Fatal Heat: A Navy SEAL Novella (9 page)

So that was her experience of sex, which was worlds away from this compulsion, like a dark creature living inside her that filled her head with heated images. Every time she moved, she was reminded of Max, particularly when she sat down.

She, who was so very self-sufficient, couldn’t wait for Max to get back from San Francisco.

Not just for the sex, either. She wanted to hear what the doctor said about his leg. She wanted to tell him what an incredible dickhead the project leader was being. Maybe she’d share her worries about Silvia. If he laughed them away, she’d feel better about it. If he took her worries seriStuworriesously, she might think of contacting someone.

She trusted his judgement absolutely.

That was something new, too. Paige never trusted anyone’s judgement as much as she trusted her own. But the few times Max disagreed with her opinion, he made her think. For such a macho man, he had the capacity to reason things out in a way that made sense to her.

She missed him. She wanted him home right now.

It was as if she had this tropism, like a plant to the sun.

She wanted him home,
now.

Her vagina clenched.

Whoa. She definitely needed to think of something else. Some work ought to do it. There was some data she needed to enter into a spreadsheet and some reports she had to catch up on. Work cooled her down, centered her.

She dove in and was lost to the world when her cell phone rang.

“Hello?”

“Paige!”

She sat up, electrified. “Silvia! Where are you? I’ve been trying to—”

“Paige, I have to be quick! I’ve sent you info on Twitter. To Barbie, go check it now. Make sure you put it somewhere safe. Something terrible is happening, Paige. I think we’re going to have to go to the FDA. Maybe the FBI.”

Paige’s eyes widened as she clutched her cell phone. “Where have you—”

“No time, Paige! I’ve been running away from them all week. I think I’ve finally found a place where I can be safe. A friend is going to help me cross over into—” The connection was broken and Paige stared at the cell phone’s display. She checked the call register. It wasn’t Silvia’s cell phone number, which was memorized in her SIM card. Silvia was either using someone else’s cell or had bought a disposable one.

Something terrible is happening.

The urgency in Silvia’s voice spurred her. She accessed Twitter and scrolled. She and Silvia had set up a private communication system—@Barbie1 and @Barbie2—to complain about their bosses. Two years ago, Paige had had what they called a “seagull boss”—he flew in, he crapped all over everything, and then flew out—who was angry at the failed results coming from his pet project. In one notable incident, he threw the hard copy of the failed test—all two hundred pages—in the air, accusing her of not doing her job. Of being a Barbie doll hired for her looks.

Instead of being kicked in the ass, he’d been kicked upstairs, but not before writing an epically negative report on her.

Silvia had been there, and ever since then, they kept a close eye on all the assholes. Currently the biggest asshole in sight was the man overseeing the Argentina project out of Buenos Aires.

Paige looked at the message Silvia had left for her @Barbie1. It was nonsense with a tinyurl in it. Clicking it brought her to a site dedicated to the restoration of Assyrian artifacts, and then to a specific section of the site. Smart girl.

She isolated the section, which was huge—at least six hundred pages, over six hundred kilobytes. But the kicker was in the first ten pages. Paige skimmed the intro to the section, her heart starting to thump in panic.

The test fields of HGHM-1 in Argentina had been planted five years ago, the minimum time the FDA required before applying for permission for human consumption of a new variety. Test results on animals had shown no anomalies. Human testing had not yet begun. But Silvia had gathered data from hospitals and clinics in the surrounding area. The data was preliminary, not all of it collation-ready, but serious enough to warrant an immediate halt to the test trials.

Cancer rates in a radius of two hundred miles had increased by 400 percent over the past five years. Argentinian newspapers were calling it “The Cancer Epidemic.” Silvia was the first to connect it to the test fields, which had been kept confidential. Even on a hasty reading, Paige could see that there was a strong case to be made for the fact that her company’s new plant variety was massively carcinogenic.

The project had to be terminated immediately, the plants uprooted and destroyed. A whole department of the company would have to shut down, a $30 million dollar investment wiped off the books, the legal department advised that probably a multi-million dollar lawsuit was in the offing. Heads would roll.

Silvia had also sent her a personal message.

On Monday, a car tried to drive me off the road. It was that twisty, winding road I sometimes take to get to Santa Maria. The car tried to run me off the road twice, but there were other cars on the road and it drove off. I was shaken. When I got home, my door was open. They’d trashed my apartment. They took my computer. I took one look and ran. I’ve kept my cell off so they couldn’t track me, and turned it on only to try to call you, but they must have some kind of homing device, because a few seconds into the call, I get static. By “they” I think it’s a little rogue operation inside the company’s security division. I don’t dare use any friends’ cell phones. These guys mean business.

I’m in BA right now, staying with friends for a night or two, then moving on. I’m sending this to you from an internet café.

I need to get home somehow. Can you help? I don’t think security at headquarters is involved, but you never know, so don’t contact them. Right now, I’m thinking FBI.

I’ll be checking for a message from you a couple of times a day. Remember it’s GMT +3.

God, Paige. Help me. I need to come home. I need to put this into someone’s hands.

Her own hands were trembling. Her mind was racing as she eliminated the restoration of Assyrian artifacts section and downloaded only Silvia’s file onto her hard drive and then onto her thumb drive. She watched the bar filling while trying to figure out who could be after Silvia.

The most obvious choice for bad guy was the overall project’s team leader, Jonathan Finder. He had the psychological profile for it, too. Ambitious and greedy. This was his project and he was making his name with it. It was going to have to be scrapped and would probably cost the company huge amounts of money in reparations. It was the kind of blow that could destroy a career.

Paige had always considered him a lightweight, but even wusses could be driven to violence by fear and greed.

Paige didn’t even know where Finder was. He wasn’t at her lab, but that didn’t mean anything. GenPlant Laboratories ran facilities all over. Four research centers in the continental United States, including the high-security facility on Santo Domingo, and three outside the country. One in India, one in Thailand, and one in Argentina. Finder could be in any of these.

Was he capable of running a rogue cover-up operation?

If she only had something she could take to someone. Even an incriminating email,
something
. If she could go to the section head, Larry Pelton, with something other than wild conjecture, maybe she could stop Finder. Larry definitely had the authority to block Finder, especially if Finder were using GL resources to hunt Silvia down.

It was true that she and Larry had an unfortunate sentimental history, but she was sure he would overlook that.

She’d had no desire for a two-night stand. One night had been enough. She and Larry had avoided each other ever since that disastrous date when he’d tried and failed to stuff what felt like a marshmallow inside her, and they both ended up staring at the ceiling.

That was nothing compared to what was at stake. Her main worry was how to help Silvia right now. How to get her to a safe place and then get her back to the States. She had no idea what to do, who to turn to.

Then she thought of Max. Of course! He was a former SEAL. He’d know what to do, or at least who to contact. The legal implications were something she could think about later, but right now, the most important thing was to keep Silvia safe. Surely he’d know how to do that?

His cell phone number was programmed into hers. She felt a huge surge of relief as she pulled out her phone, checking her watch. 5:00 pm. He’d be on the road. It was dangerous to call someone while they were driving. A text message would be better. It gave off a signal, and he could choose to pull over to the side, and then they could talk.

The message was simple.

SOS – P

There. She felt better already.

He’d help her, and he’d know what to do. Together they’d figure out a way to save Silvia. Now she needed to put that file in a safer place. Where? Max had given her his cell phone but not his email address.

If there was a conspiracy inside the company, who to trust? It was entirely possible that people in the upper echelons knew the truth, and frankly, Paige didn’t trust any of them.

There seemed to be a career point above which sce=”ove whiience started mattering less than profits.

She’d send the file to Larry and to… the police? It was a police matter, but no one was hurt… yet. The FBI? Silvia had mentioned the FBI. That made sense. Certainly the FBI would know what to do, who to turn to. There must be an FBI office in San Francisco. She logged on to the FBI.gov site and found the link to the San Francisco office, copied the address, and opened her Gmail account.

The drumbeat of anxiety over Silvia’s fate was beating in her head as she typed. Max sensed her anxiety and scrunched close to her, leaning against her leg and laying his muzzle across her feet. He always sensed when she was upset.

Paige dropped a hand to briefly scratch his head, then bent back over the keyboard.

Suddenly, to her astonishment Max scrambled to his feet, hunching his shoulders and growling low in his throat.

“Get your hands off that computer,” a male voice said.

Paige whipped around, wide-eyed. Two men were in the doorway, one tall and thin, the other stocky and shorter. The tall one had a gun pointed straight at her. She froze, utterly incapable of movement, trying to process these two men who’d appeared from nowhere.

“I said, hands off the fucking keyboard!”

She jerked her trembling hands up as if the keys were on fire. Oh, God! What now? Another minute or two and she could have sent the file to the FBI and to Larry. As it was, the only copies of Silvia’s file were on her hard drive and her thumb drive.

The two men came forward. The man with the gun kept it trained on her. The unarmed man came around to stand beside her. He bent forward to see the screen, and Paige got a horrifying whiff of sweat, suntan lotion, and some awful cologne. Instinctively she recoiled when he lowered his head to hers.

Max’s growling grew louder, lips curled back from his teeth.

The man tapped the keyboard, closing her FBI search, checking her email history. “Okay,” the man said over his shoulder to his armed partner. “This hasn’t been forwarded. There’s a copy on her hard drive. Deleting… now.”

“No!” Without thinking, Paige batted his hands away. He gave her a casual backhanded blow that nearly toppled her out of her chair.

Max attacked.

Max, her joyous, friendly dog—barely out of puppyhood—snarled like a hellhound and leaped for the man’s throat.

An attacking dog is a fearful thing, like a primal nightmare hurtling out from the darkness. The man shot an arm up to protect his face and stumbled back, giving a high-pitched scream. “Shoot! Shoot the fucking dog, goddamn it!” he shouted.

Paige’s head was still woozy from the blow, but when she saw the armed man raise his hand with the gun in it, she screamed and launched herself at him just as he pulled the trigger. The report was loud in the room, stunning her.

Max gave a loud, pained yelp and fell in a boneless heap to the ground, red staining his head.

Paige went wild, shrieking with rage, clawing for the gunman’s eyes, feeling flesh under her fingers.

This time the blow was harder, knocking her to the floor next to Max. The world turned black for just a second, then slowly came back into focus. She looked up from the floor at the two men, one holding a red-stained forearm and the other with the gun glaring at her, the two long scratches on his face sullenly bleeding.