Fatal Heat

  His cell phone number was programmed into hers. She felt a huge surge of relief as she pulled out her phone, checking her watch. 5:00 pm. He’d be on the road. It was dangerous to call someone while they were driving. A text message would be better. It gave off a signal, and he could choose to pull over to the side, and then they could talk.

  The message was simple.

  SOS – P

  There. She felt better already.

  He’d help her, and he’d know what to do. Together they’d figure out a way to save Silvia. Now she needed to put that file in a safer place. Where? Max had given her his cell phone but not his email address.

  If there was a conspiracy inside the company, who to trust? It was entirely possible that people in the upper echelons knew the truth, and frankly, Paige didn’t trust any of them.

  There seemed to be a career point above which sce="ove whiience started mattering less than profits.

  She’d send the file to Larry and to . . . the police? It was a police matter, but no one was hurt . . . yet. The FBI? Silvia had mentioned the FBI. That made sense. Certainly the FBI would know what to do, who to turn to. There must be an FBI office in San Francisco. She logged on to the FBI.gov site and found the link to the San Francisco office, copied the address, and opened her Gmail account.

  The drumbeat of anxiety over Silvia’s fate was beating in her head as she typed. Max sensed her anxiety and scrunched close to her, leaning against her leg and laying his muzzle across her feet. He always sensed when she was upset.

  Paige dropped a hand to briefly scratch his head, then bent back over the keyboard.

  Suddenly, to her astonishment Max scrambled to his feet, hunching his shoulders and growling low in his throat.

  “Get your hands off that computer,” a male voice said.

  Paige whipped around, wide-eyed. Two men were in the doorway, one tall and thin, the other stocky and shorter. The tall one had a gun pointed straight at her. She froze, utterly incapable of movement, trying to process these two men who’d appeared from nowhere.

  “I said, hands off the fucking keyboard!”

  She jerked her trembling hands up as if the keys were on fire. Oh, God! What now? Another minute or two and she could have sent the file to the FBI and to Larry. As it was, the only copies of Silvia’s file were on her hard drive and her thumb drive.

  The two men came forward. The man with the gun kept it trained on her. The unarmed man came around to stand beside her. He bent forward to see the screen, and Paige got a horrifying whiff of sweat, suntan lotion, and some awful cologne. Instinctively she recoiled when he lowered his head to hers.

  Max’s growling grew louder, lips curled back from his teeth.

  The man tapped the keyboard, closing her FBI search, checking her email history. “Okay,” the man said over his shoulder to his armed partner. “This hasn’t been forwarded. There’s a copy on her hard drive. Deleting . . . now.”

  “No!” Without thinking, Paige batted his hands away. He gave her a casual backhanded blow that nearly toppled her out of her chair.

 

  Max attacked.

  Max, her joyous, friendly dog—barely out of puppyhood—snarled like a hellhound and leaped for the man’s throat.

  An attacking dog is a fearful thing, like a primal nightmare hurtling out from the darkness. The man shot an arm up to protect his face and stumbled back, giving a high-pitched scream. “Shoot! Shoot the fucking dog, goddamn it!” he shouted.

  Paige’s head was still woozy from the blow, but when she saw the armed man raise his hand with the gun in it, she screamed and launched herself at him just as he pulled the trigger. The report was loud in the room, stunning her.

  Max gave a loud, pained yelp and fell in a boneless heap to the ground, red staining his head.

  Paige went wild, shrieking with rage, clawing for the gunman’s eyes, feeling flesh under her fingers.

  This time the blow was harder, knocking her to the floor next to Max. The world turned black for just a second, then slowly came back into focus. She looked up from the floor at the two men, one holding a red-stained forearm and the other with the gun glaring at her, the two long scratches on his face sullenly bleeding.

  Good! she thought viciously, wishing she and Max had inflicted more damage. She reached out blindly and gathered Max into her arms, burying her hands and face in his fur, tears seeping out of her eyes. Oh God, Max. Her faithful friend, her . . . she stilled. There was something . . . a faint throbbing under her fingertips.

  Max was alive!

  Please, don’t let him gain consciousness now, she prayed. The man Max attacked had been terrified. One twitch of Max’s paw and they’d finish off the job.

  Max was completely limp in her arms, but her gorgeous, smart, loving dog was alive. These monsters hadn’t killed him.

  Suddenly, she was yanked to her feet with a jerk that almost dislocated her shoulder.

  “Come with me,” the tall man with the gun said, pulling her after him. In her living room, he pushed her down into an armchaidivo an arr.

  She’d never seen these two men before, but she could guess who they were. They looked exactly like every other security moron employed lately by GenPlant. Ill-fitting suits with lumps under their jackets, check; dour, dull expressions, check; a slight hint of sadism, check.

  They were here and had pulled a weapon on her. Paige understood very well that this probably meant they weren’t expecting her to live to testify against them. More goons just like them had presumably been sent to Argentina to find Silvia, but Silvia had managed to elude their grasp. Paige wasn’t going to be so lucky. If she wanted to come out of this alive, she was going to have to think fast.

  And if she wasn’t going to get out of this alive, someone had to know what happened.

  She slipped the thumb drive way down into the cushions of the armchair. If anything happened to her, Max or the police would find it. Maybe in time to save her, maybe not. She might die and Silvia might die, but at least the truth would come out.

  The tall man brought out a kitchen chair, turned it around and straddled it, gun hand along the top of the back. His index finger stayed within the trigger guard. It was pointed loosely at her.

  “So. What do you know about this Argentina thing?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  This time the blow came from behind. Unexpected. Hard. When she opened her eyes again, it took her a moment or two to focus. Her head throbbed.

  “Okay, that was dumb of you, and I understand you’re not a stupid woman. You’ve got a PhD. So let me tell you upfront that we can keep this up all night,” the tall guy said. “No problem. And we can get real inventive. You’re a pretty woman. Smart, too, if you work in a lab. So you can connect the dots. My friend and I, we can do what we want here. No limits. We’ll get what we want. The only question is: will it be the easy way or the hard way? Your choice.”

  His eyes were a pale blue, so lifeless they could have been marbles. There was no mercy in them, no emotion at all, not even the pleasure of someone who liked inflicting pain.

  Nothing.

  Paigm" 000000"e was working hard to stop her trembling. These men were barely above animals. Animals had an instinct for fear, and attacked when they sensed it. So she had to control herself.

  If she could keep them talking for just another forty minutes, Max would be here. She couldn’t defeat these two men but he could. Even with a busted leg, these two idiots would be no match for him.

  “So. We know your friend Silvia Ramirez has been trying to contact you all week.”

  “And she’s escaped you all week, hasn’t she?” Paige narrowed her eyes at the men. “You didn’t lay a hand on her.”

  “We will. Don’t worry about it, our men down there are good.”

  Not good enough to capture a woman on her own. Paige didn’t say the words, but her expression was clear.

  “She hasn’t been able to establis
h contact with you, we know that. We cut her off every time she got you on the phone.”

  “You were listening to my calls,” Paige breathed. That was how they’d done it. The instant they heard Silvia’s voice, they cut the connection. Thank God she’d texted Max! “How long have you been doing that?”

  Another slap to the back of her head, softer this time. A smack more than a blow. A little something to establish authority. “We ask the questions here, bitch, not you,” the thug behind her growled.

  The man with the gun studied her, as if she were a bug under a microscope.

  “We deleted the file you received. Did Ramirez send you anything else? Another file? Did you receive anything in the mail?”

  Ordinarily Paige was a lousy liar. She hated lying because it gave her cognitive dissonance. She was a scientist. Reality was her field of study. Lies were a distortion of reality, and used up significant amounts of space on her mental hard disk. You had to keep track of lies, remember them, coordinate them. Not worth the effort, she’d always thought.

  She didn’t have to lie now. Silvia hadn’t sent anything else and nothing had arrived in the mail.

  Paige looked the tall man straight in the eye without blinking. “No, I didn’t receive an lot receiother file and I haven’t received anything in the mail.”

  He held her gaze for a long moment, then shifted his eyes to the man behind her. “She’s telling the truth.” He waited a beat. “Ramirez tried to contact you all week. Why?”

  Paige told a version of the truth. “Because we’re friends.”

  The tall man narrowed his eyes. “She was on the run, desperate. She wasn’t trying to contact you to make a date to meet for drinks. Why was she trying to get in touch? To send the file. Anything else?”

  Paige said nothing and his mouth flattened.

  “Let’s try this another way. What do you do at the company?”

  That was easy. No cognitive dissonance there. “I’m a plant geneticist. My main field of study is biolistics. Currently I’m applying the agrobacterium method—known as the ‘Gene Gun’—in vivo, for the transformation of monocot species, by shooting genes into plant cell chloroplasts.”

  Silence.

  “We need to take this to the lab,” the man behind her said. “The one on the island.”

  Paige’s heart started thumping, a frantic tattoo of panic. They couldn’t take her to the main company headquarters labs twenty miles away. It was a huge, bright complex, with thousands of employees coming and going at all hours of the day or night. A place where she was well-known.

  No, they meant the other complex. GenPlant Laboratories kept facilities on the small island she could see from her deck. Santo Domingo Island. Certain varieties highly susceptible to unintentional cross-breeding were studied there.

  Paige had been there once. It was mostly deserted, the main buildings dedicated to micro-propagation under artificial light, automatically watered. It was a series of concrete bunkers with huge underground facilities and only a few researchers who worked sporadically in labs confined to one wing. There wouldn’t be anyone now on a Friday evening.

  It was a perfect place to hide a prisoner.

  It was a perfect place to kill someone and get rid of the body.

  Once she was on the island, she was lost.

  “No,” she said. “You can’t go there. Company rules—”

  She didn’t finish the sentence. Something punched her arm, something covered her head, and blackness descended.

  Her last thought was, Max. Help me.

  Chapter Six

  Max found himself whistling in the SUV, coming back from the doctor’s visit—never his favorite activity. He’d grown to loathe doctors and nurses and physical therapists over the past year. His lost year. The year of putting himself back together.

  Good people, all. Probably. And they had put his broken pieces together, there was that. But they had never believed he could go back to the way he was before, and Max found that unacceptable. He’d been a hard man and he was determined to come back even harder, no matter what the medical pukes said.

  Fuck ‘em if they thought he couldn’t do it. If they thought he’d injure himself if he pushed himself harder. Well, by God, he’d pushed himself and come out the other end without causing a permanent injury, like they kept nagging he would.

  Even his goddamned bad leg was better. The orthopedic surgeon was surprised. Whatever it is you’re doing, he said, keep on doing it.

  Well, Max had every intention of doing it. He was up to a one-mile swim, every day. He’d get up to two miles—and then three—and hit that fucking island that was always just out of reach. It was off-limits, he knew that, some kind of research lab. But his goal was to get close to it and swim back. Six miles. Every day. He could do it. Maybe by the end of the year.

  And he had his own physical and mental rehab routine now. He’d swim and then spend the day with that damned dog, throwing Frisbees and laughing. It was impossible to be depressed with that mutt around.

  Not to mention the mistress, Paige. Oh yeah. He was really looking forward to spending every evening and every night with Paige.

  Because it was entirely possible that sex with Paige Waring was what had improved his leg. God knows it improved everything else. And he had every intention of keeping on doing it, just like the doctor ordered.

  That was the reason he was whistling. And the reason he was pushing the speed limit. To get back to her.

  Man, one week, and his entire outlook on life had changed. Since Afghanistan it had been one grim, gray day after another. Holding on. Surviving. Getting better one painful inch at a time. Putting one foot in front of the other, and considering it a victory, since it had been touch-and-go as to whether he’d ever walk again when he woke up in Ramstein. Touch-and-go as to whether he’d even have a leg, or so the surgeons told him. The operation to save his leg had taken seventeen hours.

  His entire life since he’d been a kid had been aimed at joining the navy and becoming a SEAL. It was all he’d ever wanted. Now that he’d never be a SEAL again, the future had been closed off, this impenetrable black iron wall clanging down right in front of him.

  He still didn’t know what the long-term future held, but his immediate future was spending his evenings with gorgeous Paige Waring in her pretty apartment and spending his days with her dog.

  Not bad for a man who only a week ago hated the thought of waking up in the morning.

  It was sex. That was part of it. Granted, hotter and better sex than he’d ever had, but sex was fleeting. No one knew that better than him.

  Up until now, he’d thought sex was fucking. Who knew sex could also be lovemaking? And that lovemaking was better than just sex? Though they’d smoked the sheets up, there was affection there. Real, tangible affection. Warmth and connection.

  He liked her. A lot. And was beginning, for the first time in his life, to think of the “L” word. Much scarier than “like.”

  She was smart and funny and just so goddamned pretty. But beyond the prettiness there had been other things he wanted to explore and knew he would. Because now that he’d found this, tasted it, there was no going back.

  She kept him on his toes. She made his heart beat faster and his blood boil. And at the same time, he found a strange kind of peace with her, as if he’d come home after a long and weary journey.

  It was going to take him a long, long time to grow tired of Paige Waring. Maybe the rest of his life.

  The sun was low in the sky, the light washing over the landscape. The effect was spectacular, every color kicked up a notch until it glowed. If he hurried, they could watch the sun set from Paige’s deck. Maybe he could coax her into sitting on his lap. Oh yeah. His dick stirred at the thought.

  Man, his dick was making up for lost time. No sex at all for two years and now it wouldn’t stay down.

  But that was okay because it was happy and so was he.

  Everything about this moment was just so fucki
ng perfect. Doctors not riding him for overdoing it, for a change. A beautiful woman waiting for him. A ridiculously likeable dog waiting for him, too. A glorious sunset.

  When was the last time he looked forward to something? Noticed a beautiful sunset? Noticed fucking colors? And when was the last time he’d felt so goddamned good?

  There was a wonderful evening ahead of him. He’d deliberately had a light lunch because he was looking forward to whatever it was Paige was going to cook for dinner. And then, oh man, spending the night with Paige. Making love until they were sated—or at least she was. Max felt like he could go forever, now that he’d reconnected with his dick. And then sleeping in on a Saturday morning, that slender soft body curled up next to his. And maybe they’d spend all day Sunday in bed.

  The future rocked.

  He was really looking forward to days playing with her stupid mutt on the beach, waiting for her to come home. Maybe one of these evenings he’d try to rustle up some dinner himself, just for some comic relief. There was a hospital nearby in case it all went south.

  Maybe tomorrow evening they could go into Monterey. He could take her out to a nice restaurant, maybe out to a movie. Maybe—what the fuck—maybe dancing? Though he didn’t know how to dance and would trip over his own feet, not to mention the bum leg. But she looked like a woman who might like that—dinner and dancing.

  And God knows, whatever made her happy was okay by him.

  Because, well, she’d given him his life back.

  He was C000ng f . . . he was happy. Looking forward to seeing her again. Looking forward to life.

  He pulled out his cell and punched in her number. To tell her he was about an hour out. To ask her if she needed him to pick up anything in town.

  Who the fuck was he kidding? He just wanted to hear her voice, hear that she was happy he was coming back to her. Hell, maybe hear the sound of that mutt barking in the background.