Red Alert (20 page)

Worry beat at her. What had happened? Something with Raine? Something with the lab? Another attack? What?

Her phone was dead. “My battery’s out,” she
called, but it was too late. The cruiser window was up, and the car was bulling its way into the thickening traffic, lights flashing.

“Are you in trouble, lady?” The driver’s eyes met hers in the mirror, reflecting his real question.
Am
I
in trouble?

“Just follow him,” she said, not really answering either question. “We’ll be going to Boston General.”

That was where it had all begun, after all.

WHEN HE HIT the second traffic snarl, Erik banged his steering wheel and cursed with impotent frustration.

How had everything fallen apart so quickly? Just the day before, they’d been on the right track. Meg had been safe and they’d been successfully fighting the attraction between them. The detectives had been working to find the young man from the hospital video. They hadn’t had a name or a connection to one of his competitor companies, but they’d had a face, damn it. Things had been starting to move.

Now those same things were starting to crumble. Raine had taken a turn for the worse—the doctors had been cagey about it on the phone because he wasn’t an actual blood relative and Meg hadn’t been there to pull rank. She was ahead of him somewhere, with the cops escorting her to Boston General.

Maybe it was better that way, better to have her protected by men who hadn’t woken up beside her, who hadn’t brought tears to her eyes.

He’d thought they understood each other, but they
hadn’t understood anything. As he drove, a lead weight settled on Erik’s chest, right above his heart.

He hadn’t meant to hurt Meg, hadn’t meant to care for her. In the end, he’d done both of those things. There was nothing he could do to fix the hurt—he needed the NPT technology, believed it was the answer he’d been seeking. He hadn’t meant to be cruel, though, and feared that was exactly what he’d done.

“Come on, come on!” He cursed the traffic and leaned on his horn, as if that would do anything to shift the lumbering bus ahead of him.

He told himself Meg would be fine with the cops. They’d keep her safe until he got there.

But deep down inside, he wasn’t sure.

MEG’S POLICE ESCORT directed her to the critical care floor, warning her that something had happened with Raine. When she met Max coming the other way and saw the bleak desperation in his normally contained expression, she feared the worst.

“What happened?” When he plowed past, seeming not to see or hear her, she grabbed his arm. “Max, what’s wrong? Is Raine…?”

He blinked and shook his head before focusing on her. His eyes cleared a notch, letting her see the unhappiness. “She lost the baby. She got up in the middle of the night and fell. Said she saw a shadow, but the guard was at his post and there was nobody in the room. There was so much blood…” He looked away,
unhappiness etched in the tight muscles of his neck and jaw.

“I’m sorry.” She tightened her fingers on his arm. “If you want to stay with her, I can—”

“She kicked me out.” He stepped away from Meg’s touch. “And don’t tell me it was just hormones, or reaction, or whatnot. I know all that. But I saw her eyes. She’s not interested. No, scratch that—she’s decided not to be interested. There’s a difference.”

Meg thought back to her morning with Erik. “Yeah. I know what you mean.”

“Jemma called,” he said, changing the subject. “She asked me to meet her in the lab—something to do with the Phase IV data. She sounded kind of funny on the phone, but she wouldn’t give me any specifics.”

Oh, great, Meg thought, that was just what she didn’t need. A problem with the NPT clinical trials would ruin any chance of persuading Cage to kill the deal with FalcoTechno.

Not that she had much hope to begin with.

Face it, she was pretty much out of luck.

Meg muttered an oath, took another look at Max’s face and made a quick decision. “You take a walk. I’ll head upstairs and deal with Jemma.”

He nodded distractedly. “You’ll be okay? Where’s Falco?”

“He’s on his way,” she answered, bending the truth just a little. No doubt he’d be here soon. He’d go straight to Raine’s room to check on her, and Meg would rather not be there to meet him.

She’d be safe enough heading upstairs. Jemma was already there, and hell, she was carrying an illegal concealed weapon, which weighed heavily in the pocket of her green blazer. She’d be fine.

And if she kept repeating that, maybe she’d start to believe it. But Raine’s nightmare—or had it been something more?—along with the pall that seemed to permeate the hospital air, denser and more desperate than usual, had her tensing.

Max exhaled. “Okay. I could use some air.” He strode toward the nearest exit, a big, strong man who’d had the legs knocked out from underneath him by a woman he’d met less than a week earlier.

Yeah. She knew how that felt.

Meg grimaced and turned toward the elevators. She stiffened when a figure rounded the corner, a twentysomething guy in low-slung jeans and a dark hooded sweatshirt. What she could see of his face looked sullen and petulant, and he walked with a loose, aggressive stride.

He looked an awful lot like the guy in the fax.

She slid her hand into her jacket pocket, felt the warm weight of Erik’s gun slip into her palm, felt the nub of the safety beneath her fingertip, and—

The guy’s face cleared and broke into a smile. “There you are!” He sped up, jogged past Meg, and embraced a young woman with an eyebrow ring, heavily made-up eyes and a hospital ID.

Meg winced. Hell. She’d nearly pulled a weapon on the gift shop attendant’s boyfriend.

“Get a grip,” she muttered, earning herself a scowl
from both halves of the cuddling couple. She waved them off. “Not talking to you. Carry on.”

She felt foolish as she waited for the elevator, which was free now of its crime scene tape. Foolish and scared and unhappy, a far cry from the almost-in-control-of-her-life-and-headed-in-the-right-direction delusions she’d been harboring just a week earlier.

How had she lost control of things so quickly? More importantly, how could she regain that control and reassert herself against an opponent who had far more money and power than she did?

An idea flickered as the elevator doors slid open, then was gone when she realized it was the same elevator that had fallen with her and Erik in it.

She opted for the stairs instead, and felt the gun bang against her hip with each stride.

By the time she reached the fifth-floor landing, she had the bare bones of a plan, a last-ditch effort to convince—and if necessary force—Cage to turn down FalcoTechno’s offer.

She didn’t want to do it, but she didn’t see any other choice.

Running the details in her mind, she pushed open the door to the main lab. “Jemma? It’s me. Max said you were having a problem up here?”

The young woman’s voice responded from the inner lab, garbled by walls and distance.

Meg didn’t bother ditching her blazer and pulling on a lab coat. She headed straight into the lab, shouldering through the heavily shielded door. “So I was
thinking,” she began, and stepped into the lab. “What if we—”

A heavy blow caught her from behind, driving her to her knees.

And everything faded to black.

Chapter Fourteen

Erik dumped his car in the Emergency entrance, knowing it would be towed and not caring in the least. He bolted to the front door, moving as fast as his leg would let him.

He’d finally gotten through to a doctor who’d talk to him, but the news wasn’t good. Raine had lost the baby. The knowledge was a painful pressure in his chest. What if he’d been there? What if he’d stayed with Raine rather than gone home to Meg?

Raine might not have fallen, and he and Meg wouldn’t have spent the night together, wouldn’t have made the mistake of thinking they understood each other.

Muttering, Erik limped past a solitary figure leaning against the hospital wall. Then he stopped. Turned back. “Max? What are you doing out here? Why aren’t you inside with Raine and Meg?”

He hadn’t been able to reach Meg on her cell
phone, but told himself it didn’t matter. The cops had followed her in. The rent-a-guard was watching Raine’s room. The women were safe.

“Raine kicked me out.” Something dark and dangerous moved in the big man’s eyes—jealousy, maybe, and something more. Something hurting and sad. “You should talk to her.”

“I will. Later.” He knew he owed her an apology, an explanation. But he owed Meg one first. “Where’s Meg?”

Max jerked his chin upward. “She’s in the lab with Jemma.”

When the hospital doors opened and a familiar figure stepped out carrying a cup of takeout coffee, Erik’s blood froze in his veins. “No, she’s not.” He raised his voice. “Jemma, where’s Meg?”

The young woman’s expression darkened when she saw the men, saw their worried expressions. “I thought she was with you.”

“No,” Max said quickly. “I told you she was on her way in. And besides, why aren’t you in the lab?”

Jemma frowned, confused. “Why would I be? And what do you mean, you told me? I haven’t talked to you since yesterday.”

Erik had his phone out and was speed-dialing Detective Peters before she’d finished speaking. “Damn it. We’ve been played.” When Peters picked up, he snapped, “Get over here. Meg’s upstairs with the guy.”

“I’m on my way,” the detective said, voice rushed. “Our techs got a hit on the face.”

Hot rage cracked through the ice around Erik’s heart. “You know who he is?”

“Not he. She.”

CONSCIOUSNESS RETURNED with a rush of fear and disorientation. Meg groaned before she remembered what had happened, then bit off the noise to avoid detection.

Too late. Her captor had noticed she was awake.

A blurry shadow passed in front of her, a young man in low-slung jeans and a dark hooded sweatshirt.

Panic jammed her breath in her lungs. Oh, God. This was it. This was the man who’d been hunting her.

She tried to run, tried to spin away and escape, only to find her arms and legs bound. She was sitting on something with her hands fastened behind her back, her feet tied with her knees bent. As her brain began to clear with full consciousness she realized she was secured to one of the rolling lab chairs.

When the shadow passed again, Meg croaked, “Why?”

The young man sneered—only as the last of the cobwebs vanished, she realized it wasn’t a young man at all. It was a woman sporting boys’ clothing and a loose-limbed, masculine slouch. The woman’s features rearranged themselves into a familiar pattern that made absolutely no sense until she said, “Because you can’t have what I deserve.”

Then she raised a weapon—Erik’s service revolver, stolen from Meg’s jacket—and took aim between Meg’s eyes.

ERIK POUNDED up the stairs, cane gripped tightly in his hand, more weapon than crutch now.
Stay outside until we get there,
Peters had said.
She could be dangerous. Hell, she is dangerous.
But the cop’s voice had echoed Erik’s disbelief.

They’d been looking in the wrong direction all along. It had never been about FalcoTechno. It had been about Meg all along.

About professional jealousy.

He reached the fifth-floor landing and paused to assemble a mental map of the floor before he keyed in Meg’s code—he’d memorized it over her shoulder on day one, just in case—and opened the door to the lab lobby.

Pulse loud in his head, he pressed his ear to the crack and listened, senses humming. Nothing.

The cops were on their way—he’d sent Max to stand extra guard on Raine, and told Jemma to wait for the detectives, who were ten, maybe fifteen minutes away through traffic. He should wait for backup. It was police protocol.

Hell, it was smart thinking.

He started to ease back, telling himself he didn’t know the situation, wasn’t a cop anymore. If his years on the force had taught him anything, it was that minutes counted in both directions. Moving too early was just as dangerous as too late. Perhaps more so.

For the first time in a long, long while, a fragment of memory came to him, a snippet in Jimmy’s voice. “Steady, partner. You’ll know when it’s time.”

And he always had, until that last day when he hadn’t, when he’d gone in too soon and Jimmy had died.

“Come on, Peters. Where are you?” Erik pressed his ear to the crack once again, partly reassured by the quiet, partly fearing what it might mean.

Then he heard a voice. Voices. First Meg’s, saying something low and groggy and trailing up at the end in an unintelligible question. Then the response from a woman he’d met only once before, one who hadn’t even been on their radar screen as a suspect.

“Don’t be stupid,” the woman’s voice said, faint with distance. “You and I both know there’s only three ways for a female to get ahead in this field. She’s born with connections, she sleeps her way to the top or she fights for it. You were born your father’s daughter. Now that Leo Gabney’s gone, I’m left with option three. Fight.”

Not liking the woman’s borderline manic tone, Erik damned his backup for being slow, eased the door open farther and slipped inside the deserted reception area. He eased his gun free as he worked his way across the open space and crouched behind Jemma’s desk.

He heard movement in the lab, risked a look and saw that the main door, which was normally sealed, had been propped open with a chair.

Invitation, trap or something else? He didn’t know and wasn’t sure he could afford to find out.

Footsteps sounded within the lab and a shadow passed by the glass window of the propped-open door as a woman climbed on the chair and fiddled with something above the door.

Erik ducked down behind the desk and angled his head around the far side in the shadows, trying to see without being seen.

The shadow shifted and the woman poked her head through the partly opened door. She was wearing a young man’s clothes and stance, but the hood of the sweatshirt was thrown back, revealing a face that was older and narrower than it should have been, pinched with tension and the mad fire that burned in eyes that were a lighter shade of brown than her brunette hair.