“That's right behind Biomolecule Production. There is no secret room there. I've been working in there the entire time. I would have noticed something.”
“Can you zoom in?”
At his direction, the techie worked her magic and the entire screen filled with the section in question. I squinted at the slightly grainy image, then felt a frown come to my forehead.
“There's a maintenance panel behind the wall there, but it's just a few inches deep—not even deep enough to step into.”
“Ever checked it out yourself?” he wanted to know.
I shook my head, feeling my stomach sink. That was happening a lot these days, and I had a good idea that it would get worse—yet again—very soon.
“Nope.”
“Then you know already where we have to go.”
Pressing my lips together, I did my best to quell the rising terror that was crawling up my spine.
“I still don't understand why you're doing all this.” Looking at the big screen and its scrolling numbers, I finally understood what that was all about. “You're selling our entire research. Why?”
Nate shrugged, looking vaguely disappointed that I had to ask.
“An operation like this requires a lot of money. A lot more than I would have been able to acquire myself. About an hour ago we broke even. Now we can pay everyone's promised salary. Maybe there'll be bonuses.”
I couldn't help but frown at this.
“Who's buying all that information? Whatever you do, the patents remain with the company. No one else can use them until the licenses expire.”
“People are nevertheless interested in the exact details of how those patents came to be. The real money's in what didn't make it into the papers. And there's of course the current, unpublished research.”
“And you're okay with likely funding terrorism with this?”
He snorted.
“What do you think this operation will be classified as? Come on, you're smarter than that.”
I gave him the blankest stare I could manage, but it was the techie who supplied the answer I was looking for.
“I'm part of a hacktivist group. We screen all the prospective buyers. They might think that they can hide behind screen names and a VPN, but it's easy for us to keep tabs on who's after what. Most of this stuff goes straight into the archives of similar corporations, with the odd eccentric billionaire looking around. It's lucrative business, but mostly harmless. Pays well to be a part of, too.” She looked from me to Nate. “Have you tried offering her money? Because with student loan rates these days many people get driven into desperate situations.”
The smile he gave her was almost fond, although he showed too many teeth.
“Don't bother. She's one of those people who do things because they're right. Or have I judged you wrong?”
There was a lot of condescension in his eyes as he looked at me, but I didn't take the bait.
“Whatever your reason for this wretched crusade, don't make me a part of it. I'm not helping you out of the goodness of my heart or because I'm such a wonderful human being, and you know it.”
“There you have it,” he told the techie, who shrugged as if to say that it was fine with her if I wanted to have it my way.
This conversation was quickly turning weird, so I decided to hone in on the part I really wanted to avoid, but knew I had to face eventually.
“This is personal for you. Until you showed me that video I figured this was just another job, but your reaction wasn't what I'd expected.”
“My reaction?” he asked.
I focused on him for a moment, trying to weigh my options.
“You're like this finely tuned, precise machine, or so I thought. You plan, you plot, you execute, it all falls in line. But when you were having Greene and me out here, that mask slipped and underneath is lurking a beast—wild, untamed, tired of being bound. I'm honestly surprised that you didn't kill Greene right there when he slipped up about that project, Destiny?”
Even thinking of the name made me shudder. Nate didn't react; in fact, he was regarding me as if he saw me in a completely new light.
“Go on.”
“Well, not much more to say. It was like something just broke through the sleek veneer, something wild and primal. You’ve above average level intellect, you likely have some kind of personality disorder, but as much as I'd love to call you a full-blown psychopath to your face, you clearly empathize, so you're much more dangerous than one of those. You choose what you do. Everything is calculated, planned. Your entire operation, dragging me into it, but also the small details. You clearly get what you want because you know how to make people get you what you want. But there's this one trigger you have that you can't completely control because it cuts too deep, is too painful to let intellect tide you over the moment. The only thing that can cause that in a person is grief and loss. My guess is that they hurt someone very close to you.” Having already doomed myself so far, judging from the way he kept staring at me, I might as well finish that thought. “Not just hurt, they killed that person in one of their sick experiments, and now you're here because you seek vengeance.”
Silence fell, and it was one of those really uncomfortable ones. More than at any other moment when I'd been around him, I was aware that he was not only physically, but psychologically capable of doing all kinds of terrible things to me. And still, in some twisted, fucked-up way, I realized that he wouldn’t.
I wondered what exactly was wrong with me that on some level, deep down and until-recently buried, that entire dichotomy was a turn-on for me.
The moment didn't pass as much as he shook it off. Life returned to his eyes, and after another couple of seconds he gave a brief bark of laughter.
“I think I could get used to this kind of surprise,” he remarked dryly.
“Like what?”
I wasn't even playing dumb. That was not the reaction I'd anticipated.
“Someone having the guts to face me down, and going about it in a smart manner, too. But I guess it makes sense. I wouldn’t have screwed up my policy of not screwing with a potential ally just for anyone.” He let that hang between us, a twist coming to his lips that made me want to roll my eyes. Somehow, the air between us had gotten a lot more relaxed since he’d watched me beat the shit out of Greene. He only underlined that as he continued. “It often takes guts to say the truth. I think that deserves a reward.”
I wasn't sure I would like where this was going.
“Such as?”
“The truth,” he offered.
I licked my lips but remained silent, and did my best not to back up when he came out of his casual pose leaning against the console and advanced on me until he could lean in and whisper into my ear.
“They did not just kill him, they murdered him. And his name was Raleigh Miller.”
I had expected a lot of things, but not this. For what felt like a small eternity, I could just stare at him while my brain was unable to come up with any kind of reply, let alone a coherent one.
Shit.
At this point I should probably explain who Raleigh Miller is—or, more precisely, was.
Raleigh Miller was on the fast track to becoming something like the Steve Jobs of virology. Young, dynamic, insanely bright, and a true visionary. It didn't hurt that he was quite the looker, but after five minutes of listening to him talk it was hard to focus on anything but his intellect and charisma.
I met him three times in my life.
The first time was when I was in grad school, and he was a guest lecturer in one of my optional seminars. Until then, I'd still been torn—did I want to go into cancer research or virology? He made that decision easy. Two hours I listened to him talk, and then I was sold. And I wasn't the only one, but maybe a little more consistent with my hero worship.
Three years later I met him at a conference. I'd been citing two of his papers in my PhD thesis, and I wanted to hear his opinion of my conclusions firsthand. I could hav
e done that via email, but I wanted to look into his eyes while we discussed this.
I must have left some kind of impression on him, because when I sent in my application for a job at Green Fields Biotech—the corporation whose headhunter had snatched him up six years ago—he wrote a recommendation letter for me, ultimately landing me the job. I met him the day of my final interview, and I was ecstatic when I found out that I'd be working as one of his research assistants.
The following weekend an accident happened in the hot lab, and he died right before my first day of work.
Looking up at Nate now, I felt a last puzzle piece click in my head. Not what kind of “accident” that must have been—that was pretty obvious. No, for hours now—and possibly longer, but I’d been missing the context completely—something had been nagging at my mind, but with all the horror and stress, I'd been unable to find the time to sort it out. But now I realized what had been bothering me.
“You're his brother. You're—”
His full name was burning on my tongue, but before I could say it, he put a finger over my lips in a terribly intimate gesture.
“Don't.”
Holding his gaze, I gave the barest of nods, then counted the seconds until he dropped his hand. Five. Way too long to only make a point, not long enough to mean something.
He looked different, but then the picture that was the basis of my epiphany had to be fifteen years old by now. He'd been younger, a lot more carefree, and back then the family resemblance had been obvious as he and his brother had shared the same eyes and wheat-yellow hair. They'd been goofing around in it, playing ball or something, and Raleigh had had his brother in a head lock, both of them laughing. They couldn't have been more than eighteen or twenty back then.
Not much of that boy on the cusp of adulthood was left anymore. Of course he was older, and there was the dark hair color that obviously stemmed from the same source as my riot red curls. But now there was steel and calculation where happiness and laughter had been. A lot had happened since then, and I could only guess that Raleigh's death had been just one event in a million that had shaped him. Maybe a part of me, buried deep down, had recognized him that day in the park—a much better explanation than instant animalistic attraction.
What really terrified me was that it wasn't really the resemblance to his brother—now that I'd seen it so glaringly obvious—that drew me to him. No, it had been those few glances at the beast lurking underneath the steel armor that still made me want to wrap myself around him and forget that there was anything in the world besides us.
How I knew this, I couldn't say. It shouldn't have made any sense, and it should have troubled me deeply, but the opposite was the case. Some twisted, dark, deeply buried part of me welcomed him, stretched out her claws and found like where only difference should have been.
And with the way he was looking at me just now, outwardly composed but with that beast lurking in his eyes, I was sure that he knew exactly what I was thinking.
I was obviously only a hairbreadth away from a psychotic break; either that, or Greene had bashed my head into the floor one time too many.
“The question is, where does that leave us now?” he asked, his voice deceptively calm.
I couldn't say exactly why that revelation changed something for me. Maybe because I'd always wondered what had really happened to Raleigh because I worked in the same field. Maybe it was the last dregs of my hero worship. Maybe it gave all that horror I'd been through a personal component that my mind needed to latch on to.
I really didn't know why, but when Nate asked me, I knew what my answer would be.
“I'll do it. I'll go into the L4 lab with you.”
He held my gaze for another moment, then turned away.
“No sense in burning daylight then. Unless you have anything better to do right now?”
I shook my head, refraining from noting that it was in the middle of the night. That my stomach was sinking with a familiar feeling of dread kept my mirth at the backburner.
“No, my calendar is completely free for some obscure reason.”
The grin I got for my effort was grim rather than humorous, and I didn't feel like returning it when he made a sweeping gesture toward the back of the atrium, where hallways would lead us down into the lower levels of the building.
“After you.”
Chapter 17
Given the circumstances, I'd expected two things to happen—a full-blown panic attack on my part, and that in front of a large audience of guards. I was surprised when Nate only brought Andrej and one other guard with him, and while that didn't make me feel much better as we headed for the connective tunnel that would bring us inside the concrete shell that housed the hot lab, I didn't completely lose it, either.
Through most of the complex, the mercenaries used flashlights when needed, but once we reached the tunnel, the way was illuminated by dim emergency lighting. I remembered from my safety training that the entire BSL-4 lab complex was supplied with two generator units that could each power the entire lab for four days straight, so shutting off the electricity in the rest of the building hadn't had that much influence here. I still would have felt better knowing that the air filtration system was running on something other than giant fuel tanks, but if I'd learned anything about Nate and his mission, it was that he had thought about everything that could be prepared for.
My hands started to shake a little when we reached the bottom end of the tunnel and stepped into the wide hallway that ran around the lab complex itself.
During the construction of the building, they'd built the lab complex as an entire autonomous unit inside the extended basement of the main building, like a reinforced concrete cube sitting on top of the foundations of the rest. I remembered that it encompassed three levels—the main lab floor plus air and electricity maintenance above, and liquid waste management below. The lab level itself didn't look that different except for the obvious reinforcements of walls and windows that made up the labs. In reality, it was a bunker that could withstand earthquakes and other natural disasters, and everything else short of an atomic bomb being dropped onto the levels above. It was the safest place inside the entire building, and the last place I wanted to be.
Nate stopped once we reached the main door to the lab and turned to his men. While they conferred in hushed tones, I gravitated toward the blackboard and sign-in sheet. It seemed ludicrous to follow normal procedures, but I had the sudden, irrational feeling that if I didn't, I would jinx this. And if you go into an L4 lab where pretty much everything inside kills ninety percent of what it infects, you don't want to jinx it.
Glancing at the others, I bit my lip, but then reached for the felt tip marker and wrote my initials onto the field that indicated who was currently working inside. After a moment of hesitation, I added an “NM” for him.
Whatever he and his men had to sort out was done quickly, and a few moments later Nate joined me at the board. He looked faintly amused at my antics but didn't call me out on them.
“Still following protocol?”
I gave a noncommittal grunt. “Can we go in now?”
“That eager?”
I shrugged.
“The sooner we get this over with, the sooner I'm out again, and that sounds freaking awesome to me right now.”
He gave me a “have it your way” kind of look and repeated his previous direction.
“After you.”
My hand still shook as I reached for the handle, but my grip was strong, and I even felt a hint of vindication as I pushed open the door and stepped inside. My very special guest followed me, while the others remained outside.
Exhaling slowly, I let routine guide me when I felt my mind wanting to go into overdrive. With limited space down here, there was only one changing room instead of two, but then the shower thing had proven that something as simple as convention didn't keep him out of designated female-only spaces. And it wasn’t like he’d never seen me naked before.
Turning back to him, I divided the heap of blue and white into two stacks and handed him his.
“Have you had any training at all concerning biosafety regulations?”
The right corner of his mouth quirked up as he tried not to grin. He did seem a little tense, now that I looked at him more closely. Understandably, considering what we were about to do, but it was still strange after the last few hours to see him react so… predictably normal.
“I think I can manage donning scrubs,” he retorted, taking the offered clothes.
As he started unbuttoning his shirt without turning around—of course he didn’t—I chose to take the high road and turned my back on him. I only had to shed one layer of rather uncomplicated clothes, so I was in fresh scrubs well ahead of him.
It seemed utterly girlish to play coy now, but then remaining standing there with my back turned on him wasn't much better. I did my best to imitate the casual leaning pose he liked to strike as I settled against the lockers and got a good eyeful of what lurked underneath those dress clothes.
His upper body was mostly lean but well-defined muscle, but now the amount of scars, under and around the tattoos that marched up one upper arm and a good portion of his back, made a lot more sense to me. I’d never bothered to ask, just assumed that he’d been in the army or something. I had no experience with the marks wounds left behind, but there was more than one roundish, puckered scar that looked like a gunshot wound, and the white, fine lines had to be from a knife. There were also a few darker patches that I realized must have been still-embedded shrapnel.
He thankfully didn't go commando and also kept on the tight, black boxer briefs, and while part of me wanted to look, I averted my eyes before they could get really curious. It was bad enough that my fingers were itching to reacquaint themselves with every pane and curve of his body.
The Green Fields Series Box Set: Books 1-3 Page 15