Forged in Ash (45 page)

“How could we without admitting what we were working on, what we had created? You’re aware of the ramifications now. The prototype was still in our possession. We were still vulnerable. Leonard Embray, Dynamic Solutions’s founder, may have had the resources to protect us; but we were on our own and we had no idea who to trust, or where to turn.”

“And you couldn’t turn to the FBI, or Homeland Security because—”

“You five kept insisting they were compromised and not to be trusted,” Faith finished dryly. “Nor could we combine forces with you, not with the media frenzy surrounding you. There was too big of a chance that you were being watched; and if we approached, we’d be recognized.”

“So you effectively did nothing,” Mac snapped. “And left us out to hang.”

“Believe me, we had meetings ad nauseam about the situation,” she said and Mac could hear the shrug in her voice.

“And did nothing,” he returned with another snap.

“Pretty much.” She didn’t sound apologetic.

“Let’s back up a moment,” Zane said. “You said that Embray knew about your research, that he was, in fact, funding it. Why the hell didn’t you get hold of him? He’s got the resources to throw a security net over the whole project. Christ, he could have whisked you away to some hidey-hole.”

“We did go to him, or at least we tried to. He’s been ‘unavailable’ since the hijacking.”

“Son of a bitch,” Mac said, reaching up to knead his forehead where a killer headache was digging in. “Are you telling me he’s missing in action, or that he’s severed the connection with you?”

“We don’t know,” Faith said tightly. “The private number Dr. Benton was given was disconnected; when Dr. Benton tried to contact him through regular channels, we were told he was unavailable. Not only were we unable to contact him after the attempted hijacking, but there is no record of him appearing in public anywhere since.”

Mac snorted. “The guy takes privacy to the extreme. He rarely appears in public.”

“True,” Faith said, “but he was scheduled to give a presentation at the trade show; he gives it every year. It’s one of the few public appearances he makes. He canceled this year. He also canceled the keynote speech he’d promised to deliver to the University of Washington’s graduating class this year.” She paused and leaned back against the backrest of her seat. “Maybe it’s a coincidence. I
don’t know. But Dr. Benton was convinced that something happened to him.”

Mac frowned, shooting Pachico another glance. The guy was still pretending to be sleeping. Fine with him, at least it kept the bastard busy.

“You think he’s dead?”

“I don’t know. Dr. Benton thought he was.”

“Then why the hell wouldn’t his disappearance have been announced or his body show up?”

She sighed. “Gilbert thought it was because of the way he’d set Dynamic Solutions up and that his death wouldn’t allow whoever is behind this, whoever it is trying to grab power, to actually step into his shoes.”

“In other words, they have to continue the illusion that the man’s alive to retain control of the corporation?”

“That’s what Gilbert thought.” She didn’t sound like she was sure of that scenario herself though; if anything, she sounded doubtful.

Apparently he wasn’t the only one who picked up on her doubt because Zane asked the question that was on the tip of Mac’s tongue. “But you don’t believe that scenario?”

Her sigh was heavy. “I don’t know. Everything just seemed so farfetched, so…paranoid. But then there’s what happened to Tony and Jimbo and what happened in the lab.”

Tony and Jimbo—Mac backtracked to the beginning of the discussion. “Tony and Jimbo? The two security guards you mentioned?”

“Yeah, Dr. Benton had brought everyone on board personally. I mean, he recruited me from the university. I’d interned under him there. He had the same kind of personal relationship with every person he brought on board.”

That made sense. He’d want to know he could trust them. “So he’d handpicked the two security guards?”

“Yeah, he’d known them since they’d been kids. They were totally reliable and trustworthy. But two weeks ago, they were killed in an automobile accident; they missed a curve in the road and sailed over an embankment. They were both killed on impact. According to the autopsy reports they both had blood alcohol levels twice the legal limit.”

“And why did this raise an alarm?” Zane asked.

“Because Tony was allergic to alcohol; in fact, a couple of Christmases ago, we had to rush him to the emergency room after he ate a piece of supposedly alcohol-free fruitcake. His face swelled up like the Pillsbury Doughboy and then it was all itchy and splotchy for days afterward.”

“And someone allergic to alcohol isn’t going to go out and get falling-down drunk,” Zane filled in. He shook his head. “Sloppy, they should have checked out whether the guy was a drinker.”

“Exactly,” Faith agreed. “Then a couple of days later, two new security guards showed up, courtesy of Dynamic Solutions, only Dr. Benton couldn’t contact Embray to verify their employment. And when he tried to fire them, he was politely told that their employment was a condition of our continued funding.”

“And your project head just accepted his?” It didn’t seem likely if he was as paranoid as she’d made the guy sound. If he’d been in the poor bastard’s place, he’d have walked on the spot. The only reason he hadn’t resigned his commission after that fiasco with the feds, following the hijacking, was because those bastards had his team squarely by the balls. No way in hell was he abandoning Rawls, Cos, or Zane. And then there was McKay.

Somebody was going to pay for McKay’s death.

“Of course he didn’t accept it. He told us he was shutting the project down effective immediately and told us to start looking for new jobs. But when he gave notice, he was told that he, along with his entire team, would be persona non grata with the entire scientific community.”

“So he backed down,” Mac said, feeling an unexpected kinship with the researcher. The poor bastard had been forced into compliance for the same reasons Mac had. He’d been protecting his team.

“He wasn’t given a chance to back down,” Faith said tightly. “Later that day, the new security guards let a delivery truck in. The truck was full of heavily armed men. They rounded everyone up then killed Marcy, Angel, and Bekka, our clerical staff, and Julio, the janitor. They loaded everyone else up in the van. And then they unloaded seven bodies. Five men and two women.”

Mac swore. “There were five men, two women on your research team?”

She didn’t say anything, but her silence was confirmation enough. So they’d kidnapped the entire research team and then faked their deaths so nobody would look for them. No doubt they were even now altering the autopsy reports to match the people supposedly killed in the explosion.

It was brilliant in an ugly sort of way. They had the entire team at their disposal now. They could either make sure the research disappeared, or they could complete the technology and make sure they owned the rights, the patent, and the control over it.

Except, of course, they’d screwed up somehow and allowed one of the scientists to escape. “How did you avoid your teammates’ fate?”

“Pure happenstance,” she said after a moment on a sigh. “During lunches and breaks I like to read. But the break room is too crowded
and noisy, so I have this…well, nest…behind all the supplies in one of the closets. There are a couple chairs back there and a bunch of books, some personal things. I was back there packing things up when the delivery truck came through.”

“And they didn’t hunt for you?” Zane asked, the same surprise in his voice that Mac was feeling.

“Gilbert dialed my cell phone as soon as they came in and hid his behind the centrifuge. So I could hear what was happening. He told them I’d left early. When they couldn’t find me after they searched the building, they must have believed him. I could hear a lot of movement in the lab where he’d hidden the phone, and then one of the men said that Charlie hadn’t found me at home. And the other guy said it didn’t matter. If I was camped out inside the building, the explosion would take care of me. If I wasn’t, they’d find me sooner or later. After they left, I snuck out the back door, took a bus downtown, and paid cash for a motel.”

Mac fell silent. The kind of research she was talking about was revolutionary. Yeah, people would kill for it. They’d keep killing for it.

“There’s obviously a tie-in between Dynamic Solutions and what happened at the lab, hell—what happened last spring to flight 2077. Although it still doesn’t make sense. Why didn’t they just grab everyone from the lab originally? Why bother trying to take the damn plane?”

Rawls glanced in the rearview mirror, his gaze lingering on the scientist. “Why did you sneak back into the lab? What were you doing under that machine?”

For a moment, it didn’t look like she was going to answer, but then she shrugged. “There was supposed to be a backup disk, detailing our research, taped beneath the machine.”

The frustration in her voice was a pretty clear indication that the disk had been missing, but Mac asked anyway. “I take it the backup was gone?”

She blew out a tight breath and nodded.

Zane’s cell phone chimed. He fished it out. “It’s Wolf, calling back.” He lifted the phone to his ear and asked for Cosky then quickly filled him in with what they’d learned. After a few minutes of listening, he lowered the phone. “Cos says this Wolf is okay. Apparently he’s got a place that nobody will be able to find. He’s sending us the location.” His phone chimed again. “Fuck,” he said. “It’s the Sierra Nevadas. That’s at least a fourteen-hour drive.”

Mac was silent, thinking. “He cleared the guy? He was trying to kill him yesterday.”

Zane shrugged. “That’s what he says.”

“Hell,” Mac said after a second. “He’d be perfect. Nobody will link him to us, so nobody would go looking for us there. Besides, Russ’s sis is already there. Is he okay with us coming?”

“Apparently,” Zane said. “We need to decide fast. It won’t be long before your new BFF’s buddies head out looking for him.”

“Is that right, Pachico? You got some buddies looking for you?”

The shoulder beneath his hand didn’t tense this time. But Mac knew damn well the bastard was awake. Fine, they’d let him play possum for a while and once they had him at the safe house they’d rip every bit of information they needed from the bastard.

“He’s awake?” Zane asked with a glance over his shoulder.

“It’s a damn safe bet, he’s just feeling shy,” Mac drawled and sent Zane a hard grin. “If the bastard is smart, he’ll spend the next couple hours ruminating on the fact he has some pretty pissed bosses right now. I’m guessing these aren’t the kind of men you want pissed at
you, so it would be in his best interest to come clean and help us nail these bastards before they take steps to nail him.”

Zane grunted and turned back around. “Amy, if they found your car, they know you were involved in this tonight. Your and Dr. Ansell’s best bet is to come with us.”

“Where are your boys?” Mac asked abruptly, glancing over his shoulder at the woman who’d been the bane of his dreams for the past few months.

She frowned, her hazel eyes shifting to meet his. “They’re spending the night with a friend. Why?”

He shook his head. “You need to call someone. Send them somewhere safe. You could be gone for a while.”

Amy already had her phone out and was dialing.

Zane shook his head, but continued frowning. “I’ve got a bad feeling about this. They know we were at the lab, they know we have Pachico, they know we have Jillian. These bastards aren’t going to sit idly back and wait for us to come to them.”

Mac nodded. He’d been thinking along the same lines. “They’ll push back.”

Zane gave a grim nod. “Hard.”

Chapter Twenty

J
ILLIAN AWOKE FROM
a deep, drugged-like sleep to the sound of voices.

Many voices. A jumble of tones, but no real words.

She recognized some of them: Marcus Simcosky’s flat, chilly tone; Kaity’s throatiness; Zane Winters’s calm; even the commander’s gravelly growl. But there were others she didn’t recognize. A woman’s brisk, no-nonsense, clipped voice. And another female voice that was slower, higher, less assured.

She didn’t realize she was listening for Wolf’s voice until she heard it.

“Drag him into the kitchen.”

She barely recognized the feral grittiness to his voice; it was such a departure from his normal smooth velvet baritone.

“Let’s just dump him on the couch,” Rawlings said in that Southern twang she recognized from the condo. “He’s playing possum, so he’s a deadweight.”

“The knives are in the kitchen. There’s water for clean up,” Wolf said with that earlier feral viciousness.

Boots sounded in the hall outside her door, followed by the scuffed sound of shoes being dragged across wood.

“He was kidding, right?” the woman with the brisk, clipped voice asked.

“Hell, I don’t know.” The commander sounded like he didn’t care either.

She stretched and settled back against the pillows. She felt amazingly good, the pain in her head and eye gone. Lifting her hand, she probed at her left eye.

To her shock, the swelling was gone. So was the pain. She closed her right eye and focused on the oil painting across the dusky room. The mountain view was shadowed, but visible.

Good lord. She could actually see.

How long had she been asleep?

Apparently, long enough for the swelling to go down and her eye to return to normal. She swung out of bed, and headed for the bathroom to take a look.

She had no intention of leaving her bedroom, though.

Maybe the men who’d invaded Wolf’s cabin hadn’t killed her children. But they’d still killed her brother. The brother who’d loved her. Who’d loved his nieces and nephews. Who’d stepped in to fill Steve’s shoes after he’d died. She would never have been able to keep the house without Russ. Or gotten the van.

It felt like a betrayal of everything he’d done for her to get chummy with his killers.