She was caught by sudden racking emotion. Her expression contorted, fighting whatever was happening inside her, but a tear slid over the sharp bones of her cheek. Jordan watched her rub it away, and even though he could feel his own heart clench like a fist, the pain barely touched him. His mind was somewhere else, strangely removed from everything that was happening. Instead of going crazy, he’d gone sane. More than sane, he was unmoved, immovable. Maybe the gods had decided to grant him one last second or two of his famous detachment, and along with that, a flash of clarity.
She might not have a weapon, he told himself, but she was armed. Her tears were deadlier than any gun.
She looked up at him, achingly desperate. Her fingers flew up, searching for invisible strands of hair.
Impulsively she approached him.
“I said stay where you are!”
“Jordan, please—”
“Stay there!” He pulled the gun from inside his jacket. His only plan was to keep her where she was. Otherwise, he would have to physically restrain her until he could get the police here. And he didn’t want that. He knew better than to allow himself anywhere near her.
“Jordan, no!” She flinched as he turned the gun on her.
He clicked on the laser sight and held the SIGPro steady. The red beam moved up her body, and she gave out a strangled cry. She might as well have turned the gun on him the way that sound cut through him. What was this doing to her? It was not a question he could afford to ask himself, but it slugged its way into his thoughts. To be held at gunpoint by the man who had vowed to save her? What kind of damage was that doing?
But Angela could feel nothing at that moment. Something had sealed off inside her when he turned the gun on her, a wall as impenetrable as the one that had protected her memory. She’d had a premonition that he was going for a gun even before he reached into his jacket, and she had pulled her backpack around as a shield. But now as she clamped the pack to her chest, her hand touched metal.
There was something in the front zipper pocket. She could tell by the handle that it was a weapon, a revolver.
She had no idea how it got there unless—
Unless someone had thought she might need to defend herself. The ramifications of that were unbelievable. Who could have done it besides Sammy? He’d said several things that had struck her as bizarre, especially his warning about Jordan. Did he want her to find the gun and force Jordan’s hand?
“Jordan, don’t,” she implored. “They do want me dead, and they want you to kill me. Please believe me. They even planted a gun in my purse.”
She unzipped the pocket to show him. Here! This was her proof! They were trying to set her up. “See?”
Her voice hissed softly, but all Jordan saw as her hand came out of the pouch was the black silhouette of deadly metal. He saw the pistol grip of a .380 caliber semiautomatic, the Cyclops eye of the barrel and a diabolically beautiful killer, reaching for her weapon.
His first thought was to shoot the gun out of her hand.
He yelled at her to stop, begged her to stop, but by that time, a powerful involuntary impulse had sparked motor nerves. He couldn’t stop himself. There was never a conscious command from his brain to shoot. He wasn’t even aware that he’d squeezed the trigger, but the gun went off. With her huge, startled eyes frozen in the halo of a tiny red dot, the gun went off.
THE evening air was heavy with the scent of lilacs and warm breezes gently wafted the rich perfume into every nook and cranny of the old covered porch. Lacy white petals fluttered and lifted, stirring up more sweetness and memories of better days. Days not blurred with pain and regret.
Jordan stood in the darkness, recalling nights he’d slept out here in a hammock when he was a kid and summer afternoons when his parents sat in the yard in aluminum lawn chairs, sipping lemonade and fanning themselves with the newspaper. How he missed those times. And what he would have given to revisit them, if only in his mind. But the comforting images were lost in the creak of wooden steps.
The front porch stairs announced a solitary figure, and Jordan felt his stomach turn when a beam of moonlight illuminated the man’s face. The burn scars seemed even more grotesque than he remembered, but the agent still led with them, as if he’d vowed to make sure that was what the world saw.
Jordan came out of the shadows. It was a calculated move. He wanted Firestarter out, too. He wanted to see the man’s face, but the agent didn’t accommodate him.
“You said it was urgent,” Firestarter said. “It had better be.”
“She’s dead.” Jordan’s voice was low and hot. He didn’t know how to put the agony in it that should have been there. He barely knew how to speak to this man. “Angela Lowe is dead.”
“Did you do it?”
Yes, I did it, you murdering scum. Happy now? “She was here when I got home tonight. She had a gun in her backpack, and when she pulled it out, I shot her.”
The agent nodded. “Self-defense, then. You’re fine. Everything is fine.”
Everything was not fine. Jordan could barely conceive of things being less fine. “I have some questions.”
“There isn’t time. Where’s the body?”
Jordan wondered if his stare was as drill-bit hard as it felt. He could have cut the man’s heart out without instruments. “I’ll tell you when you answer my questions and not before. Is that clear, you cold-blooded bastard?”
There was a flicker of surprise on the agent’s part. Jordan sensed more than saw the hitch in his neck, the faint scowl.
Score one, Carpenter. He wanted to get the man turned around so he could see him. The burns were like a mask, concealing his identity.
“Angela Lowe swore that I was part of an experiment,” Jordan said, “something she called ‘brain-tapping.’ She swore it right up until the moment she died. What was she talking about?”
The agent snorted impatiently. “How would I know? The woman was certifiably crazy. She lived in a fantasy world, and she wove one around you. That was how she wormed her way into your life. You didn’t believe any of that, did you?”
A smart son of a bitch like me? Jordan thought. Hell, no, I didn’t believe her. Any more than I believe you. “She talked about remote sensing and wireless technology, about the subjects drinking a brain cocktail every morning.”
“And how fantastical does that sound? She was a classic paranoid. I’m surprised she didn’t claim you were abducted by aliens.”
“Not so fantastical at all.” There was a wicker tea table on the porch where Jordan had left a set of drawings. He retrieved them to show the other man a device that could have passed for a portable TV set, except for the innovative antenna loop. In simple terms, it created its own magnetic field and could measure magnetic and electrical flux at ultralow levels with extreme accuracy.
“I developed this device myself while I was in medical school,” he told the agent. “It’s basically a remote sensor for monitoring the electrical impulses of the heart. I also wrote a paper that suggested adaptations. One of them was for the brain.”
Firestarter waved the papers away. “Maybe she read about your work. She was a medical groupie, and you were one of her heroes. She collected every article she could find about you.”
“The paper was never published. I was concerned about the potential for misuse if the idea fell into the wrong hands.”
“What the hell is this?” Firestarter demanded angrily. “You’re defending a serial killer? I’m not answering any more questions. Tell me where the goddamn body is, Carpenter, or I’ll call in reinforcements.”
“That sounds like a threat.”
The agent came at Jordan, snarling from the scarred side of his face. “Here’s another one, in case you have any doubt. You just killed a woman in cold blood, and you’re going to need the agency’s help. With my testimony, you won’t go to jail. In fact, you’ll be a hero. Without my testimony . . . well, shit happens.”
Jordan laughed, and God, it felt good. He lau
ghed long and hard. He laughed until the other man raged at him and demanded to know what the fuck was going on.
“Any shit that happens will be happening to you,” Jordan said. “Did it ever occur to you that I might not need your testimony?”
“What do you mean? Of course you need my testimony.”
The two men locked gazes, and Jordan had a fleeting sense of triumph, but mostly he felt pity. His opponent was a fool in so many ways.
The silence grew as they both waited. Waited for the moment that Jordan had been anticipating all night.
And then it came.
“Not if I’m alive, he doesn’t.”
It was a woman’s voice, soft and seductive. Firestarter gave out an audible gasp as he realized who it was. He whirled toward the front door as she appeared on the threshold, her hair as long and dark and liquid as a jungle night, her eyes sparkling like stars.
Angela Lowe made a very compelling ghost.
Flushed with victory, she was as lovely as Jordan had ever seen her.
“Here’s the goddamn body,” she said, looking directly at the agent.
Jordan didn’t want to think about how close he’d come to actually killing her. He’d been aiming for the gun, not her, with the crazy thought that he could shoot it out of her hand. But she dropped to her knees, and suddenly it was her face in his sights.
Two things impinged on him at once in that shadowland where life-and-death decisions are made. One was something Angela herself had said about the experiment, and the other was a woman’s face appearing in his doorway.
A second ghost. She was there and gone before he could see who it was, and maybe she’d never been there at all. He would never know, but it had all happened in a split second—the ghost, the gunshot—infinitely less time than it took to lose a patient in surgery. And infinitely more devastating.
“Jordan! He has a gun!”
Angela’s warning came too late. Firestarter had pulled a weapon, and he was holding it on Angela. It was a wild bluff to get Jordan to disarm.
Jordan thought about jaguars and boldness. He thought about how close he’d come to killing someone he was trying to save.
“I’m not dying alone here tonight,” the agent vowed.
It was a stalemate, but Jordan played it out, calculating the odds of putting a bullet through the agent’s brain before he could squeeze the trigger. In the seconds it took him to make his decision, he saw a flicker of movement in his peripheral vision.
The other ghost. She’d floated through the doorway of his living room and come up behind the agent, a soundless, weightless apparition draped in black. Jordan couldn’t take his eyes off Firestarter, but he could see that this ghost had significantly improved Jordan’s odds. She had a gun in her hand.
Angela spotted the woman seconds after Jordan did and let out a cry of surprise. “Silver!”
Firestarter whirled as if beset by demons, and Jordan saw his chance. This time he had the agent in his laser sight. And he didn’t miss.
CHAPTER 24
“LONG time no see, Ron,” Jordan said softly.
He got little more than a growl from the man as he collapsed on the floor, clutching his bleeding hand. Jordan hadn’t shot him through the head for good reason. Dead men couldn’t talk, and this particular CIA agent had a lot more talking to do.
Jordan had been aiming for the gun, but his first round hit the agent’s hand, which achieved the same result. The second lifted his hat and sent it flying. That was when Jordan realized who he was dealing with. His old rival from medical school was finally recognizable once the unscathed side of his face was exposed.
Angela was still stranded across the room.
“Come over here.” Jordan beckoned her to his side while he kept the gun trained on the agent.
She fell into his outstretched arm with enough enthusiasm to force a grunt out of him, and when he pulled her close, whatever had been holding him together through it all threatened to give way. He wanted to take her in both arms and hold her until the shaking eased. And maybe he could, he realized. They had some pretty interesting backup. Their dark ghost of a visitor had an all-business Austrian Glock in her hand, and it was trained on the agent.
“Who the hell is she?” Jordan asked Angela under his breath.
“A friend, I’d like to think,” Angela said. “Silver and I go way back.”
“Ron and I go way back, too.” Jordan indicated the man on the floor. “This could be a high school reunion.”
Silver smiled from across the room. The sleek black turtleneck and jeans she wore accentuated the metallic flecks in her pale blue eyes. But the black knit cap made her look a little too much like La Femme Nikita. Jordan had trouble imagining her as anyone’s friend, much less Angela’s.
Although there was a side of Angela—
“Feel free to holster the weapon,” Silver told Jordan. “I can handle things from here on out.”
“I’m sure you can,” he said, “but I have some questions for the man. And if he doesn’t answer me, I’m going to shoot him again, probably several more times. I’d hate for you to get caught in the crossfire.”
Silver nodded and stepped back. She winked at Angela as if to say, Interesting choice in men.
“Nasty burn, Ron.” Jordan was unsparing in his sarcasm. “Playing with matches again? You nearly burned down the dorm at school, more than once as I remember.”
“Kid stuff.” The other man scoffed, but he touched the facial scars with a sense of pride that was almost childlike. “As for my face, it was an unfortunate accident with some flammable chemicals, a lab accident.”
“Not unfortunate enough,” Jordan muttered.
Laird held out his oozing hand. “The heroic heart surgeon is going to let his gunshot victim bleed to death? How will that play at the press conference?”
Jordan smiled. “Hey, congratulations on your career transition from amoral doctor to amoral CIA agent.”
“He isn’t CIA.”
Silver’s cool remark brought a startled glare from Firestarter. “And who the fuck are you?”
“I am CIA,” she informed him. “But ten years ago I worked for your company as an informant, although I wouldn’t expect you to remember that. Or that someone from SmartTech decided to have me die on an operating table when I tried to blow the whistle on the assignments I was being given.”
“SmartTech?” Angela spoke up as if she hadn’t heard correctly.
Silver extended her hand. “Angela, I’d like you to meet your boss and one of the founders of SmartTech, Ron Laird.”
Angela’s surprise was audible. She’d never mentioned Laird to Jordan, and apparently she’d never come face-to-face with him, but then she’d only been at SmartTech a year, and it was Brandt who’d mentored her, not Laird. Any contact with Laird during her informant years was unlikely, too. She would probably have reported to a security type, so while she was obviously on Laird’s radar screen, he was not on hers.
As Silver continued, things began to fall into place for Jordan.
“I guess you could say that I’ve been interested in you and your company for some time now,” she told Laird. “The way you subvert government contracts for your own gain and covertly conduct biowarfare research, not to mention silencing your informants and their sources when they become inconvenient.”
“You have no proof,” Laird shot back. “No proof of anything.”
Angela quietly contradicted him. “I have proof that you’re running unethical experiments. And that you used me to kill a source you believed was going to sell you out. I remember it all, Dr. Laird, everything I wiped from my mind so you wouldn’t silence me.”
Laird was fearless. He was smug. “What’s unethical about tapping my own brain? I was your favorite subject, Angela—Alpha Ten. The rest of the images were simulations, and the people you interviewed were students who thought they were part of a study on innate intelligence, whatever the hell that is.”
Angela
’s voice was faint with disbelief. “Did Peter know about that?”
“Peter’s been too busy marketing Angel Face to properly supervise your work, so it fell to me.”
“But Peter must have known. He sent me E-mail instructions—Oh, God, that was you.”
Jordan released Angela and approached Ron Laird. The longer he listened, the more he began to grasp the extremes this man was capable of. Not that he was completely surprised. Ron had been suspended from both medical school and his residency in neurobiology for questionable conduct. He had never become a practicing physician but had gone into research instead, a frightening thought with his Machiavellian mind.
Jordan knelt to look at him, maybe with the thought of staring him in the eye and probing the dim recesses of another man’s soul, if that was possible. It was hard to believe that his erstwhile friend had always been this way. Something must have happened to turn him so calculating and inhumane.
“You helped yourself to my remote sensor idea, didn’t you,” Jordan said. “The one I shelved because I was concerned about misuse. You wanted to buy the rights with your family’s money, and I refused, so you lifted it. Now you’re using it with your AIR software and your supercomputers to invade people’s most basic right to privacy—their own thoughts. That’s the experiment Angela’s been talking about, the one I didn’t believe existed.”
“Maybe the rough design was yours,” Laird admitted, “but I’ve spent a small fortune of my own money on research and development, and now I’ve got government backing. Whatever it takes, they’ll fund it. There wasn’t the technology to do it back then. There is now, because of me. Think about it, Jordan. Angel Face is a criminal profiling program that can stop crime—violent crime. And that’s just one of its applications. It has unlimited potential, and I’m the only one who could have developed it. Don’t you see that?”
Jordan saw exactly what he feared. Laird didn’t know what he’d done, or he didn’t care. This wasn’t about the good he could do, no matter what he told himself. It was about the glory. He wanted recognition so desperately he couldn’t see the profound ethical questions his work had created and how flagrantly he’d abused his power. In someone else’s hands, and tightly regulated, perhaps Angel Face could be useful, but never in his hands.
Angel Face Page 27