Immune (The Rho Agenda #2)(32)

Heather walked around the equipment to stand behind Jennifer’s swivel chair. Her eyes swept the numbers that filled the spreadsheet on the laptop screen. Now here was something with which she was completely comfortable. The equipment was performing far better than would normally be expected. Between Heather’s slight modifications to the theoretical equations and Jennifer’s magical command of computers, their final touches looked complete.

Heather straightened. “Looks great.”

Mark raised his hands in a hallelujah salute. “Good. Let’s bag it and tag it.”

Jennifer nodded in agreement.

The rest of the day passed in a flurry of activity. Every piece of the apparatus had to be carefully tagged with a number and listed on diagrams before disassembly. Then, carefully packaged, the parts were placed in a set of crates. By the time a copy of the diagrams and inventory list had been placed in the last of the crates and Mark had nailed the lid closed, Heather was exhausted.

“My God,” Heather gasped. “Are we really done?”

“Oh, shit, we left something out.” A look of horror spread across Mark’s face.

As Jennifer and Heather’s panicked gazes swept the room for what they had missed, a chuckle brought their heads back around.

Mark’s grin was ear to ear. “Oh, your faces are priceless.”

This time Mark was ready, moving aside just in time to dodge Heather’s elbow. Unfortunately, his sidestep exposed his upper arm to Jennifer’s flying fist.

“Ow. Hey, Doc! That hurt.”

“Serves you right.” Jennifer’s angry gaze showed no sign of softening.

Heather clenched her teeth. “Mark, sometimes you’re not nearly as funny as you think you are. That was just mean.”

Before Mark could respond, Jennifer stormed from the garage. Mark glanced down at his arm, raising his short sleeve to examine it. Seeing his look of amazement, Heather leaned in for a look.

As incredible as it seemed, Jennifer’s punch was raising a deep blue bruise in the hard muscle of Mark’s neurally enhanced shoulder.





30


“Peaches. You okay in there, Peaches? Such a pretty bird. My Peachy, Peachy, Peachy.”

Freddy Hagerman glared at the woman across the airplane’s central aisle as she stared into the multicolored bird-carrying travel bag on her lap. Jesus H. Christ. If the idiotic woman’s cooing wasn’t bad enough, now the damn thing was squawking. He’d been hoping to get some sleep on the flight to LA.

Three quick presses of the call button brought the head stewardess, an aging blonde who could have passed for a storm trooper, beelining toward him.

“Sir, one press of the button is quite enough. May I help you?”

Just then the bird squawked again, this one an ear-splitting screech highlighted by the laughter of several people in nearby rows. Freddy stared at the stewardess, his raised eyebrows leaving no doubt as to what he regarded as the problem.

The stewardess turned her attention to the woman. The bird woman was an older lady, probably in her mid to late sixties, her attention so focused inside the mesh of the travel cage that she had failed to notice either Freddy’s annoyance or the stewardess’s arrival.

The stewardess leaned in closer. “Ma’am. Excuse me, but I’m going to have to ask you to put the case under the seat.”

The look on the woman’s face could not have been more horrified if the stewardess had just told her the bird would now be served as lunch. A heated discussion ensued, only abating when it became clear that the chief stewardess, whom Freddy had begun to think of as Mein Frau, would not be cowed.

With the bird case safely settled beneath the seat, the squawking miraculously subsided. Then Freddy discovered that, because he was in front of an exit row, his seat would not recline. For the next four hours of sleepless hell, he was forced to endure his head nodding forward hard enough to cramp his neck and a panic from bird woman as Peaches discovered how to unzip its case. This time the old lady refused to be mollified until a frantic search turned up enough tape to secure the zipper.

LAX, perhaps the most crowded and uncomfortable airport in the continental US, had never been something Freddy looked forward to walking into, until now. By the time the plane rolled to a stop at the gate and Freddy rose to retrieve his carry-on from the overhead storage compartment, he was ready to wade through hell itself if it got him off that plane.

Bird woman leaned down and retrieved the case from its resting place, cooing out a string of “Peachy, Peachy, Peachies” before setting it on her seat. Something in Freddy’s face must have given her the impression that he wanted to hear a detailed explanation of why she had been so concerned about the damn bird because she immediately turned toward him and began imparting a detailed breakdown of the events. As if he hadn’t been a firsthand witness.

As her voice droned on, the bird case on the seat behind her tumbled to the floor with a small thud that sent the woman spinning in that direction, a squeal of horror issuing from her lips. “Peaches!”

As Freddy disengaged himself to follow other passengers off the aircraft, a grin split his face. Perhaps there was a God after all.

His newly acquired good mood failed to last. Arriving at the rental car terminal, Freddy failed to find his name on the Gold Club reservation board, something that resulted in an hour-long delay while the attendant placed repeated calls to the office, trying to locate his reservation.