right for once.” Rivulets of sweat beaded across his face and snaked into the crevices on his jowls and neck.
Standridge was quiet too long, and Gabe raised the Ruger and pointed it at his other leg.
“No, don’t!” Standridge screamed. “I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you.” Gabe put the gun down and waited. “S… seventeen to the left. Three to the right. Six to the left. Twenty-eight to the right.”
The safe door opened on well-oiled hinges. “Looks like we have a winner,” Grace said, flipping though the thick stack of papers inside. “There’s a lot of cash in here, doc. What were you planning to do with all that money?”
He didn’t answer, and Grace didn’t press him for one. She shoved the papers back inside the safe and left the door open as she went back to her bag. She jiggled the box of matches to make sure Standridge was watching and swiped the match head against the rough surface on the box. Sulfur and smoke permeated the air, and she flicked it onto the stack of papers and cash and watched as the flame took hold.
“No! Are you insane? Do you even know what The Passover Project is capable of?”
“Oh, we know,” Grace said. “It’s why we’re here.”
“He’s all yours,” Gabe said.
Grace barely spared a glance at Gabe as he pulled the charges out of her bag and dispersed them throughout the house. Her eyes were all for Standridge.
She picked up her Sig, the cold steel comfortable in her hand. “You know, Allen. It never would have worked out between us.” She pulled the trigger and put a bullet right between Allen Standridge’s eyes.
“Let’s ride,” Gabe said.
Grace looked at her shoes on the floor and decided to leave them there. They deserved to be reduced to ashes. She grabbed her bag and followed Gabe out the back door to the black Audi he had hidden down the block. They got inside the car and were just pulling away from the curb when the force from the explosion shook the ground beneath them.
Neither of them looked back.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Grace pulled a black duffel bag from the backseat into her lap and took out a change of clothes. She unbuttoned the halter from behind her neck and peeled the dress down her body.
“Good thing there’s no oncoming traffic. I’d hate for some middle-aged stockbroker to run off the road at the sight of your breasts.”
Grace snorted out a laugh as she pulled on black cargo pants. “I hate to break it to you, but breasts like mine are a dime a dozen.”
“Not true. They’re the finest breasts I’ve ever seen.” He reached over and cupped one in his palm before she could slip the black T-shirt over her head.
Her breath caught as the heat from his hands sent shivers up her spine, but she shifted out of his grasp and turned her attention to putting on her boots.
“Did Ethan send you the blueprints for Standridge’s lab?”
A battalion of fire trucks and police cars passed by them in a blur of blue and red flashing lights. Grace watched them in her side-view mirror while she braided her hair.
“Yeah. The security system isn’t registered with any particular company, so I’ll have to see what we’re dealing with once we get there. We should have plenty of time to get things done. It’ll take awhile for the authorities to go through all the legal channels and see that the company that owns Standridge’s house also owns the building where his lab is.”
Gabe took a smooth right off Harvard Street onto Trowbridge and looked for a decent place to park the car. Things would be a little trickier in this neighborhood. The buildings were closer together, and more people roamed the streets since it was so close to the college.
He was in luck. An apartment complex sat to one side of Standridge’s building, and a pizza place sat on the other. Both of the parking lots were packed with cars. Gabe pulled his car into the apartment building complex and parked in the last row. The dense groupings of trees that could be found on every street divided the lots and provided ample cover.
“How do you want to approach?” Grace asked.
“I don’t suppose I could get you to stay here and cover me, could I? I’ll be in and out in ten minutes.”
“Like hell, Gabe. Don’t try to keep me out of the loop. I’m fine and I’m functioning.”
He gave her a long, studying look, but she made sure her emotions were tucked deeply away. “Fine. Let’s go.” He grabbed a windbreaker from the backseat and pulled it on so his weapons didn’t show, and she caught the second one he tossed in her direction. She pulled her black toboggan on to cover her hair and tucked away the stray wisps. Gabe grabbed his backpack and walked in the opposite direction of Standridge’s building.
She followed him into the trees and behind the apartment complex, where a narrow alley housed dumpsters and empty boxes. It dipped lower in the middle for drainage and was cracked and uneven in several places. They stopped when they reached the back entrance to the lab.
“Do you think the cameras have live feed?” Grace asked.
“We’ll find out about two minutes after we breach the front door. It looks like a key-code security system. The windows are sensored, and there’s probably a trip wire and a secondary system once you get past the key code.”
“It’s a pity Standridge didn’t have Ethan design his system. I very rarely find a challenge nowadays. It took me fifteen full minutes to get into his apartment the other morning.”
She could see Gabe’s teeth gleam in the light. “It took me eight. Though he never knew I was inside. Do you want to do the honors?” Gabe asked, holding out his hand as if to say “Ladies first.”
“As much as I hate to admit it, you’re faster. Be my guest.”
The back entrance was surrounded by a black, wrought iron fence, and Gabe had his pick in the lock and the gate swinging open in a little over two seconds. He strode up to the back door like he owned the place, and Grace kept her position at the gate so she could keep watch up and down the alley.
Gabe had the door unbolted and the cover off the keypad by the time she looked back. She shook her head in pure appreciation. He could have made a hell of a living on the other side of the law. He held a screwdriver between his teeth, and his fingers were sure and steady as he cut wires and disarmed the system.
Grace left the gate open and went to join him inside the building. She pulled out her weapon and kept quiet as Gabe dealt with the secondary system. The cameras panned and scanned, and if someone was watching on the other end, things were going to get interesting real soon. If the cameras recorded straight to video, then it would all be destroyed anyway, and they’d get away free and clear. It was a chance they’d have to take either way.
“Done,” Gabe said. He hadn’t even broken a sweat.
Grace looked at her watch. “Four minutes start to finish. Not too shabby.”
He gave her a smile that made her pulse jump and then headed further into the building. A series of see- through cubicles ran the length of the space, and she assumed they were different testing areas. Each one had a separate entry door with its own security system. The cubicles were sealed across the top, keeping whatever was going on inside completely contained.
“Damn,” Grace said. “This is going to make things more difficult.”
“Maybe not. Logan gave me something new he’s just developed. It would go faster if we could get into each room and start a separate charge, but it’ll work just fine with one point of acceleration.”
Gabe looked quickly into each room and chose the one that was obviously Standridge’s main research room. Mathematic formulas were written along the clear walls, and maps were spread across every surface. He bypassed the security and opened the door.
“All of these rooms are connected to one electrical circuit,” Gabe said, squatting down next to the baseboard and unscrewing the plate that covered the electrical outlet.
“How does the bomb work?”
Gabe sliced plastic coverings and exposed the raw wires and then pulled out a tiny glass vial.
“Logan wouldn’t tell me what the hell was in it when I asked, but the basic concept is that once the liquid touches the wires it travels through the entire electrical circuit. It works like an acid and a combustive at the same
