Mind Games

by Laura K. Curtis

  Jane nodded.

  “I asked Nash to put the geek squad on her trail when I called in this afternoon.”

  “You did?”

  “I saw your face when Clive was talking about her. She’s a good friend, isn’t she?”

  Was she? Certainly, she was the closest thing Jane had, which made Jane herself a terrible friend for not trying to find out about the supposed family emergency in Argentina. “She’s one of the few people I can relate to. The scientific community is still very male focused, and Dani had it harder than most because she’s gorgeous. Really. She put herself through grad school modeling, which pissed off a lot of her female colleagues, and her grades pissed off the men. I guess you could say when she came to work at AHI, we sort of decided we were kindred spirits. I don’t have the looks, but starting out so much younger than the rest of the team and female . . . I understood where she was coming from. I can’t believe I’ve been so focused on work I didn’t even try to find out what was going on with her family. I mean, I don’t have her parents’ phone number in Argentina, but I should have asked Clive to call sooner. Dani has a younger brother who’s been in and out of trouble a couple of times. I assumed he was acting out again, but that’s no excuse for not trying to find out for sure.”

  “With a little luck, her kidnappers want her for her expertise, same as they do you. That will protect her.”

  “She must be so scared.”

  He tilted her face up. “You can’t think that way. Nash’s tech guys are the best. If there’s any evidence on her computer, her phones, anywhere, they’ll find it. And then we’ll go in and get her back and you can move on with your lives.”

  “You make it sound so simple.”

  “It’s what we do. Okay?”

  “Yeah. Okay.” And oddly, it was. Once he’d left, she rewashed her face, letting her fingers rest for a moment against the spot where Eric had cupped her cheek; re-brushed her teeth; set the alarm on the cell phone Jake had left for her for eight o’clock; and, pajamas on once again, crawled into bed. She was asleep in seconds.

  • • •

  MORNING CAME TOO soon. What time had she gone to bed, anyway? Jane staggered into the bathroom and took a long shower, letting the hot water sluice the glue from her eyelids and the aches from her muscles. After dressing in jeans and a long-sleeved tee, she followed the tantalizing scent of coffee down to the kitchen.

  “Hey,” said Tara, looking up from a notebook she was writing in at the table. “Ready for breakfast?”

  “I’m not much for eating in the morning, I’m afraid,” Jane replied. “Though I’d kill for a cup of coffee.”

  “Breakfast is the most important meal of the day,” said a boy of about twelve or thirteen who stood at the sink, rinsing dishes before putting them into an industrial-sized dishwasher.

  Tara laughed. “This is Ricky. Ricky, this is Dr. Evans. She’ll be staying with us for a little while.”

  “Hello,” said the boy. “It’s nice to meet you.”

  “Ricky and his twin, Micky, have been here about three weeks,” Tara explained, “and they’ve heard my lectures on the importance of morning nutrition more than once.”

  “Plus, Miss Tara makes really good oatmeal,” Ricky assured her. “It’s not like . . . well, not like some places where the food’s kind of nasty.”

  “I certainly can’t turn down oatmeal.” Jane grinned at him, teasing just a little at his serious demeanor. “Especially not with such a ringing endorsement.”

  “We’re a self-service joint around here,” Tara told her. “There’s milk in the fridge and maple syrup in the cabinet to the left of the stove.”

  Jane got a bowl of oatmeal and added syrup. Her coffee she took black. Then she sat down at the table with Tara.

  “Where are the guys?”

  “Jake roped Eric into helping out with an early-morning self-defense class.” Tara glanced at Ricky. “Adult education, though we do self-defense with the kids in the afternoons.”

  Eric would be good at that. Physically imposing, he probably terrified the women at first. But soon enough they would see that not all men were to be feared. There was a stillness at his core, a deep strain of capable strength that went beyond the physical and radiated reassurance.

  “He said they’d be back at nine,” Tara said. “Which is pretty much any minute.”

  “Miss Tara, I’m done. Can I go hang with the horse class?”

  “Of course. Thank you, Ricky.”

  The kid bobbed his head and scuttled from the room.

  “He’s a good kid,” Tara said on a sigh. “They both are. But their mom’s an addict, and their dad took off a few years back. The mother’s doing thirty days on a Driving While Ability Impaired charge at the moment. Court-ordered rehab while she’s inside, then more when she gets out. Ninety-day eval; then they decide whether she gets the boys back.”

  “Tough row to hoe. Do they get to visit her?”

  “Not yet. She doesn’t even want them to see her there. Which I understand, though I think she’s wrong about it. Once she gets out, she’ll have supervised visitation, which will take place here. Jake will go get her, drive her back to the halfway house. Most of our kids have similar situations, so we do a lot of rehab-type training here. How to deal with the addicts in your life and their effect on you.” A shadow passed behind Tara’s eyes, and her hands formed fists, thumbs rubbing over her fingernails.

  “And you have horses.”

  Tara laughed, as Jane had intended. “We do. Beth and Kevin are in charge of the horses, and we take in older ones, gentle ones, ones that don’t serve anyone else and use them as therapy animals both for our own kids and for ones that are brought in. Much like the dogs. And the sheep. And the goats. And the chickens. They also help with community outreach. Allowing class trips to come visit the animals makes our mission more palatable.”

  “Oh, my.”

  “Uh-huh. I’d like to believe that our kids miss us when they go home, but I know it’s only their four-footed pals who have a real place in their hearts.”

  “How many children do you have here?”

  “Right now? Seven. But we’ve had as many as ten.”

  “Wow.” Jane rinsed out her bowl and, following Ricky’s example, placed it in the dishwasher. She’d just sat down again to finish her coffee when Eric and Jake came in.

  Jake dropped a kiss on Tara’s lips and looked at the notepad. “So how much do I have to make this week to feed the ravening hordes?”

  “Oh, stop it, you,” she said, laughing.

  “You about ready to head down to the city?” Eric asked.

  “Sure.” Jane smothered a yawn. “Let me brush my teeth and grab my purse.”

  Eric frowned, touching her face. “You look exhausted. Listen, grab a change of clothes while you’re up there. We can stay in the city tonight. It will be easier than making the trip, and it will confuse anyone trying to track you, too.”

  “Here,” said Tara, rising, “I’ll get you an overnight bag to put your things in.”

  She walked out and Jane followed her.

  “Do you . . . Does everyone . . .” Oh God, how to say this without sounding unbelievably rude to a woman who’d been nothing but kind to her?

  Tara stopped halfway up the stairs. “Do we just do whatever the guys tell us to?”

  Jane held her hands out in a “you caught me” gesture.

  “It seems that way, doesn’t it? But no. Right now, you’re in danger, and danger is what Eric, Jake, and to some extent even Kevin specialize in. Follow their lead and you’ll stay safe. But if Jake said to me, ‘We’re going to California next week because I need a vacation,’ there would be hell to pay.

  “And, frankly, woman to woman, you look like crap. The kids go to bed pretty early, it’s true, but you’ll be better in one of HSE’s apartmen
ts. They’re very comfortable, have super-high-speed Internet so you’ll be able to work, and they’re utterly safe.”

  “Eric told me it was the only place he considered safer than this house.”

  “See? It’s perfect. Then you can come back here tomorrow or the next day when you’ve caught up on your sleep, and I’ll put you to work teaching the kids science. We homeschool because they don’t stick around more than a few months, and I suck at science!”

  Jane felt the tension leave her body. “You’re on.”

  • • •

  THE DRIVE DOWN to the city took an hour, and Eric didn’t miss the fact that Jane hardly spoke at all during the trip. Was she pissed about staying in the city? He would have thought she’d welcome the shorter commute. He could see the outline of the new laptop in her overnight bag, so maybe she was just thinking about work.

  At AHI he escorted her to the lab and watched her with her colleagues for a few minutes, then went into the break room and set up his own laptop to scour the files Nash had compiled on all the AHI employees. He skimmed through the support staff first. There were few enough of them and none with any level of clearance other than Ruth, the receptionist. She was a grandmother—though a fertile womb hardly precluded criminal activity—with three children, one in Vermont and two in Maine. She lived well within her means, didn’t own a car, and her husband had died years earlier. She had worked for Clive Handler for almost twenty years, having taken a job as his secretary when he was running the company that would become Applied Human Intelligence for the most part out of his garage on Long Island. Clive knew science. She knew people. She’d helped him get his first contracts, and nothing indicated she’d ever turn on him.

  Most of the scientists had nothing more serious than a parking ticket on their records. One who was not on Jane’s team had a couple of arrests for public intoxication, and another had been accused of embezzlement by a former employer. But Clive had assured Eric that the teams did not have access to each other’s research, that only Jane’s people could see their own progress. On her team, both Rashid and Sam had weaknesses Eric found troubling.

  Two years earlier, Sam had been through what appeared from the court documents to have been an exceedingly ugly divorce. His wife accused him of stealing her jewelry, hiding money, giving her herpes, and infidelity. For his part, he accused her of infidelity, giving him herpes, aborting their child, and stealing his money. Whatever money they’d had when the proceedings had begun, they had considerably less when the lawyers were done billing. Since the papers were finalized, Sam had been living well. His credit cards showed a steady stream of late nights at bars and clubs on the weekends, often with tabs high enough it was unlikely he’d racked them up alone. What might he give away during pillow talk?

  Rashid had no record in the court system, but in his credit report and card history Eric found the typical signs of a gambling addiction. Long weekends in Atlantic City, many including ATM cash advances. Overdue bills. Large deposits followed by even larger withdrawals. It wouldn’t be hard to convince a man like that to give up information, provided he had any.

  Eric had saved Dani for last. He could not dismiss the possibility that Dani had chosen to aid AHI’s competitors of her own accord, especially since Jane had said Dani’s brother was trouble. If he’d found himself in a tight spot, they could be using him as leverage to get her assistance. He double-clicked on the file to reveal a woman whose long, wavy hair, thickly-lashed brown eyes, and smooth skin gave her the look of a fashion model. Before he could begin reading, however, Jane’s voice caught his attention.

  “I know we’re shorthanded and you’re all worried about Dani. I am, too. But people are looking for her.” Here she looked up and directly at him between the people who stood facing her and the open door of the break room. “Really smart people. That’s what they do. This is what we do. And we can do it. We will do it.

  “I realize I can come off like an automaton, though Dani was the only one brave enough to tell me so to my face. And you probably think I am a little crazy, too. There’s a better than average chance I am. But I believe in this project. I believe in you.” She took a deep breath, and Eric stood and walked to the door. Whatever she was about to say was going to cost her, and he needed to be closer. “Clive has been pushing hard because we have a deadline dictated by the sale of a completed drug. I’m not going to tell you that doesn’t matter. My salary, all our salaries, depend on keeping AHI solvent. But I push myself, push you, for other reasons, too.”

  Another breath, and now she was looking down at her feet. “I haven’t forgotten Dani. I don’t want you to forget her, either. But we have to remember the people we are working to help, too.” She paused, then went on. “When I was seventeen, my mother killed herself.” Exclamations of surprise and sorrow, but she waved them off. “I’m not telling you this to make you feel sorry for me. I haven’t been open about this before because—well, for a lot of reasons. But I want you to understand why this drug we’re working on is so important. To feel its value the same way I do. You see, my mother was diagnosed with schizophrenia at twenty-five, two years after I was born. She held it together as long as she could. Long enough to see me off to college. But then she couldn’t fight any longer.”

  Christ. Ten years ago, when he’d met her, she’d been eighteen and already a junior. College must have been hell. Not just too young and too smart to fit in properly, not just resented for busting every bell curve, but suffering the weight of tragedy as well.

  “I never knew my mother when she wasn’t either twitchy and miserable from her meds or paranoid and delusional from neurotransmitters running riot in her brain. But I loved her. And I miss her. Every. Single. Day. So never believe that what we’re doing here is about money. It’s about people like my mom and those who will miss them if they go, like me and my father.”

  A tightness he refused to name clogged the back of Eric’s throat as he watched the group around Jane slowly break up and return to their stations. Shaking it off, he sat back down, woke his laptop from sleep, and returned to Dani’s file.

  Jane hadn’t been kidding about the girl’s brother. Both Peralta siblings had dual citizenship, as their mother was American and the children had been born in California while their parents worked in the tech industry. They’d moved back to Argentina when the bubble burst—money went a hell of a lot further in La Plata than in Silicon Valley. But both children had returned to the States for college. Dani was already in grad school at Columbia when Alvaro graduated high school, so he had come to live with her in the city. The following year, he’d started at CUNY, but only lasted a few months before being busted for selling pot to his classmates. After that, he seemed okay for a couple of years, but then he was arrested for possession of oxycodone. Dani had bailed him out, but she’d shipped him back to Argentina to get straightened out.

  Yeah, the kid was a definite weakness.

  What Eric couldn’t figure out, what made no sense to him, was why, with all these vulnerabilities, AHI’s enemy had gone after Jane instead of blackmailing or bribing or seducing one of the others. Any one of them could have sabotaged the data to prevent Handler from completing his project on schedule. No, the only thing that made sense was that they needed her expertise. Which would explain why they’d taken Dani first—the two women had similar training, but Dani was an easier target. When Dani could not immediately solve their problem, they turned their attention to Jane.

  He watched her through the big glass window of the break room as she leaned over a microscope with Stella, making notes. She called Sam and Rashid over, and they all clustered together in heated conversation. Meeting on the mound. Strategy sessions always looked the same. Sports, war, apparently even science. Everyone had to know where they stood and what steps to take next.

  The day passed quickly, and once again he had to drag Jane from her work when it was time to leave. This time, they we
re picked up at the service entrance to the building by HSE’s receptionist and Nash’s assistant, Lexie Morton. Clients saw Lexie as a pleasant woman who brought them coffee and put them at ease. Eric knew she was a former DEA agent and an active HSE operative in her own right.

  Jane took a deep, appreciative sniff as she slid into the backseat. “Indian?”

  “Yup,” said Lexie. “I picked up my own dinner on the way over, so I got extra for the two of you. Hope you don’t mind garlic.”

  “Not in the least,” said Jane.

  “Have I asked you to marry me lately?” Eric teased.

  Lexie punched him in the arm. “You can’t afford me, big boy.”

  HSE was headquartered in a twelve-story building in Tribeca. Eric had become used to the place, but Jane’s eyes widened as they passed through the second security gate into the underground garage.

  “You weren’t kidding about safety,” she said.

  “More than you can even see,” Lexie replied, an unmistakable note of pride in her voice. “This building survived a bomb blast not too long ago.” She turned a key in the lock for the private elevator and, when it arrived, used the same key to open access to both the tenth and twelfth floors.

  “If you come in through the garage, you need a key,” Eric explained. “If you come in through the front door, you go to reception and Lexie or one of the others escorts you wherever you need to be. Among other things, the upper floors have apartments, which is where I live when I’m between jobs.”

  They got off on ten, and Eric let Jane into his apartment. He didn’t spend much time in it himself, and he’d never thought much about personalization. Sure, he had photographs of his mom and sister on the bookshelves and a few books scattered here and there, but otherwise the place was as he’d taken possession: a couple of black chairs, a black leather couch, and a mammoth flat-screen television. It could use a couple of those wooly throws Jane was so fond of to soften the modern lines. Maybe he could convince her to make one for him.