She stared up at him, her eyes tearing up. “Have you found the bastards who killed him?”
“We will.”
“You gave up a lot for that information from Neto. What if it’s useless?”
“XZite is tainted, Ida. The only way it will sell again is if it’s rebranded. I have no desire to touch that product again.”
“Good. Now eat a sandwich. What would Charly say if I let you waste away?”
At the mention of his woman, he grinned. Charly was the one bright spot in his day since Luis died. His eyes were drawn to her lab.
The queen of the lab was the queen of his heart.
“How can I waste away in a few days?”
“I see the shadows under your eyes, Antonio,” Ida said softly. “This thing is destroying you.”
“Someone is keeping me tethered,” he assured his friend. It was Charly. He talked to her every day. With the DoD taking over her research, things were at a standstill for her team. There were no new cases or mutations. Renata and the rest who were infected were on the mend and should be discharged after another week.
God, he missed Charly with an ache that made him feel hollow. He couldn’t wait to get back Stateside. And though she assured him about her commitment to their relationship, hearing that she actually met an ex-boyfriend did a number on his sanity. Here he was so far away from her and not a few days later, someone wanted to steal her away from him. Yes, Antonio was a stalker. He had Nico amass pictures from that seminar. His IT whiz was probably wondering why he was behaving like a lovesick fool, but Antonio was past the point of explaining the actions of a man in love. Because he didn’t lie to Charly. He wasn’t a man of flowery words, which was a good thing, because he couldn’t describe the depth of how far he’d fallen. But to claim Charly publicly, he needed to find the man who wanted to destroy everything and everyone Antonio cared for.
It wasn’t his life Antonio’s enemy was after. In their underground world, the enemy went after the person they loved the most.
It happened with Luis.
It happened with Emilio.
For Antonio, the person he loved the most was Charly.
His chest constricted. Antonio refused to follow the same fate. He needed to check in with Garrison and was surprised the spook had not contacted him. Charly’s safety was his priority. As for Andrade Industries, he put both Vicente and Simone temporarily in charge. With the age of the internet and mobile devices, he could manage his business from anywhere. The members of the board would have to suck it up. Welcome to the twenty-first century.
However, he put a moratorium on any big project expenses until Renata got back on her feet.
Renata.
In some ways she betrayed him, but she wasn’t irredeemable. They shared too much of a past to simply let this mistake erase everything they’d been through. In his eyes at least. And any lingering guilt over Dante’s death was gone.
They were even.
“Okay,” Nico announced. “I think I’ve pieced together something, but Neto isn’t providing much either. These pictures of Yehven Skoryk do not pop up in any search engine or dark web data mining.”
“CIA,” Antonio guessed.
“Bingo,” Nico said. “It certainly looks that way. So, Yehven Skoryk was thirty when he perished in that house fire with his wife and daughter. He was brilliant. Had a doctorate in biological engineering and was a chemist as well as a virologist. You name it. According to some documents, he was working for a biotech company when he made a breakthrough with the Ebola virus genetic code. That was when he was forced to work for the Soviet’s bioweapons lab. When the Soviet Union fell, it became a free for all. Rumor was he became a CIA asset and gave up several names in the Soviet’s bioweapon program and those people were systematically assassinated.”
“You think he’s still alive?” Antonio asked.
“I wouldn’t put it past the CIA to give him a new name and life.”
“The obituary could be fake. It listed his wife and daughter.”
“So how old would they be now?” Martinez asked.
“Yehven would be fifty-six, wife, fifty-four, and daughter, thirty-two,” Nico said.
“Any pictures of them?” Antonio leaned over his shoulder.
Nico flipped through the scanned images. “This one … no … this one would be closer. The daughter was six when they died.”
His IT analyst brought up the picture and Antonio’s eyes zeroed in on the mother’s image. She looked familiar, but not with brown hair.
Blonde.
Son of a bitch.
“Well that should take care of that.”
Charly glanced up to see Sandra finish packing doses of their candidate vaccine and antiviral in a biocontainment case to be shepherded by military escort to USMRIID. The United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases. Because the Z-9 series was a bioweapon, it fell under their umbrella as the medical research facility for the Department of Defense to continue antiviral and vaccine development. Charly was sure they would be summoned to that facility soon.
“Has Dr. Fournier said what our team should do next?” Sandra asked.
“No. It seems we need to assist Downtown Medical with their patients and to continue to watch for mutations.”
Sandra frowned. “So far it’s been stable.”
“We only had that cluster at the house. I’m surprised the one in Renata hasn’t mutated.”
“Why are you expecting it to mutate?” Sandra asked.
Charly pursed her lips. “The one in Raul did, which tells me whoever did this knew how to stimulate the virus to create a mutation series. If they had the technology and they know we already have the antiviral and vaccine, shouldn’t they try and throw us off our game?”
Sandra shrugged. “True. But what if they already got what they wanted? Like killing Luis?”
Charly frowned. She’d never told her about Luis and it
