opposite the one in which the man with the canvas bag had fled. Alexis considered calling out to the approaching people, but she didn’t want anyone else involved. Involvement meant complications, which would lead to questions.
And the man knew it. Because he stood his ground. She wondered if he was smiling behind the mask.
Alexis lowered her voice. “You have what you wanted. Now get out of here.”
“I don’t think so, Dr. Morgan. Not even half of it.”
“Are you going to start making threats again? Because I can’t take you seriously while you’re dressed as House.”
His black eyebrows lifted as if he’d never heard of the misanthropic TV doctor. The people around the corner were moving closer, and Alexis recognized one of the speakers as Franz Huber, a visiting neurobiologist from the Planck Institute in Heidelberg. Huber was typically Teutonic, blond and broad-shouldered, and would have been just as suited for fur and a stone ax as a lab coat. If trouble erupted, she’d bet on him over the slim man who was blocking her way.
Assuming he wasn’t hiding a gun in his scrubs.
“We’ll talk later, Dr. Morgan,” he said, pulling his mask up a little higher on his face. Huber and his companion, a female in a pants suit whom Alexis didn’t recognize, rounded the corner, and Huber hailed Alexis. The man in the scrubs walked away with a forced ease, as if he preferred to run but was holding back.
“Dr. Morgan, you’re working late,” Huber said in his deep voice, barely glancing at the man in scrubs.
Elitism. I’d have reacted the same way. If that guy hadn’t been raiding my lab, I wouldn’t have given him a second look. Just another nurse handling specimens.
“Hi, Franz,” Alexis said, straining a grin and hiding her impatience. They went through the formalities of introductions while Alexis kept glancing behind her into her lab to see if anything had been disturbed. It wasn’t until Alexis said her husband was waiting that the pair continued on their way.
Alexis went inside the lab and shut the door. At first, everything seemed as she had left it. The scanning machines were intact behind the lead-lined glass window, the computers were on, and the support vector machines were busy analyzing hundreds of brain images collected from student volunteers. Sabotage obviously wasn’t a motive, or the creeps could have caused millions of dollars in damages and wiped out months of work.
No, they were after something that was inside the lab, a tangible, portable item. Intellectual property could be stolen in a dozen ways. Her experience with the Monkey House trials had proven that crimes of the mind left no fingerprints. She wouldn’t go to the extremes of her deranged former mentor, Dr. Sebastian Briggs, who kept critical notes only on paper, but she’d also learned to run double sets of data, in much the same way a crooked business owner ran two sets of accounting books.
There was only one thing she could think of that anyone would want here. And she was smart enough to keep it off-site. Except for the secrets stored in her mind, the ones she couldn’t trust to even a computer or a piece of paper, because that might make them real.
But the first goon in scrubs had definitely been carrying something in the canvas bag. The array of thick technical manuals and books on the shelves appeared untouched. The vector machines that housed most of her records were bolted to the floor and too heavy to move without machinery. Although some of the imaging equipment was expensive, the specialized technology was pretty worthless to somebody looking for her secret research.
Whether or not one of the fake nurses was the man who’d called her, the incidents were clearly connected. It was too much of a coincidence. Her life had been relatively calm for the past year, and the Monkey House incident had been covered up just the way Mark had predicted, including the loss of his vice-presidency of CRO Pharmaceuticals.
After all, you couldn’t keep paying a man who’d just cost you billions in profits and lost you a critical ally in Washington, DC.
But the caller had threatened to kill her, and the two thieves in scrubs hadn’t so much as barked at her.
Which meant they didn’t have what they wanted yet, so they needed her alive.
For now.
CHAPTER TWO
“Are you sure Burchfield’s behind it?” Mark asked.
They were having dinner at their wooded ranch house just outside Chapel Hill, which provided convenient access to the university, Raleigh-Durham International, and CRO’s headquarters in the Research Triangle Park. But since Mark had been axed and Alexis had resigned from the ethics council, they had traveled little, although Alexis still made occasional speaking appearances to support her new book on personality-altering drugs.
“Who else would it be?” Alexis responded.
“The deal was that everyone forgets the Monkey House. All the Seethe and Halcyon was destroyed, and the facility was leveled. A minor chemical leak contaminated the property, the health department condemned it, and CRO leveled the facility and took the tax write-off. It all looked good on paper.”
“Even the four deaths.”
“Only three, remember?”
Alexis frowned. She and Mark had discussed the events of that night many times, but they could never quite put all the pieces together. The Seethe exposure had induced bouts of fear and rage, and Halcyon had punched holes in their memories. Alexis would have happily believed the whole thing never happened except both of them still bore scar tissue from fighting to stay alive in the Monkey House.
While Mark’s scars were on the outside, including the jagged purple line on his cheek, hers mostly remained hidden.
“That doesn’t matter now,” Alexis said, pushing at the mashed potatoes and salmon on her plate. “We trusted Burchfield to keep it quiet. He has more to lose than any of us.”
“He wasn’t running for president then. Now the stakes are higher. The first task of any campaign is to run a minesweeper and see if any explosives are waiting to detonate. Maybe he’s decided it won’t stay quiet on its own.”
Daniel Burchfield chaired the Senate health committee, and Mark had been one of his Washington allies. As a CRO executive, Mark’s job was to encourage the senator to back legislation favorable to the pharmaceutical giant. Not that Burchfield needed much prompting. Generous campaign contributions would have been enough, but Burchfield also saw the potential to exploit personality-altering drugs for political gain.
Alexis understood the stakes were higher now. Since Burchfield was running for the Republican presidential nomination, maybe he’d decided he couldn’t risk a potential bombshell from his past. As long as the bomb wasn’t ticking, everyone was happy. But if someone had started the countdown, wouldn’t Burchfield seek to defuse it completely? If he couldn’t wipe it away from their memories, the only response left was to wipe their existence from the face of the Earth.
“Yeah, I understand he might want us out of the way,” Alexis said. “But what would he want with my research?”
“Maybe he thinks you’re still pursuing Halcyon.” He said it with the cruel sarcasm he’d developed since the Monkey House. The sneer and the scar worked together to arouse in her a mixture of guilt, sorrow, and anger.
I’m doing it for YOU, Mark.
But, as always, she failed to completely convince herself. She pursued Halcyon for many reasons, and some of them scared her more than Mark’s frightening decay had.
Because you want to be its mother. You want to own it and be responsible for it. You want to be first banana.
Alexis glanced at the front door, wondering if Mark had locked it. She’d never felt this vulnerable, even in the immediate aftermath of the Monkey House trials, and their home’s relative isolation now was a worry instead of an asset.
“You destroyed all the Seethe and Halcyon,” she said, trying to hide the big lie behind her bitterness.
“You saw what that stuff turned us into.”
