Jill groaned, an agonizing relief stabbing through her. “Oh my god.” She collapsed onto the bed. No wonder Farris hadn’t told her what really happened. That bastard, that cold-eyed SOB, threatening her with prosecution!
Nate came over and knelt beside her, took her hand tenderly. She almost drew back from the touch—it evoked an equal surge of hurt and want, and a nagging fear that he was trying to manipulate her. Her small fingers were icy and robotic in Nate’s warm palm.
“Jill, listen to me. The fire department said it was a ‘freak accident,’ one in a million. There are all kinds of safety valves to prevent that kind of thing and…” He sighed. “The negative one pulse caused that furnace to blow. I think we both know that.”
Jill snatched her hand away. “Goddamn it, we don’t know that! We don’t know what happened and couldn’t possibly without a thorough investigation!”
Nate’s face tightened with anger. “How can you not face what this thing does? Look at how sick you were, for god’s sake! All this trouble coming down on our heads? People dead? Come on! Do you really want the government playing around with this thing? Do you want to be personally responsible for another Nagasaki and Hiroshima—or worse? Is that what you really want?”
Just then, the door opened.
It was a lab technician. Nate breathed a sigh of relief. The last thing he needed was to get caught. Whatever Jill said, he wasn’t ready to tell these goons anything.
The tech backed in with a cart. The top of it was lined with vials of blood in neat, labeled boxes. Nate’s skin danced the jitterbug at the sight. Blech.
“I’m afraid you’ll have to leave.” The tech barely glanced at him. “I have to draw blood.”
“I was just, um, dropping off a tray.” Nate went to the door, nodded at Jill mutely.
“Bye,” she said, giving him a reproachful look, a look that said he hadn’t had to bring up Nagasaki. She started crawling back under the sheets.
Jesus, she looked so small, like a little kid. Head like a mule, though, and ambitious enough to make Napoléon look like a benchwarmer. Nate sighed with a mixture of exasperation and longing and ditched out.
In the hall the two FBI guys who were stationed at her door gave him a once-over. He felt self-conscious, told himself he really hadn’t been in there that long and that the thickness of the walls and that slug of a door prevented their conversation from being overheard. He strolled casually down the hall, turned the corner, and went to the elevator. Here he stopped and stared at the elevator button.
Leave. That was simple enough. Would they come looking for him? Probably. But maybe, if he stayed out of sight, they’d give up. After all, if they had Jill—and it looked like they had her all right—they wouldn’t need him. He could save his own conscience, and that’s all he could do, right? There was nothing he could do about Jill’s decisions. Right? If she wanted to go work for the military and build some kind of Death Wave Machine, there was nothing he could do to stop her.
He paced, continuing the debate with Jill in his head, unable to let it—or her—go. Damn it, but the asinine, idiotic thing was, he believed that deep down, she cared. He believed that she cared about those people who had died, that she cared about him. Well, maybe the “caring about him” part was wishful thinking, but she cared about those people, he was pretty sure.
When the lab tech showed up with the blood cart and pressed the button for the elevator, Nate knew exactly what he was going to say to her. He marched around the corner, back down the hall to Jill’s room.
One of the FBI guys was reading a magazine. He put it down, gave Nate a hard look.
“Picking up the tray,” Nate said, in a jeez-what’s-wrong-with-you-people voice, given credence by his anger. He pushed open the door to her room.
Jill was not there. He checked the bathroom, even glanced under the bed. She had vanished.
Of course, that wasn’t necessarily weird. They could have come for her, sometime in the past, oh, twenty seconds. They could have taken her away to be questioned or for a medical test or something.
He picked up the tray, still loaded with untouched food, and went back into the hall. The FBI guys watched him, standing now, not liking all this traffic at all. Nate kept going, pretending not to notice. At the elevator, the lab tech was just getting in with his cart.
“Hold it.” Nate dodged inside.
To avoid the cart, he pushed his way to the back of the car. The door closed. As the car started to move Nate heard something, realized it was the lab tech mumbling. The guy was in front of Nate, white coat, thick dark hair, Caucasian skin. He said something again, low, cleared his throat, glanced back at Nate, a quick, inspecting-a-bug kind of look. He faced the doors again.
Nate’s brain almost let it go out of sheer distraction—almost. But something about it stuck in his craw. The guy hadn’t been speaking to Nate, which meant he was talking to no one at all, and Nate was pretty sure the words hadn’t been English. Neither one of those things made sense.
Nate moved his head a little to one side and studied the lab tech. The guy was wearing something in his ear. It was practically invisible, but the thin flesh-colored wire from it trailed down and disappeared inside his collar. He was talking to someone through a hidden microphone.
Nate’s eyes moved to the cart.
It was stainless steel, vaguely resembling a street vendor’s cart, about four feet long and three feet high. It was a square bin with a door in the side, presumably leading to shelves and supplies. Nate looked at the elevator buttons. The guy had pressed the button for level C, the third level of the underground parking garage.
Shit.
Nate had about five seconds to think. It was amazing how you can make huge decisions in a window like that when you have no other choice. Because here they were going past floor 2 and their ride would be over in a few seconds, QED.
Nate had brief mental images of himself diving for the emergency button or head-butting the guy in the back. He then had a flash of himself primly setting down the tray on the floor and taking the dull table knife in hand while the guy, who could very well be an expert in every type of combat known to man, watched and wondered what the hell he was doing.
But none of these things would work and Nate’s body knew it. While his mind still debated a plan, his hands were already acting on instinct, turning the tray sideways. Dishes, silverware, and food went flying, and in the next instant, while the lab tech’s head was in the process of coming around to see what all that noise was, Nate’s hands brought the tray up and smashed it, hard, into that dark head of hair.
The sound it made on contact, a substantial boink, was embarrassingly loud. The lab tech stood there, upper body turned, staring at Nate with a perturbed, disbelieving look, as though he had done something incredibly inane. Nate stared back. He was aware of the ongoing ringing of the silver dish cover as it spun like a top on the elevator floor. He was aware that he was dead meat. This time he mentally ordered his hands to bring the tray back up and conk the man again, and again and again, as many times as necessary, but, paradoxically, they now refused to budge. His arms, and the hands attached to them that still held the tray, had turned as rigid as a GI Joe stuck in the karate chop position.
It felt to him as though the moment stretched out nearly to the point of hysteria, but it couldn’t have really because the elevator still hadn’t reached the parking garage. Then Nate noticed a growing red stain on the white lapel of the lab tech’s jacket, a stain coming from a trickle that originated under that thick, dark hair. Nate looked up to meet the lab tech’s eyes, guiltily, but the guy’s eyes had rolled up into his head. He crumbled to the floor like a deflating Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon.