Midnight Fever

by Lisa Marie Rice

  Nick blew out a breath of air. “Well, you were really lousy at it.”

  Kay looked him straight in the eyes. God, her eyes were beautiful. This amazing bright blue color, like the sky over the sea. So bright they almost glowed.

  She was saying something and he didn’t catch it. “What?”

  “I was protecting you. Because the further Priyanka dug, the more it appeared that Bill was working on, or had perfected, a deadly bio-weapon. Someone tried to hack Priyanka’s computer, but her brother made sure that they hacked into these fake files, perfectly innocuous. Her real files were behind a wall. Then Bill was killed.”

  “Wait.” Nick frowned. “He was killed? When?”

  She sighed. “The Wednesday after. A mugging. But of course, it wasn’t a mugging, he was either threatening to talk or, even worse, his usefulness was over. By the time Priyanka found out, his office had been cleared out, his computer gone, his condo and all its contents gone. Someone did some serious cleaning up after him; it was almost like he didn’t exist.”

  Nick frowned. He didn’t like this, any of it. Three people killed. And she thought she had to protect him? What was that shit?

  “Luckily, as I told you, Priyanka was sneaky, and she had had her brother copy all of Bill’s files and put them in the cloud. It was a ton of data. She’d gone through some and on the basis of that, she contacted Mike Hammer.”

  “I can’t believe you ran away from me while this was happening. You should have come to me.”

  She looked to one side, then back to him. “You’re FBI,” she said simply. “Or were,” she added when he opened his mouth. “It was clear that Priyanka was going to blow the whistle on the CDC, and I was going to back her up. Do what I could. But…we all know what happens to whistleblowers. Then Priyanka…died.”

  She swallowed heavily, cleared her throat. Pain flashed on her beautiful face. “Car accident. I couldn’t believe it when I heard the news. She was so beautiful, so full of life. And then—then they were saying that they’d found a high blood-alcohol level, that she’d been drunk. I read the autopsy report.” That long white neck bobbed as she swallowed heavily. “Nobody would give it to me, so I emailed Felicity and she just hacked into the coroner’s office and copied it for me. She’d met Priyanka and was as horrified as I was. The coroner must have been bought off, because Priyanka definitely did not drink any alcohol. If she did have a high level of alcohol, it could only be because she was infused. So there must have been a pinprick in her elbow or subclavian. You can infuse alcohol into the system via an IV line. It’s the only way she’d have alcohol in her system. Whatever it was, Priyanka was…gone. She was thirty-two years old, brilliant and beautiful and the best friend anyone could ask for. And she was gone.”

  Nick watched as she bowed her head, another crystal tear dropping off that smooth white cheek. She was mourning her friend while holding on to him. Damn right. She could hold on to him for as long as she wanted and needed. Beyond.

  Her head lifted. “Then I got a message from her.”

  That surprised him. “From beyond the grave?”

  “Yeah.” She gave a strangled laugh. “Just like Priyanka to do something like that, nothing stops her. She decided at the age of seven to become a researcher because she thought lab coats were cool. I’ve never seen anyone more determined and more organized. She knew she had moved into the danger zone, and had taken precautions. She put together a file that was to go to me if two days passed without her entering a specific code. She was a planner.”

  A planner. Nick kept his tongue. Priyanka might have been a friend, might have been desperate, but she had painted a huge bullseye on Kay’s back. Kay wouldn’t want to hear it, but that’s what had happened.

  He was a little mad about that, but didn’t—couldn’t—show it. And to Kay’s credit, it never even occurred to her that her dear and good friend had dumped a bomb primed to go off right into her lap.

  Kay watched her finger run around the rim of the wine glass. “And then it became clear that I was going to have to be the whistleblower. The best I could hope for was that my career would be ruined. Whistleblowers are subjected to legal harassment; their contacts are scrutinized. Their friends come under scrutiny. You had a good career going that I could ruin for you, Nick. I wasn’t going to do that. No way.”

  Nick ground his teeth so hard he was surprised he didn’t crack a tooth. “I can’t believe you were thinking that.” She was terrified, in danger, and she was thinking of his career? That it might suffer? Fuck that.

  Her hand in his was shaking.

  “I went over it and over it in my head. Looked at it from every angle, and there wasn’t any angle where I didn’t ruin your life for you.”

  He felt like someone had punched him in the chest. With his free hand, he rubbed the spot over his heart. “Kay, there’s no way you could ruin my life. I wanted you. Want you.”

  “I know.” The slight sheen in her eyes only made them glow more brightly, made them more beautiful. “You don’t think I know? I wanted you, too. But I wasn’t going to destroy you. Then—” With her free hand, she swiped away another tear.

  Jesus, even tears looked good on her. Nick had never seen a woman grow more beautiful with tears, but Kay managed it. She looked so fragile he was afraid she’d break.

  But she wasn’t fragile, that was the point. She’d taken up the flag when her friend had fallen, perfectly aware that she could be trashing the career she’d worked so hard for, perfectly aware that there was danger, and still she’d thought of him. Of his fucking career!

  No, this woman wasn’t fragile. She was just exhausted and terrified.

  “Then?”

  “I asked Felicity to contact Mike Hammer through the dark web and she did. Mike knew a lot of the background. I told him I was coming to Portland. He told me to meet him and give him the flash drive. But he also said to be prepared to go underground. He said maybe I could surface a week or two after Priyanka’s findings were published, maybe longer. He said I had to be prepared to go to a safe house for a while. But of course, the subtext was that staying in a safe house might become…permanent.”

  She looked at him, heart in her eyes. “By that time, you’d quit the FBI and joined ASI. And I knew that something like this could never compromise your position at ASI, they don’t think like that.”

  “No,” Nick said, voice steady. “They don’t. But I want you to know that even if I’d still been a Special Agent, I wouldn’t have been scared of the association with you. They could have come after me all they wanted.”

  “Nick,” she said softly. “Don’t forget that people have ended up dead over this. It wasn’t just a question of your career taking a hit. The blowback could have ended up costing you your life.”

  Nick didn’t scoff. He’d known of too many people who’d lost their lives to bad guys. Not only to terrorists abroad, but to greedy bastards at home. A potential vice president had killed hundreds of people at a Washington hotel in what was known as the Washington Massacre. Countless men and women dead for his greed and power hunger. Still… “I know how to handle myself.”

  Kay pinched the bridge of her nose. “I know you do. Anyway, once you were ASI and I was planning on disappearing anyway, I—I thought…I thought maybe I could allow myself one meeting with you.” She pursed her lips. “I wasn’t planning on sleeping with you, though.”

  “You were thinking about it.” Nick was certain of it.

  She cocked her head, studying him. “Yes.” A slight smile. “I was thinking about it. I thought—if I’m going to throw my career away, maybe I can give myself a little treat.”

  He faked indignation. “A little treat?”

  The smile was still small but genuine. “Okay. A big treat.”

  “Very big treat.”

  “The biggest.”

  They grinned at each other. Nick’s heart lifted. Whatever was in the cards for them, whatever was going to happen, they would face it together. And he
had all of ASI at his back. He would never say it out loud, and could barely think it to himself, but he’d rather have ASI at his back than the FBI.

  “It’ll be all right, Kay,” he said softly. “We’ll figure it out. It’s big and it’s scary but we’ll figure it out.”

  She slid her hand out from between his and he immediately missed it. Picking up her fork, she finished the last of the lasagna and sat back. “I sure hope so. I hate this. I hate knowing Priyanka’s and Mike Hammer’s deaths were in vain. I’m even sorry that jerk Bill is dead. I’m sorry you’ve been roped into something that isn’t any concern of yours, I’m sorry—”

  Nick put a finger across her mouth. Her lips were soft and full against his finger and he remembered with a flash of intensely uncomfortable heat how those lips had felt kissing his stomach, moving lower, taking him in her mouth…

  Blood shot straight to his dick.

  Kay must have felt the sex vibes suddenly clouding the air because her eyes widened and her lips moved under his finger. “Nick,” she said.

  Oh man, there was no response. He couldn’t talk, could barely breathe, with a hard-on he could hammer a nail with.

  From touching her mouth.

  Oh shit, he was in deep, deep trouble. This was not the time and the place. She needed reassurance, a plan. She didn’t need to be fucked half to death.

  They sat there like that, a little tableau of imminent sex, angled toward each other, eyes locked, the remains of an excellent meal between them.

  God yes. Food and then sex. Guaranteed to help overcome trauma. Best thing in the world.

  Nick started rising to usher them straight back into the bedroom when his cell rang. His satphone’s ring was unmistakable. From ASI.

  His gaze never wavered from Kay’s. “It’s probably Felicity.”

  She straightened. His sex vibes pulsing at her had given her a slight blush, but she paled again.

  Nick was ashamed of himself. Since when did he have problems focusing on the mission? Never. He was intensely mission-oriented. You didn’t become a SEAL or join the FBI’s HRT without being maniacally focused.

  The thing was, Kay just overwhelmed him. He had to start getting his priorities straight, starting right now. Some very bad guys who had already killed and who might be wielding a bio-weapon were after Kay. His job was to keep her safe while she ran them to ground.

  He felt his head clear, his heart settle. Yes, that was the mission. Keeping Kay safe. That was what he was good at. He was always picked for protection detail. He was picked because he knew what to do and how to do it.

  Kay was not going to be harmed, not on his watch. Not ever.

  He could protect her best by keeping her close. Yeah, man. Very close. He wrapped an arm around her shoulders as his satphone rang again. He answered without taking his eyes from hers. “Yo. Going to the ops center.”

  They moved quickly to one of the rooms in that immense corridor. Nick entered a code in the keypad next to the door and it slid open as lights turned on. He put his hand to her back and walked her in.

  Kay blinked. It was a command center, and it looked like the White House war room in Doctor Strangelove, only from the 22nd century instead of the 20th. Huge monitors covered the walls and there were keyboards, wireless headsets, and speakers everywhere.

  “Here.” Nick was holding out an expensive mesh office chair, the kind that supported your back and was easy on the thighs and made coffee for you. She sat down and it was like sitting on a cloud. Whatever make it was, she wanted one for her office.

  Then, like cold water dashed in her face, she realized she would probably never work in her office again.

  “Okay. I’ve got Felicity on the line.” Nick thumbed his cell phone screen and Felicity’s pretty face popped up on a huge wall screen.

  “Hey,” Felicity said, and it was like her being in the room. She smiled at Kay, whose face was onscreen in a small box in the lower right-hand side, just like before. Behind Felicity stood her boyfriend, Metal, as large as a bridge support. He had a big hand on her shoulder.

  Nick appeared behind her on the small screen. She saw him and then felt his hand on her shoulder, as well.

  “Hey.” Kay smiled at Felicity. “Did you—”

  “Decrypt the flash drive? I did. Hell of a job, too. Gave even me some trouble. And it’s a lot of stuff. Part of what was encrypted was a link to more files in the cloud.”

  Oh God, it was so good to see Felicity. She wasn’t an operator like Nick, or Metal, or any of the guys at ASI but she was whip-smart and Kay felt better just seeing her.

  “Yeah, part of the encrypting was done by Priyanka’s brother. Sorry to have to ask for your help.”

  Felicity waved a long, slender hand. “Don’t even mention it, are you kidding? I had fun. Lately all I’ve done is boring stuff for ASI. What?” She turned around to look at Metal when he made a noise. “Not that much fun in devising data algorithms, don’t try to tell me otherwise. Kay’s stuff was a real challenge.”

  Behind her, Metal looked amused and resigned in equal measure. He bent down and whispered something in her ear and her fair skin turned pink. Kay sympathized. She had the exact same kind of skin. It showed all your emotions, good and bad. Judging from the sexy sideways glance she shot Metal, it was good.

  “What was in it?” Kay leaned forward. “Did you go over it?”

  “Oh God, honey.” Felicity cocked her head, straightened it, as if listening to a secret internal voice. “I have no idea what’s in it. There was almost a terabyte of info and it’s all biochemistry and virology and genetics. Most of it anyway. I did isolate a video made by Priyanka, and some emails between her and Mike Hammer. Also, she did some research on him, so there’s about ten of his environmental articles and a couple of documentaries he made for his webzine. He doesn’t appear, only as a slightly modified voiceover. He’s good. He manipulated the recordings and there would be no way to obtain a voice match without sacrificing too much quality on the recording itself. I didn’t have time to watch all the docs—meatspace time is different from digital time—but I gathered they were all hot topics where big companies are polluting. One was about a flu vaccine scam.”

  Kay nodded. She knew what that was about. A pharmaceutical company that invested ten million dollars in drumming up a flu scare and then delivered thirty million doses on the market of a vaccine that didn’t work. There had been 150 deaths and the company had made seven billion dollars, which it promptly deposited in Panama.

  Scam was too mild a word. It had been criminal.

  “Can you please send over the information?” Kay asked.

  Felicity looked blank for an instant. “Uh, Kay…”

  “She sent it immediately,” Metal pitched in. “And it was sent securely, you don’t need to worry about that. We have an internal system. Check the log. It’s along the top of the image.”

  Kay looked and found it. She clicked on the log and immediately Felicity and Metal were reduced to a small box next to the image of herself and Nick. Data started scrolling down the screen.

  “Whoa,” Nick said behind her. “Looks like the Matrix. What a mess.”

  Kay was studying the screen intently. “No, not a mess. There’s a lot of data from Bill’s drive, and it’s standard research, going back years. But here,” she tapped the screen with a stylus, “and here, and here and here,” she looked up reassuringly at Nick, “those are the formerly encrypted files, where we’ll find what he was secretly working on. It shouldn’t be too hard to sort them out. And Priyanka will have already arranged the files in an easy-to-follow order. It’s just a question of time, now. We have the yellow bricks and they’re laid out on a road. I just have to walk it.”

  “Hm. If you say so.” Nick’s voice was full of doubt. “Hell of a lot of info there.”

  “It’s what I do—what we do at the CDC.” Did at the CDC, Kay thought with a pang of pain. What they did at the CDC. Studied all of nature, in its unfathomably huge details,
to find what could harm humans, and fix it.

  Until someone inside the CDC—and that never failed to astonish her—used data to harm humans.

  “Okay. This is your thing, Kay.” Felicity was scowling on the screen. “If anyone can figure this out, it’s you. You go, girl.”

  “Oh, I will,” Kay promised softly. Priyanka and Mike Hammer, good people, had died for what was in those files. She’d find out what it was and ASI would go after them. Of that she had no doubt. Maybe call in the FBI, too. Nick trusted the FBI. At this point, Kay herself didn’t trust any institution.

  “Good. I think that—” She frowned.

  “Felicity?”

  Felicity had turned sheet white. Like flipping a switch. From its usual pale rose, her complexion had turned to dirty ice, dead white with a gray undertone. Felicity slapped her hand over her mouth and disappeared from the screen. She could be seen in the background, running.

  “Good God!” Kay leaned forward. “Metal! Is Felicity okay? Is something wrong? Is she sick?”

  “Is it official?” Nick asked behind her.

  She swiveled. “What?”

  “Yeah.” Metal’s super-broad chest lifted on a sigh. “We told everyone.”

  “So…you know what it is?” Nick asked.

  What what is? What were they talking about?

  “Twins.” Metal flashed a quick grin, then it disappeared from his face. “Boys, we think. The next sonogram should be definitive. But she’s been sicker than a dog. I hate it.”

  Kay, who had a master’s degree in biology, finally got it. Her jaw dropped. “She’s pregnant? Felicity’s pregnant?”

  “Oh yeah. Super pregnant. Double pregnant.” A corner of Metal’s mouth lifted. “We’ve been trying and trying and finally it caught.”

  “Tough job,” Nick said. “But someone’s got to do it.”

  “Well.” Kay smiled at the thought of Felicity expecting kids. She’d had a very lonely existence, much lonelier than Kay’s own, though she’d had both parents until she was in her late teens. Her parents had been Russians, undercover, and they had lived in the Witness Protection Program all her life. Kay had Gramps to love her. Felicity had had no one who loved her, truly loved her.