Forged in Ash (44 page)

Out of both eyes.

He blinked, and his vision sharpened. Closing his eye, he gingerly explored the socket. The swelling was completely gone. So was the pain. When he opened it again, his eyesight was even clearer than before.

Son of a bitch. She’d actually done it. She’d completely healed his eye.

In six seconds.

Un-fucking-believable.

Chapter Nineteen

M
AC SHIFTED UNEASILY
on the bench seat of Zane’s van, his skin prickling as Amy’s body heat bathed his left side.

“Can you head back to my car? I parked a couple blocks up from the lab; there’s an excellent chance it hasn’t been spotted,” Amy said.

“You can drop me off anywhere,” Faith, the scientist they’d rescued, muttered.

Rawls snorted. “Not likely, sweetheart; you’re safer with us for the time being.”

“Safer?” Faith’s voice rose. Out of the corner of his eye, Mac saw her lean forward and twist, to get a better look at Rawls. “You killed those guys!”

It was Mac’s turn to snort. “Did it escape your notice that they started shooting first? Or”—his voice hardened—“that we saved your ass? You’d be either dead, or in their hands—which is as good as dead—without us.”

That shut her up.

“My car?” Amy prompted.

“It’s not a good idea,” Zane said after a moment. “Even if they haven’t discovered your ride, they may be patrolling the area pretty heavily. We can’t chance going back to your car.”

Zane looked at Mac. “Call Wolf. We need a safe house. And we need Jillian to ID this bastard. Make sure he’s really the one who killed her kids.”

Dead silence hit the van. Mac could feel the tension that gripped Amy’s slender frame.

“Kids?” she asked in a tight, soft voice.

“Yeah, we found Russ Branson’s sister. It looks like her family was taken by this guy.” Mac nodded toward the man slumped against the door. “Once they had no use for them, they murdered everyone. Or tried to. Branson’s sister escaped.”

“But they killed her kids.” The look she turned on the limp body beside her was icy. “Why?”

The smile Mac turned on Pachico’s limp body was hard. “Exactly what I intend to ask him, after the bastard quits playing dead.”

“So how about you, sweetheart?” Rawls raised his voice. “You want to tell us what the hell you were doing beneath that machine in the middle of the night?” He paused a moment and then added as an afterthought, “And why everyone seems to think you’re dead?”

At least the scientist didn’t pretend the question wasn’t directed at her. “No,” she said politely. “Not particularly.”

Rawls barked out an amused laugh. Mac wasn’t nearly as amused. “Lady, we saved your fucking ass back there. You owe us some damn answers.”

“How do you figure that?” Her voice didn’t rise, or deepen, just kept that polite flatness. “I was minding my own business. You were the ones who interfered. For all I know, those other guys, the ones you killed, were following you; and you’re the bad guys.”

“Trust me, sweet cakes, we’re the good guys,” Rawls drawled. “It’s just that our white hats clashed with the night vision devices.”

Faith snorted.

Amy shifted slightly, and her elbow brushed Mac’s arm. Heat flared at the point of contact, and places farther south.

“Tell me something, Dr. Ansell,” Amy suddenly said in a calm voice. “Were you booked on flight 2077 from Seattle to Honolulu six months ago?”

Even from his position on the other side of Amy, Mac could see the woman go completely still.

“Yeah? So?”

“So were the two men in the front seats. Let me introduce you to Lieutenant Commander Zane Winters and Seth Rawlings, without whom you wouldn’t be alive, or at least free, now.”

Faith leaned forward slightly. “You were the SEALs who stopped the hijacking,” she said slowly.

“Yes,” Amy said simply and waited.

“Can you turn on the lights, so I can see your faces?”

Zane reached up to turn the overhead lamp on, and twisted in his seat so she could get a good look at his face.

A long moment of silence claimed the vehicle. Finally Faith cleared her throat.

“I read on the news that you claimed there was more behind the hijacking than the FBI and Homeland Security were admitting. That the men behind the hijacking weren’t after the plane at all, that they were after some of the first-class passengers.”

“Which the FBI ridiculed, and since we didn’t have the list of names, we had no proof,” Zane said, and Mac could hear the frustration in his LC’s voice.

“But they were scientists,” Faith said slowly. “From first class.”

“That’s what we believe,” Zane confirmed.

“Do you know who was behind the hijacking?” the scientist finally asked.

“No.” Mac’s voice tightened. “Although, I’m sure our new buddy here will fill us in once he wakes from his nap.”

He turned to stare at Pachico, who still lay slumped against the side window. Of course, the bastard was smart. He could be playing possum. He’d know that Rawls controlled the door locks and windows from the master switch up front. With no exit on hand, the bastard was probably keeping his chin down until an opportunity opened up.

“Well, I don’t know who’s behind this,” Faith finally said, “but I have a good idea of what they were after. And I’m pretty sure they got it.”

“You want to fill us in?” Mac growled when the silly woman didn’t go on.

“Well, this is all theory,” she said. “I don’t have any proof.”

“Sweet cheeks, looks like we’re in the same club.” There was more than a hint of grimness in Rawls’s drawled words. “Why don’t you tell us how come you’re not dead? Obviously, you weren’t in the lab when it exploded.”

“Yeah.” She coughed. “Nobody was in the lab when it exploded. At least nobody alive.”

Amy shifted again; this time Mac was able to concentrate on the conversation rather than that increasing burn spreading across his skin and nagging at his groin. “There wasn’t anyone in the lab when it exploded?”

“Nobody alive. They brought half a dozen bodies in, a body for each person in the lab. But they were already dead.”

“Back up,” Zane said. “You were there? You saw what happened?”

“Not all of it, but enough to piece together what happened,” Faith said tightly. “And looking back and putting things together, it started right after the attempted hijacking.

“You see, we had two security guards. Tony and Jimbo. It isn’t like our work was dangerous or required extra security or anything. So their main duty was just keeping an eye on the gate and the cameras, letting trucks into the loading dock. You know, little things like that.”

“So you weren’t working on anything sensitive?” Rawls asked, confusion in his voice.

Mac shared his confusion. What the hell were these bastards after if it wasn’t top secret or classified?

“Well…yes, we were; and no, we weren’t,” Faith said and sighed. “Maybe I should start back even further.”

“Please.” There was a world of exasperated irritation in Mac’s clipped entreaty.

“Okay, well. I guess this starts with Dr. Benton then. He was basically our boss, the project originator. His father had worked on the new energy paradigm as an intern with Dr. Fredric Poole sixty years ago—before Dr. Poole was murdered and his research disappeared.”

“New energy?” Zane asked, the interest in his voice mirrored Mac’s own.

“Yeah, the project was working on a way to access a clean, renewable source of energy. A cheap, renewable source of energy.”

“Energy as pertains to what?” Rawls asked slowly.

“Everything.” Her answer was flat. “It would have supplemented gas, diesel, coal, natural gas, nuclear energy, electricity. It would have powered absolutely everything that needed powering from household appliances to airplanes to cars, for a cost of next to nothing once the apparatuses had been developed.”

Mac shook his head. Now that sounded like a very good reason to have a thousand security guards around, and a very good reason for mass murder, or hijacking a plane.

“Where exactly does this energy come from?” Mac asked.

“From the universe or solar system.” She started to wave her arm, and hit Amy. After a muttered apology, she started talking again. “The energy is already there. It’s infinite. All we have to do is tap into it.”

“So your Dr. Benton was working on developing this apparatus? He was continuing his father and this Poole’s research?” Mac made a note to look the name up, when something else occurred to him. “You said Dr. Poole had been killed and his research had disappeared; I’m assuming someone didn’t want this research expanded on. So how did Dr. Benton Senior survive?”

“Dr. Benton’s father survived because Dr. Poole was paranoid as hell.” The scientist paused to take a breath. “Apparently Poole was convinced that several other breakthroughs in this technology had been made in the past, but every breakthrough triggered a crackdown and the scientists in question were either shut down and completely discredited and their research confiscated, or they were killed and their research vanished.”

“That’s seems a bit farfetched, don’t you think?” Zane said mildly.

Faith gave a watery chuckle. “That’s what I thought too, at least until recent events.”

“Okay.” Amy sounded interested, rather than disbelieving. “So this Poole was paranoid. How did that translate into Dr. Benton Senior surviving to continue the research?”

“Toward the later part of his research, Poole became convinced that he was being followed and watched. This was during the fifties, during Getty’s reign of terror, and rumors started floating around that he was a communist and that his research was a weapon aimed at the heart of America. He urged Dr. Benton’s father to not just quit, but to denounce him, so by the time they moved against Dr. Poole,
Dr. Benton had left the team and started working on nuclear energy. Dr. Poole convinced Benton to break from him so at least some of the research would survive the coming storm. Turns out his instincts were right on. His labs were shut down, his research confiscated, and he was arrested and brought before the Grand Jury on charges of treason. But before the case was brought to trial, he was found dead, hanging from the ceiling fan in his living room; and his death was ruled a suicide.”

“Let me guess,” Mac said dryly. “His research disappeared.”

“Apparently, it was never seen again.”

Zane half turned in the seat above and looked back at her. “And they never checked into Benton?”

“Of course they did, which is why Dr. Benton Senior never acknowledged the research again. Instead, he handed it off to his son. Even then, Dr. Benton Junior resumed the research under a different umbrella. As far as everyone except the immediate team knew, we were working on simplifying the transference of electricity. Nobody knew we were building Dr. Poole’s solar energy apparatus.”

“Somebody had to know,” Mac corrected grimly. “It would take tremendous resources to fund the kind of research you’re talking about. Who was backing the lab?”

“Dynamic Solutions,” Faith admitted.

The news didn’t surprise Mac in the slightest. Not when most of the scientists in first class that day had been on their way to the corporation’s annual show and tell.

“But Gilbert—Dr. Benton,” she corrected at the confused look Amy shot her, “had complete faith in Leonard Embray, Dynamic Solutions’s CEO. And nobody else was supposed to know what we were working on.”

Mac frowned, wondering what the chances were that Embray himself was behind the whole damn thing. Little was known about
the man, but as the CEO of one of the largest corporations in the world, he sure as hell had the money and power behind him to pull off something like this.

But then again, why the hell would the man go to all this trouble? The research was already his. “Why were you flying to Hawaii?”

“Because we had a working prototype of the apparatus, and we were on our way to show it to him, but under the cover of the trade show, under the cover of attending to drum up additional funding.”

Dead silence fell.

Zane was the first one to break it. “You’re telling us you actually created this new energy apparatus, something that would revolutionize the world’s technology and make every single way we currently power things obsolete?”

“Yes,” she said quietly. “We had the prototype on the plane with us.”

“Sweet Jesus.” Rawls whistled and shook his head. “In other words, our suspect list just expanded to include every gas company, natural gas company, electrical…every single raw resource company out there.”

“Look on the bright side,” Amy drawled, irony heavy in her voice. “At least we have a suspect list now.”

Mac shook his head with a scowl. Right, a suspect list with hundreds of the most powerful, influential men in America sitting at the top of it. The type of technical revolution they were talking about would bankrupt every single damn one of them. It sure as hell made sense why they might have combined forces to make sure the technology never saw the light of day, or combined forces to get control of it and use it to their own advantage.

“So you had it on the plane,” Mac prompted when it looked like their guest wasn’t going to continue.

As he waited for her to take up the story again, he shimmied himself around until he was facing Pachico and shoved the man against the passenger door so he could check to make sure the zip ties binding his wrists and ankles hadn’t slipped. His new BFF tensed beneath him for an instant. He relaxed immediately, but it was already too late.

“Nice try,” he told the bastard, after verifying that his wrists didn’t have any wiggle room. But Pachico could wait, at least for a little while. The good doctor was a gold mine of information.

“Yeah…” Faith fell silent for a moment. “The attempted hijacking shook us. We didn’t see how it could have been connected, but still…And then when your story hit the news and you insisted that the hijacking had been a cover for the kidnapping of seven of the first-class passengers on board…well that hit home. There were seven of us on board.”

“And you didn’t think that was important enough to step forward and identify yourselves?”