Bear Claw Bodyguard (11 page)

Jack tried not to see Ray’s face, tried not to feel the cold burn of rage when he had other things to worry about right then. But it was coming together now, and he didn’t like the pattern it was making. Grimly jettisoning crime scene protocol for necessity, he searched the dead man, aware of Tori’s wide-eyed stare following him.

“No ID,” he reported, “but we’ve got this.” He held up a short-range radio. “He must have turned it off so nobody would bother him while he was getting high.” And he had wound up getting dead instead. It was ridiculous to feel bad about that; no doubt when the body made it down to the city, it’d turn out that Ritchie here had a rap sheet and some outstanding warrants. Boy Scouts didn’t usually join up with groups like this one.

Banishing the twinge that had hit him anyway, brought on by the sight of that fixed, horrified stare, Jack clicked on the radio and turned the volume up just loud enough for them to hear a clipped, faintly accented voice saying, “My associate failed to take care of the problem, though, which means we need to vacate this site immediately. Pack everything up and lock it all down, gentlemen. We’re moving to the alternate site. Make sure the DB-Auto is locked, loaded and ready to go because we’re going to have to start over in the new place.”

Tori caught his arm so hard that her fingers dug in. “They’re going to infect another forest! We have to stop them!”

“No,” he said flatly, even though every fiber of his being was screaming
Yes!
He covered her hand with his and pressed down, trapping her touch and bringing her eyes up to his in surprise. He wanted, needed her to look at him and see that he was deadly serious when he said, “We
can’t risk it, Tori. If they find us, we’re dead. And sneaking down there to sabotage their vehicles, send out a distress call using their comm devices or whatever else you’re thinking of doing? That would guarantee they would find us.” He squeezed her hand. “The world is a better place with you in it. Okay?”

His insides were screaming
Not okay!
but he stuck to his decision. It would cost him, no doubt—in guilt, lost sleep and the faces of the next few to die of the Death Stare—but he refused to endanger Tori in the process of bringing down the Shadow Militia, and he didn’t see any other way to do it without revealing their presence.

“What if we could cripple the operation without their realizing we were there?” she asked, uncannily paralleling his thoughts.

“How are you going to manage that?”

She hesitated, blew out a shaky breath and said, “That DB-Auto he mentioned? That’s the DNA synthesizer—among other things—they’re using to create the fungus. It must need to be built from scratch each time it’s released into the wild, and then it can procreate from there. Anyway, the point is that I know how to program DBs…and, better yet, I know how to lock them down.”

The sneak attack had been Tori’s idea, and she had been the one to convince a reluctant Jack that not only was it worth it—a necessity, in fact—but that it would work. But as she hunkered down behind a couple of fuel canisters in a relatively deserted part of the camp and watched him stroll through the center of the bowl, which was now abuzz with activity where it had been dead before, she was seriously questioning both their judgment and their sanity.

He was nuts to be walking through the Shadow Militia, disguised with little more than the dead man’s jacket, a swagger and a surly look. According to him, the encampment was big enough and chaotic enough that he’d pass as one of them long enough to get to the lab trailer and make sure it was secure, so all she would have to do would be to make it from the fuel barrels to the lab, wearing the dead guy’s hat and army shirt and keeping her head down.

Piece of cake, right?

Wrong. God, what had she been thinking? She wasn’t some sort of superspy; she wasn’t even a rookie cop. She was a plant doctor, for heaven’s sake! People like her didn’t wear disguises cobbled together from a mix of her own outfit and that of a dead man, and they didn’t try to cripple
high-tech drug rings whose members would stop at nothing to protect their income stream.

“Oh God, oh God, ohGod, ohGodohGodohGod…” The whispered litany was a plea for help, for strength, for luck. Heck, for whatever she could get right now, as Jack stuck his head into the lab trailer, said a few words and then went the rest of the way into the long, narrow room.

She knew he was in there, knew she wasn’t alone in the encampment, but with him out of sight she felt suddenly conspicuous, as if a huge floodlight was going to snap on and pin her any second now. Her heart hammered in her chest and sweat bloomed between her breasts and down her spine as she waited for him to come out and give her the all-clear signal.

But what if he didn’t come out? What if whoever was in there knew he wasn’t one of them? Right now they could be tackling him, restraining him or worse—and her stomach congealed to a cold, hard knot at the thought—what if they killed him outright? Unbidden, her mind superimposed his face on the corpse up on the ridge. Her breath thinned to a pained whistle and her head started to spin.

Don’t freak,
she told herself.
Slow down. Breathe. You’re losing it.

Even as she tried to breathe slower and hold it together, her brain kept spinning worst-case scenarios. What if their pictures had been circulated around the encampment? What if—

The door to the lab trailer swung open and she jolted so hard that she wound up banging back against one of the fuel containers, which made a hollow, booming noise that sounded incredibly loud to her just then, although it didn’t attract any attention from the two rifle-toting men
who were nearest her, locked in a low-voiced argument as they strode toward a Humvee that was mounted with the turret gun.

Just as her stress-crazed imagination started showing her images of them firing a barrage into the fuel stockpile where she was hiding, a couple of white-coated men came out of the trailer and headed off to some other destination, and a familiar face with ruggedly handsome features and lake-blue eyes became visible in the shadows of the lab trailer. He sought her out with his gaze, then waved to give her the all clear.

“Jack,” she whispered, exhaling a huge gust of relief. “Thank God.” She hadn’t doubted him, she told herself. Not really. It was more that she had doubted her own luck. Usually with her, when things had a fifty-fifty chance of working out, they went the other way.

Smothering a groan because her knees had locked up while she had crouched there for so long, she rose and emerged from behind the fuel containers, pretending to check the empty clipboard she had grabbed off the fender of one of the Humvees on the way in. She doubted she pulled off the same swagger Jack had used to get across the compound unchallenged, but she kept her hat low and her head down, and minimized the too-feminine sway of her hips as much as she could.

It wasn’t that far to the lab trailer, but it seemed to take forever for her to make it across the dusty open space. Her legs felt wooden, the air burned in her lungs and she kept waiting for a shout, a shot, some sort of reaction from the beehive swarm of armed men who eddied around her. But they were busy with their own tasks, their own thoughts, and saw what they expected to see. No one even looked at
her funny, at least not that she saw. And then, thank God, she was at the trailer, climbing the three short steps leading to the cool, air-conditioned interior, and the man who was waiting for her there.

Jack pulled her inside, shut and locked the door, and dragged her into his arms.

She stiffened more in delayed reaction than protest, and he let her go and stepped back. “You’re right, bad timing. Let’s get you to work.”

But as he moved away to take up a watchful stance beside the window nearest the door, she stared after him, her heart drumming not just with fear now, but also from sudden heat. The way he had touched her just now was different, and the look in his eye as he glanced over wasn’t the same as it had been before. It made her blood hum beneath her skin, bringing new sensitivity and the thought that something had changed between them, though she didn’t know what or why.

Or else you’re just projecting,
she thought wryly. And who could blame her? She would far rather think about her handsome bodyguard than worry about the men outside or the very real possibility that she wouldn’t be able to get into the DB’s programming.
Man up,
she told herself. And banishing the heat as best she could, she turned and surveyed the lab trailer.

The narrow space was efficiently organized with synthetic and analytical machines at one end, data-crunching stations at the other. Heaps of printouts, binders, boxed supplies and the other odds and ends of a working lab had accumulated at the workstations, suggesting that the R&D phase was over and the main focus was on production. She’d only had hands-on experience with maybe half
of the pieces of equipment that were efficiently crammed together in stacked racks, some of which were on air-ride shock absorbers, others already packed with foam and air-filled plastic bumpers to keep them from being damaged when the trailer went mobile.

A few of the machines were still up and running, though, and thank God one of them was her target: the DB-Auto.

“Okay,” she said softly, swallowing to wet her suddenly dry mouth as she approached the big, boxy machine. “You can do this.” And she could, she had, only never like this before.

The Auto was deceptively plain on the outside, with a user panel that offered little more than a basic keypad, a computer interface and injection ports for various samples and solvents. Inside, though, it contained several robotic arms and a combination of different synthetic and analytical devices that allowed it to offer everything from DNA extraction and analysis to protein synthesis, even in some cases modifying the proteins to near-lifelike end products not normally offered by compact machines.

It was cutting-edge, very expensive…and it had at least one weakness she knew of.

Stretching her fingers like a pianist prepping for the opening chords of a big performance, Tori took a breath, cued up the linked computer terminal and said a quick prayer under her breath as she asked for the main screen of the software, which the company had called DB-Auto-Bahn, even though its speed was more in the category of “middle lane stuck behind a heavily loaded truck.” When the screen popped up, all blue and white and vaguely car
toonish, just like she’d expected, she exhaled. “Thank you, Mr. Scientist, whoever you are.”

“Good news?” Jack said from his surveillance post.

“It’s not pass-coded, which is going to save time.” She dropped down into the guts of the software and got to work, clicking and typing, changing a line here, a number there. All the while, she was aware of him dividing his attention between the window and her progress.

“I’m impressed. Maybe you should add ‘hacker’ to your résumé.”

“Nope, I can only really mess with this one machine.” She kept going as she spoke, aware that the seconds were ticking by far too quickly. “One of my old bosses actually was a pretty good hacker. Unfortunately, he also had a really mean sense of humor, and he liked to test the people around him, to see if they were worthy of his supposed greatness. Now and then, he would go in and reprogram some of the machines to give bogus answers, produce slightly altered products, that sort of thing. Then he’d get angry if we didn’t catch it.”

“Sounds like a real prize to work for.”

She made a face as she guessed wrong, hit a dead end and had to backtrack. “He was a brilliant scientist and I learned a ton from him. But, yeah, he wasn’t my favorite human being ever.” She paused as things started flowing again. “Guess I owe him for this one, though, because rather than getting paranoid about our science, the way he wanted us to, we figured out how to undo his little programming tweaks and came up with ways to shut him out of the programs entirely so he couldn’t mess with them anymore. Which is what—” she hit the final two keys “—I’ve done here.”

His eyebrows lifted. “That was fast.”

“I’m not in the mood to stick around.” Returning the Auto to its sleep settings, she pushed away from the console, the memories of past labs—safe jobs—draining as their surroundings came back into focus around her, bringing a renewed sense of urgency. “Let’s get out of here.”

“Your wish is my… Damn it.” His voice and features hardened. “Someone’s coming this way.” He reached out a hand for her as she crossed the room. When she took it, he drew her close and said into her ear in an undertone, “Play along, and whatever you do, don’t look at anyone. Keep your head down, you hear me?”

When she nodded, heart pounding sickly in her ears and sudden terror welling up from wherever it had briefly subsided to, he dragged down her hat so it practically covered her eyebrows and, without warning, dropped her hand and yanked open the door.

“Lazy good for nothing,” he snarled, grabbing her collar and shoving her out, so she stumbled down the steps and practically plowed into the two guys who were just about to start up them.

The men—not the lab-coated figures that Jack had talked into leaving the lab trailer earlier, but rather two more toughs of the armed-and-dangerous variety—scowled and fell back. “What the hell?” one demanded, reaching for her arm.

Jack yanked her away on the pretext of shaking her, giving a growl of, “Can’t believe you made me look like an idiot back there. And what the hell were you thinking, sneaking into the big trailer like that?” To the men, he said as an aside, “Sorry, won’t happen again.”

“Wait,” one said, going for his radio.

“Can’t,” Jack fired back. “This moron’s already made me late as spit.”

Her breath wheezed in her lungs and she fought to keep her footing as he hustled her along, heading for the fuel stash she’d been hiding in before. They drew some attention, but nobody tried to stop them, and the two guys in the lab trailer didn’t raise an alarm. In fact, there wasn’t the slightest ripple of a response as they reached the fuel, bypassed the big drums and headed up the incline of the bowl, aiming for the tree line.

Either the members of the Shadow Militia were so focused on their own tasks as the camp got ready to evac, or they were used to seeing senior soldiers dragging hapless underlings into the forest for punishment. Tori didn’t know why, but the suspicion that the latter was particularly true really reached inside and grabbed on, as did the utter strangeness of having fiddled with a DB-Auto—a normal, everyday machine—under such completely nonordinary circumstances.

She had walked into and out of an armed encampment. She had fried their Auto, or at least locked it down tight enough that it would not only refuse to work now, but it would also refuse to release any of the info stored in its databanks. She had bumped into a guy wearing a machine gun slung over his shoulder.

The ground pitched suddenly beneath her and the sky began to spin. She grabbed on to Jack, who still had her by the arm, and was hustling them up the slope of the next ridge. “Oh, God,” she wheezed, “I think I’m going to…”

“Not yet.” He changed his grip, looping her hand over his neck and wrapping an arm around her waist, supporting her so that her feet were barely touching the ground.
“Stay with me, sweetheart. We need to get far enough away that we’ll have a head start if they sound the alarm.”

She let herself lean on him. “Sorry. I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be a wimp.”

He shot her a look she was too strung-out to interpret. “Don’t be sorry. And you’re not a wimp. You’re about the furthest from a wimp I can imagine.”

“For a civilian,” she said thinly.

“For anyone.” He nudged her to a cluster of dull gray rocks within the shield of a thick stand of fungus-infected trees. “Okay, we’re going to stop here for a little while. Now you can feel free to faint, puke, have quiet hysterics…whatever you need to do. I won’t judge, I promise.”

She sank down gratefully with her back against one of the big boulders, and rested her forehead on her knees while she concentrated on breathing.
In. Out. In. Out.

Beyond the small-feeling cage created by her body, she was conscious of Jack taking a quick prowl around the immediate area. Once he was reassured that they were as safe as they were likely to get right then, he sat down and leaned back against a rock opposite her, then stretched out his long legs on one side of her, close enough that she could feel the warmth of his body heat. Or maybe she just thought she could. Either way, it helped. It mattered. He was something solid and real when nothing else seemed that way right then.

In. Out. In. Out.

He pulled out the stolen radio and clicked it on, dialing through the channels to check whether there were other conversations going on. Finding just the one airwave in use, he settled on it, tuned the squelch and settled back to listen in on the chatter, which was focused on securing
the last of the trailers to move out; checking maps but not revealing the coordinates of the “alternate site”; and berating somebody named Bert for being an idiot and denting one of the trailers with a Humvee.