Dangerous by Default

22. The woman prepares

The woman scanned the room but her target was nowhere in sight. She heaved an empty silver tray with a white gloved hand. Only a few minutes ago she had brought it from the kitchen fully loaded with bread crisps and smoked salmon topped with tiny black beads of caviar. But the vultures had snapped up the food much faster than she anticipated. She raged silently. This was not going according to the plan.

The empty tray meant another trip back to the kitchen, and another chance to miss her target. I don't care if my daughter worshipped this man. I don't care that she chose to go to art school because she was inspired by his work. Because of this man, her daughter was dead. Tonight she would make things right.

The woman was jolted from her thoughts into the present as a sudden gasp ripped through the crowd, the attention of the room shifting to someone making a grand entrance through the elevator doors. The woman seized the instant to remove a small antique revolver from one of the displays, sliding it surreptitiously into her pocket. The delicate pearl inlay on its handle and it's long silver barrel were nearly identical to the revolver that had originally been on display. Until she swapped them earlier that afternoon. Identical, except for the only detail that mattered: the revolver that she now carried in her pocket was loaded. Divine providence, there could be no doubt about it.

"Let Caine believe that it's the same weapon that led to your daughter's own death." said the woman in the crimson hoodie when she handed her the weapon in a paper bag. The woman had appeared to her out of nowhere in a dark corner of the hospital. Was she an angel? Her daughter had died just hours before and she was totally lost. Now she had a purpose: Divine retribution.

Sliding past the elevator bank, the woman glanced through the crowd and her eyes locked on a raven haired woman emerging from the open elevator doors. Her target, just feet in front of her now.

Don't you look pretty on the last night of your life. As she brushed by her, she caught a whiff of her perfume. She resisted every urge to brandish her weapon and pull the trigger then and there. Not yet. She was so close. Everything was falling into place. All that was left was to set the scene, to make sure Caine was watching. She carried the empty silver tray back to the kitchen to be reloaded with salmon and caviar. She was resolute. Before the tray was empty, Mina Blue would be dead.

. . .

Mina stepped out of the elevator onto the 4th floor of the museum, staring at the blurry image on her phone. Hours of work in the lab, and for what? She began typing furiously.

Distorted vision, again. Is it the lense?

She could hear Ami's voice reminding her, as she often did, that, "Every failure is a droplet of water. Only when the failures form a puddle can you see your reflection."

Without Ami's Japanese Zen Buddhist upbringing, she couldn't argue with wisdom she didn't fully understand. I don't want to see my reflection, I just want the damn thing to work.

This was the last hurdle, they were so close. She studied the blurry image on her phone one last time. It was supposed to be a hi-definition mapping of their first patient's internal organs. Would this really be the last piece of data she would see from her life's work? A blurry, crappy jpeg? Without Jeff Stanson, or any other investor for that matter, the lights would be going out tomorrow and the project left unfinished. It was so unpoetic, so mundane. That must be the secret lesson behind Ami's mantra about failed research, she wondered. The important lessons in life are all mundane.

Mina raised her eyes from her phone to meet the room. Why is everyone looking at me? It took her a spell to remember what she was wearing. It was the very same dress gifted to her after shooting a campaign for Oscar de la Renta. She had saved it for this moment. What better time than now to wear it, to honor her husband.