Red Alert, page 16
And if she kept repeating that, maybe she’d start to believe it. But Raine’s nightmare—or had it been something more?—along with the pall that seemed to permeate the hospital air, denser and more desperate than usual, had her tensing.
Max exhaled. “Okay. I could use some air.” He strode toward the nearest exit, a big, strong man who’d had the legs knocked out from underneath him by a woman he’d met less than a week earlier.
Yeah. She knew how that felt.
Meg grimaced and turned toward the elevators. She stiffened when a figure rounded the corner, a twentysomething guy in low-slung jeans and a dark hooded sweatshirt. What she could see of his face looked sullen and petulant, and he walked with a loose, aggressive stride.
He looked an awful lot like the guy in the fax.
She slid her hand into her jacket pocket, felt the warm weight of Erik’s gun slip into her palm, felt the nub of the safety beneath her fingertip, and—
The guy’s face cleared and broke into a smile. “There you are!” He sped up, jogged past Meg, and embraced a young woman with an eyebrow ring, heavily made-up eyes and a hospital ID.
Meg winced. Hell. She’d nearly pulled a weapon on the gift shop attendant’s boyfriend.
“Get a grip,” she muttered, earning herself a scowl from both halves of the cuddling couple. She waved them off. “Not talking to you. Carry on.”
She felt foolish as she waited for the elevator, which was free now of its crime scene tape. Foolish and scared and unhappy, a far cry from the almost-in-control-of-her-life-and-headed-in-the-right-direction delusions she’d been harboring just a week earlier.
How had she lost control of things so quickly? More importantly, how could she regain that control and reassert herself against an opponent who had far more money and power than she did?
An idea flickered as the elevator doors slid open, then was gone when she realized it was the same elevator that had fallen with her and Erik in it.
She opted for the stairs instead, and felt the gun bang against her hip with each stride.
By the time she reached the fifth-floor landing, she had the bare bones of a plan, a last-ditch effort to convince—and if necessary force—Cage to turn down FalcoTechno’s offer.
She didn’t want to do it, but she didn’t see any other choice.
Running the details in her mind, she pushed open the door to the main lab. “Jemma? It’s me. Max said you were having a problem up here?”
The young woman’s voice responded from the inner lab, garbled by walls and distance.
Meg didn’t bother ditching her blazer and pulling on a lab coat. She headed straight into the lab, shouldering through the heavily shielded door. “So I was thinking,” she began, and stepped into the lab. “What if we—”
A heavy blow caught her from behind, driving her to her knees.
And everything faded to black.
Chapter Fourteen
Erik dumped his car in the Emergency entrance, knowing it would be towed and not caring in the least. He bolted to the front door, moving as fast as his leg would let him.
He’d finally gotten through to a doctor who’d talk to him, but the news wasn’t good. Raine had lost the baby. The knowledge was a painful pressure in his chest. What if he’d been there? What if he’d stayed with Raine rather than gone home to Meg?
Raine might not have fallen, and he and Meg wouldn’t have spent the night together, wouldn’t have made the mistake of thinking they understood each other.
Muttering, Erik limped past a solitary figure leaning against the hospital wall. Then he stopped. Turned back. “Max? What are you doing out here? Why aren’t you inside with Raine and Meg?”
He hadn’t been able to reach Meg on her cell phone, but told himself it didn’t matter. The cops had followed her in. The rent-a-guard was watching Raine’s room. The women were safe.
“Raine kicked me out.” Something dark and dangerous moved in the big man’s eyes—jealousy, maybe, and something more. Something hurting and sad. “You should talk to her.”
“I will. Later.” He knew he owed her an apology, an explanation. But he owed Meg one first. “Where’s Meg?”
Max jerked his chin upward. “She’s in the lab with Jemma.”
When the hospital doors opened and a familiar figure stepped out carrying a cup of takeout coffee, Erik’s blood froze in his veins. “No, she’s not.” He raised his voice. “Jemma, where’s Meg?”
The young woman’s expression darkened when she saw the men, saw their worried expressions. “I thought she was with you.”
“No,” Max said quickly. “I told you she was on her way in. And besides, why aren’t you in the lab?”
Jemma frowned, confused. “Why would I be? And what do you mean, you told me? I haven’t talked to you since yesterday.”
Erik had his phone out and was speed-dialing Detective Peters before she’d finished speaking. “Damn it. We’ve been played.” When Peters picked up, he snapped, “Get over here. Meg’s upstairs with the guy.”
“I’m on my way,” the detective said, voice rushed. “Our techs got a hit on the face.”
Hot rage cracked through the ice around Erik’s heart. “You know who he is?”
“Not he. She.”
CONSCIOUSNESS RETURNED with a rush of fear and disorientation. Meg groaned before she remembered what had happened, then bit off the noise to avoid detection.
Too late. Her captor had noticed she was awake.
A blurry shadow passed in front of her, a young man in low-slung jeans and a dark hooded sweatshirt.
Panic jammed her breath in her lungs. Oh, God. This was it. This was the man who’d been hunting her.
She tried to run, tried to spin away and escape, only to find her arms and legs bound. She was sitting on something with her hands fastened behind her back, her feet tied with her knees bent. As her brain began to clear with full consciousness she realized she was secured to one of the rolling lab chairs.
When the shadow passed again, Meg croaked, “Why?”
The young man sneered—only as the last of the cobwebs vanished, she realized it wasn’t a young man at all. It was a woman sporting boys’ clothing and a loose-limbed, masculine slouch. The woman’s features rearranged themselves into a familiar pattern that made absolutely no sense until she said, “Because you can’t have what I deserve.”
Then she raised a weapon—Erik’s service revolver, stolen from Meg’s jacket—and took aim between Meg’s eyes.
ERIK POUNDED up the stairs, cane gripped tightly in his hand, more weapon than crutch now. Stay outside until we get there, Peters had said. She could be dangerous. Hell, she is dangerous. But the cop’s voice had echoed Erik’s disbelief.
They’d been looking in the wrong direction all along. It had never been about FalcoTechno. It had been about Meg all along.
About professional jealousy.
He reached the fifth-floor landing and paused to assemble a mental map of the floor before he keyed in Meg’s code—he’d memorized it over her shoulder on day one, just in case—and opened the door to the lab lobby.
Pulse loud in his head, he pressed his ear to the crack and listened, senses humming. Nothing.
The cops were on their way—he’d sent Max to stand extra guard on Raine, and told Jemma to wait for the detectives, who were ten, maybe fifteen minutes away through traffic. He should wait for backup. It was police protocol.
Hell, it was smart thinking.
He started to ease back, telling himself he didn’t know the situation, wasn’t a cop anymore. If his years on the force had taught him anything, it was that minutes counted in both directions. Moving too early was just as dangerous as too late. Perhaps more so.
For the first time in a long, long while, a fragment of memory came to him, a snippet in Jimmy’s voice. “Steady, partner. You’ll know when it’s time.”
And he always had, until that last day when he hadn’t, when he’d gone in too soon and Jimmy had died.
“Come on, Peters. Where are you?” Erik pressed his ear to the crack once again, partly reassured by the quiet, partly fearing what it might mean.
Then he heard a voice. Voices. First Meg’s, saying something low and groggy and trailing up at the end in an unintelligible question. Then the response from a woman he’d met only once before, one who hadn’t even been on their radar screen as a suspect.
“Don’t be stupid,” the woman’s voice said, faint with distance. “You and I both know there’s only three ways for a female to get ahead in this field. She’s born with connections, she sleeps her way to the top or she fights for it. You were born your father’s daughter. Now that Leo Gabney’s gone, I’m left with option three. Fight.”
Not liking the woman’s borderline manic tone, Erik damned his backup for being slow, eased the door open farther and slipped inside the deserted reception area. He eased his gun free as he worked his way across the open space and crouched behind Jemma’s desk.
He heard movement in the lab, risked a look and saw that the main door, which was normally sealed, had been propped open with a chair.
Invitation, trap or something else? He didn’t know and wasn’t sure he could afford to find out.
Footsteps sounded within the lab and a shadow passed by the glass window of the propped-open door as a woman climbed on the chair and fiddled with something above the door.
Erik ducked down behind the desk and angled his head around the far side in the shadows, trying to see without being seen.
The shadow shifted and the woman poked her head through the partly opened door. She was wearing a young man’s clothes and stance, but the hood of the sweatshirt was thrown back, revealing a face that was older and narrower than it should have been, pinched with tension and the mad fire that burned in eyes that were a lighter shade of brown than her brunette hair.
Annette Foulke, vice chair of the chemistry department.
They’d been so busy looking for the money angle, they’d overlooked the other major motivating force for crime.
Power.
“I know you’re out there,” she said. She didn’t focus on the desk, though. Instead she addressed the lobby at large, including the open office doors in her sweeping statement. “I know you’re listening, that you’re scrambling to figure it out. But what’s to figure? You want her. I have her.” She smiled now, a cold twist of lips that wasn’t quite sane. “I’m done being subtle. You couldn’t figure it out on your own? Well, let me help you. I want what’s coming to me, or she dies. You’ve got five minutes.”
She disappeared back through the doorway and pulled the chair away, letting the door shut and seal in her wake. That left Erik with almost nothing to go on besides two critical pieces of information. One, Annette Foulke had gone over the edge. Two, she had Meg.
They were looking at a hostage situation, damn it.
He swore under his breath, and grimaced when he realized his leg had cramped from the awkward position. He crab-walked around the desk, staying low, and opened the various drawers of Jemma’s desk.
He hit paydirt on drawer three with the discovery of a small compact mirror. It was no more than two inches across, but it would have to do.
Breathing shallowly through his mouth, he eased away from the desk, toward the closed door. He was hoping for a crack, a gap beneath the panel that would let him get the mirror through, let him get a look at the situation. But that was a no-go. The lab door formed a tight seal around all four edges. No gaps. No cracks.
It made sense, he supposed. They would need to be able to seal off the lab space in case of a problem with radioactivity or chemicals. But that left him with too few options, too many questions.
He heard the rise and fall of Foulke’s voice, heard the crash of something falling, and felt a jolt of adrenaline, the fear of being too early or too late. Weighing his options, he decided to risk it. He eased the mirror up the solid half of the door, to where the window began, and angled it so he could see a small slice of the lab beyond.
A clatter from the far side drew his attention. He tilted the mirror and saw Annette kick a piece of lab equipment, saw the expensive machine list to one side.
She was losing it. She was close to boiling over, and she’d put them on a deadline. Five minutes.
But five minutes for what? Until what?
He reversed the angle of the mirror and scanned the rest of the lab, almost afraid to see— There. He had her.
Meg’s reflection shook until he steadied his hand through force of will. He squinted to make out details, and saw that she sat on a rolling chair with her hands behind her back and her feet bound in place. She was positioned between two of the large picture windows that ringed the lab, and seemed unhurt.
As he watched, she turned her head toward him—or rather toward the door and its stealthy mirror—and gestured with her head.
Fierce relief ran through him. She was okay. She knew he was here. Or rather, she knew someone was here. After their fight, he doubted she’d be too happy to learn it was him holding the mirror.
The thought brought an anxious twist. So many things to fix. Maybe not enough time.
He wanted to signal her, but he didn’t dare. A quick turn of the reflection showed him that Annette was still occupied killing the piece of lab equipment. But for how much longer? He couldn’t be sure, but felt the seconds tick away.
He returned his attention to Meg while his mind spun. When she gestured a second time, jerking her chin upward, he followed the motion.
At first he didn’t see it.
Then he did.
Terror sliced through him. She was positioned directly beneath the emergency shower, a spray head connected to the water main, designed as a first line of response in case of a chemical spill. If a lab worker was accidentally splashed with a toxic chemical, the emergency response protocol dictated that they jump under the shower and yank the handle, which would trip an alarm at the same time it released a gush of water.
Only this shower wasn’t connected to the water main anymore. Even in the small mirror, Erik could see that the line had been interrupted. Now it led to three interconnected jugs of liquid, all fitted to what looked like a high-pressure pump.
It was a good bet those jugs didn’t contain anything as benign as water.
Acid, his mind supplied on an adrenaline rush of horror. Or a strong base. It didn’t matter which—both ends of the pH spectrum were equally dangerous, equally capable of melting flesh off bone on contact.
“Ssst!”
Erik whipped his head around at the hiss, tensing to duck and run while he got off a few shots of covering fire.
Through the half-open lab door, he saw Detective Peters hold a finger to his lips, signaling quiet.
Backup had arrived.
A muffled voice yanked Erik’s attention back to the mirror. In an instant, his blood iced. Foulke’s body blocked the reflected image. Her silhouette approached the door. The crank handle turned. The door eased open.
He slipped the safety on his weapon, going stone-cold at the knowledge that he would have only one chance.
Then he heard Meg’s voice say, “Getting paranoid, Annette? Afraid they’ll come for you? Afraid they’ll get around the explosives you’ve set on the doors? Or are you afraid they won’t come for you?”
The door slammed shut, muffling Annette’s angry words.
Erik stifled the urge to yank open the door, roll in low and start firing. Too early. He had no plan. Too late. Annette had the doors wired somehow, apparently on a trip system that let her open from her side, but would blow if he opened it from his.
Like the other traps, it was clever and crude at the same time, and almost indefensible.
Almost.
Though it nearly killed him to do so, he pocketed the mirror and eased away from the door. He crossed the lobby, staying low and moving fast, and didn’t let out a breath until he was back in the stairwell. The small space was crowded with bodies in bulletproof vests. Detectives Sturgeon and Peters were there, along with a handful of other cops wearing protective gear and guns. Jemma crouched at the edge of the group, lips pressed in a determined line. When she met Erik’s eyes, she said, “I know the lab. I know how to get you in the back.”
Erik shook his head. “She’s booby-trapped the front and back doors of the main room.” He quickly sketched the situation, trying to keep the emotion out of a voice that cracked on the strain. But the images were there in his brain—Jimmy’s blood-soaked body sprawled on the road outside a corner bank, Meg’s face when he’d told her of his plans for the NPT technology, the defiant timbre of her voice when she’d warned him of the trap.
The soft curve of her cheek and shoulder in the dimness as they’d made love the night before.
He traded a look with the head of the SWAT team, cop-to-cop. “Okay. Here’s what we’re going to do.”
ANNETTE’S BREATH was sour on Meg’s face when the older woman leaned close. Her hair was stringy and unkempt, but her clothes were laundered and smelled of fabric softener. The effect was jarring and just wrong.
“You think you’re so smart,” Annette hissed in a wash of poor hygiene so different from the hardworking, focused researcher she’d always seemed. “You think just because you’re Robert Corning’s daughter that you’re untouchable. Well, you’re not!” She jabbed a honed fingernail into Meg’s shoulder, bringing a stabbing pain sharper than the ringing in her head or the dull ache of her bound joints.
“What does this have to do with my father?” Meg demanded, wanting to keep Annette talking past her arbitrary five-minute deadline. “I moved out when I was eighteen.”
“You have his name,” Annette said flatly. “He was a Nobel Prize winner, for God’s sake. All your success trickles down from him. Men make the world go around. Women live in their shadows.” She gestured to her outfit. “You see, Mother was right. Edward was always better than me. If I dress like him, become him, I can go places and do things a woman can’t.”
Meg shook her aching head and felt confused, desperate tears press. It was all too much—the buckets looming overhead, a noxious pairing of hydrochloric acid and sodium hydroxide, the mirror she thought she’d seen in the doorway, the crude devices wired to the only two exits…
