Acceptable Risks (17 page)

“You’re not an idiot,” he said automatically. She hadn’t been smart, no, but who would expect her to be? She wasn’t trained, hadn’t been prepared for involvement in something like this. It was significant that Isaac had gone after her himself. Maybe he didn’t have much of a team.

“Nils must have checked the flash drive right away and had Isaac ready outside the gate to follow me. I’m sorry, Matthew, I tried.”

“You succeeded.” He rose and crossed the room, helping her to her feet. “You kept the data away from him. That’s all you needed to do.”

Gabby looked around. “Where are we?”

“I don’t know. Some kind of basement. I was unconscious when I got here.”

He was close enough now to see her scowl at him in the dim light. “How could you allow yourself to be taken?”

He didn’t tell her “allow” was the operative word. “What did Nils and the blond guy say to you?”

“Um…Nils said it wasn’t very smart of me to have played him, and the other guy told Nils to shush. I asked what was wrong, trying to play dumb, which wasn’t difficult, actually.” She sighed. “Nils grabbed my arm and shoved a needle into it, and that’s all I remember. I’m sorry. I’ve made things worse, haven’t I?”

“Remains to be seen. But probably.”

“Don’t sugar-coat it, I can take the truth.”

He chuckled at the wryness in her voice. She was taking this surprisingly well. He’d always thought of her as high-strung and jittery. But maybe that was just because of him. He could hear Jason’s voice in his head, saying “Arrogant much?” But the idea generated a kind of excitement deep inside. Something he hadn’t felt since Kelly, and had been trying not to feel about Gabby for weeks. Something that needed another time and place.

“So what do we do?” Gabby asked.

Matthew ushered her over to the pile of blankets and eased her down, then settled beside her with his back to the wall, his legs crossed in front of him. “We wait.”

* * *

Lark didn’t like separating from Jason. She could tell he didn’t want to leave her, either. But they’d decided they didn’t have much choice. Time mattered, and they couldn’t examine the flash drive he’d taken from Isaac’s office and get Gabby back at the same time.

So Jason took Lark back to his house. She followed him yet again as he searched it and double-checked his security.

“I’m a great big albatross,” she muttered.

“You’ll be doing something important. That flash drive could have what we need.” Jason cleared the guest room, checked the closet, and relaxed. “That’s it. No one’s here.”

“What if I spend hours searching and find nothing more helpful than his grocery list?”

“We still have to look, whether there’s anything there or not.” He caught her chin in his hand and raised it. “It’s important, and so are you.” He kissed her forehead, and she rolled her eyes.

“Thanks. That’s very patronizing of you.”

He smiled, a little less wide than usual, and instead of walloping her in the gut it loosened something in her chest.

“Check in every half hour, okay?” She rested her palm on his chest for a brief moment. “Or as close as possible.”

“I will.” He folded his hand around hers. “Don’t worry about me.”

“I can’t help it.” She drew a fortifying breath.
Don’t do it, it’s stupid, don’t do it
. But even though she avoided emotional entanglement, she never kept things close to the vest. “About before…”

“No.”

“Yes.” She grabbed his wrist before he could back away from her. “Despite what I said, I want you to know that I care about you. Come back in one piece, okay?”

His jaw tensed, but he nodded. Maybe it complicated things a little, but Lark felt slightly better for having said it. She watched him go with a sense of foreboding she hoped was simply a product of her own anxiety.

* * *

Amazingly, Nils Fredlund was listed with Directory Assistance.

If Nils were smart, he wouldn’t be home. Being listed meant he was easy to find, even by someone without access to Hummingbird’s records. But Jason counted on Nils believing no one was aware of his involvement with Isaac. Nils hopefully thought everyone who knew—Gabby and Matt, primarily—was in custody. And this late at night, if Jason was lucky, Nils was off the clock.

His home address was in an old house-turned-apartment building in Silver Spring, Maryland. Jason studied the big house as he strolled up the block toward it. Lights shone through the front windows on both the first and second floors, and from one small window in the rear of the second floor. Besides the hum of nearby traffic, the grass-scented rustle of wind in the neighborhood trees, and the occasional bark of a dog a few houses away, the neighborhood was quiet.

Jason casually climbed the front steps and checked the mailboxes. No names, but Nils’ address was 512½, and judging by the placement of the boxes, that was second floor, rear.

The front door’s lock had broken long ago, with no apparent attempt to fix or replace it. He stepped into the central hallway and let the door thump quietly closed against his back. The foyer and stairs were dimly lit and covered in threadbare carpet. He leaned forward and craned his neck to look up the stairway, spotting two doors before the light at the top began to spin. Air caught and held in his chest, and his vision tunneled toward darkness.

He backed toward the door and shook his head hard to clear it. Those stairs probably creaked like mad. Better to go around back, anyway. Then he wouldn’t alert Nils and send him fleeing into the alley. It had nothing to do with the open, wallpapered, spindle-railed interior stairwell, completely different from the one in which he’d been shot. It was just strategy.

This kind of house should have an outside stairway to the upstairs apartments in the back. He went back outside and circled the building. As he crossed below the side windows, music throbbed through the wall. Good. The hard rock bass might penetrate the floor and make it harder for Nils to hear Jason’s approach.

The back yard was dark, the nearest light a security lamp on a telephone pole two houses down. A narrow gravel alley bordered the yard, and two old cars were parked in a gravel indentation in the lawn. The music was louder back here. Jason used it as cover as he jogged up the rickety back steps. The paint was almost completely flaked off, the wood splintery. A couple of steps were broken. The hand rail too, in a few places. As he reached the halfway point and negotiated the turn, he looked up to assess his destination. Lights sparked to life in his peripheral vision, and his breathing went harsh in his ears. Wood bit into his left hand, tightly gripping the rail, and the steps under his feet were solid, but his brain told him he was falling backward. He swayed with vertigo, and the lights flashed faster, pinpoints of gold in solid blackness.

He squeezed his eyes closed and bent forward, facing down. He’d been on normal stairs since his accident, Goddammit, why was this happening now?

Because you’re working
. Just like at Isaac’s office. The circumstances weren’t similar now, but his physiology was. His thought processes and preparation for a fight had triggered the panic. Now that he knew that, he could fight it. He
would
fight it. He took slow, even breaths, trying to keep aware of his surroundings even as he fought the spinning. He wasn’t sure how much time had passed once his head cleared and his heartbeat slowed, but the same song played inside. No cars had appeared at the back of the house. The second floor light still glowed in a patch on the grass.

“He’d so better be there,” Jason muttered under his breath. If he’d gone through all this and Nils wasn’t in the apartment… He drew in one final deep breath and resumed the climb, this time keeping his face front and only using his eyes to skim ahead of him.

A black-and-white cat hung out on the top step of the upper porch, watching Jason’s approach. It opened its mouth in a silent cry as he passed it, and he reached down to scritch the back of its neck. It arched, then turned and dashed through a broken board into the house. Jason went the opposite way, heading to the dark window of the right-side apartment.

The window looked into a tiny, sparse bedroom. A twin bed, a basic computer desk sprouting wires from various pieces of computing equipment, and a tiny TV on an old metal stand were the only pieces of furniture. The open bedroom door showed a kitchenette, the light on over the sink. It appeared to be empty, too.

Jason tried the lockless window, which stuck. Maybe swollen from the day’s humidity. He crouched to examine it. Chipping showed thick layers of paint that probably helped hold it shut. The window might have been nailed from the inside, too. He rose again and braced the heels of his hands against the top of the pane. Feet wide, he gathered his strength and shoved.

The window resisted for only a second before it shot up six inches. Now that
was cool. He kept forgetting his rehab had actual benefits, not just side effects.

He shifted to the side of the window in case someone had heard the noise, but there was silence from inside. He forced the window up just enough to squeeze through. His boots left muddy prints on the wool blanket covering the bed. He hoped it was Nils’.

He listened for a few minutes to the music downstairs and a few random settling-house-type groans. The odors of old spaghetti sauce and maybe a fruit-scented candle hung in the air, neither fresh. Evidence said Nils wasn’t here, but instinct told Jason evidence was wrong. He moved forward, easing around the edge of the doorframe into the kitchen. Still nothing. Then he sensed a presence, someone standing very still outside the kitchenette. He stepped quietly nearer, trying to remember how tall Nils was and where he’d be holding a weapon. Then he lunged around the corner, hands out to grab the bat or gun, or Nils’ wrist or throat.

Miscalculating the thought processes of a geek cost him. Every muscle spasmed as a hundred thousand volts slammed through his body, and he crashed to the floor.

Chapter Fifteen

It took Lark a while to settle down. The house was so silent that every little sound made her leap to her feet and prowl until she found the source—the air conditioning hissing through the vent above her, the boiler heating the hot water in the basement, creaks of settling walls that she couldn’t trace but that made her sweep the house each time.

Finally, after making a cup of tea—and wasting time wondering why Jason had tea in his house, because he sure didn’t seem like a tea drinker—she forced herself to sit at the table with his laptop and the flash drive, resigned to reading each and every file.

Most of it was junk, easy to skip through. Maybe important stuff to Isaac, but not relevant to the Hummingbird situation. She waded through three years’ worth of security service invoices, but those were the only business-related files. All the rest were lists and random notes. She supposed they could be in code, but it all seemed too straightforward for that.

The information was so boring, she had to keep dragging her wandering mind back to what she was looking at. She wondered if Jason was faring any better. Nils probably wouldn’t be that difficult to turn. He was a pipsqueak and no match for Jason, mentally or physically.

She hoped. Jason had winced and hissed a lot when she touched him, and he’d alluded to undesirable side effects. She hated the idea of the RT-24 causing problems, but few treatments had no downside, and it was still experimental. They could probably modify the formula to mitigate the side effects in future patients. But that didn’t do Jason any good.

Then there was the cramping. She cringed, remembering the torment in his face when she’d found him on the treadmill. What if that worsened, and a morning workout stopped being effective? She needed to talk to Gabby about this. Maybe some mineral supplements would help. Or a massage every day. She smiled before she could stop herself, remembering this morning.

Such a thing had never happened to her in her life. An orgasm wasn’t that difficult to achieve, when things were done right. But a little more time and some nakedness were usually involved. She flushed, remembering how she’d rubbed herself against him, flung herself around. God, the embarrassment.

Of course, he’d been a little red-faced, himself. Maybe he didn’t like being vulnerable, hadn’t appreciated needing her help. That was probably why he didn’t want to talk about it. It wasn’t manly. So when had resistance become desire? She shivered, remembering the kiss, the way he’d fisted his hand in her hair and devoured her mouth.
Something
she’d done had triggered his need.

She wanted to do it again.

The chiming of the grandfather clock in the other room pulled her out of her thoughts. That meant forty-five minutes had passed since Jason left. He was supposed to call her fifteen minutes ago. She eyed her cell phone, then the phone on the wall. Being late might not mean he was in trouble. If she called, she could interrupt him at a bad moment. And getting voice mail, if he’d turned off the phone, wouldn’t make her feel any better. She decided to give him another fifteen minutes.

With a sigh, she clicked on another file, this one’s header indicating it was a party guest list. She had a hard time imagining Isaac throwing a party. Her eye ran down the list of names, half of which had strikethroughs. Maybe those who RSVP’d with a no? Her gaze snagged on something familiar. She studied the name, not recognizing it, but hearing a bell nonetheless. Ella Reinhart. She had an Aunt Ella, and there was a guy at work named Stuart Reinhart. That must be why it looked familiar. She continued reading, but stopped again immediately. The next name on the list was Carl Darron. Below that was Mike Frankel. Her ex-boyfriend Carl’s last name was Frankel. She skimmed back up the list, and sure enough, the name before Ella’s was Stuart Jones. Stuart. Reinhart. Ella. Darron. Carl. Frankel.

“Holy crap.” She’d cracked the code! She grabbed the pad and started writing all the first names on the list. Then she wrote the last names, starting with the second one on the list, and putting it with the first first name. The first last name went with the last first name… She stared. She had no idea what this list was for, but she recognized more than half the names this way.

Her ex-boyfriend. Her boss and two guys from work. A couple of names might be Hummingbird employees, though she wasn’t positive. And her mother’s sister. Ralph’s last name and the other guy’s from BotMed were crossed through, but Ella’s and Stuart’s weren’t.

Lark’s mind raced through possible explanations. Maybe these were people close to her and to Hummingbird that Isaac thought he could use. But how did the strikethroughs factor in? Were they people he’d turned, or not? And was it the first names or the last that mattered? Nils wasn’t on the list, of course. That would have been too easy.

She needed Jason. They could figure this out together. Their brains seemed to connect, like network computers accessing more processing power. But he still hadn’t checked in, and it had now been an hour and a half. Lark went to the kitchen phone and dialed his cell from memory. It went straight to voice mail, just as she’d expected. She hung up without leaving a message, immediately pacing the kitchen while she figured out what to do.

There were two reasons Jason wouldn’t check in. He was hiding and using his phone would alert his quarry, or he was in trouble. If it was the former, going after him would jeopardize his plan, maybe him. But if it was the latter, and she did nothing, she risked losing him as well as her father, not to mention Gabby. That wasn’t acceptable.

But dammit, she wasn’t a fighter. She braced her arms on the countertop, closing her eyes and swallowing down the bitterness in her throat. She could barely handle a gun, never mind use it, and that made her a liability. Going in after Jason could put him in a worse position.

But it was
Nils
. She’d beaten him in hand-to-hand.
Several years ago
, the voice of reason whispered. He could be better now. But maybe not. And she still worked out.

Nils might not be alone. He shouldn’t have been a challenge for Jason, not unless he had help, which meant she had even less of a chance of doing any good. She twisted to look at the clock on the wall again, her lungs tightening. She couldn’t just sit here all night, worrying.

She had Nils’ address. She could just go drive by, see what she could see, gather information to help her decide what to do. She knew how to ride a motorcycle, thanks to an old boyfriend, but she didn’t have a license and she had no idea where Jason kept the keys.

She snatched her cell phone off the table and checked the charge. More than half. She switched it to vibrate and stuck it in her front pocket. The gun was trickier. She knew better than to put it in her waistband, especially while riding a motorcycle. Somewhere in this house, Jason had to have a suitable holster.

After a frustrating half hour searching, she found a set of keys she hoped would start the bike and a shoulder holster that wouldn’t fit no matter how much she adjusted it. Damn, she’d have to leave the weapon behind. She felt vulnerable, but she’d be no good to anyone with a hole in her butt.

The wind would be cold during the ride, so she shrugged on a zip-up sweatshirt from the front hall closet. The sleeves needed rolling six times, and the hem came halfway to her knees, but it would be warm and add protection on the ride. After double-checking the route to Nils’ house on a map and committing all the side roads to memory, she went out to the garage to uncover the bike.

The Suzuki sport bike was different from the little Ducati her ex owned, but the principle would be the same. She hoped. It was a big machine. She was surprised to find the tank full. Her father must have had it gassed and everything when he knew Jason was going to be released.

She swung her leg over. Her toes just touched the ground, but the bike had exquisite balance and wasn’t hard to keep up. One of the storage compartments had a garage door opener in it. She hit the button and watched it slowly reveal the driveway and dark, empty street outside. Taking a deep breath, she started the bike, maneuvered out of the garage, and roared off to save Jason.

Or something.

* * *

Gabby huddled against the dirt wall, her legs drawn up on the rough blankets on the floor, and tried to hide her shivering from Matthew. He hadn’t said much over the last hour—it was hard to know how much time was passing, sitting here with nothing to do in the dark—and he was probably trying to come up with a plan. She didn’t want him to see her as weak and therefore a liability. Getting herself captured had certainly caused him problems.

“Are you cold?” he asked.

“No.” She hugged her knees tighter to stop the shuddering, but realized the move just proved her lie. She forced herself to relax and added, “I’m fine.”

But then he was beside her, wrapping his arm around her shoulders, and Gabby no longer cared if he thought her weak as long as he kept touching her.

“I messed things up for you, didn’t I?”

“No. Isaac did that.” Matthew’s tone was light and easy, and it relaxed Gabby even though she knew he was lying.

“I’ll do anything you want me to,” she told him.

His arm tightened briefly around her shoulders. “Anything?”

She smiled, wishing he meant the double entendre but knowing he couldn’t possibly.

“Anything. Well—please don’t ask me to shoot someone.”

He chuckled. “I won’t.”

“But I’ll play sick, or whack someone over the head with a hammer, or whatever.”

“I’ll keep it in mind.”

He went silent again. They sat that way for a few minutes. His warmth seeped into her, stopping the shivers and then filling her with a level of comfort she shouldn’t be feeling, given the circumstances. Gabby wanted to ask Matthew how he’d gotten himself abducted and what he thought Isaac’s plan was, but realized there were things she knew that he didn’t. Maybe telling him would get him talking and bypass the old-fashioned chivalrous streak that drove him to protect her. The reason was less that she was a woman and more that she wasn’t an agent—but it was still misplaced.

“I talked to Jason today. At least,” she amended, “I think it was today. When did you disappear?”

“Today.” She could hear the smile in his voice.

“Okay, good. Anyway, I saw Lark and Jason this morning after they found out you were captured.”

The hand rubbing her arm went still. “What do you mean, after they found out I was captured?”

Gabby opened her mouth, then closed it. She realized they hadn’t actually said Matthew was abducted. She’d inferred it and they never corrected her. Maybe she didn’t have as much information as she thought she did.

“Someone claiming to be you left me a message to compile all my data on Jason and his treatment and give him the flash drive when he came to see me,” she explained. “I couldn’t reach you, and then Jason called me and told me to meet him and Lark in town.” She described the meeting. “Jason said the call hadn’t come from you, or if it had, you’d been coerced. So I guess I assumed you’d been…” How to say it without insulting him? “Taken. I went back to the lab and erased the flash drive, protected all the data, and you know the rest.”

Matthew’s chest expanded under her as he took a slow, deep inhale. “When did you last talk to them? Is Lark okay?”

“This afternoon. She’s fine. Tough.”

He let out the breath, just as slowly. “Tell me again what happened this morning.”

She repeated everything, adding as much detail as she could. “Was it you who called? Were you drugged?”

“I didn’t call. But it’s not that hard to fake my voice. It’s not distinctive. No accent or special tone.”

It was distinctive to her. But then again, maybe not, since she’d been fooled.

“Well?” she prodded.

“Well what?”

She pursed her lips in frustration. That hadn’t worked as she’d hoped. “Well, do you have, you know, anything to say about that?”

“It helps fill in some blanks, thank you.”