Variable Onset

by Layla Reyne

  For a panicked moment, Lincoln swore the ex–top cop had seen right through their cover. His panic rose, exponentially, when Barry shifted his blue eyes to him. “And I want blondie to answer.”

  Carter scoffed, hand splayed on his chest in mock outrage. “My answer’s not good enough?”

  “Shut up, Georgia.”

  Lincoln’s panic receded, a little. If Carter had fooled him on the accent, then Barry didn’t know. He suspected—he was fishing—but he didn’t know. Time for Lincoln to pull his weight, as a partner. Except there was that tiny speed bump of having not discussed this part of their cover. An oversight, lost in the delays this morning and the unexpected party last night. The party... Fuck! He shifted in his seat, angling away from Barry and toward Carter. “You didn’t tell them this story last night?”

  If Carter had, they were fucked. His only hope would be Susanne or Jennifer jumping in to tell the story for him. Which he didn’t think angry-Barry-Jerry would abide.

  “No,” Susanne said. “He was just about to when you arrived.”

  She, Jennifer, and Lydia hunched forward, forearms on the table, eagerly awaiting the story. It reminded Lincoln of Elena and her friends when they were younger, snuggled in sleeping bags on the living room floor. They would beg him for a scary story, and he would plumb his research and cases for remembered bits and pieces he could assemble into a good scare.

  Carter stretched an arm across the booth behind him and smirked, that same one from the first day of class. “Go ahead and tell them, honey.”

  Cocky asshole. And it grated that that smirk was the answer to Lincoln’s dilemma. He knew exactly what to do. He righted himself and turned his attention half to Barry, half to the ladies. “I was his teacher.”

  “Ooh,” Lydia said, as she pulled her thick gray hair back into a ponytail. “This is gonna be good.” Her hazel eyes twinkled with interest, the same shared by everyone around the table, including Barry.

  “What’s a librarian got to teach a survival expert?” he asked.

  Carter’s arm tensed behind Lincoln. “We didn’t tell you that.”

  “Didn’t have to.” He waggled his accusing finger at Susanne and Jennifer this time. “They were giving Lydia the 4-1-1 before you arrived.”

  Carter relaxed, and so did Lincoln, continuing with his story. “I taught information science classes on the side, at one of the community colleges. Carter was a student there.”

  “When I got out of the army,” Carter said, picking up where he’d left off, “I knew the field part of survival training. Knew I wanted to bring certain aspects of it to local law enforcement agencies and other interested parties who might benefit. But this one—” he dropped his arm off the top of the booth onto Lincoln’s shoulders and squeezed “—taught me some of the technical parts of running a business. How to create systems for finding and storing data, which also helps with client databases.”

  “That was eight years ago.” If Lincoln sounded genuinely impressed, it was the truth. Scared a little too. Carter had effortlessly spun all that from his head.

  “And you’ve been together that long?” Barry asked. “They told Lyd you were newlyweds. Long time to wait.”

  “Oh, no,” Carter said. “We only recently reconnected.”

  “I wouldn’t have married him eight years ago,” Lincoln said. “He was the worst student I’ve ever had.”

  “Hey!”

  “Loud, always interrupting, always had to be the center of attention.” None of that was a lie. “Hard to handle in a full class.”

  “Which was why I had to be so loud. So you’d see me.”

  “Oh, I saw you.” Lincoln cut his eyes to Carter...and snagged on the earnest expression that had wiped away the agent’s usual smirk. Wait... Did he actually mean that, or was this part of the performance? It sure as fuck didn’t look like a lie, and Lincoln hadn’t been lying before either. Was this Carter’s honest response? And what did it mean? Heat flared in Lincoln’s chest and warmth crept up his neck again, on the way to searing his cheeks. As acutely as he felt it, everyone else must have seen it too. The swoony collective sigh from across the table confirmed as much. Cover sold, intentionally or not.

  “How’d you reconnect?” Jennifer asked, a dreamy quality to her voice.

  “Carter called me with a particular research question. Asked for a meet.”

  “I’m glad you accepted.” Carter tore his gaze away, aiming it back across the table, and Lincoln’s mortification at having been caught staring, still, made him blush harder. “I heard him play his guitar about two months after that meet. Proposed on the spot.”

  And the sighs got louder. But it was the bucket of ice water Lincoln needed to snap out of the land of impossibilities. Just in time too, as Barry was back on the case.

  “You gonna be doing some research here?” he asked. “I assume they’re not paying you to just stack books.”

  “Yes, it’s a bit more than that,” Lincoln said with a chuckle. “I’m studying population migration in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Apex has some of the best-kept archives in the region.”

  Barry’s stern face broke into a wide smile. “That’d be my brother Harry’s doing.” But then the grin dimmed. “He worked at the library, before you. Passed last year.”

  “I’m sorry for your loss,” Lincoln said, meaning it. Clearly Barry had been proud of his brother and felt his loss.

  “Thank you.” Apparently satisfied, or sufficiently mollified, for the time being, Barry extended his big paw to Lincoln. “You got any questions, just ask. I’ve got a list of Harry’s passwords somewhere, and I’ve been around these parts longer than most.”

  “Thanks, Barry,” Carter said, returning the shake Barry offered him next.

  Beneath the table, Carter’s knee knocked against Lincoln’s, and when Barry turned back toward the kitchen, Carter flashed him a victorious smile. They’d survived that speed bump, even managed to connect with a potentially valuable resource. But the victory was short-lived.

  “You know,” Susanne said, “the church accompanist has taken ill.”

  ABORT.

  “So, Jennifer,” Lincoln said, “tell us how you and Susanne met?”

  She grinned and looked fondly at her thankfully stymied wife. “It’s not as swoony as yours, but it’s still a pretty good story.”

  Carter bumped his knee again, then lowered his face to Lincoln’s shoulder, pretending to drop a kiss there, but Lincoln felt the tremors of his laughter. Green eyes twinkled up at him and the mischief in them worried Lincoln. More than a little.

  Chapter Five

  Carter waited until they were halfway across the snow-dusted quad, far enough away from the car that Lincoln wouldn’t bolt, before he brought up the thing his partner least wanted to hear. “You need to play at the church service.”

  Lincoln rounded on him mid-step, teetering only slightly on the slick walkway. “Absolutely not.”

  “Back there at the café, you changed the subject awfully fast.”

  “Your point?” Lincoln snapped.

  “I said it already. You need to play that service. From what I can tell, there are three main gathering places in Apex and other small towns like it. School, which we’ve got covered, the local watering hole, which we visited this morning, and...”

  “Church,” Lincoln grumbled.

  “Exactly. So, what’s the problem?”

  “I’m an atheist,” Lincoln answered. “And extremely opposed, politically and philosophically, to organized religion.”

  “And I’m a gay, very-lapsed Jew who put on a sports coat and red tie every day for eighteen months and wooed a senator’s daughter so I could infiltrate her politician father’s inner circle.”

  The look of disgust on Lincoln’s face was the same one Carter had had to hide that entire assignment. One of the worst of
his career. The desert and all of its ghosts were better than that particular tour of duty.

  “Accurate,” he said, then, hand at the small of Lincoln’s back, started them walking again. “But I did it because I was an FBI agent investigating suspected abuse of collegiate athletes. And sure enough, at a fundraiser for her father and his rich white evangelical cronies, I walked in on the senator and two other men forcing themselves on a scholarship athlete.”

  Lincoln gasped and missed a step. Carter wrapped a hand around the strap of his messenger bag to keep him upright. “That was you?” he said. “You broke that case?”

  It was the biggest bust of Carter’s FBI career, one he was particularly proud of. He was a foster kid; he knew what it felt like to be cornered without a choice. Those scholarship athletes had been in a similar position, forced to suffer abuse or else lose their place on the team and a shot at a better future. But Carter had asked that his involvement in the case be kept confidential. He’d wanted the spotlight to remain on the victims, on the corruption that had led to the abuse, and on the assholes who were stripped of their political offices and jailed. He’d also wanted to continue undercover work, which meant his face couldn’t be splashed all over the news.

  “I was,” he said. “Now you’re facing a similar dilemma. Do you want to be the one who breaks this case? Who finally catches Dr. Fear? You said you’d do anything to bring Kirk’s kid home.”

  Lincoln cursed and plowed a hand through his hair, leaving the blond-and-silver strands askew. “You don’t understand,” he said, voice plaintive. “I don’t—can’t—play in front of people.”

  Ah, so this was a double whammy for Lincoln. Carter gentled his push, understanding better how big an ask this was. But there was so much else on the line too—two lives and possibly more. “Not even for Ruby Kirk?”

  Lincoln released a heavy, resigned sigh. “I’ll consider it, though fair warning, I might burst into flames the second I step inside the building.”

  “No might about me.” Laughter broke the tension that had wormed its way between them, and Carter aimed to chase it farther away. “You’re better at this undercover stuff than you think.”

  “I was a terrible field agent.”

  “I heard.”

  Lincoln chuckled. “I see my reputation precedes me too.”

  “Except fieldwork as an agent and fieldwork undercover are two very different things. We’re doing our job here but we’re also playing a role.”

  Beside him, Lincoln missed another step, but he corrected before Carter had to catch him again. “Sorry, I’m not the best in winter weather. I haven’t worn these boots in three years. Last time—” He cut off his nervous ramble, about what Carter didn’t know, and waved a hand at him. “Sorry, go on.”

  Carter struggled to remember what he was saying, the blush on the professor’s cheeks distracting. The attractive color streaking over pale skin had damn near killed him back in the café. Depending on how long this case lasted, it might kill him still. Not a bad way to go. Cause of death: too hot for teacher.

  “The role,” Lincoln prompted, as he veered toward the library.

  Carter gently tugged his elbow the opposite direction toward the surprise that had thankfully come together in time. He picked up his undercover tutorial before Lincoln asked about the redirect. “Sometimes a role is easier to slip into than talking to witnesses or questioning suspects. Professor Polk asking questions is very different than Agent Monroe asking them.”

  Light brown eyes flickered to the side, considering him with something like gratitude and awe, a potent cocktail. “You’re good at this.”

  “As I said.”

  “Okay, question then, where are we going? Because the library was back that way.” He jutted a thumb over his shoulder. “And if I recall the campus map correctly, this is a biology building.” He nudged an orange plastic post with his foot. “That’s apparently under construction.”

  “You recall correctly. This is Parness Hall, biology department.” Carter followed the footpath around to the building’s side entrance. “It’s closed until summer while they finish remodeling the bottom two floors.”

  “And the top two?”

  Carter withdrew a key card from his pocket and waved it in front of the card reader. The lock audibly disengaged, and Carter pushed open the door for Lincoln. “After you, Professor.”

  “You said last night we didn’t have after-hours access.”

  “To the library.” He withdrew a second card and handed it to Lincoln. “Susanne brought these last night. They’re not keyed for the library, though.”

  “I’m not a fan of surprises.”

  “Trust me,” Carter said with a wink. “I think you’ll be a fan of this one.” He hoped so. Carter was eager to prove to Lincoln that he was good at more than just playing the cover.

  Inside, they dodged stacks of plastic-covered construction supplies to reach the stairwell door. The key card granted them access, and they climbed two flights to the third floor, emerging into a different world. As Carter had hoped. No plastic tarps, no pallets of tools and equipment, no lingering construction dust. Just bright shiny floors, clean white walls, and empty labs waiting to be filled.

  And a dark-haired man dressed in a three-piece suit, waiting outside a door halfway down the hallway.

  “Chancellor McCullough?” Carter asked. He’d looked up the chancellor on Apex U’s website, and Carter was fairly certain this was him, but the Ryan McCullough in the profile photo on the website didn’t have the deep lines around his eyes or the thinning hair of Ryan McCullough in person.

  “That’s me,” the chancellor said. “Are you—” He cut himself off, gaze shifting between Carter and Lincoln. “I spoke with someone...from DC.”

  “That was me,” Carter said, dropping the Southern accent for the neutral, unaccented one he typically used for business calls, including the one he’d made to McCullough yesterday. Carter reached into his pocket and withdrew his FBI credentials. “Special Agent Carter Warren,” he said, holding the badge out to McCullough. “And this is my partner, Agent Lincoln Monroe.”

  Lincoln likewise handed over his badge, which the chancellor cursorily glanced at before passing both of them back.

  “Sorry about that,” McCullough said. “I mean of course you’re them. You’ve got the key card I sent over with Susanne. I put it in the usual welcome package for new faculty, hoping she wouldn’t... This is just—”

  “Unusual,” Carter supplied.

  “To say the least,” he said with a kind smile, and Carter thought perhaps he’d misjudged those deep grooves around the other man’s eyes. “And please, call me Ryan. I’m so sorry I missed the welcome party last night.”

  Handshakes and pleasantries were exchanged, Carter doing most of the talking. Lincoln was relatively quiet, seemingly more interested in their surroundings. Part of the awkward agent bit? Or just the excited nerd?

  Ryan picked up on it too and held out a ring of keys to Lincoln. “I’m guessing these are for you.”

  Forehead wrinkled, Lincoln looked from Ryan, to the keys, to Carter. “I thought I was working at the library?”

  “But it’s not just about the archives, is it?” Carter said.

  With Lincoln frozen in some sort of shocked stasis, Carter accepted the keys from Ryan, opened the lab door, and gently pushed Lincoln inside.

  Carter surveyed the room. Two long lab benches, desks at the far end along the windows, a principal investigator’s private office in one corner, and all the equipment Carter had requested. A fume hood in one corner, and spread out on benches: microscopes, chromatographs, spectrometers, a DNA sequencer, and all the necessary peripherals, plus other crime lab basics such as powders, brushes, and tapes. At the desks, two docking stations with keyboards, monitors, and mouses awaited their laptops, and the office had been transformed into a tempo
rary dark room, suitable for photo processing.

  Carter tossed his coat on the closest stool. “Any questions about the setup requests?” he asked the chancellor.

  Ryan shook his head. “Snagged the DNA sequencer from a genetics professor’s lab. He’s on sabbatical this semester. The rest will be perfect for the crystallography professor we’re wooing. He’s scheduled to visit later this month.”

  A few feet in front of them, Lincoln rotated in place, taking in the space. “You remembered all this from class?”

  The wonder in his eyes was intoxicating. So much so that Carter backtracked, before he got drunk on it in Ryan’s presence. “Mostly, though I called your assistant a half dozen times to confirm.”

  It’d only been one call, but the partial lie had the intended effect. Lincoln scoffed and hitched a hip. As much as Carter had enjoyed the look of awe, the praise he craved, prickly Lincoln was a comfort too, the professor back to his usual self.

  “You’ve got what you need?” Carter asked him.

  “Yep.” Lincoln dropped his bag on a bench and moved down the aisle. “Thank you, Ryan.”

  “Can I ask who or what you’re looking for?” Ryan said.

  “We can’t tell you that,” Carter answered.

  The chancellor wrung his hands, then straightened his tie. Maybe the lines around his eyes were from smiling, but Carter would bet that receding hairline was equal parts genetics and worry about Apex U. “I just need to know if my campus is in danger.”

  “It’s very unlikely,” Lincoln said.

  “If that changes,” Carter added, “you’ll be the first to know.”

  “Guess I’ll have to live with that.”

  Carter withdrew his wallet and pulled out a business card. “My cell number is on here.” He handed the card to Ryan. “Call if you have any concerns. And thank you again for working with us and getting all this set up on such short notice.”

  Pocketing the card, Ryan adjusted his tie once more, then glided his hands down the front of his jacket, as if sweeping away his nerves. “It’s no trouble. We’re proud of our archives collection here. If it can assist you, if this can too—” he gestured at the lab setup “—then I’m happy to help.”