“What do you mean?” I asked.
“If he was trying to conceal a project like this, he’d probably move it out of Research and Development entirely,” she said matter-of-factly, “he’d probably put it somewhere totally different. It will take me some time to track this down. I’ll look under this number, but Jenna was almost certainly wrong. He wouldn’t put it there.”
I hadn’t thought of that, but she knew my dad better than just about anyone else. She knew how he thought. And she was right that my dad wouldn’t willingly make the same mistake twice. Still, at least Theresa had somewhere to start her search.
“Thank you for doing this, Theresa,” I told her. “I know what I’m asking you to do won’t be easy for you. I know you’re taking a risk.”
Theresa shook her head.
“I’m only agreeing because I’m hoping you’re wrong,” she said, “I’ll check everywhere, go through every individual file in the archive, but only because I don’t believe Richard would do something like this.”
Whatever she had to tell herself. I could see in her eyes that she suspected it was true. Maybe it was only a little bit, but she suspected that I was right.
“Thank you,” I told her, hugging her again and then giving her the number of my new burner phone.
“Don’t thank me yet,” she replied, “You’re going to be disappointed when you find out you’re totally wrong.”
I laughed bitterly.
“Are you kidding?” I said, “I would be overjoyed to find out that I was wrong!”
That made her frown. She shifted uncomfortably in her high heels.
“Oliver called me,” she blurted suddenly, “He tried to tell me Richard was doing something illegal and I told him he was delusional. I said some very unkind things to Oliver. I hung up on him, but I also didn’t tell your father he contacted me. I wasn’t sure what to do. He left another message yesterday and said he needed to speak with me.”
“When?” I asked her urgently, “I’ve been trying to get in touch with him for several days. I’ve been worried about him.”
“Yesterday,” she answered, “he’s going to tell me the same thing that you did, isn’t he?”
I nodded seriously. I would have spared them both if I could have.
“I’ll call you as soon as I can,” she told me, “but I better get to the party before people start looking for me. Please look after yourself, Nicholas. And don’t judge your father too harshly until all the evidence is in. You might be wrong about him.”
“I hope you’re right. I really do.”
For as long as I could remember, Theresa had been in love with my dad. She hid it well, even from him. Especially from him. But I’d known her my entire life. It had taken me a while to realize that the look she gave him when he was annoying her was not just indulgent affection, but real, abiding love. I was ten years old when I first realized what was going on, unrequited, between them.
Richard had bought Theresa a huge bouquet of flowers for her birthday, just like he did every year. The flowers sat on her desk until they were completely dead and dried up. I remember asking her why she kept them, and she blushed exactly the same way that Margaret in my third-grade class had when my best friend Sam gave her a Valentine’s Day card. That blush was seared into my memory because Margaret hadn’t looked at me that way when I gave her my card, and I’d felt a horrible sinking feeling in my stomach.
I felt a different horrible sinking feeling in my stomach again as I made my way home that night. I hoped I hadn’t made a terrible mistake.
31
Jenna
Nicholas returned from his errand with Theresa with a smoldering look in his eyes. I barely had time to ask how it went before he’d crossed the hotel room. He grabbed me by the shoulders and pinned me against the wall with a wordless, urgent need.
He kissed me, and any questions fled from my mind as his tongue twirled mercilessly around mine, stealing my breath and leaving me gasping. I could feel the tension in him, and just like the matching tension in me, I knew it was knotting up his muscles and coiled tightly around his thoughts. I wanted to fix it.
I hooked an ankle around his and pulled him closer to me, shuffling him forward a step and pressing our hips flush against one another. In response, he reached down and lifted my dress up over my head in one fluid movement. I started on the buttons of his shirt, but he was quicker, unsnapping my bra and then tugging down my panties. In less than a minute I was naked, and he was still fully dressed in front of me.
There was no hesitance in him tonight. Nicholas’ hands moved possessively over my body. One was busy pinching, cupping, and rubbing at my chest before his mouth left mine to kiss each nipple. At the same time, his other hand worked urgently between my legs to catch me up to his arousal that I felt pressing hard against my thigh. It didn’t take me long. I was panting and rocking against his strong, now-wet fingers within seconds.
I went for his belt buckle and he let me undress him only enough to free him from his pants before he bent slightly to pick me up. I locked my legs around his hips and he took me hard, rocking me into the wall and using the force of gravity to drive a quick, eager rhythm. It was almost too much too quick, but I wanted to give him what he needed, and my body did, too.
Eager noises escaped me as he pushed into me, thrusting hard and sending my back flat against the wall over and over. Our neighbors could probably hear us. I couldn’t be bothered to be quieter. In fact, I hoped they called in a noise complaint.
Nicholas gripped my ass and carried us the short distance to the bed, depositing me there before pausing only to lock Harley out before returning to flip me over, facing forward into the oblivion of the mattress. He straddled my hips and penetrated me again from a prone position, leaving me unable to do anything but take him.
Although he pounded his hips against me hard, his hands on my forearms were gentle. He whispered compliments in a husky voice, telling me how sexy I was face down on the bed, how hot and tight I felt inside, and how beautiful he thought I was. His low, urgent voice against my neck and ear made me shiver.
A quickening tightness started to build deep in my core and I rocked back into him as forcefully as I could. He kept his rhythm steady, resisting my demands to go faster and biting down gently over my pulse point. I slipped a hand between my legs and gave my body the forward friction I desperately needed to finish, pushing me closer and closer to climax.
Nicholas grabbed my wrist and stole my relief from me, pinning my wrists to the bed.
“Not yet,” he whispered into my ear, “Not yet. Wait for me.”
I tried, but I was going mindless with need. My body bucked back against his, desperate for pressure and pleasure.
But he didn’t give it to me. Instead he kept moving, and the building tightness inside me kept increasing. I whimpered. I moaned. I writhed and begged and felt him getting close to his own climax. I was wild and needy before he relented. He released my wrist and finally slipped his own hand around my thigh to give me something firm to grind against.
The moment I could thrust against him, I came into his fingers harder than anything I’d felt in my life. Every feeling in my body exploded into pleasure, momentarily eclipsing even my vision. My moan was swallowed by the mattress beneath me and I was still shaking with little aftershocks when Nicholas gasped his way to his own climax a moment later.
We lay together for a long time afterward, sweaty and exhausted but—at least for me—feeling infinitely better.
“Jenna, are you still awake?” Nicholas asked me eventually.
I mumbled something that wasn’t even pretending to be a sentence. I hadn’t returned to coherence yet. How Nicholas could talk at all during sex was a mystery to me. I was lucky if I could manage a word or two. Even afterward I was mostly mute for a good thirty minutes.
“Jenna, I’m in love with you,” he said, and my heartbeat accelerated from almost sleeping to running a marathon in an instant. I flipped over to
face him, suddenly wide awake.
I stared at his blue-within-green eyes in wonder.
“You are?” I asked, needing to hear it again before I could believe it.
He nodded nervously, and his Adam’s apple bobbed in his throat as he did. He
“Say it again,” I ordered.
“I’m in love with you,” he repeated.
I wasn’t dreaming, at least I didn’t think I was, but I wasn’t able to process his words, either. Like a computer encountering a processing error, I was replaying the last twenty seconds over and over in my mind. It didn’t seem real.
“Say something, Jenna,” he urged, brushing my hair back from my forehead to get a better look at my eyes. His voice was worried. “Jenna. Please say something.”
“I love you too,” I whispered, kissing him and then smiling into the kiss when he pulled me closer into a tight embrace and rolled on top of me.
“No matter what happens with my dad, or Skylark, I’m glad I met you Jenna Masters,” Nicholas said to me seriously. He took his weight on his forearms and looked down at me tenderly. “We’re going to figure this out. I know we can do it.”
I nodded. When I was with Nicholas, anything seemed possible. Even something as huge and as difficult as exposing the secret chemical weapons program of the largest chemical conglomerate in the western world.
“Theresa agreed to help us find the records we need,” he told me as I was drifting off to sleep again a few minutes later. I blinked my eyes open to see him staring at the ceiling on his back. His face was unreadable.
“Do you think we can trust her?” I asked him.
“Yes, I know we can,” he replied. He sounded entirely sure.
Theresa must have a totally different personality around Nicholas. I supposed she’d known Nicholas since he was a little boy. It made sense that she would be fond of him. I could only imagine how cute and mischievous little Nicholas must have been. Even Theresa wouldn’t have been able to resist.
“Do you think she’ll come through?” I followed up.
“If anyone can find the records, it’s Theresa,” he said, “I’m just worried that something bad will happen to her. She’ll get found out. Or Oliver will. Or you. I feel like I’ve pulled everyone that gives a damn about me into this. I’ve put you all in danger. Maybe I should never have said anything. I could have just stayed in Alaska. You would be safer.”
I scooted over until my head was above his heart and I could wrap my arm across his waist. He relaxed slightly when I nuzzled him to find the most comfortable position for my head. He ran his fingers through my hair and I leaned into his touch.
“You did the right thing by telling us the truth,” I told him, wiggling when his fingers stilled until he started stroking my hair again. “We might be in danger right now, but we’re going to win. It’s inevitable. Secrets like this can’t stay hidden forever. The people behind this need to go to jail. And they will. They’re going to go to jail for a very long time. I know it’s hard to accept, but that means your father. He’s picked his side. Coming back here and deciding to fight your own father like this took a lot of courage. That’s how you know it was the right thing to do.”
Nicholas sighed.
“You’re right,” he agreed, “but that doesn’t make it feel any better. I just can’t help thinking how selfish it was of me for pulling more people into danger.”
“It wasn’t selfish,” I told him, “and we decided to help you. We made that choice. You didn’t make us do that. I could have told you to fuck off, remember? Oliver could have told you to fuck off, too. I’m shocked and amazed that Theresa didn’t tell you to fuck off. But we all made that choice of our own free will, just like you did.”
Nicholas seemed unconvinced. I knew he was wrestling with guilt over what he’d done and what he didn’t do five years ago. And I knew that approaching Theresa had upset him a lot, although I didn’t know why. I stroked his chest and his face until he relaxed and fell asleep, finally letting go of whatever thoughts were keeping him awake. He’d said it himself. We could do this. We’d find a way.
32
Nicholas
Two days into hiding out from Skylark and I could tell the fugitive lifestyle was already wearing on Jenna. She hid it well, but I knew she was missing her mom. The story that Jenna told her mom—that we were going out of town on a spur of the moment cruise—had bought us some time before she’d have to tell a more substantial lie, but I was dreading our inevitable ‘return from the Caribbean’. The truth was that I had no idea how long it would take Theresa to get the records, and Oliver was in the wind.
The rules that I’d established for myself when I first went on the lam were simple but brutal:
Absolutely no contact whatsoever with anyone I knew ‘before’ and the methods used to contact them (email accounts, phone numbers).
Avoid anything that might create new personal records (doctors, police etc.).
Use cash.
Never use the same route twice.
Stay off the internet as much as possible to avoid temptation.
After a few years living in Alaska, I felt safe enough to relax rules four and five but rules one through three were essential. All my research indicated that avoiding the creation of a paper trail was the key to anonymity. Since Jenna and I hadn’t been attacked yet, we could only surmise that we hadn’t yet been found. Changing my appearance or otherwise pretending that we were some kind of superspy was unnecessary and silly. The loneliness was the hardest part, although at least Jenna and I had each other. We had enough cash to survive for a long time, and we could stay in the hotel room for a while, but hiding indefinitely wouldn’t be much of a life.
That’s why I was I was so happy to hear from Theresa the following Monday. She texted my new burner phone that she wanted to meet at a corner store in the busiest part of downtown at noon. Jenna opted to take Harley to the park and get some fresh air while I went to meet her. While I waited inside the store, I bought a scratch off ticket to give me some reason to be standing around.
When Theresa came in to stand next to me in front of the candy aisle, I could tell from her smeared mascara that she’d been crying.
“You were right,” she said to me while looking resolutely straight ahead at the display of skittles. “I didn’t want to believe it.”
“You already found the records?” I asked in disbelief. Even for Theresa, that was fast.
Theresa sighed.
“They were in the safe in your father’s desk,” she told me, “He gave me the combination years ago as a backup. I figured I might as well check in there first. And there they were. The original records from Project Winterspring, with all the pictures and the dates and everything, plus the newer records from the program.”
She gave herself a little shake as if to dislodge the images.
“I called in sick after I saw the pictures while Richard was at lunch,” she said, “I don’t know if I can ever look at him again.”
“Did you take the records with you?” I asked her hopefully.
“No,” she told me, “I’ll have to copy them tomorrow. I know you wanted them, but once I saw the pictures of those poor little tortured animals I called in sick for the rest of the day. I really do feel ill. I don’t like rats very much, but you could tell the poor things suffered. It works just the same on people, you know?”
I didn’t know what to say, so I just nodded. Theresa was taking this hard. The hands that clutched her handbag were trembling.
“Oliver called me again,” Theresa added, “I’ve been avoiding his calls. I just don’t know what to say to him.”
“Don’t worry about Oliver,” I told her reassuringly. “Just focus on getting the records. We’re so close now.”
“Nicholas, I’m sorry I didn’t believe you,” she said, “I’ve always known that Richard didn’t necessarily play by the same rules as everybody else. But I always thought that his heart was in the right place. But now I just don�
��t know.”
I knew how she felt. It still didn’t make sense to me. The fact that my dad would put the creation of something so evil ahead of his family made no sense. Family meant everything to my dad. At least that’s what he was always saying. Apparently, the family’s bottom line was all he meant.
“We don’t know all the facts yet,” I told Theresa. I wasn’t sure if I even believed there could be a good explanation for his behavior, but I wanted to. “Once we have the records we’ll finally be able to expose this to the world. People will demand to know everything. Eventually the truth is going to come out.”
Jenna believed that the truth couldn’t stay hidden forever, and I’d chosen to believe her. Theresa looked a bit more skeptical.
“The production of these chemicals has been going on for more than ten years,” Theresa said despondently, “How many people do you think have been killed during that time?”
“Don’t think about that,” I told her. “Really. It won’t help. The only thing we can do is try to stop more people from dying.”
Theresa lifted her eyes from the candy in front of us and looked at me for a long moment. Eventually she nodded.
“I have to believe that there’s a good explanation at the bottom of all this,” she said, “I just can’t imagine why Richard would do this just for the money. It’s not rational.”
“I’m sure you’re right,” I told her.
“I’ll get you the records this afternoon after Richard leaves,” Theresa said, selecting a chocolate bar and looking at the nutrition information on the back, “and then I’ll call to meet you.”
“Be careful,” I reminded her, “Don’t let anyone see you making copies or taking them out of the building.”
“They won’t,” she replied haughtily, “I’ve been sneaking home things to work on for over thirty years. I think I have it down.”
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