by Lucy Monroe
“I’ll inform Whitmore we have a perpetrator in custody and ask him how he wants me to proceed.” Mykola gave her a questioning glance. “Will that make you happy?”
“I just don’t want you to lose your job trying to keep me and Casey safe.”
“That should be my job, but politics and directives get in the way. I won’t let them in this case.”
“I appreciate that more than I can say, but please, don’t do anything stupid.”
Mykola reached out and tugged her ponytail. “No plans on being stupid, doc.”
She found herself smiling and wishing she could lean across the table and kiss him. She forced herself to stay where she was.
“Do you think the Taiwanese government will succeed in catching Vega?” Casey asked.
“With the CIA’s help, they’ve got a chance.” Brett didn’t sound too hopeful despite his words. “With the scrap metal, and lost barges, they should be able to connect Vega to the hijackings.”
“Which would ensure he got a prison sentence. Right?” Nisha asked.
It was Claire’s turn to look doubtful. “In a perfect world, yes.”
“But we don’t live in a perfect world,” Lana said with a sigh. She should know.
“No, we don’t.” Mykola’s tone was bleak. “I don’t want to rely on catching Vega with his pants down. He’s a cautious man. If I was him and I lost out on getting my scientist, I’d try the enzymes in my own labs, rather than taking them to the Paracel Islands. And I’d make another try for the scientist.”
“But don’t you think he’ll wait to make the try until he’s sure he can’t make the enzymes work on his own?” Brett asked. “Like you said, he’s a cautious man. He shouldn’t attempt a second kidnapping until he’s sure it’s necessary.”
“I concur with that scenario,” Casey said. He frowned. “But I wish there was a way we could be sure.”
Claire sat up straighter, excitement emanating from her. “Maybe we can. I’ve been working on a program that turns the microphone on a person’s computer into a listening device. I can try to get it onto whatever system or systems Vega is using to retrieve his e-mail.”
“Do you think you can do it without detection?” Mykola asked.
“Yes. But if his security is good, it will take longer.” She took a few notes on her handheld. “I can also monitor all incoming and outgoing e-mail correspondence to whatever systems I get into.”
Mykola said, “Do it.”
“What about contacting Vega?” Lana asked. “We could tell him the enzymes don’t work for metals. That there is no way of designing any that would without requiring exorbitant amounts of energy for the change process.”
“You mean via his e-mail?” Claire asked.
“Yes.”
Claire looked like she thought it wasn’t a bad idea. “If nothing else, it will encourage him to test the enzymes.”
“Giving us time to figure out what his plans are,” Brett said with satisfaction.
Mykola didn’t look nearly as pleased as the others. “Or, it will make him more determined to come after Lana.”
“What if we give them what they want?” Lana asked as an idea came to her.
Mykola erupted from his chair. “What the hell are you talking about?” He dropped to his knees and spun her chair to face him so they were looking directly at one another. The others in the room might as well not have been there. “You are not giving yourself up to keep Casey safe.”
“No, I’m not. But what about giving up my research?”
“Do you really want them to be able to double their drug crops even if they can’t make the metal transformations?” he asked.
And she loved him for doing so. He understood her and the fact that such an eventuality would be devastating to her.
“She’s talking about all the research up until six months ago, aren’t you, boss?” Casey asked.
“Exactly.” She grinned at Mykola. “Until I had an epiphany six months ago, all my enzymes killed the test plants rather than transforming them for a second harvest. I wouldn’t have to fake anything. My notes are all there and the research will match up with whatever it was that Ramirez managed to smuggle out of my lab. Which from the note you said you saw in the margins was the preliminary project proposal for Frank.”
“If we tell them the enzymes don’t work, their testing of the enzymes proves they don’t work and their own scientists have no luck with the enzymes, they’ll believe it’s just a pipe dream like particle transportation technology.” She hoped.
“Which they are closer to than they’ve ever been,” Claire said with a laugh.
“Yes, but we’re still far from transporting people,” Lana replied without looking away from Mykola.
“True.”
Lana bit her bottom lip and looked at Mykola. “So?”
“It’s an idea worth considering, but I think we should wait on contacting him.” He brushed her lip with his thumb, soothing the stinging flesh.
“Let him sweat out what we found out from his lackey,” Brett said.
Mykola nodded, his focus still entirely on Lana. “And give him time to see for himself the enzymes don’t work, so he’ll believe your research.”
“There’s a hell of a lot more going on there than your status report implies.”
Myk had never thought Whitmore was stupid. He’d just told his boss he had a person of interest for the FBI. During a phone call.
“We stopped the attempted kidnapping of Dr. Casey Billings.”
“And took a hostage, which you are just now telling me about.”
“He is not a hostage, sir. He is a perpetrator in custody.”
“Duly noted.”
“Are you going to get the information on the Paracel Islands to the CIA and Taiwanese government?”
“Yes.”
“If there are any survivors from the hijackings they will be with the barges and scrap metal at the coordinates I gave you.”
“I’ll make sure the information is acted on immediately.”
“If you take too long and Vega gets worried his thug knows too much, he’s going to order their deaths and the pulling out of his people.”
“You asked me to trust you to do your job, Myk. Now you need to trust me to do mine.”
“Noted, sir.”
“Thank you.”
There was a few seconds of silence.
“Are you going to tell me the rest of your plan?”
“No, sir.”
“Damn it, Myk.”
“What you don’t know, you don’t have to act on.” Like illegal bugging of a drug lord’s computer system.
“True. I’ll assume you are proceeding with caution then.”
“That would be best.”
Whitmore was laughing when Myk cut the connection.
Whitmore called back fifteen minutes later with directions on turning Jorge over to the FBI.
Later that night, Myk and Brett met in the living room and went over the schedule changes necessary to integrate Brett’s people into the security teams at ETRD and compensate for the staff that would be gone on training. The shift alterations for the ETRD guards would not begin until Monday, but Brett’s people would be there every shift beginning the next day and continuing through the weekend.
While the majority of ETRD’s scientists and technicians did not work weekends, some experiments required daily checking and measuring. Lana and Casey would not be returning to work until Monday, and they would be under constant guard.
“What about Elle’s wedding?” Lana asked from where she had settled beside Myk on a white leather sofa.
The thing was eight feet long, with lots of room for her to settle into her own space, but she chose to curl right up into his side. Damn if he didn’t like it.
“What about it?” he asked her.
“We’re going, aren’t we?”
“We all are.”
“My partners will be here to attend as well,” added Bre
tt.
“And up security. Not that I don’t think Roman’s got it covered with his men.”
Lana laughed softly.
“What’s funny?”
“It’s kind of fitting, you know? For the Queen of Badass to have a wedding with more security than royal nuptials.”
“Here’s hoping she’s enjoying the irony of it. I want her wedding day to be special,” he admitted.
“It will be. She and Beau will be promising their love and commitment to one another. Nothing more special than that.”
“You’re a romantic aren’t you, doc?”
“I never thought so. Maybe a little.”
“I did it!” That happy screech was followed by a dancing redheaded dervish whirling into the living room.
Claire threw herself at her husband and kissed him soundly, then turned to face them, ensconced happily in her husband’s lap. “I not only got the program working on the main system but I managed to identify the other computers in the compound using the same ISP and planted the program on those as well. It was a bitch mother in PMS to crack the first system, but once I got it, the others were easy.”
“That’s fantastic news.” Lana grabbed Myk’s thigh. “We’re bound to learn something about his plans now.”
“We already have.” Claire looked deservedly smug. “According to what I overheard, they’re planning to test the enzymes on six different metals tomorrow. At the Mexico facility.”
“So, we were right that they aren’t going to go to the islands just yet.”
“Yep.”
“Any word about Jorge?”
“They don’t think he’ll break. Apparently, Vega works very hard to keep his minions loyal. Intimidation and pain being his favorite tactics.”
“He’s assuming we wouldn’t use nontraditional means to break Jorge.”
“Exactly. Ramirez has also assured him that Jorge doesn’t know anything important.”
“He didn’t know how much information he had stored in that pea brain of his either, but thanks to Lana’s very effective serum, we got a lot from his latent memories.”
“I’m glad it worked.”
He put his arm around her, letting her settle even closer to him. “You’re awfully smart there, doc.”
She giggled.
It wasn’t a sound he expected to hear from her, but he liked it. Claire and Brett were smiling at them, too.
“So, when do your partners arrive?” Lana asked.
“They’re in town already, but they’re staying at a hotel near Elle and Myk’s parents’ home.”
“Why aren’t they staying here?”
“The fewer people that come and go from here, the less likely our base will be discovered.”
“This security stuff is a pain.”
“Just be glad you’re not the president.”
“I am.” Lana gave a visible shudder. “I am so not the political type.” She shifted and laid her arm over Myk’s stomach. “I heard you call Lise’s husband Wolf, but I heard Elle refer to him as Joshua,” she said to Brett.
“We still call each other by nicknames we picked up in the Rangers.”
“What’s yours?”
“Hotwire.”
“And Daniel Black Eagle’s?”
“Nitro.”
“It’s pretty cool that you are all still working together.”
“Nitro and Josie are part-timers,” Claire said. “They were going to quit completely, but she hasn’t been able to get pregnant and she wanted something to keep her occupied. She found out she missed training soldiers. So, they run a few select training camps a year and help out as needed with the company.”
“What do they do the rest of the time?”
“Daniel watches his wife while she consults on computers,” Claire said. “He’s a bit protective.”
“We all are,” Brett admitted sheepishly.
“Just wait until they adopt.”
“Is that what they are going to do?”
“They’ve been talking about it.” Claire snuggled into her husband. “Josie wants to start a family before she’s thirty-five.”
“That gives her some time,” Brett said.
Claire rolled her eyes. “Not to hear her tell it.”
“What about you two?” Lana asked.
“I want kids, but I want to wait a while. We thought I was pregnant early in our relationship, but discovered it was a hormonal imbalance from stress. We decided to wait a bit after that. I like what I do…being an active part of the dangerous assignments, but that has to end when I have kids. It’s only fair to them.”
“Right.”
“So, ask me again in a couple of years.”
Brett looked supremely happy about those words and Myk knew there had to be some sort of story there.
Chapter 20
Lana uncurled from her position beside Mykola when he and Brett began going over security for Elle’s wedding again.
Mykola grabbed her around the waist. “Where you going, doc?”
“Upstairs.” She didn’t say she was going to bed because that was not what she had planned.
“I’ll be up in a bit.”
“All right.”
He gave her an appraising look, but let her go.
Had he expected her to balk at sharing a room? Perhaps he could have asked, but she’d made no secret of the fact that in bed with with him was exactly where she wanted to be. That look had been a lot like the ones he’d been giving her off and on for the past couple of hours—while she cuddled against him as they chatted with Brett and Claire. Okay, so she wasn’t usually a cuddly person. Or at least hadn’t been for a very long time.
She could remember evenings watching television curled up against her mother, nights when she’d had a bad dream and her father had rocked her back to sleep on his lap. Long car rides when her big brother had let her fall asleep against him in the backseat.
She could still remember the feeling of warmth and security her family’s physical closeness had given her.
Those times had come before her parents had realized what a freak she was, before they admonished her to “be normal” when they went places. Her precocious mind had embarrassed and sometimes angered them when she had questioned things other children her age took for granted. Like how the television worked, or why other children believed in Santa Claus.
She’d been four years old when she’d realized it was a physical impossibility for the jolly man in the red suit to be real. She’d taxed her mother with the truth and Mom had said it was magic.
Lana had looked sadly at her mother and wondered how she, a grownup, could not know magic wasn’t real. Her mother must have read the look correctly because she’d gotten offended and sent Lana to her room. A place she had spent increasingly more time—by her own choice. There was no one to disappoint when she was alone.
However, that summer, her parents took Lana and her brother to Disney World. And she’d realized magic did exist—in that very special world. The world where fairy dust made boys fly and scullery maids ended up married to Prince Charming.
It would be another couple of years before she found out that another world of magic existed. That of science. But her love of all things Disney had been cemented.
Her desire to have her bedroom decorated with Mickey and Minnie Mouse was one of the few things her parents had thought was normal about her as a child. They’d changed their opinion when her tastes in décor had not changed by the time she was a teenager. Though by then, they’d given up on their daughter being anything like normal.
After all, she’d graduated high school before she was an official teen and was doing college course work when her physical adolescence had hit. She’d studied the changing reactions in her body like she did everything else. She was probably the only fourteen-year-old who understood what was going on in her body better than what was going on around her.
She’d often wondered as an adult why her parents had supported her accele
rated learning if they’d wanted so badly for her to be like other children her age. Because support it they had, in so many ways. She would never have been able to get the education she had without their help.
So, why had they been so disgusted with the other trappings of her overactive brain?
She’d never come up with an answer. It no longer mattered. She’d finally accepted herself for who she was, even if others did not. If along with that acceptance came the realization that she was not a person who inspired deep, abiding love in others, that was her problem and no one else’s.
So, maybe, she wasn’t supercuddly. She didn’t pass out hugs like they were potato chips and she’d never snuggled with previous boyfriends. Not that Mykola was her boyfriend.
He was her temporary protector and lover. Temporary being the operative word.
But inside her heart, he was so much more. He was the man she loved. Lana was in love for the first and, she was absolutely certain, the last time in her life. Love required implicit trust and she was never going to meet a man like Mykola who both inspired that trust and had opportunities to prove himself worthy of it.
He might see her as a convenient bed partner, someone to practice his amazing sexual skill on, but to her, he was the one—the man that if she could not spend the rest of her life with, she would spend the rest of her life loving. Even if that love was never spoken aloud.
Other women were probably not like her, but she didn’t suddenly think sex was all that. She thought intimacy with Mykola was all that and a hot fudge sundae. She’d been attracted to him on their first meeting and had somehow fallen in love almost as quickly. She didn’t understand it.
She couldn’t build parameters to make her emotions logical; she just knew they were there, forever in her heart. It was those feelings that made making love with Mykola so incredibly special.
He was the only man she wanted to cuddle with. The single person on the face of this earth she wanted to hug and kiss the moment she saw him and before leaving him, even if it was simply to step out of the room for a moment. Not that she gave in to every urge, but she gave in to the ones that were safe to.
She was storing up experiences, memories to warm a future that would be void of what she had come to realize was the one true source of magic. Love.