Keeping Watch: Heart of the Night\Accidental Bodyguard (49 page)

Faith tried not to think of the bigger picture. She tried not to consider her future or Jonas’s. She tried to stay right here in the moment. To keep her wits about her and her senses sharp.

It wasn’t hard to focus on the predicament she was in right now. Once the sun had set and the wind picked up, the temperature in Laramie had dropped steadily. She shivered beneath the tent of Jonas’s brown jacket, but admitted her shaky composure might be from nerves as much as the cold.

They huddled between a hedge and a brick wall while they waited for the campus security guard to finish his hourly check on the outside doors and windows of the building. They’d walked through the building that afternoon to learn the layout of the lab and find the best way in. But since the lab required a valid student ID to even enter, Jonas had decided they would come back late at night and break in instead of causing a scene and drawing unwanted attention to themselves.

Faith lightly tapped on the broad back that faced her. “Are you sure this is a good idea?”

He glanced down at her over his shoulder. “We won’t get caught.”

“That’s not what I asked. Technically, I haven’t broken the law yet. And breaking and entering is definitely against the law.”

The shadows masked the expression on his face, making it difficult to tell whether he was amused or annoyed by her attack of conscience. “If it’ll make you feel better, we’ll send a little extra money to the university for its electric bill. All we’ll be doing is running one of their computers. I don’t plan to do any damage. We’ll slip in, slip out, and they won’t be any wiser.”

“In and out,” she repeated, drawing the corduroy collar of his coat up around her neck and gathering her courage.

“Cold?” She heard Jonas move in the shadows an instant before two strong arms pulled her up against his chest.

She was startled for a moment, but quickly took advantage of his abundant heat and burrowed against the chest he offered. He wore a black, body-hugging sweater that tickled her cheek and snagged some strands of her hair. But it smelled heavenly—like musky man and a clean, warm blanket. “Better,” she approved, finding strength as his warmth seeped into her. “Is covert work always like this?”

“No. Usually, you have to deal with the cold on your own.” But the long hours and constant alertness and threat of danger always remained? She got the joke, but the unspoken balance of his answer weighed on her compassion.

Faith curled her glove-sheathed fingers into the front of his sweater, feeling for all the long, lonely hours he’d spent doing this same kind of work to protect others. To protect her country. “Thank you,” she murmured against his chest.

“For what?”

How did she answer that one with sounding like the naive sap she was? She finally opted to be as vague as he had been. “For keeping me warm.”

“There.” It was a whispered alert, not a comfort word.

Faith pulled away, brushed the loose hair off her face and tucked it behind her ear. “What is it?” she asked, keeping her voice equally low.

He pulled a slim flashlight from his coat and turned it on to check his watch. “That’s it.” Jonas turned off the light. “The guard will be back in twenty-five minutes if he sticks to his schedule. That’s our time slot.” He folded his hand around hers and pulled her along beside him. “Let’s go.”

She patted the disk that was wrapped inside her pocket and quickened her pace to keep up with Jonas’s long, crouching strides. He hurried behind the wall and hedge that encircled most of the engineering building and headed for the structure’s side entrance. The decorative wall was both a blessing and a curse, according to Jonas. It would hide them from passersby on the street and sidewalk, but it would also hide their view of the guard when he made his next security check. Hence the need for timing their little visit down to the last minute.

“Can I help?” she asked after they ducked inside the door’s protruding archway.

But Jonas already had the situation well in hand. He twisted the flashlight on and stuck the handle in his mouth. Then he drew out a wallet filled with thin metal tools. The items he pulled out looked like toothpicks in his big, gloved hands. But he used them with the dexterity of a surgeon. She marveled at the speed and stealth he used as he inserted them into the lock—twisted, jimmied, snapped—and then he was ushering her inside and closing the door behind them.

“Upstairs.” He nodded toward the half staircase ahead of them. With his hand at the small of her back, he quickly guided her up the stairs and down the long dark hallway toward the computer lab entrance at the far end.

They hurried along in a whisper of movement through the tomblike interior of marbled floors and high ceilings. At every juncture with another hall or lecture room, she’d feel Jonas’s fist at her neck, latching on to the jacket’s collar and pulling her back a step as he scanned for any signs of company.

Faith took up the sentinel role when they reached the lab and Jonas opened the door with the same swift, silent process. “We’re in.”

He pushed open the door and guided her inside. “Twenty minutes,” he announced, checking his watch and reminding her of the time crunch before handing over the flashlight and letting her scan the computers to find the one most likely to suit their needs.

She knew in a minute that the only one with the proper disk drive and software program would be the one at the front desk—in clear view through the glass door should the guard decide to run a check inside the building. She offered Jonas an apologetic smile, even though he probably couldn’t see it. “I’m afraid that’s the one we need.”

The risk of it didn’t phase him. “Get to it, then.”

He headed back to the door while she sat down and booted up the computer. Faith’s heart pumped a little faster as the monitor came on and filled her workspace with a small puddle of light. “I won’t need the flashlight now. Do you need it?”

Jonas zipped back to her side, took the flashlight, but remained, putting a physical blockade between her and the door. Her protective shadow raised the tension another notch. Faith clutched her fingers into fists, them wiggled them straight, wishing her pounding pulse wouldn’t manifest itself in the form of shaking hands. “Are you sure I can’t take my gloves off?” she asked.

“We’re not leaving any fingerprints.” A familiar logo from Eclipse Labs blossomed onto the screen. “There it is.” He squeezed his hand over her shoulder and Faith jumped at the contact. “Easy,” he crooned in a bone-deep pitch, leaving his hand in place and drawing out some of her tension. “Can you make it work?”

Faith glanced up, marveling at his patience in the face of a ticking clock. His glacial eyes caught the light from the monitor and seemed to glow in the dark. But she found it comforting rather than eerie, knowing that those eyes would spot any danger long before it got to her.

She inhaled a steadying breath and placed her hands on the keyboard. “Everything’s on a network. Someone will know that we were here.”

His grip tightened in a comforting squeeze, then disappeared. “They’ll know when, but not who. And we’ll be out of town before anyone questions it.”

She nodded and began to type. “The disk is encrypted. But I know most of Dr. Rutherford’s entry codes.” She quickly typed in several, but as she suspected, nothing opened the secret files. “What would you use?”

She typed in
Darien Frye.
Error. She tried
Frye.
Error.
NT-6.
Error.

“We’re down to fifteen minutes.” Jonas was circling the room now, a noiseless wraith checking windows and doors and keeping the outside world at bay. “Got anything yet?”

She was taking quick, deep breaths now, suppressing the urge to panic. She typed in his granddaughter’s name. His late wife’s.
Eclipse. Doomsday.
Faith clapped her fists together. “Dammit, it won’t open.”

“Easy, honey. You’ll get it.” She looked up, searching the darkness for the source of the husky endearment.

A skittering sensation of soothing heat short-circuited her frustration. She turned her attention back to the keyboard. “Does it mean anything when you say that?” she asked, expecting him to call it a slip of the tongue or to say nothing at all.

He didn’t. He was back at the door now. “Just keep working. We have twelve minutes.”

On a whim she typed in
honey.
Error. She could hear the word playing through her mind in Jonas’s deep, dark pitch.

And she could hear another voice. An older voice.
Faith, honey, have you seen my notes on the Ryan project?

“He wouldn’t,” she breathed out loud. It would be too much of a cosmic twist to this whole nightmare. An expectation that Dr. Rutherford knew she’d be involved up to her eyeballs in NT-6. Whatever it might be.

She slowly typed in a word.
Faith.

Goose bumps prickled along the surface of her skin as a series of numbers and letters scrolled across the screen. “I’m in.”

Jonas hurried to the desk and squatted down beside her. “We’ve got ten minutes. Let’s take a look.”

Faith skimmed her finger down the screen, evaluating their choices. “Design specs?”

“Sounds good to me.”

She selected the file and waited for it to load. “He used my name, Jonas. The password. Why would he use my name?”

“Probably because you were important to him. Wait.” Jonas had spotted something. Her nerves tightened into knots. But his narrowed eyes weren’t looking at the door, they were looking at the screen.

Faith looked too. “What is it?”

His fingers brushed along the hair at her temple, tucking it gently behind her ear. Now she was really worried. “It’s nothing.”

“You’re a terrible liar.”

His fingers slipped around to cup the back of her neck. “It’s nothing we’ll talk about now,” he amended. “Our time’s running out.”

She intended to hold him to that promise. Scaring the bejesus out of her without saying why? He’d need a little lecture about that. Later. But drawings and formulae were coming up on the screen now, and she diverted her attention to study them.

“It looks like some kind of storage container.” She scrolled down to the next image. “Something that can be converted into a—”

“A weapon.” Jonas said it with such drop-dead certainty that it chilled her to the bone. “It’s a freakin’ bomb.”

“A bomb?” Faith shook her head. That didn’t make sense. “Dr. Rutherford was such a gentle man. He designed toasters for NASA, not bombs.”

“Looks like he designed this one.” Jonas checked his watch again. “Can you print that out?”

“Yeah.” She hit the print command and closed the file. The printer beeped and clicked and whirred to life. “Oh, my God. That’s loud.”

Faith instinctively reached for the off switch to silence the cranking noise that would surely give them away. Jonas grabbed her hand and turned her back to the keyboard. “We’ve got a few minutes. See what else is on the disk.”

“But—”

“Just do it.” His voice was calm and assured. She wished she was, too.

“How much time do we have before the guard comes back?”

Jonas didn’t answer. He pointed to a file labeled NT-1-5. “Open that one.”

Feeling the knots twist ever tighter in her stomach, she clicked on the icon and opened up a list of scientific formulae.

“Do you know what they are?” Jonas asked.

Faith scrolled through the pages. “They look like chemical compounds for metal alloys.” One line of figures jumped out at her and she frowned. “But this one wouldn’t work. Extreme temperatures would break it down. It’d crack. Crumble into dust. He must have labeled the project NT-6 because that’s the compound that worked.”

Jonas leaned back, resting his elbow on the desktop, and looked right at her. “What kind of engineer are you?”

She grinned at the awed skepticism in his voice. “A smart one. Who aced chemistry.” For a few moments, his obvious admiration chased away thoughts of ticking clocks and security guards. “Do you want me to print this off?”

“No.” He checked his watch again and vanished into the darkness. Her stress-free reprieve vanished with it. “Is that thing done printing?”

His voice was near the door again. Faith checked the page count. “It’s got a couple more to go.”

“We can’t wait that long. Our twenty-five minutes are almost up. Turn it off and kill the noise.”

“But it’ll still be queued up in the printer. Someone could see—”

“Then clear it out.”

“That’ll take some time—”

“Now’s not the time to argue with me.”

She was already clearing the print command. “I wasn’t arguing. I was pointing out—”

A toilet flushed somewhere down the hall.

Faith froze.

But she could hear Jonas moving. “Shut it down now. Our guard just took a potty break. He’s two minutes early.”

Her fingers flew frantically over the keys as she commanded everything to shut down. “C’mon.” She tapped her feet nervously on the floor. Why was it taking so long? She saw a beam of light through the glass door. “There’s a light in the hallway.”

“Grab the disk.”

The next half minute rushed by too quickly for Faith to take note of everything that happened. She snatched the disk as it slid out of the computer, stuffed papers into her coat pocket. And then she was across the room, jammed into a dark doorless closet with Jonas at her back and his hand clamped over her mouth.

Her pulse hammered in her ears and her heart felt as if it would pound right out of her chest. The lab door was opening and light from the monitor was pouring into the room. It clicked off the instant before the beam of light swung across the computer terminal she’d been using. The sudden shock of light and dark and light again startled her. But her gasp was muffled by Jonas’s broad hand. His left arm closed more tightly around her waist, pulling her up against the heat of his body as if he could sense the responding chill bumps that made her shiver.

She tried to breathe deeply, silently as the guard stood in the doorway and inspected the dark room with his flashlight. The pungent scent of Jonas’s leather glove warred with the smell of her own fear. But Jonas breathed slowly, steadily behind her.