Some of it came from odd angles, but there was a lot of information there if you knew how to look, and certainly Jay knew that.
It bothered him that he was doing it. No, that wasn’t strictly true—what bothered him was that he believed he had a
Was it just guilt? At how he had felt as she was rubbing his crotch? Or shame at how hard it had been to jump up and run out of her office?
Because that had been tempting. Lord, it had. He could have just . . . let go, pretended it was VR, that it wasn’t really happening, and he had a feeling it would have been absolutely dynamite sex, too. Blond, beautiful, brainy, everything to like . . .
But the image of Saji holding their child had bloomed in his mind, and he couldn’t see past that to the woman wetting her lips for him and reaching for his zipper. . . .
Sure, a lot of men had affairs after they were married. None of them seemed to think it was that big a deal, a little on the side, but Jay realized that he wasn’t like most people. He had been a computer geek for a long time— he’d had a couple of girlfriends—but nobody had ever loved him like Saji. She had been there for him while he was lying in a coma, she had given him a son, and what he felt for her was beyond his ability to put into words.
Yes, Rachel Lewis was smart, she was sexy, and she wanted him, no question, but if he had gone down that road, how would he have felt about himself afterward? Were a few minutes of sexual pleasure, no matter how hot, worth his self-esteem? Worth risking his marriage?
The answer was simple: No.
Once he had realized that, once he had made that decision, even in the panic in which it had taken place, things had . . . shifted. There was an old saying he had seen somewhere, from the I-Ching or the Tao or something: “The Truth waits for eyes unclouded by longing.”
When it had been a fanciful possibility that he might have fallen into bed with Rachel, he hadn’t looked at her as critically as he might have done otherwise. He didn’t like that, but he had to accept it. She’d had a free pass.
On some level, he had been enjoying the flirting, the idea of it, the risk. But when push came to shove, he couldn’t do it. It would have been
And now? Now his vision wasn’t being blocked by the image of Rachel lying naked on a bed. And he had started wondering.
Now, all those little things he had accumulated that he had ignored? They suddenly seemed bigger than they had before.
Who had given him the information on the URL that he’d wasted so much time chasing, only to find it a red herring?
Who had been with him when his scenario crashed as he was about to catch the Alien Cowboy?
Who had access to all the Army’s sensitive information, and the ability to use it without being suspected?
From whose unit had the original information supposedly been hacked?
Who, if she hadn’t been beautiful and sexy and smart, would have been at the top of Jay’s check-’em-out list, once he got rolling?
The answers to all the questions were the same.
There was a tendency to separate people into good guys and bad guys, and since Lewis had been on the same side—and gorgeous—that made her ipso facto one of the good guys. But there had always been bad cops, and they were harder to catch because nobody started out looking at them.
Now, there were too many fingers pointing that way for Jay to stay blind any longer.
He came across the entry on Rachel’s father. He turned to that page, began reading. A career Army man, just as she had told him. Died young . . . hmmm.
A sub-index on Sergeant Robert Bridger Lewis turned up the cause of death: suicide.
As Jay read the file, he felt a cold sensation begin gathering in his belly.
Sergeant R.B. Lewis had been court-martialed and convicted of killing a soldier, and had been awaiting sentencing when he shot himself.
Records of the trial told the story: The soldier had allegedly assaulted the then-seventeen-year-old Rachel Lewis, a date rape. Her father had gone to find the young man and had killed him with his side arm.
The cold in his gut turned into a hard and icy lump.
Jay leaned back and stared at the book. That might tend to make for a screwed-up view of the Army, that they prosecuted your father for taking out your rapist. But it wasn’t proof.
Jay thumbed back to the index, and to the medical records section.
There was no record of Rachel Lewis ever having a child. That didn’t mean all that much—could be she had avoided giving her real name. He could strain the records looking for live births about the time it would have happened, and death certificates due to the cause she had told him, a burst aorta. That would take a while. . . .
No, wait, hold on. Here was a sealed record of a medical exam just last year, a routine physical, and a copy of the doctor’s exam notes: “Well-developed, well-nourished sthenic Caucasian female, gravida 0, para 0, appearing to be about the stated age of . . .”
Jay grabbed a medical dictionary and leafed through it.
Whoa.
If, after a physical examination and lab tests and all, a doctor had written down that Captain Lewis had never been pregnant, much less had a baby?
That meant she had lied to Jay about her baby. Why?
Well, if she had been trying to get his sympathy, certainly that had worked. He had wanted to hug her and comfort her when he’d heard that, and if she had designs on him to keep his mind from churning along a certain path—
She wanted to sleep with him—but not because she thought he was God’s gift to women. It was to put him off her trail!
What a moron he was! Why hadn’t he seen that before?
Jay was certain of it in that moment. Rachel Lewis was behind the attacks on the Army bases. The only question was, how was he going to get enough evidence to prove it?
Maybe Carruth, if they got him alive, would roll over and give her up. But Jay couldn’t depend on that. He had to get what he needed in case Carruth blew himself to pieces when the authorities came to call.
Then again, once you were convinced of something, once you knew it was the truth, finding evidence to back that belief was easier than fumbling around in the dark looking for it in the first place.
Well. He had plenty of material to look at. Everything she had told him needed to be checked. She had been lying to him all along, and somewhere in that mess might be just the thread he needed to unravel it.
Rachel was the bad guy. Damn.
34
The roar of the BMF revolver was a noise to rival Thor’s hammer smashing a mountain of granite, a scream that stunned both the ear and the mind. He wasn’t worried about his hearing or ballistics at this point—it was his ass on the line. They were here, they knew who he was. All bets were off.
He pointed the handgun at the front door, not bothering to aim, and squeezed the trigger again, and the
