“Devereaux?” Kay twisted her head to look up at him. She had a slight smile on her face. Yeah, Isabel’s cooking would do that. He gently ran the comb through her tangles until they smoothed out.
“Yeah. Isabel Devereaux. Soon to be Isabel Harris. Joe’s been champing at the bit to marry her for a while now. So yes, Isabel set up the food stores and is getting ready to start up a big hydroponics farm for fresh vegetables. Okay, there you go. All done.”
He’d untangled her beautiful hair, braided it, and tied the braid off with a piece of gauze.
Kay looked at herself in the mirror, turning this way and that to see the braid. Nick was really happy with his policy of not having her wear underwear because the material stretched over her breasts lovingly. He made a manful effort to keep his eyes on hers and not look down.
“That’s a good job you did, and you didn’t hurt me combing it out. How do you have experience braiding women’s hair?”
“Two little sisters who had to get ready to go to school every morning and my mom had to be at school before them. She was a teacher. So my brothers and I were on Braid Patrol. We had records. We could get our sisters up, washed, dressed, feed them breakfast and get them out the door to the school bus in 28 minutes. I timed it.”
Kay smiled. “You come from a big family.”
“The biggest,” he said. “And the best.”
She gave a small sigh. “For almost as long as I can remember, it’s only been Grandpa and me.”
“Yeah. Good old Al.”
Kay smiled. “He did a good job, though. He was always around and was always good to me. It was only a few years ago that someone told me that he was being groomed for the directorship when he…inherited me, I guess would be a good word. When I asked him, he just smiled and shrugged and said it was water under the bridge.”
True. Goodkind had refused all postings, even if they meant promotion, to stay in the DC area. He’d have made a kickass director, but instead he’d opted to be a kickass substitute parent.
“It’s true, isn’t it?” Kay asked, looking directly into his eyes.
She was way too smart to lie to. Nick nodded.
She sighed. “And to think he was so encouraging about my career, even when it took me away from him.”
Goodkind hadn’t traveled after becoming Kay’s caregiver, but she had. She’d studied in Cambridge and Paris and had worked for the WHO, where she’d been posted to Singapore and Gambia. Nick had done his homework and had quietly grilled Goodkind, who’d answered all of his questions with a sardonic smile.
“He loves you,” Nick said quietly. “And he loves Felicity.”
Goodkind hadn’t broken under torture to deliver Felicity to Borodin, a Russian mobster in a good suit. Felicity had something Borodin badly wanted and he’d used Goodkind to get to her. It hadn’t worked.
Kay nodded. “He was like a father to her, too. Her own was cold and remote. Grandpa is really good at being an anchor for lost girls.” She gave a shake, as if to cast off bad thoughts. “I heard you talk about food, was that just you blowing smoke?”
“No, ma’am.” Nick put a hand to her back and ushered her out of the room. “I wasn’t blowing smoke at all. I’d never joke about food.”
They walked along a corridor of doors, which were all bedrooms/living quarters for the various ASI people, until they came to the end of the corridor and walked across another huge living area into a small kitchen.
“Wow.” Kay’s head was on a swivel.
Well, the place was pretty fantastic. Half the guys at ASI hoped the zombie apocalypse came so they could hang out here forever.
“That’s the third kitchen I’ve seen. How many are there?”
“Four. All fully functional but different sizes. The biggest one has three ovens, one you could roast an ox in. That kitchen’s for when we all get together. This one’s for a small party.” Nick touched a button on the remote in his pocket and a microwave started up. Another button and a cascade of ice fell into an ice bucket.
“So we get the magic kitchen, do we?” she teased.
“Yep. So, milady, your chair awaits.”
Nick pulled out a chair that was shaped like a Louis Whatever—Suzanne had explained the whole thing to him but there was nowhere in his brain the intel could stick to—only almost invisible Plexiglas. There was a round table and he’d set two table mats out and two plates and two wine glasses. It wasn’t an evening for water.
He knew where everything was because, well, after an ASI agent had asked permission to bring his girlfriend for a weekend, he’d fumbled and opened every cabinet before he’d found the essentials. His girlfriend—now his wife—had made a sarcastic comment and Suzanne had sighed.
The next weekend, all kitchen cabinets in all four kitchens were glass-fronted, and Nick could see clearly where everything was.
“Ma’am. Sit please.”
Just as Kay was seated, the microwave pinged and he placed a trivet—a word Suzanne had taught him—on the table and pulled out a deep ceramic dish from the microwave, placing it on the trivet while inhaling deeply. Man, that smelled good.
Kay leaned forward, too, taking a deep breath of the glorious smell. “Wow. Lasagna. Did you whip that up while I was taking a shower?”
Nick wrestled briefly with the temptation to lie but decided against it. She’d never believe him anyway. “No, sadly, I didn’t. But Isabel did. She and four of her interns came up for a few days and made about a billion servings of lasagna and other stuff and froze them. She said they had a great time.”
Isabel’s interns had all been good cooks but more to the point, hot babes. Several of the newer recruits to ASI had spent those days going up to the Grange and volunteering for slave labor and KP.
At another time, Nick would have volunteered, too. But by that time, he’d had Kay in his head and she wasn’t leaving it. Hadn’t left it. And now he knew would never leave it.
Another ping and Nick opened the bread maker, and a small loaf of five-grain bread came out, adding to the delicious aromas. The magic freezer had small doughs of the bread and the bread maker defrosted and baked. All he’d done was pop the dough in. He shook some salt and poured some olive oil over a sliced tomato salad—his only contribution to the dinner—popped a cork on a bottle of merlot and sat down.
Kay watched him. “What?” he asked as he spread the napkin over his lap.
“Really? Freshly made bread and a fresh tomato salad? In a country hideaway?”
He poured their glasses and lifted his philosophically. “Well, a really, really well-equipped country hideaway.” It wasn’t the moment to tell her about the massive security measures, the armory that had enough weaponry to go to war with a small country—say, Aruba—the fact that the entire complex was encased in a Faraday cage built to withstand an EMP…
“That it is. Mm.” Kay closed her eyes as she put a bite of lasagna in her mouth. “Oh my God. I hope those interns got a lot of really good sex in return.”
Nick’s hand stopped halfway to his mouth. What? What did she just say?
Kay laughed. It felt good to hear her laugh. “Oh, Nick, if you could only see your face. You think a company filled to the rafters with testosterone and single guys wouldn’t latch on to a cooking session with interns? In a beautiful mountain hideaway? Isabel is out of the running of course, since she’s totally devoted to Joe, but I’ll bet there were a bunch of guys running up and down the mountain. You included.”
“Nope.” He put his fork down. That was the old Nick. He leaned forward and Kay put her own fork down at the serious expression on his face. Time to give her the new Nick. “That weekend had a lot of ASI guys—the single ones—going up and down the mountain, just like you said, and a few got laid, but I wasn’t one of them. I met you for the first time two months before the lasagna weekend. Since I laid eyes on you I haven’t fu—messed around.”
There. It was out in the open now. He’d nailed his colors to the table. Ball in her cour
t.
Kay folded her arms and leaned forward, keeping her eyes on his. “I’ve been avoiding you,” she said.
He nodded. “I know. The whole company knows.”
She winced slightly. “It wasn’t like that.”
“No?” Nick held her gaze. “So, how was it?”
Her chin firmed. “There’s a reason I was avoiding you. I was trying to protect you.”
Nick’s jaw dropped, then he clenched his teeth. “Protect me? What the hell? I don’t need protecting.”
Kay reached out with one hand, letting it hover over his, then drop to cover it. Her hand was slim, pale, soft. A scholar’s hand. His was larger, darker, tougher. A fighter’s hand. He waited to hear how she thought she was going to protect him.
“The weekend we were supposed to meet up in Washington, remember?”
God yeah, he remembered. He’d switched training cycles with a teammate when he heard Kay would be in town for a full weekend, bought tickets to something high-minded at the Kennedy Center. And then sat around steaming when she canceled her visit at the last minute.
Kay dicking him around. More of those to come.
She tightened her grip on his hand. Met his eyes. “The day before our meeting, Priyanka asked me to meet her in Grant Park in Atlanta.”
“Priyanka?”
A sad smile that didn’t reach her eyes. “Priyanka Anand. A biochemist at the CDC and my best friend. Was my best friend. She died. In a car accident where she drove herself off the road while drunk, so they said. But that was impossible—because Priyanka never drank, ever. She was allergic to alcohol, something very few people knew.”
Oh God. Nick put his other hand on top of hers, sandwiching it. Her hand was chilled.
“She hadn’t been much in touch lately and when she asked me to meet her on our lunch hour at a park far away from the CDC, I thought maybe she was going to tell me she had a new boyfriend or had accepted that job teaching at Stanford. She was being headhunted ferociously. Priyanka is—was—a genius. Not to mention funny and kind.”
Kay’s eyes welled and she dropped her head between her shoulder blades. A tear plopped on the table. She took a napkin and wiped her eyes with her free hand. Her head lifted.
Nick’s gaze didn’t waver. “Go on.”
Kay cleared her throat. “So, I thought it was a casual meeting between friends. Instead, Priyanka was agitated, worried, anxious. She said she wanted to meet in Grant Park because there were no security cameras. That was my first clue that something serious was going on.”
“What was Priyanka’s job?” Nick asked.
“She was trained as a biochemist, but she was an expert in bio-warfare.”
Fuck. Nick opened his mouth to say something, then closed it again.
“Yeah.” Kay shook her head. “If Priyanka was worried, I was worried too. It turns out that a colleague, a man, had been acting strange. I know the colleague in question, Bill Morrell, and honestly, I don’t know how she could tell strange from normal with that guy. He was a high-functioning sociopath, definitely on the autism spectrum.”
“Was?”
“Mm. Alive when we met, though. At first, I didn’t take her too seriously. Bill had a thing about Priyanka. Somewhere in the recesses of his brilliant but sick mind, they were meant to be together. Two people who knew so much about the genetics of viruses were destined to be a couple. And of course, to fall straight into bed together. No matter that Priyanka was blindingly beautiful and Bill’s eyebrows had dandruff, and his eyebrows were the most attractive thing about him. He’d have needed about a year of plastic surgery and dentistry and serious gym time to even think of asking Priyanka out on a date. And he had bad hygiene. Horrible personality, awful looks coupled with amazing arrogance. A male trifecta. Priyanka couldn’t stand him and had complained several times to management about him.”
“They should have gotten rid of him. Any guy in the FBI whose female colleagues complains about him to management would be gone.”
“Unfortunately, Bill was also brilliant at his job. Even Priyanka conceded that. When she told me he became rich all of a sudden, though, things changed.”
“Rich?”
“Yup.”
“Let me guess,” Nick said dryly. “New car, snazzy wardrobe, vacations in St. Lucia.”
She nodded. “And let’s not forget the new penthouse in Chapel Tower. A luxury condo skyscraper in the heart of Atlanta. Expensive and flashy and terminally stupid for someone on a researcher’s salary to buy.”
“That’s major league new wealth. Someone die and he inherited?”
“That’s what he said. But Priyanka is—damn! was—cynical and untrusting. I just loved that about her. She looked his family up and there was no one within a thousand miles who could die and leave him that kind of money. His mother lived off social security and his only brother was in jail for drugs. Bill was brilliant at science, but really dumb at life. He didn’t even manage to make up a good excuse for his sudden money. And he was also bad at social relations—wasn’t discreet. Everyone on the research floor knew he suddenly had access to a lot of money, big time. Priyanka was really worried because of his current research project. If he’d sold out to someone, his field was dangerous.”
A rogue scientist who was an expert on bio-warfare, showing clear signs of corruption. What could possibly be wrong with that picture?
“What was his specialty?” Nick asked, dreading the answer. As both a SEAL and an FBI special agent, he’d had extensive training on bio-weapons, though thank God he’d never encountered any. Mainly he’d encountered bullets and bombs, which were fine. All you needed was bigger bullets and bigger bombs.
But he remembered briefings on sarin, ricin, anthrax. So scary his balls tried to crawl up into his body. There was one mission where they’d had to don MOPP suits because they hadn’t known if there would be a bio-weapon.
There hadn’t been a bio-weapon, but he remembered vividly the sweaty confines of the awkward and fiercely uncomfortable suit. A teammate had reminded everyone that if their fears were true, they were in suits in which a mere pinprick or slight invisible tear would be enough to guarantee them a horrendous death. He’d added that the suits had been delivered by manufacturers who’d been the lowest bidders.
Not a couple of hours he’d care to replicate.
Bombs and bullets were fine. Tiny particles he couldn’t see that would make him puke his lungs and stomach out—not so much.
“He was studying the Spanish Flu.”
Nick blanked. The flu? Next to what he’d read of the other diseases—Ebola, Lassa, smallpox—the flu didn’t sound so bad.
Kay saw his expression. “We’re not talking sniffles and a touch of fever here, Nick. The Spanish flu was a never-before-seen strain of flu that in 1918 wiped out half a billion people worldwide. More people died in one year than in four years of the plague in the 14th century. More people died than in World War I. Life expectancy dropped by twelve years. Bill was studying the virus taken from the lungs of a body frozen in the Antarctic. We still don’t understand the mechanisms of the strain. But Priyanka thought that he’d figured it out, replicated it, and made it even more swift and deadly. A fast-acting and deadlier form of Spanish flu…” She shuddered.
“Hell, if Spanish flu 1.0 killed half a billion people…”
“Exactly.”
He thought about that. It wasn’t pretty. “Though—1918. That was before antibiotics, right?”
“There’s no antibiotic on earth that can combat H1N1. And most antibiotics are unfortunately becoming ineffective. Anyway, that’s why I called off that weekend. Priyanka was supposed to come over to my place and we were going to go over the information she’d gathered.”
“You’re a bad liar,” Nick said. “I thought you were having an affair.”
She was a terrible liar. She’d stammered and stuttered and made up three stories, each more ridiculous than the next. They’d Skyped and she might as well have grown a P
inocchio nose in front of his very eyes. You didn’t need to be an FBI behavioral analyst to tell she was lying. She’d turned beet red in the face and her eyes had constantly shifted to the left.
He’d have said that was that, except for the fact that just before signing off, she’d said she was going to be in Portland the next weekend to see Felicity.
And fuck, he’d said, wasn’t that a coincidence, he was going to be there too. Except Nick knew how to lie. There wasn’t one tell on his face, he knew. After Joe Harris, who was The Man at poker, he was second best at bluffing. And it sort of wasn’t a lie. If you squinted.
He’d been thinking more and more about joining ASI. First, because they were all buddies of his from way back. Second, he’d worked for the government all his adult life. He’d had good men commanding him and bad. His last two bosses at the FBI had been cover-your-ass types. What in military-speak had been known as REMFs. Rear echelon motherfuckers. Men who rode desks. More intent on snaking their way up the career ladder than on doing their job putting away fuckheads.
ASI was run by exactly the opposite type of man. John Huntington, aka the Midnight Man, and Douglas Kowalski, aka the Senior, were righteous dudes, great bosses who never asked anyone to do something they wouldn’t do themselves. They were building a truly great company, employing the best of the best. The starting pay was double his income as an FBI Special Agent. And Portland, Oregon, was a nicer place to live than Washington, DC.
Because then and there, he’d made up his mind to join ASI. He’d had a standing invitation and decided to take John and Senior up on it. He’d scheduled a meeting for the next weekend and damned if she hadn’t left the city while his plane was touching down. She’d come early and left early.
“I know I’m a terrible liar,” Kay said, rolling her eyes. “Of course I am. It’s a professional deformation. Scientists can’t lie. We can’t distort the truth, because digging for the truth is what we do. Unlike you slick superspy undercover dudes.”
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