The Whole Truth (The Supercharged Files Book 1) (25 page)

“I hope you’ll wait until after
the company picnic before you make up your mind. After all, it was your idea.”
Yuri shoved the doughnut box to my side of the desk, attempting to pacify me
with starchy goodness. “Are you sure you don’t want a Krispy Kreme? Lou’s
granddaughter was selling them for a fundraiser.”

“I’m sure.” I threw myself into a
chair, realized I wasn’t ready to sit, and jumped up, pacing through Yuri’s
office like the security guard of a very small building. I marched to the
plants next to the coffeemaker, to the door, to the fake window and back. My
tennies were kinder to my feet during my mini-protest rally than the heels I
normally wore to work.

“You should have trusted me.” I’d
let Yuri and Al think I’d unmasked John the traditional way because it was
humiliating, and dangerous, to divulge my sex immunity. “I don’t care about
your crackpot clean slate theories, Al. I bet John hindered my search for the
real saboteur and this mythical second leak you think you have.”

“Why would he have done that? It
would be in his best interest for us to find the other leak or the saboteur.”
Yuri fiddled with a small plant on his desk, poking his finger in and out of
the soil. “Did you read something from him about it?”

“It’s simple logic. He could have
fed me misleading information to make sure I never suspected him.” He was
capable of it. He’d misled me into bed so I wouldn’t pester him for answers.
“Months of time, wasted. This could have been avoided if you’d been honest from
the get-go.”

“Arlin’s a controlled leak.” Al
left the door to pinch a doughnut in his huge hand. “As long as we have him,
his handler won’t try to insert a new agent, one we don’t know about.”

“We’re lucky we just have one,”
Yuri added. “Baumhauser and Psytech are riddled with ‘em.”

“According to you, you don’t have
just one.” I kicked the floor, my tennies squeaking. “You should have told me
about John.”

Al took one of the two empty
chairs, bit into the doughnut, and answered. “And take the chance you’d let on
you knew?”

“It’s not like
he
can read
lies,” I commented, a sour taste in my mouth. “I can dissemble with the best of
them.”

Yuri and Al exchanged a glance.
Okay, not with the best of them, but I could have kept a lid on this and myself
out of John’s bed.

“John had to feel confident he
wasn’t a suspect,” Yuri said. “He senses more than DNA under certain
circumstances.” Yeah, like orgasms, apparently. “If your reaction to him hadn’t
been entirely natural, he could have figured it out.”

To their credit, neither Yuri nor
Al had been offended by my diatribe. They’d calmly defended their actions and
assured me they weren’t disappointed in my performance, despite being
disappointed in the results. Yet I couldn’t help feeling there was another live
mine in the field and my foot was hovering over it.

It would turn me to shrapnel. I
needed to bolster myself. The Krispy Kremes won out. With a muttered curse, I
sank into the chair beside Al. I’d used up a lot of energy pacing and ranting.
Imagine that—I’d actually gotten exercise in my exercise clothing.

“I understand why you made the
choices you did, but I’m seriously questioning your methods.” Because of them,
I wasn’t sure I could face John again. Ever. “Is there some reason why Samantha
can’t handle the interviews by herself?”

“That’s something we already
considered.” After adding drops of greenish solution to his plant, Yuri cleaned
the particles of dirt from his fingers with a wet wipe. “Quite a few supras can
fight off my granddaughter’s push.”

This surprised me. I paused as I
reached for a doughnut. “Really? What about what Lou does?” Or what I did? I
already knew Beau could fend me off to an extent.

“Later,” Al said. I couldn’t tell
if he meant later or never, because he masked slightly. “What else did you
learn from Arlin?”

“He believes he’s not connected
to the sabotage.” He believes I trust him and am thrilled to be his girlfriend.

“We agree,” Al said. “Hence the
continued importance of your assignment.” He tossed his doughnut napkin into
the trash and busied himself at Yuri’s small coffeemaker. “We’re sending him
back to Atlanta.”

That solved one of my problems—how
to avoid my would-be boyfriend. It just didn’t solve the rest of them. “Why
does he do it? He said he wants the best for YuriCorp, and he meant it.”

Yuri leaned back in his chair and
laced his fingers across his stomach. His bright blue gaze, so much like
Samantha’s, was unflinching. “I’d bet a potato patch they have something on
him. That’s how it works, Cleo. Everyone’s got somebody somewhere. If push
comes to shove, we’ll let him know we know, but that would make him vulnerable.
It’s better this way.”

“It’s deceptive. I don’t like
it.” I’d wrestled with my feelings about John all night. Traitor or no, sex to
John meant monogamy and commitment. In his eyes, I was his girlfriend.

Too bad he wasn’t as faithful to
his employment contract.

“It’s safer for him.” Al pointed
at me. “You’re not the only person who can force secrets out of somebody. If
John actively worked with us, they’d find out and punish him. You’re welcome to
ask what they’ve got on him if you think you can do it without tipping him off.
Maybe we can help him.”

“I’ll try.” I dusted off my
sugary hands. From being turned on by John to being furious with John to being
afraid of John, now I felt sorry for him. He wasn’t a bad person. I’d seen the
lies of my share of bad people. Even taking espionage into account, he was
straight arrow.

Yuri’s white eyebrows met in the
center as he watched me. “You’ll cooperate with our plans for the picnic?”

“Yes, I’ll do it.” I leaned my
head back and stared at the ugly popcorn ceiling. Not only was the picnic at
Lou’s farm, but she was head of the refreshments committee and had already enlisted
me. Would I have time to help her with all the sneaking and interrogating? Then
there were Beau’s blood tests to consider.

Everyone wanted a piece of my
action. Why didn’t I feel more like a winner?

“Thank you, Cleo.” Yuri released
a sigh and stared at a closed manila folder on his desk.

“I’ll also do the interviews if I
have to,” I added, so Al would know I wasn’t interested in transferring to
security. “On one condition. You can’t turn me into a full time lie detector
exclusive. That is not the color of my parachute.”

Yuri nodded, his attention
elsewhere. Al’s expression remained blank.

In fact, as I reflected on the
meeting, both of them had maintained unreadable expressions, as if they’d been
holding something back. Sudden foreboding crushed me into my chair like pea
gravel. It was all I could do to raise my arm and drag a second pastry out of
the box.

“So,” I said after I swallowed,
“what are you not telling me?”

Yuri drew a thick binder out of
his desk and slid it across, where it came to a stop next to the doughnuts.
Wow. I’d rather have the abridged version of what they weren’t telling me.
“We’ve drawn up a detailed evaluation of families and known romantic partners
to supplement the list Al gave you. Individuals with access to information
possessed by the saboteur are marked in pink, so their families necessitate
closer scrutiny. Please consider this classified.”

I had a week and a half to
memorize it, not a year. “That’s all?”

“All the information about the
employees? Yes.” Al said with what had to be deliberate obtuseness. He sounded
tired. The perking coffee filled the air with rich, penetrating scent.

“Refill me, would you?” Yuri slid
his empty coffee cup across the desk, and Al caught it before it hurtled to the
floor. “Cleo, we need a list of volunteers for the dunking booth. You can use
that as an excuse to question people.”

“Seriously, a dunking booth?” How
would asking people whether they wanted to be the object of ridicule help me
find the saboteur?

“Al ruled out the pie throwing
contest.” Yuri studied Al, who waited beside the coffee pot. “We should tell
her.”

Tell me what, the reason they’d
outlawed pie throwing? Clearly, because it was a waste. I could only imagine
how outraged Uncle Herman would be.

Al drummed his fingers on the
side of the mug, a counterpoint to the
pop-pop-pop
of the coffeepot.
“You think that’s a good idea?”

“I do,” Yuri said. “We can’t keep
a lid on it much longer anyway.”

So there was more. “You shouldn’t
keep anything from me. Look at all the trouble it caused,” I said, feeling both
apprehensive and vindicated.

“Cleo, we’d never put you at risk
if we didn’t have to,” Yuri said. “But people are...” He coughed into his hand.
“It is critical we find out who’s doing this.”

I gulped doughnut. “Risk?”

“In accordance with his living
will, Adam Donning’s family took him off life support last night,” Yuri said, a
hitch in his voice. “He died this morning around five a.m.”

Had I heard him correctly?
Numbness leached the ability to feel or blink or breathe from my body. “He’s
not dead. He’s in a coma.”

“He’s no longer with us,” Al said
gravely. He set a cup of coffee beside Yuri and placed his huge hand on the
other man’s shoulder. “The family asked that it not be announced until the end
of the week so they can have time to mourn privately.”

“I can’t believe it.” Comas were
one thing. Death was something else, an intense new evil I didn’t want to deal
with. “We have to, I don’t know, tell somebody. The police. The authorities.”

“We are the authorities.” Yuri
closed his eyes, his face paler than usual. “Psytech and Baumhauser are
starting their own investigations. We’re going to share information. It’s a bit
revolutionary.”

“Maybe they’ll have better luck
finding out who’s doing it,” I suggested.

“They don’t have you.” Al smiled
grimly. “They want you, but they don’t have you.”

“I haven’t done anybody any
good.” I rose, my thoughts in turmoil, and stood beside the door, my
doughnut-sticky hand on the knob. “Wait. I nearly forgot to ask. Yuri, what do
you know about this that you haven’t told me?”

He opened his mouth to respond,
and Al coughed.

“Nothing,” Yuri lied, his mask a heat
wave around his bald head.

“You’re not trying to take down
your own corporation, I don’t know, for tax purposes?” I asked. “Al told me to
question the inner circle. You just lied. Are you the saboteur?”

“Absolutely not,” he insisted,
and it was true. But he did know things he wasn’t telling me.

“Warned you,” Al said to him.

I banged my head, gently, on the
door jamb. “If you can’t be honest about this, how am I supposed to do any good?
I haven’t so far, and it’s because you kept so much from me.”

“You know everything you need to
do your part. Anything else is not related to this case,” Yuri insisted, and he
believed it, even if I didn’t. “We’ve got to find out why this is happening
before anyone else is hurt. Step one is locating the person or persons
responsible for our information leak. So far the attacks have been on the job.
What if it shifts to our homes?”

“We have to stop it before law
enforcement or the media notice a pattern,” Al added. “We can’t cover up
something like that, not with a hundred Lou Lampeys.”

They echoed thoughts and fears
I’d already had, so I couldn’t argue. As long as the burnouts only happened to
supras doing their jobs, it was industry-related, greed-related, power-related.
Transfer those attacks to the personal arena, and it was something else,
something a lot more terrifying.

“We’re all in this together,”
Yuri said.

“Most of us are,” I pointed out.
“Some of us, not so much.” Moles, moles, everywhere, and not a man to trust.
“Will there be a prize for the first person to catch the bad guy?”

“How about your contract?” Yuri
suggested, and I couldn’t tell if he was joking.

Chapter 19

What Are Friends
For?

The news about Adam Donning hit
the company hard. On the plus side, everyone was talking about it so it was
easy for me to ask questions.
Who do you think could have done this? What do
you think they want?

On the minus side, the more I
dwelled on it, the more my stomach burned like a permanent tequila hangover.
I’d had a tequila hangover once—never let it be said I’m incapable of learning
lessons—but at least I got to be drunk the night before. Now I just got to
worry about life, liberty and the pursuit of the saboteur. Anyone the saboteurs
attacked in the future could suffer Adam’s fate. A Baumhauser supra in a coma
had been given a grim prognosis.

Since no one had any idea how or
why this was happening, we couldn’t protect ourselves. Hysteria didn’t erupt
but tensions mounted. The fact the incidents had expanded beyond YuriCorp did
cut down on the number of people who wanted to quit, though.

Now they all wanted to move to
Canada. Like that would protect them.

When my would-be boyfriend
offered to spend the night at my place prior to leaving town, I texted back
about how unsettled I was regarding my secret assignment and did he want to
brainstorm with me? Suddenly he had to work late. He wouldn’t want me asking
his opinion without a post-orgasm power down. There was no way I could sleep
with John now, but I couldn’t squeeze a break up into my schedule either. I had
a limited number of hours in which to do what I hadn’t been able to do in five
months, and it didn’t help that Lou had absorbed me into her picnic
preparations. I became very adept at listening for the pitter patter of her Dr.
Scholl’s because if I didn’t hide, I’d end up on the other side of Nashville
tracking down bulk biodegradable plates.

I couldn’t ask questions about
company loyalty and supra burnouts if I were alone in my car, running Lou’s
errands.

Sergeant Lampey ambushed me
Friday before I could duck into the closest cubicle and pretend to be obscenely
busy. Since the closest cubicle was Sheila’s and she’d recently slipped me
another “You’re too nosy for your own good” note, my hesitation at using her as
cover was my undoing.

“Cleo!” Lou practically chortled
at the sight of me, hovering between shabby office walls with panic in my
heart. “Just the person I wanted to see.”

“Hi, Lou.” I could pretend my car
was in the shop. I’d tried out of gas yesterday and she’d given me ten bucks
and lecture. “I hope I got enough plates.” I’d bought half again the number
she’d requested to make sure she wouldn’t send me back for more.

“Potato salad,” she said without
preamble. “We have to pick two.”

“German and red skinned. Yummy.”
I inched backward, readying myself to break for the lab. Arguing with Beau
about blood tests, which he hadn’t completed yet, thank God, was better than
helping Lou. Maybe. “I have an appointment with—”

“Have you had lunch? Never mind,
you’re always hungry. Samples in the break room. Chop chop.”

In the cubicle behind me, Sheila
snickered. Her amusement was more proof of the vindictive personality hiding
underneath all that “I’m trying to be a friend” rubbish.

“Does chop chop mean I have to
cook? I’m no chef.” Lou towed me reluctantly behind her. We passed Samantha and
I cast her a beseeching glance. She’d known Adam for years, and his death rattled
even her. She knew what I had a week left to decipher.

“No cooking. You just have to
taste.” Lou motioned at Samantha but didn’t grab her arm like she had mine.
“You, too, Sam. You could use some meat on your bones.”

“I have an appointment with—”
Samantha began, sounding uncannily like me.

“We only have eight days, girls,”
Lou barked. “This picnic has to be perfect. We’re going to do your grandfather
proud.”

Samantha fell into step behind
me. Lou was the Pied Piper of Potato Salad. Before I could blink, she’d seated
us at a table with ten white Styrofoam containers, a couple biodegradable
plates, and two paper forms.

“Write down your assessments,”
Lou said. “I expect these to be filled out in the next thirty minutes. Use
water to cleanse your palate between samples.”

“I don’t eat potatoes,” Samantha
said with a moue of distaste. “Empty carbs.”

Lou shoved a fork at her. “Come
to the farm and help cut grass tomorrow. You won’t gain an ounce.”

I gamely spooned a clump of
potato salad on my plate. The yellow, eggy mixture seemed heavy on the onion,
if the smell were anything to go by. “Looks delish.”

“I also need that list of dunking
booth volunteers,” Lou added before she tromped out of the break room.

Samantha waited until Lou was
safely out of earshot and pushed her plate away. “I’m not eating white
potatoes, and I’m sure not eating any mayonnaise.”

I checked the blank assessment
form, glad she’d been nabbed by Sergeant Lou. It’s not that I wanted Sam’s
company, but I had questions about sex and supras she could answer. Plus, I
wanted her at the top of the list of dunking booth volunteers.

If I could get Beau on there
second, I’d be set. No one said I couldn’t approach people I personally wanted
to dunk.

“Number eight uses sweet
potatoes,” I told her. “Try that one.”

She did and pronounced it
inedible. “Come on, Cleo, I’ll just write whatever you write.”

“If I have to eat these by
myself,” I said in as coaxing a voice as I could muster, “you could make it up
to me by sitting in the dunking booth.”

“Sounds like fun.” Not the answer
I’d expected. Was I being primed for something? “Can Alex sit in the dunking
booth too?”

“Um, sure.” Also not the response
I’d expected. “Will he mind being our Psytech target?”

“Not if I ask him the right way.”
She chuckled.

That was more in character and
created the perfect opening for my other line of inquiry. Supra sex. “What did
you and Alex do last weekend?”

Samantha rubbed her hands
together. “What didn’t we do?”

She was never loathe to discuss
sex, in great detail and with accompanying gestures. Today was no exception.
Through careful questioning, I discovered burnouts after sex are not only
common but expected, and the longer you burn someone out, the better a lover
you’re considered.

John hadn’t mentioned how long
he’d been burned. I mean, the foreplay had been mutual, but I hadn’t put the
effort into it he had. He’d probably been back to full smell within an hour or
two. No doubt I’d botched supra sex as much as I had supra investigating.

Samantha, on the other hand,
considered herself damn good at supra sex, if the fact Alex was unable to do
whatever it was he did all day Sunday was anything to go by.

Or walk without a limp, but at
that point I redirected the conversation.

“No more seeing other people?” I
asked after scribbling down my reactions to potato salad number five.

“I don’t know why he thinks he
can do better than me.” As if unaware of her actions, Samantha helped herself
to number four, a delicious mix of new potatoes, dill and creamy sauce. “I just
reminded him what he’d be missing.”

“What exactly does Alex do?”
Could he read her mind? Find out YuriCorp’s schedule and send his minions to
sabotage our employees? Not to mention his own coworkers and Baumhauser, to
hide his tracks.

She smirked. “I don’t want to
tell you that.”

“You don’t want to tell me
anything.” I scraped my nearly empty plate into the garbage and unlidded the
next potato salad.

Samantha, like Al, could
circumvent my ability. A simple and heartfelt “I don’t want to tell you”, and
there was nothing more I could learn.

“Are you bringing Alex to the
picnic?” Maybe I could catch Alex off guard.

“Of course.” She tried another
bite of potato salad, her eyes closed in empty carbohydrate bliss. “It would
look weird if everyone brought families or dates and I didn’t bring Alex.
Besides, Clint will be there.”

“Why would your ex be there?”

“He’s seeing some girl from the
downtown office.” She licked dressing from the tines of her fork.

“How long did you date him?”
Sometimes, when Samantha got tired of talking about sex with Alex, she talked
about sex with Clint. He worked for a PI firm and there were handcuffs
involved, even a body bag once, which was more than I’d ever needed to know.

“Long enough to figure out he’s
got issues. He’s bad news.”

That had been crystal clear the
first time she’d mentioned the body bag. I dug into my current mound of
potatoes. “Don’t most guys?”

“Don’t most people?” Samantha
laughed and forked up salad. “He can’t get over losing me. He thinks we’re
perfect for each other because we negate each other.”

“He’s a pusher too?”

“Something like that.” She waved
a hand vaguely. “Skills don’t have to be exactly the same to pair cancel. If
your skills are similar, supras can block each other. Like chameleons can’t
fool each other.”

Beau seemed to be exempt from
that. I lowered my voice. There was a blanket in the break room, but whenever
you turned it on, it attracted all sorts of people suddenly dying for coffee
and eavesdropping. “If I met someone who could do what I do, do you think I
could read him and vice versa?”

“Doubtful.” She sipped her water
and dapped her lips with a napkin.

“So you do know any single men
who can do what I do?” I joked.

“Cleo, I’m shocked. What about
your pocket chameleon?”

I diverted her before she could
ask questions about Beau. Or John. “Al told me there’s a way to get around your
ability.”

“Did he?” She started opening and
closing potato salad lids, settling on one I hadn’t tried.

I stuck my fork into the center
of my next blob, this one an unhappy-looking mush. “Pair cancellation or
something else?”

She smiled. I didn’t tell her
there was dill between her teeth. “I don’t want to—”

“Tell me that,” I finished,
cutting her off. Hey, I’d verified there was a way. The bud would blossom for
me eventually. “Does it involve sex?”

“Not necessarily.” She sighed and
ate a chunk of potato. “I shouldn’t eat this.”

“But Lou told you to.”

“Speaking of Lou,” Samantha
confided in a whisper, “is it me or has she gotten scarier this week?”

“It’s not you. She has.” Lou was
wasting her time working as YuriCorp’s receptionist cum eraser. She should be
CEO—of a much larger company. Something like FEMA. But even with the picnic
looming, her incredible hustle sometimes stalled out in rant about supra
police. “Did you sign her latest petition?”

“I always sign the petition.”
Samantha finished her serving and started eating the rest straight from the
container. “Want to know something crazy? Ursula thinks I have a thing for
you.”

If I could have a single
conversation with Sam that didn’t swerve in some freakish, unnerving direction,
it would be a red letter day. “What did you tell her?”

“I like men.” She indicated that
I should try her potato salad selection. “Your orgasms are of no interest to
me.”

For that, there was a mask. A
light one, but definitely a mask.

“Dude!” I shoved the container
back at her. “No, thanks.”

She grinned. This time there was
no greenery on her straight, white teeth. “Oops. Maybe I find your sex life a
little interesting.”

“You’re trying to make me
uncomfortable.” Samantha cared about my orgasms but wasn’t gay. It made no
sense. “Wait a minute. This is about my ability. You want me burned out.”

“Who wouldn’t?” She rolled her
eyes. “Do you have any idea how hard it is to be friends with you? Dealing with
your ability is exhausting.”

“It shouldn’t be exhausting to
tell the truth,” I whispered, somewhat stung. How had this turned into a kick
the Cleo session?

She shrugged. “I’m surprised John
hasn’t seduced you. It’s got to be wearing him out with everything he has to
hide. How did you find out—you know what?”

“Right question, right time.” I
averted my gaze, my face heating. It had to be as red as the lipstick she’d
somehow retained through an entire container of potato salad.

Samantha observed me closely.
“You screwed him, didn’t you? You slut!” she exclaimed too loudly for comfort.
“Beau is gonna be pissed. I can’t imagine he’s the type who’d appreciate his
woman cheating on him.”

“Shush,” I hissed. “I’m not a
slut.”

“Ho.”

“I said shut up.”

“You faked the big O.” Samantha’s
hands crept across the table toward me, and I leaned against the back of the
chair, crossing my arms. “John bought it? That’s amazing. He must be one
trusting SOB.”

I could, at last, understand why
Samantha harbored such ill feelings toward John. He was betraying her
grandfather’s company. “We can’t talk about this here. John doesn’t know we
know. Yuri and Al said it needs to stay that way.”

“I won’t say a word,” she
promised. She had no plans to blab that particular information. “Jesus, you’re
good. I didn’t think you had it in you.”

“That’s enough.” My stomach churned.
Potatoes, onions, olives, eggs, bacon, celery and various dressings threatened
to make a reappearance. I didn’t need to be reminded of the skank factor of my
situation. If I’d become YuriCorp’s hot topic for landing Beau, I could only
imagine how scalded I was going to be for switching to John. “You tell me when
you don’t want to talk about things, and I’m telling you I don’t want to talk
about this.”

She laughed. “I’m not as nice as
you. Who’s got a bigger cock, Beau or John?”

I wanted to tear my hair out. No,
hers. “I’m absolutely not going to answer that.”

“Who’s kinkier? Do either of them
tie you up? Spank you? Let me guess. John. The man’s got obvious control
issues.”