by Harper Allen
“Who said my inquiries resulted in a big zero, love?” he asked softly. “I told you that up until this evening I hadn’t found anything on you. As of about two hours ago, that situation changed.”
“Changed?” Without glancing sideways, she let her peripheral vision widen to include the shadowy expanses of grounds to either side, but her reaction was mere reflex. Escape wasn’t an option. What she’d told Asher was true: she needed to be back in the persona of Dawn Swanson. As dreary as her alter ego was, being her for the next little while was the only way of remaining close enough to Sir William to find the notes she and Lab 33 needed.
“Remember having to submit to being fingerprinted before you were given your lab pass the night you arrived?” Asher’s grin was tight. “Dawn Swanson made her indignation bloody clear, as I recall.”
“I remember,” Dawn said shortly. “Indignant or not, I wasn’t worried about being printed. I’m not on file anywhere.”
“Dawn Swanson isn’t. But two years ago the Swiss police obtained a partial thumbprint of a certain Donna Schmidt. Seems Fräulein Schmidt was the personal secretary of a murdered Zurich banker who was later learned to have been into cartel money laundering in a big way. That’s probably why the Swiss weren’t as zealous in finding his murderer as they might have been…and why they didn’t pursue their inquiries into Fräulein Schmidt when they found she’d dropped out of sight immediately after her boss bought a bullet.” His focus on her suddenly sharpened. “But you know what I found most interesting about Donna Schmidt? The minute portion of her thumbprint that Interpol has on file is a dead match for yours.”
“Which doesn’t mean squat or we wouldn’t be having this conversation,” she answered with a shrug. “A partial print? Minute portion? Depending on how small it is, it could match up with half a million other prints in the world. You’re fishing, sweetie, but you won’t catch anything with bait as puny as that.”
“And it’s just a coincidence that Donna Schmidt and Dawn Swanson both sound like aliases for the same woman?” At her nod, frustration crossed his features. Then he gave a reluctantly brief smile. “Like I said, cool and controlled. For what it’s worth, I sent a reply to Interpol saying you couldn’t be Schmidt, that I had solid confirmation you’d been in the U.S. during the relevant time period.”
Although she’d kept her composure during all his other revelations, this latest one caught Dawn totally off balance. “But you don’t—not if you think my whole résumé’s a clever fabrication. Why didn’t you simply drop a dime on me to the Swiss authorities?” She saw his confusion and realized with irritation that she’d used a Lee Craig-ism. “Rat me out,” she elaborated. “Turn me in to them.”
The aqua eyes holding hers showed momentary amusement before they hardened again. “Because I don’t give a tinker’s damn that a money launderer for the cartels was executed or that you might have been the inside contact for his killer. I just give a damn about what you’re doing on my turf…which is why you’re coming with me now to the guard’s office where Keifer can witness my official interrogation of you. You still haven’t told me what you were doing out here, Swanson, and—”
The quiet of the night was suddenly shattered by the raucous sound of a motorcycle’s engine. Asher glanced with a frown in the direction of the main gate as the cycle’s throaty rumble was abruptly cut off, to be replaced by raised and furious voices.
Lover Boy had just arrived and was catching hell for coming in so late, Dawn realized swiftly. But as far as she was concerned, his timing was perfect.
“That bloody Reese and his motorbike. This is the second night this week he’s broken curfew and whatever his excuse is this time, he’s going on report,” Asher muttered as he began to turn back to her. “This place is supposed to be run along military lines, dammit, not—”
Already moving at top speed through the shadows, Dawn allowed herself a small smile. From the darkness behind her came an angry explosion of swearing. Mr. SAS certainly had an impressive command of basic Anglo-Saxon curse words, she thought as she heard his reaction to her disappearance. Any moment now he would realize he was wasting time and turn his efforts to something more productive, like making straight for her room, but by the time he arrived she would be in bed and feigning sleep.
As she’d told him, he wouldn’t be able to prove she hadn’t been there all along. She didn’t have to worry about any repercussions from tonight’s escapade.
All she had to worry about now was the fact that her partial fingerprint was apparently on file with Interpol. Which was odd, she told herself grimly…because four days ago her prints hadn’t been on file at all.
Chapter 7
Status: fourteen days and counting
Time: 1607 hours
“Marmite sandwich, Miss Swanson? They’re awfully good.”
Drop that last adjective and your assessment’s probably more accurate, Rog, Dawn thought with a mental shudder as Roger Poole eagerly thrust a dried-out triangle of two layers of bread encompassing a thin and gluey brown filling practically under her nose. Unwillingly she plucked it out of his hand, gingerly holding it between her thumb and middle finger.
“I’m a vegetarian,” she lied. “Sorry and all that, but—”
“How simply wizard, so am I!” Behind his taped-up glasses, Roger’s brown eyes goggled in kinship at her. “Then you’ll love the taste of this. It’s a yeast product. Very popular back home, you know.”
With a Dawn Swanson frown, Dawn handed the sandwich back to him. “Yeast is a living organism. I’m not the kind of woman who bends her principles just because they’re inconvenient.” Her own sandwich was on the cafeteria tray in front of her. As she picked it up and sank her teeth into the ham and cheese on rye she saw him look dubiously at her. “All soy,” she explained inelegantly, her mouth full. “Tastes just like the real thing.”
His dubiousness vanished, to be replaced once more with the puppy-dog adoration that Dawn Swanson apparently engendered in him. In fact, Dawn mused, most of the scientists and technicians sitting in the cafeteria right now were throwing similarly besotted glances her way. For some reason, the Swanson chick’s abrasive personality and determined dowdiness had the male contingent of Sir William’s lab vying for her attention.
They’re probably all picturing me in leather with a whip, she thought, washing her mouthful of sandwich down with a swallow of milk. Or maybe as a stern schoolmarm, with them as the bad little boys who haven’t done their homework. Oh, well, whatever floats their boats. She took another bite of her ham on rye and pointed the crust at Roger.
“The shipment of beakers that came in this morning—who authorized them?”
Hastily he choked down the minuscule piece of his own sandwich that he’d just bitten off, and went into one of his by-now-familiar coughing fits. “I imagine I did,” he said apologetically when he could talk. “Why, is there something wrong with them? I ordered from the same supplier we’ve always—”
“They’re fine.” She popped the crust into her mouth and looked longingly at the dessert lineup on the nearby serving counter before firmly forcing her attention back to him. “Just checking, is all. I like to keep tabs on everything, as you know.”
“Of course.” Roger set his sandwich aside. The cup in front of him held lukewarm water with a tea bag floating listlessly on top. With every appearance of enthusiasm, he jerked the string of the tea bag up and down while he spoke, not noticing that the water was barely changing color. “I must say, Miss Swanson, I’m terribly glad you’ve taken over the reins, so to speak. The supervisory position only fell to me because no one else wanted it, but I’d much rather be behind a microscope. I’m afraid I not only lack your head for detail, but I can’t seem to control the staff with as firm a hand as you do. Why, just yesterday Sir William demanded to know why he hadn’t been consulted about the extra personnel that had been hired. He hardly believed me when I told him we had the same number as always, but that you’d lowered the boom
on the break times the technicians had been taking.”
“I went out the back door the first morning and saw every last man jack of the British staff sucking away on cigarettes,” Dawn said acidly. “I told them if they wanted to smoke themselves into early graves that was fine by me, but they could do it on their time, not Sir William’s. Plus I made sure they cleaned up the mountain of old butts they’d dropped. As I told Sir William from the start, I’m not here to win a popularity contest. I’m here to smooth out any problems that might hinder his work.”
She reached briskly over and took the tea bag from the bespectacled Englishman. “That’s as good as it’s ever going to get, Rog,” she said, not unkindly. “Now tell me, do you think Sir William’s pleased with me?”
“Pleased? Dear Lord, he’s ecstatic!” He blew unnecessarily on his cold tea. “When you discovered that the reason his mutation experiment had been compromised was because the cleaning staff had been wiping down the petri dishes with glass cleaner every night, he was beside himself. The experiment’s going well now, by the way.”
“Yeah, great,” she said distractedly. “But listen—how do I get close to him? I mean, there are things I need to discuss, but whenever I try to set a time for a meeting he simply tells me he can’t be disturbed and that I’m to do whatever I think best for the running of the lab. I suppose that’s a compliment, but there really are a couple of decisions I need his input on.”
“I had that very problem myself,” Roger commiserated. “But never fear—I finally found out that the one time of day you can be sure of pinning him down is just around teatime. He always retires to his rooms and has a proper British tea, with paste sandwiches and anchovy toast and on special occasions, baked beans and egg.” He glanced down at his unfinished meal and weak tea with a noticeable diminution of his earlier gusto and then looked up at her, his expression brightening. “I say—why don’t we drop in on him now? He’ll probably ask us to join him, but since it’s to help you I don’t mind fibbing and telling him I haven’t eaten yet.”
“Four o’clock is teatime? I thought this was a late lunch,” Dawn said, pushing away her chair and waving him back into his seat as he began to stand. “No, Rog, I wouldn’t dream of dragging you away from your marmot sandwich.” He coughed in quick consternation, but she rushed on, “I’ll find Sir William myself and talk with him. Thanks for the advice.”
She made her way to the lunchroom exit, not forgetting to glower meaningfully at a table of technicians who by her watch should have finished their meal break and been back in the lab a few seconds ago. Five pairs of thick lenses magnified five suddenly guilty gazes as they jumped to their feet, gathered up their trays and practically fell into one another as they deposited their litter in a nearby bin before hastily heading back to work.
Their reaction went unnoticed by Dawn. She’d been in place for over four days, she thought grimly, and except for her first night here when she and Sir William had had their nocturnal conversation, she’d barely laid eyes on him. And as for getting any closer to finding out where he keeps his notes, forget it, she told herself in disgust. If I don’t make some serious progress soon, I’m going to have to change my tactics. Time’s running out and I can’t count on my symptoms remaining in remission like they have for the past few days.
The possibility of her headaches returning was never far from her thoughts. Equally dangerous, though, was the likelihood that Asher might dig up another fragment of her Lab 33 past more damning than the partial print he’d already discovered, and make the decision to turn her in to the authorities.
She’d expected him to show up in person the night she’d escaped from him and made it back to her room, but instead he’d sent Keifer. The young lieutenant had obviously been uncomfortable with his mission; even more so when Dawn had answered his tentative knock at her door dressed in brown flannel pyjamas and with a drab robe firmly cinched around her waist. She’d squinted disgruntledly at him, as if he’d awoken her from a sound sleep, and at his halfhearted query as to whether she’d been out and about on the grounds during the past hour, she’d given him a full dose of Dawn Swanson indignation.
“Are you accusing me of conducting some kind of clandestine rendezvous with a man, Lieutenant?” she’d demanded, snatching her glasses from her robe pocket and angrily jamming them onto her face. “Because if you are, my opinion of you just sank as low as my opinion of Captain Asher. I might have expected this kind of harassing accusation from him, but not from—” She’d stopped and glared at him. “He sent you, didn’t he?” she’d asked furiously.
“The captain said he’d seen someone who might have been you roaming the restricted area a few minutes ago, yes,” Keifer had said awkwardly. “It was an honest mistake, I’m sure.”
“Are you?” Dawn had leveled a disbelieving look at him. “I’m not. I think your commander made a fool of himself the day I arrived, and since then he’s tried his best to make his ridiculous suspicions seem justified. From the first it struck me as odd that a senior SAS officer should be assigned to a lower-level posting like this, but now I’m beginning to realize there’s a reason he’s been shunted out of more active duty.”
This last had been merely the kind of cutting remark Dawn Swanson would have delivered, but to Dawn’s interest, it unexpectedly roused a defensive response from Keifer.
“I consider it an honor to serve in any capacity with Captain Asher,” he’d said stiffly. “I’m well aware of the details of his military career, and if the man has any fault at all, it’s that he’s gone above and beyond the call of duty at times.” He’d clamped his lips together, as if he’d said more than he’d meant to, and with a formal nod and an apology for disturbing her, had taken his leave.
Dawn’s curiosity had been piqued, but when she’d closed the door behind Keifer and sat down on her narrow bed, her own hidden history rather than Des Asher’s had been the main thing occupying her mind.
Accidents happened, she thought now as she turned down the hall that led past the lab to the staff’s living quarters. Not every eventuality could be foreseen. But Lee Craig, for all his faults, had been the best black-ops teacher a girl could possibly have, and he’d drummed into her the vital importance of leaving nothing of herself behind when she completed an assignment. For those missions that had necessitated her going undercover, naturally it had been harder to obliterate all trace of her often weeks-long presence at a given scene, but even then it had merely been a matter of caution and discretion. For instance, she reflected, take the glass she’d just drunk milk from in the cafeteria. Within minutes it would be entering a dishwasher and her fingerprints on it would be cleaned off. But when she’d taken consignment of the beakers that had arrived this morning, she’d been careful not to touch any of them. They would be here and possibly still unused long after she’d left, and plastering her prints all over them would simply give her one more thing to wipe down before she went back to Lab 33.
She would have sworn Donna Schmidt had been as scrupulously careful as Dawn Swanson, but apparently that wasn’t the case, she told herself in chagrin. In her persona as Fräulein Schmidt she’d possibly neglected to wipe a desk drawer or the space bar on her computer keyboard or maybe even one of the Spode china coffee cups she’d handed around during the many meetings between the Swiss banker and his business associates. It didn’t matter where the authorities had lifted the partial thumbprint. It just mattered that it was on file.
And it also mattered that Carter Johnson had assured her it hadn’t been.
It’s SOP—standard operating procedure—for those pencil pushers on Aldrich’s payroll to run us through the computers every once in a while, Dawnie. One of Lee Craig’s earliest lectures on tradecraft came back to her. Turning down the corridor that led to Sir William’s rooms, Dawn frowned but didn’t push the memory away. That’s how they justify making the big bucks, while us dumb schmucks who put our lives on the line are lucky if we get our expenses reimbursed. He’d winked, and
a thirteen-year-old Dawn had winked back at him, feeling as if she and her beloved Uncle Lee were in an exclusive club of two. He’d ruffled her hair, but then his grin had disappeared and his tone had sobered. Standard procedure or not, when you’re about to leave on assignment, you insist the bastards make one last check on your cover identity, your prints, the whole enchilada. Shit happens, and even the best of us can get pulled over for a broken taillight or some pissant infraction like that. You don’t want to hand your license to some Smoky to call in, and then look in your rearview mirror to see the son of a-bitch holding his gun on you as he walks back to your vehicle.
Like everything Lee had told her, she’d taken that advice as gospel, Dawn thought. Before each mission it had become her own standard operating procedure to have Lab 33’s Identities Department give her one final assurance that her cover ID was clean, her weapons were untraceable and she herself didn’t exist as far as the outside world was concerned. She’d stood over Carter as he’d conducted his computer sweep with the sophisticated software that enabled him to tap into every data bank in the world, no matter how closely firewalled and guarded, and she hadn’t left his side until the program had run its course and delivered its all-clear message.