowly. Maggie stays on the move. She knows that black-suited men will be on her any second.

A voice yells out something in Russian.

Probably telling her not to move. She turns and sees the black-suited man aiming the gun at her. Her mind whirs, searching for a solution — but in the midst of the whirring, she notices something interesting.

The black-suited man doesn’t fire right away.

Why? CinderBlock fired. This guy fired too when she was in the glass walkway.

Why isn’t he firing now?

And then the answer comes to her. Oleg Ragoravich loves these cars. They are expensive, worth millions of dollars apiece. The black-suited men probably figure that they have her trapped now. No need to fire and risk harming something so valuable.

That gives Maggie the wiggle room she needs.

She keeps sprinting and ducking behind cars until she reaches the Ferrari. Two black-suited men follow. She fumbles with the door but manages to slide into the driver’s seat. One of the men is on her now. He grabs the handle of the door as she starts to close it. With her left hand, Maggie keeps pulling the door closed. With her right, she fires up the ignition. The man keeps his hold on the driver’s-side door. Maggie tries to hold on, so he can’t get in. It’s a draining game of tug-of-war.

The ignition is on, but the car isn’t an automatic. It’s an old manual with a stick shift. Maggie hasn’t driven one since she was eighteen. But her dad had taught her. The man is pulling hard on the door. He has the leverage now. Another man is coming to join him. No way Maggie can fight them both off. She holds on with her left hand and tries to shift the car into gear with the right.

It’s not working.

He’s winning the battle. The other guy arrives and grabs the door too. Maggie waits until they have full pressure on her. Then she simply lets go. The door flings open. The men stumble back, lose their balance. That’s what she’s been counting on. But one of them recovers fast. He reaches out and grabs her by the hair.

He starts dragging her out of the car.

Maggie takes her right hand off the shift. She curls her fingers and delivers a palm strike straight into his groin.

The man’s grip loosens.

Maggie pulls the door back closed. She shifts now, hits the accelerator, drags him a few feet before the man falls away.

The showroom doors haven’t opened enough for her to get through. Again: Doesn’t matter. She slams the Ferrari through whatever opening there is, pushing into the wooden doors and doing Lord-knows-what to the Ferrari’s paint job.

The doors hold for a second before splintering and releasing the car.

Maggie is out.

She feels something akin to euphoria — her plan worked! — when a bullet shatters the back window. Maggie ducks. The cold again rushes in. With one hand still on the gearshift, she pulls the steering wheel hard to the left. Another bullet whizzes above her head, shattering and knocking out the front windshield.

Now what?

Just keep your foot on the gas pedal.

She does. Up ahead she sees another black-suited man aiming his gun at her. She aims the car at him and stays low. He ducks away.

She hears bullets, but nothing hits.

Now what?

She checks her phone.

Are there enough bars?

She hits send again. No reason to look anymore. Just keep hitting the send button and hope for the best.

She can see now that the front gate is closed. Can she ram the car through? She doesn’t think so. The car is old and small. The gate looks foreboding, built for security. A man stands in front of it, gun drawn.

She veers to the right and takes a road up the side of a hill.

A black SUV is following her now.

Shit. Another gun blast.

Her tire explodes.

She swerves, but she keeps her foot on the accelerator. The Ferrari still has enough firepower. She keeps her foot down. The car fishtails up. She has no front windshield anymore. The cold digs deep into her face. She can barely keep her eyes open.

The black SUV chases her, moves alongside. The tire is gone now. She’s driving on the rim. Another bullet rings out.

Maggie feels something tear in her shoulder.

It’s over now. A part of her knows that. There’s nothing she can do to control the car anymore. She takes her foot off the accelerator, tries to hit the brake. But either her foot or the car won’t obey.

The Ferrari veers off the road. Maggie’s eyes are closed now. She feels rather than sees the plummet. She tries again to hit the brake or turn the wheel. But nothing happens. Nothing slows down. The descent continues until the car slams into a tree.

There is no seat belt in the Ferrari. Not that Maggie would have had time to put it on. But there is nothing to keep her in place. Maggie feels her body lift and rocket forward through what remains of the front windshield. Shards of glass slice her skin before she smacks into something hard.

Her body goes slack. Everything leaves her. Everything turns cold, so cold, a deep, hard, bone-crushing cold she’s never experienced before.

And then, mercifully, everything turns black and there is nothing.