Infected (5 page)

Carina moved closer to Tanner and gripped his hand tightly. “I told Meacham that I needed to finish talking to Tanner.”

“And I wish there were time,” Sheila said smoothly, quickly rearranging her features into the bland expression she usually wore. “But unfortunately, something has come up that requires you and me to go straight back to my house. Alone.”

“Why, did you leave the oven on?” Carina said, not bothering to hide her sarcasm.

She had a smart-ass side that came out when she was stressed. It was something she’d been working on controlling, and more than once she’d had to apologize to Uncle Walter for something said in the heat of the moment. He had been very understanding. Sheila didn’t look like she
intended to be. Carina thought she saw Baxter trying to cover up a grin.

“No, the matter is of a far graver nature. As soon as we are
alone
I’ll fill you in.” She glared at Tanner, who scowled back.

“Actually, I’m not going anywhere without Tanner,” Carina said as evenly as she could manage. “He’s my boyfriend and I need him today. I just lost my
uncle
, in case you forgot.”

Sheila looked like she was going to snap back, but instead she clamped her mouth shut and exhaled hard. So subtly that Carina thought she might have imagined it, Sheila made a small motion with her hand, and Meacham edged closer, circling around so that he was positioned between them and the thinning crowd.

“All right. In that case,
Tanner
is welcome to come back to the house with you for a while, but I really do need to speak to you in private for a moment. Tanner, you don’t mind, do you? Carina and I will be right under that tree.” She pointed at a flowering tree that shaded the path. “I promise we won’t go anywhere without you.”

Carina exchanged a glance with Tanner and let go of his hand. As she followed Sheila to the tree several yards away, she wondered if it was possible that this new and combative side of her guardian could merely be the result of the stress she’d been under—or if there really was something to her uncle’s suspicions. Perhaps Walter and Sheila had had a fight before he died, and if Walter had lived they might have eventually patched things up, come to a new understanding.
There was no way to know now, and Carina had to decide whom to trust—and fast.

When they were under the tree, Sheila turned to face Carina with a grim expression.

“There are things you don’t know about the project your uncle and I have been working on,” she said before Carina could speak. “The situation isn’t what it appears to be. Walter made some … unfortunate errors in judgment recently.”

Her tone—accusatory and grating—set Carina’s teeth on edge. Any desire she had to be fair, to give Sheila the benefit of the doubt, evaporated.

“Oh really? How would you even know that?”

Sheila blinked and Carina could see the effort she was making to keep her temper in check. “Walter and I worked together before you could talk, Carina.”

“If anything was going on, I think I’d know, considering that I’ve been
living with him
for the past year.”

“You have no idea what we were working on.”

“Sure I do—your
nutritional research
, right?” Carina didn’t bother to keep the skepticism out of her voice. “Only that’s not really what you guys were doing at all, was it?”

Sheila stared at Carina for a moment, narrowing her eyes. Finally she took a step closer, leaving only inches between them. Up close, Carina could see the faint lines between her eyebrows and bracketing her mouth. Carina had always thought Sheila was attractive for her age, if you liked thin, wound-tight women, but up close her eyes had a hardness to them and her smile was forced.

“All right,” she said softly. “All right. So this is how we’re
going to do this. I didn’t want to risk tarnishing your uncle’s memory in any way, but you aren’t giving me a choice. You’re right—our research was much more … shall we say,
far reaching
than you were aware of. Classified, in fact, so at least you don’t need to be angry at your mom or your uncle for not telling you about it, because they were legally prevented from discussing it with you.”

It stung to know her mother had kept secrets from her. Carina supposed she shouldn’t be too surprised—she’d accepted long ago that her relationship with her mother was more distant than she would have liked. But this meant there had never been an adult in her life, not a single one, who had always been honest with her.

Still, she wasn’t about to give Sheila the satisfaction of seeing her pain. She fixed a cold expression on her face and glared back. “And I should believe you … why?”

The corner of Sheila’s eye twitched. “How about this—because you’re in danger, serious danger, and I can keep you safe?”

Carina laughed bitterly. “Danger, really? Is that why Meacham won’t even let me go to the bathroom by myself? Are you afraid bad guys are going to parachute into the stall and torture me until I tell them what Walter was working on? Oh, wait—it was
classified
, so there’s no way I’d know anything about it anyway—right?”

“You need to shut up and listen,” Sheila snapped. Out of the corner of her eye, Carina saw Tanner edging closer, Meacham close on his heels. “The press is reporting that your uncle died in a random auto accident on the way from
the Houston airport. That’s not entirely true. That embankment he crashed into? Two vehicles with bogus license plates forced him off the road. He couldn’t have avoided the collision, and since he’d been trying to outrun them, he was going close to eighty miles an hour when he died.”

Carina struggled not to blink. “I don’t believe you.”

“Believe
this:
those cars were driven by members of one of the most violent gangs operating in the Republic of Albania. They were after Walter because of some specialized research he was supposed to give them. Which, by the way, has nothing to do with nutrition and everything to do with enhancing battlefield performance. The Albanian mafia intends to use our work to fight a crackdown on cocaine trafficking by the government. If they are successful, many, many innocent people will die.” Sheila sighed. “That technology we developed was meant for our own army, needless to say. Your uncle was a brilliant man—too bad he was so hardheaded.”

“Uncle Walter would never get involved with anything like what you’re saying,” Carina said, outraged. “He was—” She struggled to find the words to describe him: brilliant, and passionate about his work, but he could also be funny, and on the rare occasions when he took a break from his job, he was kind and generous with her. In some ways, he’d been more of a parent to her than her own mother had been. She could no more imagine him cheating on anything than she could imagine him singing on
American Idol
.

“He was human.” Sheila shrugged. “He made mistakes. For whatever reason, the Albanians thought they had made
a deal with him, but he didn’t actually hand over the research like he was supposed to. That’s why he was killed. They made an example out of him. Now, unfortunately, our intelligence suggests that his contacts believe
you
have access to the data.”

“Me? Why would they think that?”

“You were close to him,” Sheila said.

“That’s crazy. He never told me
anything
.”

“Closer than anyone else,” Sheila amended. “He told several people that you were his protégée. Before he made his last trip, Walter wiped his lab’s servers of all his files, and changed all his passwords.”

“What’s going on?” Tanner demanded, putting his arm protectively around Carina. “Is she threatening you?”

“I’m trying to save her life,” Sheila said. “If you try to get involved, you’ll just endanger her further.”

“She says some Albanian gang was after Uncle Walter to get at his research, but he hid it all before they killed him. And that now they’re trying to find me because they think I have it.”

“That’s crazy,” Tanner said. “They’d have a dozen different layers of data security at a place like Calaveras Lab. There’s no way Mr. Monroe would have been able to single-handedly take it all down.”

“Aren’t you the clever one,” Sheila snapped, glaring down her nose at Tanner. “You must belong to the computer club at school. A regular
prodigy
.”

“I’d have to belong to the idiot club to believe that high-security government contract data isn’t routinely encrypted and backed up.”

“Indeed. But what you’re not taking into account is Walter’s private work. Technically, the lab owns anything developed by Walter even off-premises, but he seems to have been adept at blurring the lines. There were …
elements
 … of our project that Walter alone had access to.”

“So you’re saying that my uncle had his own thing going on, something outside your supersecret ‘battlefield enhancement’ project, and
that’s
what he was killed for?” Carina demanded. “That’s what they think I have? What exactly is it, anyway? Some kind of extreme energy drink? Rock star in a pill?” There was that smart-ass side again, the one she couldn’t contain when she was angry.

Sheila’s grim expression turned even more scornful. “You don’t need to worry about the details. All you need to know is that we have access to communications suggesting the Albanians believe Walter gave key information to you. The reason Baxter and Meacham have been so attentive today is that they are trying to keep you safe.” She raised an eyebrow. “You might actually want to try being grateful.”

“Grateful?”
Carina said incredulously. “If you knew all this, if these Albanians are as big a threat as you say they are, then you practically got Walter killed yourself.”

“Carina!”
Sheila snapped. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. You have no idea how ruthless they can be. If they want you—and trust me, they do—then they’re just waiting for the opportunity.”

“If we were in so much danger, why didn’t you say anything about it sooner?”

“I didn’t think …” Sheila shook her head impatiently. “I don’t have time to explain. New information has come to
light, and you can bet they have people on the ground close by, watching us even now—”

“I don’t believe her,” Tanner said, not bothering to lower his voice, never taking his eyes off Sheila. Meacham had a hand on his shoulder, and Tanner was trying to shrug him off without attracting the attention of the people who were wandering close to the gardens.

Carina didn’t believe her either. Walter couldn’t have been killed over something as simple as a performance-enhancing drug. Something else was going on, and she was beginning to feel certain that Sheila was at the center of it.

“Give me ten minutes to say goodbye to Tanner,” she hedged. “Alone.”

Sheila glanced impatiently at her watch. “You’ve got your priorities all mixed up,” she said. “Your boyfriend should be the
last
thing on your mind. At least until we get this nailed down. In a few days’ time the authorities should have the men who killed Walter in custody, and you can quit worrying about them. Until then, I highly suggest you let the grown-ups do what they’re paid to do.”

If it weren’t for that final dig, that last bit of condescension, Carina might have agreed. But Sheila had been treating her rudely all day, snapping at her to hurry in the morning, and again when she was taking too long to walk to her seat. Gone was the solicitous kindness she usually showed Carina, the almost insistent generosity she’d exhibited at the salon. In its place was a cold efficiency that made Carina’s skin crawl.

“Ten minutes,” she repeated.

“It’s okay, Ms. Boylston,” Baxter said. “They’re just kids. Give them a few minutes.”

That earned Baxter a scowl, but Sheila reluctantly nodded, and Meacham let go of Tanner’s shoulder. Carina took his hand and they practically jogged down the path until she was certain they were out of earshot.

“I’m sorry,” she murmured to Tanner. “I can’t believe I got you into this.”

He pulled her closer. “This is really weird,” he whispered against her ear, “and try not to react, but that guy Meacham showed me his gun. When you were talking to Sheila. Like, if I tried to mess with you he wasn’t afraid to use it on me.”

“Are you sure he wasn’t just trying to intimidate you?”

“Uh, yeah. It’s hard to misinterpret when a guy holds his jacket open and points to his holster, you know?”

“But Sheila said …” Sheila had said Meacham and Baxter were supposed to be protecting her, and presumably not just from the Albanian mafia. Was it possible he considered Tanner a threat?

And if she was to leave with Sheila—what guarantee did she have that Meacham wouldn’t do something to Tanner the minute they were out of sight?

“This is so messed up,” she said. “I wish we could just go somewhere, the two of us, and figure this out.”

“Your uncle said to stay away from her. Do you trust her?”

Carina considered; it didn’t take long at all for her to come up with an answer. “Yesterday I would have said yes.
Today? I don’t know who to trust. But I certainly trust my uncle more.”

“So come with me. Just us, we’ll go somewhere alone and figure out your next move.”

“Now, you mean? There’s no way they’ll let us.”

“I don’t know about that. It’s the middle of a memorial service, and there’s, like, half a dozen news crews here. Even those guys wouldn’t risk making a scene that will end up on the Internet or TV.”

Carina turned over the possibility in her mind. She had the key—and Walter’s instructions to go straight to the address in his note. Whatever waited for them there, was it any riskier than staying here?

“Look over behind me, to your right,” Tanner said. “Don’t let them see you doing it, but … there’s a little road that goes around the Dumpsters. I’m pretty sure that’s a service drive. We go that way, get a head start, there’s no way they’ll catch us before we get outside.”

Carina calculated the distance to the wall that ringed the cemetery. If Tanner was right, there would be a break in the wall, just around the corner, for delivery trucks. If he was wrong …

Well, he couldn’t be wrong. That was all there was to it—because what he proposed was better than trusting Sheila.