Red Alert (15 page)

Then again, why had she imagined a mansion? He was a bachelor who, by his own admission, spent more time on the cot in his office than at his home. He had no need for a big place. But in her experience, the practicalities rarely mattered when it came to showing wealth. Her mother, for instance, had wanted half a dozen fancy cars, a pool and three weeks on the Cape each summer. Her father had wanted to be left alone with his research.

These days, they both had what they wanted and seemed happy, but Meg had always wondered what would’ve happened if they’d thought about compromise.

“Ma’am?” The officer held out his hand. “I’ll need the key and the security codes.”

She nearly groaned at being ma’am-ed, which made her feel about a hundred years old, and groaned again when she realized she didn’t know how long they’d been sitting at the apex of the circular brick driveway, near the front entrance to Erik’s house.

She’d zoned out. Then again, she was working on too much stress and not enough sleep. She probably deserved a moment of staring into space.

“I’ve got it.” She opened the cruiser door and hauled herself upright. Residual tightness tugged in her lungs and throat, reminding her that she was damn lucky to have escaped so easily.

Damn lucky Erik had been there to rescue her. Again.

The knowledge fisted beneath her heart, creating a little bubble of nerves when she mounted the front steps and fished in her pocket for the key and security codes he’d given her. The nerves didn’t come from fear—she had a cop at her back, after all. They came from the fact that she was venturing into Erik’s personal space when everything personal between them was so unsettled.

Knowing there was a certain naughty thrill in that, she unlocked the door and typed in the two-layer security code, one on a unit outside the door, one on a keypad hidden inside the hallway closet.

Normally, she might have wondered what he was trying to hide, but with her own home security proven pitifully inadequate, she was simply grateful.

She turned to the cop. “Are you coming in?”

He shook his head. “No, ma’am. Detective Sturgeon arranged for a local car to swing by every half hour or so.” He gestured to Erik’s keychain. “Use the panic button if you need it.”

She glanced at the fob, a black plastic square with a bright red button in the center. “That’ll call 9-1-1 for me?”

“Yes, ma’am.” He backed up until he was framed in the open doorway. “I’ll wait outside while you
lock up and reset the alarms. Wave from the window when you’re secure.”

Feeling almost foolish, Meg did as she was told. Then she felt even more foolish, because once the cruiser was gone from the driveway and she was alone in Erik’s house, she found herself near tears.

The accumulated stresses of the past two weeks felt as if they were crashing down around her all at once. Part of her wanted to curl up in a ball and weep.

But because she was better than that, stronger than that, she went exploring instead.

IT TOOK ERIK a torturous half hour to reach the top of the climbing wall. The route—or “send,” as Cannon had called it—got tougher the higher he climbed, with blobs and cracks spaced farther and farther apart. At one point, he’d hit a dead end and had to backtrack, wasting nearly ten minutes.

But he hadn’t quit.

Finally he’d used one shaking, sore leg—he wasn’t even sure which one was the bad one anymore, they both felt like jelly—to boost himself up and over, onto a three-foot ledge that ran the length of the building, sixty-some feet up.

Cursing, he’d dragged himself onto the flat surface, breathing hard, nearly sniveling with exertion.

“Doesn’t look so hard from the ground, does it?” Cannon said. He was sitting a few yards away with his mismatched legs dangling over the edge. He
looked cucumber-cool, as though he could lead a high-powered board meeting anytime.

Erik thought about pushing him off for general spite—knowing his belay buddy would break the fall. But that would’ve taken too much effort, so instead he dragged himself to a sitting position beside the other man. “I’m up here. Now talk.”

“Look around you.” Cannon gestured to the upper levels of the climbing gym, where the original floors of the warehouse had been gutted and replaced with tall beams, making the place feel like a pillared coliseum. The padded floor seemed far away, the other people small and unimportant. “Now picture open air. Just rocks and sky and a few climbing buddies. And tell me this isn’t worth a little butt chafe.”

Erik grimaced and ignored a faint, wistful memory of hiking with his granddad, back before everything had gotten so complicated in the family. “I don’t need a hobby, I need information. Where does Pentium stand on the NPT deal?”

“We’re out.”

It took a moment for the words to penetrate, another for the irritation to rise. “You brought me all the way up here to tell me that? And what the hell do you mean, you’re out? It’s going to be a huge breakthrough!”

Cannon shrugged. “True, but the head honchos think the ethics may be a tad squidgy—it’s based on stem cells, after all, and fair or not, that raises the whole specter of experimenting on human embryos.
After that brouhaha last year when our steroid testing kits gave false positives on a half dozen of baseball’s finest, and the class-action lawsuit the year before, we’re trying to keep a low profile.”

“The ethics are fine,” Erik said. “But don’t let me talk you into it. I’d just as soon Pentium stayed out of the mix.”

“Then you’re in luck.” Cannon turned his attention back to the open space surrounding them. “And you already know why I made you climb up here to get your precious answer. You needed to climb.”

“Bull. I need to finish this deal before I—” Erik broke off. “Never mind. How the hell do we get down?”

He wasn’t looking for a friend, wasn’t looking to bounce his problems off a near stranger. Though he was willing to bet that Cannon was on the up-and-up, and that he’d told the truth about Pentium’s status in the NPT deal, that didn’t make them buddies.

“We rappel.” Cannon briefly outlined the procedure, and then was gone, leaping out into open space tethered only by his main line and the safety belay. He swung in and pushed off the wall once, twice, three times, his artificial leg making a weird, mechanical sound as it absorbed the shock.

Determined to ignore the twist of nerves in his stomach and the raw chafe of his harness, Erik double-checked his attachment point, muttered something uncomplimentary about Cannon, and pushed himself off the ledge while letting the rope play through.

He was braced for pain when he swung in and pushed off. There was pain, yes, a singing jolt of impact that ricocheted up both legs. But that sensation was lost in another.

The feeling of flying.

It only took a handful of seconds for him to reach the ground. A few heartbeats. One slow exhale. But it was long enough to remind him of the rush of speed and wind and adrenaline he’d once craved, once lived for.

In that moment, he remembered himself.

Then he hit the padded floor too fast. His bad leg howled pain and buckled, and he fell off to one side. When he reached out to catch himself, his arms fouled the lines.

He landed on his face. In public. The crash helmet Cannon had pressed on him absorbed most of the impact, but pain thrummed from his heels to the top of his head. He groaned and rolled onto his back just in time to watch a small crowd gather.

Otto looked sheepish. “Sorry, dude. I thought you had it under control.” Translation—he’d been flirting with the coeds.

A strange woman bent close. “Are you okay?”

“He’s fine,” Cannon said. He shooed the others away and tossed Erik’s cane, so it landed a few feet away. “And don’t tell me it hurts. If it doesn’t hurt, you’re not pushing yourself hard enough.”

He walked away, headed for the locker room on one flesh leg, one metallic one.

Erik cursed Cannon, cursed his relatives and any
children who might be unlucky enough to have the heartless bastard as their father. Then he pushed himself up, stripped off that godawful harness and hauled himself to his feet. His legs were shaking—both of them—and he was soaked with sweat, but there was no way he was getting naked in a communal shower, so he headed for the door, pausing only to pay for the dubious pleasure of using the wall, the rental equipment and Otto’s so-called spotting.

“You’re all set.” The gum-popping girl at the front desk waved him past. “Luke took care of it.”

Erik nodded curtly and stalked past.

He tried to tell himself that he’d achieved his goal, that they could cross Pentium off their suspect list, because why would they care who bought NPT if they weren’t still in the running for the deal?

But as he hit the street and the sharp fall air chilled the damp shirt to his back, he found himself thinking not of the case, but of Meg waiting for him in his house. On his turf. Surrounded by his things.

He wasn’t sure what to call the emotion that rattled in his chest. Wariness, maybe, or fascination. But as he collected his Mercedes, her image was firmly in the forefront of his mind, along with Cannon’s parting words.

If it doesn’t hurt, you’re not pushing yourself hard enough.

THE WAY MEG SAW IT, there was a pretty fuzzy line between scientific curiosity and plain nosiness. She
figured she’d stepped over that line the moment she moved out of Erik’s living room and into his high-tech office. But the door was open, and he hadn’t told her any part of the house was off limits, had he?

Okay, she was rationalizing, but something compelled her to cross the vibrantly patterned Oriental rug and slide into the soft leather chair behind his desk. A desire to understand Erik, perhaps, or the effect he had on her.

They were on opposite sides of a pitched battle. He was the enemy, representing the big business and industry her father had warned her against for so many years. And Erik was no prize on the personal level, either. He was suspicious and reactive, and wanted to blame her for an attraction that clearly went both ways.

“Why do I always pick the complicated ones?” she said, thinking back to her two past serious relationships. She had to think back a ways, to before she started working at BoGen.

Benjamin had been a fellow grad student who’d shared her enthusiasm for the extreme outdoors. He’d had a mean, jealous streak she’d ignored for the most part, but when he’d quit school to “find himself,” she hadn’t been at all tempted by his offer of a shared sleeping bag in Alaska.

After him had been Foster, a stockbroker who worked long hours and liked fine wine and fast airplanes. It had taken her nearly three months to figure out that he’d also liked juggling girlfriends. What she’d thought were his deep, reflective silences were
actually moments when he was scrambling to remember his cover story.

At least Ben and Foster had been kind to her, for the most part. Erik hadn’t even bothered with that much. Then again, maybe that made him more honest than most, in an antisocial sort of way.

“Face it,” she said out loud, “you want him, but you don’t always like him.”

Rather than echoing back, her words were deadened by the pleated blinds covering the single, wide window, and the built-in shelves that held everything from paperback novels to a wooden ship model in an expensive-looking glass case.

The ship seemed out of place, a touch of whimsy in an otherwise utilitarian workspace.

Aware that she was invading his privacy and not sure she cared, not even sure what she was looking for, Meg slid a stack of folders from one side of his desk to the other. She murmured, “Well, well. What have we here?”

The motion had revealed a framed picture tucked into a corner alcove.

The photo was grainy with age, and the six clustered figures wore clothes from another decade, in styles that had already come and gone at least once more in the years since. The picture showed what looked like three generations, with an older man standing behind a smiling couple in their thirties, with three boys, dark haired and happy, arranged in the foreground. The quality of the outdated clothes spoke of wealth, as did the marina in the background,
where a large sailboat called the
Amadeus
lay berthed.

Meg couldn’t find Erik’s adult features in the faces of the three boys, who ranged in age from probably nine or ten to midteens, but she had to guess it was his family portrait. It seemed strange to think of Erik as having brothers, and she shrugged off the faint twist of envy she habitually felt at the thought of siblings. She would have liked a brother or sister, but her parents had been too intent on their separate goals.

Would things have been different between her parents if they’d had more children? Would her mother have felt compelled to stay then? She stared at the photo, trying to force the answer, but there was nothing but six static smiles and a twinkle of humor in the old man’s eyes.

“This is getting me nowhere.” Though she was almost reluctant to set it aside, she tucked the photo back where she’d found it before she rose and began pacing the room. She wouldn’t turn on the computer—that would be taking the snooping thing too far—but there had to be something in here that would give her leverage when it came to dealing with Erik on the professional level.

And maybe the personal one,
a thoughtlet whispered in her brain, and for a change she didn’t shove it away.
Yeah,
she agreed mentally,
maybe the personal one.

But when she finally found her leverage tucked behind the model ship, it was nothing like what she’d
expected, and nothing she could, in good conscience, use in the negotiations.

But it sure explained a hell of a lot.

ON HIS WAY HOME, Erik phoned the detectives to let them know that Pentium had moved down to his “probably not” list, and to see if they had come up with anything.

“Nothing on the trace evidence from Dr. Corning’s home,” Peters said, frustration edging his tone. “This guy is either damn good or damn lucky.” There was a pause and the sound of rustling paper. “The techs came up with a possibility on the security videos from the hospital, though. Looks like a young man, late teens, early twenties, wearing loose jeans, a dark sweatshirt and a skullcap. The video caught him walking away from the elevator just after it fell.”