Edge of Danger (5 page)

 
“No?” he asked, sounding annoyed. “Why the hell not?”

 
“Because, even in a freaking bizarre dream like this I want more than a quickie orgasm, that’s why.” Her jaw ached from gritting her teeth to try to counteract the insistent pulse of her body readying itself to climax.

 
“God, I’m arguing with an imaginary man.” Eden pushed herself up against the pillows very carefully. At this point her body had a hair trigger. “When—
if
I eventually do make love with Jason, we’ll do it together. Not in my imagination. Until then I have Richard for that.”

 
She used iron control of mind over matter. Her body started to cool, very much like water having boiled in her kettle. A twinge here, a ping there.

 
The chair creaked. “Who,” he asked disinterestedly, “is Richard?”

 
“None of your business. Look, this is my dream. And I’m ending it. So get lost. I can have sex—good sex I might add—by myself any time I like. I don’t need some figment of my imagination manipulating me.”

 
“You’re wet. On the brink—”

 
“Yes. And yes. Most uncomfortable. But not fatal. Don’t you have some other dreamer to annoy?”

 
She sensed rather than heard him sigh, then jumped at the unexpected brush of his hand across her eyes when he’d been safely across the room. “Close your eyes, Eden,” he said softly.

 
She flinched at the brilliant flash of light beyond her closed lids.
Well, shit,
she thought indignantly,
the son of a bitch killed me after all.

 
THURSDAY9:35A .M.

 
“This still feels too weird. Does it still feel too weird to you?” Marshall Davis, Eden’s assistant, demanded as the inner door opened.

 
“It’s bound to feel odd without them,” Eden answered, preceding him into Verdine Industries’ computer lab in the Tempe, Arizona, head office. High, narrow windows flooded the stark room with morning sunlight.

 
Marshall was a tall, almost gaunt young man, who looked, and frequently behaved, years younger than his actual age of twenty-two. Like Eden, he’d been on an accelerated learning curve. His black hair always looked as though it had been chewed off instead of cut. Choppy and uneven was made worse because Marshall tugged at his hair when he was concentrating, so it usually stood straight up in ragged steps around his face. The bane of his existence was his acne, which usually translated into a debilitating shyness around women.

 
He didn’t exactly consider Eden a woman. She was his idol. His leader. His mentor.

 
“Weird,” he repeated, looking around.

 
“Weird” summed up the bizarre dream that had wakened her in the early hours of that morning. Sex and violence. Crazy dreams and brutal reality. Each profoundly disturbing in its own way.

 
It had been just over two weeks since her mentor, Dr. Theo Kirchner, had been murdered, and the prototype of their top secret Rx793 robot stolen. There was no evidence now of either crime. The trashed computers and equipment had all been replaced with dizzying speed. The crime scene people were long gone. There was no taped outline in the small kitchen where Eden had discovered Theo’s body that night, no smudges of black fingerprint powder dusting every surface.

 
She’d been told to take two weeks off. She’d reluctantly done so. After spending two days cleaning her apartment she’d been out of her mind with boredom. Bored enough that she’d hopped a flight to Sacramento and gone to see her mother.

 
The visit had been better than expected. Of course, Eden thought wryly, her mother was interested in the murder, something that wasn’t about her daughter’s work. They loved each other, but they were so dissimilar that it was hard to sit down and have a real conversation, although they always tried.

 
Eden was pathetically grateful to be back at work.

 
The lab was once again pristine. No wonder her subconscious was freaking out. How could she pretend that things were normal when they were anything but?

 
Theo wasn’t just “gone”; her eighty-six-year-old mentor had been murdered in cold blood. He should have died in his own bed. Peacefully. Instead, he’d been shot and filled with terror, his last words to her:
“Destroy everything. Trust no one. Promise me.”

 
Though Jason Verdine had provided round-the-clock bodyguards to ensure her and Marshall’s safety, Eden was nervous as hell. She had wiped all the data from the computers, as Theo had instructed. But 80 percent of their work was in her head.

 
If anyone ever discovered
that…

 
She’d worked for Verdine Industries for more than a decade. This, the Elite Team lab, was the nucleus of VI’s long-term projects in core areas of artificial intelligence. Supposedly headed by Dr. Kirchner, but really overseen by Eden.

 
The R&D department next door consisted of a hundred and fifty-some people, and their support staff. The rest of the employees in the building were admin, sales, and manufacturing. Verdine Industries was a multibillion-dollar corporation. They manufactured everything from home robots that cleaned and vacuumed floors, to innovative items for NASA, to high-tech robotic toys.

 
The Elite Team had consisted of the three of them. Herself, Theo, and Marshall. Now there were two.

 
The authorities suspected one of Verdine Industries’ rivals of the theft, but so far had no proof. The police had to be right on target; the killer, the thief, must be a competitor.

 
But no one knew how they’d been able to bypass the security systems in order to get into the lab. No one, not even the United States government, could penetrate the complicated, sophisticated access system at the lab. Particularly this smaller lab.

 
Yet, somehow, someone had.

 
Theo’s death and the theft were an active case. Every now and then another alphabet soup government official would show up with more of the same questions. Eden and Marshall had no answers. She wished they did.

 
She glanced around the brightly lit lab. She’d designed it herself and every aspect of the room usually brought a thrill of pride. This was normally the time of day she enjoyed most. When the day was just beginning and ripe with possibilities. When hours stretched before her, each one conceivably holding the key to something she hadn’t known the hour before.

 
But Jason had been told to halt any further development of a replacement for Rex, pending the outcome of the investigation.

 
Eden felt lost. Dr. Kirchner’s murder, and the theft of a decade’s worth of work, had changed her fundamentally, and nothing would ever be the same again. The
lab
would never be the same. She’d never again feel the peace and joy walking in here as she had done every morning for the past ten years.

 
There had been breakthroughs made in this lab that no one but the three of them had known. Not even Jason himself knew the extent of their advances. And even Theo and Marshall didn’t know how much further Eden had gone on her own.

 
The ramifications of such advanced robotic technology falling into the wrong hands were terrifying. She’d known pushing the AI envelope that far was dangerous. Known it, but kept on going past the point of no return. Because her damn curiosity had compelled her to keep striving for the holy grail of AI.

 
The Rx793 robot they called “Rex” now had the capability of reasoning abstractly. Which allowed him to reason analogically and hierarchically. Rex was capable of interacting without benefit of communication.

 
Marshall, a mechanical engineer, had designed the automated parts of Rex with 3-D geometry, and had spent hundreds upon hundreds of hours “playing” with the robot, teaching it human behaviors.

 
Even he had no idea just how far she’d taken their creation, Eden thought, pressing a hand to her stomach. Forget about butterflies. She had pterodactyls swarming and dive-bombing inside her.

 
And now someone else had Rex.

 
All that someone needed to do was ask Rex the right questions. Oh, God—She felt sick to her stomach. No scientific advancement was worth a human’s life. She knew with every fiber of her being that Theo had died trying to protect the robot’s technology from falling into the wrong hands. He’d tried to warn her that the world wasn’t ready for such advancements. But she hadn’t listened.

 
Her eyes stung. She’d already cried buckets. She didn’t have a drop left. “Theo practically shoved me out that damn door that night. If I’d stayed another half hour—”

 
“
You’d
be dead too.” Marshall reached out and gave her a hesitant, awkward hug. Bless his heart, he smelled strongly of Clearasil and Brut cologne. In all the years they’d worked together, he’d never touched her. Embarrassed, he let her go immediately and shot her a self-conscious smile as he stepped back, his face pink.

 
“I don’t want you to be dead, Eden. Losing Dr. Kirchner was bad enough. I
really
don’t want you to be dead.”

 
“That makes two of us.” She was thankful for Arizona’s open carry law that allowed her the LadySmith .357 Magnum, five-shot revolver she now had in her purse. The gun had been under her pillow when she’d woken this morning. She’d been wearing her ladybug pajamas as well. Which proved, no matter how realistic it might have been, her dream had been just that. A dream.

 
Perhaps her body was trying to let her know subconsciously that it was time to find a lover. Jason?

 
He was charming, and nice looking, and wealthy, and—

 
Not him,
she thought, puzzled by her own reticence.

 
Marshall pulled out his chair and sat at his workstation, picking up a small red ball. “I have no idea why I’m holding on to this stuff. It’s not as if we’ll need it again.”

 
They’d used dozens of toys as learning tools for the robot. Balls, mechanical insects, colored blocks. Flash cards. Items that to untrained eyes were just clutter.

 
Apparently whoever had killed Theo hadn’t taken any chances of leaving anything behind. They’d taken every disk, every scrap of paper, everything except an overlooked red ball.

 
“Hey, you never know.” Eden sat down in her ergonomic, five-thousand-dollar chair, booted her computer, and tried to sound cheerful. “Maybe Jason will give us the go-ahead to rebuild him.”

 
And if I could do it again?
she asked herself.
Honestly? In a heartbeat.
It had been the most exhilarating, fulfilling event in her career.