Indispensable Party (Sasha McCandless Legal Thriller No. 4)

by Miller, Melissa F.

  The tube was remarkably light considering the incredible weight its contents carried. In his hand, Michel held a weapon more powerful than any other yet made by man. A droplet or two sprinkled in a market could start a daisy chain of suffering, illness, and death that would stretch across the globe. A vision of moaning, dying children filled his eyes, and he blinked it away.

  The buyer had promised he would not release the virus; he’d said he needed it for leverage, that was all. If the man had offered only money, Michel would have pressed for more details, better assurances. But, he hadn’t offered only money—money was changing hands, and quite a bit of it. More than money, though, the American had offered him priceless information: the address where that tramp Angeline had taken his Malia. Four years old, a jumble of wild blonde curls and elbows and knees, singing her silly songs, oceans away from her papa.

  He felt his grip tighten on the bottle and took a long, steadying breath. Soon, Malia. Very soon your papa will come for you. He slid the cold vial into the front right pocket of his trousers and hurried back to the airlock.

  He retraced his path out of the laboratory. His anxiety began to recede with each step closer to the exit. The soft bump of the vial against his thigh with each quick stride thumped out a beat: He’d done it. He’d done it!

  The hard part was almost over. Soon he’d be in his pristine Smart, with the cooler on the seat beside him, driving carefully through the countryside to the prearranged drop spot. He’d split the sample among the three smaller vials the American had provided and leave the cooler behind. And then he would begin his journey to retrieve his daughter and begin his new life.

  CHAPTER 2

  Leo’s cell phone came to life in his pocket, and he flushed with annoyance. He knew from the ring tone that the call was from Grace Roberts, his second in command. When he’d left the office at lunchtime to get an early start on the weekend, he’d instructed Grace not to bother him for anything short of a catastrophe.

  Sasha’s head rested against Leo’s chest. She was reading some legal journal article about intellectual property rights in cyberspace. He tried to ignore the ringing in his pocket and continued stroking Sasha’s hair. The warm, gingery scent of her shampoo rose and enveloped him like a cloud.

  Leo watched through the window overlooking the lake as the outdoor spotlights illuminated the fat, wet snowflakes that floated past in the darkness. He was perfectly content—the happiest he’d been in months—if not entirely relaxed. The truth was he was on his best behavior. The lake house, situated in Deep Creek, Maryland—a resort town halfway between Washington, D.C., and Pittsburgh—was both a compromise and an experiment. In the two months since he’d left Pittsburgh and the Department of Homeland Security to take a private sector job as the chief security officer for Serumceutical International, headquartered outside D.C., the situation with Sasha had been delicate.

  In his view, he had left her with an open invitation; but in her view, it had been an ultimatum. To her credit, though, she’d been the one to pick up the phone and call him.

  She’d agreed to try out a long-distance relationship with some reluctance, and he didn’t dare to revisit the issue of her moving to D.C. As an early Christmas gift to one another, they’d rented this lakefront vacation home for the season. The house was a place to spend time together on neutral territory while they figured out a long-term plan. Leo hoped that, by spring, she’d be willing to make a permanent move. But she was like a deer, liable to start at any moment and gallop away.

  His cell phone rang a second time, and he felt Sasha stiffen. Great.

  He caressed her arm and gently shifted her to the couch, then fished the phone from his pocket and answered on the third ring.

  “What is it, Grace?” Leo said, keeping his voice even on the off-chance that she was calling about an actual emergency.

  “Not on the phone,” Grace said immediately. Her voice was serious but calm.

  Grace’s tone conveyed urgency. And she hadn’t apologized for interrupting him on a Friday evening, which meant she had no doubt that whatever was going on, it was important enough to merit his involvement.

  He felt Sasha’s eyes on him. Although Grace’s judgment to date had been sound, he decided to probe her for some details, hoping to find a reason to let her handle the problem, whatever it might be, and return to lounging on the couch with Sasha in his arms.

  “In general terms, then,” he said.

  Grace exhaled, a frustrated snort, and said, “Corporate espionage. That’s all I can say.”

  Leo’s stomach sank, but he nodded. As usual, Grace’s instincts were spot on; if the issue was a spying competitor, they couldn’t talk about it over the phone, especially not in light of the sensitive nature of their government contract.

  He should have known she wouldn’t have called him unless it was warranted. Grace was a former National Security Agency analyst. She was blazingly smart. She was also something of an adrenaline junkie. Upon realizing that the NSA position entailed none of the glamour of a Jason Bourne movie but all of the paperwork of a position at the Department of Motor Vehicles, she’d put out feelers for a more exciting, not to mention more remunerative, gig.

  Leo’s friend Manny Ortiz, a special agent in the EPA’s Criminal Investigation Division, had called him about Grace. Manny had known Leo wanted to bring in an outsider to work directly for him at Serumceutical. Someone who was smart and driven, and, most important, had no ties to Serumceutical. A lieutenant whom Leo could trust. Manny had promised that Grace fit the bill. He’d also mentioned that she was a knockout, a fact that shouldn’t have mattered, but had ended up removing any objections the other corporate officers might otherwise have had to his first official act: hiring a well-paid assistant. To a man, they’d been utterly charmed by her. Women, by contrast, appeared to hate Grace.

  “Leo? Are you there?” Grace asked.

  He could tell from the tight way she spoke that she was tense and ready for action. And he realized he was going to have to leave the cocoon that he and Sasha had built.

  “I’m here. I heard you. I’m leaving now. I’ll be there in about three hours,” he said and ended the call.

  He slid the phone into his pocket and looked at Sasha. Her head was still bent over the journal, but her eyes weren’t moving.

  “Hey,” he said in a soft voice.

  She twisted around to face him, her green eyes searching his.

  “I have to go to the office. I’m sorry. I’ll be back in time to start a fire before we turn in for the night,” he said, nodding toward the hearth.

  He glanced down at his watch. No, he wouldn’t. It was after six. Even if the meeting with Grace only took an hour or two, it would be well after midnight by the time he returned.

  Sasha cocked her head and looked at him for a moment. Then, she shrugged and said, “I see.”

  He knew what that look meant: she was really saying ‘I see how it is. When my work comes first, you call me emotionally stunted, but, when it’s your work, it’s a different story.’

  Leo took both of her hands in his. “Sasha, believe me, I don’t want to go. I’d much rather have dinner by the fire and then beat you at Scrabble. But, it’s an emergency.”

  She arched an eyebrow at him. “Did I say anything, Connelly? Go. Drive safely.”

  Before he could respond, she extricated her hands from his, stood, and walked to the large window. She wrapped her arms around herself, hugging the oversize sweater—or dress or whatever she was wearing over leggings—tight against her body and stared out at the water shimmering in the dark.

  She looked so small and vulnerable, even defenseless—although that was the last thing she was—that he suddenly felt a desperate need not to leave her there alone, isolated in a resort town off-season.

  “Hey,” he said, trying to sound casual, “why don’t you tag along?”

  She pivoted from the window. “Why?”

  He knew better than to say he was worried about
leaving her alone. If he did, she’d just pull herself up to her full four feet, eleven-and-three-quarter inches and glare at him. Might even remind him that the night they’d met, she’d disarmed him, breaking his nose and one of his fingers in the process—as if he could forget.

  He couldn’t lie to her, though. That was the down side of having a trial attorney as a girlfriend. She had an uncanny way of sniffing out untruths.

  He decided to go with the partial truth and sell it well. “Because I’ll be lonely on the road by myself for six hours. And six hours spent in a car with you beats six hours spent missing you.”

  Her eyes softened and her mouth curved up slightly at the corner.

  He pressed on. “I’ll drive both ways. You can read or take a nap.”

  She turned to face him full on, and he could see she was considering it.

  “If it’s still open, can we stop at The Perfect Cup on the way back?”

  Leo was more than happy to agree to the detour to the coffee shop they’d found tucked away in a nearby town, but to save face he said, “As long as I control the radio.”

  Sasha broke into a real smile and said, “You have a deal, Connelly.”

  CHAPTER 3

  Colton Maxwell smiled reassuringly at the small Webcam sitting in the center of the highly polished conference room table. He resisted the urge to look at the image of himself projected on the wall-sized screen that hung on the other side of the room. It was critical to maintain eye contact with the camera so that the anxious board members who had called this unnecessary, last-minute board meeting would see how calm he was and realize how silly their panic has been.

  “But how can you be so certain?” Molly Charles repeated, her worried face appearing on the screen in a small box superimposed in the lower corner, near Colton’s shoulder.

  When the IT team had first set up the Web conferencing equipment for him, they had programmed it so that Colton saw his own image until someone else spoke, at which point the screen would switch to a feed of the speaker. That had bothered him. He wanted to be able to see his own reactions to other people’s comments and input in real time, just the way he appeared to them. The technical wizards had fiddled with the settings so that other people appeared in a small box, similar to picture-in-picture television screens.

  Before answering, Colton studied Molly’s forehead, furrowed with concern and noted the hint of a frown on her thin, pursed lips.

  He nodded, still smiling, and said, “I understand your hesitation, Molly. I honestly do. It’s frightening to take bold actions, to lead with confidence. You worry that others won’t share our vision. And, I also realize that other board members have the same reservations. But, trust me, AviEx is going to propel this company, not just to the next level, but to the stratosphere of our industry. This is a medication that will treat a virus capable of killing hundreds of millions of people. We can’t afford to think small now. The company is poised to make history.”

  He watched as Molly, who’d been nodding along with him while he spoke, relaxed her brow and softened her lips into a smile.

  “We appreciate, and share, your enthusiasm, Colton,” Tim Bailey interjected, his thin, rat-like face replacing Molly’s on the screen, “but the government has flat out said they don’t plan to stockpile AviEx. They’ve put their money on the vaccine. That’s a reality.”

  Bailey narrowed his eyes and waited for Colton’s response.

  “I know what the press reported. So what?” Colton said. His tone was deliberately dismissive. His weak-willed board had overreacted to the press report, blowing it wildly out of proportion. The truth was that the report was a setback, but it was, at most, a manageable speed bump, not the insurmountable roadblock the board was making it out to be.

  “So what?” Bailey repeated. His untied bowtie flapped against his neck.

  He’d made sure they all knew he was going to be late for his black-tie holiday affair. As if any of them cared.

  “Yeah. So what? Surely you aren’t naive enough to believe the low-level press officer who handled that inquiry has a finger on the pulse of the decision makers? I’m telling you, Congress is going to appropriate a tidy sum to purchase tens of millions of doses of AviEx or more. I guarantee it.”

  “You guarantee it,” Bailey said.

  Colton reflected that, for a high-level banking professional, Bailey didn’t add much to a conversation. In fact, they could have filled his seat with a parrot and gotten the same effect.

  “Yes. I can’t go into details as to amounts or timing, of course. The NDA is still pending approval, after all. But, the government will shift its focus from the vaccine to AviEx. You can take that to the bank,” Colton said, ending with a hearty chuckle to highlight his pun for the bank officer.

  Bailey chuckled, too, and shrugged, “Well, I don’t much want to know the details of our lobbyists’ efforts. They’re the experts. And I think this call has gone a long way to assuage folks’ concerns. You understand why we felt it necessary to talk, though, right?”

  Colton could tell from his tone that the man was feeling sheepish about the board’s decision to call the emergency meeting. Good.

  “I do, Tim. Although I would have hoped that, by now, this board would have enough trust in me to lead the company forward without second guessing me.”

  He let the chorus of apologies and compliments about his leadership abilities wash over him, barely registering.

  He didn’t care at all, of course, what the board thought of him. But it was useful for them to think he did—to believe he had feelings that they could wound and to worry that if they overstepped he might move on to a competitor.

  He suppressed a smile and considered his next steps. What he’d said to the board had been true: Congress would abandon its plans to stockpile Serumceutical’s vaccine in favor of purchasing AviEx.

  But, that decision would have nothing to do with ViraGene’s cadre of unctuous, insincere K Street lobbyists. No, he would never leave such a critical issue in the hands of someone else. He’d make sure of it himself.

  ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

  Anna Bricker sensed her husband’s presence behind her. The force of Jeffrey’s personality was such that the air became electrified when he entered a room.

  And, when he left a room, he took all the energy with him. It amazed her, how their home felt so quiet and still when he was gone—despite the noise and activity their six children generated.

  She marked her spot in her notebook and placed her pen on the table. She stood from the table and turned toward him with a smile.

  He smiled back at her, and she felt a tingle in her stomach. After eighteen years of marriage, she still thrived on his attention.

  “Leaving already?” she asked.

  He shouldered his duffel bag and nodded. “I’ll only be gone two days.”

  “I know.”

  She knew how long he’d be gone, just not where he’d be or what he’d be doing. He hadn’t volunteered the information, and Anna had learned years ago that there was no point in asking. Jeffrey would simply tell her it wasn’t her concern or, worse, he would lie—make up an innocuous story so that she wouldn’t worry about him while he was out there doing … whatever he did to protect their family.

  He jerked his head to the tangle of Go Bags piled high on the scratched and worn wooden table. “Everything in order?”

  “I’m making sure nothing’s out of date,” she said. “They’ll be ready to go again by evening.”

  He clasped her shoulder. “That’s good work, honey.”

  She flushed at the compliment and waved it off. “It’s my job to make sure our family is prepared.”

  It was a job Anna took seriously. Every three months, she gathered the eight backpacks hanging on hooks in the mud room and the eight identical backpacks stored in the back of the family’s aged but pristine Suburban and emptied their contents onto the dining room table. The Go Bags were to be grabbed if a disaster struck that required the family to eva
cuate in a hurry; they contained essential supplies to get the family through the first seventy-two hours after any emergency.

  Each pack contained toiletries; a knife; a flashlight with spare batteries; a whistle; a face mask; two bottles of water and an assortment of energy bars; a small first aid kit; a change of clothes; and a pair of hiking shoes. Four times a year, Anna checked that the food hadn’t expired and swapped out the clothes and shoes according to the season and her growing children’s sizes.

  In addition to the items in the kids’ bags, each of her two bags contained a collection of antibiotics that needed to be checked for date; a small sealed packet of assorted seeds in case they never returned to their home and the garden she tended there; a water purification kit; and an emergency supply of games and activities intended to occupy bored, frightened children if the need arose. Jeffrey’s bags each contained the basic items; a map; a journal; and a gun with ammunition.

  She sorted through the rainbow of colored bags until she found the army green ones.

  She held one out to him and said, “Your bags are done. Do you want to take one with you?”

  “That’s not a bad thought, Anna.” Jeffrey reached for it and slung it over his back, bumping it against the duffle bag he already wore.

  He leaned in and kissed her forehead, pressing his lips against her skin for a long moment. Then he took her chin in his hand and tipped her head back so her eyes met his.

  “I’ve already said goodbye to the kids. I’ll call you when I can,” he said.

  She savored his touch, knowing she’d ache for it in his absence.

  “Have a safe trip,” she answered.

  He turned to leave. When he reached the doorway, he turned back. “The rifle’s in the closet in our bedroom, should you need it.”