Athena Force 9: Payback

by Harper Allen

  Aldrich will be over the freakin’ moon when I phone in my initial progress report later this week, Dawn told herself now. If anything could reassure him that I’m still the best at undercover assignments, this will.

  She shut all thought of Aldrich Peters and Lab 33 from her mind and gave her attention to her unlikely companion. “More tea?” At his nod she walked over to the bed from the small desk where she’d been sitting, the battered thermos that Sir William had brought in her hand. Absently he held out a glass lab beaker, and she filled it before pouring some of the vile-tasting brew into a chipped mug for herself. “Of course there’s nothing to stop the gene from mutating under controlled conditions,” she said as she sat down again. “Since it hasn’t, someone’s obviously screwed up the conditions.”

  “A typically glib Yank answer.” Under scraggly eyebrows, London’s regard was sharp with annoyance. “Who the hell would dare to—” He stopped abruptly, his scowl deepening.

  Who indeed? Dawn thought wryly. For starters, just about anyone, if this lab was anything like the one she’d grown up in. All scientists, in her experience, were prima donnas. All lab technicians were underpaid. All maintenance staff were overworked and cut corners where they could. At least at Lab 33 everyone ultimately answered to Peters, which kept them toeing the line, but that wasn’t the case here.

  A plan began to formulate in her mind. She pursed her lips Dawn Swanson-style, but before she could speak, London exploded. “That ass Hewlitt! He came to me straight from Von Trier’s facility. The bugger’s trying to sabotage my work!”

  “Maybe.” She kept her voice calm. “Then again, maybe not. Tell me something, Sir William—the supervisor who showed me to my room this evening, Roger somebody?”

  “Roger Poole? What about him?” The scowl was back on his face. “Roger’s been with me for years. He’s as loyal as a beagle, so if you’re trying to suggest he—”

  “Loyalty’s not the issue,” she cut in. “Being a decent guy’s probably his biggest problem. You need someone taking care of the day-to-day running of your lab who’s not afraid to be disliked.” She shoved her glasses higher up onto the bridge of her nose and leaned forward, her expression tentatively eager. “I hope I’m not out of line, Sir William, but any slip-ups that are occurring in your lab certainly can’t be your fault. And you shouldn’t have to take time from your groundbreaking research to correct these problems. I know I was hired as a lab tech, but it’s obvious you need a pit bull a whole lot more than you do a beagle. Let me be your pit bull. Give me two days, and I promise your lab will be running like a well-oiled machine.”

  “She’s not cleared for that kind of responsibility, Sir William.” The door to Dawn’s room crashed open and Des Asher, still in uniform, took a step across the threshold. His expression seemed carved from stone as he went on, directing his words at his uncle and ignoring her. “As head of military security here, I can’t allow her to be given free access to this facility.”

  He turned to Dawn, his gray eyes cold. “You’re good. It’s only been hours since your arrival and already you’ve made your move. But I’m good, too. I’ve sent off top-priority queries on you to both Washington and Interpol, complete with your photograph. If you’ve ever gotten so much as a parking ticket anywhere in the world, I’ll know it.”

  His smile barely lifted his lips. “If you have, you’d better hope it was under the name of Dawn Swanson. But I doubt it…because I’m beginning to think Dawn Swanson doesn’t exist at all.”

  Chapter 4

  Status: seventeen days and counting

  Time: 0145 hours

  As the angry whine got louder, Dawn spared a moment to gauge its nearness. She was cutting things a little fine, she judged, but her preparations were nearly in place. All she needed to do now was to splash the road with the volatile chemical she’d liberated from the lab earlier, make sure she had a match handy and then crouch down in the patch of sage that at this hour of night was nothing more than a slightly blacker shadow in the surrounding darkness.

  Piece of cake. But she had no intention of telling Aldrich that. She didn’t want him thinking he could set up these last-minute meetings whenever he felt like it.

  Her mouth drew to a straight line at the thought. Twisting the metal cap off the small glass container she held, she began sprinkling the gelatinous substance it contained onto the hard-packed dirt of the road. It took only a second to lay the wavering trail of clear jelly. When she’d finished she dropped the bottle into the hole she’d dug earlier in the soft earth by the shoulder of the road and then replaced the earth, taking care that no telltale trace gave away the bottle’s newly filled in grave. The chemical itself would be totally consumed when it burned, Dawn mused as she brushed a few twigs over the settled dirt. If anyone investigated this incident, which was unlikely, they would assume that a leaky gas tank from an earlier vehicle had left just enough gas on the road to be ignited by a stray spark struck by a piece of gravel. She half rose from her burial detail and listened. The whine now sounded like a hornet in a bottle. Her shadow melting in and out of the moonlight, she ran across the road.

  This was insanity. Either that or another one of Peters’s tests, but whatever his reasons for insisting on a face-to-face progress report from her, they weren’t good enough—not when they jeopardized her cover and especially not when her phoned-in report had given him all the information she’d been able to provide at this early stage of her mission. Or at least, all the information she was willing to give, she amended with reluctant honesty.

  “Of course I did nothing to arouse Asher’s suspicions!” she’d lied emphatically last night when, as arranged, she’d dialed the number that if traced would show as connecting to nothing more sinister than a bookstore specializing in used and out-of-print scientific volumes. She’d converted the anger in her tone to ice. “Maybe when I was just starting out in this game six years ago you might have had some justification in asking me that question, Doctor, but now it’s an insult. I told you, one of his people screwed up my cover name. He couldn’t handle that, so he took it out on me. His attitude only got worse when Sir William overrode him and gave me the supervisor position.”

  That last was the mother of all understatements, Dawn thought, extracting a book of matches from her pants pocket before stretching out at the side of the road. She dug the inner edges of her sneakers into the dirt, kept her head down but her focus straight ahead and took her weight on her elbows.

  It was the classic sniper position, and one that was second nature to her. She could wait like this for hours if she had to, but from the escalating decibels of the approaching whine the waiting would last only a few more seconds.

  She didn’t want to hurt the rider, whoever he was. She couldn’t afford to damage the motorcycle. Precision was going to be key in this operation.

  “When isn’t it?” she asked herself in a mutter. “If Mr. SAS hadn’t stormed into my room when he did yesterday morning, I get the feeling his uncle might have declined Dawn Swanson’s eager offer and kept his old chum Roger on in the position of lab supervisor. But if they have nothing else in common, London and his nephew seem to share the same determination to get their own way. It couldn’t have been more obvious that his insistence on giving me the run of his lab was just his way of jerking Ash’s chain. And talking about jerking chains…”

  Transportation was one of the pesky little details Peters hadn’t seemed to consider when he’d insisted on this meeting tonight, she thought. Even though their clandestine rendezvous was to take place at a bar just outside the limits of the nearest town to London’s facility, it was still a jaunt of twenty miles. What had he been thinking—that she would simply hop in the hatchback, wave airily at the man who’d already warned her he suspected she was an imposter and drive off into the night before returning again hours later?

  She tilted her head and listened. For the past few minutes the unknown motorcyclist had been tearing like a bat out of hell down the rul
er-straight road just before the curve where she’d stationed herself. Now she heard him gearing down rapidly in preparation for the hairpin bend, his engine revs red-lining as noisily as they had the previous night when the loyal Roger Poole had been showing her to her quarters.

  She’d fixed a Dawn Swanson expression of irritation on her features. “I was under the impression this facility was located miles from anywhere, not right next door to a motorcycle speedway. Half the staff on this floor must be awake with the noise.”

  Roger had given an apologetic cough. She’d already learned that an apologetic cough was his one-size-fits-all reaction to most situations, and the thought had crossed her mind that he would be the perfect candidate to give lessons in being a real Englishman to Des Asher.

  “I’m afraid we’ve just resigned ourselves to the racket. Really, it would be rude to complain.” He’d raked a hand through thinning brown hair. “After all, the chap riding that infernal machine is one of the military guards protecting our research from falling into the wrong hands. He must be on day duty this week, because he’s been roaring out of here for the past few evenings about eight and returning around now. I believe there’s what you Yanks call a ‘juke joint’ in the next town? Ah, here’s your room. Now, where did I put the blasted key?”

  While Roger, coughing madly, had fished around in the pockets of his lab coat, Dawn had mentally filed away the information he’d given her. She hadn’t realized she would be using it so soon, she thought now, but since she’d been put in a position where she had to, she owed it to the hapless biker to do it right.

  Stripped down to the essentials, this particular operation was simple physics, as so much of her training had been. Except this time instead of calculating the trajectory and velocity of a bullet, she’d had to figure out the path an experienced motorcyclist would take after swerving his vehicle to avoid a sudden wall of flames. She’d remembered the hairpin bend from her own drive here two nights ago, but until she’d arrived with her rope and looked over the location carefully, she still hadn’t known for sure whether it would do.

  She’d been relieved to find the same dry and crumbling soil that had posed such a problem for the hatchback’s tires when she’d run off the road the night she’d arrived. It wouldn’t be like drifting into a feather bed but as a Ranger, the biker would know instinctively how to fall. Hopefully the worst of his injuries would be a bruised ego.

  A single blinding headlight abruptly rounded the curve. Immediately emptying her mind of all else, Dawn focused on the swiftly approaching motorcycle. The biker, now that he had negotiated the turn and knew he had a straight run until the unmarked side road that led to his destination, wrenched back on the throttle to pour on more speed.

  She struck the match she was holding and touched it to the chemical fire starter. Whoever he was, he was good. As the flames sprang up in front of him he reacted instantly, wrenching the Harley Sportster to one side with the obvious intention of going around the unexpected barrier. But as soon as the Harley’s tires hit the loose dirt it began fishtailing, despite the unknown rider’s efforts to keep it under control. “Dump it, buddy,” Dawn muttered under her breath. “You’re going to go down anyway, so you might as well choose your own moment.”

  As if he’d heard her advice and reluctantly agreed with it, the Harley’s rider did just that. He’d long since eased off on the throttle and the rough terrain had further cut his speed, so the maneuver when he executed it was little more than a controlled stepping away from the falling bike. Jogging toward him, Dawn watched as he rolled like a paratrooper for a yard or so. He ended up on his hands and knees, shaking his helmeted head as if to clear it as she walked up behind him.

  “But clearing your head is exactly what I can’t let you do, buddy,” she murmured regretfully as she stood over him. “I know I’ve already put you through the wringer pretty thoroughly, but…”

  She slipped a stainless-steel cylinder from her back pocket as she spoke. As the biker began getting to his feet and pulling off his dark-visored helmet, she quickly twisted the cylinder into two parts. Reaching around him, she held the broken halves in front of his face.

  The cylinder was one of Lab 33’s more benign gadgets. Although if it had been found in her luggage when she’d arrived it would have been dismissed by a searcher as a slightly oversize fountain pen, when the seal that kept it in one piece was broken it released a sickly sweet cloud of gas, similar in composition and effect to chloroform but much more predictable.

  The hapless biker sank to his knees again, his helmet falling from his gloved hands. Taking care not to inhale the remnants of the gas, Dawn eased him to the ground.

  “Believe me, buddy, if I could have worked this any other way in the time Aldrich gave me, I would have,” she told the unconscious man regretfully. “But you’ll come out of your little nap in a few hours. By then I’ll have returned your wheels and as far as you’re concerned, you’ll just have had a nasty spill that knocked you out for a—”

  Instead of finishing her sentence, she inhaled sharply. Her mystery biker lay on his back, the moonlight shining full upon his face. Pitch-black hair brushed his forehead. His lashes were dense fans against his cheekbones. His breathing was regular and a faint smile softened his lips.

  She felt a rueful answering smile tug at the corners of her mouth. On impulse she brought the tips of her fingers to her lips and kissed them.

  “Wrong time, wrong place again, Lover Boy,” she whispered huskily as she blew her kiss toward him. “Maybe one of these days we’ll have a chance to get it right.”

  Her smile disappeared as she checked her watch. Briskly turning away, she grabbed up the fallen helmet and hurried for the Harley without looking back.

  “I owe you an apologetic cough, Rog, old chap,” Dawn muttered over the Harley’s rumble as she rode the heavy motorcycle into the dirt parking lot outside a long, low building. Peeling purple paint covered the rambling structure and its entry consisted of a spring-loaded wooden door with torn screening, but its slightly sinister air was dispelled by the glittering strings of Christmas lights that festooned it. “I figured your command of American-style English was a little shaky but it was spot-on, as you Limeys say. This here’s a juke joint, all right.”

  She cut the bike’s engine and kicked its stand into position before using both hands to lift the full-face helmet off her head. She balanced it on the gas tank, shook her hair into some semblance of order and looked around her curiously.

  The lot was full. Although there were some other motorcycles nearby, the majority of the haphazardly parked vehicles were cars, although not the usual run of modern sedans and SUVs. Pulled right up to the rambling wooden porch that ran the length of the dilapidated structure was an old black Buick. It had what looked like small chrome portholes along its sides, and the black metal visor protruding above its windshield must have been the last word in style some sixty or so years previously. A row over was a vintage truck, and beside it was—

  “Oh my God,” Dawn breathed, her eyes widening as she dismounted the Harley and walked closer. “A ’55 Caddie ragtop. And she’s cherry…original paint job, whitewall tires that look like they’ve never had a speck of dirt on them, lemon-yellow leather interior. Elvis may have left the building, but I think I’ve found his car.” She tipped her head to one side as a blast of music started up from inside. A slow smile spread across her face. “And from the sounds of that wicked slide guitar, I think I’ve found his blues roots. Uncle Lee only played that old recording of RL Burnside’s ‘Snake Drive’ about a million times while I was growing up. He’d go nuts over this place.”

  “He did.” Aldrich Peters moved out of the shadows and into the dim illumination of the lights. There was distaste on his aquiline features. One snowy-white shirt cuff brushed against the peeling porch railing, and he jerked his arm away as if he’d been burned. “What a dump,” he said in revulsion. “Your uncle used to say it was the only place west of the Mississippi tha
t reminded him of the dives he frequented in that poverty-stricken backwater he grew up in. Since he couldn’t shake the Delta mud off his feet fast enough when he was given the chance to get out, I never understood the attraction.” He shrugged. “Still, when I realized how near it was to London’s lab I thought it would be a convenient contact location for us. Plus I learned that it’s off-limits to the lab personnel and guards.”

  “Snake Drive” had ended. As Dawn walked slowly up the porch steps, she recognized the gritty growl of Reuben Glaser plunging into “Killer Blues,” another of Craig’s favorites, but this time recognition gave her no pleasure.

  Too bad she couldn’t regenerate her memory as well as she could her body, she thought stonily. If that were possible, she would cut out all the sentimental recollections and replace them with ones that were less likely to keep tripping her up. She suddenly wished that Peters had chosen anyplace else—a deserted factory, even a graveyard, dammit—for this meeting.

  But he hadn’t. He’d chosen this place, and if she knew him, he’d chosen it precisely because of its connection to Lee Craig. For some reason, he wanted her all misty-eyed and vulnerable, she thought with a cold inner smile. She could do that.

  “I miss him, Doctor,” she said with a slight throb in her voice as she reached for the rusty handle of the screen door. She held it open, but Aldrich impatiently waved her through first. “Oh, I always knew we were in a risky profession and that every time he left on an assignment he might not return, but I guess I never really believed he could be beaten. I was in denial for a long time while I was AWOL from Lab 33.”

  “Really?” Peters’s tone was suddenly silky. “So was I. But eventually we all have to face reality and deal with it, don’t we? Excuse me, waiter—could we be escorted to a table?”