“He’s another big-name scientist, but he’s also very much an animal activist,” he said. “So she’s been raised with that similar attitude.”
“I guess,” Diesel said, “the question is, when we find her, if she would help in her rescue or if she will be a hindrance, and I’m better off to knock her out.”
“I would definitely give her at least a chance to let you know the answer to that on her own,” Shane said with a note of humor.
“I’ll give her at least three seconds,” he said. “First sign of trouble and she’s out.”
“She’s known to be very resourceful,” he said.
“So then the question is, is she doing anything to help herself?”
“When you find her, you can ask her yourself.”
“Got it,” he said.
As soon as he checked out the various related links, he brought up the additional history on Eva. A fair bit was in here. She lived a quiet life after her father was arrested for some activism, where he’d been arguing local politics. He’d taken his daughter on several of those trips. When he was arrested, it had been a traumatic experience for her, and she had stayed home more or less ever after and then had devoted her adult life to scientific research, rather than public protest.
Diesel could understand that. Especially as a child, that would have been rough.
On the other hand, she’d created a medical breakthrough, and mankind was desperate for it. She’d been working on a number of diseases from the basic building blocks of the malaria-carrying mosquitoes that started it all. And now she was working on something a little more definitive. He didn’t quite understand all this part, and it certainly wasn’t a disease currently emblazoning the world, but she had an awful lot of research that had somehow made a breakthrough with stem cells.
He wondered if it wouldn’t have been easier to just grab her research instead of taking her, depending on how well she was known to be a difficult person.
As he read through more, he learned she was single, had no children, had no living mother, was supporting her adult brother with known addictions. That would also be difficult for her as well. And since her father had retired and had moved away, she was left with nobody in Boston to defend her when she ran into trouble. Neither was anybody looking after her.
Frowning at that, he thought about what her life was like as a single person on her own, taking care of her alcoholic brother, trying to save the world from global diseases with no known cure to date. That couldn’t have been easy. At least the brother was living in a group home at the moment so that had to be easier on her.
When a knock came on the hotel door, he froze. But he got up, slowly walked to the side, and, as he got there, the door opened in front of him.
Eva Langston took a long slow deep breath, studied the keyboard in front of her, even as she watched the guard walk behind the three different scientists. He was busy talking on his phone—yelling into his phone was a better description. The other two scientists, another woman and a man, looked at Eva and frowned. She nodded and kept her fingers moving on the keyboard. They had to show some results, or else it would turn out very badly. It was important to keep their heads down and to make it look like they were compliant, working. They were guarded every minute of every day. The guards switched out every eight hours, and they had a guard at nighttime. They were given food, time on their own in their rooms, but they had no electronic devices in their rooms. No way to call out for help, no way to do anything, and all their time on the lab computers was almost always monitored.
A team of security guards on the other side of the lab’s observation window watched them, even as this particular gunman walked back and forth, yelling into his phone.
She didn’t know how much longer she could do this. The strain was showing. One scientist had committed suicide. She wasn’t even sure how he’d done it but presumably had found a way. At least he committed suicide according to the guards. It was a reminder that their livelihood was dependent on the guards’ goodwill.
She didn’t know who was behind this, but they were in China, so it wasn’t hard to guess. But it was easy to blame the Chinese government, and she had no way of knowing if that were the case or not. But she’d heard enough horror stories of some of the things going on over here to make her blood curdle. Including the fact that the resistance and other religious groups opposing China had been plowed underground and were used to harvest organs for transplants for the Chinese citizens who could order up what they needed.
It was a scary thought, and one that made her blood run cold. If that were the case, that’s what their end would be as well.
Unless she could get the hell out of here.
She had no clue how to do that, and she had nobody in Boston who would call in the alarm or give a crap. Although she had a decent job, it was still just a job. And, if she didn’t show up one day, a few might cry about it for several minutes, but her five minutes of fame would quickly die out. And they had her research, so it’s not as if they would care about her personally.
She had had some major breakthroughs on the work that she was doing, but that didn’t mean that anybody there couldn’t just carry on with her research. That’s also the problem here; they had provided her with copies of a lot of her own research, which didn’t make her happy because it had been put in the wrong hands. Although
