"Anja?" This time the question came from Brittany.
"I...think of something I forgot to do this night." A frown grew between Anja's elegantly trimmed eyebrows. "I must go back to the lab."
"Oh! No," exclaimed Shana, turning around at the back door. "We all agreed. Wednesday was sacred."
"I'm very sorry." Anja's face was an odd mix of preoccupation and regret as she rose from her cross-legged position on the floor. "I don't know how I could have forgotten. Is very urgent. You all excuse me, please."
"No." Shana looked as if she were about to stamp her foot.
"Of course we'll excuse you." Brittany threw a dark look toward Shana. "Emergencies can happen to anybody."
"Well, " Shana relented, obviously remembering as she strode back toward the futon sofa. "There was that time I had to finish up a proposal for a big client by midnight."
"There. You see, it's perfectly all right," Brittany assured Anja.
Anja, now standing, gave them all an apologetic smile. "I'm so sorry I forgot this important thing I have to do."
"It's all right. Didn't we say so?" But Olivia felt concern beneath her own reassuring smile. Anja looked decidedly off-balance. "Do you need anything?" Olivia asked. "Is there anything we can do?"
"Yeah," Shana put in. "Anything we can do, just let us know."
"Same goes," Brittany said.
Anja appeared surprised by the offers of aid. Suddenly, the anxiety cleared from her brow. "I give up trust, but not for you, my friends. For you I keep my trust."
"Now that's the spirit," Shana said.
"You can trust me, but I don't know about her," Brittany jibed, thumbing at Shana.
Shana rolled her eyes while Anja laughed and went to the sliding glass door. "I will call soon," she promised.
"Do that," Olivia agreed, and made a note to do the calling if Anja didn't.
Meanwhile, Anja opened the sliding door. The sound of the barking dog briefly reentered the room while she stepped out and before she closed the door after herself again.
"Whose dog is that, anyway?" Shana muttered.
"I hope she's all right," Olivia murmured with a frown.
"Does this mean we get out of meditating?" Brittany asked hopefully.
"Not on your life." Olivia gestured. "Light that candle."
~~~
Outside, Anja could hear the dog clearly, though it sounded some distance away. She stood for a moment on Olivia's redwood porch, shivering in the cool evening air.
Or perhaps she was shivering at a bell tolling for her. This was a dog on a scent. She'd heard the sound before, back in Russia.
Sentimentality. She was the one who should have offered to give up that vice. It had been sentimental to attend the Girls' Night In tonight, when she knew time was crunching down on her. If the results she'd seen two days ago at the laboratory hadn't been enough to warn her, the grim-faced head of the Agency had then demanded she turn everything over to him: her results, samples, and computer hard drive. It was time, he'd said. Time to take all this 'upstairs.' Anja had put him off, saying she needed to do some fine-tuning.
Privately, she knew she couldn't let anybody, not even the boys upstairs, get their hands on something as potentially dangerous as the vector she'd developed.
She didn't even want to give it to the Agency head, a man sworn to protect her and any research she developed, a man with enough integrity and raw-edged masculinity to have made her once consider taking him for a lover.
Yes, at one time he'd been in the running. No longer.
Anja walked to the edge of Olivia's deck and squinted across the backyard toward her own house. The fixture she'd left on over the kitchen door shed a puny light in the dusk, barely illuminating the terra cotta pots of ferns and calla lilies littering the Mexican tile of her back porch.
Dare she take the time to go home? A packed suitcase waited by the front door. But she could hear the dog, barking madly. It could be anybody's dog, of course, and perhaps not even on a scent, but fifteen years of childhood in Soviet Moscow had trained her to assume the worst.
"Chort!" She couldn't go home, not if she were to keep the promise she'd just made and give up the laziness of trust. She had to assume this was an antagonist, that a leak at the Agency had set someone with dogs after her and what she'd developed.
A deliberate leak?
Anja's mouth curved cynically as she clipped down the stairs from Olivia's deck in her Manolo Blahniks. If so, the perpetrator couldn't be too high up in the chain of command. Her address was well known to the higher-ups in the Agency. Indeed, the Agency head, himself, had chosen Anja's house for her. Anja's cynical smile deepened. In the process of that selection, the man had been forced to reveal far more of his personal affairs than he'd have liked.
But that was life. Full of unfortunate little compromises. Like the one Anja was being forced to take just then, stealing through Olivia's backyard and opening the gate into Shana's, thus abandoning a suitcase full of her favorite clothes. While it was true she knew a few things about the head of the Agency he'd rather others not know, and while it was true she trusted him more than anyone else involved in the classified laboratory, she wasn't ready to stake the lives of all humanity on his integrity.
Accordingly, Anja was taking a powder. She jogged down the narrow run between Shana's house and the fence, meanwhile pulling her cell phone out of her purse. She had the phone number for the cab company memorized. Oh yes, Anja had taken care of all the little details. She'd known this day was coming.
"Yes, I need ride from 1250 Maple Way," Anja murmured into the phone, naming an address several blocks away. As she snapped the phone back into her purse, she waltzed out onto the sidewalk, as if she had no more on her mind than an evening stroll.
It almost worked, too. Until Anja nearly barreled straight into Walter. The burly undercover sentry had to reach out and grab her shoulders to keep them from colliding.
"Anja." He smiled. The gap between his front teeth made his wide face seem even wider.
Chort poberi! Anja ignored the staccato beating of her heart and produced her own, serene smile. She'd been careful to look casual, and Walter, though the size of a fullback, was harmless.
"What's going on?" Walter asked. "I thought it was Girls' Night In." He let go of Anja and he was still smiling, but that didn't change the fact he was in the pay of the Agency. That had been part of the whole we'll-give-you-a-house deal. They kept an eye on her. Walter's eyes.
Fortunately, Walter was not the brightest bulb on the tree, and he was half in love with Anja. So she turned up the wattage on her smile. "We ran out of rum," she said, "for the daiquiris."
"Oh." Walter's brow furrowed. "The liquor store is quite a piece up the road."
"Yes." Anja delivered a credibly inebriated laugh. "But I'm already in no condition to drive, even if I did have a car." Her car-lessness was no doubt how the dogs were managing to track her, following her trail from the bus stop. So much for trying to be 'green,' Anja thought.
"If that's the case," Walter said, "I can — "
"No, no." As flirtatiously as she dared, Anja pressed her palms to his broad chest. She intended to distract him, but — oh, my. Her fingers hit solid muscle. Surprised, she glanced up. Walter was big, but Anja had never considered he was also strong. Apparently very strong. Quite...masculine. Carefully, Anja lifted her hands from his broad chest. "Ah. Um, a little walk will do me good. Wait for me, hm?" She recovered enough self-possession to cock a finger at him. "I'll even give you the first sip."
"You know I don't drink when I'm on the job."
"Oh, no. Of course not." Anja made a face of mock outrage at herself. "What was I thinking? Still, you wait for me, yes?"
Walter, bless him, was so enraptured with the idea of being asked to wait for Anja that he didn't think to ask to go with her. "All right," he said, looking dopey. "I'll wait."
Giddy with relief, Anja threw him one last smile before swiveling to continue down the si
dewalk. She was going to get him into trouble, but it couldn't be helped. She could hear the dog, getting closer. She had to make it to the cab.
Anja's heart raced again, even as she kept to an even pace down the block. She, herself, was the only loose end. She'd taken care of everything else; the notes, the samples, her computer hard drive. Far from turning it all over to the Agency head, Anja had taken some very different precautions.
The thought pierced through her anxiety and curved her lips into a pleased smile. Indeed, at Olivia's house tonight she'd completed the last step in her precautions.
Nobody, not even the extremely clever head of the Agency, would be able to get his hands on her vector — not until she had made sure it was rendered perfectly safe.
~~~
He had three mixed breed pit bulls tracking the woman.
Two of the dogs were doing a fine job, baying on the scent, straining at the leash. The third dog was straining at a different part of his anatomy.
"Oh, for the love of — " Sebastian Archibald Hollister, III, slid his well-shod toe out of the way quickly as Rufus, the oldest of the three dogs, stopped and squatted, for what had to be the third time in ten minutes.
"Shit," Sebastian muttered, a word that was unfortunately apt. They were almost on her, he was sure. In his carefully nondescript suit, he peered up the tree-shaded sidewalk, past lush lawns and freshly painted mailboxes. Yes, he could easily imagine the fastidious Dr. Andropov living here.
He'd been having second thoughts about his methods of finding her, back at the bus stop when the dogs had been unable to locate her scent. Over and over he'd had to dig the Yves Saint Laurent scarf he'd stolen a month ago out of his jacket pocket to let them refresh their memory. For a terrible twenty minutes he'd thought he'd bought three track-attack dogs with terminally clogged sinuses. He'd berated himself for not simply stealing the formula. With the formula he could manufacture the drug himself, and then reap its very large rewards.
But Sebastian was aware this drug was more complicated than most. There could be a mistake in the DNA sequence. There could be a snag in bringing the thing from laboratory sample to mass-market development.
Not to mention, Dr. Andropov could have other brilliant — and lucrative — ideas in that pretty, little brain of hers.
So, feeling hot, feeling needy, at the bus stop he'd waved the woman's scarf under the dogs' noses as often as they'd liked. He wanted Andropov. With her, Hollister Pharmaceuticals could grow big, even bigger. And he could become the man he always knew he would become, despite his squalid beginnings. More than merely wealthy. Admired.
Finally, Sylvia, the yellow bitch, had lifted her head and bayed like an opera star. Portia had chimed in for a soulful duet. Sebastian's heart had soared.
And now this. Sebastian glared at the heaving brown dog. Time was closing in on him. Andropov was getting away. He could tell. Meanwhile he stood here waiting for an idiot animal to evacuate his bowels.
Hissing, Sebastian stepped close to Rufus. He snapped the leash from his spiked collar. The dog had cost a pretty penny, but there was game afoot worth many times the dog's value. Rufus was on his own now.
"Go, Portia! Go, Sylvia." Sebastian made a fist around the leashes as he let the two remaining dogs set the pace down the tree-shaded sidewalk. He would not be thwarted. He would get the woman.
With Rufus already forgotten, Sebastian smiled. As he did, a taxicab cruised past him.
CHAPTER TWO
Gideon Chandler sincerely hoped the other two men in the underground room had no idea what a mess his head was in. To prevent such a discovery, he lolled back in the chair behind the old office desk and stroked a Cross pen between his fingers, slowing everything down, doing his best to project an aura of competence and calm.
He was the guy in charge, after all. For the past nine months he'd been head of the Agency for Prevention of Technological Disaster, an elite and top secret government agency that provided security for the highly classified laboratory that sat above his office. No longer merely a section supervisor, he was top dog now, the man in charge.
As such, he had just lost the lab's single most important scientist.
Not that Anja Andropov's disappearance was what was messing up Gideon this morning.
"So you're saying Walter actually saw and spoke with her at 1900 hours yesterday?" The question came from Peter Grenadine, a whipcord of a man who looked deceptively at ease as he leaned forward in his chair, his forearms on his thighs. His eyes were keen, however, and far too perceptive, as they trained on Gideon.
Gideon resisted the urge to clear his throat. "Yes, Walter saw her."
"But how could he have just let her go?" Dashwood, a.k.a. Dash, Gideon's brainiest agent, leaned his lanky form against a bookcase, his eyes narrowed behind the lenses of his wire frame glasses and his lips pursed in thought.
"Walter was supposed to protect Anja, not restrain her," Gideon explained. "She has the highest possible clearance, which means she's not considered a flight risk."
Peter tilted his head. "Could she have been abducted?"
"Possible. But not likely."
"Why not likely?"
Gideon halted the rocking motion of his chair and heaved a deep sigh. "Because I think I'm the one who frightened her into running off."
"You?" Peter sounded incredulous. Gideon was the wonder boy. He never made mistakes, or at least not big ones.
Gideon leaned forward to rest his arms on his big, scarred desk. "I told Anja it was time to take this thing into deep freeze, higher than high security. She appeared okay with the idea, but now that I look back on it — " Gideon paused. "I can see I wasn't reading the signs. She wanted to retain control. And she took it. Everything she was working on — notes, computer files, samples — is gone. There's not a drop of information about her work that's still in our possession."
Peter's brows curled. "Just how dangerous is this drug she's developed?"
"It's not a drug," Dash corrected. He made a point of keeping au courant with what was going on in the lab. "It's a vector."
Peter turned to Dash. "Can you explain that in English?"
Dash looked affronted. "I just did."
Gideon smiled. "It's a man-made virus, specially created to infect human cells with pre-selected DNA."
Peter's brows remained curled. "Which means?"
"Gene therapy. Only Anja's will probably actually work."
Peter still seemed confused. "What's dangerous about that?"
Gideon and Dash exchanged a look. "It hasn't been tested on humans yet," Gideon said, "but Anja's vector looks to be able to give a person any genes you want."
"And that means...?"
Dash took over. "It means if you have some horrible disease because your DNA is faulty, Anja's vector can give you the right DNA and cure your disease."
"Well, that sounds good. Great, in fact."
Dash's straight lips curved at the corners. "It can be. But it also means she can give you some horrible disease by injecting bad DNA."
Peter's brows uncurled and his eyes widened. "Oh." His gaze went to Gideon. "And this woman was living next door to your ex?"
Gideon could feel his teeth start to grind. "Across the backyard, and Olivia is not my 'ex.'"
"Might as well be," Peter muttered under his breath.
Dash ignored this by-play, apparently lost in an interior consideration of the various possible scenarios. He uncrossed his arms. "Do you think Anja went to the other side?"
Gideon tapped a thumb on the desk top. "We can't rule out the possibility, though I think it's dim, personally. She just wanted control." She'd muttered something about safety protocols, Gideon remembered, though he couldn't recall the details. "The fact remains that she's very dangerous, whether or not she intends it. Leaving our protection means she could be taken under the influence of God-knows-who."
"I don't even want to think about it," Peter muttered, and rubbed at a jaw that never seemed quite shaved.
"Obviously," Gideon went on, "we're attempting to track her using the usual methods. I have my entire team on it."
Dash raised an eyebrow. "Except for us."
"Except for you," Gideon agreed. The mess from which he'd temporarily been distracted began to swirl again, now in his gut. He took a moment to stare at the papers piled on his desktop before saying it. "The other way of locating Anja, and the research she took, is by working the inside angle."
That stumped them. Both of Gideon's top agents stared at him blankly.
"What inside angle?" Peter finally asked. "Anja's gone."
Gideon took a deep breath. "Yes, but her three closest friends, her neighbors, are not. They're quite available, in fact."
There was another, less stumped silence.
"Are you thinking — ?"
"She told her neighbors where she was going?"
"Or where she put her notes and samples?"
Gideon had to smile, though it was a tense, tight gesture. "Anja is obsessively private. I doubt she'd trust anyone with her plans. However..." He sucked in his lips. "I can't afford to discard the possibility."
Dash took a step toward the desk. His six-four frame tensed with eagerness, already prepared to pursue the mission. "Do you want us to interrogate the neighbors?"
"Are you kidding?" Peter shot Dash a disgusted look. "These are Anja's best friends we're talking about. Women. We can't find out anything by flashing our badges and interrogating them."
"Peter is right." Though privately Gideon wondered how Peter happened to know the gender of Anja's neighbors. Just how deeply had Peter delved into Gideon's personal business? "You'll have to work undercover, gaining the confidence of your targets without them ever knowing what you're after."
Peter was giving Gideon a very odd look. Gideon tried to forestall what was behind that look by handing each of the men a manila file folder. "Dash, we're putting you next door to Shana Taylor. The house is for sale and, though we're only renting it, you can act like you're moving in for good."
Indiscreet Ladies of Green Ivy Way Page 2