Chase Me (26 page)

Lorin chatted with Paige while Nathan and Mike wrapped the capsule. It was nice to catch up on what was happening at the dig, but Paige didn’t mention anything about her hot vamp, and Lorin didn’t ask. Before long, Nathan handed her the capsule, its glowing metal obscured by a layer of small bubbles and clear packing tape.

As she tucked it into her messenger bag, the smell of grilled breakfast meat wafted in from the kitchen next door. Her stomach growled loudly, making Paige giggle. The smaller woman tucked her arm through Lorin’s. “Let’s get you fed.”

They walked to the noisy dining hall, and after a round of hugs and hellos from the rest of the crew, she and Paige finally sat down. Gretchen brought over a platter of breakfast burritos bursting with eggs, bacon, and a pepper/onion mix that made Lorin’s mouth water.

“Wow. These look fabulous.”

“Thanks, Gretchen,” Paige said with a smile.

Gretchen smiled back.

Hmm, interesting.
Lorin listened as Paige chattered about events at the dig with no trace of her previous sarcasm or sullenness. Maybe she was worrying about nothing.

But she’d talk to Mike before she left and find out what was what.

Much later that day, Lorin was back at her desk in Sebastiani Labs’ subterranean workroom, scrolling through another set of pictures—of the command box’s contents—even though the objects themselves now lay in individual shallow trays on an adjacent table just across the room. She replayed the slideshow from the beginning once again, gazing at the first shot: the contents of the box
in
situ.
Even though the box had been transported, shifted, and jostled many, many times since she’d dug it out of the ground, she’d followed proper procedure anyway, documenting and measuring the position of each of the objects relative to each other immediately after she and Gabe had opened it.

Several hours had passed since then, hours during which she’d tried to throttle back a clawing, growing hunger that food wouldn’t satisfy. Gabe, scribbling on a clipboard behind her, apparently had no such problem.

She zoomed in on a fragile curl of birch bark, the dozen or so kernels of what looked like wild rice, the doll—or perhaps it was a spiritual totem—lying next to two locks of hair, one black and fine, the other curly platinum blond, lashed together at one end with a near-translucent polymer that looked a lot like fishing line. And there, at the back, lay the tech unit—nearly invisible because the metal it was made from was a visual match to the box itself—looking like something she could buy from the freaking Apple Store. Handheld, maybe three inches by six, it was sleek and slick.

She glared at the device’s tiny glowing light. Bailey had hovered so much during Lorin’s initial documentation, and had been such an epic pain in her ass, she’d given the unit to the other woman as soon as she’d finished with individual pictures and measurements. Bailey had immediately absconded with it, disappearing into the adjacent computer lab, her face glowing like a child who’d seen Santa Claus’s boots drop down the chimney on Christmas morning.

Across the lab, Gabe muttered as he consulted a clipboard. Lorin rolled her eyes. He hadn’t said a personal word to her since she’d come back from Isabella. Work, work, work. Though she’d felt his gaze throughout the afternoon, apparently he wasn’t in the mood to talk.

The silence grew oppressive and heavy without the beeps, cheeps, blips, and pings of Gabe’s Bat Phone, which Bailey had decreed be powered down. Bailey’s technical explanation about her reasoning had completely flown over her head, but Gabe was complying. Since her return, he’d snatched up the handset of the wall-mounted landline a couple of times, having a short, jargon-filled conversation with Julianna Benton, and then calling his sister to ask how things were going with her prosthetic. His guilty expression as he spoke with Glynna made her queasy.

Gabe was sacrificing so much to work on this project, and it was all her fault.

She threw a dirty look at the door leading to the Biohazard Lab. Though his interest had been clear as she’d removed the capsule from her messenger bag, Gabe had ordered it placed under the hood for bubble wrap removal, lest they have what he’d called “an encore performance.” He was right, damn his eyes, but that didn’t mean she had to like it. And now the capsule she’d sacrificed sleep and probable sex to retrieve lay slumbering under a biohood. Untouched. Waiting.

Like her.

Ah, damn, now he was talking, taking copious oral notes as he moved the ProScope over each millimeter of the box. She shifted restlessly. Apparently his actual words didn’t matter, nor did the fact that he’d directed so few of those words to her. His rumbly voice stroked her as thoroughly as his clever tongue had the last time they’d made love.

She could practically see his synapses snap as he picked up his clipboard, scribbling a notation in his heinous handwriting. When had she started finding concentration—thinking—so damned sexy? When had a days’ growth of beard juxtaposed against a starched oxford shirt made her slicken with want? Damn it, she knew
exactly
how delicious that scruff would feel scraping its way up her inner thighs.

Gabe stepped away from the table with a sigh, rolling his head in circles to stretch his neck. Latex snapped as he removed his gloves. He raised his hands to his shoulders and rubbed.

She stood, approached him from behind, and covered his hands with her own.

He tensed for several endless seconds. Slowly, with a stroke of skin against skin, he removed his hands.

Placing himself in hers.

Lorin’s breath quickened as she rubbed her thumbs against his tight trapezoids. Gooseflesh rose on the back of his neck, and his silent exhale vibrated into the fingertips resting lightly on his Adam’s apple. The sterile air suddenly seemed heavy, and her perfectly comfortable clothes pulled and scratched. She felt her sex soften, dampen, clench against emptiness. Taking a half a step, she closed the distance between their bodies, bumping the toes of her boots into the heels of his loafers. Gabe groaned aloud as her breasts made contact with his back. When she twined her arms around his chest, hugging him from behind, he reached back to clutch her ass in his long-fingered hands, yanking her more tightly against his lanky frame. He hissed a breath as she dragged her hands down his chest, over his abs, taking a meandering path to the waistband of his flat-front khakis.

Which were no longer quite so flat.

She groaned. It had been too long since she’d touched the hard flesh bulging under the soft fabric, forever since she’d felt his weight in her hand… tasted his essence on her tongue. Sidling around his body, brushing him with lips and breasts as she made the journey, she reached for the tab of his zipper.

His icy blue eyes burned with heat. He covered her hand with his—

“Damn it!” Bailey’s frantic voice carried clearly from the adjacent computer lab.

Lorin dropped into a fighting stance—or tried to. Gabe’s arms clamped around hers like a vice, impeding her range of motion. Intruder? Security breach? She had no idea, but the panic in Bailey’s voice was real. “Move, damn it.” Lorin shoved out of Gabe’s arms. Stalking over to the entrance, she slapped the silent alarm button that would bring Sebastiani Labs’ Security and Emergency Response teams running. The cluster of warning indicators on the panel above the button indicated nothing amiss.

Bailey bumped into her as she scurried into the lab, holding the tech unit in front of her at arm’s length. She ran directly to the box, dropped the tech unit into it, and slammed the cover down.

Lorin quickly scanned Bailey from stem to stern. No blood. She was mobile, all limbs working. Breathing, talking. “Are you okay?”

Bailey looked at them like they were missing the brain regions responsible for critical thinking. “Guys. That
thing
”—she pointed to the box she’d slammed closed—“connected to my network.”

Lorin looked at the now-closed box, and then at the laptops both she and Gabe were using. Both units were top-of-the-line, but their network access was nil. She could type up her notes, Gabe could update his spreadsheets, but that was it. Bailey must have a different set-up for herself. Why hadn’t she listened to the technical details more closely during all those meetings Gabe had helmed?

And now Bailey and Gabe were walking quickly, jabbering about LANs, RFID shielding, encryption, and jammers.

“Damage?” Gabe asked.

“Don’t know yet.”

Lorin brought up the rear as they entered Bailey’s domain, the computer lab she’d explicitly built to test the unit she’d just slammed back into the box. Dimly lit, fans whirring, nearly a dozen laptops, monitors, and CPUs elbowed for space on the crowded L-shaped table. Bailey dropped onto a wheeled backless stool, pushed off with a foot, and clattered half the length of the table, coming to a stop in front of a large monitor, where she pounded on a keyboard in frantic bursts that sounded like the rat-tat-tat of a machine gun. She bounced her Converse-clad feet as characters flew across the screen.

“Son of a bitch,” Bailey finally muttered at a stream of letters and numbers that meant absolutely nothing to Lorin.

“What?” Lorin asked. “What do you see?”

“Actually, it’s what I don’t see,” Bailey said, leaning in to peer at the screen more closely. “There’s no sign of it now. It’s gone. If the unit was still latched on, we’d see it, right”—Bailey pointed to a tiny stream of characters—“there. Damn it.”

“Bailey, are you sure—”

“Yes, and now it’s gone.”

Gabe glanced to the door leading to the lab, and back at Bailey. “So you were working with the unit in here—”

“It was just lying there on the desk,” Bailey said defensively. “I hadn’t started my first test yet—”

“Hang on. When the tech unit was in here with you, out of the command box, it latched onto the network,” Gabe said. “And now that it’s back in the box, there’s no sign of it?”

“Yeah.”

“So… the box is blocking the signal somehow?”

“Like a Faraday cage? Maybe.” Bailey chewed on her lower lip. “But what the hell did it do, what did it access, when it latched on?” Focusing on the screen again, she muttered something about viruses and payloads and core dumps.

Lorin was having trouble understanding the fine technical details, but Freyja, she got the gist. “How did you think to put the unit back in the box in the first place?”

“The box has been down here, closed, for several days now while Gabe ran his initial tests. My network’s been clean all that time, was clean when I ran my last diagnostic a couple of hours ago. What’s changed? The box was opened, and the unit was removed. I thought putting it back, turning back the clock, would be a good first thing to try.” With a sigh, she whirled her stool back toward the screen, where white characters marched across a black background. “We’re lucky it worked—or seems to have worked, at any rate—’cuz after that, I had nothin’.”

“What’s the risk of incursion into SL’s network infrastructure?”

Lorin caught her breath.

“Unknown.” Bailey looked up to the ceiling, where ten floors of
very
privately held corporation soared overhead. “We’re shielded down here, but I won’t know anything about the unit’s range and capabilities until I examine it—”

“Which won’t happen anytime soon,” Gabe said darkly. “That thing’s staying in that box until—”

“Shit,” Lorin blurted. The day she’d found the box—the day she’d accidentally opened it, and noticed the unit and its red glowing light—she’d been attending a Council meeting.

“What’s wrong?” Gabe asked.

“Council_Net,” she said starkly. “The first time I opened the box, I was attending a Council meeting. I was logged into Council_Net.”

Bailey’s eyes widened as she considered the implications of a possible breach of the Underworld Council’s confidential workspace. “I can’t run Council_Net diagnostics from here. I—”

They heard a loud crack. Lorin ran back to the other lab, just in time to see the tread of Lukas’s big boot slam into the tempered glass window of the outer door again, lengthening the fissure he’d made, but not yet shattering the glass. Elliott and a uniformed Sebastiani Labs security team stood behind him.

“Damn it. Hold on.” Lorin opened the door.

Lukas shouldered into the room, his laser-beam gaze slicing into every corner. “What happened?”

“Get in here,” Bailey called from the computer lab. “We’ve got a couple of problems.”

Lukas didn’t comply until he’d satisfied himself that everyone was okay, that the lab was clear. After he turned off the alarm and sent the security team back to their stations, she, Gabe, Bailey, Lukas, and Elliott congregated in the computer lab while Bailey explained what had happened. With five people in the small, dim room, space was at a premium. Lukas paced while he, Elliot, and Bailey had a convoluted, jargon-laced conversation about the lab’s proprietary shielding technology, and the capabilities of the prototype jammer Bailey had thought to install. Lorin scooted up onto the table to free up more floor space.

Lukas summed up. “So, bottom line, the tech unit may have breached SL and Council_Net.”

“That about nails it,” Bailey said grimly. “I need to go back to Sebastiani Security to run a Council_Net diagnostic.”