Beck & Call Read Online Free PDF Page A

her?” he asked Curtis.
    Mia prayed he meant test her memory.
    “Certainly,” Curtis said.
    As Raeburn unlatched his briefcase to remove whatever he intended to quiz her with, her gaze slid to the other side of the conference table, where Jake had tipped his chair back against the exposed brick wall. Naturally, their second investigator was relaxed, though to her amazement he wore a tie today.
    The little wink he sent her as he flipped it steadied her.
    Raeburn set a legal pad and fountain pen on the table, followed by a page torn from a Yellow Pages, the sort you rarely saw anymore. The print included advertisements as well as phone listings.
    “How long do you need?” he asked.
    “I’ve got it,” she said. “You can put it away.”
    The page hadn’t lain in front of her for more than a heartbeat. Raeburn looked surprised as he pulled it back. She knew he hadn’t seen her do anything. Her gift didn’t require concentration, or calm, or any other effort. Her brain did what it did because it was wired that way.
    Understanding what was expected, she sat in the empty chair beside the CEO to scribble what she’d seen on the legal pad. She reminded herself to keep her hand relaxed to prevent it from cramping. Thankfully, Raeburn’s expensive pen wrote smoothly. Fifteen minutes and six pages later, she’d recreated the phone book page in extremely precise detail.
    Jake, bless him, had taken over serving coffee in the meantime.
    Raeburn set his cup in the saucer when she handed over her little stack.
    “You can proof it,” she said, “but everything is there.”
    Raeburn laid out the pages, each of which duplicated a section of the original. She’d have been surprised if he didn’t check her work. He did it swiftly, obviously sharp between the ears himself.
    At last, he sat back and gazed at her. “That’s amazing. You even drew the illustrations in the ads.”
    “I figured you wanted me to. Otherwise, why pick a page that included them?”
    He rocked his office chair thoughtfully. “You can memorize anything? No matter how detailed?”
    “If my eyes can see it, I can draw it afterwards.”
    “What if you don’t understand the information?”
    “It doesn’t matter. I reproduce it visually.”
    “Were you born like this?”
    She hesitated. She didn’t want to be rude. She knew getting this assignment was important. “I’d rather not talk about that, if you’ll forgive me.”
    “Of course,” he said. “I was just curious.”
    He didn’t seem offended, but she was still unnerved by his attention. The feeling was nothing new. People who saw her do her thing tended to react as if she’d turned into a Roswell style alien.
    Watch out for my big gray bobblehead! she thought. The private joke allowed her to smile faintly.
    “Okay,” Raeburn said, addressing her boss again. “I’m satisfied she can do what you claim. What I’m wondering is why you’re sure you can plant her on Call’s personal staff. That paranoid bastard doesn’t let anyone close to him.”
    Curtis had prepared her not to react to this assumption—not that it mattered. Raeburn wasn’t watching her anymore.
    “You can leave that to us,” Curtis said. “You’re paying us for results, after all. We’ll move forward as soon as you specify the smoking gun you need Mia to search for.”
    Raeburn frowned then seemed to make up his mind. He sat up straighter in his chair, pulling a large rolled up sheet of paper from the relative emptiness of his briefcase. His blocky, powerful looking hands flattened the page on the table. Curtis and Jake leaned forward to see better.
    Because she was next to Raeburn, Mia had a clear view of it.
    She wasn’t sure what she was looking at—possibly a blurred copy of a circuit board or a blown-up view of a microchip. The images were dense, with tiny printed symbols and mathematical formulas. The page was stamped CONFIDENTIAL, and the G/lightning slash/B that formed Genbolt’s logo marked the