“Jason.”
“I see it.” The front door was open. “Stay here.”
Not even. She got out of the car and stopped. She didn’t want to get in his way, but she wasn’t sure how long she could suffer the swelling in her throat before she charged in shouting “Dad!” She counted the seconds, forcing herself to keep them slow, and ignoring the images flashing in her head. All the things Jason could find in there.
Amazingly, he appeared back on the porch way before she expected him, and waved her in. Relief made her stumble as she dashed across the macadam and up the steps to the front door. He wouldn’t call her in if her father was dead in there.
“What?” she asked breathlessly.
“Come here.”
Lark followed him to her father’s home office, the relief already having run its course. He’d found something. He stayed close beside her, as if ready to support her. Or catch her.
But there was nothing in the office to explain his concern. No blood on the floor, smashed computer, or scattered papers. The desk and files were as tidy as they always were. The computer was off.
But Jason didn’t follow her to the desk. He stood in the far corner, where there was a sofa and television, a remote in his hand. There was a sticky note on the table where the remote usually lay.
“Don’t tell me.” She circled back around the desk and stood next to him, folding her arms around herself.
He looked grim. “I won’t.” He aimed the remote at the DVD player and pressed a button.
Her father’s image appeared on the screen. He wasn’t battered or unkempt, but his eyes looked dull and he didn’t blink as he spoke in a near monotone.
“Larkspur. JT. I know you’ll find this. The situation has gotten dire and I have decided to remove myself from your proximity to keep you both safe. I’ll contact you when I get to Mexico. JT, I completed the investigation into the employee you mentioned. He was the only insider feeding Kemmerling. I want you to return to Dr. Berwell and complete your testing and immunizations. We need the results as soon as possible. Nothing is more important. I love you both.”
The last words rang with truth, a stark contrast to the rest of what he said.
“It’s all bullshit,” Lark said. She couldn’t catch a breath. Her chest burned. “He doesn’t call me Larkspur.”
“And he never calls me JT. Only the agents do.”
Concentrate on the facts. Forget possibilities. Things her father had taught her. Nausea surged and she swallowed it down. All these quick-change emotions were churning her up. She wouldn’t be any good to her father if she lost it. “He hates Mexico,” she pointed out. “It was where he and Mom went for their honeymoon.”
“They had a horrible time, he got sick and refused to go back,” Jason added.
“He’d never leave us to ‘keep us safe.’ He knows what a crock of shit it is.”
“Nils has to be a low-level connection. Someone else in the company is a traitor.”
She wanted to weep. Her father was so careful about who he trusted, and to get burned this badly… “It sounds like this Dr. Berwell—”
“It’s not Gabby.” Jason cut her off. “But it could be anyone else.”
“How do you know it’s not Gabby?”
He turned his head, his expression intense. “Because she’s in love with your father.”
“Oh.” She worried her bottom lip, letting the revelation join the cauldron of details. “But she could—”
“I’ve just spent three months in intensive contact with her. She’s not part of this,” Jason insisted.
Lark didn’t bother arguing. Men could be stupid, but Jason had to have good instincts to do the job he did. That didn’t mean she would take this Gabby/Dr. Berwell off the list. Jason was right, though. It could be anyone.
He rewound the DVD and replayed it. “He’s wearing a different shirt than the one he was wearing when I saw him yesterday,” he said. “Unless he spilled coffee on himself, this was probably done today. See the light behind him?” He twisted to check the windows. “It came from there, and came across.” He swept his arm past the wall that was behind her father in the recording. “Morning sun. Couldn’t have been too long ago.”
“He was drugged.” Lark moved closer to the TV. “He could have been putting on the monotone and the stare, but he can’t dilate his eyes at will. Especially with that much light.”
“There are two coffee mugs in the kitchen. One has lipstick on it. The other is full.”
“So someone was here. A woman.” She carefully didn’t reference Gabby again. “Any sign—”
“No struggle. I don’t think whoever it was used his coffee to drug him, and he didn’t fight them.”
Lark listened to the end of the speech playing on the DVD. “He wouldn’t send you back to the lab, either. I can’t figure—”
“It’s not a lab,” he said in a low voice, as if considering.
“What?”
“Gabby gets annoyed when I call it a lab. It’s a medical facility. Or something, she never really said.”
Her brow wrinkled. “Okay, whatever. My point is, Dad saved your life for you. Not to test the technology. He wouldn’t trap you again.”
“Thanks.” He squeezed her shoulder and let his hand stroke down her hair before focusing on the DVD player again. “Let’s see if we can figure anything else out.”
They sat down and watched the recording half a dozen more times, picking up tiny things that only reinforced what they’d already deduced. After the last time, they sat for a minute.
“What do we do now?”
Jason knew what Matt would have wanted him to do, or at least half of it. “I should hide you someplace and go find your father.”
“But you won’t.” There was no doubt in her voice.
“No.”
“The question is, will you not hide me because you need me as bait, or as help?” It didn’t seem to matter to her one way or the other.
Jason chuckled and shook his head. “I like you, Lark Madrassa.”
Her mouth curved, but she didn’t respond.
“Either or,” he told her. “Except Matt would kill me if I used you as bait. And wouldn’t bring me back this time.”
“He wouldn’t be very happy with using me as a partner, either,” she pointed out.
“No. But I can’t trust anyone else.” That reality burned his gut more than ever. You couldn’t work in this business and be an idealist. They always knew the risk of betrayal. But they hadn’t actually encountered it before, and since they had no idea where the threat lay, they had to believe it was everywhere.
“You said Gabby is in love with Dad,” Lark said. “That she wouldn’t betray him.”
“I believe that. It doesn’t mean I can trust her.”
“But she’s our only lead, right? In that whole speech—” she waved at the TV, “—she’s the only one he mentioned specifically. Do you think she’s back at the facility?”
“Probably. She doesn’t seem to ever go home. But we can’t go down there.”
“Because that’s what he wants us to do.”
“Who?” Jason blurted, disconcerted how closely she followed his train of thought. He wasn’t used to anyone but Matt doing that. Not even Allison, the mission leader he’d worked with longest.
“Kemmerling, if we’re assuming he’s behind this. I don’t know who else it would be, but you might.”
“No, he’s pretty much the Big Bad in this scenario.” Matt had mentioned others who wanted to get their hands on the technology, and maybe on him, but he’d talked about them as if they were distant buyers, not anyone who would actively pursue the information.
“Should we call Gabby to come here?” Lark’s knees bounced in agitation, and Jason could tell he wasn’t going to be able to hold her back. He stood and went to Matt’s desk to boot up the computer.
“Not exactly.” Matt synced his contacts list to a computer file, so Jason should be able to access ph
one numbers he wouldn’t normally have, like Gabby’s home and cell phones. It took a moment to get through his layers of passwords—Jason had limited access to certain areas of the computer—so to speed things along, he just added Matt’s file to his own, telling the program not to overwrite duplicates, and explaining to Lark what he was doing as he worked. The top-of-the-line system zipped through the download, and a minute later he scrolled through his phone book to double-check they were all there.
“Give me your number, too,” Lark said, her phone ready. “And Gabby’s. Just in case we get separated.”
“We won’t get separated.” But he did it anyway, just in case. Then he scrolled through the call log on the desk phone, but there was nothing within the last twenty-four hours, and the calls before it weren’t connected to this situation.
“So what’s the plan?” Lark asked when he finished.
He shook his head. She looked annoyed, but closed her mouth until they were outside and in his car—in his own car now, not a company-issued one. Settling into the seat of the old Range Rover had made him feel more in control than he had since he woke up three months ago.
Lark clicked her seatbelt, then folded her arms and looked straight out the windshield. Then she unfolded them and let her hands rest, as if pretending she wasn’t still annoyed. Trouble was, she looked like a cockatoo with its feathers ruffled. Jason barely managed to stop himself from smoothing her hair again. It had been silky against his palm, one of the few areas of his body where light touch wasn’t excruciating.
“You can ask now,” he told her.
“Ask what?”
“What the plan is.”
“I didn’t think you were going to tell me.”
“I wasn’t going to tell you in there, where it might be bugged. There was no point in taking the time to sweep the room when we were leaving anyway.”
“Oh.” She bit her lip. “I suppose if someone could get in there to plant the disk—and record it, too—they could have planted bugs at the same time.”
“Right.” Jason started the Rover and pulled around the circle to head down the driveway. “Same reason I didn’t take the company car again when we left Hummingbird.”
“What makes this one safe?”
“I have an automatic detection system on it.” He tapped a unit hanging from the keychain. “It’s clean.”
“Okay. Then, what’s the plan?”
“You’ll see.”
He chuckled at her yelp. She was fun to play with. Now wasn’t the time for playing, of course, with her father’s life possibly hanging in the balance, but it did help with the tension. Jason wouldn’t underestimate the value of reducing the stress, even for a few seconds at a time.
“They wouldn’t hurt him, right?” She looked left and right as he pulled up to a stop sign. “No, that’s not what I’m asking. They would hurt him, if they thought they needed to. I meant—they won’t kill him. Right?”
Jason knew what she wanted him to say. Luckily, he could say it truthfully. “I don’t think so. Why bother making the recording if they’re getting rid of him?” He went straight and pressed down on the accelerator on the open stretch.
“If they didn’t want us to look for his body—”
“Don’t.” He rested his hand on her thigh, intending it as comfort or reassurance. Her quads flexed under his fingers, as if she wanted to squirm. “Keep your imagination on a short leash, Lark.”
“Yeah.” She put her hand on top of his, and it had just the right amount of weight to it. Her touch yesterday had been stronger, sending a bolt of pleasure through him. He couldn’t afford that kind of distraction, especially now. But now, it was just a touch. He let it linger, both taking comfort and giving it.
After a moment, he said, “They went to a lot of trouble to send us in a certain direction. They don’t want him dead. Not yet, if at all. Kemmerling isn’t a killer.” At least, the Isaac Jason knew hadn’t been a killer. He didn’t know him now. Didn’t know how corrupt he’d become. But he didn’t think it was a factor, at least at the moment. Isaac wanted something specific, and had a plan to get it. If he killed Matt, all incentive for Jason and Lark to play along would disappear.
He hoped Isaac saw that logic.
Chapter Eight
Matthew woke in a pit.
Not literally, or at least he didn’t think so. It was hard to tell. The dirt walls had no windows or doors. The ceiling seemed to be wood, but was out of his reach. The only light came through slits in the ceiling. He guessed he was in some kind of earthen basement under a cabin or something similar.
He kept still and let his eyes adjust to the darkness. He lay on a scratchy blanket, probably wool. Several of them formed a pallet on the bare floor. He didn’t rate a bed, apparently. Isaac wasn’t following the “respect your opponent” school of thought.
Matthew stretched, wincing at the ache in his muscles. They hadn’t handled him delicately while he was out. Jason would kill him when he found out Matthew had let himself be taken. But it had been a calculated risk. He couldn’t get near Isaac any other way.
The sedative Ella injected him with contained an added chemical that was supposed to make him compliant. He’d fought it, and though he’d made the speech she told him to make, he managed to put clues in it that both Jason and Lark should pick up on. Well, Jason, anyway. Matthew wasn’t sure how Lark would handle his abduction. She might be too emotional to examine his words. He felt a pang of regret for putting her through that, but if his choice made her less of a target, it was worth a little distress.
He bit back a groan as he pulled himself upright to study the room. A camping-style chemical toilet sat crookedly in one corner. An old-fashioned pitcher and basin rested on a stand against the wall between the toilet and the pallet. An intercom unit had been pressed into the dirt wall, cables leading up into the structure overhead.
Matthew ignored the intercom for now. In the dim, striped glow from above, he took inventory of his body, tensing and releasing muscles, shifting and prodding to make sure nothing was broken or torn, before rising and taking a couple of small steps. Muscles twinged, evidence of both his age and rough handling, but he didn’t seem to have any true injuries. No dried blood or healing cuts, aside from the tender spot where Ella had inexpertly plunged the needle into his neck. He shivered, partly because of being underground, partly a side effect of the sedative. Movement would combat both.
He paced around the room, testing the walls and checking corners, squinting up at the floor above. He couldn’t see any interruptions in the light that would indicate either people or furniture in the room above him, and there was no noise, human or electronic. He found the faint outline of a well-cut trap door dead center of the room. They’d cut it there purposefully, to keep him from climbing the walls and breaking out. Most of the gaps between floor planks were too narrow to wedge his fingers into. But he wasn’t planning on escaping, anyway. Not yet. It would defeat his whole purpose for being here.
He checked his pockets. Cell phone, wallet, car and house keys, all gone. He’d known they would be. Before Ella arrived, he’d locked his Hummingbird pass card in his safe, and had only the front door and main car keys in his pocket. Nothing would be helpful to Isaac or whoever had him.
“You planned this? From the beginning?” he could imagine Lark’s outraged demand. She’d be shocked, first, that he expected the worst from her aunt. But he’d trained Isaac, and Hummingbird was a successful company not because they threw up walls when someone tried to hurt their clients, but because they understood the minds of those they were up against.
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