Come and Find Me A Novel of Suspense - By Hallie Ephron Page 0,75
expect. Oh, and you should use the Gamelan corporate style.”
“We have a corporate style?”
“It’s amazing what impresses people.”
Daniel yawned and stretched. His eyes seemed to have gone flat, the spark of intensity dimmed.
“Why don’t you take a break? I can do this stuff in my sleep, and you need to sleep.” Diana carried the printout to her computer. As she walked, the paper seemed to flutter like a sail on a little boat floating across the room, and she felt detached and floaty. She’d had just enough of the Xanax-laced coffee to give her some buoyancy and a thin layer of separation between herself and her surroundings.
“Help yourself to more coffee.” She tossed the words over her shoulder. “Our meeting’s not for hours.” She opened the Gamelan presentation template and began to reshape the memo.
A while later she glanced over at Daniel. She recognized the cow-skull logo on the Web site that he was looking at—Cult of the Dead Cow—the online meeting place for hackers worldwide. Daniel had been one of the founders of their Ninja Strike Force, the elitest of the elite.
Soon he was yawning again. More coffee. She tried to telegraph the thought.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Diana took her time over the presentation, fiddling around with transitions and special effects that she’d normally never have messed with, stretching out what should have been a thirty-minute job. Daniel stayed at Cult of the Dead Cow for about a quarter of an hour. Then he opened a window with a bright green background and boxes and lists—probably a system management tool. After that he was in OtherWorld. He projected a combat sim on the curved silo wall. Diana had to turn away to keep from feeling seasick at the 3-D effect. Finally he pumped his fist and the gunfire and explosions stopped.
Then, for a while, there was just clicking and the odd ding or whoosh. He was probably in e-mail. She heard him yawn. She didn’t look around when he got up to pour himself yet another cup of coffee.
A little while later, Daniel leaned back in his chair, stretched his legs out in front of him, and folded his arms across his chest. He yawned and rubbed his face.
A few minutes later, he started to nod off, jerking awake and then subsiding. Finally he nodded off completely, tilting sideways. Diana waited. And waited.
She was about to get up when he gave a snort and sat up.
Diana pretended she was still working. Daniel had gone through more than half the pot of coffee. There should have been enough Xanax to make the average person comatose. But it would be a fatal mistake to consider Daniel average.
He sat forward, looked around, stretched and yawned, then settled back again. His eyes drifted shut and his head fell sideways. Full stop.
Diana waited, not daring to breathe. Daniel didn’t stir. She cleared her throat. No response. She scraped her chair and coughed. Still he slept.
She walked over to him. With his mouth and his jaw slack, his face completely relaxed and unwired, Diana could see both the man she’d fallen in love with and the one he’d turned into. Then and always, he was so self-centered, so completely focused on whatever mission he’d set himself at a given moment, that he was willing to throw the people who loved him off a virtual cliff.
Once upon a time, Diana had let him mold her, shape her. If she’d been an apt pupil, then losing him wouldn’t have broken her. But she’d allowed herself to depend on him to reflect back her very identity.
She looked around. He’d certainly found the perfect place from which to sow his brand of chaos. The mill was isolated, apparently abandoned, the silo like a bunker with its three-foot-thick walls.
She gazed up the wall, tracking a path connecting a rebar that was just a step up from the mesh floor to one just a few feet higher, to another one, and another, and on up to a rebar within easy reach of the hatch that led to the outside world. For any experienced climber, it wouldn’t be a challenging ascent. No more difficult than the practice wall she’d once trained on—the “baby wall,” Daniel had called it—after she’d mastered her terror of climbing it for the first time.
But climbing even a baby wall, alone and without a safety harness, was suicidal. Just imagining herself, halfway up and untethered, made her want to throw up. Besides, she had no intention of running away.