The Spy Who Saved Christmas (8 page)

“You thought something was wrong with you.”

“Then a couple of years back, I had a wife.” He pushed away those dark memories. He didn’t want to think of Leila’s broken body, the grave on the side of that damned mountain in Afghanistan where he’d buried her. “Anyway, nothing happened there either. So I was pretty sure.

“Plus there was this other thing. I caught some shrapnel to a sensitive area at one point.”

“Ouch.”

“You’re telling me. So the doctor said I might have, you know, trouble from that later.”

Her red-rimmed eyes blinked. “You had a wife?” She stared at him, storm clouds gathering on her face.

“Long story.” He definitely wasn’t going to talk about that. To anyone. Ever.

She took a wobbly step back. “While you were in Hopeville?” Another layer of hurt was added to her voice, her violet eyes widening with the pain.

Okay, so he hadn’t always been truthful with her. Still, it stung that she was so ready to assume the worst about him. “I’m a conscienceless bastard for the most, but not that much of a bastard. A vote of confidence would be nice here.”

Her eyes narrowed. “You’ve been lying to me from the get-go. I’m not going to apologize. What happened to her?”

“She was killed.” Along with two hundred forty-two innocent men, women and children—most of a small Afghan village. Because of him.

R
EID WAS HER ONLY HOPE
, and he was the most terrible last resort a desperate woman could have, Lara thought as the drugs wore off. Hours had passed while the two of them waited for a call, some clue they could follow. He wasn’t just bad luck for her, he was bad luck for all women, it seemed. He’d had a wife. And she’d been killed. He hadn’t said that it’d been his fault, but the look on his face told a grim story. His face had been so hard she thought his cheekbones would crack.

She wondered whether his tragic marriage happened before or after he’d come to Hopeville to mess up her life forever. It didn’t matter. She had little claim on him. And still, when she thought of him walking away from Hopeville, leaving her behind, heartbroken and pregnant, to marry another woman, her heart twisted with pain.

“Will you tell me about her?” She bit her lip. It wasn’t like her to be a masochist. Maybe he wouldn’t answer. God, she needed to get out of here. She moved away from him, walking to the hall closet for her coat.

“No.”

And she nodded, equally disappointed and relieved.

He came around her to block the front door. “And you’re not going anywhere. How are you feeling?” He searched her face.

“Better. My heart is still ripped out, but the drugs are wearing off, so at least I can think. You can’t expect me to sit still here.” It was midafternoon. She couldn’t stand the thought of all those hours her babies had already spent without her.

“So what, you’re planning a statewide house-to-house search? They can be anywhere. Before we act, we need information to act on. I know waiting is pain—”

His cell phone rang.

“Thanks. I owe you one,” he said to whoever was calling. Then he walked over to Ben’s laptop on the coffee table.

She followed, needing to know what information was coming in.

He opened his e-mail. He had a single message in his otherwise empty inbox. She must have had ten thousand in her own. Maybe he never saved anything, as a security measure.

The sender field was blank. The message said,
Here is the first file. Still working on the rest.

She watched over his shoulder as he opened the attachment and scrolled through information that meant little to her. “What is it?”

“The ingredient list for some kind of chemical compound.” He scrolled some more. “No, never mind. That’s just the carrying agent.” His finger stopped on the keyboard. “Oh, hell.”

“What?”

“PX12. A virus originally engineered as a bioweapon by our own fine government. Then abandoned when it proved to be too difficult to control.”

“How deadly is it?” she barely dared to ask.

“Enough to take out a couple of thousand people by New Year’s if it’s released at Christmas. And as it’s passed on… By Easter, we’re talking about a hundred thousand deaths.”

She sat suddenly, the strength going out of her knees. She’d suspected that he was involved in something pretty bad, something she didn’t even want to know about. But this was worse than she’d thought. And now her babies were in the middle of it. She couldn’t breathe all of a sudden. “When?” she asked, stunned. “Where?”

“That’s the million-dollar question. Let’s hope there’s information about that in one of the other files. In the meantime, I know someone who might know more about this stuff.” He pulled out his cell phone and dialed.

“Hey. I’m going to read you a list of nasties. Can you tell me who handles this stuff in the New York–Philly area?” He read the list of ingredients for the carrying agent then waited for the answer. “That’s fine. Call me back when you have it.”

He stood to stretch his legs, his expression thoughtful, as if he were searching through a catalog of information in his head, trying to look for something, anything, that would give them a clue, a connection. He was calm, but not relaxed. More like the complete silence of the land before a major earthquake or other natural disaster. There was something foreboding in the way he measured his steps.

She walked out to the kitchen for a glass of water, her mouth dry as baby powder. Side effect of the drugs she’d been given, no doubt. Now that they’d worn off, panic was gripping her muscles again, nothing dulling the pain that seared through her chest. She felt hollow without her babies, empty. She took a long drink. It didn’t help. Her hands began to shake. She was losing it.

“I can’t stand the waiting.” She slammed the plastic cup on the counter. She couldn’t stand thinking how scared Zak and Nate must be without her.

“We won’t be sitting around much longer. The second we have something to go on, we’re out of here.” He looked at the e-mail on his laptop again, then back at her. “So here are the ground rules. When I say duck, you duck. When I say stay back, you stay back. And whether I say it or not, you’ll stay quiet and stay out of the way.” His warm cinnamon gaze turned to cold quartz crystal and held hers. “If there’s trouble, you run. I’ll worry about Zak and Nate.”

“Who will worry about you?”

“Nobody needs to worry about me.”

The way he looked just then, a rock of determination and strength, she could almost believe him.

“So take whatever last chance we have here to rest. We’ll both need all our focus and strength,” he told her, his voice softening with patience.

She took off her coat. He ordered food. They ate. She didn’t taste any of it. Five minutes later, she couldn’t have said for a million dollars what the toppings on the pizza had been. The air was filled with tension. Her accusations of him, her blaming him for what had happened were part of that. She knew she wasn’t being entirely reasonable, but she was too petrified for her babies, too emotionally wrung out to take the words back.

All she could do was stare out the window at the cops who were milling around the house. Were they still hoping to find some clues out there, or were they here for protection? She asked Reid.

He shrugged. “Both, I’m guessing.”

He kept checking his e-mail. Nothing was coming in. He paced the room for hours on end. When darkness fell, he ordered food again. The cops left, but an unmarked police car with two plainclothes officers was now parked in front of the house.

Every time Reid’s phone rang, she jumped. But it was never a call that brought any answers.

“The kidnappers didn’t say when they were calling back?” she asked for at least the third time.

He shook his head. “Go to bed. Get some rest.”

“I can’t.” She kept staring out the window at a row of streetlights, hoping that somehow, by some miracle, she would see her babies being brought back.

She chewed every nail she had down to bloody stumps, and she’d never chewed her nails in her life. She was ready to start pulling her hair out by the time midnight rolled around and Reid’s phone rang again.

He picked up and listened for ten or fifteen minutes with only the occasional, brief question. “Okay. Thanks.” He hung up, then looked at a picture of a man on the phone’s display. “They might have found the virus.”

She’d been hoping for,
we have the babies,
but this was something. At least they were heading in the right direction. “Where?”

“At a fertility clinic not far from here. A friend of a friend knows a guy, Jason Wurst, who’s sold something like this abroad before to supplement his research grant. Couldn’t pin it on him at the time, but the man who investigated the case swears by it.”

She stared. “An ob-gyn?” What did that have to do with deadly viruses?

“Not exactly. A hard of his luck scientist who helps out at the clinic so he has access to the cryogenic freezer. His ex-wife worked on the original project for the government. She died of unknown causes a few months after the project was closed. I’m guessing our Jason here blames the government, whether or not her death was related.”

“You think the wife told him about the project? Wouldn’t that be confidential?”

“She might have found talking about it irresistible. They were both top scientists at one time. Or she, too, might have blamed the government for falling sick and told her husband in some last, desperate act before her death.”

“So he figured out how to make the virus and whipped up a batch. Do you think he still has it with him?”

“Unless our bad guys have a cryogenic freezer at home next to their beer coolers, they wouldn’t pick the virus up until the last second, when they’re ready to distribute it.”

She was on her way to the door. Reid cut in front of her, made sure it was safe to leave before they went to the car, nodding to the cops who were still outside.

“It’d be better if you stayed here with them.” He made a last-ditch effort, not looking too surprised when she took the passenger seat without bothering to answer.

One of the cops ran over.

“I’m taking her to another, more secure location,” Reid told him. “Looks like you’re done here. Thanks, guys.”

For a while, he drove in silence. And she worked herself into a frenzy of worry. Because so many things could go wrong here.

She wished the kidnappers would call back already. She couldn’t stand not knowing what was happening with the boys. She was gripping the laptop hard enough to make the plastic creak, so she peeled her fingers off and wrapped her arms around herself.

“Why me?” Reid asked out of the blue.

A few seconds passed before she could pull her thoughts away from her worries and focus on him. “You what?”

“You obviously don’t sleep around. So, two years ago in Hopeville, why did you choose me?”

Not a question Lara wanted to address in any great detail. Or at all. For, say, the next hundred years. “I’m fine. You don’t need to distract me.”

“You’re not fine. And I want an answer.”

Great. How was she supposed to explain?

“You were my first flight lesson,” she said at last, after she’d managed to pull her thoughts together. “Your what?”

She drew a slow, deep breath. “My grandmother, Granny Jordan,” she clarified, “was a member of the Ninety-nines. Not a founding member. I mean later.”

“A sports team?” he guessed, looking puzzled.

“An organization of women pilots founded by Amelia Earhart.”

“You’re kidding.”

“She was brave and wild and had a life fit for the movies. My mom didn’t like her. Probably because my father idolized her. Mom didn’t get the whole flying high on the wings of freedom concept.”

“But your grandmother was your hero.”

“Right. So Dad died when I was twelve, same year as Granny Jordan, and Mom had even more rules after that. I think she was scared of raising a teenage girl alone. It was like living in a nunnery. Then I went away to college and saw a little freedom for like five minutes before she got sick and I went home to take care of her. Then she died, and I was in a daze for a while. Then my uncle retired to Florida and gave me his butcher shop in Hopeville.”

“Why you?”

“He doesn’t have any kids. He’s too old to do the work. He said he didn’t mind if I sold it, but he didn’t have the heart to. And I wanted to do that, but then I came to Hopeville, and… Even the name. It had
starting over
written all over it. It was scary. It was something my mother would have never done, and Granny Jordan would have taken on in the blink of an eye.”

He nodded. “So where do I come into the picture?”

“I was going to live a life of excitement like my grandmother. You were my first wild adventure.” She bit her lip. “And then I learned my lesson.”

He gave her a thoughtful look. “I don’t think an adventuring spirit can be silenced that easily.”

Oh, yes it can.
“Mine was,” she said to make sure he understood. “Silenced. Dead and buried.”

He shook his head. “Is that why, instead of staying at a safe house under protection, you insisted on coming with me to steal a deadly virus from a bunch of terrorists?” For a second, he took his eyes off the road to look at her.

And what she saw in his gaze confused her. There was warmth there and appreciation and, for a second, a distinct flair of desire.

She swallowed hard and looked away, out the side window at the houses flying by them.

“What if you were born to be wild?” he asked, his voice like a warm, gooey cinnamon roll all of a sudden.

She remembered that voice. It had been her undoing two years ago. She’d had no defenses against it then. She better damn well find some now. And fast.

What did he know about her, anyway?

She was not born to be wild. She wasn’t even attracted to wild. She might have been at one point. But definitely not anymore. Life had cured her of that. She was going with Reid simply because she couldn’t stand staying behind. She needed to be part of the effort to find her babies.

“Remind me again why the FBI can’t go and investigate that virus and this Jason guy?” she asked.