“And that I ran into you in the park last month was no coincidence, obviously.”
His mouth quirked up into the hint of a smile.
“Of course it wasn’t.”
Swallowing became hard for a second, but I forced myself to keep my gaze locked with his.
“So, you figured you’d do what, fuck me into compliance?”
His broadening smile let me know that he’d greatly enjoyed himself along the way, but he surprised me by shaking his head.
“The plan was to get to know you, yes. Or, more importantly, for you to get to know me. Build some trust, a loose friendship, if you will. You had a dog as a kid, so I borrowed one from a friend. You often lingered in that park after work, so I figured it was the ideal place to run into you. You’re addicted to coffee, so taking you to get some was a no-brainer.”
“And the rest?” I gritted out when he didn’t go on.
“Well,” he started, cutting off with a snort. “If you need me to repeat what happened after that coffee in that alley right behind the coffee shop, I didn’t really do as good a job at it as I remember.”
I kept glaring at him, trying hard to swallow the resurfacing betrayal that wanted to clog my throat.
“You know, it takes a special kind of asshole to pull that number on a woman and gloat about it, too.”
Was that irritation that crossed his face?
“My intention was to be friendly, never to lie to you,” Nate insisted.
“Then why did you?” I asked, happy that I sounded more pissed than hurt.
“I didn’t.”
“But you—“
He cut me off by leaning into me, and when I took a step back, he followed, until my spine ended up pressed against the locker with him hovering over me.
“Trust me, that was pure, unadulterated chemistry. I never, not in a million years, thought I’d find you attractive, let alone wouldn’t be able to keep it in my pants for even half an hour after meeting you. And don’t pretend that it wasn’t mutual.”
Denial burned on my tongue, but I swallowed it when my mind just wouldn’t let me utter that lie.
“So it was what, a bonus?”
His shrug was a slap in the face in its own way, but the way he kept staring at me—need and hunger so plain in his gaze that they were impossible to ignore—gave me the answer that I kind of needed to hear.
“Actually, it sucks, because now you hate me and feel betrayed, and I had to fuck up the one connection I’ve made to anyone in years that really meant something to me, and all for this fucking mission. Happy now?”
Not really, but I did feel a little vindicated—even if the fact that his cause meant more to him than I did rankled. Which it shouldn’t. I was so screwed.
Nate glowered at me for another second, then pulled away, giving me much-needed space to breathe.
“Did you ever find out who leaked that transcript to you?” I asked, trying to change tracks, my voice still a little hoarse with emotion.
“Mike Jenkins,” he replied, his tone stating that, of course, he had followed up on that.
That was a revelation that hit me like a slap in the face.
“Jenkins?”
Nate frowned as if my disbelief irked him.
“He was one of the people working down here. It can't be that much of a surprise that he was the one who set things in motion.”
“Not because of that,” I started, then trailed off as another piece of the puzzle whizzed through my mind. “That fucking tea!” He shot me a look that wasn't even asking for an explanation but plain demanded it, and I was only too happy to oblige him. “The morning of my breakdown, Thecla, Mike, and I were having breakfast and coffee in the kitchen down the corridor outside the lab before going in. Thecla got all mysterious, hinting that she had something she wanted to show me.” Now it was easy to guess what. “Anyway, she left early, because according to her work ethics, she had to be on site at least fifteen minutes before the set work time, while I lingered over my mug of coffee. It was early, and taking another five minutes seemed like a good idea.”
He cleared his throat, prompting me to get to the important part, and after a slight shake of my head I forced myself to go on.
“Mike and I usually didn't talk much, but I knew that his wife had been sick for a while then.”
“Terminal stage cancer,” Nate helpfully supplied. That made my heart sink, but I chose to ignore that for now.
“He told me she'd made a batch of kombucha the weekend before. You know, that fermented tea? When he offered me some, I couldn't decline. It was more a service to his wife than him to drink it. It tasted dreadful, but I figured that was part of the deal. And, lo and behold, an hour later I saw miniature unicorns and dragons chasing each other through the lab, then get inside my suit as they turned into scorpions, which made me want to tear it off right in the middle of the hot zone.” Swallowing bile, I snorted. “Guess it wasn't that much of a coincidence that Mike dropped by just in time to drag me back out of the airlock into the decontamination shower to keep me from killing myself.”
“He likely saved your life in more ways than one,” came Nate's succinct reply.
I mulled that over for a moment. It wasn't hard to guess what he meant. I doubted that I would still be standing here if I'd been in cahoots with Thecla. Then again, the more I thought about the last minutes of her life, the more it seemed to me that he really hadn’t intended to kill her, just talk. I had to admit, if she’d been responsible for killing my brother, demanding answers would have been the least I’d have wanted to do.
“I would like to hope that I would have had too much integrity to let her drag me into that fucked-up project of hers,” I offered.
His intense stare made me start to sweat, but when I didn't back down, he let it slide.
“If it interests you, Jenkins sold all his assets the week after he quit working here, which I think coincided with his attempt to get you out of the line of fire. I was able to trace him back to a rental boat and cabin on a small island in Indonesia that he only left three times to get provisions and fill his wife's prescription. The trail went cold five months later, long before I had the knowledge or means to reach out to him to gather more information.”
“You think he was a part of it?”
He gave a noncommittal grunt.
“So far, I've only been able to directly implicate four people. My brother did the groundwork; Thecla the human trials and further development after his death; Elena Glover likely got her current job as head of the HR department because she used her previous employment as a social worker to find the perfect test subjects. Gabriel Greene knew about the project and it is likely that he was responsible for funding at least the later stages of it, but I don't have a signature, and he only got involved with his father's corporation three years ago, so someone must have financed Raleigh's earliest endeavors. I have no evidence about Mike Jenkins’s involvement. My guess is that he either stumbled over the files or the experiment himself, or Raleigh confided in him. As former head of animal handling, either is possible. Maybe you can fill in those blanks if you take a look at the files stored on the lab terminal.”
“If?”
“When?” he asked in return, cocking one eyebrow.
“What makes you think that I have any motivation to continue helping you?”
His answering smile held just enough mirth to make me want to punch myself for phrasing it like that, but for once he didn't use the opening I'd offered him on a silver platter to tease me.
“Your reaction to seeing my brother's video log was quite telling. The fact that you've talked yourself down from both a nervous breakdown and a fit of anger just underlines that.”
“Quite telling, huh?”
During our talk we'd slowly regained some distance, but now he leaned close, forcing me to steel my spine to keep from backing away.
“Unlike most people who know you, I do think you can be ruthless, particularly under t
he wrong kind of stress and bolstered by the right kind of motivation. You try so very hard to be a nice, compassionate team player, but you're like a rabid honey badger when you get all riled up. You may not agree with my methods, but you’re curious by nature, and I know that you want to find out what exactly Raleigh was working on, and why. Either to exonerate him, or find out where he went wrong, maybe even learn from his mistakes. I have no delusions about you wanting to help me, but if it will work out for you, you’d be happy to compromise your superficial loyalty to your employer—again.”
My sputtering indignation was an instantaneous reaction, but it came with a sinking feeling in my gut.
“I have no fucking clue what you're talking about!”
“You don't? I thought you were smarter than that,” he taunted, then settled back into a relaxed stance. “Want me to elaborate, to dissect the thin slices of your life that were enough for me to come to this conclusion?”
“No!”
“Well, too bad, I don't believe in coddling people I think deserve more honesty.” His smile grew as I kept glowering at him, and he seemed to take my silence as demand for him to explain himself.
“Just take the last eleven hours. When we took over, you hid, you took care of yourself first. Once we threw you in with the others, you didn't try to socialize, just chatted with the only person you were familiar with. Your attempt to come to her aid might have been genuine, but after so many years of deceiving yourself into acting like a good little girl, that is to be expected. Your claws definitely came out when you kicked the living shit out of Greene. Since you walked out of that cube, you don't seem to have had a care in the world for how your former compatriots are doing, and you needed no convincing at all to help yourself by helping me. When you were confronted with what is almost irrefutable evidence of what happened to my brother coming out of his own mouth, it was not simple horror or compassion that was etched into the lines of your face, but conviction. You may not agree with my methods, but then it's been a while since you balked at them. Who knows? Either way, you now understand what I'm doing, and deep down you agree with me that it needs to be done. The logical conclusion of that is that you will continue helping me, and your knowledge of virology and my brother's other work predestines you to be the one to look through his files and reconstruct any details that are not obvious to us already.”
It was quite the speech that he delivered, and while I could have found excuses for every point he made, none of them wanted to trip over my lips when I opened my mouth to defend myself. His words made me uncomfortable, and not just because they painted me in a different light than I wanted to see. No—what shut me up was that the woman he was talking about sounded a lot more self-sufficient than I thought myself capable of.
“Convinced, or shall I go on?” Nate asked.
He had me there, and he knew it, judging from the smug look on his face.
“Considering how much you obviously love to hear yourself talk, please, indulge yourself,” I shot back, at a loss for what else to say.
Nate snorted, but did oblige me after a brief pause.
“The one mistake my brother made was trusting in the wrong people. I guess you could also say that it was a mistake that he clearly misjudged Thecla Soudekis, which ultimately led to his demise, but it is in the end just a consequence of the other.”
“That’s rather fatalistic,” I offered.
“You think? You saw what that virus does to people,” he pointed out. “And he helped develop it. I have a good idea why, but that doesn’t make it any less reprehensible. My brother was a self-serving, narcissistic asshole on a mission.”
“Sounds like someone else I know,” I pointed out.
The grin he flashed me was a real one.
“Whatever. Fact is, he probably had it coming. None of the people who have been working on this are around anymore, and with the exception of Jenkins, they more or less died for the cause. Does this look like the kind of project any scientist would embark on who still had a working moral compass?”
I couldn’t help it. His words just rubbed me the wrong way.
“He mentioned an antidote.”
“To something that should never have existed in the first place,” Nate replied, but the complete lack of anger in his voice didn’t go by me unnoticed. There definitely was more to this than he wanted to admit.
“So it’s his fault that he got killed?”
His shrug was pretty much confirmation.
“As I said, he trusted the wrong people. I don’t intend to make that same mistake. That’s why I picked you from the pile of possible candidates whose help I could recruit. And don’t glare at me like that. I already told you that how that actually happened wasn’t according to plan.”
“And that should make me feel better about it now?” I huffed.
“And there I thought most women would feel at least vindicated at the knowledge that they’re irresistible?”
I held his gaze until he broke it as he turned away, unable to keep a certain smugness from surfacing.
“And where does this leave us now?” Nate mused, striking a mock-considering pose. “Ah, right. Are you going to help me finish this? Or would you rather curl up somewhere and pretend that nothing I said got through to you?”
My first reaction was to deny that his words had struck a chord deep inside of me, but honestly, I couldn't. If anything, what had happened during the last hours rather than our talk had made me weary of continuing the way my life had played out over the last couple of years. Realizing now how different things could have been just added to my conviction.
“I may regret this later, but I'm going to help you.”
He cocked his head to the side, a hint of bewilderment on his face, but it was quickly replaced by what I'd come to think of as a genuine grin from him.
“Excellent.”
With that, he turned around and walked over to the door, like before holding it open for me to step out before him. I wondered if he thought of that as a gentlemanly gesture, or still didn't trust me enough not to run off first chance I got. Even with what I'd just committed myself to, I wouldn't have trusted myself, either.
Andrej and the other guard were gone, but that didn't seem to alarm Nate in the least. He set out for the connective tunnel as he got his radio out, sounding calm and almost bored as he asked for a status report. The rest of the trip to the atrium we passed in silence.
Chapter 19
Just outside the double doors that led into the glass cathedral of the atrium, the techie—Dolores, I reminded myself—was waiting for us.
“Get her a copy of the files from the off-site computer,” Nate told her before he turned back to me. “You have two hours. After that, we have to get this party wrapped up. I wish I could give you more time, but we already hit a lucky streak that they’ve let us hunker down here so long undisturbed.”
“They?”
He shrugged.
“Police, national guard, you name it. I honestly didn’t think we’d manage to stay under their radar for so long.”
I had to admit, now that he mentioned it, it made sense.
“So you haven’t completely infiltrated them?” I mocked.
“Only key personnel,” he replied, smirking.
“Guess the flu epidemic is playing into your hands?”
He paused for a moment, but then shook his head as if to disband the thought that had occurred to him.
“In theory, we should manage to be out of here before anyone notices. Then, of course, they will notice, but Friday afternoon to Saturday morning is a good window to remain under cover. People leave early, they go out for drinks, so they don’t show up before late morning again. Don’t worry about it.” He glanced at the techie, then back to me. “Let me know if you need anything.”
“Something to write on would be useful,” I offered.
“I think that can be arranged.”
I still waited until he had left the atrium through
one of the back doors before I sank into one of the swivel chairs by the workstation. Then I let out a loud sigh, waiting for a weight to lift off my chest, but I only got a twinge from my nose and cheek for my bother. In the hot lab, I had been able to ignore how the bruises on my face were doing, but now that I could prod at them, they got increasingly harder to ignore.
“Electronic format works for you? The data is mostly in pdfs and text files, and you should be able to play the vids on this, too,” the techie said as she held out a state-of-the-art tablet to me. I looked at the offering for a moment before accepting it. My fingers were steady and my grip firm yet not convulsive, and if not for the cuts in my palm I might have deluded myself into thinking that the last day hadn't happened.
The screen was set to show a folder containing a huge amount of the aforementioned documents, making me wonder how anyone should be able to make sense of it all in just two hours. Some of them were labeled in ascending numbers, others looked like dates, and none had the telltale “start here, incriminating evidence inside” tag that such things always had in movies.
“He likes you, you know?” the techie remarked, briefly looking from her screens to me.
Her tone was just casual enough to tip me off that she was fishing for information even if it sounded like random small talk, but her face looked open and trustworthy, making me wonder if it maybe was simple curiosity. Unlike the Ice Queen and Nate himself, I had a terribly hard time getting a reading from her.
“You think?” I offered when I couldn't come up with anything more intelligent.
She grinned, obviously understanding where I came from. I couldn't say why my alarm bells didn't go off around her—she was as much a part of the operation as everyone else, and I was sure that she was armed, too. But something about her demeanor made her appear less hostile. I just couldn't put a finger on it.
“I do. And it's obvious that the feeling is mutual, even though you must really hate yourself for that right now. Don't bother continuing to beat yourself up over it. Nate has that effect on some people.”
The Green Fields Series Box Set: Books 1-3 Page 18
