think Tara Marx is my real name?"
"Oh." Duh. "Right."
"How are we going to find the oncology department without asking a bunch of stupid questions?"
"I interned at the Mayo. Unless they've rearranged the entire building—always a possibility—I can find it. Besides, there's always the directories."
"You mean you're a doctor doctor?"
"Sure." She looked so surprised, it surprised him. "What?"
"A medical doctor?"
"Yeah. I got my MD a few years ago when I got bored. It didn't take very long."
"So you're an MD, and I heard you've got at least two PhDs ..."
He coughed modestly. It was refreshing to share this with a beautiful woman; usually such glorious creatures weren't impressed by his credentials. And he couldn't tell them what he really did for a living. All the drawbacks of being a field agent, none of the perks. "Three, actually. Physics, organic chemistry, and explosives technology."
"I am sooooo turned on right now."
"Really?" he asked eagerly.
"No. Not really."
His shoulders slumped. "Yeah, I figured. Well, listen, Tara—if that is your real name—"
"I just told you it wasn't."
"—we've got a long drive, and we'd better pass the time. So, what brings you to law breaking?"
"A broken home."
"Really?"
"No. Not really."
"Gonna be a long ride," he muttered.
"Not really," she said, yawning. She snuggled back into the car seat and closed her eyes. In another minute her head was leaning against the passenger side window, and she was breathing evenly.
"Tara?"
No reply.
"Come on, nobody falls asleep that fast. Tara?"
Nothing. She was out. Zonked.
"Well, shoot," he muttered, and inched the car up to ninety-five.
Seven
"Have a nice nap?"
"Lovely." She didn't expect someone like Ben Dyson to understand, when you were in the field you
slept whenever and wherever you could. Over the years she'd been able to train herself to fall asleep
at the snap of a pair of fingers ... sometimes quicker. Now she felt alert, refreshed, and horny. No, just alert and refreshed.
"Will it be all right in the car?" he whispered as they walked up the sidewalk. His breath tickled her ear, which should have been annoying, but was really quite pleasant.
" 'It' has a name. Katya. And she'll be fine. She can take care of herself, believe me. Also, she's not in
the car; she's in the pocket of my lab coat."
"What!" Dyson nearly tripped over a flower bed. He straightened and ran his fingers through his vibrant hair, making it stand up more crazily in all directions. She almost snickered. "Tara! We're supposed to
be inconspicuous. And even under the best of circumstances, you don't exactly blend in.
"What's that supposed to mean?" she cried, stung. 'Tara, you have a skull and crossbones piercing your
left nostril.
"So? You're wearing a brown tie. And at least I remembered to put both my contacts in, blue eye."
"Leave the tie out of this. And the contacts." He paused outside, the door to the clinic, took a deep breath, and said, "Okay, let's get it together."
"Yes, let's."
"Here we go."
"Thanks for stating the obvious again."
He glared at her, which almost made her laugh again, and held the door open. She swept past him, the hem of her lab coat flapping. It was actually a spare of his, and she'd had to roll the sleeves up. It smelled like him, too, a combination of Drakkar Noir cologne and clean cotton. She fought the urge to cuddle into it.
Memo to me: long past time to get laid. Once this is taken care of, take care of that.
She followed him to a set of elevators, and neither of them said a word as the car ascended several floors. At the appropriate floor, he grabbed her hand and walked out.
"How could they steal a cure for cancer?" Tara wondered aloud. "Like there aren't a ton of lab notes and computer files and stuff? They can't recreate it?"
"Maybe they're stupid bad guys," Dyson suggested.
"Well, they've stayed a step ahead of you pretty handily."
"Us," he said, glaring.
"Oh, sure."
"This way," he said, turning left down a corridor.
"How the hell are they even still in the hospital?" she asked. "They should have grabbed what they needed and gotten out."
"Do you know what the cure for cancer looks like? Could you pick it out of a laboratory filled with beakers and fridges and tables and drawers and notes?"
"No," she admitted, "but I had sex in high school. I've always got that to cling to."
"I hate you," he sighed.
"Probably shouldn't have tagged along, then," she said smugly.
They paused outside a closed door that was lettered ACUTE LYMPHOCYTIC LEUKEMIA (ALL). "What's that?" she asked.
"Cancer of white blood cells." He was squinting at the wooden door and fumbling in his back pocket. "There's three guys in there."
"How do you know that?"
"This contact," he said, tapping the eye socket beneath his blue eye, "sees in X-ray."
"Of course it does." Still, she was impressed in spite of herself. She'd never met a guy so smart and so dumb at the same time.
She put her hand in her own pocket, gave Katya a pat, then asked, "Do you want me to kick the door in?"
"God, no. I've got a spare key card."
"You've got what?" she asked, staring as he withdrew a silver card the size of her Visa. "All this time you've had a spare?" Her ringers itched to strangle him. To choke him and stroke him and pull his shirt off ... no, to slap the shit out of him and throw him out the window. "What the hell am I doing here, then?"
"Well," he said reasonably, "if you knew there was a spare skeleton card, you wouldn't have helped me."
"Damned right I wouldn't have helped you!"
"Shhhhhhh!"
She seized him by the collar and began to shake him back and forth. Ohhhh, the things she would do. Tendons would rip; muscles would tear. She'd wrap that stupid brown tie around his throat and choke him until his multicolored eyes bulged out. She'd ...
. . . kiss him back.
Somehow, during the attempted throttle, he'd gotten his arms around her and dodged her flying elbows and pulled her close. His mouth was moving over hers, and he smelled, oh, he smelled wonderful, and she was still clutching his collar, but now she was leaning into him, into his mouth, into the kiss, the amazing, unbelievable kiss. . . .
He pulled back. "Whoa. Sorry, Tara."
"Huh?" she huhed.
"I mean, there's a time and place. It's just. . . I've wanted to do that since you marched into my garage.
I mean my lab. And are you a bad bad guy? I mean, you don't beat up old ladies, do you?"
She was having a little trouble following the conversation. "What? No. What?"
"Oh, good. Because we can work on the rest."
"What?"
"Well, let's get in there, then."
She grabbed his shoulder and spun him back, then planted one on his mouth for good measure. She'd
call the shots around here, thank you very much! If there was kissing, she'd be the kisser, not the kissee. Ooh, yeah, and now his hands were sliding up, caressing her back, and ...
"Holy shit, it's Tara Marx!"
. . . the bad guys had opened the door.
Eight
"I told you," Ben said, trying not to sound smug. Trying not to sound out of breath, too. "I told you: time and place."
"Hi, March," Tara said. "Webber sends his regards. Okay, not really."
The beefy black man who opened the door jerked his head at Ben. "Whatcha got L.F. here for?"
Ben blinked. "L.F.?"
"Er, Lovely Friend," Tara said.
"Oh, no!" he said, horrified. "It's Lab Freak, isn't it? Is
n't it!"
"Uh, yeah. But it's like a compliment."
"We paid you," the man named March said. Rumbled, actually. He was a full head taller than Ben, and about twice as wide. He'd be frightening enough without the shoulder-length dreads. "What's the problem?"
"Um, you lied and didn't mention you're going to use my invention to screw over my country?"
"Yeah," Tara added.
"Oh, like you give a shit," March snapped at her. He was dressed in splendid bad guys' fashion—black suit, black shoes, black shirt, black tie, black tie clip.
"I've got my reasons."
"Yeah, yeah, don't cry about it again. 'One more big job and I'm out; one more payoff and I'm going straight.' Puke."
Ben turned to her, surprised. She looked, weirdly, embarrassed. "Really, Tara? Good for you."
"Oh, shut up," she muttered. "You shut up, too, March. Are you gonna let us in, or do I have to kick your big butt up and down this corridor?"
"You're gonna have to kick my big butt up and down this corridor. And watch it with the weight comments," he added, wounded. "I've been working out."
"Fine," Tara said, and Ben almost gasped. Gorgeous, a great kisser, smelled like a meadow, and she was fearless, besides! What a woman! "It's on!"
"No, you don't," he said, grabbing her shoulder and thrusting her behind him. He whipped out his cell phone and pointed it at the enormous man in the doorway, a man so large he was actually turned sideways in order to fit. "Don't touch her or you'll be sorry."
March blinked. "What, you're gonna call your mama?" Then he said, "Eeaarrrgggghhhhh!" as an electric current shot from the phone into his chest. He twitched a few times like the world's largest bass, then collapsed in the doorway. They had to skip back to avoid being crushed.
"And I'll bet it works as a phone, too," Tara commented, watching March fall.
"Of course it does," he replied, offended.
"You are a weird weird man," she commented. "Well, that's two bad guys out of three. Got any other tricks up your sleeve?"
"You'll see," he said with bravado that was, amazingly, entirely unfaked. Being in the field was exactly
as exciting and as much fun as he imagined! "Let's go."
"Okay," she said, and kicked his legs out from under him, then jumped on top of him. A bullet smacked into the wall where his chest had been a fraction of a second earlier.
"I didn't know you cared," he said, staring into her greenish eyes.
"I'd just hate to see the hallway get all messed up," she said, flinching as a bullet whined overhead. "At least he's using a silencer. Otherwise we'd have tons of company up here."
"He's shooting at us?"
"Not everyone buys flowers." She snickered, then rolled over, pulling him into a sheltered corner of the hallway. "Don't worry, it won't take long. He doesn't like walking around with spare clips—says it
wrecks the line of his suit."
"So he's just gonna shoot blindly until it's empty?"
"Sure. He has no idea who's after him, so it's a relatively sound plan. Wouldn't you run?"
"I would not!"
"Fine, fine. Just stay down."
"You know, bad guys trying to blow my head off isn't as much fun as I thought it would be," Benjamin commented. "It's more stressful than anything else."
"Typical," Tara said. "Felony assault—it's all hype."
"Any bright ideas on how to get out of this?"
"Ben, I am so not the brains of this team. Besides, it's your fault we're even here."
"The hell! You're the one who wanted to steal the world."
"I didn't want to steal the world, just a few key pieces of it, not that it's any of your business. You're the one who insisted we save humanity." Tara invested the phrase with heavy sarcasm. "Could there be a bigger waste of time? No? Ask the guys with the guns if you don't believe me."
"Fine. Anyway, we'd better get out of here before bullets start exploring our temporal lobes. This hallway isn't going to provide cover much longer."
"So? Think of something, gadget man." Tara stretched out her long, long legs and closed her eyes. "Let me know what you come up with."
He watched, dumbfounded, as she went to sleep. She could always do that. It was unbelievably aggravating.
He leaned over and shouted into her gorgeous, still face, "And I did not get us into this!" In the distance, the firing pop of the silencer accentuated his statement.
"Did, too," Tara said without opening her eyes.
"Did not!"
"Don't you remember?"
As a matter of fact, he did. "Never mind that," he snapped. He counted another three shots, which added up to nine. "Hey, he's all done. We can storm the bridge, so to speak."
He started to get up, only to feel Tara grab his ankle—in her sleep, apparently—and pull him back down, just in time for another bullet to whine overhead. "Nine in the clip, one in the pipe," she said without opening her eyes.
"I knew that," he lied. Actually, he hardly ever messed around with guns. Dull, dull, dull. It was more fun to mess around with cell phones and car engines.
"Of course you did." She yawned and sat up. "Ready?"
"If you're all done catnapping."
"Don't knock it. I'm fresh as a daisy while you're just. . . well, never mind."
"Stay behind me," he ordered her. "I'll look out for you."
"Great. I'm sure I'll enjoy my early grave." But she waited for him to jump through the doorway over March's still unconscious frame, then followed.
Nine
The final confrontation was anticlimactic, to say the least.
Johanssen blinked at both of them and, as a terrified-looking physician cowered behind a counter, said, "What are you two doing here? And what in the world did you do to March?"
"We're here to stop you!" Dyson declared, and Tara rolled her eyes. Since she'd hooked up with Ben Dyson, it seemed that's what she did most of the time. "Just like we put a stop to March and his nefariousness!"
"I'm not really with him, Jo," she explained. "Well. I'm with him, but not with him with him."
"What, you've got a problem all of a sudden?" Johanssen was looking puzzled, thank goodness, as opposed to homicidal, which would have been very bad. She couldn't really blame him. They'd never
had to cross paths before. In a weird sort of way, she respected him. Well. She had until she found the body at the florist's. "Why? Why now?"
"Because you're a deceiver and you're going to hurt thousands of Americans!"
"Ben. Let. Me. Handle. This."
"Dr. Dyson, what do you think you're doing?" Johanssen was a deceptively mild looking man in his fifties, with dark eyes netted with wrinkles ("laugh lines," for someone who laughed), a medium build,
and tough, blocklike hands. His suit proclaimed "businessman." His hands said something else.
Ben shook his cell phone, which she suspected was currently lacking a charge, at Jo. "Stopping you, you foul fiend of—of—evil!"
"Foul fiend of evil?" Tara repeated.
"You got paid, right?" he asked, still sounding puzzled.
"Irrelevant!"
"Wh-what's going on?" the doc shivering behind Johanssen squeaked. He was a smallish man with watery blue eyes, a pale blond combover, and a neck so weirdly long he reminded her of a chicken. "Who are you people?"
"Never mind," Johanssen said absently. "I'll take care of it."
"I didn't sign on for any of this when I hired you," squeaky doc continued.
Tara rolled her eyes again. Civilians, swear to God. Sweat them a little, ramp up the pressure, and they spilled their guts.
"You hired him to steal my key card?"
"We didn't steal anything," Jo explained patiently. "We paid you."
"You paid me ... in subterfuge!"
Tara started to massage her temples. "God ... God ... God..."
"Well, you don't work for criminals," Jo said. "You're famous for your naive patriotism. So we had to
pay you in, er, subterfuge."
"I'm dying to know," Tara confessed. "How'd you make the paperwork look right?"