Red Alert (3 page)

She lunged across the last few feet separating them and grabbed his sleeve. “Erik!”

He turned and his face blanked with surprise. “Dr. Corning. What are you—”

Someone pushed her from behind and she tumbled against him. She felt hard muscle through the elegant suit, then another blow slammed into her, knocking her aside.

She shrieked and stumbled back, arms windmilling. Her hip banged into a railing and wood splintered. The heel of one of her tall boots snagged on something.

She screamed. Overbalanced.

And plunged into the construction pit.

The fall was short, but when she hit, the impact drove the breath from her lungs. Her landing pad was cold and wet. Too heavy to be water, too gritty to be mud.

She’d fallen into the cement form.

And she was sinking.

Over the growing hubbub of screams and shouts from above, she heard a man’s voice shout,
“Meg!”

She looked up and saw Erik leaning over the lip of the cement form. He stretched his arm down and sunlight glinted off his cane. “Grab on!”

Gasping and choking as the wet, heavy weight pressed on every fiber of her being, she reached up. She could just touch the cane with the edge of her fingertips. She stretched farther and heard a rushing roar, and a man’s shout.

Above her, the cement truck sluiceway opened up and dumped heavy, clinging cement on top of her.

“Help me!”
she screamed. The cascade of wet cement filled the space quickly, covering her shoulders in seconds, then working its way up her neck.

Why hadn’t they turned off the sluice? Couldn’t the cement truck operator tell there was a problem?

Even as the thought formed in Meg’s brain, it was too late. The liquefied silt poured down around her, covering her neck and ears. She screamed, though she knew it would do no good.

She was being buried alive.

Safety was no more than ten feet away. Rescue had to be on its way. But it would be too late.

She screamed again and arched her back against the sluggish give of the setting cement. She looked up to the edge of the cement form, toward the sidewalk, where the protective railing hung askew. Though she could hear nothing over the splatter of cement that continued to fall from above and her eyes were blurred with clinging clumps of grit, she saw the silhouette of a broad-shouldered man in an expensive suit.

The image of blue eyes stayed with her when she sucked in her last breath.

Chapter Two

“Get that crane down here! And kill the flow,
now!
” Erik’s ears rang from the equipment noise and the force of his own shouts. “What is wrong with you people?
There’s a woman in there!
”

He gripped the edge of the cement form so hard his fingers ached. He cursed the construction crew for being incompetent, and cursed himself for being worse than useless. Eight years ago, he could have jumped in and saved her.

If he jumped in now, there would be two of them stuck, drowning.

The flowing cement cut out with a rattle. The last few blobs plopped into the foundation form and were immediately absorbed by the smooth gray surface.

There was no sign of Meg Corning. No sign of movement.

Panic spiked through Erik. “Damn it! Where’s that crane?”

“Here!” a man’s voice shouted, and a weighted
ball with a large, dangling hook swung down into the foundation pit.

Erik was aware of the shouting, gesturing pedestrians cramming close to the disaster site, aware of the rising throb of sirens in the near distance. The local cops would be here any moment, but the trapped woman couldn’t wait that long.

The thought brought an image of her, a flash of red-gold curls and intelligent hazel eyes, a stacked body hidden beneath a starched white lab coat.

He’d gone to the meeting in person because he’d needed to put a face to the reams of reports he’d amassed on Meg Corning. He’d told himself it was groundwork, but it had been more than that.

It had been a compulsion. He’d needed to see her.

Now he might be the last person to ever see her.

The crane operator finally swung the line toward Erik, who caught the cable. Cursing, he pulled himself onto the swinging weight, braced his good foot on the hook and let the other leg dangle free. Damn thing wasn’t good for much else.

“Lower me into the pit,” he shouted, waving at the crane operator. “Stop when I give the signal!”

He hung on tight as the crane operator swung him out over the slick gray surface and lowered him toward the cement. Please let it still be liquid, he thought. Please let her be holding her breath.

But that seemed a thin hope. The average person would be struggling. Thrashing. Fighting to get free, only to drive themselves deeper into the muck. The very stillness of the slurry was a problem. Either
Meg Corning had professional-level survival skills or she’d lost consciousness.

Having met the pretty lady doctor, he feared the latter. She didn’t seem like the survivalist type.

“Okay, stop!” He waved when the hook was barely skimming the surface of the cement, not wanting to drop the heavy weight on top of her. Then he took two quick breaths, aimed off to the side of the form, away from where she’d fallen—

And jumped.

The impact was like slamming into a solid floor that became liquid the moment he passed through. His bad leg folded, sending agony up his hip. He ignored the pain and fought through the clinging gray grit, which had started to set.

It wouldn’t be fully solidified for hours, maybe days, but the partially thickened soup blocked his efforts. She couldn’t be more than three feet away, but he couldn’t get to her.

Heart pounding, fearing it was already too late, he reached up and grabbed on to the hook, then waved to the operator. “Pull me toward the other side. Slowly!”

Gravel and grit dug into his hands as the hook moved, dragging him through the resisting cement, sparking tortured howls in his bum leg.

Not for the first time, he wished they had just cut the damn thing off.

Then he felt something beneath him. A change in the texture, a hint of cloth and something solid.

“Hold it!” he shouted. “Stop! I’ve got her.”

He looped one arm over the hook and reached down with the other. He felt for a handful of cloth, an arm, something he could use to drag her to the surface.

A strong hand clasped his wrist.

“She’s conscious!” he shouted. “Pull me up, quick! No,” he contradicted himself, “Slowly. Very slowly.”

He didn’t want to lose his grip. More importantly, he didn’t want to hurt her. The hold of the cement was stronger than he’d expected.

He reached down and grabbed her upper arm, near where it joined her body. As though they’d discussed the plan, she wrapped her arms around his legs and hung on tight.

This time he welcomed the burn of pain that shot up his right hip.

“Okay, pull!”

The crane engine revved above him and the weighted hook lifted. Erik’s shoulder joint popped.

The hook rose, but he didn’t. A human anchor weighted him down. She was stuck fast, and the seconds counting down in his head told him she didn’t have much time left.

Indeed, he felt her grip slacken, sliding in the grit and the grime.

Then her hands fell away. Her body went limp against him and the image of her peaches-and-cream complexion went gray in his mind’s eye.

No!

The hook continued to lift. Erik’s shoulder and arm burned, but there was no give from below.

He needed more lift, more strength, more leverage. The man he’d been before would have had the tools and the skills, but the man he was now had nothing but a mangled leg.

With a roar of anger at things he couldn’t change no matter how much he wanted to, he let go of the trapped, unconscious woman and reached up to grab the ascending hook with both hands. He dragged his legs forward and wrapped them around her body. He locked his good ankle around his bad calf and hung on tight.

If the pins and screws that ached in the dark of winter nights had ever served a purpose, now was the time.

“Lift hard!” he shouted to the operator, and tensed every muscle in his body. The moment the engine surged, he scissored his legs forward, curling his body up in an effort to break the cement hold on her body.

Nothing.

As the clock ticked down past “too late” in his head, he tried again, summoning all of the strength he’d retained, and maybe some remembered from back when he was whole. He pulled himself up toward the hook with his arms and dragged the woman with him, legs vised around her torso.

He felt a shift. A give. And then he was moving upward, toward street level, toward safety.

And he brought Meg Corning along with him.

He heard cheers from the crowd, whoops of sirens and the shouts of local cops creating order. The crane
operator lifted him above the crowd, then back down, lowering Erik and his limp burden onto a hastily cleared section of pavement near the broken barrier.

Uniformed officers reached up to take the unconscious woman, who was immediately swarmed by emergency personnel. They left Erik to jump down on his own.

He did, then staggered and nearly fell.

“I’ve got you.” An overweight, balding stranger grabbed him by his sodden suit jacket, righted him, and shoved his cane into his hand. “Here. You’ll need this.”

Erik stared at the cane, at the ring of polished wood near the handle that made it stronger and weaker at the same time. “You can say that again. Thanks for hanging on to it for me.”

“No sweat. I owe you one.”

Erik glanced up. “Do I know you?”

“It’s not a big deal if you don’t remember me, Mr. Falco.” The stranger grinned. “You bought out my father’s company a couple of years ago. Celltronics. Gave him enough money to retire to a big-assed boat in the Caribbean, and put all the grandkids through college.”

“Glad it worked out,” Erik said automatically, though he barely remembered the deal, which had been one of too many acquisitions, all aimed at an impossible goal.

Or maybe not so impossible anymore. Not once he got his hands on the NPT technology.

At the thought of the technology and its creator,
he turned toward the knot of rescue personnel nearby. To his surprise, he saw that Meg was conscious, sitting up without assistance while chunks of half-set cement dribbled from her lab coat and dark hair.

And she was glaring daggers at him.

DAMN IT, Meg thought. The bastard had lied to her. And then he’d rescued her.

How was she supposed to react to that?

The aftershocks raced through her body, remnants of those long seconds that she’d been submerged in the cement. She’d told herself to be calm, to remember her old training.
Count your heartbeats,
her skydiving instructor had told her.
It’ll keep the panic away.

And it had. Mostly.

Then Erik Phillips had come for her.

Only he wasn’t Erik Phillips. He was Erik Falco, head of FalcoTechno, which was one of the largest technology conglomerates on the eastern seaboard.

And one of the highest bidders trying to buy her upcoming patents.

Piercing blue eyes fixed on her, Falco crossed to where she sat on the bumper of an ambulance, huddled beneath a scratchy wool blanket. “How do you feel?”

“Alive, thanks to you.” She tightened the blanket around her shoulders. “I’m not sure why you made the effort, though. It’d be much easier for you to push the deal through with me out of the picture.”

He nodded, acknowledging his identity, as well as the standoff that had been handled through lawyers and the hospital administration up to that point. But his expression darkened as he said, “You think I’d let you drown to get the deal done?”

She shrugged, feeling the rasp of drying grit against her skin. “In my experience, the human element doesn’t matter much to commercial drug developers.”

“Oh. You’re one of
them.
” He rolled his eyes. “You’re one of those researchers who think academia is the only pure science. God forbid someone make a profit off research.”

She sniffed. “Let’s just say I’ve had better luck with the university types.”

“Why? Because your mother left you and your father for a man with a bigger house and a better bankroll?” Falco stopped and cursed. “I apologize. Please forget I said that.” He waved to the hovering paramedics. “Let’s get you transported to the ER so the docs can check you out.”

“I’m fine.” She stood stiffly, feeling her suede skirt and pretty green pullover crackle with the motion. “And no, I won’t forget what you said. Don’t think you know me because your people did a few background checks. And don’t think you can order me around because you saved my life, or because you think that little charade with—” She broke off. “Oh, hell. You’ve got to get Raine—if that’s even her name—back here.”

“Why? What’s wrong?”

Cautious of patient privacy, Meg said, “Not here. Have your wife—” She saw the shift in his expression and pressed her lips together. “Another lie. Who is she?”

He didn’t even have the grace to look ashamed. “Raine Montgomery, vice president of my pharmaceuticals division.”

“Lucky for you there was a pregnant woman handy. And lucky for her, too. Have her meet me in the lab in ten minutes.”

He scowled. “You won’t be in the lab in ten minutes. You’ll be in the ER.”

Temper fraying with the need to get somewhere alone, somewhere private where she could shake, scream, fall apart, all the things she couldn’t do across the street from her office and in full view of countless hospital employees, Meg snapped, “Don’t tell me what to do. In fact, leave me the hell alone. I want to see Raine ASAP, but I don’t want to see you. Not ever again.”

His expression shifted to neutral. “That could be difficult.”

She sneered at him. “The way I’ve heard it, you thrive on a challenge, Mr. Falco. Consider this one.”

She turned and pushed through the crowd to the hospital, ignoring the TV reporters’ microphones and shouted questions. She left the cops enough information to find her later, after she’d cleaned up. After she’d broken down.