Angel Face (27 page)

Jordan laughed, and God, it felt good. He laughed long and hard. He laughed until the other man raged at him and demanded to know what the fuck was going on.

“Any shit that happens will be happening to you,” Jordan said. “Did it ever occur to you that I might not need your testimony?”

“What do you mean? Of course you need my testimony.”

The two men locked gazes, and Jordan had a fleeting sense of triumph, but mostly he felt pity. His opponent was a fool in so many ways.

The silence grew as they both waited. Waited for the moment that Jordan had been anticipating all night.

And then it came.

“Not if I’m
alive
, he doesn’t.”

It was a woman’s voice, soft and seductive. Firestarter gave out an audible gasp as he realized who it was. He whirled toward the front door as she appeared on the threshold, her hair as long and dark and liquid as a jungle night, her eyes sparkling like stars.

Angela Lowe made a very compelling ghost.

Flushed with victory, she was as lovely as Jordan had ever seen her.

“
Here’s
the goddamn body,” she said, looking directly at the agent.

Jordan didn’t want to think about how close he’d come
to actually killing her. He’d been aiming for the gun, not her, with the crazy thought that he could shoot it out of her hand. But she dropped to her knees, and suddenly it was her face in his sights.

Two things impinged on him at once in that shadowland where life-and-death decisions are made. One was something Angela herself had said about the experiment, and the other was a woman’s face appearing in his doorway.

A second ghost. She was there and gone before he could see who it was, and maybe she’d never been there at all. He would never know, but it had all happened in a split second—the ghost, the gunshot—infinitely less time than it took to lose a patient in surgery. And infinitely more devastating.

“Jordan! He has a gun!”

Angela’s warning came too late. Firestarter had pulled a weapon, and he was holding it on Angela. It was a wild bluff to get Jordan to disarm.

Jordan thought about jaguars and boldness. He thought about how close he’d come to killing someone he was trying to save.

“I’m not dying alone here tonight,” the agent vowed.

It was a stalemate, but Jordan played it out, calculating the odds of putting a bullet through the agent’s brain before he could squeeze the trigger. In the seconds it took him to make his decision, he saw a flicker of movement in his peripheral vision.

The other ghost. She’d floated through the doorway of his living room and come up behind the agent, a soundless, weightless apparition draped in black. Jordan couldn’t take his eyes off Firestarter, but he could see that this ghost had significantly improved Jordan’s odds. She had a gun in her hand.

Angela spotted the woman seconds after Jordan did and let out a cry of surprise. “Silver!”

Firestarter whirled as if beset by demons, and Jordan saw his chance. This time he had the agent in his laser sight. And he didn’t miss.

“L
ONG
time no see, Ron,” Jordan said softly.

He got little more than a growl from the man as he collapsed on the floor, clutching his bleeding hand. Jordan hadn’t shot him through the head for good reason. Dead men couldn’t talk, and this particular CIA agent had a lot more talking to do.

Jordan had been aiming for the gun, but his first round hit the agent’s hand, which achieved the same result. The second lifted his hat and sent it flying. That was when Jordan realized who he was dealing with. His old rival from medical school was finally recognizable once the unscathed side of his face was exposed.

Angela was still stranded across the room.

“Come over here.” Jordan beckoned her to his side while he kept the gun trained on the agent.

She fell into his outstretched arm with enough enthusiasm to force a grunt out of him, and when he pulled her close, whatever had been holding him together through it all threatened to give way. He wanted to take her in both arms and hold her until the shaking eased. And maybe he
could, he realized. They had some pretty interesting backup. Their dark ghost of a visitor had an all-business Austrian Glock in her hand, and it was trained on the agent.

“Who the hell is
she
?” Jordan asked Angela under his breath.

“A friend, I’d like to think,” Angela said. “Silver and I go way back.”

“Ron and I go way back, too.” Jordan indicated the man on the floor. “This could be a high school reunion.”

Silver smiled from across the room. The sleek black turtleneck and jeans she wore accentuated the metallic flecks in her pale blue eyes. But the black knit cap made her look a little too much like La Femme Nikita. Jordan had trouble imagining her as anyone’s friend, much less Angela’s.

Although there was a side of Angela—

“Feel free to holster the weapon,” Silver told Jordan. “I can handle things from here on out.”

“I’m sure you can,” he said, “but I have some questions for the man. And if he doesn’t answer me, I’m going to shoot him again, probably several more times. I’d hate for you to get caught in the crossfire.”

Silver nodded and stepped back. She winked at Angela as if to say,
Interesting choice in men.

“Nasty burn, Ron.” Jordan was unsparing in his sarcasm. “Playing with matches again? You nearly burned down the dorm at school, more than once as I remember.”

“Kid stuff.” The other man scoffed, but he touched the facial scars with a sense of pride that was almost childlike. “As for my face, it was an unfortunate accident with some flammable chemicals, a lab accident.”

“Not unfortunate enough,” Jordan muttered.

Laird held out his oozing hand. “The heroic heart surgeon is going to let his gunshot victim bleed to death? How will that play at the press conference?”

Jordan smiled. “Hey, congratulations on
your
career transition from amoral doctor to amoral CIA agent.”

“He isn’t CIA.”

Silver’s cool remark brought a startled glare from Firestarter. “And who the fuck are you?”

“
I
am CIA,” she informed him. “But ten years ago I worked for your company as an informant, although I wouldn’t expect you to remember that. Or that someone from SmartTech decided to have me die on an operating table when I tried to blow the whistle on the assignments I was being given.”

“SmartTech?” Angela spoke up as if she hadn’t heard correctly.

Silver extended her hand. “Angela, I’d like you to meet your boss and one of the founders of SmartTech, Ron Laird.”

Angela’s surprise was audible. She’d never mentioned Laird to Jordan, and apparently she’d never come face-to-face with him, but then she’d only been at SmartTech a year, and it was Brandt who’d mentored her, not Laird. Any contact with Laird during her informant years was unlikely, too. She would probably have reported to a security type, so while she was obviously on Laird’s radar screen, he was not on hers.

As Silver continued, things began to fall into place for Jordan.

“I guess you could say that I’ve been interested in you and your company for some time now,” she told Laird. “The way you subvert government contracts for your own gain and covertly conduct biowarfare research, not to mention silencing your informants and their sources when they become inconvenient.”

“You have no proof,” Laird shot back. “No proof of anything.”

Angela quietly contradicted him. “I have proof that you’re running unethical experiments. And that you used
me to kill a source you believed was going to sell you out. I remember it all, Dr. Laird, everything I wiped from my mind so you wouldn’t silence me.”

Laird was fearless. He was smug. “What’s unethical about tapping my own brain? I was your favorite subject, Angela—Alpha Ten. The rest of the images were simulations, and the people you interviewed were students who thought they were part of a study on innate intelligence, whatever the hell that is.”

Angela’s voice was faint with disbelief. “Did Peter know about that?”

“Peter’s been too busy marketing Angel Face to properly supervise your work, so it fell to me.”

“But Peter must have known. He sent me E-mail instructions—Oh, God, that was you.”

Jordan released Angela and approached Ron Laird. The longer he listened, the more he began to grasp the extremes this man was capable of. Not that he was completely surprised. Ron had been suspended from both medical school and his residency in neurobiology for questionable conduct. He had never become a practicing physician but had gone into research instead, a frightening thought with his Machiavellian mind.

Jordan knelt to look at him, maybe with the thought of staring him in the eye and probing the dim recesses of another man’s soul, if that was possible. It was hard to believe that his erstwhile friend had always been this way. Something must have happened to turn him so calculating and inhumane.

“You helped yourself to my remote sensor idea, didn’t you,” Jordan said. “The one I shelved because I was concerned about misuse. You wanted to buy the rights with your family’s money, and I refused, so you
lifted
it. Now you’re using it with your AIR software and your supercomputers to invade people’s most basic right to privacy—their own thoughts. That’s the experiment Angela’s been
talking about, the one I didn’t believe existed.”

“Maybe the rough design was yours,” Laird admitted, “but I’ve spent a small fortune of my own money on research and development, and now I’ve got government backing. Whatever it takes, they’ll fund it. There wasn’t the technology to do it back then. There is now, because of me. Think about it, Jordan. Angel Face is a criminal profiling program that can stop crime—
violent crime
. And that’s just one of its applications. It has unlimited potential, and I’m the only one who could have developed it. Don’t you see that?”

Jordan saw exactly what he feared. Laird didn’t know what he’d done, or he didn’t care. This wasn’t about the good he could do, no matter what he told himself. It was about the glory. He wanted recognition so desperately he couldn’t see the profound ethical questions his work had created and how flagrantly he’d abused his power. In someone else’s hands, and tightly regulated, perhaps Angel Face could be useful, but never in his hands.

Laird was the criminal who had to be stopped.

But Jordan had a more immediate concern. There were still missing pieces, too many to make sense of the other man’s motives.

He posed a scenario to Laird. “Let’s just say for the sake of argument that you wanted Angela dead because she was in your way, and you wanted me to kill her because
I
was in your way. Two birds, so to speak. Why would you also frame her for serial killings she didn’t commit?”

Laird looked sorely tempted to explain. The dark side of genius, Jordan thought, was unmitigated ego. He wanted to share his grand plan. He wanted to gloat.

“You’ve got me stumped,” Jordan prompted him.

Laird’s quick headshake probably took all the restraint he had. “I’m saying nothing more until I talk to my attorney.”

“I hope you’ve got a good one,” Silver muttered. “I hope you’ve got a whole team of them.”

Laird’s laughter held a sneer. “What are you, anyway, a punk field agent? I have connections at the highest levels of government. You’re not taking me down. Nobody’s taking me down.”

“You’re already down,” Jordan pointed out.

Laird turned on him instantly. His voice was low and trembling. His eyes were blindingly bright. “You smug bastard,” he said, “who got you into Phi Chi? Do you think a research nerd like you, who survived on scholarships and handouts, had a chance with a crowd like that? I was the reason they accepted you. I was the reason you got lucky with all those perky sorority bitches, Carpenter. My family, my name.”

Jordan had never felt the depth of this man’s hatred before. He did now. And it all seemed to stem from their college years. It was true that Ron had taken him under his wing and introduced him around, but Jordan had known why from the beginning. Ron wanted to pick his brain, copy his work, and be on hand to take advantage of his friend’s academic prowess. He used Jordan, but he also resented him.

“I would have made it, Ron, with or without you. And whatever you did for me didn’t give you the right to steal from me.”

“Why not? Why the hell not? You stole from me. You stole fucking everything I had. Did I ever tell you how many times my own father asked me why I couldn’t be more like you? It was always after you’d been at our house for dinner or whatever. I’d get one of his famous speeches about how disappointed he was in me, and it finally dawned on me that he always would be. I didn’t have ‘brilliant potential.’ I wasn’t going to be a bright, shiny hero like you.”

Jordan understood more all the time. Maybe he
understood it all. “You wanted Angela out of the way, and you wanted me to kill her so you could have a ringside seat while they dragged me through the mud, right?”

Laird’s eyes told the truth.
Yes,
they said,
I wanted to bring you down any way I could. If I couldn’t
be
you, then I wanted to ruin you.

Angela was just a means to an end, Jordan realized, and that end was him, Jordan. Laird had never been able to control his youthful jealousy and rage. He’d carried it all the way into adulthood. It wasn’t even greed that motivated him. It was recognition and revenge. He was still nothing more than a kid, seeking his father’s approval.

“Why haven’t I been allowed to call my attorney?” Laird struggled to get to his feet. “This is a violation of my rights.”

Jordan hauled him up and took him over to the wall phone by the kitchen door. “Call!” he said, pressing the gun barrel to his temple. He was strongly tempted to pull the trigger, but he had the feeling Laird’s very public trial was going to be a lot more interesting and less merciful.

“Wait! There’s something I need to know.”

Angela came up behind them. Laird turned his frightening countenance on her, but she stood her ground. “Who
is
Angel Face?” she said. “Tell me who she is. You owe me that much.”

“I owe you nothing. You’d be dead by now if not for me.”

“Bullshit,” Angela said softly. Apparently she wasn’t feeling particularly grateful. “There never was a female serial killer, was there? You invented her
and
her victims, and you tried to frame me for killings that never happened.”

Laird laughed at her. “You’re crazy, and I can prove it. Your own psychiatrist will testify to that.”

Jordan struggled to understand what Angela was
saying. “Killings that never happened? But those doctors died, Angela. Somebody killed them.”

“They died,” she said, “but no one killed them. I can’t prove it, but I’m certain of it.”

“Dr. Inada, the visiting surgeon? The patient in my office tonight? I took their vital signs,” Jordan insisted.

But something stuck in his mind. When Inada’s body disappeared, Firestarter had told him the CIA had to cover up the killings because Angel Face was a threat to national security. The authorities could not be allowed to find out how the doctors had died. Inada was going to have an accident, Firestarter had assured Jordan. His death would be accidental as had all the other victims’ deaths.

Jordan didn’t know what to make of Angela’s theory, and she obviously couldn’t explain it. He looked from Ron Laird to Angela to Silver, but he found no answers to his dilemma there.