by Dale Mayer
Masculine satisfaction shone on his face as he walked to the seat beside Mason and said, “I had a great nap – how about you?”
The men grinned and dove in as Marielle recovered enough to bring over the pan full of sausages to add to the huge bowl of scrambled eggs Shadow had whipped up.
She sat down beside Dane and served herself a scoop of eggs and a sausage. As soon as she forked up her first bite, a second sausage and a second serving of eggs landed on her plate. Dane calmly ignored her gasp, saying, “Eat. You don’t know when we’ll get the next meal.”
A horrible reminder that this wasn’t a holiday and wasn’t a group of friends enjoying brunch.
“Right.” Aware of the darker mood falling on the table but realizing it was necessary, she asked, “What are we doing now?”
“Hiding,” Mason said.
Her movements slowed. “What good does that do?” she asked in confusion.
“Keeps you alive.”
“But for how long,” she cried. “We have to go after these guys.”
“And who are you going to go after?” Mason asked quietly. “We’re looking for the guys who killed the professor.”
She stared at him.
“And if you have anyone to suggest we take a closer look at, then speak up so we can hunt them in cyberspace.”
She nodded, feeling better, and of course they were working on it. It wasn’t like they could sit here and babysit her for the rest of her life. Although she’d love that.
“Speaking of your Ph.D. committee, did anyone there help you get the position at Tenesco?” Dane asked.
“No, I got that job through Professor Michaels. His buddy worked there for years and was looking for a new grad student.”
Silence.
She cut a slice of sausage and popped it into her mouth. Then realized it was too silent.
“What?” she asked as soon as she swallowed her mouthful.
“Do you know other people that were friends of Michaels?” Shadow asked, his laptop now suddenly on the table beside him.
“James. Dr. Dennis James, who was killed in a car accident, was a good friend,” she said around a mouthful of food. “He died a few months back.”
More silence.
“Damn,” Mason said. “Why did we not ask you about his associates before?”
She shrugged. “What about who knows him at Tenesco, like Hudson? Or Dr. Hoerner, the guy who hired me, and his German associates. Tenesco has an agreement with a large chemical company in Germany. And another in China.”
Breakfast was forgotten as more laptops appeared and notepads came out.
Suddenly the questions shot her direction rapid fire.
She answered as fast as she could. Some she had only a vague idea and others were right there in her brain.
A half hour later she was exhausted from the instant brain drain, and the intensity of the questions. She’d no idea that she had so much information stuck in there. By the time the questions wound down, the men were buried either on the phones or on their laptops or in Mason’s case, maps. And what he could be looking at she had no idea.
Feeling tired and needing something else to do, she stood up and started cleaning off the table. All the dishes had been shoved to the center. She moved them over to the sink and washed them up quickly. Then set up coffee. She kept checking on the men, but they were deeply involved in their research.
Good. After she had cleaned up, she walked into the living room and grabbed up her laptop. Turning it on, she brought up her email and sorted through it. She’d lost her phone somewhere along the way and when she’d found it, she’d been too ill to care about her emails. Although she’d missed it initially, she’d found a certain freedom in being disconnected. Now she had hundreds of emails to catch up on. Although as she went through the bulk of them, the delete button was used heavily. Several emails were from other students. She answered the ones she could and marked the ones she’d need to do later.
By the time she’d gone through all the ones piled up, she checked for incoming emails and watched as three more downloaded.
Two she deleted without looking and then clicked open the third.
She hit the ground running before her eyes had truly seen or her mind truly understood what she was looking at.
“Dane!” she cried.
She was in the kitchen as the men bolted to their feet.
She handed over her laptop and cried, “Look.”
*
DANE STARED AT the laptop, his mind still adjusting from the shock of her cry and believing she was in trouble to the image of a dead man staring up at him.
Narrow eyed he stared at the email address and the simple message.
“You’re next,” he read aloud.
The others crowded around behind him. He looked over the top of the screen at Marielle. “Do you know this man?”
She was slowly going to pieces now that the visual threat had shown up. She nodded. “Dr. Hudson. He works at Tenesco. One of the arrogant chemists.” Tears came to her eyes. “Oh my God,” she cried. “I shouldn’t say that. He’s dead. The poor man is dead.”
There was no doubt about that as the man’s throat appeared to have been cut. He was dressed in a lab coat and showed signs of torture. His fingers were skinned and there appeared to be burn marks on the back of his hands. Several fingers were twisted the wrong way.
“Would he have any idea about the research you are doing?”
“Not access to it, I don’t think,” she said, her arms tightly crossed over her chest. “But he’s the head of the lab. I don’t know how their security or password system runs. Anyone at Tenesco could in theory have access. I’m low on the company ladder. I imagine all the chemists and department heads above me could.”
“Is there a reason why he’d be chosen to have information about your project?”
She whitened. “He publicly claims credit for everyone else’s work. So he probably said something to the wrong person. But even he doesn’t know all I’m doing.”
“Does anyone?”
“No–” she stopped herself in mid thought. “Professor Michaels. He knew a lot of it.”
“And we’ve already heard all these names? Any others?” Shadow asked.
“No, I gave them to you already.” She sat back down at the kitchen chair. “I need to contact Candice. She’s going to be devastated.”
“His wife?”
She shook her head. “No, the admin. She runs the department really. But hasn’t got the title. It’s typical of many departments. The person who keeps it running is the one with the real power.”
“And we’ve never heard of Candice, why?” Shadow had an affronted tone to his voice. “She could be key.”
Marielle laughed at the idea. “No. She’s a small Asian lady who runs that place like a military barracks.”
“Asian,” Mason said quietly. “Does she have any connection to the other companies?”
“No,” she said. “Candice is an administrator. She was a chemist trained in another country but couldn’t get recognition for her degree over here and when her husband got a good job she gave up on the idea and started at the company as an admin. Now because of the degree, she’s the perfect person to run the department.”
“What’s her temperament like?” Shadow asked.
“Uhm.” Marielle winced. “I’m afraid she’s a bit acerbic. I figured she’d been in the job too long. She knows everyone and hates a lot of them.”
“We’ll go and talk with her,” Shadow said. “See if she’ll tell us anything.”
“She won’t,” Marielle said. “She’s not very friendly.”
“You don’t like her?”
“She’s efficient but not easy to get along with. However, she loved Dr. Hudson. That’s why I know she’ll be devastated.”
“Will she or could she have been so angry that she had something to do with his death?”
She shook her head. “No, I don’t think so.”
After several more minutes of questions, Mason and Shadow got up and slipped out the back. If she hadn’t been watching them, she wouldn’t have realized they were going, they moved so quietly. Leaving her alone with Dane.
Chapter 18
“I PRESUME THEY have gone to talk to her?”
“And check out other leads,” Dane said.
“And what do we do while they’re gone?”
“You are supposed to heal. Rest, relax and get better.”
She snorted. “So everyone else gets to do something useful, and I get to lie here and do nothing.” She threw her hands up in the air. “I hate that. I want something to do. Something proactive. I hate waiting and I hate being a victim.”
“But you like being alive and that’s the point we’re at right now. Keeping you alive.”
“But they are trying to kill me – why? If they wanted what I know then they would try to kidnap me. If they have my research they don’t need me. And they wouldn’t need to kill me.”
“Unless they figure that Michaels told you something about who they are, and so they are cleaning up.”
She stared at him wordlessly. “Just because of that? Do people kill over such little things?”
“You put their whole organization at risk. Imagine a big company selling chemical warfare to our enemies.”
She paled. “That’s terrible. I don’t want my research to be involved in something like that,” she cried. “That’s not what I’m trying to do.”
“But it’s what is happening, so we have to nip it in the bud before that is the end result.”
He stood up and tugged her into his arms. “We can’t think about what you would have preferred to have happened but rather deal with what is happening.”
She snuggled in close then reared back to look up at him. “We have to stop this.”
“We are working on it.”
“No, let’s go to the company and destroy my research.”
“There’s a couple of things wrong with that idea. First, I doubt you own it. Second, there will be copies of it, third, it’s likely already been stolen and fourth, we need to know what it might all be so that our people can develop some type of defense against it.” He pulled her in tight and just held her. “Remember,” he said. “It’s not your fault.”
“And yet it feels like I’m to blame.”
“Because of your research?”
She nodded.
“But this isn’t what you planned to do. It happened. In many ways, this discovery could be brilliant,” he admitted. “Particularly if used against our enemies. Like anything, we wouldn’t want it turned against us, so we need to know the details so we can come up with a line of defense against it.”
“Or I destroy it completely,” she said in a small voice. “Then no one needs to get hurt.”
He hugged her close. “We should be so lucky to live in a world without war. I could hope that it would happen in my lifetime – at least in my children’s lifetime.”
At the word children, she froze, then lifted her head. “Do you have children?”
“No.” He laughed. “But maybe one day I will.”
“Yeah, me too.”
She lay her head against his chest, appreciating the moment. There’d been so few lately.
“Now considering that you’ve given us several leads, I need to track some of them down.” He looked around. “Maybe in the kitchen. Where are you going to be? I can work anywhere, so pick a room and I’ll move with you.”
“The table here is fine.” She stepped back and gathered up her laptop and workbooks and set up on one end of the table. “I’ll work here.” As she brought up her work, he shifted so he took over the other side of the table. Settled, she got down to refreshing her mind on where she’d finished on her research paper. There were several work oriented emails. Thankfully there were no other nasty ones. She could tell from the way Dane stared at her as she got started that he was expecting something less than pleasant. She smiled up at him. “Just the normal emails.”
“Good.” He disappeared into his work.
She spent a pleasant hour working on her paper until Hawk walked in the door.
He sniffed the air. “I missed breakfast, didn’t I?”
“You did,” Dane said from behind his computer. “But there are cold sausages in the fridge beside the eggs.”
Surprised, she watched Hawk prepare a hefty breakfast for himself. He caught her looking at him at one point and smiled curiously at her. “What’s the matter?”
“I was surprised you are cooking,” she admitted. “But I shouldn’t be. You are all so damn capable it’s scary.”
“How can capable be scary?” Hawk scoffed. “It should make you feel better to know we can handle many situations.”
“Oh it does,” she teased. “It makes you guys ideal men.”
“Hawk is, but he’s taken now,” Dane said. “Our last set of days off ended up being worse than many of our missions, but the end result is he found someone special. Isn’t that right, Hawk?”
“It is,” Hawk said cheerfully. “Talk about a life event.”
“Really, you guys have long-term partners?”
Both men looked at her. She flushed. “Sorry, I just figured that with the stress and danger you’d avoid long-term relationships. Not that you couldn’t have them or wouldn’t have them just…” she stopped and shrugged, “I’m an idiot…”
“Not at all,” Hawk said gently. “It is an issue with us. Many don’t do well married. Some military wives can’t handle the stress and uncertainty of sending their men off to war every day. Same goes for law enforcement of all kinds. It’s a problem. However, there are many successful marriages. Special women who can handle it. I lucked out.”
“And so did Mason,” Dane said quietly. “He’s been the leader in this area.”
“Really?” She thought about the man and smiled. “Makes sense.”
Dane looked at her suspiciously. “What makes sense?”
“That Mason is in a committed relationship. There isn’t the same roaming eye on him that there is in many of the other men. He’s not only in a relationship, he’s happy to be with her.”
The other two men nodded. “It’s an ideal situation, but so few military men manage to get it.”
“And I’m keeping you from her,” she said softly. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. It’s the job. And if it wasn’t you, it would be something or someone else. She knows it and so do I.”
“Still…” she felt odd realizing that as much as she really liked these men they all had lives she wasn’t a part of. Lives they could go to when the job was done. She needed the reminder. Right now she was a job to them.
And they would get to go home at some time when the “job” was over.
They were nice to have as friends and Dane…well she’d love to have him as more than a friend but it wasn’t likely to happen. She cast a look in his direction and found him staring at her.
She raised an eyebrow in question, but he shrugged and went back to working on his laptop.
She understood how he felt. There was no understanding or explaining this inexplicable draw to each other. Attraction was one thing. This…was something else. She wondered at Hawk and Mason and their relationships. What were the women like? Would she like them? She had so few friends and most were men. She’d love to have a core group of women friends.
So far it hadn’t happened. There were a few at work but they were older. Less on the friendly side. She’d thought she’d make more friends at the university but had found that studies had completely taken up most of her time and she’d not been a party animal. That hadn’t left much opportunity or time to meet other women. Men were easier to be friends with. And she’d naturally gravitated toward the men, so it had been an easy choice.
Now at her age, she found herself wishing for more women in her life.
*
DANE DRILLED THROUGH the layers of
hierarchy in Tenesco’s history. The company had connections. Did they know what their people were doing? Or were they actively requiring this type of behavior, as the company itself was involved in things it shouldn’t be? He hadn’t been able to find anything odd on the surface of course, and even now as he checked deeper into their history and the roots of the company, nothing was raising red flags. Except it was involved in a major takeover a few years ago. The previous board of directors had been fired and the new company replaced every one of the top management personnel. He was still checking the old versus the new. He asked Marielle about it.
“Oh, that’s right. I’d worked there the summer before I went to university over the winter and went back early spring and all the upper management staff were gone. Not that I have much to do with any of them, but there’d been a lot of talk. The new owners were taking the company in a new direction. Although I have no idea what that meant. There was a lot of talk as people worried about their jobs for months then as a big boom wasn’t lowered, they eased up. I’m not sure I ever met anyone in the new management team. Hudson wasn’t happy with the changes though and was fairly voluble about it in private. He was always perfect when the company bosses wandered the floor but wouldn’t say anything nice about them later.”
“It happens that way sometimes. Mergers and takeovers are not always welcome, and people often lose their jobs in the shuffle.”
“Several jobs were lost and several people were ugly about it, but it’s not like they are going to steal information from the company as a way to pay it back for losing their job,” she protested lightly.
Dane just stared at her. “That’s exactly what they do.”
“Really?” Her shoulders sagged and she muttered, “Why are people so…much like people?”
“You are just living in a world full of sunshine and rainbows.”
Silence at the table had him looking up at her. Had he upset her? “What?”
“I was living in a world like that,” she said. “But I’m not anymore.”
Hawk brought his plate to the table, changing the tone of the conversation.
“Did you see anything out there, Hawk?” she asked.