Page 107

107

Professor Sweetwater’s eyes widened. Paul shook his head.

“I’m sorry, I’m in conference and can’t be disturbed,” said Sweetwater. “Can you come back in half an hour, please?”

“We just have a few questions for Mr. Brightman—”

“Half an hour,” Sweetwater said in a louder, more imperious voice. He ejected the flash drive and handed it to Paul, looking at him questioningly and speaking in a soft voice: “Which Brightman are they after?”

“Me,” Paul said.

“What did you do?”

“It would take too long to tell you.”

“You didn’t kill anyone, right?” the professor said with a half smile.

Paul shook his head. He immediately flashed on the man who called himself Frederick Newman, back in New Hampshire, who’d gotten killed in their struggle over the speargun. Did the FBI want him for that murder, too, along with his theft of the Phantom drive? Not only was Newman a hired killer, but he’d gotten himself killed while Paul was defending himself.

“How the hell they know you’re here?” his father whispered.

Paul thought of the surveillance camera he’d noticed on the edge of the Carnegie Mellon campus on the way over. “Facial recognition,” he said without explaining. “Now what do we do?”

Sweetwater pointed to a second door in the office that Paul had barely taken notice of before, because it was covered with framed things and didn’t look like it was used very often. “This opens to a conference room I never use,” Sweetwater said, “and the door at the other end leads to an internal corridor near the elevator. But don’t take the elevator. Keep going past the elevators, down that hallway, past the stairs, then hang an immediate right. That will take you to the Pausch Bridge, a pedestrian walkway that connects this building with the Purnell building, the Purnell Center for the Arts. Go. I’ll keep them at bay while you guys go.”

“Thank you,” Paul and his father said at the same time.

Sweetwater opened the second door. The two Brightman men rushed into the dark conference room. Paul spotted the door to the corridor. There was a glass panel inset in it. He peered through it, saw nobody, then slowly opened the door. The elevator was fifty feet away. No one around. Maybe the FBI didn’t know about this rear exit.

Then a woman came down the hallway, and Paul broke out in a cold sweat.

The woman came toward them, smiled, and passed by.

Paul and his father kept walking. Paul’s heart was clattering. “If we get lucky, we won’t have to do anything. Just walk out of here. Slowly .”

“How’d they know we were here?” Stan asked again.

“That camera on Forbes Avenue, maybe. Or maybe there’s something in the flash drive that sent out an alarm. I don’t know. They must have scrambled a local FBI team. They must have an APB out for me.” He used the jargon for “all-points bulletin” from cop shows he’d watched.

“So you think they have a picture of you on some national database?”

“Probably.” He swallowed. “You trust Sweetwater, don’t you?”

“Completely.”

Paul nodded. “Me, too, actually.”

They saw the exit to the footbridge connecting this building with an older one, which the professor had said was the college’s drama department, the Purnell Center. The bridge seemed to be suspended over a grassy area, some two hundred feet in length. Lit up blue. The side walls of the bridge were opaque but not tall enough to block a view from the ground. In case someone on the FBI team was watching—which was unlikely, he thought—the two men walked separately, Paul in front and his father twenty feet behind. They walked, didn’t run.

“They don’t want to shoot you,” Stanley said. “They want to arrest you, am I right?”

Paul didn’t reply for a long moment. Then he said, “I guess we’ll find out.”