by Radclyffe
“Ready when you are,” Loren said.
Ramsey grunted and disappeared around the corner. Loren caught up to him before the double doors that led to church, the members-only meeting room where they held their tactical gatherings. Quincy was there, and Armeo, both of them looking hungover and as confused as Loren was about the sudden meeting. Ramsey closed the door after she followed him inside.
Loren took her seat in the usual place and Ramsey slumped into his at the head of the big table. “Jesus, what a night.”
Loren waited for Ramsey to confront her about bringing Tricia into the sanctuary, but he ignored her.
“Everything okay with Tricia?” Quincy asked. He was the only one who could broach a personal subject with Ramsey—they’d been friends since they were kids and now Quincy was Ramsey’s VP. Quincy’s number one job was to have Ramsey’s back in all things.
Ramsey smiled wryly. “Still got my balls.”
Everyone laughed and the tension in the air lessened.
“So what time is it? Fucking eight o’clock in the morning? Fucking militia.” Ramsey rubbed his face, his palm producing a scratching sound as it rubbed over the bristles covering his heavy jaw. “Some broad who says she’s in charge of the gun deal wants a look at the exchange point.”
Loren’s antenna went up and she stiffened. “Wait a minute. Somebody we don’t know? How do we know she’s even with the militia?”
“We don’t,” Ramsey said. “That’s what I told her. Said I didn’t know what she was talking about.”
“What did she say?” Quincy asked.
“She gave me enough details to prove she was the real deal.”
“You sure she couldn’t have gotten the info from some kind of surveillance?” Loren asked. “Or a snitch?”
Sometimes an undercover operative’s best defense was misdirection. She’d hardly raise the possibility of a snitch if she was one.
Ramsey shook his head. “She knew about your meeting with Graves the other night. Who was there, location—too many details she could only have gotten if she was on the inside.”
“So what’d you tell her?” Armeo asked.
“That I’d have to get back to her.” Ramsey looked at Loren. “We need to bump up the timetable. Get the money and get clear of this bunch. They’re loose cannons.”
Loren almost smiled but managed to shrug with a straight face. “I’ll do what I can, but like I said, big shipments like this have to be moved carefully. Something tips off the feds, or even the locals, a lot of people could go down.”
“Work your magic, McElroy.”
“Do what I can.”
“In the meantime, I told her we’d send someone to rendezvous with her. Discuss the exchange. Map it out.”
“I can do that,” Loren said before Ramsey suggested anyone else. If there was a new player, she wanted to know who it was, and another meeting could be her way in. “Tell them I want to meet on their ground first. That I need to be sure who I’m dealing with before I provide any details.”
Ramsey’s eyebrows went up. “What are you thinking?”
“I’m thinking a new player at this point doesn’t feel right. We wanted a look at them, this is our chance.”
Ramsey looked at Quincy and Armeo. They both nodded.
“Quincy and Armeo will provide backup. All of you, stay available.”
“Sure,” Loren said.
“What about the redhead?” Ramsey winced. “Jesus, what is it with the broads these days—now we have to negotiate with them? Whatever happened to the days when all they did was suck dick?”
Quincy and Armeo laughed. Ramsey looked at her.
“What’s the story? You find out anything when you weren’t busy extending a little hospitality?”
Loren’s stomach tightened. “She checks out. The New Year’s run is coming up, and you know national always wants more dues this time of year to finance the council’s flight to Reno.”
“Yeah, while the rest of us freeze our nuts off riding there,” Quincy complained.
“Right,” Loren said. “I think the leadership wants to be sure we’re sending in our fair share.”
“You get any vibes she’s here looking for anything else?”
“Nope.” Loren knew how things looked—she and Sky had set it up that way. “We haven’t exactly been talking a lot of business, though.”
Quincy snorted. “Hard to talk when her tongue’s down your throat.”
Loren grinned.
“Keep working on her,” Ramsey said. “I don’t want it to look like we’re nervous, so do whatever you have to do to make it look like your interest is…personal.”
“No problem,” Loren said.
“Yeah, I’ll bet it’s not,” Armeo muttered. “I get wood just watching her sip a beer. Wouldn’t mind her lips around—”
“Fuck you, Armeo,” Loren said.
Armeo made sucking sounds and laughed.
“If I get wind of any problem,” Loren said to Ramsey, “you’ll be the first to know.”
Ramsey studied her silently and finally nodded.
*
The brunette Loren had called Tricia stalked over to Sky like a lioness patrolling her hunting territory. “So, who are you?”
Sky smiled and held out her hand. “They call me Red. Name’s Lisa.”
Tricia gave her a surprisingly strong handshake. Her dark eyes, shrewd and appraising, dropped to Sky’s chest and then lower in the same way most of the men’s usually did, but she wasn’t getting a sexual vibe from her. She was being sized up as potential competition, so Sky relaxed and let Ramsey’s old lady take a good long look. When Tricia’s gaze returned to hers, Sky said, “I think I have to get myself a gun.”
“Oh yeah? Why is that?” Tricia said.
“Because I’ve had plenty of mornings when I’ve wanted to blow some bimbo’s tits off, myself.”
Tricia narrowed her eyes and finally grinned. “Ain’t that the truth? Dick or no dick, every damn one of them has a problem keeping their fly zipped.”
“True enough.” Sky gestured to a coffeepot behind the counter. “Make you some coffee?”
“Sure.” Trish settled onto a stool at the end of the bar like a queen.
Sky went around behind, rinsed the pot, and filled the coffeemaker with fresh cold water. She looked around, opened a drawer under the countertop, and found the coffee packets. In a minute, she had the coffee brewing. After rinsing a couple of mugs, she set them on the bar and folded her arms, facing Tricia. Tricia was the club president’s old lady. That made her number one among all the women and more powerful than a lot of the men. If Sky wanted inside the club, she needed to make friends with her. The first step to acceptance was to show her respect for Tricia’s position. “I’ll have that for you in a minute.”
“Appreciate it.” Tricia reached down the bar and took a pack of cigarettes someone had abandoned. She lit one, blew a thin stream of smoke into the dust-filled, gray morning light. “Where you from?”
“Little place south of San Diego.”
“Yeah? What the hell are you doing here?”
“A favor for a friend. Dougie up in Sacramento called me. Said they wanted some numbers crunched. I owed him. Otherwise you couldn’t get me into this frozen hellhole for all the money in China.”
Tricia laughed sharply. “I keep after Ramsey to take me to Palm Springs or Arizona or any damn place as long as it’s warm in the winter, but he won’t do it.”
“Can’t trust the club to anyone else, I guess,” Sky said noncommittally. Tricia was fishing, and she wasn’t going to throw herself onto a hook by criticizing Ramsey.
“Two weeks in the friggin’ middle of January when nothing’s happening. Wouldn’t miss anything.” Tricia ground her cigarette out angrily in an ashtray.
“Gotta be tough sometimes, I guess.” Sky poured the coffee and placed the mug in front of Tricia. “A hell of a lot of fun, though.”
“Yeah, mostly.” Tricia laughed
and sipped the coffee. “Thanks.” She lit another cigarette. “So, does Dougie still ride that sweet little Harley Sportster?”
“Last time I saw him,” Sky said, calling up the images in Douglas a.k.a. “Dougie” Holloway’s file, “he was riding a Fat Boy.”
“Oh yeah. I forgot he traded that old bike in.”
“Yeah? He always told me he won the Fat Boy off a Soledad in an all-night poker game.”
Tricia laughed. “Yeah, that sounds like him. Always got a story.”
“Yeah.”
“So how long you gonna be here?”
Sky took a chance. “I was only supposed to be here a day or two, but then…” She nodded toward the door leading to the back rooms. “I kinda like some of the scenery.”
“I take it you don’t mean Ramsey.” Tricia raised a brow.
“Sorry, no.”
“So you swing the other way?”
“Yeah.”
“All the way or, you know, flexible?”
Sky lifted a shoulder. “Meaning no disrespect, but when I’ve got a soft mouth between my legs, I want someone who knows what they’re doing from experience.”
“No disrespect taken.” Tricia laughed. “Good luck. I hear McElroy’s very good at it, but she’s not much for staying around.”
“I’m not looking for a proposal. Just some fun.” Sky glanced to the back of the bar as Loren walked in next to Ramsey. Some people would call Ramsey handsome with his powerful physique and dark, craggy looks, but Loren was just as strong and powerful with the added benefit of being gorgeous. “And that is some fun package.”
“No denying that.” Tricia put out her smoke, stood, and cocked a hip in Ramsey’s direction. She gave Sky a last look. “If you’re still here the end of the week, get Loren to bring you along on the New Year’s run to Reno. I could use some company whose brains are bigger than their boobs for a change.”
“I thought I needed an invitation.”
“Consider yourself invited.”
“In that case,” Sky said with a satisfied smile, “I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”
Chapter Sixteen
“I hope you had better luck than I did,” Cam said to Wes after they’d cleared security and settled at a small table at one of the airport chain restaurants to wait for their flight.
A waitress flew by, barely pausing long enough to say, “Need menus?”
“Coffee and a turkey club would be fine,” Cam said.
“Same.” Wes draped her black topcoat over an adjacent chair.
Like Cam, Wes wore a tailored dark suit and white shirt, and she carried herself with the authoritative attitude and direct gaze of the naval officer she was. Cam had wanted someone with that cool, commanding demeanor to take on a group of what had to be defensive scientists and litigation-phobic corporate directors. No one at Eugen Corp had been briefed on exactly what had happened to the stolen viral agent. All they’d been told was that it had been used in a criminal undertaking. Cam had dealt with the security director—cop to cop—and she’d gotten nothing she hadn’t known before the flight down.
“I reviewed the security tapes for the two days before and up to the night the virus went missing,” Cam said. “There’s nothing on them out of the ordinary. Angela Jones is the best suspect we have, since she’s the only one missing, and she can be seen coming and going from the facility and the lab at her usual times. If she spirited that vial out, she was very good at it.”
“She’d had plenty of time to plan,” Wes said, sipping the coffee the waitress had deposited on another fly-by. “And if someone really wants to get something out, it’s not that difficult. Almost all the security at research centers like this is directed at keeping would-be terrorists from getting in or creating physical barriers to prevent the agent itself from escaping via airborne contamination. Precautions against someone carrying it out are less rigorous. In private centers like Eugen, security isn’t even federally regulated. Unless every person going in and out is scanned—thermally, radiographically, and radioactively—detecting a small quantity of an agent in a sealed vial is pretty impossible. And the cost of that kind of security is prohibitive.”
“Did anyone strike you as being involved?” Cam asked.
Wes shook her head. “I talked to the lead investigator, and he seems solid. I know him by reputation, and he’s devastated by the breach in security. This kind of exposure can call into question all the results of the team’s work. If someone can spirit something out of the lab, someone can introduce foreign agents or sabotage the results in some other way. Basically, they’re looking at repeating months if not years of work to validate what they’ve already proven.”
“So what you’re telling me is this guy would have no motive to be behind this, unless his sole focus is sabotage.”
“Exactly, and I can’t see that that’s the case. He has a well-established career. He left academia when the funding dried up. A lot of the cutting-edge researchers did. They simply couldn’t continue to support their work without federal funding, and that was one of the first things to disappear when the economy took a dive.” Wes shook her head. “Unless you turn up something in the background checks on the other team members that points to an extremist connection or some kind of blackmail leverage, I don’t see the leak being one of the primary investigators.”
“We haven’t, but I wanted your face-to-face assessment,” Cam said. “How many people were in on the planning stages of the project?”
Wes sat back as the waitress slid club sandwiches in front of them. Once she’d left, Wes picked hers up and took a bite. After swallowing some coffee, she said, “The lead investigator, the co-investigator, and several research associates drafted the original plans for the project, but once it got under way, there were probably a dozen people who had at least some working knowledge of the project goals.”
“So how hard would it be for someone interested in stealing one of the specimens to get themselves into a position to manage that?”
“Not that easy,” Wes said. “Like I said, the project wasn’t exactly top-secret, but it was pretty small. On the other hand, the nature of the work necessitated a Level Four environment, and lots of projects are going on in there. Someone working on a different project would have access, theoretically at least, to everything in that lab.”
Cam frowned. “So we’re back to looking at everyone who had clearance for that lab.”
Wes nodded. “Anyone on the main project would just be too obvious. What about Jones? Anything more on her?”
“We knew Angela Jones was an alias,” Cam said, “but I was hoping we could find out more about her—or turn up some other possible suspects. Her file here is as clean as the background I already ran. Strong credentials, been here almost two years.” Cam paused. “Do you have to register this kind of project or something?”
“Ordinarily, yes, investigative projects of this nature are registered with the FDA. They receive a DIN—a drug investigation number—even if no drugs are expected to be produced.”
“And there would’ve been a record, somewhere.”
“Sure. Probably multiple places, especially if the PIs—the principal investigators—went outside Eugen Corp for funding.”
“So let’s say someone’s looking for exactly this kind of project, discovers this place, maybe other places that do something similar, and applies for positions at all of them,” Cam said. “Someone with Jones’s credentials is likely to get one of those jobs, right?”
“Absolutely. I reviewed the copy of her CV you sent me. Stellar training, good previous experience, and apparently willing to relocate. That would make her an excellent potential candidate.”
“So we dig deeper into her background. She’s still the number one candidate,” Cam said. “Eventually we’ll find the place where her falsified identity breaks down.” She thought she might already know where the truth stopped and the lies began. Some things couldn’t be erased or repurposed. Angela Jones’s b
irth certificate might be fake, her name, her driver’s license, her social security number—all fabricated. But at some point she had come from somewhere, had to point to a trail that could be checked. Somewhere she had stopped being who she was and had become Angela Jones, and Cam was betting it was the day she’d left home and started college. The day she entered the system, she became Angela Jones. Before then, she and Jennifer Pattee had known one another—Cam was certain of that. An operation this long-range wasn’t orchestrated by people who didn’t know and trust each other completely. Who didn’t have history. What she needed to do was follow them both back in time until their paths intersected, and then she’d find the ones who had trained them. Were very likely still training others just like them.
“We did catch one break,” Wes said.
“Tell me nothing else is missing.”
“The vial we confiscated is the only thing they’ve come up with that’s not accounted for. Their inventory has been thorough. If there’s another attack, it’s not going to be viral. At least, not with this agent.”
“No,” Cam said slowly. “Next time, I think the focus is going to be much more directed. They were hoping for a big splash by releasing the virus at a public function with the president and high-ranking officials in attendance—they’ve lost the element of surprise now, and they know we’ll be doubling security on those kinds of events. Having failed to create the kind of chaos that produces multiple casualties and throws confidence in the government into question, they’ll want to make a strong statement of some other kind. The way to do that is to single out a well-known target of critical importance to as many people as possible.”
Wes put her sandwich down, suddenly not hungry. “POTUS?”
“Or someone close to him—someone whose death could stand in for his, who represents the same kind of public symbol.” Cam didn’t need to name names. Wes knew. And so would whoever followed in Jennifer’s wake—and she knew someone would. She needed to find them or draw them out first. But before that, she needed something else. She checked her watch and stood up. “Listen, I’m going to change flights. Sorry.”
