“We’re flying out tonight,” he said calmly.
“Good,” she said in delight. “Hopefully home?”
“Yep,” he said, “and I know it’s been quite the trip so far, but I thank you for your patience.”
She sighed. “It sounds incredibly immature of me to even complain,” she said. “I mean, let’s be obvious. You’ve done a lot to … everything you’ve done has been to keep me safe, so I’m just glad we’re finally going home.”
And, at that, they were driven to a small hotel, and, when they went inside, she thought they’d be in another hotel room. Instead it looked more like a boardroom. She looked around in surprise. “So …”
And Diesel just laughed and said, “We’re here until our flights.”
“Okay,” she said. “In that case, what will we do here?”
“We’ll do nothing,” he said.
She groaned, buried her head in her hands, and said, “I’m so tired of doing nothing.”
“What would you like to do?”
She perked up. “Shop?”
“Nope,” he said.
She groaned. “How about … be a tourist and go sightseeing?”
“No,” he said.
She groaned. “Read a book? Watch TV?”
“Absolutely. Anything inside that doesn’t require leaving.”
She sighed. “Fine then.” And she headed to the TV and she turned it on.
“Eva’s handling it pretty well,” Jerricho said beside him.
Diesel looked up, saw Eva sitting before the TV on the far side, and nodded. “Like anybody in her position, she just wants it over with.”
“And, of course, this is hardly a romantic way to spend time together.”
At that, Diesel rolled his eyes. “Quit harping on the romance,” he said. “This is all about real life.”
“Romance is real life too,” she called out over the TV.
He groaned. “You aren’t part of this conversation.”
“Maybe I should be,” she said, looking back and flashing him that bright grin that he was starting to really enjoy.
“Not really,” he said.
She shrugged. “You can’t hold all the conversations yourself, you know?” she said. “That’s just being greedy.”
“What more do you want to talk about, then?” he asked in surprise.
“Nothing,” she said. “I just …” And then she stopped and said, “Well, I just really want to go home.”
“Got it,” he said. “We’ll get you there soon enough.” He added, “And I know it doesn’t feel like we’re doing anything fast because we’re deliberately not trying to do the speedy route, but I want to make sure that you get home safe.”
“Got it.” She kicked her feet up, turned her attention back to the television.
He looked over at Jerricho. “Any concerns?”
“No,” he said slowly, “but still something’s just niggling in the back of my mind.”
“Me too,” Diesel said. “I just don’t know how or why. I think we’ll be fine to head out of here and to go to Wisconsin. We got several flights to make that trip. But she’s right. She wasn’t kidnapped from the lab. Yet the lab was using their marketing efforts to build up the lab’s visibility to bring in investment money.”
“It’s quite possible that they overstated their findings,” Jerricho said.
“Well, we’ve certainly seen stock manipulation happen time and time again,” he said. “This wouldn’t be any different.”
“No. Do you think they had anything to do with it?”
“I hope not, for her sake,” Diesel said slowly. “It has crossed my mind, but I haven’t been able to find anything.”
“Me either,” he said. “And, if they did, then what?” Jerricho asked.
“Then she’s not safe even back at work,” he said, his tone low so she couldn’t hear him. “And that in itself is even more upsetting because, after all this, you’d like to think that we’re taking her back to where she’s safe and sound, but is she?” Diesel looked over at Eva and called out, “What would your boss be doing right now?”
“My boss?” Eva said. “He’d be in his office, probably talking to investors, talking to the shareholders, fielding questions from the other techs. Why?”
“I don’t know. I just wonder if he had anything to do with this.”
“I don’t think so. He’s a people guy. I don’t think he’s somebody who thinks that far ahead of what could happen if somebody stole his scientist. Did he ask for donations because of my research contributions? I guess it’s possible. Or maybe the shareholders donated money? I don’t know.” She turned to face them better, and she said, “Since this started, I wondered because I do know that I’ve seen them exaggerate some of our findings to get more public interest, and that’s frowned upon in the scientific world. So I don’t really know what’s going on there. I just can’t imagine that he thought that this would really be a good answer. Generally I would have said he was somebody with heart.”
“Nationality?”
“American,” she said. Then she frowned. “But his wife’s Chinese.”
“His wife is Chinese?”
She nodded. “And she’s a scientist too.”
“And where does she work?”
“She’s on the board of directors,” she said. “She doesn’t come into the lab anymore.”
“Any idea if she had anything to do with this?”
“But I don’t know why she would.”
“Right,” he said, staring out in the distance. “I just feel like something else is involved.”
“I’m sure there is,” she said with a nod. “How will we ever find out what that is? And to find it out before I go back to work? And, of course, we could be looking at it completely wrong. And accusing people having absolutely nothing to do with this.”
“And that’s always the challenge, isn’t it?” Jerricho said. He looked at Diesel. “I’ll pick up on the research.”
He nodded. “I will too.”
Both of them grabbed their laptops. Both jumped into the Mavericks chat window and asked for information about the company, her boss, and the boss’s wife, looking for connections, looking for any thread that would lead back to the lab in China. Immediately Diesel was sent
