Chapter 11: Meridian

"She'll run to Palmer," Jonas said in the van. "Which means the office is the safest place in the city for a while."

"Why?"

"Because she'll never think I'd walk in the front door."

Oz printed him a badge in five minutes.

By 2:30 we were crossing the lobby of Meridian Labs.

It was a bright glass cavern with a fountain, two security guards and a floor of polished stone.

Jonas had a baseball cap, a cast in a sling and a cardboard box under his good arm.

I wore a lanyard and the expression of a woman delivering lunch.

The first guard looked at the badge.

The second looked at Jonas's face.

I saw it happen.

Something went still behind the guard's eyes, and his mouth opened slightly.

Jonas lifted two fingers to the brim of his cap and walked right past him.

I swear he walked like the building was his.

The elevator doors opened on the eleventh floor, and the sound of the place hit us.

Sixty or seventy engineers sat at long white desks under a ceiling of hanging plants.

At the far end a glass office stood dark.

The brass plate on its door read J. WRAY, CEO.

Someone dropped a mug.

A woman at the nearest desk stood up slowly.

"Jonas?" she said.

The room went quiet in a wave.

One by one, the heads came up.

Jonas took off his cap.

"Hi," he said.

A bearded man in a gray hoodie crossed the floor at a run and stopped a foot away, and I saw he was crying.

"They told us you jumped," he said.

"I was told that, too."

"We didn't believe it. Nobody believed it. Yvette said you'd been unwell for months."

"I'd have noticed," Jonas said, and several people laughed, wetly.

A thin man in a good suit stepped out of the crowd with his phone half-raised.

I knew him from the vigil, where he'd stood two steps behind Yvette the whole time: Meridian's chief technology officer.

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