Concrete Evidence (11 page)

Jake tossed a look over his shoulder at Lee and slid a possessive arm around her shoulders. She itched to shove him away but needed to lose Lee first. At the doorway, she nudged Jake into the room with a sharp jab of her elbow, then turned and said, “Sorry, this conversation is private,” and shut the door in Lee’s face.

She whirled to face Jake, knowing better than to turn her back on him for long. “What the hell are you doing here?”

“What? No kiss hello?”

“Pucker up while I bend over.”

He laughed. “I’ve missed you, Cream Puff. Life on the boat was dull after you left.”

“You can’t team with Talon & Drake.”

He held up a manila envelope. “But I am. This is my qualifications package for the team. I was hoping to talk to Edward Drake, but I hear he’s in a meeting.” He took a step toward her and lifted her chin with his forefinger. “Don’t fuck this up for me, sweetheart.” He leaned into her. “I mean it. You’ve been blackballed on the West Coast. Breathe one word of our past association to anyone here, and the rumors about you will finally make it to DC.” His lips were within an inch of hers. “You do want Talon & Drake to pay your tuition for grad school, don’t you?”

Her stomach lurched. She’d finally begun to hope. She couldn’t be an underwater archaeologist, but she still had a future as an environmental scientist.

He smiled. “You have no proof of what happened in Mexico. Nothing. So let it go. You so much as mention the word ‘Aztec’ to anyone and not only will you lose grad school, but Marco will pay you a visit. Understand?”

She could not show fear or weakness. She’d trained until she was bruised and bleeding, knowing she’d face him again someday. “I’m not a prisoner on your boat anymore, and the cops here can’t all be on your payroll. Leave me alone.” She reached for the doorknob.

Jake reached over her shoulder and held the door closed. “Listen closely, because your life depends on it. I know why you took the job at Talon & Drake, and you need to let it go. You have no proof. Now, I need your word that you won’t tell anyone about the Aztec artifacts. You won’t tell anyone about Marco.”

“Fine,” she said.

“If you break your word, there is no way I’ll be able to protect you.” He released the door.

She jerked the door open and came face-to-face with Lee. She grabbed his arm, dragging him toward their office. “C’mon,” she said sharply. “We’ve got work to do.” As much as she wanted time to think, she couldn’t leave Lee alone with Jake.

Only one thing was certain. She couldn’t tell Janice the truth.

Not today.

Not ever.

C
HAPTER
E
LEVEN

A
FTER WITNESSING
E
RICA’S REACTION
to the stranger in the hallway, Lee knew he’d finally caught a break. At last, he had something tangible to investigate. Erica didn’t say a word as she steered him back to their office, and her shuttered expression only raised more questions. She’d seemed frightened of the mystery man, yet she’d faced him head-on and taken complete control of the situation. Her fear triggered Lee’s protective instincts, while her steel nerves impressed the hell out of him.

He had a path to follow, a code to break. All he needed was to identify the man who frightened Erica. He settled in front of his computer and searched the company network for references to a navy project. There were several, but none were in the proposal stage. JT should know. He’d ask him when the meeting with the colonel was finished. Across the room, Erica shifted in her seat. He couldn’t let her see what he was doing. With the touch of a button, he brought up the Tetris game and pretended to play.

He glanced in her direction. She looked calm. He would even say serene. “Who was that guy?” he asked.

She startled, proving her serenity was a façade. “Nobody.”

“I don’t get it. First you swooned, then you acted like you don’t like him. Which is it?”

“I didn’t swoon. I was hungry and surprised, is all.”

“So you don’t like him.”

“No. I don’t.” Her words were clipped.

“Is he an ex-boyfriend?”

“God, no.” The words came out harsh, laced with disgust.

The amount of relief he felt worried him.

She closed her eyes for a second and breathed slowly. Then she met his gaze. “Thank you. For helping me. When I nearly fainted.”

“No problem,
Cream Puff
.”

She stood abruptly. Her chair crashed into the table behind her desk. “Don’t
ever
call me Cream Puff.” She bolted from the room.

He sat in stunned silence. In the last three days, he’d said and done several things he should have regretted, but his mission was paramount. This time, however, in crushing her sincere thank-you with a taunt, he’d gone too far.

He closed his laptop and picked up the Thermo-Con file, mindful of the fact that he needed to look like he was working if he wanted to blend into the background as he wandered the maze of offices. Over two hundred people worked in the Bethesda office, and so far all but Erica had paid him no mind. Which was exactly what he wanted.

He tried to look clueless and lost, but in truth he’d memorized the Talon & Drake floor plan. Nameplates on doors and cubicles aided his sense of direction as he looked for Erica. She wasn’t in the break room or any of the empty conference rooms.

He approached the main conference room where JT and his top engineers were meeting to hammer out a contract for work in Afghanistan. The conference room door opened, and Edward Drake stepped out.

JT’s prime suspect looked anxious. Lee paused by a water fountain. Drake headed for the stairwell. Lee followed. Making up with Erica would have to wait.

Drake used his ID card to unlock the door at the top of the stairs. He stepped into the ninth-floor corridor and turned right just before the door swung closed.

When he reached the top, Lee turned left. He could circle back behind the center cubicles and not look like he was following Drake. He walked with purpose, holding the file as though he were making an important delivery. Rounding the corner, he entered Drake’s office hallway from the far end and stopped at a shared printer and fax station. He flipped through the papers in the printer tray as though he were looking for a printout. At the other end of the hall, Drake entered his corner office.

The words “Request for Proposals from the United States Navy” caught his eye on one of the pages. He felt a rush of excitement as he read the page. He’d found the navy project Erica had mentioned to the mystery man.

The navy wanted to hire a salvage expert to pull up a Douglas TBD-1 Devastator Torpedo Bomber from the bottom of Chesapeake Bay. This had to be the same aircraft project Rob Anderson had asked Erica about in the break room just before she denied her background in underwater archaeology. He slipped the RFP into the Thermo-Con file.

At the far end of the hall, Drake’s administrative assistant opened the man’s door. “Here’s the qualifications package you were waiting for, Ed.”

He couldn’t hear the response, but the door started to close. The woman’s voice rose. “JT has already called—”

“Edward Drake, line one,” the front-desk receptionist said over the loudspeaker. “Edward Drake, line one.”

Drake’s assistant pointed up at the commanding speakers. “He wants you in the meeting.”

Lee heard Drake clearly this time. “Answer the page and tell the interfering prick I’ll be back in five minutes!” The door slammed.

He waited another minute, then headed toward Drake’s office. He paused when he reached Drake’s assistant at the corner. “Which way is Arnie Ross’s office?” he asked.

She pointed in the direction he’d been heading. “He’s at the end of the hall, near the stairwell.”

Drake’s office door opened a crack. Drake was speaking to someone inside. “I appreciate you stopping by on your way to the senator’s.”

“I’ll talk to Joe, but I don’t think it’ll make much difference. Per Senate ethics rules, JT’s in charge.” Lee recognized both the cadence and the voice. Sam Riversong was inside Drake’s office. Drake was trying to use Riversong to override JT.

The door opened another inch. So far, the one thing Lee had going for him was his intern status, which made him invisible to the powers-that-be in the office—a difficult feat for a six-foot five-inch man. But Riversong had
seen
him. And he’d certainly notice Lee now and likely say something that would make Drake take notice. He had to get out of there. Fast.

Lee hurried to Arnie Ross’s office and twisted the knob. The door was locked. Crap!

Days ago, he’d made a copy of JT’s ID card, which opened every office door but left an electronic trail that couldn’t be erased. He had no choice. He slid his magic card in the slot and entered. Thank goodness the concrete engineer was in the meeting with JT.

He stood by the window that faced the hall. After setting the Thermo-Con file on a shelf, he closed the blinds, then held up one slat a fraction of an inch and watched Drake and Riversong pass by.

Exactly which of JT’s plans did Drake want to override? And why hadn’t JT told Lee he was rattling Drake’s cage? Was JT holding out on him?

Lee waited a few minutes, then reopened Arnie’s blinds and slipped into the hallway. After using his card to relock the door, he casually strolled down the corridor.

He was safely back at his desk, wondering where Erica was, when he realized he’d left the Thermo-Con file inside Arnie’s locked office.

C
HAPTER
T
WELVE

E
RICA SAT AT HER DESK
and simmered. She was supposed to be working, but in her mind she heard Jake’s threats, while in her office she heard Lee’s incessant questions.

She’d given him an environmental assessment template and asked him to use it to create the Thermo-Con report. All he had to do was adapt the headings to this particular project and paste in the sections that had already been written. He cooperated by asking her to explain every aspect of the task.

“I don’t get it,” he said. “If the appendices aren’t paginated with the rest of the report, how do we show them on the table of contents?”

She was too frazzled after seeing Jake. She couldn’t take his incompetence for another second. She growled and said, “Give me the Thermo-Con file. I’ll do it later.”

“But I need to know—”

“Play Tetris and leave me alone!”

She hit the print button for another cell tower report. The blue screen of death flashed on her computer. “Nooooo!” she wailed. Not today. She couldn’t take this today.

It took ten minutes to reboot her computer, and when she got back into the cell tower database, her worst fear was confirmed. The crash had corrupted the file. Even the backup contained the damaged data. As if today wasn’t already on her top-ten list of most rotten days ever.

She glanced at Lee, wondering if he could help. But when she’d explained how to cross-reference the Thermo-Con photo captions, he’d accidentally deleted the photos.

He was hopeless with computers.

Unless he was playing Tetris, which he was doing now. She smiled grimly. This was the first time all day he’d done as instructed.

After cursing and sighing, she started copying the data one record at a time and pasting it into a clean, bug-free file. The task would take hours. Hours in which she wouldn’t be working on Thermo-Con, but it was the only way to rescue the database. And no matter what happened, she needed this job, needed to keep her annoying cell tower clients happy.

She would never be safe. Not unless Jake, Marco, and the crew were locked up. Several times over the last year, she’d considered going to the FBI with her photographs of the artifacts, but she’d chickened out every time.

Without the actual artifacts, the photos proved nothing.

Lee left the office at five o’clock, triggering envy that he was done for the day and a surprising disappointment at his absence. He might be useless as an assistant, but she didn’t feel lonely with him in the room. She worked into the night, afraid to go home, afraid Marco would be waiting for her.