Deadly Secrets

by Lisa Phillips

  Fear sat sour in his gut. Where was Emma? Why had she left like that? Was she okay? He wanted to be angry at her for the fact she’d exposed herself to danger again. But something about it just didn’t sit right. Even with everything that had happened between them, he still didn’t believe she’d just walked out. If she had, he’d have been able to find her. She would be here, doing what she had said she would—supporting her father’s charitable efforts.

  Mint was just glad he hadn’t spotted her mother. Though, considering what had happened at the funeral, he figured Isabella Burroughs was somewhere trying to minimize the social media fallout of the big announcement—and the implication that she’d had an affair.

  All this fuss over a man who, by all accounts, hadn’t been a nice man. Or a good father. Or an uncle that Bradley and Rachel liked.

  He, of all people, knew what happened when those in authority—those who were supposed to nurture and protect—became the kind of people who only tortured and terrorized. He was glad Emma hadn’t grown up in the senator’s house. Would he have broken her or twisted her with his mind games, the way he had with Lincoln?

  When he found Emma and managed to get her back, maybe she would talk to him about it. He could convince her it was for the best.

  Mint didn’t want to dredge up the past. Not considering everything that would surface. It just wasn’t worth reliving any of it, or even thinking about it again. He wanted to leave it buried and move on. Live his life now, not the life he’d had in the past—one full of humiliation and abuse. Otherwise, he’d never be truly free of it.

  What he wanted was the chance to tell Emma that he liked her. That he was attracted to her, and how he wished he could spend more time—stress free, thank you—with her. Get to know each other better. See if maybe they’d been placed in each other’s lives for a reason.

  He didn’t even know whether that was a thing. But, looking at what had happened between Bradley and Alexis, he thought that maybe it was possible. Some people were supposed to be with each other. As though maybe they’d been born to complement each other.

  A weird vibe made the hair on the back of his neck stand up. He’d learned over the years to always pay attention to the feeling, so Mint stopped his forward progress through the crowd to see what was giving him this vibe. He’d been making a circuit of the room. Checking everywhere to make sure Emma wasn’t here.

  There.

  He zeroed in on a woman standing at a table, flanked by two men in the uniform of wait staff. They didn’t fit with the upper-class crowd. They looked more like hired goons, or bodyguards to some tough guy with enough money to buy the loyalty of unsavory thugs who would do anything because of the paycheck. Their outfits were no better than Halloween costumes, with guns clearly hidden under their aprons. The woman didn’t fit with them. Her dress was a pale peach color, her hair up in a complicated knot. Her face was paler than her dress, and her fingers shook as she lifted her drink to take a sip. Not alcohol. Water.

  The men were waiting. The woman was scared for her life.

  “I caught that, too.” The voice, belonging to Bradley, came through Mint’s earpiece. “Wonder what that’s about.”

  “Who is she?” Mint asked in a low voice so the people around him couldn’t hear.

  Steve was the one who replied, also over their comms. “Our survey says…Mrs. Brent Caulder. Doctor Elizabeth Caulder. Turns out they work the research lab together.”

  Mint kept walking, like he hadn’t even noticed the men. He made his way to an empty corner of the room. On the way, he swiped a glass from a waiter. When he’d found a spot he could talk away from overhearing ears, he lifted the glass to his lips. Right before it touched, behind the disguise of the glass, he said, “So where is Mr. Caulder?”

  He continued to scan the room.

  “Got him,” Bradley said. “At the bar, facing the room. Someone just dropped a phone behind him.”

  Mint found the man he’d seen on his iPad screen. Before Emma had left the room. Before the entire security system had gone haywire. Not even dark. A power outage, or some kind of brown-out would have explained that. Instead, the system had literally gone haywire. Someone had been messing with it big time. And they hadn’t been able to figure out who before it suddenly stopped. Then the alarm at the end of the hall had gone off, indicating the fire exit had been opened. Security cameras outside hadn’t come on for another minute, by which time there had been nothing to see.

  And Emma had been gone.

  They were way too understaffed to be able to cover all their angles. Two team members down and two out of town. The company could easily have been crippled and, as it was, they were running on little more than fumes left in a gas tank.

  They needed to have two funerals as soon as they got the bodies—or what was left of them—back to Washington. Steve had already informed the families. It was time for the company to pull together so they could all move forward. Help the families do the same. Instead, they were here trying to figure out what the blackmailer wanted with Emma. And likely also Brent and Elizabeth Caulder.

  Mint made his way to the bar.

  If the blackmailer was watching, any move they made would be noticed. There was almost no way to make contact with either of them without being seen. But if the benefit was high enough, it would have to be done.

  Mint asked the bartender for a soda water with lime and got a funny look. He stared the man down until the guy said, “Fine” and moved to pour it. Mint didn’t much care what it said about him. What a bartender thought about Mint’s dietary choices was hardly his biggest concern right now.

  The phone rang.

  Four feet to his left, Brent Caulder nearly jumped out of his skin. He spun around and swiped up the phone. Answered it with a shaky hand. “Hello?”

  Brent Caulder’s face paled. “Just don’t hurt her.”

  **

  The SUV pulled up outside the facility, and the driver threw it in park. Emma looked out the back window. Fences topped with barbed wire. No security guards that she could see, but they were there. Card swipe entrances to get in. Cameras. Sensors.

  And finally, a keypad to a door inside that she was supposed to have the code for.

  By the time she got there.

  I don’t like this.

  The driver turned to her. “You know what to do.”

  She nodded, though it made her head swim. Whatever they’d stuck her with in that syringe had worn off, but not all the way. Could she walk confidently in a straight line? She was going to have to figure out how to fake that, or this wasn’t going to work.

  Emma tugged on the door handle, clutching the card they’d given her. Doctor Elizabeth Caulder’s key card. Hopefully whoever was on security looked at their screens and realized it wasn’t her. But Emma wasn’t exactly hopeful. Not considering the man in the front seat—the one who’d confronted her in the hallway after her funeral speech—had a laptop open. The camera feeds for the facility were on his screen.

  Had he hacked in? They’d managed to breach the security at Double Down, fool the system into seeing what they wanted it to see, and then set the alarms to ring when they wanted. Emma didn’t think security guards at this medical research facility were going to see anything these men didn’t want them to.

  She paused, one leg out of the car, and turned to the two men. “You know who he is, don’t you?” She had nothing to lose. Not at this point. What did it matter if they told her who the blackmailer was? Okay, that wasn’t exactly true. Considering she would definitely lose the “something” that could be between her and Mint. All she had right now was the possibility, a hope that maybe they might have made something. Not now, though.

  The driver smirked. “I hope you don’t cross him, or you’ll end up dead.”

  “Who is he?”

  He chuckled. “You don’t want to know.” Then he twisted, pointed a gun at her. “Get moving or you’ll have even more problems. Can’t imagine it’ll be easy to wal
k in there and carry out the device with a gunshot wound.”

  She already had one. Still, she wandered away and left the door open. Only for the sake of exercising the tiny bit of power she had, which wasn’t much more than the power to kind of irritate them. She strode to the side entrance and swiped her card in the card reader. The gate clicked.

  Crossing the forecourt made her breath hitch with every inhale. Yellow lights lit the place. Emma made no attempt to disguise the fact she was walking right through the middle of the open area, straight to the door they’d told her to use. If those guys back in the SUV were any good at this business, then she didn’t need to bother hiding her entrance from anyone looking.

  They could control security all they wanted, but what she prayed was that someone—anyone still there—would glance out a window at just the right moment and see her.

  But it didn’t happen.

  She made it to the door without incident and stepped inside the medical research facility. The two men in the car also drilled into her the layout of the building. She had the card in one hand and, in the other, an old flip cell phone. They were going to call her and give her the code.

  Did that mean they didn’t have it?

  Emma kept to the side of the hallway, a tiny piece of self-preservation flickering inside her. Like she could hide just by hugging the wall. Or manage to save herself. But her bravado had only gotten her so far.

  The phone buzzed.

  She flipped it open to see a text.

  STOP.

  Emma backtracked two steps and froze. Close enough to a door she could duck inside if she needed to. Wherever the door led to.

  At the end of the hall, a security guard strode from left to right, not even glancing down the hall towards her. The man stared instead at the glowing screen of his cell phone as he walked. Keys jingled on his belt, tucked under the belly that strained buttons on his shirt.

  Emma held her breath, scared to even exhale and make that much noise in the quiet. The man moved out of view. She blew out her breath as quietly as she could.

  The phone buzzed again.

  Go.

  She set off, moving fast. All the way to the interior room they’d showed her on the map. Some kind of secret lab that only the top doctors—like Elizabeth Caulder and her husband—had access to. And only with a code.

  How they were going to get it, Emma didn’t know, but she prayed no one was going to die in the process. She figured the blackmailer had paid Aaron Jones to kill the senator. Or compelled him to do so in some way. Emma knew from Double Down that another woman, a victim of the blackmailer, had committed suicide.

  He had cost people their lives through his actions. Emma didn’t want to die. But more than that, she didn’t want anyone else to, either. She was done being involved in so much death.

  And so she prayed.

  In the hallway of a medical research facility she’d broken into, she lifted the cry of her heart to the Father who always heard. The Father who had never deceived her.

  As she walked, Emma glanced at the doorways. Auditory research. The next one said, Frequency Studies. All this had to do with sound? One said something about “resonance.” She was an accountant, so she had no idea what it was all about except that it sounded interesting.

  Patient Studies gave her pause. Was there someone inside she could ask for help? The SUV men had drilled into her how dangerous it would be to draw attention to herself. But wouldn’t it be worth the risk to at least try? Maybe that was naïve thinking.

  At the end of the hall she turned left. The overhead lights were more sporadic now, giving her the impression she was moving into some kind of secret area. Seriously, how obvious could they get? Emma pushed aside fear, and the temptation to look over her shoulder for the fiftieth time, and kept walking.

  All the way to room 311.

  The doctor’s keycard got her inside where she was faced with a wall of glass windows. On the other side of the glass was a huge room that could have been a basketball court for all she knew. Except for the sign beside the door at the end of the viewing area where she stood.

  Do not enter when red light is on.

  Weapons testing in progress.

  Auditory research, medical studies and…weapons testing? Her thoughts raced around and around as she tried to put all the pieces of the puzzle together in some semblance of order. A blackmailer. A place like this. Emma, caught in the middle. Others’ lives in danger. Being pushed to take the blame for a murder.

  The door she was supposed to get the code for was at the end. Lab 43. Highly protected by security in a building where weapons were being tested.

  Emma took a step back, feeling like she’d been punched in the face. Did the blackmailer want her to steal some kind of weapon for him?

  Like a bomb?

  Was she going to be implicated in some kind of terrorist attack? Accused of killing hundreds of innocent people…or more?

  Chapter 20

  “Execute.” The command from Steve came through Mint’s earpiece.

  Steve and Bradley took out the two men flanking Elizabeth Caulder. Mint waited while Brent realized what was happening and then said, “Let’s go,” in a low voice he hoped wasn’t audible over the phone.

  He ushered the man to a room off the main ballroom of the hotel. A quiet place that looked like a work area for professionals traveling. Or a meeting room.

  He wasn’t under any illusion that the blackmailer—or persons in his employ—weren’t watching the whole thing. Whoever it was would likely know right away that they had intercepted the situation and resolved the danger. But the risk of exposure was worth it to secure Elizabeth Caulder and eliminate the threat against her that was being used to coerce her husband into doing the blackmailer’s bidding.

  Brent had the phone to his ear. He blanched, listening to the person on the other end. Mint waved for the phone, put it on speaker and laid it on the table.

  “So nice of you to join us, Mr. Davis.” The voice on the other end was distorted, probably male, and heavily disguised. There was no way to find out who it was without a sophisticated computer system.

  “Where is Emma?”

  Brent stood, listening, while the blackmailer said, “On an important assignment for me.”

  “Because you threatened her into doing it?” Mint balled his hands into fists. “You haven’t tortured her enough so you thought you’d get your jollies doing it one more time?”

  “My work is far more important than jollies, as you so call it.” Disdain dripped from his words. Either he had a high position in life and so expected people to just defer to him on everything, or he was naturally completely condescending.

  Either way, Mint figured the man believed this was the only way. But to do what? They had no idea what his endgame was.

  Mint glanced at Brent Caulder. Did this man know? Hopefully Brent could shed some light on all this.

  “Which brings us back to the point,” the blackmailer said. “Mr. Caulder, the code if you please?”

  “No.” Caulder’s chin lifted. “My wife is safe now. There’s no way I’m letting you in my lab. Not now and not ever.”

  “Hmm. That presents a problem, doesn’t it?” The blackmailer paused for a few seconds. “If you’ll direct your attention to the phone on the table. A text just came in.”

  Mint’s whole body jerked. The blackmailer couldn’t just hear, he could see them? Mint had shut the door. There was no one else in the room with them.

  He spun around and glanced at the walls. High up in one corner was a security camera.

  “Smile. You’re live.”

  Mint figured that was an expression, not that he was actually live on some website. Not that he cared. Who would watch a video of two guys staring at a phone? He snatched up the cell and swiped through to the text without ending the call. The number was unknown, the text—a photo. Emma.

  “That’s the lab,” Caulder said, looking over his shoulder. “Or the hallway out
side it, anyway.”

  The blackmailer’s voice came through the line. “And so we move from one bargaining chip to another.” He paused a second. “The code, or Mr. Davis’s charge—who he hasn’t been keeping close tabs on I might add—meets a disastrous end. Though, I’ll let you pick, Mr. Davis. Death or life in prison.”

  “You hurt one single hair on her—”

  Laughter rang out. When the blackmailer was done being amused, he said, “Perhaps if you care so much for her well-being, you wouldn’t have allowed her to slip out from right under your nose. Twice, if I recall.”

  This man had been watching the entire time. The realization washed over Mint as he ran through the how and why of it all. They could unpack that later all they wanted. Right now there was a major problem to solve.

  He said, “We’re not going to allow you to leverage someone’s life, and their future, for your own gain. Whatever you’re trying to do, there’s no way Emma would want that to happen. Whatever you have planned, it’s not going to work.”

  Mint felt pretty good about that. Or at least, he wanted to. Inside, his stomach was roiling, and he wondered if he was about to lose his lunch all over the floor. With the blackmailer and a doctor he didn’t know watching. That would probably amuse the blackmailer to no end.

  The truth was, the man had a huge amount of leverage.

  There was no way Mint wanted Emma to lose her freedom, her future, or her life. And he would do everything he could to make things okay again for her.

  “Mr. Caulder?” the blackmailer said. “Your device, or this woman’s life?”

  Brent shifted.

  Mint glanced at him. He wanted to shake his head, to tell Brent not to do it. Emma wouldn’t want it. But despite what he’d said, Mint realized he didn’t have it in him to convince someone else. Even though he wanted to.

  Brent swallowed. “What difference does it make who is in danger? My wife, or a woman you care about?” He asked the question in a low voice, but not so low the blackmailer couldn’t hear.