by Vicki Hinze
“Hello, Dr. Erickson.” She stopped sweeping, swept her forehead with her hand. “This is my husband, Max.”
Max extended a hand. “Pleasure to meet you, Doctor.”
The doctor shook it. “David,” he said, clearly expecting more of an explanation.
Gabby gave him one. “Candace is down with a headache. She said you and Dr. Swift couldn’t get here because of downed trees and power lines blocking the roads, so she asked us to make sure the lab was okay. I’m afraid you had a little damage. Nothing serious, though.”
Erickson glanced around and his expression went dark, then horror flooded his eyes. “Oh, my God. What happened to the tanks?”
“Hurricane damage,” Max said. “We found some spares in the supply room and contained all we could. Candace said that was important.”
“Oh, yeah.” Erickson prowled the lab, and spotted the plywood over the window. “Did any mosquitoes get out of the lab?”
Gabby dropped the broom. It clanged on the tile floor. “Sorry.” She smiled, bent to snag the broom handle. Her muscles ached, threatening to lock down. Swallowing back a groan Max wouldn’t have heard if he hadn’t been watching for it, she straightened upright. “I don’t think so.”
Erickson dragged a hand through his sandy hair, knocking down some of the spikes. “If we’re not sure, we’d better follow procedure.”
“Which is?” Max asked.
“Notifications have to be made to authorities.” Dread filling his voice, Erickson slid his gaze to his desk, to a photograph of his son. “These are test subjects, Max, not normal mosquitoes.”
Max leaned a hip against the steel lab table. “Which means?”
Erickson hesitated, moved to the row of canisters and immediately checked the black-banded one to make sure it was undamaged. “I’m sorry. I’m not at liberty to discuss it.”
“I see.” Max let Erickson know he understood completely.
Erickson picked up on it. “If there’s any risk, we’ve got to call the authorities.”
“There isn’t.” Max held Erickson’s gaze, but not without costs. He personally didn’t agree with Conlee’s orders on this, but he had learned long ago to trust the commander’s decisions. With information being disseminated on a need-to-know basis in the unit, trust was the only way to operate. He hoped to hell this wasn’t the one time Conlee’s judgment proved to be on hiatus. “Candace asked us to review the security tapes to make sure everything stayed inside the lab. We did. Everything’s fine.”
Erickson hiked a brow. “You’re sure?”
“We’re positive,” Gabby said, not at all certain Max was up to lying again. How could Erickson look at Max’s face and not know the truth? It was as clear to Gabby as the shattered glass on the floor.
Though, considering she’d been married to the man for seven years, she had insights strangers wouldn’t have. God, but it was hot in here. Where was the thermostat? She found it on the wall near the door, and knocked it down ten degrees.
Married to the man for seven years?
Stunned, she leaned back against the rough wall, her knees weak. She squeezed her eyes shut, tried and failed to meditate her way to calm, then settled for something just shy of panic. What in heaven was she doing? Married to Max? She was thinking as if she were really married to Max?
This was wrong. Very wrong. What was happening to her mind? She sent Max a worried look that he missed, having his back to her while talking with Erickson. She needed more information on the effects of Z-4027. She couldn’t be losing it already. She had too much to do to lose it already. But something was jumbling her real memories with the ones manufactured in her covers. It had to be the Z-4027.
Gabby tensed. Cold fingers of fear clenched her stomach and her chest, and sweat popped from her temples. Thin trickles of it flowed down between her breasts and soaked her bra. Her heart thudded, banging against her ribs. She was going to die and didn’t want to; that was one thing. Becoming mentally diminished before she could debrief Max and do what she had to do was another.
Erickson would know the answers to her questions about Z-4027. But she didn’t dare to ask him.
The mist thickened in her mind, and the gauze compacted, grew more dense, becoming a veil she had to claw and punch through to think straight.
She slumped onto a stool, propped her head in her hands, her elbows on the lab table. She did not need this. Not now.
Keith. She could ask Keith. He was working the mirror contract.
That thought stopped her dead in her mental tracks. Why was it okay for Keith Burke to know she and Max were associated with Conlee but it wasn’t okay for David Erickson to know it?
Commander Conlee never did anything without a specific reason. She slid off the stool, walked over to Max, then looped her arm in his for balance. “Max?”
“Yeah, honey?” He turned his attention from Erickson to her, saw the look in her eyes, and responded to it at once. “Are you ill?”
“Headache,” she said.
“You’ve been bitten.” Erickson looked down at her forearm. Several swollen bites dotted it. “Did that happen here?”
“No,” she lied. “Before I came here.”
“Are you sure?” Erickson’s brow furrowed and real fear sparked in his eyes.
“Oh, yes. I’m sure. Don’t worry, Dr. Erickson. It’s just the humidity. I don’t deal with it very well.” She forced a smile. The lab’s pungent hospital smell had her nauseous. “A couple Tylenol and a few hours’ rest, and I’ll be fine.”
Max hooked an arm around her waist, looked at Erickson. “You’ll be in the lab?”
“Until the repairs are complete and it can be locked down, yes.”
Max hedged on stating the obvious, but made his point clearly. “It wouldn’t be a good idea to leave the lab until it can be sealed under full power, Dr. Erickson.” Conlee would be monitoring every move. If he objected, he’d let Max know before he and Gabby could leave the building. With Erickson there, Gabby couldn’t debrief. Conlee had to know that, too, and from the looks of her she needed to get that done soon. The Z-4027 symptoms were manifesting in spades.
“Full-power lockdown only.” Erickson nodded, lending weight to his words. “I’ll be here.”
Max gauged the man and he passed. “I’ll take my wife home, then.” He led Gabby to the door, and then out of the lab.
She waited until they were in the parking lot to say anything. “We’ve got a new complication.”
Max helped her get into the Jeep. She tried to snap the safety belt, but for some reason she was all thumbs. Leaning into the Jeep from the door, he reached over and snapped it for her. “What kind of new complication?”
His face was close to hers. So close she could see the pores in his skin, the little crinkles from too much squinting at the corners of his eyes, and the deep gray flecks in his irises. Something in the region of her heart softened. Marrying him was the smartest thing you’ve ever done …
“What new complication, Gabby?” he repeated.
Married him?
Mission covers, she reminded herself. Not marriages. Mission covers.
Her heart knocked around on her ribs. She mentally shook herself, forced herself to focus, to think straight. Okay. Okay. She had it together now. She was okay now. Complication. Tell Max the complication. “Conlee,” she said. “He’s holding out on us.”
“I’m sure he has his reasons.”
So Max had thought so, too. She really was okay now, in her mind. The gauzy veil parted and her thoughts seemed clear. “I want to know what they are—his reasons, I mean.” Her panic subsided to a reasonable worry. “He’s got something significant in mind, Max. Experience with him is warning me of it.”
“You think he’ll send another team down here?”
Max didn’t have to say, “to cancel us.” They both knew that’s what he meant. “I’d be shocked if he hasn’t already. But he’ll pad the reason in something else to justify it.”
&nbs
p; Max stared off through the window, obviously exploring potential pads Conlee might use. “Headquarters has to move out of D.C. If he were considering moving Home Base to Carnel Cove and Oversight asked questions, he could justify the agents’ deployments without raising red flags on expenses or assigning them secondary missions of canceling us. There is major construction going on down on the sublevel floors at Logan Industries—mainly one and two—that’s where I appropriated the plywood for the lab window.”
Gabby followed his thoughts. “That would also explain Candace, Erickson, and even Keith’s reactions to us. Candace would know about the move, of course, and probably about us, but she wouldn’t be any freer to discuss it than we’re free to discuss our missions.” Gabby stared at Max. “Conlee would do this. He’d see it as a win/win situation. You know that bottom line, we’re—”
“Expendable.”
“Yes.” She lifted her chin. “He’d hate it, but he’d do it. He’d send a second team after us. He might even tell us they’re coming as backup for us. He knows no other SDU agent, aside from Westford, stands a chance of blindsiding one of us, much less both of us.”
“He already has—sent backup.” Max grimaced. Conlee had levied cancellation orders on Gabby and he wouldn’t think twice about issuing them on Max. Max wasn’t the pseudo-sister of the Vice President of the United States and head of Oversight. “So what do we do? Just wait for them to show up and kill us?”
Gabby shrugged and sent him a sidelong look. “What else can we do?”
She said the words he expected to hear, but they didn’t ring true. Gabby was planning … something. Having no idea what it was, Max frowned and backed away from the Jeep. On the driver’s side, he got in and then cranked the engine.
It roared to life. “What’s on your mind?”
“I don’t want you to wake up dead because he played his cards too close to his chest.”
“Me?” Max’s hand stilled on the gearshift. “What about you?”
It was hard, but she didn’t look away. She met his head-on gaze and held it, though her tone thinned and echoed hollow. “I’m dead anyway.”
Because she was, that comment irritated Max from the toenails up. He slapped the gearshift into drive and left the parking lot. Swinging around an uprooted oak just pissed him off further. It reminded him of the photos of the oaks in Gabby’s memory box. The memories she had planted lay uprooted, too, stretched across the concrete and gravel, limp and beaten by the storm.
They had been her anchors. The one thing in her life that remained real and reminded her of who she really was. And now they were dead and gone.
No wonder she felt as if her life had been wasted.
Hell, maybe his own had been, too.
Chapter Seventeen
A ringing phone in the dead of night signals one thing: Someone you love is critically ill or dead.
At least that was the case in most homes in Carnel Cove, and throughout America. But Darlene Coulter’s home was different.
For the first three years she had been married to Sheriff Jackson Coulter, the frequent midnight calls always had caught her off guard. She’d get that rush of stark terror that clutches your throat closed. But Darlene had finally made peace with the midnight calls. Now, the only time she got the terror rush was if one came in and Jackson wasn’t at home in bed beside her. Tonight, thankfully, she had to roll over him to grab the receiver. A bleary-eyed glance at the clock advised it was just after three A.M., but because of the hurricane crisis, he had been home for only about thirty minutes. “Coulters’.”
“Darlene?”
“Elizabeth?”
With effort warranting a grunt, Jackson cranked open an eye. “What’s wrong?”
“Tell Jackson it’s nothing. Go to the kitchen and call me back.” The dial tone buzzed.
“Is she okay?” Unable to hold his eye open, Jackson muttered into his pillow.
Poor guy hadn’t slept more than a couple of hours in three days. Darlene gave him a pat on the hip. “She’s fine, honey. Go back to sleep.”
By the time the words were out of her mouth, he was snoring.
She slid into her slippers, shrugged on her robe, and headed for the kitchen, then dialed Elizabeth. When she answered, Darlene didn’t mince words. “Is Candace dead?”
“No. Keith says she’s stable for now.”
Darlene knew at that moment. Elizabeth was making the sign of the cross for Candace. It was as natural to the woman as breathing, and had been all her life. If Darlene weren’t a penny-stretcher, she’d bet a nickel Elizabeth had her rosary in her hand while doing it, too.
“You need to get over to my house right away.”
Darlene didn’t ask why. She knew that tone, and what it meant. Someone was in crisis. “Did you call Paige first?” Darlene lived further away—the rest of the ladies were clustered in the ritzy area on the cove—but Paige had a hell of a time dragging herself out of sleep. By the end of the day, she was so emotionally wrung out from the constant bombardment of her senses that she couldn’t shut down. She didn’t go to sleep; she fell into it. And falling in was a whole lot easier than falling out.
“I did. I told her to be conscious when she got here, too. I’ll call Miranda next.”
Miranda, aka “the informer,” was never unconscious—or uninformed. “Ten minutes,” Darlene said. It’d take her every bit of fifteen, but she’d still beat Paige by five.
When Darlene walked into Elizabeth’s mansion on the cove and passed through the grand entrance, she saw a photo of the four ladies that had been taken at a fund-raiser to buy Jackson a new patrol car. She’d known it was going to be a beautiful picture and plastered all over society pages from Mobile to Miami, and it had been. Safe bet, on Darlene’s part. Anytime the four stunners stood together, their group photo appeared everywhere.
Rich women had a look about them, and women who weren’t so rich, like Darlene, loved looking at them, and many spent a lion’s share of their discretionary income trying to achieve that look—or so said the advertising gurus. But Darlene knew “rich” was more than a look. It was an attitude. A confidence. And the other ladies had it.
Some Covers thought the ladies were all fluff and no substance, fancy former trophy wives or widows, who flitted away their days at country club luncheons, garden parties, golf clubs, tennis courts, and as token members on the boards of various charities. The ladies did do those things. But they did far more. Darlene had looked deeper, beyond the obvious, and she’d been impressed with what she’d seen.
She looked down at the photo, where the four of them stood side by side. They were stunning. All tall and lean and well honed, pampered in the way those who can afford to care for themselves. Candace Burke, bless her heart and get her well, was the most beautiful of them all, dressed in bold red that clung to every curve and fairly shouted “bombshell.” Twenty-nine, blue eyes, long wheat-blond hair that tumbled in soft curls and framed a face fit for the cover of Vogue that had graced the cover of People and Fortune magazines. Unfortunately, “bombshell” and that she had formerly been Keith Burke’s second wife, was most all Covers remembered about her.
Why he and Candace had divorced was a mystery Darlene hadn’t solved. They still made public appearances together and were clearly still in love. Miranda would know—she knew everything—but Darlene wouldn’t ask; she respected Candace’s privacy. No other Cover would ask, either. Candace was a force to be reckoned with, owning Logan Industries and employing hundreds of locals. She was a fair, reasonable woman, if a risk taker. Why mess with her over something that was none of anyone’s business anyway?
Elizabeth stood next to Candace, wearing a black crepe Dior. She was oldest at forty-four, but looked thirty with her tawny hair swept back from her face, accentuating her high cheekbones and exotic eyes. There was nothing token about her membership on any of the seven local charity boards on which she served. Elizabeth was organized and she always had a plan. If she couldn’t get what you n
eeded, it couldn’t be gotten. Some of the light had died in her eyes when her beloved William had died back in February. But everyone in the Cove made it their business to give back some of the support Elizabeth had given to so many over the years.
Darlene looked on to the third woman, Miranda Coffield. As intense and quiet as Candace was bold and Elizabeth was organized, Miranda had been married to a shrink, Samuel, but had divorced him because he’d given psychiatric counseling to a pedophile and refused to give counseling to the victim’s family because he said it was a conflict of interest. For Miranda, this was an unforgivable choice. He’d always taken the easy way out, the path of least resistance. That had annoyed and embarrassed her for years. Miranda felt a good man would have had the character to make the offer on his own, because it was the right thing to do. Sam hadn’t, and she refused to share her life or her bed with a man who lacked character.
Dripping in enough diamonds to make Lloyd’s of London break into a cold sweat, she’d taken Sam to the proverbial cleaners, used the money to build a youth center in the victim’s memory, and paid for the family’s grief counseling with another psychiatrist—and the Covers had loved Miranda for it. Sam had been invited to move his practice to another town. Since he’d left, anyone with a moral dilemma or a domestic “challenge” (“problems” were for those too uncivilized to seek solutions, according to Miranda) turned to her for counseling. After all, she’d been more mentally healthy than her husband, the shrink, so she was certainly qualified to offer advice, and she did, which is why she was informed about everything and everyone in the Cove.
Paige Simpson inherited a fortune from her daddy, a prestigious lawyer, and opened a dozen New Age stores across the country. Standing on the far right in the photo, she wore no jewelry and seldom did since she didn’t need any adornments. Dressed in a soft gold lamé that made her flawless skin look like perfection itself—a challenge more easily met by someone barely thirty than by a woman cruising through her forties, like Darlene—Paige looked as sleek and sophisticated as the other women. Few would guess that under her polished exterior, she was an extremely creative woman with an unrelenting conscience, and an empath who felt too much and suffered mightily for it. None of them were perfect, including Paige. She talked about auras and karma too much for Elizabeth’s liking, but Darlene thought the differences in spirituality were about as significant as wearing different dresses. Like clothes, spirituality has to fit. So Paige’s New Age talk didn’t bother Darlene a bit.
