Immune (The Rho Agenda #2)(131)

“So what do you think?” Janet asked, although a part of her feared the answer.

“I like it.” Then Jack dropped to his knees, placed his ear right up against her belly, and tapped it twice with his finger. “Hey, you in there. What’s your name?”

Janet laughed out loud. “I don’t think he’s going to talk back.”

“You sure it’s a he?” Jack asked, still listening for a response.

“Positive.”

“Woman’s intuition?”

“Tall Bear told me.”

“And he would know?”

“Some sort of Navajo spiritual thing. He says he got it from his grandmother.”

“Hmm,” Jack said, rising to his feet and kissing her once again. “Well, I guess we can’t argue with that. Jack Junior then.”

“That’s horrible.”

“Jack Senior’s taken.”

“From the way he’s been acting in there, I was thinking of an Indian name. Something like Kicking Donkey.”

A broad grin spread across Jack’s face, bringing a twinkle to his eyes. Lord she’d missed him.

“Looks like we better keep his mom and dad alive long enough to hash all this out.”

“Gonna disappoint a lot of people.”

“Can’t be helped.” Jack paused. “You know we’re going to have to get married for real now.”

“Can’t we just keep living in sin?”

“Nope. Can’t have little Kicking Donkey getting teased at school.”

Janet grabbed his hand and led him out onto the porch, pulling him into the swinging loveseat. The warm rays of the afternoon sun felt nothing like November, but given this fleeting moment of comfort and happiness, she wasn’t about to argue with the weatherman.

Jack’s face grew more serious. “What have you got for me that you couldn’t encrypt into a message?”

Janet sighed. The warmth of their moment had passed.

For the next forty-five minutes, she laid out the whole story as she knew it. How she’d finally pieced together the puzzle, how the whole time they’d been hunting their mysterious source in the Rho Project, it was right under their noses in the persons of Heather McFarland and Mark and Jennifer Smythe.

When she finished, Jack leaned sideways in the loveseat, absently petting her stomach with his right hand.

“So they’ve made no contact since they disappeared?”

“None.”

“And you think it has something to do with the second alien ship found in that canyon?”

“I’ve run a number of correlations. There are too many coincidences. That’s not far from the cave where the Rag Man took Heather. You said that guy moved like no one on this planet. Mark showed incredible coordination, and we both suspected he was holding back from his true potential. Then the kids’ project won the national science contest. Somehow, they just happen to be connected to a whole set of unusual happenings. Given that they disappeared right after that ship was discovered, if there’s a better explanation, I’m listening.”

“Not one I can think of. Whatever they stumbled upon has them running and hiding.”

“Which is why they couldn’t keep providing the hacker link we were using. They’ve been on the move.”

Jack paused, stroking his chin with his hand. “Just because they can’t keep that link up doesn’t mean they haven’t been checking in on us. Didn’t our source say to leave a message on your laptop if we needed contact?”

Janet sat up. “I forgot all about that.”

“I’ve got a disk full of data I need them to break for me.”

“Got it on you?”

Jack pulled the DVD from his jacket pocket, holding it out to her.

Getting to her feet, Janet took it and headed for the laptop.

“Then I guess we ought to put our message in the bottle.”





138


Don Espe?osa sat, tied to a chair next to Mark, his face an unreadable mask. They’d debated chaining him in the bathroom, but had decided it was better to keep him under Mark’s watchful eye, even if that meant letting the drug baron hear everything. It didn’t matter. Heather had seen Espe?osa’s future, and he no longer had any.

Don Espe?osa knew he’d only continue living as long as they needed him and had already gone out of his way to demonstrate the extent to which he could be useful. He’d placed a call to one of his cleanup crews, giving instructions to get rid of the human remains in the gym and to scrub it down so thoroughly no DNA samples remained. It was a risky thing, but far better than dealing with queries about the smell. This wasn’t exactly the first bloody cleanup to have occurred on this property.

Jennifer wiped at her swollen eyes with the back of her hand, as if she could scrub away the memories that haunted her. For the last two and a half hours, the story, begun haltingly, had spilled from her lips, sweeping Heather into a maelstrom of emotion.

Despite that she’d showered and changed into clean clothes, Heather felt sullied. A glance at Mark revealed a similar response. They could live with the illegal activities Jennifer had performed for the cartel. But this Eduardo person was something altogether different. Jennifer’s brief glimpse into his soul had been so horrifying it had left her at his mercy. Now he had both Jennifer’s headset and the Rag Man’s.