I run around a lot, picking up loose ends or trying to solve small problems before they become big ones….
He supposed he fit in the small-problem category.
He’d reached a certain amount of calm during the distraction provided by this new idea. He understood that Josh had done what he felt he had to do. He could even, grudgingly, accept that in the position she’d been put in, Samantha had had little choice but to lie.
What he couldn’t accept was his own idiocy. The very idea that a woman like Samantha would be interested in a man like him was ludicrous. That for a short while he’d believed it was even more so.
Shaking off the unwelcome thoughts he stood up for a moment, stretching cramped muscles. He would finish the section delineating the procedure he planned to implement, he thought, and then he would grab a nap. He thought briefly about going home but decided against it. Only, he assured himself, because it would be inconvenient, when he could sack out right here and be back to work in a couple of hours.
He sat back down and started where he’d left off, at stage three. The excitement began to build again as his mind raced, looking for reasons this wouldn’t work and not finding any.
Much later he thought he heard something but finished his sentence before looking around. The lab should be empty. Stan had left shortly after obtaining the data Ian had needed from Redstone Aviation. He’d seemed a bit peeved that Ian had asked him to make the call, but he hadn’t wanted to stop his work just then. Then Ian had realized it was Stan’s golf Tuesday, and apologized for keeping his boss from his standing 2:00 p.m. tee-off time. Stan was very aware of appearances, and the ability to get away to play golf was part of that, Ian knew. He didn’t understand it, but he knew.
An explanation of the new idea seemed to placate the man, and he’d asked if there was anything else he could do. At Ian’s negative response, Stan had encouraged him to get as far as he could tonight and had left him to work, exactly as Ian preferred.
Ian glanced up at the clock now, and for a moment stared at it, confused. He was certain he’d been working longer than four hours since Stan had left at two-thirty, yet the clock read six-thirty. It took him a moment to realize the entire evening and night had passed, and he was looking at six-thirty in the morning.
No wonder he was stiff, he thought as he stood up. He needed to walk around. And so much for his nap; the building would start waking up itself in an hour or so. Knowing Josh, he was probably already here, and knowing St. John, he probably had never left.
He’d take a walk outside instead, he decided. Some cool, fresh air would do the trick, maybe a cup of coffee, and then he could come back ready to go again.
He locked the lab after him, since no one else was here yet. He yawned as he got into the elevator. He’d walk the perimeter of the building, he thought, and go by the coffee stand across the street that was open early, his usual stop on the frequent occasions when he pulled an all-nighter.
He stepped outside and took a deep breath of unprocessed air, already warm enough to hint at how hot the day would be. He hadn’t done this since Samantha had moved in. He hadn’t wanted to keep her waiting. His mouth curled sourly at the thought that she would have, in fact, waited as long as it took. It was her job, after all.
He saw a blue car parked down from the coffee place and marveled at the way his heart took a little leap at just the sight of a car that resembled hers.
He forced himself to look the other way as he headed toward the street, not bothering this early to go all the way down to the crosswalk. He would cut across midblock where his desperately needed coffee waited, and if he got arrested for jaywalking, at least nobody could say he wouldn’t be safe, sitting in jail.
He stepped off the curb. Heard a car door slam somewhere to his right. Where the blue car had been. He tensed, all the while telling himself it couldn’t be her. He kept going. Heard an engine start. Hoped it was the blue car, leaving. The bark of tires told him whoever it was, was leaving almost fast enough to suit him. At the last second he couldn’t resist a glance.
It wasn’t the blue car.
It was a black van.
It was almost on top of him.
Something grabbed him. Yanked. Hard. He saw the asphalt seemingly rising toward him.
The morning sun blinked out.
Chapter 11
“Sam?” She looked up to see Josh striding across the hospital waiting room toward her. “How is he?”
“They say he’ll be fine.”
Josh let out an audible breath. He’d obviously rushed. She wondered how many movers and shakers he dealt with would even recognize him in the worn jeans and faded sweatshirt he’d pulled on to rush to the hospital.
“What’s the status?”
“They did X rays, a CT scan and an EEG. The diagnosis is a very mild concussion, incurred when his head hit the curb. He’s in good physical shape, which they say will help him bounce back. But they want to keep him a day for observation, just in case something develops later.”
“Good. Can’t be too careful with that kind of injury, even if it’s mild.”
“That’s what the doctor said, that ‘There are no minor brain injuries.”’
She didn’t mention that the phrase had chilled her even after they’d assured her Ian would recover.
“Is he conscious?” Josh asked.
“Yes. He never went out completely. He was a little dizzy and disoriented immediately after.” She gave her boss a crooked smile. “And cranky, I might add, when the medics kept asking him to repeat the same words every five minutes. But by the time we got here, he was almost back to normal. They said that’s a good sign, too, when the symptoms clear up that fast.”
Josh smiled back, but it was fleeting. “If you hadn’t been there to pull him out of the way…”
She grimaced. “If I’d been there ten seconds sooner, he wouldn’t be lying in there at all.”
“If you’d been ten seconds later, he could well be dead and we’d be notifying his family.”
Josh’s quiet words made a chill ripple through her. The image of Ian lying motionless in the street was bad enough. The thought of him never getting up again was hideously worse. That it would have been while she was right there would have been unbearable, and she was honest enough to admit it would only be in part because she was responsible for his safety.
“Any word on the van?” she asked.
“No. But the police have it down as a felony hit-and-run, so you can bet they’ll be looking for it seriously.”
Yes, with Josh’s name involved, she would bet they’d be looking seriously.
Josh gripped her shoulder comfortingly. “You did your job, Sam. He’s alive, and he’s going to be fine.”
She couldn’t quite discard the idea that if she’d really been doing her job properly, he wouldn’t have been hurt at all. But she also knew there hadn’t been much else she could do beyond being there and ready. She’d had no way of knowing they’d try something again, after they’d successfully stolen what they thought were the right disks. And certainly no way of knowing it would happen the first time Ian stepped out of the building in more than twenty-four hours.
“It wasn’t a kidnap attempt this time, Josh.”
“I know.”
It was only two words, but Sam felt the ice in them. She looked at her boss’s face and thought that she was very, very glad not to be whoever turned out to be the mole in Redstone. The outsiders after Ian’s work would be in enough trouble when Josh found them; the insider who had betrayed them and nearly cost Ian his life would be much worse off.
“Do we have any idea who it is yet?”
“We have suspects. I’ve put everyone on the team who’s in the country to work on it. In the meantime, everybody in the lab is suspect. I haven’t even told Stan Chilton what’s going on.”
Sam couldn’t picture the rather fussy man as involved in industrial espionage, but she nodded. And was still puzzled. “Why? Why would
they suddenly change and try to kill him? Without him, the project is dead in the water, isn’t it?”
“Unless they think they got all they needed when they stole those disks from his house.”
She frowned. “He did say they’d get pretty deep into them before they’d figure out they were fake.”
“If I know Ian, they’d have to be as smart as he is, too.”
“So if they think they have the real deal, why would they…”
Her voice trailed off as the realization hit. She raised troubled eyes to Josh. “Would somebody really do that? Kill him now that they think they have the data, just to stop Redstone from getting there first?”
“When they say business is cutthroat, sometimes it’s meant literally,” Josh said.
His voice was inflectionless, but Sam wasn’t fooled. “You’re furious, aren’t you?”
“I am,” he said calmly, “outraged. Until now I was satisfied with protecting Ian until he succeeded, making their efforts pointless.”
“And now?”
“Now,” he said in a voice that was all the more frightening for its lack of emotion, “I will bring them down.”
“Still don’t remember what happened, Mr. Jones?”
Ian grimaced. “Can we stop with the ‘Let’s see if I can catch him’ stuff? And no, I don’t remember what happened. I was heading for a cup of coffee, and the next thing I remember is being in an ambulance with a paramedic asking me questions like that.”
The young man in the white coat that, with the pockets stuffed full and sagging crookedly, looked rather like his own lab coat, actually laughed.
“You’re going to be fine, Mr. Gamble. You may have some occasional residual dizziness or headaches, but if it lasts longer than twenty-four hours I’d be surprised. You’re going to be one of the lucky ones.”
He opened his mouth to say, If he was one of the lucky ones, he wouldn’t be here in the first place, but a shrieking wail made him shut it again. The nurse who had been in to take his blood pressure—every few minutes, it seemed—had explained the woman making the haunting sound had suffered a serious brain trauma. Lucky might be the word after all.
“Of course, having your friend around to save your life was pretty lucky, too.”
“My friend?”
“The very attractive blonde in the waiting room. She’s been quite concerned about you.”
Samantha.
It came back to him now, sort of, a fuzzy memory of her face as she crouched beside him, saying his name over and over.
“She’s here?”
“Yes. I’ll send her in in a moment, as soon as the doctor says you’re okay for a visitor.”
Before Ian could think of a good reason to protest, the young man was gone. Ian couldn’t blame him. What man in his right mind wouldn’t think a woman like Samantha would be very welcome?
A few moments later he heard footsteps and tried to brace himself. And then thought his vision was acting up again when a man walked in. A split second later he realized it was Josh and started to breathe again. Then he stopped when he realized Samantha was on Josh’s heels. But he realized this would probably make it easier. They could hardly get into any uncomfortable discussions with Josh right here.
After assuring his boss that he was fine, Ian asked him wryly if he had any pull around here.
“I want out of here,” Ian said. “I need to get back to work, while things are still clear in my mind.”
Josh smiled. “And you’ll get out—” Ian brightened until Josh added “—when the doctor says so.”
Ian grimaced, but he recognized finality when he heard it.
“Besides,” Josh said, “you can’t be sure your mind is clear just now.”
Grumbling, Ian had to concede that point.
“And you’ll be safe here,” Josh said. “Until we track them down.”
Ian blinked. “Safe?”
“It was no accident, Ian.” Josh’s voice was soft but resolute. “Just like the earlier incident was no accident. Only this time, they didn’t intend to kidnap you.”
“Then what—” He broke off as the obvious meaning penetrated his still slightly foggy brain. “You think they meant to kill me?”
“And would have, if not for Sam.”
He didn’t turn his head, remembering how nauseous that had made him in the ambulance, but Ian’s gaze flicked to Samantha. She wasn’t looking at him.
“But why?” The only reason he could think of was retaliation for the useless disks they’d stolen, but that didn’t make sense. “They couldn’t have gotten through the fake data so soon,” he said.
“Exactly.”
It took him a moment to get there in his current state. That now that they had what they thought was the real data on the Safe Transit Project, their next logical step had been to eliminate the one man who could possibly reproduce it and still beat them to the final product.
“I buried it too deep,” Ian said as the logic of it got through.
He’d apparently given them too much good data—albeit from an approach Redstone had abandoned as unworkable a few weeks ago—before he’d inserted the contradictory data that made the whole thing fall apart.
“More likely, you overestimated their intelligence,” Samantha said, speaking for the first time. “Brilliant people tend to do that.”
“You may have masked it better than you had to,” Josh agreed, “but it worked just as you hoped.”
“I didn’t hope they’d try and run me down,” he said wryly, deciding he was better off with that little gap in his memory. Too bad he couldn’t have lost a chunk of Samantha memories while he was at it.
“They’ll pay for it, Ian. I promise you that. As soon as we find out who’s behind this, they’ll—”
“But we will know soon,” Ian said, brow furrowing. “Or we should.”
Josh looked puzzled. “We should?”
“Yes.” Ian had to think a tiny bit harder to make sure his words came out right. “I had a Trojan horse put on the disks.”
“Have mercy on me, Ian,” Josh said. “I can use a computer, but that tech-head stuff isn’t my thing.”
“Programming isn’t mine, either,” Ian said. “Stan was busy—he’s the best in the lab on computers—so I had Mike in info systems do it.”
“What,” Samantha asked, “does the Trojan horse do?”
“I don’t even know what a Trojan horse is, in computer talk,” Josh protested. “Some kind of virus?”
“It’s like a virus, but it gives the newly infected computer orders to do something specific,” Samantha explained. “Usually something the computer owner wouldn’t want it to do.”
“Exactly.” Ian was a little surprised at her knowledge but wasn’t about to say anything now. “In this case it’s supposed to notify me when the data on the disk was run through any computer but mine.”
“Notify you? You mean, send you an e-mail or something?” Josh asked.
Ian nodded, and was pleased when it didn’t bother him. “And send me a…fingerprint of sorts of the computer it’s being run on.”
Josh went still. “You mean you’ll be able to identify where it was sent from?”
“I won’t, but Mike should be. It may take him a while, but he says he can figure it out.”
Josh let out a long breath. “I take back anything bad I ever said about my computer.”
“Get me out of here, and I can see if it’s come yet.”
“No, Ian. I want to know, but you’re not getting out of that bed until you’re cleared. I’ll have somebody else go to the lab and check.”
“It’s not at the lab. If you were right about the leak there, I figured it was safer to have it notify me at home.”
“Good idea,” Josh said approvingly. “And here I thought you weren’t taking this seriously.”
“I wasn’t,” Ian admitted, a bit sheepish now. “But I knew you were, and that was enough to make me take some precautions.”
Josh
’s mouth quirked up at one corner. “I appreciate that. I know what a compliment that is.”
Ian wondered if he’d ever get used to Josh’s easy way of dealing with his employees and acknowledging openly when they’d pleased him.
“I’ll have somebody go by the house, then. Sam, you want to handle that?”
“All right.” Her voice was inflectionless, but her glance at Ian told him she knew perfectly well this wasn’t the solution he would want. “I’ll need a password, I assume?”
“I—”
Ian broke off suddenly. Dear God. This couldn’t happen. He’d never live down the embarrassment. As clearly as if it had been five minutes ago, he remembered that day last week when he sat down as he always did on Sunday and changed his password for the next week. It had been the day of the baseball game, the day Rand had appeared next door. He’d been in the middle of all those tangled emotions when he’d sat down at the computer. And instead of his usual choice of an alpha-numeric mix, he’d instead picked a name.
Samantha.
“Ian?” Josh asked.
“I…can’t remember just now,” he said, for the first time grateful for the cover of that knock on the head, knowing neither of them would push because of it. “I change it every week.”
“Is it written down anywhere?” Samantha asked.
It’s etched into my brain, he told her silently. “No. But I’ll remember, as soon as I sit down at my computer. I always do.”
“Ian,” Josh began warningly.
“No, I’m not trying to get out early, I just…can’t remember.”
“It’ll have to wait, then,” Josh said, not sounding too happy about it.
“It’s armored,” Ian said. “The Trojan horse, I mean. They shouldn’t find it.”
“I’m not worried about that. I’m worried about giving them another shot at you.” Josh straightened up, his jaw set. “I’ll have a guard posted outside your room.”
“Josh—”
“I don’t want any argument from you,” Josh snapped. “I’ve had it up to here with this dance. It’s over, as of now.”
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