Next to Die (27 page)

“Hannah?”

“Yes, sir.”

“First of all,” he said placing a settling hand on her shoulder, “You make me feel so old when you call me ‘sir.’” He wasn’t a day over forty. “Second, I’ve opted to step down the promotion ladder, so please do call me Rafe.”

“Okay. Rafe.”

“That’s better. Now take a deep breath. I’m coming with you to get coffee.”

She drew a deep breath and nodded. “I’m good now.”

His ghost of a smile was almost real. “I’m going to enjoy working with you.”

Three hours later, Hannah pushed her chair from her desk and rubbed her stiff neck. “I’m hungry and restless,” she admitted. “How can you sit that still for so long?”

Rafe dragged his dark gaze from the monitor and looked at her in surprise. “I don’t know,” he said.

“We’ve pored through hundreds of documents. We’ve cross-referenced every aspect of the victims’ lives, and we still don’t have a motive,” she lamented.

“Perhaps we should talk about it over lunch,” he suggested.

“You’re only saying that because I said I was hungry,” she accused.

“I’ll never tell,” he retorted, rolling to his feet.

While Hannah stretched, he stood there like an undisturbed pond.

She gasped. “I have an idea.”

“On an empty stomach?”

“Bear with me. It’s probably not a good one. Who knows about the ricin poisoning besides you and me?”

“The three techs at Quantico who ran the tests,” he replied.

“What if we were to leak this to the press?” she suggested.

“And we would do this because . . .”

“Number one, so that high-ranking officers know to be vigilant. This guy might be trying to poison someone else right now. We could save a life. Two, chances are that someone out there knows something we don’t, like what these victims all had in common.”

Rafe regarded her thoughtfully. “I’ll think about it,” he promised.

“Fair enough,” said Hannah. “Let’s chow.”

Joe rounded his desk to gently close his office door.

His impulse was to slam it. Immediately, the noises that had been distracting him all afternoon were muted, and he heaved a sigh of relief.

Maintaining an open-door policy was an intentional leadership decision, but it was giving him a headache. The buzz of voices, punctuated by laughter in the break room or Senior Chief McGuire’s bark, was making Joe as edgy as a Gerber blade.

He returned to his desk and thumped down into his wheeled chair. He found where he’d left off in the manual he was perusing, but after reading the same line three times, he accepted that he’d lost focus.

Joe slapped the book shut. He rubbed his aching eyes. Behind closed lids, he envisioned Penny the way she’d looked with her legs wrapped around him, her head thrown back, lost in ecstasy. Longing surged through him. He wanted her again, and not just physically. He hadn’t spoken to her in days. He missed the sound of her voice.

Glancing at his watch, he wondered if she was home from work yet.

But he needed a reason to call.

While leaving his house at dawn this morning, he’d noticed that the police who were supposed to be guarding Penny were gone. He could inquire into that.

Butterflies swarmed Joe’s stomach as he punched an outside line. A minute later, her cell phone was ringing and his heart was doing an inexplicable jog.

“Hello?”

Pleasure broke over him. “Hey, it’s Joe,” he said, as casually as he could manage.

“Oh, hello.” She sounded startled.

“Are you home from work already?” he inquired.

“No, I’m sitting in my office doing paperwork. I usually keep my phone off at work. I guess I forgot to.”

“I’m at the office, too,” he said.

“You’ve been putting in long hours,” she observed. “I hardly ever see your Jeep in the driveway.”

Did that mean she’d been looking for him? “I’m still trying to get my bearings,” he admitted.

“So how’s it going?”

He gave a grunt. “My XO’s been great—you met Lieutenant Renault at the party.”

“Oh, yes.”

“He’s taught me a lot. The dynamics are different from what I’m used to, though—kind of laid-back. At the same time, we’re short-handed with men in the field and the rest of us scrambling to get the paperwork done.”

She hummed sympathetically. “How’s Senior Chief McGuire?”

A sensation similar to jealousy snaked through him. “Fine,” he said shortly.

“There’s no tension between you two?”

Joe hesitated. “We’re professionals,” he said finally.“We don’t let personal stuff drive our working rela-tionship.”

“Well, that’s good,” she said.

Silence filled the phone lines before Joe remembered the purpose of his call. “I noticed your watchdogs weren’t out front this morning.”

“Oh, yeah, they got tired of watching the house and tailing Ophelia. Nothing’s happened, so they’ve left us to our own devices.”

“Does Hannah Lindstrom know that?”

“I assume so.”

“But Eric’s killer is still on the loose,” Joe pointed out.

“I know,” said Penny. “They left us a number to call if something happens. At least we’ve made headway in another area. Get this, you know the military men who’ve died without any visible cause over the past few years?”

“Uh . . .”

“A deputy Chief of Staff member was the latest one,” she added helpfully.

“It rings a bell,” Joe admitted.

“Hannah told me last Monday that they were poisoned by ricin,” Penny said excitedly, “in different ways, though, so that the cause wasn’t noticed until recently. She thinks it’s the same ricin that Eric sold five years ago.”

“Damn,” said Joe, growing more concerned by the moment. “Obviously the victims had something in common, besides how they were killed, I mean.”

“Yeah, Hannah hasn’t figured that out yet. But she’s working with a bigwig from D.C. headquarters. I’m sure they’ll catch this nut sooner or later.”

“Yeah, but in the meantime, no one’s guarding you,” Joe pointed out. Uneasiness gnawed at him.

“I’m thinking of installing an alarm system,” she said, sounding only halfway serious.

“I could, uh, camp out at your place,” Joe suggested, “if you want some protection.”

“Oh . . .” That obviously caught her off guard. “You’re busy enough, don’t you think?” she hedged.

Did she want him or not? He couldn’t tell. “Look,” he said, opening himself to rejection, “I wasn’t expecting what happened the other night to be a onetime thing,” he confessed. “I want some more, Penny,” he added in a voice that betrayed his eagerness.

She was silent for way too long. “Come over tonight,” she finally agreed.

Anticipation flared like a Bunsen burner. “What time?”

“Whenever you get home. I’ll cook dinner for you. Ophelia’s working late,” she added.

He grinned at the underlying message that they would be alone. “Great. I’ll be there around six.”

“Okay. See you then,” she said, sounding breathless.

Yeah, she was trying to sound nonchalant, but she wanted the same thing he did.

Joe hung up the phone and glanced at his watch. It showed bad form when a commander left work before his men. He punched the interoffice button connecting him to his XO’s office. “Gabe,” he said.

“Sir.”

“What’s it going to take to get everyone out of here by seventeen hundred?”

“Not a problem, sir. When do you want the halls cleared?”

“Holy shit! Change the channel back,” Vinny commanded, forgetting the Diet Coke that was stuck in the vending machine.

The two men watching TV in the lounge at Guantanamo Bay’s airstrip ignored him. They’d found a comedy show instead.

Vinny lunged for the remote control, snatching it out of Haiku’s hands. “I said change the fucking channel,” he repeated, flicking through the stations.

He groaned out loud. There she was. The woman who occupied his every waking thought was clutching a microphone and reporting the news.

“Hey, come on!” Haiku protested. “We’re watching TV here.”

“You come on. That’s my girlfriend,” Vinny boasted, nodding at the TV.

The other two SEALs eyed Ophelia with skepticism. Wearing a snug yellow sweater, her copper hair cascading over her shoulders, she looked hot enough to make Vinny break into a sweat. He focused his hungry gaze on her berry-colored lips and let her husky voice wash over him.

“—from this laboratory at BioTech five years ago,” she was saying. “Ricin is listed on Homeland Security’s National Terror Alert as a toxin attractive to terrorists. It is a stable but lethal substance, deadly if inhaled, ingested, or injected into the bloodstream. This is exactly what happened to Sergeant Master Ernest Aimes, U.S. Marine Corps; Colonel Luis Powell of the U.S. Army; Navy Commander Jonathan Pruitt; and most recently General Casey Fripp of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, four men who for reasons unknown were poisoned, possibly by the very ricin that disappeared from BioTech in 2002.

“Whoever murdered these four men is also believed to have killed two of BioTech’s technicians. Danny Price died in a hit-and-run in 2002, soon after the ricin’s disappearance.” The photo of Danny Price made Vinny’s nape prickle. Was it his imagination, or did Ophelia look exactly like the man?

Danny
Price
. He even had the same last name as her.

Stunned by the possibility, he processed little about the murder of the second lab tech, other than the fact that it’d happened just recently. The conviction that Lia was invested in this news story kept him from hearing another word. He could read it in her body language, in the way she clutched the mike.

She’d never indicated to him that her father had been murdered. But apparently he had, by some freak who was now targeting military officers.

“Oh, man,” Haiku exclaimed, oblivious to Vinny’s racing thoughts. “She is on fire, brother! You go!” He turned to give Vinny a high five, but Vinny was digging for change in his pocket. He needed to call Ophelia and find out what this was all about.

Fuck! Here he was, ass-deep in a mission that would take him back to Haiti shortly, and his woman was stateside embroiled in a murder scandal. He looked down at his hand. He had twenty-six cents.

“Let’s go, Echo Platoon!” shouted a voice from the end of the hallway. “Helo’s waiting.”

Vinny swore out loud. He glanced longingly at the pay phone even as he snatched up his rucksack.

There were times that he really hated being a SEAL, and this was one of them.

Damn it to hell, he hadn’t even gotten his soda out of the vending machine!

Buzz Ritter had known this moment was coming. He was counting on it, calculating how much he could get away with asking for this time.

His cell phone vibrated within five minutes of the news broadcast. He smirked as he recognized the number. “Ritter here,” he purred.

“Did you watch the news—Channel Ten?”

“Yes, I did,” said Ritter. Nor was he the least bit concerned. By terminating Tomlinson, he’d tied off what he considered to be the last loose string. Should’ve happened five years ago, as far as he was concerned.

But the caller sounded panic-stricken. “I thought you had contacts at the Bureau. Are you going to tell me you didn’t know about this earlier? They’ve made the connection, damn it!”

“I guess they have,” Ritter agreed, knowing that as yet they knew very little. “They must have stumbled onto something.”

“Like what?” the caller demanded. “You said that lab tech you just took out told you nothing. I want answers, damn it!”

“It won’t be easy,” Ritter mused, priming his request. “I’ll have to question more people.”

“Don’t hurt them,” the caller pleaded. “That reporter implied that I’d killed those two lab techs. I don’t like that, Ritter. You know I don’t.”

“Sometimes that’s the only way,” Buzz retorted.

“Just . . . question people! Get some answers but leave them alive, for God’s sake. How hard can that be?”

“Fifty thousand,” said Ritter, throwing out a number.

“Jesus,” the caller complained. “What do you think I’m made of?”

“Take it or leave it.”

“If they catch me, Ritter,” the caller blustered, “I’ll make damn sure that you go down with me.”

Ritter smiled. “I don’t think so,” he said, cracking his knuckles.

An uncomfortable silence elapsed. “Fifty thousand dollars,” the caller agreed with defeat. “I’ll wire it as before.”

Joe had beat her home, as revealed by the Jeep parked in his driveway. Penny let herself into her own house, eager to spruce up before he came over. To her astonishment, she found him sitting in her living room.

“How did you get in?” she asked, startled, a little taken aback that he would do such a thing.

His gaze was somber. “Penny, your back door was unlocked,” he said with disapproval and concern.