Ben Winters returns with a speculative, corporate espionage thriller that takes the adage "Time is money," and makes it literally, frighteningly so.
HERO: Grace
The best part of Grace's job at the FDA's Center for Devices and Radiological Health is that she can clock out at five. She's got things to do-like care for her aging, cantankerous mother, her angsty and remarkably bright teenager-with little time for herself to spare. Which is why Grace is peeved when in the late evening, she's called into work. A woman has appeared at a local hospital, injured, shaken, and with an unusual portacath implanted in her chest. The hospital cannot recognize the model. As Grace investigates, the scant info on the device's provenance appears apocryphal. What's been done to this girl? And who is behind it?
VICTIM: Ana
When she comes to, she realizes she's been taken. She's in the back seat of a black car: woozy, scared. She'd been asleep, and then she'd been awake, a woman with a catalog face, dressed in tailored pants and a crisp white blouse had dragged her out of her tent beneath the overpass and stabbed her in the neck. The same woman who was now in the front seat. Somehow, Ana escapes. When she arrives at a hospital in Hanover, Maryland, she's found with an usual device attached to her body. Ana is confused, and as she tries to grasp for any memory or scrap of the past, she comes up empty. She can't remember anything.
VILLAIN: Desiree
Desiree is on fire with pain, the pulp of her right eye a bloody mess. She can't believe the girl had blinded her, can't believe that she'd escaped. Tending to the wound: it had set her back. And now the client is not happy. What she needs is to fulfill the mission. Desiree has a job to do, and she is almost out of time.
