Immune (The Rho Agenda #2)(106)

“No, but I rest and I meditate.”

Finally, she shrugged. “Oh, all right. Just make sure you stay on your side.”

“I can’t believe you even think I wouldn’t.”

“Right.”

Mark let Heather shower first before taking his turn. By the time he’d put on a fresh set of clothes and returned to the bedroom, Heather was fast asleep beneath the covers. Mark lay down atop the covers on the other side of the bed, rolling onto his side. As much as he knew he should be thinking about the next steps in their search for Jennifer, he just lay there watching Heather sleep beside him, her gentle breathing the most wonderful sound he could imagine. It was another of those moments he intended to record in his memory, down to the last perfect detail.





111


Garfield Kromly stared at the report on his desk. The brown double wrapping still lay on the floor where it had fallen as he removed the outer covering of the classified package. This was just one more piece in the puzzle, a jigsaw picture that had begun to resolve itself from the information on the disk he had gotten at Union Station. And as badly as he wanted to believe something else, anything else, it was looking more and more like Jack Gregory was right.

At this point, Kromly was sure that someone at the top level in the White House had assisted in the assassination of President Harris; he just didn’t yet know who that someone was. As for the connections to the Rho Project and the upcoming release of the alien nanotechnology, he had come up with little more than a string of very odd coincidences. He was going to need something much stronger than that to break this thing open.

Kromly glanced down at the computer disk that lay beside the package he had just received. Along with a host of circumstantial evidence, it contained the digital recording of a phone call from the White House, made just minutes before the president had been killed. It might just be the break he had been looking for. Unfortunately, the recording was encrypted using some of the most sophisticated hardware and software available to the United States government. Without the STU encryption key, his chances of deciphering it were practically nonexistent.

His hopes of at least getting a voiceprint from the scrambled data had proven fruitless. Perhaps the folks at the NSA could do it, but everyone who had gone that route had found themselves very, very dead. And although Kromly didn’t fear death, he had no intention of rushing to embrace it either. There was too much at stake for the country for him to get himself killed just yet.

Already, he’d been lucky. The man who had been killed at Union Station, not far from where Kromly had entered the parking garage, had turned out to be a mob hit man named Pauly Farentino. A more thorough check into Farentino had revealed that he had been seen following Natalie Simpson before she reached Union Station. It didn’t take much imagination to guess that he had seen the exchange outside Auntie Anne’s and had switched targets on the fly.

The public story that Farentino was killed by an angry vagrant was laughable. While Farentino wasn’t the smartest guy on the block, the man had earned a reputation as a vicious and dangerous killer. Unfortunately for him, in the middle of the crowd at Union Station, he had crossed paths with a much more dangerous predator. The knife work was too precise. Two quick cuts severing each side of the throat in a manner designed to produce the maximum spray of blood, something to shock the surrounding crowd, drawing their focus away from his face.

But it was the third and final wound that left no doubt in Kromly’s mind as to the identity of the killer. The long knife had punched straight up, entering Farentino’s head just beneath the chin, punching its way up through his mouth and into his cranial cavity with enough force to drive the blade and several splinters of bone deep into the hit man’s brain. The person who had killed Farentino had wanted to make sure that he could not survive his injuries, even if he had been treated with the nanite serum.

Kromly shook his head. So now he owed Jack his life, twice if you counted the fact that Jack hadn’t killed him when he could have. Apparently, Jack wanted to make sure he lived long enough to complete the task he had agreed to.

Maybe he’d have to put Jack back on his Christmas card list after all.





112


From her barred window, she watched the back-slapping, laughing men below, several carrying rifles slung loosely across the crook of an arm. From the look of the activity, preparations for some sort of celebration were well underway. Heavily laden workers moved back and forth, dropping off supplies and setting up tables and chairs beneath a large awning that had been erected between the wings of the hacienda-style mansion. A glance at the sky gave reason to their hurry. Rain was coming, and from the look of the thick clouds creeping down from the peaks of the surrounding mountains, it was going to be a gully washer.

Jennifer’s face pulled back from the bars, the tears that had dripped from her cheeks leaving damp spots on the stone window sill, precursors of the coming storm. She lingered for several moments, then stepped down from her perch atop the single bed, her eyes making a circuit of the room. It was tiny, barely large enough to hold the bed. A foul-smelling bucket occupied the farthest corner at the foot of the bed, across from a heavy wooden door. Moving across the space separating the bed from the door, her small hands twisted and pulled on the handle, but it was useless.

Backing into the corner furthest from the stinking chamber pot, Jennifer slid to the floor, her hands rising to cover her face as sobs shook her body.