Читать книгу Red Alert - Jessica Andersen - Страница 11

Erik shouted and grabbed Meg. He tried to shield her with his body, but it was impossible. The danger was all around them.

The elevator floor barely pressed against his feet as they fell, giving a sense of weightlessness even as nausea jammed at the back of his throat.

He twisted, still holding Meg against his chest, and slapped the red Emergency Stop button beneath the main panel.

Nothing happened.

He punched the red button harder. “Engage, damn it!”

The brakes locked. Metal screamed and sparks leaped up through the carpeted floor, which jolted and slowed its descent.

Unbalanced by the sudden change in inertia, Erik crashed to the floor. Meg landed atop him, driving the breath from his lungs.

“We’re still moving!” she shouted in his ear, panic cranking her voice to a shriek.

“Hang on!” Erik tightened his arms around her and tucked her face beside his as the grating squeal of metal-on-metal intensified. The howling sound reverberated in his skull until—

Crash!

The impact slammed him flat. His head bounced off the carpeted floor and rebounded into Meg’s shoulder. He cut his lip between his teeth and her collarbone, and tasted blood. Her body dug into his and then sprawled away as a final crashing noise ripped through the small space.

Then the cacophony died, leaving a strange, heavy silence broken only by the strident ring of alarms. A small, battery-powered emergency light provided wan illumination.

They’d hit bottom. They’d survived.

Erik let the knowledge work its way through him, partway expecting relief. He found anger instead. Red, bloody anger.

That was no accident.

It wasn’t until he heard the words echo in the noisy silence that he realized he’d said it out loud.

Beside him, sprawled half over him, Meg moaned and stirred. Her elbow jabbed him in the ribs, and when she rolled off him, she shoved her knee against his bad leg, sending shooting sparks of pain to join the dizzy ache of impact.

Erik buried the wince and turned to look at her. “You okay?”

She levered herself to a seated position, then slumped back against the wall. Her orangey suit and tall black boots still looked as professional as they had when she’d first stepped into Cage’s office. But her red-gold hair had fallen from its slick knot, making her look less unapproachable. More vulnerable.

She shifted experimentally before she said, “Everything works, if that’s what you’re asking. But no, I’m not okay. We were just…we just…” Her full lower lip trembled until she bit it and mastered the half-formed tears. “Sorry. I’m fine. How about you?”

The sirens cut out then, leaving a chilly silence that was soon broken by thumps overhead.

Far overhead.

“No broken bones, and I’ll settle for that under the circumstances.” Erik grabbed his cane and used it to push himself up off the floor, which was tilted beneath them. He put a steadying hand on the wall and reached up to bang on the ceiling of the elevator car, where a body-size panel hung slightly askew. “Looks like this’ll be our way out. You want me to boost you up, or would you rather wait for an official rescue?”

The thumping noises increased overhead as Meg’s eyes met his. “What if that’s not the official rescue?” she asked quietly.

Then we’re sitting ducks, he thought. With the elevator lying at the bottom of the shaft, there was no way they were getting the main doors open. It was out the top or nothing.

But the question remained… What if whoever had engineered the fall was up there waiting?

He saw understanding in her eyes, a grim sort of fatalism that clashed with his impression of the woman. It made him wonder if there was more to her than the academic exterior she projected. His investigators had mentioned she’d been a bit of a hellion in her younger years, and concluded she’d outgrown the risk-taking behavior. Her quiet calm made him wonder whether she’d retained more of her skydiving, bungee-jumping past than she let on.

Or, his suspicious side prompted, maybe she’s like Celia. Maybe this is all part of a plan.

“Boost me up,” she ordered.

He stared for a moment, as her image merged in his mind with that of another woman, lighter in coloring except for the red slash of her painted lips.

Then he shook his head to banish the image. Celia was gone for twenty-to-life and had no place in his head. Meg Corning was nothing like her.

Nothing at all.

“I’ll go first,” he said finally. He motioned her to the corner as the banging continued overhead. “Watch yourself.”

“You want a boost?”

He bit back the automatic retort. “I’ve got it.” He poked the cane up with more force than necessary, sending the panel clattering out of the way. Then he wedged the rubber-tipped end on the metal handrail that looped around the elevator car, used the cane as leverage, jumped as high as he could manage, and grabbed the edge of the escape hatch with his free hand. Cursing with the effort, he dragged his upper body through the opening one-handed, then pulled the cane up after him.

It wasn’t much of a weapon, but it was all he had left.

Exertion sang through his bloodstream, sending his pulse into his ears. A quick glance showed him a lighted rectangle some twenty feet above, stark contrast to the darkness of the elevator shaft, which was lined with metal, cement and thick cables.

A human figure stood silhouetted in the doorway. Another clung to the side of the shaft, maybe fifteen feet away.

Erik stayed silent, though there was little hope of avoiding detection. With one muscle-popping surge of effort, he scrambled to his feet until he was standing atop the ruined elevator car with his cane in his fist, a weak defense against the dark shadow that dropped down the final feet separating them, landed heavily atop the elevator car, and clasped his shoulder.

“You’re okay. Thank God.”

Relief laced through Erik. It was Zach Cage. Rescue, not attack.

“What happened?” the hospital administrator asked, then cursed. “Never mind. Dumb question. Is Meg hurt?”

“She’s rattled,” Erik said as a coil of rope snaked down from above and the crackle of radio traffic announced the arrival of official personnel. “And frankly, so am I. You know what this means, don’t you?”

Cage nodded grimly. “The hospital isn’t the target. These so-called accidents are focused on one of you guys. Question is, which one?”

“I don’t know,” Erik admitted, “but I’m damn well going to find out.”

THE NEXT HALF HOUR passed in a blur of firefighters and paramedics that seemed all too familiar to Meg.

Two near-death experiences in two days. How was she supposed to deal with that?

She didn’t know, but as she sat alone at a conference table in a bare, faintly cool room deep within the Chinatown police station, she gave herself a stern talking-to. “You’ve bungee jumped off a bridge. You’ve skydived. You’ve pedaled bikes off the sides of cliffs. Hell, you even base-jumped off a skyscraper once. You used to get a rush out of stuff like this.”

So why were her hands shaking? Why was her stomach knotted and why were her knees doing a fair impression of Jell-O?

Because those rushes were years in the past. And because she’d chosen the dangers. Over the past forty-eight hours, danger had come looking for her, and all she wanted to do was to run home and hide. She hadn’t signed up for this. She was a researcher, damn it, not a contestant on some freaky reality show where people volunteered to be buried in cement or dropped down elevator shafts in an effort to win a million dollars.

Even as she gritted her teeth on the thought, the door opened, admitting Erik Falco and the two detectives who’d earlier introduced themselves as Peters and Sturgeon. They were easy to tell apart— Peters was the handsome, athletic one. Sturgeon had that Mr. Limpet thing going on. And Falco…

Hell, she didn’t know what to think about him. Most of the time, he leaned on that two-toned cane as though he was utterly dependent on its support, scowling to let the world know he hated every minute of it. He didn’t want sympathy, but he also didn’t seem comfortable in his own skin, regardless of the expensive clothes and tasteful haircut. But once or twice she’d seen flashes of something else, like when he’d rescued her from the cement or shielded her body with his during the crash. Then, he’d seemed to grow bigger. Taller. Meaner.

In those moments, he’d made her feel safe.

But now…now he stumped into the room and dropped heavily into a chair opposite her at the round conference table. His handsome face hardened into a glare, as though everything was somehow her fault.

Meg found herself bristling. “Don’t give me that look. If you hadn’t insisted on pursuing a deal I have no intention of making, none of this would have happened.”

Detective Peters paused in the act of setting up his PDA to record the conversation and glanced at them. “What deal?”

“Falco here wants to buy my patents, and can’t get it through his thick skull that NPT isn’t for sale,” Meg said. “Not to him, anyway.”

Maybe she shouldn’t snipe at a man who’d let her use his body as a landing pad when their elevator crashed. But business was business.

Falco smiled at her with an expression that showed lots of teeth and very little warmth. “Like I said before, call me Erik. We’re going to be working closely together this week, so there’s no need to stand on formality.” He glanced at the detectives. “Unfortunately for Meg, she doesn’t hold veto power over the hospital’s decision. Unless she’s able to come up with a licensor willing to accept her terms—highly unlikely—the deal will go through one week from today.”

His use of her first name struck a chord she wasn’t entirely comfortable with, and had her hissing out a breath. A week. He was going to be dogging her tracks for the next seven days, probably ambushing her attempts to gather investors.

She didn’t know much about Erik Falco, but she had a pretty good idea he wouldn’t give up easily. Hell, he’d been working to get the deal done for months, and it hadn’t been until the last few days that Cage had begun yielding to the hospital’s growing financial pressures.

Come to think of it… “None of this started until Cage agreed in principle to FalcoTechno’s offer,” Meg said slowly. “What if someone’s trying to sabotage the deal?”

“If that’s the case, I expect you’ll track them down and offer to help.” Erik’s grimace suggested he was being sarcastic, but he continued. “It is possible, though. Several other companies are in the running for the NPT technology.”

“Nobody’s in the running,” Meg snapped. Her eyes itched, her brain felt as if it were stuffed with cotton batting and she was perilously close to tears. She bit her lip until the urge receded. “But I think it’s a valid hypothesis. If—and this is only hypothetical—if we agree that Erik and I were the target of these attacks, then our attacker could be someone trying to tank the deal.”

Detective Sturgeon flattened an index card on the table in front of him, apparently eschewing his partner’s technology. “Names?”

Erik flicked his fingers to dismiss the question. “I’ll work that end of things.”

Meg expected the detectives to rip a layer off him for the I’ve-got-money-I’m-above-your-rules attitude.

Instead Peters said, “We’d appreciate it—on an unofficial basis, of course. But I’ll still need a list of everyone who might have reason to want you or Dr. Corning dead.”

The last word sent a chilly spear through her midsection and she fought a shiver.

“I’ve got a few names,” Erik said, not sounding particularly upset by the fact. “How about you, Doc?”

“There’s nobody,” she said, pressing her fingers to her temples, where stress and nerves pounded in an increasing rhythm. “I can’t imagine anyone wanting to hurt me.”

“When the NPT technology is released, there’s going to be a big shift in the open market,” Erik pointed out. “Jobs’ll be lost. Cash equity is going to move around. Money is a powerful motive.”

Meg scowled, hearing the sentiment echo in her father’s voice. For some people, money is the best motive.

Even as a young girl, she’d known he meant her mother. Though many years and a few awkward meetings with the woman who had birthed her had given Meg some perspective, the fact remained. Her mother had cared less for her family than she had for things that couldn’t be bought on an academic’s salary.

The door opened and a dark-haired cop stuck his head into the room, interrupting. “Detectives? I think you’ll want to see this.”