Midnight Fever

  Nick took careful aim and fired three shots. One after the other, spaced not even a second apart.

  One by one, the escaping men fell. The first one grabbed his neck and looked astonished before falling to the ground. The other two realized there was another shooter but they couldn’t tell where. They were still looking when they fell, red mists where their heads had been.

  The shots from the back of the warehouse ceased and so did those from the SWAT team. Wilson stood from a crouch and limped forward. The front of his tactical pants was red with blood, but you wouldn’t know that from his face.

  “Mancino?” he called, shielding his eyes with the palm of his hand.

  “Yo.” Nick stood just as Bud rushed into the room.

  It was unusual for someone as senior as Bud to be part of an op, but Bud wasn’t a desk jockey. He looked around, noting everything. The three dead guys clustered at the back. Wilson and his team around Nick. The two men on the ground. They were wounded but breathing, Nick was delighted to see. And the bad guys were dead.

  “Mancino saved our asses,” Wilson said quietly to Bud.

  “No, no man.” Nick pushed that away with a gesture of his hand. He didn’t want the credit, he just wanted the dead guys dead. As a matter of fact, things had gone his way, because he’d have killed them anyway. The fact that he’d done so and wasn’t going to be charged with homicide was icing on the cake. “I happened to be outside and could make a lateral entrance. Your team softened them up, I was just on mop-up detail.” He looked at Wilson and allowed the grief he felt to show. “Your two guys out back. They’re gone. They had explosives ready to blow.”

  Wilson staggered, almost lost his balanced. His head hung low, then he raised it. He turned to Bud. “Medics on the way? Eisner and McBride are wounded. Eisner’s losing a ton of blood.”

  “Yeah.” Bud tapped the comms unit in his ear. “They should be here right—” A loud ambulance siren filled the air, cutting out as the ambulance drew up outside with a screech of brakes. “Now.”

  Two guys wearing EMT jackets jumped out of the back of the ambulance while it was still rocking, carrying a gurney. They carried out a stabilized Eisner, already transfusing, then McBride. Both men held thumbs up, Eisner’s hand shaky, McBride’s firm.

  Everyone stood silently as two body bags were carried out.

  The ambulance drove away, the PPD crime scene unit showed up and Nick groaned.

  Bud’s heavy hand landed on his shoulder. “I know,” Bud said sympathetically. “But we have to do this by the book and I need to get your testimony, together with that of the SWAT guys still standing. We can get Eisner and McBride’s testimony later when they’re out of surgery.”

  Nick quivered. He wanted to get this over with as fast as humanly possible and get back to Kay. He wanted to hold her, reassure himself that she was all right, then get her into bed as fast as he could.

  He was pumped with adrenaline, and the handiest way to vent that was fucking. Way out in the desert in Afghanistan, there hadn’t been any women available who wouldn’t have been stoned to death for talking to him, and he didn’t fancy goats. None of the team members did, so they all beat off in the barracks.

  So yeah, he wanted Kay, because he was about ready to explode.

  He wanted her. Not just any woman with the right plumbing but her, Kay Hudson, beautiful and brilliant and all his.

  It was way too soon to propose. He knew that. But he wanted to stake his claim. Nail her and nail her down at the same time. Make sure she’d stay with him in Portland. Nick wasn’t one to think much about the future, because usually the present was enough to handle. Or that was the old Nick.

  The new Nick wanted to make plans, be absolutely certain that Kay would be part of those plans. He wanted to look into the future and see her in it.

  Right now, he’d give anything to be with Kay, holding her, kissing her, being inside her. He didn’t want to be here in this abandoned warehouse, walking Bud and his crime scene team through what had happened. But—Nick was a professional. He’d had patience beaten into him when he’d joined the Navy as a hotshot hothead. Patience and control and discipline had been pounded into his head and muscles.

  So he answered Bud’s questions patiently, walked him through it, basically did an after-action review, like he’d done countless times after a battle.

  And it had been a battle, no doubt about that. A hundred bullets fired, five dead, two wounded. Yeah, that was a battle.

  They’d discovered the laptop that operated the drone and one of Bud’s techs would go through its entire history. About an hour into the debriefing, IDs on the dead guys came in from the facial-recognition databank.

  The head guy was a surprise—Oliver Baker, himself.

  Nick looked at Bud in shock, and saw his surprise reflected in Bud’s face.

  “Oliver Baker,” Bud said slowly. “Huh.”

  Huh indeed.

  Baker wasn’t quite a security contractor, not in the sense that ASI was. He was more a power broker, the “Fixer”, as his nickname suggested. So, he was the one who had used the bio-weapon?

  The two other men were in his employ. Basically his only employees, so his company, Solutions International, was effectively no more. Nick wasn’t too clear on what exactly Baker did, and didn’t care. What he cared about was that for whatever reason, Baker and his guys had gone after Kay and now they were dead. Everyone who wanted to hurt her was dead. That was good enough for him.

  Nick looked at Bud. “Kay has about a terabyte of data that she’s studying. What he was up to will be in the data. Kay will figure it out, if she hasn’t already.” He met Bud’s sober gaze. “What I can tell you is that he was messing around with bio-weapons, with some kind of weaponized super-flu. Something that had Kay scared shitless. She’s a virologist and doesn’t scare easy.”

  Bud’s face tightened. “Bio-weapons, huh? Give me a gunned-up mobster any day.” He shuddered. “Don’t ever want to puke up my insides.”

  “I think that’s Ebola, but what this guy was messing with was potentially worse. Could have caused a pandemic. Millions dead.”

  Bud made a sound of disgust deep in his throat. “Then we owe Kay our thanks.”

  “That we do. Okay. We done here, Bud? I’d like to—”

  “Get back to her,” Bud said. “Yeah. Get out of here. If we need you again, we’ll call. Get back to your woman, she’s been through a lot. We might need to depose her, but not right now.”

  “Not right now.” Nick pulled out his cell. “Felicity, Nick here. It’s all taken care of.”

  “I heard.” Nick could hear the smile in her voice. “I imagine you want to know where Kay is.”

  “Like my next breath.”

  “She’s waiting for you back in her room at the hotel. I heard mention of room service and champagne. If I were you, I’d get there before she changes her mind.”

  “Oh, yeah. I think I can hitch a ride with the PPD.” He raised his eyebrows at Bud. Bud nodded. “Great.” And he took off at a run.

  “Nick!” He turned at Bud’s call. Bud held his thumb up. “Good work!”

  Nick gave a thumbs-up in reply and ran.

  Kay was just lighting the candle on the room service dinner table when she heard a sharp knock on the door. No time to ask who it was because she heard Nick’s voice.

  “Kay! It’s me! Nick!”

  As if she wouldn’t recognize that deep voice.

  Smiling, she opened the door, held her hand out. “Hi. I ordered dinner. I didn’t know what you’d want so, I just went with steak and—umpf!”

  Like before, like that night that changed her life, Nick backed her up against the wall and took her mouth in a kiss that she felt right down to her toes. As before, ferocious and hungry, but this time with something else.

  He’d killed three men, Felicity had said. Kay led a scholar’s life, but something deep in her DNA told her that coming straight from a kill meant his blood would be up. Mankind was a
bout a hundred thousand years old, and had only been civilized for about two thousand of those years.

  Right now, Nick would be in a pre-civilizational state. His movements were jerky, fierce, fast. Totally unlike the cool operator he usually was.

  He was pressing against her so hard, she found it difficult to breathe.

  Kay put her hands on his shoulders and pushed, just a little.

  He pulled away, head back, eyes closed. “Sorry,” he whispered, then brought his head back down to look her in the eyes. “Sorry, sorry. I don’t want to be out of control.”

  She could see that. She could see that he was fighting a fierce battle with himself. “It’s okay.” Kay smiled at him. “You’re just back from the wars.”

  Nick leaned his head forward until his forehead touched hers. “That’s why I love you. One of the reasons why I love you. You’re both beautiful and wise.”

  “Hmm. Let’s try this again, from the top.”

  He cupped the back of her head and kissed her again, more tenderly, less ferociously. “Like this?” he murmured.

  “Exactly like this.”

  He kissed her from every angle. He’d plunge into her mouth, tasting her, then lift and kiss her again from another angle. She welcomed him, glad that he was here with her, alive and safe.

  It could have gone differently. He could have been shot, as two police officers had been. Nothing about what had happened had been safe. She could right now be looking down at Nick’s dead body in the morgue, mourning him and mourning what might have been.

  She didn’t have to mourn him now. She would, one day, about seventy years from now if they were lucky. But not today.

  “I’m so glad you came back to me,” she whispered when he lifted his head.

  “Always.” Those dark eyes looked deeply into hers. “I’ll always come back to you. So.” He winked at her. “Are we done talking?”

  Kay laughed. “Yeah, we’re done talking.”

  “Good,” he said, and started unbuttoning her silk shirt, focusing narrow-eyed on the task as if he were defusing an atom bomb. Slowly, taking infinite care with each button, down to the last one. He looked up into her eyes, asking permission.

  Kay said nothing, just held her arms slightly out from her sides.

  He brushed it off and it fell fluttering to the floor. One of her expensive Ralph Lauren pastel-silk blouses from the suitcase Portland PD had delivered back to her. She glanced down at it, at her feet. Normally Kay kept her things well, but right now, the sight of the soft sage-green silk abandoned on the floor pleased her, a symbol of her normally fastidious organization gone a little loose because she had Nick in her life.

  She foresaw a lot of silk blouses on the floor in her future. Maybe.

  Her black gabardine pencil skirt was next. It was closely tailored so it required her to shimmy a little to get it down and off her, and Nick shuddered at the sight.

  “You’re a cheap date if that excites you,” she said.

  The muscles in his jaw jumped. “It all excites me. Undressing you, thinking of undressing you. Listening to you breathe excites me.”

  “How about this?” She reached behind herself and unhooked her bra. It fluttered to the floor, landing on top of the silk blouse and the skirt.

  “Jesus,” Nick muttered. He curled his hand around her breast and took her nipple in his mouth, suckling so strongly his cheeks hollowed.

  “Oh!” Kay had been feeling so smug and so in control, but all of a sudden, the control left her in a whoosh. She clutched his head, fire shooting from her breast to her sex. Her legs could barely hold her up.

  “Okay, that’s it.” Nick picked her up, strode the few steps to the bed and laid her down. Jacket, shirt, tee shirt, boots, socks, briefs, jeans. All dropped to the hotel carpet in seconds. His hard penis bobbed, already shiny. He closed his eyes, opened them again, gaze fierce. “God, you’re beautiful.”

  “So are you.” He was. The epitome of male beauty. Broad shoulders tapering down to a narrow waist, strong thighs, and what was between them…wow. She curled her fingers in a come to me gesture.

  His face lightened and one side of his hard mouth lifted. “I thought you’d never ask. But first…”

  He slid her lace panties down her legs slowly. Down her thighs, knees, ankles and threw her panties over his shoulder.

  “At one point, we’re going to have to treat our clothes better.”

  “Yeah,” he answered. “When I get a little less worked up at the thought of having you. Maybe in about a hundred years. And speaking of being worked up…”

  He climbed onto the bed, covered her body with his.

  “Yeah?”

  He kissed her while spreading her legs with his own hairy thighs. “I’m afraid that’s it for foreplay. It has to be now, otherwise I’m going to explode.”

  “Now, Nick,” she whispered, watching him closely, seeing the moment his eyes lit up.

  He entered her immediately, one long, deep stroke. He didn’t use his hands, but he didn’t need to. Kay had had more than one lover who’d needed to stuff themselves inside her. Not Nick. He slid in, and he found her more than ready.

  He lay his head next to hers on the pillow, mouth next to her ear. Cupped her hips. “Now.” And started moving so strongly, the headboard beat against the wall in a pounding rhythm.

  Kay closed her eyes, concentrated on where they were joined, feeling him thrusting so hard and fast inside her, and surrendered almost immediately to her climax. The pressure was almost too much to bear, so much heat, that slick rhythm that echoed her pounding heart—she erupted with a cry, holding him so tightly to her.

  Nick bucked and moved in her even faster, harder, then held himself deeply inside her, grinding, groaning as he came, too.

  Long minutes went by as she slowly came back into herself, drifting back down to earth. Who knew where she went when she had an orgasm with Nick? She had no idea. Somewhere really nice, though.

  Coming back to earth was always a jolt. Nick’s heavy body crushing her so that she had to consciously expand her lungs to breathe. Her sex and thighs were damp and the smell of sex was sharp in the air. Her knees fell to the sides, her arms dropped down to the mattress. She had no strength left.

  “Whoa.” Nick lifted his head. “That was fast.”

  “But furious.” She smiled.

  “I’ll make it up to you once I eat something. You were saying something about room service when I walked in.”

  “There’s nothing to make up for.” Kay made a real effort and lifted her hand to caress one sharp cheekbone. “But yes, I did order room service. Steak and salad. And it should be arriving right about—”

  There was a knock on the door.

  “Now. There’s a robe on the armchair. Can you put it on and open the door? I’m going to take a quick shower.”

  “Sure.” Nick rolled easily out of bed, found the bathrobe, walked to the door.

  Kay hoped the room service meal would be good. Considering she was going to leave Nick tomorrow morning.

  Deja vu. The next morning, Kay slipped out of the hotel room like she had…what? Only a couple of days ago? Was that possible? It felt like a lifetime ago. So much had happened, everything was different and yet here she was, slipping away from Nick. Again.

  He was going to be so pissed.

  If she was successful, she’d have to calm him down.

  If she failed, it wouldn’t matter because she’d be dead.

  This time, walking out the door, she didn’t pay attention to the cameras. She didn’t need to.

  There was an internal passageway to the auditorium and conference venue, but Kay wanted to walk along the road. Feel the sun and smell the air. Because maybe it would be the last time she ever felt the sun on her face.

  No. No use thinking like that. She was sure of her reasoning and she was sure of Felicity’s skills. This was going to work and her revenge was going to be complete.

  And then she was going on to lead a
long and happy life with Nick.

  But still, she gulped in the fresh air, lifted her head to catch the sunshine, glanced in shop windows on the way. Feeling terrified, determined and angry.

  The conference hall entrance was around the corner from the hotel. The building itself was stepped back and the entrance was a two-story atrium. Inside was a reception hall where conference attendees met and mingled. Poster sessions lined the walls.

  It was the last day of the World Virology Conference and the place was buzzing.

  Inside was all virology, all the time.

  Her people.

  She looked around fondly at the very unlovely people who prized brains over looks. The men all but wore lab coats. Lab coats probably would have been an improvement over the wrinkled, rumpled polyester sports jackets that male scientists seemed to privilege. The women were frumpy, too. Most with messy hair and no makeup and not a malign thought in their heads. Friendly souls, mostly, who worked themselves into the ground in the hopes of providing a tiny brick in the wall of human knowledge.

  Her tribe, and she loved them.

  It was early. She walked around, greeting people she knew. It wasn’t that big a world. Most of them knew each other from their graduate student days and she caught up on work and life with a number of people. One woman, a researcher for NASA’s extraterrestrial life program, gave gentle condolences for Priyanka’s death. Unexpectedly, tears sprang to Kay’s eyes.

  Oh God. She still wasn’t over it. She looked away, blinking furiously, then brought her gaze back to the woman, who was looking at her kindly. She placed a hand on Kay’s arm, a gentle touch. “She will be missed,” the woman said, and Kay nodded, a lump in her throat.

  It reminded her why she was here. Because evil men had killed her best friend and removed a bright, wonderful soul from the world.

  For money.

  And they were playing with a fire that could burn down the world.

  For money.

  Goddamn them.

  She stood in front of a poster. Mutation Analysis of the ATP7B Gene. She knew two of the authors, genial nerds working at a research center at Biopolis in Singapore. Hard workers, very smart.