Until It's You (7 page)

For all that, he had seemed on edge yesterday. The way he’d stopped her as she was trying to leave was prickly even for him. Maybe the stress was wearing him even thinner than usual. Maybe the stress had more than one source.

She looked at herself in the mirror. This disguise was fine. On to something else. Deep breath. She needed a plan. 

Without a better idea, she went to her bag and got out her tab and keyboard. Set herself up on the couch with the coffee table as a desk. Began making her standard profiles of all the possible leaks that needed investigating. Dunn, Brantley, and Bruman to start.

She needed to treat this like a normal investigation, as strange as it was. This was something she knew. Something she had to know. It was why Landon had trusted her to help. Even if she was blinded by everything going on—the chase, the pharm in her veins, her brothers,
him
—none of it really changed the process she would need to follow to get results. It was always the same.

And step one was get the lay of the land. So she tapped out profiles for every one of the people on their list. Birth dates, educational history, work history, media clips. Taking information out in the world and shaping it into something digestible, something she could own. Seeing potentials emerge from the web. It was a map as much as anything. Something digestible for her mind to work through with more handholds than a cloud. It was another way of doing the same thing people always did with their lives: adding labels, rearranging, considering, turning over in the mind like the teasing of a toffee machine at the fair.

Construction of those maps is what she had been learning to do her entire professional career. She was very good at it. With enough time, she would find a breakthrough.

Landon turned down the first alley he saw, then made his way to a residential street running parallel to Western. Didn't even catch the name. From there he walked north to Addison and grabbed another cab. Had it take him to Humboldt Park and found a small car lot there. Bought an older Audi with a bit under a hundred thousand on the odometer from a Mexican man named Cesar. Dropped thirty-four k on it and felt fine. Should have come this way in the first place. Showed what he knew about this shit.

He ran it over in his mind as he drove back to the apartment. How close a call had that been at Moonlight? It was ridiculously lucky that thug hadn’t seen through the disguise Kristina had done up. Lucky Kristina could do a good disguise.

The salesman had called him Roy. He had to remember that. Let Kristina know, just so they could have it on record in case it popped up later. This could end up being an opportunity.

It had to be coincidence that he'd had shown up at the lot. Right? If his comm or something was being followed, he would have gotten picked up by now. Only way he could have gotten out of that was dumb luck.

Unless . . .

He looked in the rearview mirror, suddenly paranoid. Took the next turn he could, parallel parked. Waited for the passing cars. Several went, but Roy was driving none of them. He could have an accomplice, but it seemed unlikely.

After a few more minutes, he drove on.

Passed a billboard for Tranqueel as he drove. Had to suppress a smile, then grimaced. Yes, he could use some of that right now. Wasn't normally into tranqs but he was losing it.

Fifteen minutes later, he parked the Audi outside of the apartment. He stepped out of the car, walked to the front door, and unlocked it. Went to the apartment, unlocked that, and walked in.

Kristina was sitting on the couch, hunched over her tablet on the coffee table. She wore her dress slacks and what appeared to be a new, crisp white undershirt that hugged her chest. Her wet hair had been dyed the color of wet plaster, and she had done her makeup differently. Very differently.

It was casual, unpretentious, and somehow erotic as hell.

He took a deep breath.
Steady now
.

If she noticed the effect she'd had, she didn't let on. “Any problems?” she asked.

He threw his keys on the counter. “You’re looking different,” he said.

She cocked a thin brow up. “Is that a 'no' on problems?”

He smiled and approached the couch. “I did have a problem, actually. I think your disguise may have saved my life.”

She shut the screen of her tablet off and sat up, her dark blue eyes wide. That had her attention. “What happened?”

“Guy I saw at The Velvet. Came into the auto dealer while I was negotiating for the car. His name is Roy. Have you heard of him?”

“No. You think this guy is dangerous?”

“He’s the reason I decided to disappear after leaving The Velvet.”

She held her finger up. “Put a pin in that. You said the disguise saved you."

“Yeah, he didn't recognize me. Or else he would have made a move.”

"Didn't bug you or anything?"

"Don't think so. Didn't even touch me."

She looked at him skeptically, then stood up and walked over to him. She reached up and brushed her hands through his hair.

He bent his knees slightly when he realized what she was doing. With easier access, she dug her fingers in under his shirt collar, down his shoulders and arms. His skin felt warm everywhere she touched, and it took all the control he had not to grab her and kiss her right then and there.

"Check your pockets," she said quickly. If she was affected by their proximity, she wasn't showing it, though she stepped back as she said it.

He checked his pockets and around the waist of his pants. "Nothing," he said.

She nodded, though her lips were still pressed together. He thought she might sit back down, but she stayed planted where she was. “What the hell was he doing there?” she asked.

He took a deep breath and brought his focus back to the task at hand. “I don’t know. Seems kind of impossible he could track me.”

She stood there, long-lashed eyes glazed while she was deep in thought. After a few seconds, she heaved a sigh and shook her head. “So did you get a car?”

"I did eventually, yes."

"Where was it you saw him?"

"Dealership at Western and Belmont. Place called Moonlight." A thought occurred to him. "You know it?"

But she shook her head. "I'll have to check it out, though. And Roy. No last name?

Landon shook his head.

She went back to the couch, sat down and typed a few things out for notes. "I'll add them to the background summaries."

"How has that been going?"

"Fine. Back to Roy. What about him made you decide to disappear? Why were you worried in the first place?"

His nostrils flared, but he held it together and motioned toward the couch. She returned his gaze and moved over. He sat down on the leather couch and turned to her.

“How much do you need to know?"

“Clients typically want me to do the best job possible, and to do that I need to have as full an idea as possible. With that in mind, it's up to you."

He laughed. She cracked a small smile, but kept her eyes trained on him.

"Why don’t you start with what made you draft this protocol in the first place?”

He sat back. She was right. It was time to give her the full story. “I guess in order to do that you need to know a bit about my company. How much do you know about how I got started?”

She shrugged. “It was just out of school, right?”

“Right. So my thesis at the end of college was about a method for interface with nanos in the bloodstream that I’d discovered. Basically, it was a cheaper, more efficient way to work with the little nanos that had just been developed to go in the bloodstream. Instead of just being able to gather vitals, pH, all that, we could interface fast enough to network that across the body.”

She looked at him doubtfully. “Which was important?”

“Which opened up a huge field of possibilities. It was technical as much as chemistry.” He could see he was losing her, so he sped it up. “The point is, it was a huge breakthrough. I went from a promising chemistry student into the head of a company with serious investment.”

“I see. That sounds like you needed a lot of advice."

“There were a lot of people trying to screw me.”

She nodded. This was apparently something she understood better. "So what did you do?"

“Thankfully, I had an advisor at U. Chicago who I trusted. Dr. Robert Oliver. He put me in touch with people he trusted.”

“One of whom was bad and might be after you now?”

He scoffed. "You have worked on a lot of these problems, haven't you?”

She shrugged and continued to look at him expectantly.

“Well," he said after a moment, "none of them seemed bad, no. I could still be proven wrong.”

“Of course. Is Dr. Oliver still alive?”

“No, he had a heart attack almost five years ago.”

Her red lips—now that he really took it in, that was a bold lipstick—pressed together. “Sorry to hear it.”

“He was a great man.”

Landon let the room sing silence for a moment.

It wasn't often that he missed his mentor, but when his name bubbled up, the grieving hurt. Dr. Oliver had basically been a second father. Without his guidance, that first breakthrough may never have happened.

Seconds ticked by. He felt her watching him, her face very still.

“Anyway," he said, gathering himself. "He introduced me to both Fordelli and your firm. And Ms. Bruman.”

Kristina's face was somber. Did she see that he'd been upset? He couldn't be sure.

“So how does this connect to the current situation?” she asked.

Landon grimaced. She'd noticed. “Just that he introduced me to all these people, and he also told me that there might be a time where I couldn’t trust anyone and needed to burn it all down.”

“Burn it all down?”

“Change the people around me. Start over. He was paranoid about betrayal. Something about his wife he never talked about.”

“Okay.”

Landon swallowed. His mouth was nearly dry. “Anyway, I had been thinking about it ever since we started seeing results with the Phobos project.”

“Why?”

“The leaks were too fast. The DoD knew about it before it had even been unveiled.”

“Doesn’t that say ‘willing customer?’”

He shook his head. "It says leak. The security we have around a project like that is the highest we can afford. Which is basically the highest there is in the private sector."

"But it wasn't enough."

"Somehow, it wasn't enough. So once that happened I realized I had a real problem." He grimaced. “I didn’t put the protocol development into motion until I came home to a fruit basket on my kitchen counter. It had a note: ‘Can't wait anymore.’”

"Can't wait?"

“It means whoever sent it wants me to stop dragging my feet on the deployment of the Phobos project. They know I know.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“I had the fruit in the basket tested. Call it paranoia. Anyway, it wasn’t just tainted. It was tainted with one of the most recent experimental batches of our Phobos work. If I'd have eaten it, I would have had a problem.”

Her eyes opened wide. “So they could get to you.”

“They could get to me. But they wanted to show me they knew before . . .”

"Right. And it may have been at least partly the government, so . . ."

"So I didn't go to the police. Right."

“What did you do?”

"Made sure my apartment was as secure as I could make it, then took the rest of the day off and thought about my options. In the morning I called your firm and had the protocol drafted as a kind of safety net. In case I had to disappear.”

“Why not go to the police with the break-in, at least? It can't be that widespread, can it?"

“I don't know how widespread it is, and I didn’t want to give them any information about how I was reacting. Mostly because I was pretty sure they expected me to react. I knew I had at least one leak somewhere high up in the development of Phobos, but I didn’t have any idea where it was.” He shook his head. “I could have fired the whole development team, of course. Literally everyone who knew about it. Then fired my corporate security team, IT, maybe even Ms. Bruman. That’s what Oliver would have told me to do.”

“But you didn’t.”

“I still might. But I'm trying this first. Same kind of courtesy they extended me with the note, I guess."

"So far this isn't going so hot."

His nostrils flared slightly before he could rein in his reaction.
That was some cheek
.

But her expression was light. So light, that if he took actual offense it would be inappropriate. He forced a weak smile back.

Maybe this meant she was getting more comfortable, so that she could make fun of him. That was a good thing, right?

“So what made you decide to run at The Velvet?" she asked.

"Right, your original question." He took a deep, steadying breath. “After a few weeks I put out some feelers as quietly as I could about whether anyone in the development team was unhappy. I got a message that said they would do a handoff of the info if I attended this birthday party.”

“And you went?”

“I went, but I knew it might be bad so I was ready to bolt if anything looked off. Eventually I got uncomfortable with the way this Roy character was looking at me and I decided to make a break for it.”

Kristina nodded. “Sounds like you did something really stupid and nearly got yourself killed.”

He choked out a chuckle. “Perhaps, but I didn’t.”

***

Kristina sorted through the information Landon had just given her. Some of it—especially the timeline for his working with Fordelli, Bruman, and her firm—lined up with things she had just learned. Other parts were fresh.

This whole ordeal might amount to one person. Or it might be all of them. Tough to say, especially with the possibility of someone in Washington at the very top.

“So,” she said, feeling it was time for her to take charge. “Let’s just be clear here. You were suspicious because some of the developments in your project were getting leaked. Then when you got threatened that confirmed your suspicions, and so you made this protocol."

"Correct."

"Then when this Roy guy looked at you wrong, you bolted.”

“That sounds right."

“How do you know his name was Roy?”

“The car dealer used it. Sounded like the guy knew Roy well enough. Like he might have been expecting him.”

"What was the dealer's name?"

"Mark."