“Will you shut up if I get it for you?”
“Possibly.”
Sighing, he pulled a glass from the cabinet, walked over to the sink and held it under the tap. Carrying it back to the table, he set it down with a thump. The water sloshed over the side, but he didn’t care.
I reached up and carefully slid both palms around the glass, which wasn’t easy with cuffed wrists, not to mention the fact that my hands were shaking.
“So, how much was your cut for keeping the microchip safe?” He swished the bacon around in the pan.
I looked up. “Huh? My cut?”
“You know, in exchange for keeping the microchip.”
“Oh, that cut. Ah…ten thousand dollars.”
He turned to face me. “Ten thousand dollars? Maybe Nickelward was a genius. Do you have any idea what the microchip is worth?”
“Millions?”
“No. Millions of millions.” He snorted, turning his back to me and flipping the bacon. “You could’ve held out for a lot more, you know. I bet you were in love with him or something. Women. So dumb when it comes to matters of the heart.”
As soon as the words were out of his mouth, I flew out of my seat, threw the water over his shoulder and directly onto the bacon and hot grease in the pan.
Kaboom!
It exploded into a spectacular ball of fire. I saw the startled look on his face a nanosecond before his eyebrows and hair caught on fire.
“Shit!” he screamed, dancing about, waving his arms.
I didn’t wait to see what would happen next. I bolted for the front door, the enormity of what I’d done slamming into me.
“Oh, jeez, oh, jeez, oh jeez,” I breathed as I skidded to a stop and threw open the door.
Hyperventilating, I paused on the porch for a full second to figure out where the barn and Bacon were located. I ran in the opposite direction, heading for the trees and freedom for all my skinny butt was worth.
“Hey!” Bacon stared at me, his mouth hanging agape. He still held the broom.
Terror gripped me and I increased my speed. After a moment, I dared a glance over my shoulder and saw he was in hot pursuit. I was less than a meter from the tree line when several police cruisers and two dark sedans sped up the driveway, lights flashing, sirens blaring. I shouted, changing direction in midstep, heading directly for the cavalry.
Bacon took an immediate detour away from the police, and by extension, me.
“Get, him, get him!” I screamed.
Several guys with guns leaped out of their cars and started yelling, “Get down, get down, get down.”
I dropped facedown to the ground while a couple of guys raced past me and after Bacon.
The first guy to reach me rolled me over. “Lexi?”
I looked up into the eyes of Agent Simmons. I hadn’t realized I was crying, but he wiped away a tear on my cheek.
“Are you okay?”
“Yes,” I said, lifting my cuffed hands to swipe at the wetness on my cheeks. “Don’t worry, I’m not crying from fear.”
“Why do you smell like smoke?” He sniffed. “And bacon?”
“I just fried a guy—literally. I started a grease fire. It exploded in his face and mine, thus the tears. Last time I saw him he was in the house, trying to put out the fire on his hair.”
He glanced up. I could hear shouting and screaming coming from the house. “Smart girl.”
“Seriously desperate girl. Did the Zimmermans get my message?”
“What message?”
“I emailed a cry for help.”
He helped me sit up. “Maybe. It was Elvis Zimmerman who helped us find you. He gave us this address and said he thought you’d be here.”
“That guy is a freaking genius.”
I stood, with Agent Simmons’s assistance, and he led me to a dark sedan. He went into the house to find out what was going on. I sat in the backseat, trying to stop the shakes. After a minute, he returned, his face somber.
I gulped. “Give it to me straight. Did I kill him?”
“No. He’ll live. But he’s missing most of his hair, not to mention his eyebrows.”
I closed my eyes. “Wish I could say I’m sorry, but I’m not. He threatened to kill me.”
Agent Simmons got something out of the trunk and then cut the cuffs off my wrists with a wire snipper. Just as he finished, an ambulance screamed up the driveway.
“Did they get Bacon yet?” I asked.
“Bacon?”
“The big guy running after me when you guys arrived.”
“Don’t know yet. Can you tell me exactly what happened?”
I brought him up to speed from the moment Bacon had kidnapped me, including the fact that he’d admitted to murdering Dr. Nickelward. I told him I’d sent two goons on a goose chase to the Crazy Parrot Hotel looking for the microchip. Simmons called that in immediately and then leaned against the car, peering in at me in the backseat of the sedan.
“You’ve been one busy girl.”
“It appears my brain goes into overdrive when I’m in mortal danger.”
“That’s a good thing.”
“If you say so.”
He handed me a bottle of water. My hands were still trembling when I took it. Guess I wasn’t Superhero Girl after all.
“By the way, Elvis said you know where the microchip is.”
I glanced up mid-sip, startled. “He didn’t tell you where?”
“Was he supposed to? We didn’t really have time for a chat.”
I held out my arm. “I’ve got it.”
His brows knitted together. “Where?”
I pointed to the back of my arm. “Here. Nickelward apparently injected me with it. I didn’t know until moments before Bacon snatched me. Elvis figured it out.”
Agent Simmons whistled as he inspected my arm. “Ingenious, if not a little weird.”
“A lot weird. Can you get it out?”
“As soon as possible. And, Lexi?”
“What?”
“You did good. You held it together, kept your head in a difficult situation. If you hadn’t, this might have turned out differently.”
“Honestly, half the time I wasn’t sure what I was doing. But after all of this, there is one thing I know for certain.”
“And that is?”
“I’m never, ever going to the beach again for a vacation.”
Chapter Ten
It took the doctor exactly fifteen minutes to give me a topical anesthetic, cut into my arm and extract the microchip under the close observation of Agent Simmons, Agent Mandel, two scientists and a nurse. The doctor dropped the microchip into a petri dish and passed it over to one of the scientists, who cradled it like a baby. The doctor started to sew me up when she made a sharp exclamation.
“Wait. There is something else here.”
I twisted around to see what she meant.
The doctor frowned at me. “Hold still, please.”
I could feel her probing around and then she pulled another microchip out of my arm. Startled, the nurse held up another petri dish and the doctor dropped it in. For a minute, we all just stared at it.
“What is it?” I asked when I could find my voice. “Why are there two?”
Agent Mandel shook his head. “I don’t know.”
Agent Simmons came to stand in front of me. “Think, Lexi. Is there any reason Nickelward would have injected you with two microchips?”
“Jeez. I’m still having trouble wrapping my head around the fact that he injected me with one microchip. Two? Not a clue.”
Just the same, I thought back to our meetings and my mind raced through the conversations. Suddenly I knew.
You hold my life i
n your hands.
“It’s his baby,” I said.
Agent Simmons blinked in surprise. “His what?”
“His baby. His research project.”
Agent Mandel stepped forward. “You mean the RFID chip for diagnosing and possibly curing disease?”
I nodded. “It could prove to be revolutionary in the medical arena.”
Agent Simmons peered closer at the hole in my arm until the doctor swatted at him. “Move back, sir.”
“Is there anything else in there?”
The doctor asked the nurse to shine the light on my wound and she probed around a bit more. All this poking had started to hurt.
“Hey, ouch.”
The doctor patted my shoulder. “She’s clean. You’ll be fine, Miss Carmichael. Your arm will be sore for a couple of days, but there should be no lasting effects.”
I breathed a sigh of relief. “Thank God.”
She started to stitch the wound and I tried to keep my mind off what she was doing. “Agent Mandel, what will you do with the other chip if it does turn out to be his research project?”
He frowned. “Humphrey Nickelward was a criminal.”
I winced as she worked and wondered if the anesthesia was wearing off. “Technically, yes. He stole something that didn’t belong to him and engaged in criminal activity with persons intending to counterfeit U.S. currency. Seriously bad stuff. But in many ways I think he was little more than a desperate and misguided man with a big dream of helping others. He didn’t intend to hand over the Treasury chip to the counterfeiters.”
“You can’t be sure of that.”
“Not one-hundred-percent certain, but pretty close.”
Agent Simmons came around to the front of me, looking directly into my eyes. “Lexi, you only met this guy three times. He injected you with two microchips and nearly got you and your friends killed. Why are you defending him?”
It was a legitimate question and I wasn’t sure I fully understood the answer myself. Perhaps it was our geek connection, our kindred link. He stood alone in life, no family, no friends—he’d admitted that to me. His entire life had been nothing more than a search for a higher purpose and the belief that the power of technology for the common good could transcend all other concerns. Not always a smart approach, not necessarily advisable, and in this particular case, not legal either, but I got where he was coming from. I got him, which in hindsight is probably why he’d chosen me.
You hold my life in your hands.
“Look, there would be no harm in passing on the technology.” I felt the cold smear of a lotion of some kind and then the doctor pressed a bandage to my arm. “You don’t have to say where you got it from or how it came to be. Just permit the technology to exist for what it is. Let Nickelward make his contribution to society. It may turn out to be nothing, but it could be a stepping-stone to something significant. We can’t know at this point.”
Agent Mandel sighed. “I guess we could check it out and make certain it gets into the right hands. But no promises after that.”
“Fair enough.” It would have to be enough. If anything significant came from the research, then it would carry itself onward. I suppose Dr. Nickelward had also known that. There were no guarantees in science, but at least his work would have a chance.
I hopped down from the examining table. “Am I done here?”
“We need to keep you one more day for debriefing and then you’ll be free to go. The Secret Service greatly appreciates your cooperation. Please let us know if there is anything else you need.”
I paused. “Well, there is one thing.”
Agent Mandel lifted an eyebrow. “And that would be?”
I touched the soft bandage on my arm, wondering if I’d lost my mind. “Would you be willing to release the body of Dr. Nickelward to me? I’ll give him a proper burial.”
“That’s kind of you, especially after what he did to you.”
“I know. But he doesn’t have anyone else but me.”
“Then he’s lucky.”
“He’s dead, which doesn’t make him all that lucky. But I’ll try to do right by him.”
“You’re a good person, Lexi.”
I didn’t agree with that, especially since I believed that if Nickelward had met someone more in tune with people’s emotions, he might still be alive. But we are who we are, he’d chosen me, and now my life was forever linked with his. The least I could do was to see he didn’t go into the ground alone.
“Lexi?” Agent Simmons spoke from beside me.
“Hmm?”
“Just make sure you don’t close the casket on his fingers.”
A smile rose to my lips. “Very funny. You do know you’re invited to come and make sure I don’t.”
He grinned. “Thought you’d never ask. Wouldn’t miss it for the world.”
Chapter Eleven
Dusk had arrived by the time I pulled into the driveway of the ranch house off Guilford Street. It both surprised and delighted me that the Zimmerman twins lived only ten minutes away from my modest apartment in the small town of Jessup, Maryland. Mathematically, it made sense as the NSA’s headquarters were nearby. Still, I felt lucky for the coincidence, which was not a scientific way of looking at things, but such was my life lately.
I rang the bell and Basia opened the door. She launched herself into my arms and I gave her a hug back.
“Oh, my God, Lexi. Are you okay? We’ve been worried sick about you.”
The NSA had kept me one more day in Ocean City while they checked out the microchips and debriefed me. Basia and the twins had left Ocean City the day before and apparently all of them had returned here to the Zimmermans’ house.
Basia still had her arm around me when I turned to face the twins. They were barefoot and dressed in jeans and matching white T-shirts that read On the keyboard of life, always keep one finger on the escape button. Xavier held a Mountain Dew and Elvis looked like he’d just stepped out of the shower, his brown hair damp and curling behind the ears.
Jeez, I adored these guys.
“Hey, Lexi.” Xavier gave me a fist bump and Elvis smiled.
For a moment I just stood there, looking at my two new friends. Then I took a step forward and hugged them both at the same time.
“You guys totally rock. You know that, right?”
Elvis’s smile widened. “Back at you. You sure know how to make a vacation exciting.”
Xavier laughed. “Yeah, that was like our first vacation in six years, and now we’re going to need another six years to recover.”
Basia touched my bandage. “Are you clean? Did it hurt?”
“I’m clean and it hurt just a little bit.”
Elvis and Xavier ushered us into a dining room that had been converted to a computer operation center with dozens of computers and laptops clustered along long tables backed up against the walls. Wires and cables snaked everywhere. A ginormous flat screen television hung on the wall, but the screen was currently blank. I shivered at the arctic cold temperature, but Elvis brought me a blanket, draping it over my shoulders. Basia already wore a sweater similar to the one Elvis had loaned me, and I suspected Xavier had given it to her. It seemed as if Basia had made a new friend too, and that made me happy.
We sat in a variety of computer swivel chairs and everyone listened while I recounted the events of the past two days. Basia gasped several times, but no one spoke until I’d finished.
I pulled the blanket tighter around my shoulders and glanced at Elvis. “Agent Simmons said you’d given him Bacon’s address. How’d you figure it out?”
Basia clapped her hands together in glee. “Now you get to hear our side of the story, Lexi. It was awesome. Like something out of a James Bond movie.”
Elvis’s cheeks redde
ned. “Actually, it wasn’t that spectacular. This Bacon guy wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer. For starters, he cuffed us with our hands in front.”
“Me too.” I rubbed my wrist, remembering.
“After examining the locking mechanism, I knew I had only to find a small, thin object to insert between the roller lock and the straps so I could get free.”
“But how? He cuffed you guys together and then to the balcony door.”
Elvis shrugged. “The sliding glass door was unlocked. He never even checked. We just slid the door down far enough for me to reach the end table where I had some of my computer repair equipment. I knocked the box over with my foot and was able to retrieve a metal pin. I inserted it between the roller lock and the straps. The pin blocked the roller lock from the teeth on the straps and I slid out of the cuffs. The whole thing took all of two minutes. Maybe less.”
Basia beamed. “He was amazing.”
“I ran after you, but it was too late. You were gone, but the desk clerk said he saw you and the big guy leave in a pickup truck. He didn’t catch the license number though. He wasn’t looking for it.”
“So what did you do next?” I asked.
“I returned to the room, called the police and the Secret Service. Then I went hunting online. After I checked my email, that is.”
I smiled. “I knew it. I knew you’d check your mail.”
“It was logical of you to presume that, of course. It’s what I would have done if I could get access to a computer. Once I got your message, I decoded it and ran the house number you provided against a cross reference of all people who owned pickup trucks through the Maryland DMV. I came up with three hits, but only one in the immediate area.”
“Wow. Basia is right. You are amazing.”
“I was lucky this time. No way around it. But I wasn’t the one who tricked a thug into letting me access his computer while setting fire to a second guy and making a run for it. Now that’s amazing.”
Xavier spun around in his chair. “Excuse me. If I may insert myself into this Mutual Admiration Society, I would like to mention that I, too, managed to unlock Basia and myself from the handcuffs while Elvis was madly dashing after you. Doesn’t that make me amazing, too?”
No Money Down Page 9