He carried her to his own truck instead of arguing with paramedics who had other emergencies to attend to. Laid her across the bench seat and pulled away from the crossing with the wipers fighting a losing battle against the rain. She watched him the entire time, silent, assessing. The way a person watches someone they have decided to trust before they have decided to explain why. Her name, she finally told him somewhere past the second stoplight was Vivien Lauron. though she said it the way most people would confess to something rather than introduce themselves.
Malcolm recognized the surname before she finished saying it. The way anyone who read a newspaper might recognize the name attached to shipping contracts in downtown towers, though the woman bleeding into his passenger seat bore little resemblance to the composed executive who occasionally appeared in business sections. There was no driver waiting for her, no security details scanning the street, nothing but a stranger with a truck and a jacket. she had never asked to borrow. "Where are we going?" she asked again. And when he told her the hospital a second time, she shook her head with a firmness that caused her visible pain.
"No hospital," she said. "Not tonight. Not until I know who else is looking." Malcolm pulled the truck into a gas station lot to check her leg under the dome light, and it was there, digging through the wreckage of what remained in her side of the car before it had been towed, that he found the flash drive. It had rolled beneath the passenger seat during the crash, black and unmarked except for two characters etched into the plastic casing. The letters L and the number 17.
He did not show it to her. He could not have explained why, except that something in the way she guarded her silence told him that showing his hand too early would only teach her to lie more carefully. He slipped it into his jacket pocket instead, the same jacket she was now wearing, and said nothing as he pulled back onto the road toward wherever she would let him take her. It was somewhere past the old railard that Viven first checked the mirror and went pale in a way that had nothing to do with blood loss. A black SUV had fallen into place, three car lengths behind them, matching speed with a patience that no ordinary driver bothered to fake.
Malcolm watched it in his own mirror for a long moment before asking who they were. And Viven's answer came out flat and quiet. The voice of someone who had spent months rehearsing exactly how little to say. "They control the company I built," she told him. And when he asked her to explain further, she said only that if she told him everything, he would leave her at the next intersection and never look back.