Afterglow

by Cherry Adair

  Geographically, they were closing the gap.

  She hoped Paul’s unintentional clue would be the key to finding the lab. Her shoulder hit a tree trunk with a dull thud, but she didn’t cry out in surprise. A city girl, Dakota found the night silence spooky, and she was glad to hear her heartbeat and the soft crunch of their feet on the dirt and scrub grass.

  “Okay?” Rand asked quietly, his fingers tightening around hers.

  She nodded, realized he couldn’t see her, and whispered, “Peachy.” She had no idea how he knew where they were going, since it was completely dark. He must have eyes like a bat. Or was that ears? Radar? Instinct? Or all of the above. Maybe he was just damn good at this undercover security stuff. For a second, she allowed herself to wonder what their lives might’ve been like if he’d remained a stunt coordinator, and if he’d trusted her. What kind of life would they have had?

  She’d never know.

  After about ten minutes he let go of her hand and turned on the powerful flashlight, keeping the beam low and partially covered by his palm. She tucked her fingers under his arm and closed the small gap between them.

  The narrow beam, filled with small flying insects, led the way through the rocky ground scattered with clumps of grass, a large tree trunk, and the occasional looming shrub. “How are our numbers?”

  “Holding steady.”

  “The ruins,” he announced, letting the narrow beam illuminate the walls.

  Ruins was right. The structure had four broken-down stone walls and no roof. Rand led her “inside” and scanned the walls with the light. No bigger than ten by twelve, it had once been an outbuilding of some kind for a long-vanished monastery. Now it was nothing more than a pile of rocks.

  He set the light on a protruding rock, pointing it at the ground, and dropped the backpack beside it. “Strip.”

  She plopped her tote down at her feet. “You say that to a woman holding a gun?”

  He slid his hand under her hair and pulled her forward. “I can because I have a bigger gun.”

  She tilted her face, and her lips were right there as he closed the gap and kissed her.

  Too short, but definitely sweet. He looked into her eyes as he lifted his head. “Change quickly. Let’s get this over with.”

  Dakota pulled dry jeans and long-sleeved T-shirts out of the backpack, held one of each closer to the meager light to check the size, and handed him his clothes. She tossed hers over a nearby rock and quickly stripped to bare, goose-bumpy skin. It felt liberating being outside on a black night, completely naked. Too bad they couldn’t linger. She toed off her shoes instead of reaching for Rand.

  Rand leaned over and rubbed down her chilled skin with something dry, running the soft fabric all the way from her shoulders over her breasts and down her belly. “I hope that isn’t your nice, dry shirt,” she scolded, leaning into him, then backing up because he still wore his cold, wet clothes.

  “You have goose bumps.”

  She smiled. “You can’t see my goose bum—”

  “About time you got here,” a man said without inflection. “While this is touching, we expected you two hours ago.” He stepped into the small stone ruin to join them.

  CONFUSION STAYED RAND’S GUN hand, but he guided Dakota behind him as he stared toward the voice of the man who shouldn’t be anywhere near this place.

  The faint beam of the down-turned flashlight glinted momentarily on Creed’s gun. “Seth? What the hell are you doing here?” The director was so out of context that Rand wasn’t sure whether the man was his old friend Seth Creed or his doppelgänger. It would’ve been helpful if the damned moon would make an appearance. All that was visible were several black shapes beyond the broken wall behind Creed. The narrow beam of the flashlight did little more than make the director’s features marginally easier to identify.

  Dakota crowded against his back, her cold fingers brushing the small of his back.

  “Let Dr. North dress, fellas,” Creed said helpfully. He stepped aside so that several men could come up alongside Rand. “A little crowded, but we’re all friends here.”

  No, Rand suspected they weren’t friends at all. “Make it fast,” he murmured to Dakota, who was shimmying into her jeans, still vulnerable behind him. The darkness concealed her now, but that wasn’t going to last.

  Rand was aware of the man beside him a nanosecond before he felt the hard, unmistakable jab of a muzzle hard to his jugular. He didn’t dare move, or Dakota would lose him as a human shield. A second guy grabbed him by the arm and started patting him down. Found the Glock, stuck in the front of his jeans, then patted down his legs and got the knife in his ankle sheath.

  The shadowy men stepped back. “He’s clean.”

  “I’m not putting on a striptease here,” Dakota said curtly, coming up flush behind Rand. He felt her tuck the .38 into his waistband. She pulled his shirt over it, and shifted away. “Turn your backs!” He heard the rustle of fabric and the brush of her arms and knees against him as she finished pulling on her dry clothing in the shelter of his body. “I don’t know what’s going on, but whatever it is can wait until I put my shoes on.”

  “You’re a very difficult girl to pin down, Dr. North.”

  “That’s because I’m not a girl,” she said with asperity, stomping her feet into her sneakers. Rand recognized that tone in her voice, knowing it didn’t bode well for whoever was on the receiving in. “What’s this all about? What does a film director have to do with Rapture?”

  “I made a movie by that name a couple years back, remember that, Maguire?” Yeah, Rand remembered. Creed had told him the stunts in it were going to make his career as a stunt coordinator. He’d felt indebted to the director for the opportunity then. But he sure as hell didn’t now. “Bring them along,” Creed said to his men, his shadow drifting toward the opening between the crumbled walls. He added to Dakota, “It was the last job your very talented boyfriend did before he quit the biz.”

  “News flash, neither of us works for you, so stop giving us orders.” Dakota slipped her hand into Rand’s as they stepped onto the grass beyond the close confines of the walls. The other shadows crowded around them.

  Creed chuckled. Amiable, good-old-boy laughter that hinted at beers shared and fun times.

  Jesus. This didn’t compute. “What are you doing here, Creed?” Rand’s footsteps slowed. Dakota’s quiet, “Don’t!” motivated him to keep walking more than the hard jab to the ribs with the barrel of a gun. Damn it to hell.

  “This way. I have a car. A luxury here but, I find, a necessity if one doesn’t want to traipse all over hell and go by foot like the monks do. It’s six miles to the lab, and I don’t want to tire you out. It’s going to be a big night for you.”

  The way Creed talked in circles and in an unrelentingly cheerful tone made the hair on the back of Rand’s neck lift in warning. His flight-or-fight responses were on red alert. He tried to assess his surroundings as they walked. It was pitch dark, he had no fucking idea of the lay of the land, and these guys were heavily armed. All he had were his wits and Dakota’s pea shooter. “What the fuck’s going on?”

  “Dr. North is necessary for further work on Rapture,” Creed said as if this were a normal conversation over lunch at the Ivy.

  Rand’s gut clenched as he realized Dakota had been right all along. They’d wanted her, and he was the vehicle to get her there.

  “I stopped working on DL6-94 two years ago,” Dakota told him, her voice flat. “I don’t have my notes, and I sure as hell don’t remember any of the formulas. Frankly, even if I did, I’m not going to be part of turning this drug loose on the world. Just save time and take us back to the boat.”

  “You have all the notes, Dr. North. If you can’t access them from that reportedly clever mind of yours, you can retrieve them from your iPad.”

  Her reaction was instantaneous, and she stopped dead in her tracks. “You son of a bitch! You were the one who set me up? Why, for God’s sake? I don’t even know yo
u!”

  Rand felt as though he’d fallen into some sort of hallucinogenic rabbit hole as beside him Dakota’s entire body bristled with fury. “You robbed Dakota’s house? Set her up to be convicted of a felony for stealing trade secrets?”

  “Not personally. I have people for that. And I can assure you, Dr. North, you might’ve been accused of economic espionage, but never imprisoned. That was merely a means to an end. Here we are,” Creed said cheerfully, opening the back door. No light came on. “I’ll sit with you and keep you company. Stavros, get in the other side beside Dr. North.”

  “Means to what end?” Rand demanded as Dakota slid into the car, before he got in beside her. He squeezed her fingers as Creed crowded in on his left. The other guy got in on the other side of Dakota, squashing them tight as fucking sardines in the back of the vehicle.

  Creed didn’t respond.

  What purpose could he possibly have for setting her up in such a Machiavellian way? The end result was obvious. He needed her here to work on the old formula. “How did you know about this particular drug? Did Paul mention his frustration over the years as the teams worked out the kinks to get the drug to market?”

  Creed hadn’t been interested in an antidepressant. Fucking hell. Paul must’ve told him of the formula’s aphrodisiacal properties. Avarice was behind the director’s bizarre behavior. He must’ve discovered that the drug was unstable, and with Paul in prison, he needed a chemist intimately familiar with the formula to fix it.

  He’d gone to extraordinary lengths to get Dakota to Greece by the most convoluted methods possible.

  “All it needs is Dr. North’s experience and a little fine-tuning.”

  With a sinking heart, Rand heard the smile in the older man’s voice. He was a dead man walking, and Dakota, once she’d stabilized Creeds multibillion-dollar product, would be expendable.

  Except the formula couldn’t be stabilized. He squeezed her slightly clammy hand in warning, but he knew he didn’t need to caution her not to blurt out that little factoid. First Seth would force her to prove that was the case. Then he’d kill her. It was just a matter of timing.

  Four men got into the front seat, and the car rolled across the rocky ground, lights off. There was nothing around them but inky black. No sign of the ocean or the moon. Just a sense of motion and the crunch and snap of the tires going over rocks and shrubbery.

  “This is all very double-o-seven,” Rand said dryly, hoping like hell his eyes adjusted soon. “Where are we going?” Not that he’d had any choice, but getting into the car was probably a fatal mistake. Not knowing their destination made formulating a plan of escape tricky. His mind was going a mile a minute as he tried to think three steps ahead. Unfortunately, he couldn’t see three inches ahead.

  Not even the dash lights shone, making the darkness complete. The man driving must be wearing night-vision glasses, because otherwise he was driving blind. Fucking dangerous, close to a six-story drop-off.

  “I’ll show you Dr. North’s state-of-the-art lab before we make arrangements for your departure, Rand. You’ll be impressed, Dr. North.”

  “I’ve seen state-of-the-art labs before.” Her voice remained steady, but Rand knew her well. She might’ve seemingly taken the quick gun battle at the hangar in Albania in stride, but right now the cumulative experiences of the last few days were catching up with her. She was understandably, justifiably scared. “I’d prefer to leave now.”

  “After all the trouble I went to getting you here? That’s not very sporting of you, Doctor.”

  Without the distraction of visual input, Rand immediately picked up the nuances of what Creed was saying. “What do you mean, ‘trouble’? What did you do to get Dakota here?”

  Creed chuckled. “How far back do you want me to go? Let’s see … We could start with the actor I hired out of Central Casting to play the private detective for your mother. He was an excellent investment. I thought the actress portraying Dr. North was particularly talented. You saw the stills. An amazing likeness, don’t you think? The wig she wore had to be custom-made, of course. Dr. North’s hair is so distinctive. I knew you’d look no further than the hair for your proof, buddy.”

  Not the manipulation of a possessive mother. A deliberate act with far-reaching consequences. “Did my mother know he was fake?”

  “No. Which made nutty, fucking fruitcake, bat-shit crazy mommy’s performance so much more sincere. Manipulative bitch fell into the script as if well rehearsed.”

  “You cut and dubbed the video of Dakota and my mother talking at the house?” Shit. Of course he had. Rand wanted to punch him. “Did you kill her, you son of a bitch?” he demanded, a nerve in his jaw twitching.

  Dakota murmured, “Rand,” and he realized he’d been squeezing her hand hard enough to hurt her. He eased his grip, apologizing by stroking his thumb over the backs of her knuckles.

  Christ. They’d all been set up by this egotistical son of a bitch. His mother, Paul, Dakota, and himself. Mere pieces in an elaborate chess game for Creed’s amusement.

  “Me?” The director’s voice tinged with satisfaction and a trace of amusement. “Good Lord, no. However, I did make sure Dr. North was fired. Damned inconvenient that she still happened to be in the lab the night I blew it; she was supposed to leave right away, not linger. Very diligent of you, Dr. North, but ultimately extremely inconvenient. The explosion almost killed you.”

  “It was extremely inconvenient for me too, you sick fuck!” Dakota snapped. “Not to mention the small inconvenience of murdering all those innocent people.”

  Creed chuckled. “Had to get rid of any remaining evidence pertaining to Rapture and anyone who might be able to reconstruct the successful tests.” Creed shifted slightly in his seat. “You were the one who showed me how to detonate the C-4, remember? It went off better than I expected—you’d be proud of what a good pyrotechnic student I was.”

  “Jesus, Creed. That explosion killed a dozen people—”

  “Dr. North wasn’t supposed to still be in the building when it blew, over diligence on her part, and a small miscalculation on mine. I must admit, I had some tense moments when she had to spend so long in the hospital.”

  “Sorry my recovery was so inconvenient.”

  “The planning was meticulous until you were foolish enough to stay in the lab after you were fired. Your protracted hospital stay put us back several months.”

  “Well, seeing as how you put me there, that’s hardly my fault, now is it?”

  Rand felt Creed’s body tense beside him. He didn’t like someone questioning his fucking loony-tunes plans any more than he liked actors questioning his directions on set.

  “If your intention wasn’t for Dakota to be arrested for stealing the formula, what was the point of going to all the trouble to make it appear that she’d done so?” Rand asked as the car slowed into a sharp turn. Were they almost at their destination?

  “A precaution. Burning bridges for her. Really, who’d hire a chemist who’d steal company secrets? No one.”

  “So you made sure she was out of work after you put her in the hospital.”

  “And homeless,” Creed added with a smile in his voice.

  “A prince of a guy,” Dakota said tightly.

  “Then it was a matter of getting her to come to us.”

  “Kidnapping would’ve been more expedient,” she pointed out grimly.

  “You’re far too stubborn to have cooperated with us if we’d resorted to kidnapping and coercion. We wanted you to have no where to turn, to be completely out of options.”

  Rand shifted, wishing he could see Seth’s face. Dakota’s .38 was a reassuring hard knot in the small of his back. But he couldn’t reach it easily, and in the close confines of the car it would probably do more damage than good. Creed had always been a well-prepared, meticulously organized director. Rand already knew the men in the car with them were armed to the teeth. All weapons trained, point blank, at him.

  “Who’s ‘us’?
” he asked.

  “You, my friend, unfortunately were—and are—expendable. Just a means to an end. Amanda and Jason’s wedding cost me a fortune. But I consider it a lucrative investment. A twofer, as it were. It not only demonstrated the wonders of Rapture to our buyer but also coerced Dr. North to come to Europe, even if it meant interacting with the man who broke her heart. The obvious use of Rapture ensured that she’d come racing to your side to help you.”

  “You were responsible for dosing the wedding guests?” Rand said bitterly. “Talk about Machiavellian and convoluted. All that as an inducement to get Dakota to come here? My God, you are seriously fucked up, you know that? That shit is nothing more than poison.”

  “Oh, I know,” the director said almost proudly. “When we were showing it to our buyers in Spain, they wanted to see what the effect was when Rapture was airborne. We fed it through the air-conditioning system. It was very gratifying. We let the salesman keep whatever he took from the safe. An employee perk,” he said, chuckling.

  “You were right,” Rand told Dakota, then addressed Creed. “Who was that demo for?”

  “Eastern bloc mob. Those petty criminals have the green, and plenty of it. A very lucrative deal. They put in their first order yesterday.”

  “And in Paris?”

  “Another salesman. One of our best street-drug men. He scored big with that buyer, a dealer who holds a monopoly on almost half of Europe. We gave him France. No need to be greedy. We’re all going to make a great deal of money with this venture. That idiot salesman had to party afterward, happily talking about things he had no business sharing. Partaking of the product is not allowed. His death was inconvenient when we were in such a critical phase of operations.”

  “Tragic,” Rand muttered.

  “We tried to take Dr. North at the hotel in Paris,” Creed said conversationally. “But when our men arrived, she’d gone into the catacombs in search of you, my friend. Ahh, true love. Even her severe claustrophobia didn’t deter her as we’d hoped.”