by April Hunt
Keeping in shape and running Steele Ops with his brothers and the ever-growing collection of military elite they employed took up most of his time.
They’d officially opened their doors last year, converting the historic Keaton Jailhouse in downtown Alexandria to house both of their business ventures. Iron Bars Distillery & Beer Garden took up the first three floors and had quickly gained a reputation within the community. But beneath the feet of their vanilla-vodka-loving customers, Steele Ops ran like a well-oiled machine.
Anti-terrorism. Covert extractions. They got shit done the government couldn’t do thanks to bureaucratic red tape or lack of manpower. Only a select few knew of their existence, one of them former Army chief of staff Hogan Wilcox.
His teammate’s Cade’s father, Wilcox was the one who’d raised tonight’s alarm, which meant that whatever happened here at Tru Tech wasn’t insignificant. As much as he didn’t want to be here, it was probably a good thing they were.
Ryder cleared his throat as they took another step to the front of the security line. “I have one request. Just a little thing really. I wouldn’t even call it a request…more like a suggestion.”
“You two are just full of demands today,” Roman muttered.
“Let me do the talking. We both know when you open your mouth, chances are high you’ll piss someone off.”
True. Of his brothers, Liam and Ryder were definitely the most personable, with Knox, the eldest, a close second. Roman had never been much of a people-pleaser, and after his years in black ops and working at the kind of CIA installations that don’t exist, he saw even less need for roundabout politeness. Manners only got in the way of progress.
“I’ll keep my people skills on the down-low,” Roman agreed. “At least until someone says something that’s too stupid to ignore.”
From deep inside the security perimeter, one of the plainclothes cops ended her conversation with what looked to be a lab employee and headed their way. Natasha James eyed each of the brothers warily as she motioned for the perimeter guard to let them pass through.
Finally.
“I should’ve known when Roger Carmichael said he’d hired outside help who it would’ve been. Why is it that wherever there’s trouble there’s usually a Steele?”
Liam grinned. “Come on, Nat. Admit it. If we all hadn’t come back home, you would’ve been bored sitting in that squad car.”
Nat dropped her gaze to the detective badge on her hip. “Actually, I’ve graduated from beat cop—which means that this clusterfuck is all mine. Please tell me you won’t make it any worse.”
“It’s definitely not on our agenda.” Ryder nodded toward the building behind them. “Can you tell us what happened?”
“Long story made longer? At nine last night, four masked men stepped off a private elevator and right into the basement lab. They threatened the workers, shot the security guard when he tried intervening on the doctor’s behalf, stole a nasty virus, and then, believe it or not, hopped back on the elevator as if nothing happened.”
“And no one thought to stop them from leaving the building?” Roman asked.
“Yeah well, that’s just it. They didn’t leave the building…and yet they’re not here.” She guided them to Tru Tech’s front entrance.
“How the hell does that work?”
Nat shrugged and led the way through the police chaos and into the building. “Wish I knew. There’s only one way to get down to the basement lab where the virus was stolen and there’s no video footage of anyone stepping onto the elevator. Just off of it when they reached the lab.”
Liam grunted and said exactly what Roman was thinking. “Then someone’s messing around with the surveillance images.”
“If they are, we sure as hell can’t tell.”
“I’ll be able to tell.”
Liam wasn’t boasting. It was the honest truth. There wasn’t much the former Navy intelligence officer couldn’t do when a computer was put in front of him. If someone tampered with the security feed, Liam would know. If no one did, and these assholes really did disappear into thin air, then they did it while carting around brass-plated balls and fucking magic wands.
“You said something about a doctor?” Roman asked. “People were in the lab at the time of the theft?”
“Three of my best employees.” Dressed in a suit that probably cost more than Roman currently had in his bank account, an older man crossed the lobby, headed their way. “Roger Carmichael. Tru Tech CEO.”
“Your three employees?”
“Dr. Isabel Santiago, her assistant Maddy Calhoun, and the Legion’s core evening security personnel, Frank Hutchins.”
“Core?” Roman asked.
“Not every staff member is permitted into the Legion, for obvious safety reasons. Those who are undergo rigorous security clearances and specialized training in the event of—”
“Something like this happening?”
Ryder cleared his throat and muttered under his breath. “Down-low.”
Carmichael frowned, obviously unhappy with Roman’s retort. “Actually, no. I can’t say we’ve ever trained for this eventuality, because it shouldn’t be possible.” His eyes narrowed on each of them before falling on Roman. “I can’t stress the importance of finding my missing virus enough. As it stands, I’m sure the government will use this as another reason to gift our deserved funds to another undeserving cracker-jack box lab.”
Carmichael’s tone rubbed Roman the wrong way. “That’s why you want us to track down your virus? Because you won’t get your bonus check in the mail?”
Ryder cleared his throat, playing referee. “We’ll find your virus, Mr. Carmichael. Where are the employees who were present at the time of the break-in?”
“In quarantine until their bloodwork comes back clean, which will hopefully be sometime tomorrow.”
Roman cocked an eyebrow. “Was there an actual exposure?”
“It doesn’t appear so. According to Dr. Santiago, despite the fact that the thieves stole the virus, they did so with great care. The quarantine is a standard precaution. I’m guessing you want to talk to them?”
“You guessed right.”
Nat nodded. “That’s a good idea. Maybe repeating the story will jog something in their memories. I’ll get in touch with you later to compare notes.”
Liam nodded and shook her hand. “Thanks, Nat. Congrats on the promotion. We’ll try not to step on your toes too much.”
“We both know that promise will fall a few miles short. Just don’t do anything I’ll have to arrest you for.” Nat reached for the phone on her hip and walked away with a small wave.
Carmichael took them the roundabout route, dropping Liam off at security before taking Ryder and Roman up to the third-floor quarantine level. He stopped in front of two sets of doors. “Miss Calhoun is in the room to the right, and Dr. Santiago the left.”
“They weren’t placed together?” Ryder asked.
“It’s to minimize risk in case one was exposed and the other was not.”
Ryder glanced nervously at the door. “And we’re okay strutting in there?”
Roman smirked. “Nervous, little brother?”
“Of contracting a highly lethal disease and watching my dick rot off? Hell yeah, I’m nervous.”
Carmichael waved off the concern. “Miss Calhoun and Dr. Santiago are in separate air-pressurized rooms within those doors. You’ll simply be stepping into an observation suite a lot like medical universities use for surgical teaching purposes. There’s no chance of contact or contamination.”
On his hip, Carmichael’s walkie screeched to life and he blew out a frustrated breath. “If you’ll excuse me, I have more fires to put out. When you’re done, Eddie will see you to the lobby.” He nodded toward the lone guard standing at the edge of the hall.
When Carmichael disappeared from view, a familiar shit-eating grin slid onto Ryder’s face as he reached for the doctor’s door. “Guess I’ll take the doc—”
“Why the hell not?”
Roman studied Ryder’s face before finding his answer in the dark gleam of his eyes. “Because of that horn-dog look you got on your face. You googled her before you even picked my ass up, didn’t you?”
Ryder’s mouth twitched. “It was research…but yeah. And I gotta say, if my doctor looked like her, I’d actually get my annual physicals.”
“Yeah, this is a job, not a dating service, and it’s been far too long since you’ve gotten any. I’ll take the doc.”
“Says our resident monk.”
The truth in Ryder’s snarky comment pissed Roman off. Thanks to their Steele genes, he and his brothers had never struggled to find female companionship when they wanted it…even as knobby-kneed teens. The problem was that he didn’t want it.
Not really. Sex didn’t relieve stress any better than working out in the gym, and anything more than a quick romp with the fairer sex was off the table. Relationships required trust, and the only people he counted on to mean what they say were his family and his team.
Ryder’s smirk widened. “Fine. Take the doctor, and I’ll question the assistant.”
Fuck. He gave in way too easy, which meant both women were no doubt gorgeous as hell. “You’re an asshole.”
Ryder shrugged. “I’ve been called worse. Just remember that the point of going in there is to see if we can coax information out of them they may not realize they know.”
“Your point?”
“That it requires finesse. A delicate touch.”
“I can be delicate,” Roman lied.
Ryder snorted. “You’re about as delicate as a sledgehammer, Ro.”
So he wasn’t a teddy bear, and he didn’t beat around the bush. Tact was something people used when they wanted to dance around a subject instead of plow right through it, and Roman sure as hell didn’t dance.
Roman shouldered his brother out of the way. “I’ll take the doc…and I’ll finesse the hell out of it.”
Ignoring his brother’s chuckles, he tugged on the door and stepped into the room.
Eyes closed and head tilted back against the wall, Isabel Santiago sat on a metal cot not unlike the ones he’d encountered in the Army. Her curtain of long dark hair framed her heart-shaped face and was a stark contrast to the white jumpsuit she wore.
She didn’t look like any scientist he’d ever seen.
“Dr. Santiago?”
Her eyes opened and scanned the room before falling on him.
Large golden brown eyes inspected his presence, narrowing in unfocused concentration. He recognized that half-glazed look all too well. Hell, he’d seen it a million times out in the field. Anyone who’d been deployed into an active combat zone scenario wore that same face at one time or another.
Especially him.
But there wasn’t a war happening outside this room, and they hadn’t been dropped into a hot zone.
Roman shoved aside all his self-professed finesse and did the only thing he knew would work in pulling her out of the funk.
“Dr. Santiago, I’m Roman Steele. I’m with the private security firm your employer hired to find out what happened to—and to track down—your missing virus.” Locking Isabel in his sights, he summoned every ounce of assholessness he possessed. “Care to tell me how the hell this happened?”
* * *
Isa wasn’t as immune to the male form as Maddy thought, but even if she had been, there was no ignoring Roman Steele’s. He stood well over six feet tall, his leather jacket–encased broad shoulders rivaled only by his wide chest and trim waist. And his eyes…dark to near black and framed by long, thick lashes, they studied her as if attempting to look through her, and the intensity stirred something she hadn’t felt in a long time.
Interest.
At least until she pulled her thoughts away from the deep timbre of his voice and onto his words. “Did you just…?”
Isa blinked once. Then twice. His stare turned accusatory as he waited on the other side of the three-inch safety glass. Oh hell yeah, he did.
Ignoring her earlier exhaustion, she stiffened her shoulders and met him glare for glare. “I don’t know how something like that happens, Mr. Steele. Maybe they had second jobs as magician’s assistants.”
Roman kept his blank mask in place as he leaned against the small table in the observation room. “There’s no reason for the sarcasm, Doc.”
“Yet it was the first thing you dished out the moment you stepped into the room.”
“Because things don’t add up, and I don’t like it when there are big question marks hanging over my head.”
“Then I suggest you wear a hard hat and go in search of the answers.”
“That’s what I’m doing here.”
“No, you’re trying to piss me off, and guess what? It’s working. If you have a real question I may be able to answer, then ask. If not, you know where the door is.”
“Your lab is practically impossible to breach without having appropriate clearance.”
Isabel waited a beat. “Practically impossible, but seeing as we’re in this situation, it’s obviously not out of the realm of possibility. What’s your point?”
“My point is that nine times out of ten that impossible becomes possible because there was an inside man…or woman.”
If she were superhuman, Isa would’ve sent her fist through the window and throttled the gorgeous jerkwad on the other side.
Isabel uncrossed her legs and stood, summoning her best icy tone. “I don’t like what you’re insinuating, Mr. Steele.”
“That’s not me insinuating, Doc. That’s me making a factual statement.”
“None of my colleagues had anything to do with what happened,” Isabel said adamantly. “We do what we do to rid the world of dangerous diseases, not so we can unleash them on a vulnerable public.”
“I’d like to believe that, but we have four armed men getting off an elevator with no visual proof that they’d gotten on it in the first place. And then they disappeared pretty much the same way. If they didn’t have inside help, they really are magicians.”
“You’re the ridiculously priced security expert Carmichael hired. Isn’t it your job to figure out how they pulled it off and locate the FC-5 virus? Because in case you haven’t realized it from the fact that I’m in a glass fishbowl, it’s not a simple flu strain.”
“Oh, my team and I will track them down. It’s just a matter of time.”
Isa was already shaking her head. “That’s something none of us have. FC-5 isn’t just an Ebola-like strain. It’s the strand. It’s an end-of-days virus that could wipe out millions of the world’s population before anyone has a chance to react.”
“How is it different from Ebola?”
“Standard Ebola has an average incubation of fourteen days and then a fifty percent survival rate.”
“And FC-5?”
Isabel’s stomach rolled as she fought back rising bile. “A four-day average incubation…and a five percent survival rate. In case you’re not keeping track of time or the math, it’s already been a day since the virus was taken from the lab, and a five percent survival rate means that ninety-five out of one hundred people infected don’t make it back to their families.”
Roman’s jaw clenched, the muscles in his cheeks flexing wildly.
Good. Fear, in her line of work, was a necessity. It kept you on your toes. It made you careful. And in this instance, it made her determined to keep FC-5 as far away from any civilization as humanly possible.
Chapter
Three
“When you called and told me to bring climbing gear from headquarters, this isn’t what I expected to be doing with it.” Ryder hung suspended on the rope next to Roman as they slowly lowered themselves down the elevator shaft at Tru Tech Industries.
Isabel Santiago’s adamancy that she’d watched the four thieves step back onto the elevat
or only fueled Roman’s wild hunch, a hunch he prayed to God was wrong.
While with Special Forces, he’d worked with CIA teams in high-profile urban extractions, and it was the only way he could explain it. And if he was right, it threw a whole different kind of wrench into this brewing shit-storm, because it meant whoever was behind it wasn’t a low-level fly-by-the-seat-of-the-pants crook. It took careful planning, expert knowledge, and a whole lot of balls.
Anyone with that kind of skill set was a loose cannon, and it was that unknown factor that made him damn uncomfortable.
“Did you look at that file Carmichael gave us on FC-5?” Ryder eased himself down another few inches, his head swiveling as he looked around them. “I looked at it right before calling it a night, and I couldn’t fall asleep. I like all my orifices the way they are—blood-free and without liquid oozing out of them. I think this will be the first year Ma won’t have to threaten bodily harm for me to get my flu shot.”
Roman grunted in agreement. Hell, he’d be the first bastard in line, too.
After Isabel’s parting warning yesterday, he’d also looked up the supervirus and had wished to hell that he hadn’t. By the time he’d read the last page, he’d experienced nearly all the FC-5 symptoms—except bleeding orifices—and had climbed into the shower and scrubbed head to toe no less than two times and then again a third right before he turned in for the night.
He still didn’t feel completely clean.
People thought his line of work was dangerous, but he’d take flying bullets over viruses any day of the week. You could visualize a gun aimed at your head, or a ticking bomb counting down in front of you. You couldn’t see what microscopic shit came your way from a sneeze or, hell, touching a damn doorknob.
In his opinion, what Isabel Santiago and Maddy Calhoun did every single day took real guts—unless one of them was the reason he was sliding down this elevator shaft.
“Interesting.” Ryder’s voice pulled Roman from his thoughts.
