Gabe stared at her intently, his face blank of any thought. She already regretted her mistake of coming back with him. She wasn’t ready for whatever he had in mind. Her solitude and her trigger finger were the two things that had been most important to her the last couple of years. Gabe had managed to take one of them away so far.
The elevator opened again, and a fresh-faced kid wearing sweatpants and a Halo T-shirt bounded out of the elevator. His hair was dark brown and shaggy, and she’d bet money he’d never shaved a day in his life.
“Hellooo, beautiful. What do you say you and I do a little extra-hours work this evening?”
“Don’t be obnoxious, runt,” Jack said, smacking him on the back of the head. “Grace, this is Ethan Thomas. Try not to kill him. As hard as it is to believe, he actually proves himself useful every once in a while.”
The kid was cute, Grace thought, trying not to laugh so she wouldn’t hurt his feelings. In another ten years he’d be a good-looking man. Right now, though, he was still awkward arms and legs, his body on the thin side. Horn-rimmed glasses lay crooked on his nose, and a slow flush of anger at the way Jack had scolded him was working its way up his neck and into his cheeks.
“Listen, sweetheart. I might be young, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have experience. You know what I mean? I know how to treat a lady.”
“Good thing I’ve never claimed to be a lady,” she said, ignoring Gabe and Jack’s laughter. “The last man who thought he wanted to share his experience with me ended up with a bullet between his eyes.”
Ethan waggled his eyebrows, and he put a hand over his heart. “I think I’m in love. I’ve been looking for a woman who could be my protector. I’ve always thought I would adjust well to being a kept man. This is like kismet. Tell me your name, sweetheart, and make all my dreams come true.”
Grace held out her hand, and Ethan took it automatically. Her grip was strong but nonthreatening, and it gave Ethan plenty of time to feel the ridge of callous along her finger. His eyes widened, and she gave him a smile that made the smirk on his lips and the teasing sparkle in his eyes fade.
“Grace Meredith,” she said. “Gabe tells me I’ll get used to working with you. I’m sure it will be a pleasure.”
He snapped his hand back as if she’d burned him and looked at Gabe with an anger she wouldn’t have guessed someone so young would possess.
Silence lay heavily across the room. Grace wasn’t used to being the center of attention. She was used to hiding behind the rocks and taking the long, hard shots. She used Gabe as her center and didn’t break his stare as Ethan analyzed her closely.
“Seriously, Gabe?” Ethan asked. “Have you lost your fucking mind?”
“Are you questioning my authority, Ethan?”
Grace winced as Gabe turned cold blue eyes toward Ethan, and she shook her head as Ethan tried to bluster his way through. The kid had a lot to learn, that was for sure, and he’d probably be lucky to seen twenty-one with the way he was going.
“She’s a fucking mercenary,” Ethan said, backing up a step as Gabe’s expression grew more menacing. “You can’t trust someone who’s only in it for the money. And from the things I’ve heard lately, she should probably be rotting in a prison somewhere.”
Jack stepped in front of Gabe before things got too far out of hand, and Grace breathed a sigh of relief. No one really knew the kind of people they’d had to be over the last decade. The kills that had to be justified, the lies and subterfuge. She and Gabe and Jack had seen and done unimaginable things. Ethan Thomas couldn’t possibly know what he was dealing with when he tested Gabe like he was doing. Gabe was a good man—a fair man. But he lived by his own code and his own rules, and if Ethan Thomas overstepped himself or put any other agents in jeopardy with his smart mouth and careless ways, then Gabe wouldn’t hesitate to take him out. She would have done the same thing.
“She served her country just like the rest of us did,” Jack said, trying to calm things down. “And what she’s done with her life since she left the CIA is her business and no one else’s. You know how rumors fly. You’ve never stepped foot out in the field, but the rest of us have spent our lives making life-and-death decisions. And I promise you that there’s not one of us who doesn’t regret occasionally making the wrong choice.”
Gabe stepped around Jack and advanced on Ethan with menacing purpose. Ethan finally caught on to the fact that he was in deep shit and backed away from Gabe until he hit the wall.
Gabe’s voice was low, but each word was clear. “I assembled this team for reasons that you’ll never know or hope to understand. It’s not your place to say or question
Grace winced and looked at Jack. Being debriefed was a nice way of saying that Ethan would be drugged and brainwashed until he couldn’t remember who Gabe was or anything they’d been working on. She’d heard they’d tried to do that to Gabe when he resigned from the CIA and that they could never break him. Gabe was lucky he hadn’t been taken out by an inside source.
Ethan stared down Gabe, trying to get his temper under control. “Yes, sir,” he said between gritted teeth.
Gabe nodded and backed away, avoiding her gaze as he headed toward the conference room. “Now let’s get some work done,” he called over his shoulder. “Because we’ll all end up dead if we don’t catch this bastard.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Tension vibrated in fine waves from everyone in the room, and Gabe sighed. Grace sat there stoically, pretending it didn’t matter what Ethan thought about her when he knew damned well that somewhere deep inside of her it did. Jack sat beside her like a guard dog ready to defend her honor. And Ethan sat sullenly on the far side of the table. By the time Logan walked in and gave him an arched look in question at the atmosphere, all Gabe wanted was a drink and maybe a good fight.
Logan took a seat next to Ethan, and Gabe slid thick black folders to each of them.
“All of this information is in your packet in greater detail, but I’ll hit the high points.” Gabe took his seat at the head of the table and flipped open his folder. “Before World War II, the United States began research on a biochemical weapon called The Passover Project. It started much like its counterpart—The Manhattan Project—as an experiment for annihilation. But it was never meant for mass destruction like The Manhattan Project was with the atomic bomb. The Passover Project was meant as an assassination tool designed for one specific target. Of course, the target at the time was Hitler. All The Passover Project needed to become viable was a single strand of DNA—a piece of hair or skin cells to add to the basic formula—and the weapon would turn live. In theory, once it was launched, it could seek out its DNA match from a crowd of hundreds of thousands of people and eliminate the target once contact was made.
“Holy shit,” Jack said under his breath.
“To say the least,” Gabe said. “The core formula could be modified for any specific target by changing the DNA.”
“I’ve never heard of The Passover Project before,” Ethan said. “I’ve never even seen it mentioned in any Pentagon or CIA files.”
Gabe nodded and stood up to move around the room. He never liked being in one place very long. It made him restless.
“It never came to fruition,” he said. “The Passover Project began production in 1939 in an underground laboratory in Nevada. The whole purpose for experiments like The Passover and Manhattan Projects was that intelligence indicated that the Nazis were already working on similar weapons. At that point, it was just a race to see who could finish first.
“Clearance was so restricted on The Passover Project that there were only four scientists on the original development team. Dr. Josef Schmidt, a biochemistry professor from Stanford, was the project’s creator and lead scientist.”
“And what happened to Dr. Schmidt?” Grace asked cynically. “Knowing our government the way I do, they wouldn’t let a man with that kind of knowledge live very long.”
“The lab, the research, and the weapon’s developer were all destroyed in an explosion before it could do
