Read Online No Time to Die by Kira Peikoff - Free Book Online

that hard. I have her e-mails right here.”
    â€œCan you tell if there’s anyone she wrote to often? Friendly seeming?”
    There was a pause. “I’m scrolling. Here’s e-mails from students, a couple from the dean . . .”
    â€œAnyone else?”
    â€œSomeone named Natalie Roy. Says on her signature that she’s another professor, same department. They seem pretty friendly.” Les heard clicking sounds. “Looks like there’s more from her than anyone else.”
    â€œDon’t move. I’m coming over.”
    Les slipped the phone back into his pocket with a smile. Too bad Barrow couldn’t know. Les hated to admit that he liked him for his coldness, his skepticism—the very qualities that would have repelled anyone else. Les felt drawn to people whose respect was a prize, not a party favor. With time, Barrow would come to recognize that Les deserved to be chief, and that propagating a rivalry would only hurt one of them. But Les was forgiving. He wanted to keep the best men on the team after all. So with every move, he would chop away at Barrow’s icy exterior and thaw him into an ally.
    Until then, he knew just where his next meeting would be—New York.
    Â 
    New York City
10:20 A.M.
    Â 
    No one spoke right away. Zoe looked from her mother’s stunned horror, to her father’s angry disbelief, to Gramps’s quiet amazement. Her blurted announcement hung in the air. She imagined it sinking down into their skulls like a gas, paralyzing them on impact. Ripped open in her father’s lap was the dreaded credit card bill. Everything was out.
    Seconds ticked by like drops of Chinese water torture. Her mind was an overblown circuit. She thought nothing, felt only the rubbery burn of her calves from sprinting the mile and a half home from Dr. Carlyle’s office. A tinny ringing in her ears filled the living room’s silence. Then her father’s voice burst out in a snarl.
    â€œSo this isn’t a joke, Zoe? You’ve spent ten thousand dollars on medical tests without our consent?”
    â€œI had to know,” she whispered.
    â€œWhat kind of quack doctor did you find on the Internet?”
    She blinked. “Dad, he’s one of the leading diagnosticians in New York.”
    â€œThis is an outrage! I didn’t raise you to be a thief!”
    â€œBut the tests—”
    â€œForget the tests!” he snapped, tearing shreds of the envelope apart like tinsel. “I thought we raised you to be more sensible than this!” He turned to his wife, who was sitting beside him on the faded beige sofa’s edge. “What did we do wrong?”
    Zoe watched her mother’s face. A tear slid from the corner of her eye along the thin bridge of her nose. She met Zoe’s gaze as if seeing her for the first time in months—not just as a reminder of her own failings, but as a human being, a daughter in distress.
    Sitting in his shabby leather recliner, Gramps was watching them all. Behind his head hung a framed portrait of the four of them grinning in beach chairs and sunglasses, shot during last summer’s vacation to the Outer Banks. The peacefulness of their family on that trip struck her now as unbearably distant. Gramps noticed her grimacing and shot her a glance of compassion, but said nothing. She wondered if his silence was a sign of his agreement with her father, or merely his reluctance to be burned in the fray. It wasn’t like him to shy away from a fight.
    â€œStephen,” her mother said. “Can’t you see she’s hurting? Her health is more important than the money. Maybe there is some truth to what he told her. I mean, we’ve never had a proper diagnosis all these years.”
    Zoe gave her a grateful look.
    â€œPam, please. To claim she is still fourteen years old—who’s ever heard of such a thing? I’ll have my firm file for malpractice before he knows what hit