“I think I mentioned you can call me Zach,” he said, struggling to keep up with her strides while he rubbed his chest.
“You did, but you may not wish me to do so when you have heard my explanation for my actions this evening.”
“Okay, let’s go.” He shrugged.
She grabbed his arm and continued her taut, long steps, dragging him along. A few times, she swayed momentarily, but managed to keep her balance. Her head still swept side to side, scanning their surroundings. Her eyes shifted constantly, checking shadows for movement, or deeper shadows that didn’t belong, or who knew what else. Hell, he thought, he had no idea what her training had actually been.
They covered the last fifty feet to the car in silence.
She approached the passenger’s door and turned to Zach. The cut on her forehead was bleeding again. He couldn’t see her pupils in the available light, but her eyes were glassy enough that he was concerned for her. A red trickle ran down her face and over her cheek to her jaw, where she’d swiped at it several times, leaving a smear. Goode spoke again. “As I understand the software, you’re the only one who can drive your car. Is that correct?”
“Yes. Why?”
“Just gathering intelligence for potential worst case scenarios.”
“I guess you have to think that way. Part of the training, and all.”
She seemed uncomfortable. “In my line of work, surprises are usually unpleasant.”
“I understand.”
Her eyes continued to search the shadows, her tension palpable. “We should leave the area as soon as possible.”
“You’re injured,” he spoke in a serious tone. “Maybe we should get you to a hospital.” Zach opened her door for her.
She shook her head. Wisps of blond hair floated around her face. “I need to check something. Do you have a flashlight?”
“Yeah, sure,” he said, and leaned across, opening the glove compartment. He handed it to her. “What—?”
The question was cut short when Sara crouched, shining the light under his car, and it hit him.
“No. You have got to be kidding,” he grumbled, as he levered himself onto the pavement next to her.
Sara worked her way around to the front of the Mitsu, and with a grunted expletive Zach couldn’t quite catch, reached under the bumper and tugged. She stood, holding a tiny, black box, which she dropped to the pavement and crushed under her heel before returning to her seat.
“A bug? Really?” Zach said, following her. “Thing looked like it came from a store in a strip mall. What’s up with that? Secret Service having budget problems?”
She turned her head in his direction and stared at him from under her brows. “That was a non-standard tracker. We would just use your iLink or track your car through its Auto-nav system, which we have not been doing, to the best of my knowledge. That thing would track your car without having to go through channels. The batteries’ll die in a couple of months anyway, but we need anonymity right now.”
“Who the hell planted—the guy in the SUV?”
She nodded. It’s probably how he found you, tonight.
He rolled his eyes again. “Okay. About getting you to a hospital.”
“Thank you, but that won’t be necessary. I’ll be fine.” She slid into the seat, and reached for her handle to close the door. “I just need to rest.”
He closed her door before walking around to the driver’s side and climbing into his seat. When the software awoke, he instructed the car to drive south. Using a quieter secondary road would give him time to find out what was going on. He hesitated as the car wheeled out of the subdivision, unsure how to broach the subject. “I hate to ask you this, and please don’t take it the wrong way. How do I know you were telling the truth when you told me Laz was dead?”
She nodded. “Because…” she hesitated. “I was going to say, because I’m with the Secret Service, and no matter what, we’re committed to the job, to the truth. But as I’m currently acting on my own, proceeding under an ethical imperative, I can only ask you to suspend judgment until you have more information. I give you my word, I had to choose between your safety and your friend’s and I chose yours.” She inhaled and went on. “I had hoped to be able to secure both of you, but I was too late. For you to see him in that condition would have been counterproductive. I’m very sorry for your loss.” She sounded genuinely sad.
Memories of Laz flashed through Zach’s thoughts. The semester they met at school, how they’d become friends, how Laz had introduced him to Kathy, and how Laz had been there when she left. If Goode was telling the truth, there would be a hole in his life that would be hard to fill. He blinked the memories back before they could spill down his cheeks. “I understand, and I wanted to thank you for saving me. I believe that man from the SUV intended to shoot me.”
“Yes, sir. Those were his intentions.”
“Well, thanks. It was a hard decision.”
Her gaze landed on him for a second, and he saw, or hoped he saw something else under it. “You’re welcome. If it’s any consolation, I do sympathize with your loss. It’s always hard to lose a friend, harder when life leads you to believe you have a degree of safety.”
It was his turn to nod. “How was he… I mean, how did he die?”
Her eyes moved to focus on a spot over his left shoulder as she recited the facts in a calm, efficient, emotionless tone. “The victim was sitting in the living room on a dark leather couch. There were no signs of struggle, and no defensive wounds I could see from my vantage point. There was a single entry wound in the chest, approximately five centimeters to the left of the sternum. Directly in front of the victim, a half-full glass of an unidentified dark liquid sat on a coaster on the coffee table next to a plate containing a sandwich. Said table was approximately twenty centimeters from the couch where the victim sat.”
Zach blew out a breath. “That was… impressive, considering how quickly you dragged me out the back door.”
Some of the smile returned to her face. “Thank you, sir. We’re trained to take in details very quickly.”
Zach shifted toward her in his seat. “Tell me, do you always talk that way?”
She raised an eyebrow at him. “What way, Dr. Marshall?”
“I don’t know, like a goddamn robot. Like you’re giving a report.”
Goode started to answer, stopped and considered for a moment. “My apologies, Dr. Marshall. But it helps to maintain objectivity.” Her lips went thin. “You should know—”
“Come on,” he said, trying to smile. “Let’s get you cleaned up and you can tell me what this is all about over coffee, or dinner, or a drink, or something, and we’ll figure it out.”
“I don’t know, Dr. Marshall, I—”
“You do eat and drink, don’t you.”
She nodded, with a little hesitation. “Yes, sir, I do. It’s just…” she trailed off.
“Listen, can we at least make a rule? For the next ten minutes, you call me Zach, and I’ll call you Sara. Just ten minutes. If you don’t like it after that, we can go back to being all tight-assed. Okay?”
A smile crept across her lips. “I’d like that, Dr. Marshall, I mean, Zach.”
“The other part of the rule is I promise not to give you a hard time until you decide we’re safe and you can explain things to me. You can do your job and I’ll do my best to take orders.”
“Thank you, um, Zach.”
He held up a finger. “Consider me silly putty in your hands.”
His comment brought the smile to her eyes. She even chuckled once. “That might be too much to ask.”
“Have it your own way,” he said. Then, “How are you at small talk?”
The smile on her lips faded a bit. “Not very good, sir, um, I mean Zach. We don’t get a lot of time to socialize.”
“That’s okay,” he said. “I pretty much suck at it, too. Graduate school is the last, best killer of the socialization skills of young minds.”
She
laughed again, and he decided he liked the sound of it. He gently squeezed his hand around her forearm. When she glanced at it, he shrugged. “Non-threatening, friendly gesture.”
She closed her eyes and shook her head, but the smile had returned to her lips.
“How’s your head?” Zach tossed the question at her slow and easy.
“Hurts like hell.” She tensed, as soon as she realized she’d let her guard down. “Sorry, I mean—”
“Yeah,” he said. “Bet it does. Dizzy?”
“A little.”
“Nausea?”
“Yes, Zach, I have a mild concussion. I recognize the symptoms.” Her voice carried more exhaustion than irritation.
“Tell me, what did you mean a little while ago?”
“Sorry? When?”
“When you said your colleagues had set out to kill Laz and me and you currently have no direct superiors in the Secret Service.”
She drew in a deep breath, and bit her bottom lip. He wondered if the gesture had been one from childhood, or a learned response she’d picked up as an adult. He found it an endearing characteristic, and determined to ask her later, if there was time.
“I am so far off the reservation on this, that I’ll probably spend the next ten years in federal prison.” She leaned back into her seat again and closed her eyes. “If I live that long. I have to contact Washington in the morning.”
“Crap. You’re serious.”
“Very.”
A chill crept up his back. “At least let me take you to my house where you can get cleaned up and I can take a peek at the cut on your head.”
Goode leaned her head against the seat back, the handkerchief against her forehead. “You can’t go back to your house, Dr. Marshall.” She sounded like the exhaustion was finally gaining on her for the first time.
“Ah, ah, ah,” he waved a finger at her. “It’s Zach.” He checked his watch. “We still have seven minutes. No, it’s okay,” he said, trying a smile. “I’m sure the fire trucks are gone by now.”
She slid him a sidelong look, and raised an eyebrow.
His heart dropped into his stomach. “That was my house?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“My…?” His gut twisted. “They burned my house down?”
She nodded once.
“I wasn’t even—who?”
“Murphy.”
“Who’s Murphy?”
“The SUV tonight.”
“The big guy or the driver?”
“The big guy.” She nodded her head. “Murphy. If you need a bull in your china shop, you want Murphy. Frankly, he scares me, and I don’t scare easily.”
“That why you ran him over with the car tonight?”
“I couldn’t think of any other means to get you away from them.”
“Who was the other guy? The driver, I mean.”
“Newman? Not a bad guy, just a little easily led, and Murphy has a strong personality.”
“If they’re responsible for Laz…. Why were you so cautious leaving his house? They were incapacitated and without wheels.”
“No way to be sure he doesn’t have other assets.” She shrugged a shoulder. “I figured we were better safe than sorry. Besides, in dangerous situations, we’re trained to get our charges to safety at any cost.”
He nodded. “Thanks. Not to question your decisions, but are they going to be all right?”
“I think so. They were breathing when we left them.”
“I think I heard the sound of a stun gun at some point.”
“I had to do something, and I couldn’t bring myself to…”
“Hard as it was, I have to agree with your decision.”
Sara exhaled. “I hope we live to regret it.”
“Yeah. It’d make my day, too.”
***
As they rolled along the dark road, she leaned the seat as far back as it would go and closed her eyes. Zach alternated between the rear-view screen and her face. Once, she was staring at him. It was somehow soft and intense at the same time, like she was looking into, not at him. It left him feeling warm and protected, like the times as a child he’d curled up under an old quilt in a corner of the back porch while winter storms spilled cold rain onto the roof by the bucket-full, when his mother had gone off her meds and locked herself in the house.
He shook it off. “Who is this guy Murphy? I mean, where did he come from. He doesn’t seem to fit the mold.”
“It’s a long story.”
“Let me check my schedule.” He hesitated half a heartbeat. “I seem to have some time available.”
“He’s former OCIS.”
He considered her words for a moment. “OCIS?”
Sara exhaled. “Office of Central Intelligence and Security.”
He stared at her, not sure he’d heard her right. “Central—? I thought the Secret Service was separate from those guys. Crap, they’re almost as bad as the terrorists they were originally organized to combat. Didn’t they just get caught—”
“Canada?” She closed her eyes for a moment. “Yeah. They bungled the nickel-mining op and pissed the Canadian Government off righteously.” She snorted, almost too quiet to hear. “Pretty much the only ally the U.S. still has, and they flagged around with them.”
“Clever bunch.” The sound she made was unself-conscious, innocent. It made him smile.
“Not very, but they’re effective in some of the really corrupt places in the world.”
“Like here.”
“So it would seem.”
Zach considered for a moment. “So, how does a guy like this Murphy end up in the Secret Service? Don’t you people have some kind of screening process or standards or something?”
“Oh, yeah,” she smiled. “There’s a screening process, and everyone you’ve ever known has to bring their own KY to the party. I’m not sure how Murphy ended up on the team. We were detailed to the duty at the same time, after Congressman Stiles announced his candidacy. I made the team because I grew up in Tampa and I’d recently managed a transfer back to this field office. Johnson and Morris are the older guys, and technically in charge, but about three months on, Murphy showed up from nowhere, and started working his own angles. Johnson thinks Rabbit or Sugar requested him personally.”
“Rabbit?”
She shrugged. “Code name. It refers to his habit—”
“I think I can figure that part out. Sugar?”
“As in brown sugar. Don Brown. The campaign manager and spin doctor.”
“Right. Why does he think that?”
“Two reasons—the director was pissed in a major way, and because Murphy gets a free rein. He seems to report to Brown and Stiles directly, which is unheard of.”
Zach nodded. “So this former OCIS dick just runs around bumping people off?”
“He’s never done anything like this before. This is over the top, even for Murphy. Before now, it’s been little things. Nothing Johnson or Morris could take to the director, it’s more his get it done mentality, going outside channels, that sort of thing. There’s something else…”
“What?”
“About a month ago, on a hunch, I entered and searched his apartment, and found a quantity of plastic explosive. I saw him leave his apartment with that explosive earlier this evening.”
“My house?”
“I believe so.”
His jaw tightened. “I’ll see him in jail for the rest of his life before this is over.”
“No, you won’t. Murphy will never go to jail.”
“Dead then. Either way’s okay with me.”
“I hope you don’t intend to follow through on that threat.”
“Why, Special Agent. You going to arrest me?”
“No. He’s trained and experienced. You’ll fail. Then, all this will have been for nothing. I wouldn’t like that very much.”
He sat back against his seat, and considered her statement. “Okay, we’ll table that plan for now. What’s next on the
agenda?”
“The next order of business is to get to GenTest.”
“My lab?”
“Yes. We have to get into your lab.”
“No problem, It’s a biometric reader and I happen to have my thumb right here. Why?”
“We should get to your lab as soon as possible, preferably tonight, before evidence can be removed.”
“Evidence? What evidence?”
“Evidence in Dr. Thomas’s murder investigation, for one,” she said, “and conspiracy to commit murder, specifically yours. An attempt to cover up facts and defraud the American public, for another.”
“Evidence in a…” he hesitated as pieces dropped into place. “Cover-up.” The hair on his neck stood up. “The DNA sample.”
“Yes.”
CHAPTER 9
Zach leaned against his seat and stared out at the night, unable to comprehend what she’d just said. His mouth went dry as his car drove them through the night on auto.
“I’m sorry, Zach.”
Thoughts careened around the inside of his head until they stalled, leaving him with one inescapable conclusion. “My friend is dead because we did the testing on that sample. Because I did the testing on that sample.” He buried his face in his palms, trying in vain to wrap his mind around it. “I might as well have pulled the trigger myself.” Bile backed up into his throat.
“No.” The word was almost a command.
“No, what?” He spun on her in his seat as he struggled to catch his breath.
“No, you didn’t kill your friend.” She rolled onto her side in the seat, touched his sleeve with her fingers in a gesture of kindness. “I brought the sample, remember? You didn’t know where it came from.” Her voice softened. “I understand it’s hard to—”
He glared at Goode through tear-blurred vision. “Hard? Hard? Fuck hard. I thought you’d brought us a sample in some low-profile bullshit federal trial of some poor dip-shit that didn’t even merit coverage by the news feeds. But it’s not, is it?”
Goode shook her head.
“No. Hell, no,” he said, wanting to strangle her. “’Cause you’re not the FBI, you’re Secret fucking Service, and you don’t do terrorist plots, do you?”
“Not very often.” Her voice was little more than a whisper.
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