Home?

To my surprise, the car doesn’t go far at all. The driver pulls out of the underground parking garage into what’s clearly a sizeable campus with a number of tall buildings, drives a little way across the campus to the largest building I can see, and drives down into another underground parking garage. I look at Morgan in surprise. “I thought I would be going home,” I say. “This is one of our office buildings, isn’t it?”

“It is,” she replies with a nod. “It’s also your home now.” Something in my expression makes her giggle. “No, I don’t mean you’re going to live at the office. Ms. Whyte—Nevaeh—will be briefing you shortly, but she filled me in on this much: ETI’s board decided recently to convert the top two floors of this building, our main administrative building, into a penthouse apartment and had been trying to convince you to move into it. She confirmed my suspicion that she, and the board, had been afraid of an attempt on your life for some time.” The car parks next to a non-descript elevator with no button, just a blank pad. We get out.

“You’ll need to learn to do this again, Sir,” the driver says in a soft tenor. “I’m the head of corporate security, so I have the card and key sequence, but very few employees do.” He places the card—a blank white piece of plastic except for a small logo in one corner—on the pad, holding it there with two fingers, and traces a pattern on it. The elevator doors open and we enter the car. I notice as we pass through that the doors are extraordinarily thick. The driver hits the button for the top floor.

“According to Nevaeh,” Morgan continues, “this apartment was completed several months ago, but you had flatly refused to move into it. After the first attempt on your life, she took it upon herself to have you moved. She figures that one home is as good as any other for you now, and that two attempts have proven that having you commuting is an extremely unwise risk. The fact that someone was able to try to assassinate you on our campus frightened all of us, but if even our campus isn’t completely safe, for you to go off-campus before the threat to your life has been identified and neutralized would be playing with fire.”

The elevator doors open and I step out into my new apartment. There to meet me is Nevaeh, looking somber. “Let’s get you to a chair, John—you still look terribly weak. We need to talk.”