her, and hurried up the stairs, then came out into a huge kitchen. The design was old-fashioned, but the appliances were state-of-the-art. He couldn’t imagine what the rest of the mansion must look like, but that was for another time. He found the remote and key, then ran back downstairs.
“Got them,” he said. “I’ll lock you in, and I won’t be long, so don’t shoot me when I come back.”
“You’re safe,” she said. “I’m not a very good shot.”
“With a gun that size, you don’t have to be,” Charlie muttered, and left on the run.
Wyrick heard him leave, and then his car driving off the property. She closed her eyes and concentrated on the pain in her body. She didn’t quite understand how it worked, but in the same way she’d stopped herself from bleeding out, she could also block out pain. She needed to be clearheaded and at ease when she kicked the first block out from under Cyrus Parks. After that, it would be like a house of cards. It was all going to come tumbling down.
Eighteen
Charlie took all of the shortcuts to get to his apartment, then grabbed a suitcase and started packing. He didn’t know how long he was going to be there, and he didn’t expect it to be easy. They got on each other’s last nerve on a regular basis, but she was, by God, worth the hassle. And after what he’d learned about her these past few days, all he wanted to do was fix every damn thing they’d broken in her.
He tossed in his laptop and iPad and a handful of charging cords, his favorite old sweats and his toiletries kit, then ran into the kitchen and put his entire candy stash into a plastic bag and packed it, too.
Chocolate.
It was what tamed the dragon in her.
He could hear the wind changing as he carried his suitcase out of the apartment into the parking garage and put it in his Jeep. Even as he was getting in, he could feel the temperature dropping. Damn, it was cold—cold enough to snow, as he headed back to the old mansion.
* * *
Wyrick conquered the pain, but she still had to get from her bedroom to the office without face-planting. She threw back the covers to get up, then gasped. Putting weight on her leg was hell.
Damn you to hell and back, Cyrus Parks, for doing this to me.
Then she hobbled out of the room, grabbing on to furniture as she went to steady herself, then into the hall, holding on to the wall to balance herself until she got to the office.
She slid into the seat with a sigh of relief, booted up the computer, then took her arm out of the sling, wincing as the muscles pulled.
The first thing she opened was the FAILSAFE file. She’d thought long and hard about how to do this, and who to tell first. Part of her concern at the outset had to do with who might be involved that would squelch the revelations of what she was about to unveil.
Her solution was to become the whistleblower, and she began sending the same information to every media outlet in the free world, including the Associated Press, and then to the judicial side, the FBI, the CIA and to the US attorney general, uploading the proof of her claims by sending file upon file, with data and test results of using humans as guinea pigs for their tests, and all of the failures—the bodies buried in doing it—then files with proof of the illegal testing and research they’d used to accomplish what they’d done.
It was an avalanche of information that, once released, could no longer be hidden, and the people guilty of collusion would fall along with them.
She sent proof of Cyrus Parks and UT’s involvement in human trafficking to the FBI, to the attention of Special Agent Hank Raines, who had been in charge of taking down the Fourth Dimension, explaining that the very high-tech security installed at that place was from a system she had personally designed and created for UT when she still worked there, and that the only person who would have had knowledge of that specific system would have been Cyrus Parks. Then she linked the file she’d sent to the FBI to Hank’s file, as well.
But the denouement—the final proof was her. Her personal story, from the time they’d experimented with the DNA of four scientists, to the gene-splicing and gene manipulation