Hot Contract

by Jodi Henley

  “Your cousin knew?”

  “Mac…was doing his residency at the hospital, but he was also the head of Security ops. He knew everything that went on at StallingCo…the entire complex is wired. My grandfather Stalling was p-paranoid. Mac...Mac destroyed the video...all of it. All the copies. It was my first time. He told me…” she began, all her pain and horror tamped down into a little ball. The same little ball she’d kept it in for the last eight years. “That he wanted a way into StallingCo but I was f-fat. And frigid. Not a real woman,” she continued, high and tight, holding on to her composure with both hands. She strangled her voice down and took a deep breath. “And I had to lose weight and drop out of school because he didn’t want a fat wife and geeky kids, no matter how much money my dad paid him.”

  “Jen, I’m going to tell you something and I want you to listen, all right? Your dad is an asshole—still listening? Asshole. Want me to repeat that?”

  She tried laughing, but it came out more like a sob. “It was a long time ago. You’re nothing like him.”

  “I’m from your dad. I can see where you’d be allergic.”

  “I’m trying to build my resistance. You can, you know, kiss me again and help me out.”

  Keegan smiled crookedly. “So I’m like a shot now? Nasty medicine?”

  “Medicine is good for you,” she breathed, lifting her face to his.

  He pulled her tight, just holding her. “God,” he whispered, “this is fucking unreal.”

  That startled a laugh out of her.

  “You’re smart, Jen. And beautiful, and hot—” He hesitated. “Really hot. I can’t...think, with you in my arms.”

  Her hands were trapped between them, and yeah—maybe he wasn’t healed up. How she felt him flinch, he didn’t know.

  “I hurt you,” she said quietly.

  “You caught me the wrong way. It’s just a scratch.”

  Jen gave him a frustrated look. “I’ve seen your shoulder. It’s not just a scratch.”

  He gently lifted her arms up around his neck. “Trust me,” he said. “Try it like this.”

  “Tell me why you’re here?” she asked a little later, as they watched the fire pop in the grate. “Watching over me.”

  Keegan pulled the blanket up over her shoulders. “Want another marshmallow?”

  “I want you to talk to me,” she hesitated, “please?”

  Despite his best efforts to contain it, the crap in his head was about to break loose. “Angry,” he said. “Not at you.”

  He thought he’d worked through it, but the guilt was still there, all bright and shiny. Self-loathing filled him up and choked the words in his throat. If he’d only moved faster, formulated some kind of backup plan, Connor wouldn’t be a hostage, and Keegan wouldn’t be here...with Jen. He looked down into her eyes and felt her concern like a sucker punch.

  “My brother,” he said abruptly. He rolled a marshmallow in his hand and flipped it into the fire where it broke open, throwing out flows of charred fluff. “DalCon specializes in ransom drops, damage control. It’s understood, see? That kind of money, there’s got to be go-betweens. We make sure everyone plays fair. The Samoy backed out at the last minute. Kai—he's got cash, and they wanted more. We took the kid, but the chopper was a piece of shit. Connor and the kid fell out. We got the kid back, but the Samoy got Connor.” Keegan rubbed at his eyes. “Two million? DalCon is people and equipment. I don’t have that kind of money. They’ll kill him if we insert. They’re waiting for me to try. They know us, see? And I—I don’t know what to do. Corlis wants us to go for it.”

  “My mother was kidnapped,” Jen said, looking down into the fire.

  Out of the corner of his eyes, the curve of her cheek trembled in the flickering darkness. She opened her mouth and took a deep breath before saying, “Maybe your sister is right.”

  “I promised to keep Connor safe and I’m not willing to risk it. For right now, he's safe enough. A full frontal is the last thing I want.”

  “So what do we do now?”

  “Tell me about the rest of your family. We need to troubleshoot who wants you dead.” Keegan looked into Jen’s eyes for the first time since he’d started talking. “I need to get into the Project, Jen. I need to know why Terri was so important to the Aina.”

  “It’s locked down and you don’t have ID.”

  “I have you,” he said tightly. “It’s enough.”

  ****

  Sunlight struggled through the crappy curtains, as gray and sour as the climate. Cheap paneling, cheaper carpet. The bad was so damned old, Fallon could feel springs poking his ass through the flattened out mattress.

  He sat with his back to the wall, watching Corlis sleep. It was her expression and the way she carried herself that made her such a hard-ass. She had the eyes of a killer in the face of Malibu Barbie.

  With them closed, the resemblance was tight. She’d hate waking up to find him. Hate it worse if he eased on over and held on to her like a damned squeeze toy. He could hear Keegan out in the kitchen and Jen’s lighter voice say something in return. Fallon stood, a blanket drawn up over his shoulders. It was thin and didn’t help much. He flipped it over Corlis anyway.

  Banging his best friend ranked way up there on the stupid-scale. He should have carried his ass.

  “Thanks,” she mumbled. Not to him, sort of at the wall. Like she knew he was there and didn’t want to thank him personally.

  She did want his blanket though, hugging it up around her until the only thing he could see was a thin slice of hair and face. Her eyes opened and focused on him. And for a gutted second his breath caught.

  She didn't reach for him, but she didn't push him away and for a second, he held on to her—face buried in her hair, and pretended everything would be all right.

  ****

  The early morning sunlight slanting in off the hood made Jen’s wilted pink dress look like a wino’s bag, holding a bottle. Keegan looked over at her from the driver’s seat and thought it wasn’t supposed to be this way, this feeling he had for her. It was supposed to be grand, all bells and whistles and bows and long, romantic walks and stuff, like a Hallmark commercial. Not this glow.

  He felt warm and...happy?

  His brother was in danger; Jen’s family was out to kill her. And he felt happy? Her shoulder brushed his. Happy was a good word. Insane was probably better.

  The car bounced down into a rut and jumped out again, rattling up the switchbacks. A bright yellow sign he hadn’t noticed before warned visitors that the Project was a restricted zone and all movement through it was recorded, followed by various warnings about hydrogen sulfide blowouts and rare mineral allergies.

  “It’s a grid,” said Jen, pointing to a series of up-thrust cliffs against the distant horizon. “That escarpment there forms the northern boundary of the Southwestern Rift Zone. The Project has permission to drill there,” she pointed again, twisting around in her seat. “And there. The administrative offices are at the upper end because this is a high lava hazard zone, and features we built into the wellheads can’t be used to preserve people.” She grinned. “We tend to combust.”

  Keegan shook his head. “Lava hazard zone?”

  “It’s not as scary as it sounds. As volcanoes go, this is a sweetheart. Even with a flow, we’d still have time to shut down and evacuate.”

  A dump truck rattled by, headed in the opposite direction.

  “It’s like a pancake,” said Keegan. “There’s no way to get in close without being seen.”

  “It was designed that way.” Jen sank down in her seat, rubbing at her eyes. “Our access roads run right through the park, we get lots of tourists.”

  Keegan glanced at her. “You’re scared.”

  She nodded. “What if they’re waiting for me?”

  “I doubt they have the manpower. It’d be easier to wait until you resurface. They lost us after the party, but they’ve got to know you’ll go back to the Project.”

  Corlis kicked
the back of his seat. “Let us out here, we'll go in around the cameras.”

  Fallon looked like the ass end of Hell, eyes burning in his head. Whatever kind of rest he’d gotten had come back to bite him, and he moved like someone with a bad case of wire control. He threw the door open and got out.

  “They don’t look happy,” said Jen.

  “I don’t think they’ll ever be happy,” said Keegan. He waited until his sister caught up with Fallon. “C’mon, Jen, show me where to park this thing.”

  The closer they got to the Project, the bigger it loomed. No wonder the Aina were worried. He didn’t remember it being so damned big. The Pele Project was no one’s definition of short term.

  Carved black lava walls and blackened steel girders. He didn’t need the small plaque screwed into the welcome sign to know the project was backed by Jen's family.

  “Your daddy is a contributor?”

  Jen nodded. “The linkage is the only thing we agree on.” She pointed to a small road running around the side of the Project. “Turn in there.”

  The Project slid by off to the left, more utilitarian and not so fancy away from the front. The parking lot was in the process of being built and it was an odd patchwork of finished spaces and dirt fill backed by a loading bay.

  “We both believe in cheap power,” said Jen. “And before you ask, he didn’t build the Pele Project as my toy. It’s one hundred percent real, and I got the job without help. The people at the Project know I’m a Stalling, but there are so many of us. I could be any one of a hundred minor connections. There's my space,” she said, pointing to a stall bordered by a construction dumpster and a concrete island.

  Dr. J. Stalling. Keegan stopped the car and got out.

  Jen threw her door open and rubbed the hem of a pink ruffle over the dusty green sign. For an incandescent second she looked proud and happy, lit from within like someone had switched on a floodlight. “Mac unscrewed it the day I started working here and posed me up against my office door. I felt like such a geek.”

  “He was proud of you,” said Keegan.

  She met his eyes. “Yes,” she said, starting across the parking lot. “He’s nice.”

  They walked up a ramp into the garage, through a maze of tubing and pallets loaded with things Keegan figured would work better on the moon. It was a new world, all shiny and heatproof. No one came running to warn them away. Apparently the only people taking Terri’s death seriously were Jen’s father and the terrorists out to kill her.

  “Can you get us into Terri’s office?” he asked.

  The building Jen called the rear annex wasn’t finished. The atrium was still in the original packaging, and the railings that bracketed the future walkways were orange safety mesh. He looked up to where a handful of occupied offices spread across the upper levels.

  Jen nodded. “None of the security measures are working yet. No one thought unauthorized access would be a problem.” She gestured him down a long hallway. “Hope you’re up for a climb because the elevators don’t work either.”

  In real-life Terri must have been one hell of a woman. Keegan pushed the door to her suite open with the feeling of stepping into a personality.

  Everything from the sign on the door, bright orange with rainbow colored enamel, to the lurid shag carpet said Terri had been a woman who liked what she liked and could care less if you liked it too.

  He sneezed.

  “New car smell,” said Jen, pushing in behind him and wobbling only slightly.

  She looked green around the eyes and white around the mouth, but she didn’t throw up. Whatever mind-mojo she’d used to conquer her phobia worked with the door closed.

  “How long was she in here?”

  “A week. We’re all scheduled to move, but she couldn’t wait. She wanted this suite and that view.”

  Keegan looked at a series of pictures impaled on the wall with what seemed to be long steel chisels. Jen was in a couple of them, dressed in a yellow shirt with a bright red safety-vest. Deacon was in the biggest, carefully blown up and in a real frame. Jen’s mind-mojo must have spilled over on him too, because the laughing happy guy in the frame looked nothing like the sour-ass CIA agent Keegan remembered from his days at SOSCOM.

  He did a quick walk-thru and returned for Jen. “See if you can find anything.”

  Jen nodded. “What are we looking for?”

  Keegan opened a file cabinet and dumped the contents out. The stack of folders hadn’t even been opened. A handful of tabs were paper-clipped to a plastic pouch filled with different colored markers. There wasn’t a single piece of loose paper anywhere.

  “Honey, I have no clue, but I hope I’ll know when I see it.”

  Jen up-ended a trash can. A packet of silica gel and a solitary candy wrapper fell out. “I hate them,” she said quietly. “She was the best. She had so much potential and now it’s gone, like she was nothing. Except for me and Deacon, no one even cares.”

  She threw the trashcan down. It hit the computer desk and knocked the mouse off. The screen whispered to life.

  Jen grabbed the mouse. “There’s a program running. She must have been working when the Aina killed her.”

  Keegan sat in the chair. From this angle, he had a clear view of the web-cam aimed at his face. “It's a set-up wizard.”

  Jen leaned in over his shoulder. “The Department of Energy is conducting an ESI. An environmental impact study,” she explained. “Terri was scheduled to video-conference with Washington later this week, but she’d never used a webcam before. I remember…she told me she needed to practice.”

  Keegan brought up the last file. “It auto-saved when the computer went to sleep.”

  “...geochemical models of the middle zone, southwest rift show striking similarities in comparison to—what are you doing here?” Terri asked, startling them both. “I thought we’d agreed to keep it away from the Project. Get out of my office! You know I can’t be seen with any of you.”

  “...outside,” said a voice.

  “We’re going to hurt a lot of people. I’m having second thoughts.”

  “You can’t have second thoughts,” said a female voice.

  Terry said, “We can discuss it outside.”

  The file kept running, focused on the chair. There was a faint murmur of sound, off to the side, and a sudden, violent scream.

  Keegan put a disk in the drive and hit burn.

  “That’s me,” said Jen. She hugged herself, holding on like she was afraid she’d fall out of her dress. “I’m the one screaming in the background.”

  “You’re lucky you got away.”

  “They let me go, Keegan. I’m family. They’d want to be sure before they killed me.”

  Jesus, she had one hell of a family if the best she could say was that they were efficient killers. Anything that took Keegan’s attention off their surroundings was a risk, but he had to hold her. He was afraid. Not for himself, but for her.

  Jen held on tight, face pressed to his chest. “Something is wrong with me,” she whispered. "I can’t feel any of it. It’s like it’s all muffled and distant.”

  “It’s okay to grieve, sugar.”

  “I’m not grieving. I’m angry. This whole thing is a cover-up. They killed Terri, now I’m caught in the middle. The only one who cares is my dad, and he’d rather I die before he tells my brother. It’s just so wrong—”

  Keegan caught her shoulders and looked down into her eyes. “I’m running blind and he knows who your enemy is? With the kind of money he’s laying down, I can’t believe he’d take a chance with your life.”

  “My father is a person just like anyone else.” Jen pulled away from him, rubbing at her arms like she was cold. “The minute he brings my brother into this he’ll lose all pretense of control.”

  The man in charge of StallingCo Security ran an army equivalent to that of a small nation. In Keegan’s world, Jen’s brother, Percival, was as infamous as they came.

  “He works for your dad,
doesn't he? Why can’t Art tell him to back off?”

  “It’s not that easy. Percy only technically works for StallingCo. He created Security to protect us. It belongs to him. Dad has override powers, but to my knowledge he’s never used them. Percy can be a jerk.”

  The man responsible for last year’s hostile takeover of the Tamara Weapons Research Group was a jerk. Fancy that.

  Jen shivered. “Keegan, I—”

  The door slammed back and bounced off the wall, and a stranger stumbled through the opening. Fallon followed, kicked the man over and held a gun to his head.

  Corlis stood to the side of the door, watching the walkway with a look in her eyes that said she’d be happy to blow someone away.

  Fallon didn’t look up. “Time for true confessions.”

  Chapter Eleven

  “I’m not telling you anything!” spat the captive.

  Fallon slammed his palm flat down on the stranger’s face, and the man screamed, head bouncing off the shag, back into Fallon’s hand.

  “Man, you are just asking for rug burns. Who sent you and where are they?”

  “Torture!” wailed the terrorist.

  “Not if I make it quick,” said Fallon. “Then it’s just meat removal, you feel me?”

  Jen squatted down beside the prisoner, the ruffled hem of her dirty pink dress billowing out around her.

  “You aren’t related to me,” she said. “Who are you?”

  The Aina rolled his eyes toward Jen. “I belong to the Land. Ua mau ke ea o ka aina I ka pono. The life of the land is preserved in righteousness. Kuipo is on to you, heretic! She’ll find you soon. You can’t hide from her!”

  Keegan swore under his breath. “Any more out there?”

  Corlis glanced over her shoulder at them and jerked her chin at the captive. “Unarmed observer.”

  The man lurched upwards. “I don’t need a weapon to be of use to Kuipo!”

  “Think I’ll start with his ears.” Fallon pulled a knife and wiped it slowly on his sleeve. “Wouldn’t want you to get blood poisoning from a dirty knife.”