by Rachel Lee
“Did she complain? Ever?”
“No.”
“Then,” Trish said gently, “maybe that’s the thing you should focus on.”
He looked at her from haunted eyes. “It’s too late now. Isn’t this the point where I should say, I hope I’ve learned something?”
She nodded slowly. “Maybe. If it’s true. If it helps.”
“God knows, I’ve had plenty of time to think about my shortcomings.”
“Yeah,” she said quietly. “I know all about that. Funny how we get so fixated on what we messed up that we seldom think about what we might have done right.”
“Well, I messed up the ultimate and it cost my family their lives.”
“As if you were supposed to know.”
He froze, brows lifted.
“People get those little twitches all the time.”
“Twitches?”
“Flashes of things. Visions. I dunno. If I believed everything that popped into my head in vivid detail, I’d never go out my front door.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning there’s no way you could have known you were having precognition. Let me give you an example.”
He came back to the table and sat facing her.
“A couple of years ago in Boston, I came to an intersection I drove through every day. I stopped at the stop sign and then this weird thing happened.”
He nodded, listening.
“I all of a sudden had an absolutely vivid impression of my car being struck on the passenger side and spun around. I could literally feel the impact and the spin. It shook me enough that I double-checked to make sure the intersection was clear and there was no oncoming traffic. The feeling followed me home. I dismissed it as a moment of imagination and drove through that intersection the next day and every single following day without anything happening.”
She waited, but he didn’t comment.
“So,” she said after a few moments, “given what you told me about possibilities and all that stuff, I guess I should conclude that I sensed a probability, one that never happened, and it may not have happened only because I became aware of the possibility of having an accident and took extra care.”
“That’s entirely possible,” he agreed.
“Or I could say it was just a weird brain backfire. Regardless of what it was, I didn’t presume it was a vision of something that was absolutely going to happen. I had no reason to think so. Nor did you have any reason to think your visions of a plane crash were anything but anxiety about flying. It’s not like you’d spent your life foreseeing the future.”
“I know that, intellectually. It’s at the gut level I’m having a problem.”
“I understand,” she said gently. She wished that she could hug him fiercely and erase his awful burden of guilt. But only time could do that, she reminded herself. He’d have to find his own personal resolution, just as she was having to.
A minute or so later he unleashed a long sigh. “I still think there must be a way to let your friend Gage in on this.”
She drummed her fingers on the table a moment, thinking, trying to ease back from some of the raw feelings he’d exposed and made her feel. This was a time to think, not get emotional.
“Tell me exactly what you’ve seen,” she said. “Everything you think you know.”
“I told you it’s splintered. Glimpses. And I can’t tell what I’m seeing from my perspective and what I might be seeing from his. Like the plane crash thing. I don’t know why I kept seeing it from the pilot’s perspective. If I’d seen it from my own, I might have grasped it.”
She put her chin in her hand. “Maybe all that simulator training just made you interpret whatever information you got from that viewpoint. Does it really matter why you saw it that way?”
“Not really. At least in terms of what’s going on now.”
“Let’s work on now. I think you’re probably going to spend the rest of your life trying to figure out this conundrum.”
“Maybe so. I doubt I’ll find any hard and fast answers, though.”
“You never know.”
He smiled again. “The carrot is always out there.” Then he took a deep drink of cocoa and put his mug back down. “Okay, what do I know about this current situation?”
“I’m all ears.”
“I know the guy is going to leave Mahoney’s at ten to one in the morning. I see the clock, I see him briefly from the back as he gets up and leaves. So I go there every night looking for him.”
She nodded.
“Then I get this feeling of walking. And it’s not me walking because there’s no limp or pain. So in that part I’m seeing it from his viewpoint. And that’s why I walk every night, following what I’m fairly certain is his path toward your house.”
“You’re hoping you’ll run into him.”
“Well, I’m hoping I’ll catch sight of him at least and then I can do something to stop him when I’m sure I have the right guy.”
Chin still in hand, she narrowed her eyes in thought, wondering how she had managed to divorce herself enough from this situation that she was able to think about it like a number problem to solve. She ought to be quaking, maybe crying, calling the cops…
No cops, she reminded herself. At a minimum, if all this played out, this man had to get into her house in order for him to be arrested. Until he crossed her threshold uninvited, he would have committed no crime. And unless they could get him arrested, they’d never find out important details, such as who, what and why.
Without warning, her detachment snapped and she realized she was shaking. “Oh, man…” The words came out of her almost like a whimper.
Grant rounded the table as if he didn’t have a bad hip, and so fast the sound had barely finished escaping her. He pulled her up into his arms and held her snugly against his chest. Strong, warm. He felt like safety.
“I can’t believe this,” she whispered. “I can’t believe this.”
“Of course you can’t.”
“What’s wrong with me?”
“Nothing that I can see.”
She tipped her face up, still shaking. “One minute I’m so calm, and then it hits me like a freight train…”
“I know,” he murmured. “I know. I’ve been doing that for a year now.” He lifted one hand and stroked her hair gently. “I’ve been doing it, too.”
“I can’t believe I’m sitting here talking about this like it’s a puzzle to be solved, or something in a game.”
“It’s no game,” he said grimly. “Now will you let me call the sheriff? All I care about is that someone is watching over you.”
But one thought kept rising to her mind, scary though it was. “Grant, I’ve got to be the bait. I’ve got to. Because if we don’t catch this guy I’ll never be safe. You know I’m right.”
“Assuming I’m not totally crazy and didn’t just dream this up out of some kind of guilt.”
She shook her head. “We’ve been over that. The sense that something awful is lurking just ahead of me in time started before you showed up. And it’s not going away.”
He stroked her hair once more, then tightened his hold on her, just enough to make her feel surrounded by strength.
“We can’t keep tossing this ball back and forth between us,” he said. “We’ll both go nuts. In the morning I’m going to call your sheriff if you won’t.”
“But it might do more harm than good, Grant!”
He shook his head and touched her cheek with his fingertips. “Don’t you see what we’re doing? We’re running this round and round without finding any really good options. You’re talking about being bait, I’m wondering if I’ll be able to help at all if this guy shows up, hoping against hope I can figure out what to do, and hoping against hope I’m not just going to be a silent witness.”
“Oh, God.” She pressed her face to his chest, trying to grapple with stark imaginings, horrific possibilities and the way they jangled against the world she had always b
elieved in.
“You know I’m right,” he said quietly. “We need a more objective head. Some other input. Otherwise we’re going to stay on this hamster wheel for God knows how long.”
“You didn’t want to tell me,” she said, lifting her head. “But now you want to tell the sheriff?”
“You’ve reinforced my feelings. I’ve reinforced yours. We’ll go to him together. And maybe Dex will come up with something that will pinpoint a reason for all this. I hope so, because it would be nice to go to your sheriff with something tangible.”
“The chips,” she said, her voice cracking. “The damn chips. I wish I’d never looked at those numbers.”
“And maybe it’s a damn good thing you did. Do you even know why some of those chips can’t be outsourced? Why they’re classified?”
“Not my area.”
“Well, I can assure you it’s not because they could be used in a home computer.”
She sighed again and closed her eyes. “God, this just keeps getting scarier.”
Before she could open her eyes to gauge his response, she felt something touch her lips. A light touch, and for a second she thought it was his finger. Her heart and breathing seemed to stop, as if she wanted time to hold still.
Then she knew: he was kissing her. Lightly, almost questioningly, as if he wasn’t sure about what he was doing. As if he wasn’t sure how she would respond.
If her brain had engaged, she surely would have stepped back. But brain cells stopped operating in a huge rush of naked desire. She needed this. More than anything she needed to be held and kissed and cuddled and…
Aching, she leaned into his kiss, parting her lips just a little, inviting more because nothing else in the world mattered right now except that she celebrate being alive in even this small, primordial way.
A kiss, a touch…a reminder of all that was good, all that could be good. Feelings she had sworn off years ago when she convinced herself they didn’t matter anymore.
But they mattered. They definitely mattered, and now they swamped her with an ache that filled her every cell.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered against her lips. “I’m sorry. I can’t…”
His apology hit her like a douche of cold water. At once she reared back, pulling out of his arms, turning away.
Of course he was sorry. He was still a man locked in grief. And she was a fool to have forgotten that for even a second.
Still aching, still yearning, feeling a bubble of anger rise and burst because her entire body was screaming for something she hadn’t even really wanted until he kissed her and then pulled away, she kept her back to him.
“I’m sorry,” he said again. “I shouldn’t have.”
“Don’t say that,” she said tautly. “Please don’t say that.”
“I just meant…” But he trailed off, evidently guessing that explanations wouldn’t be a good thing right now.
Finally, he asked, “Can I use your computer? Maybe Dex has already found something.”
“He doesn’t sleep, either?”
“Not when he’s curious.”
She turned slowly, seeking stability. “You guys must really be fun.”
“Oh, yeah, like a basket full of kittens.”
She couldn’t quite look at him. “Go ahead, you know how to turn it on.”
She was grateful when he walked out toward her den, grateful to have a few minutes to scold herself and get past the absolutely huge frustration she felt.
She didn’t even bother to run over for the umpteenth time all her reasons for avoiding men, particularly men who were still attached to someone, living or dead. She didn’t bother to remind herself that this guy would take to the road any day now.
She didn’t remind herself of one damn thing because she knew it all.
So she settled for a silent You idiot! and reclaimed her seat, sipping cocoa now gone lukewarm. At least it was chocolate. Wasn’t that supposed to create the same feeling as being in love, without all the hassles? Maybe she should drink four or five mugs of the stuff and get herself a bar of dark chocolate in the morning. Purely out of self-defense, of course.
“Trish?”
She heard Grant call from the office-den, so she picked up her mug and went reluctantly to join him. “Yes?”
His back was to her, the only illumination the screen of her laptop. Was this how he worked? In the dark?
“Dex found it. Those missing chips of yours?”
“Yeah?”
“They are definitely not for export. Dex says approval has to come from the Department of Defense, because they’re used in weapons applications.”
“Oh. My. God.” Her hand started to shake and she had to set her mug down on top of a cluttered bookcase so she didn’t spill it. A cold wind ran through her body and she wrapped her arms around herself. “Oh, my God,” she said again. “Is he sure?”
“Dex is not one to say something he doesn’t absolutely believe to be fact.”
“How could he know? All I have are code numbers.” Her voice cracked as she spoke, as she tried to absorb the enormous implications. Her knees began to feel rubbery and she leaned back against the doorjamb.
“Let’s just say Dex knows his way around computers enough to get a look at things most people couldn’t see without a ten-digit pass code and a retinal scan. He’s being cautious here, and I’m sure as heck not going to ask him for details this way. Even with a dedicated line, anyone could be tracking your computer traffic.”
Another chill ran through her. “Can I see his message?”
“Sure.” He rose and let her take the chair.
Trish sat. Cautious was an understatement she realized as she stared at the screen.
Dod only wepapp.
“That’s not cautious,” she said, “that’s downright cryptic! How can you be sure?”
“Because I know Dex. Because we always used to misspell things to confuse anyone who might stumble on something we wanted private. So look at it again. Dod is Department of Defense. Given what I asked him earlier, the rest falls in place. Only means the chips can only be sold to the Department of Defense. Wepapp…well, just say it out loud. It means this chip has weapons applications.”
She might only be a bean counter, as some people might like to call those in her profession, and she didn’t know a thing about what was actually going on with technology at the plant, she could put two and two together to make a nice round four. Classified projects, chips that couldn’t be sold without an export permit…
Oh, it made an awful kind of sense. She could only begin to imagine the kind of money some people might pay to get their hands on chips that had weapons applications, because you’d have to be talking about smart weapons.
The chill that had washed through her minutes ago came through again. She turned her head jerkily to look at Grant. “If this is true…” She paused. “Do you need to do anything else?”
“At the computer? No. Dex doesn’t need to get in any deeper, and I don’t want to create a buzz of traffic on your computer that might draw attention. Log me out and shut down.”
With her hands shaking, she couldn’t seem to do that fast enough. Finally she was able to push away from the desk and stand.
“I’m in shock,” she announced for no particular reason except that she felt extraordinarily weak and everything looked odd, as if her office had suddenly become a different world.
Grant took her arm as if to steady her, and guided her to the living room where she dropped ungracefully onto the sofa. What had she stumbled into? The thoughts buzzing through her brain like angry bees didn’t want to settle anywhere.
He went and got their cocoa and passed her mug to her. She held on to it like a lifeline as he took the armchair facing her.
“That settles it,” he said.
“Settles what?” She was still trying to absorb the magnitude of what she had discovered.
“We’re talking to the sheriff in the morning. If someone is selli
ng those chips illicitly, it would be ample cause to murder you for having discovered it.”
She nodded slowly, accepting the truth. Then she whispered, “What if Hank is part of it?”
“I don’t know. I mean, his response to you may have been just because he knows exactly what those missing chips are and he’s worried about it. Maybe hoping he can somehow find them without having to call in the feds.”
“Maybe.” Her lips felt dry, almost cracked. Her heart was beating hard, though not fast. And she was feeling far colder than the room temperature should have allowed. “Maybe I should call the feds.”
“And say what? That there are some missing chips, you’re not completely positive they’re missing, you don’t know what they are…? Because I can’t drag Dex into this. They’d want to know how he found out, and how he found out is something no one is supposed to be able to do.”
She forced herself to expel a long breath and reach for calm. A sip of cocoa, getting colder by the minute, seemed to help.
“Okay,” she said. “Assuming Dex is right, there’s a good reason for someone to want to shut me up.” She couldn’t bring herself to say kill me. “If Dex is right, I have no way to prove it to anyone without getting him into trouble, and I’d really prefer not to do that. I don’t want to get anyone into that kind of trouble.”
Grant leaned forward. “If it seems like the only way, I’ll drag Dex into it.”
She shook her head. “There has to be another way. You’re talking a federal crime, even if you’re not saying it. Even I can figure that out. So no, we don’t mention Dex to anyone. What we need is another way to prove what’s going on.”
“We need to catch the guy who’s coming after you. He’d be the link in the chain.”
She nodded slowly. “Okay, I give in. We talk to Gage in the morning. Privately. This is too big to keep to ourselves.” And now scarier than ever.
“Good. If he listens at all, we might be able to figure out something better to protect you than me sitting on a park bench.”
“This is so surreal!” The complaint burst out of her, but even as it did she felt silly for making it. She’d been through surreal before. They happened, those moments or times when something changed everything in a fundamental way. Like Jackson. Complaining about it did no good. “Sorry,” she said.