Prescription: Makeover (3 page)

That left it up to Vasek & Caine — or rather left it up to William — to identify the other eight members of the supposedly nonexistent group and bring them to justice. He’d be ensuring the company’s safety and future. He’d be saving the scientific community from their very own version of organized crime. And as an added bonus, he’d be showing up his former boss, FBI Special Agent in Charge Michael Grosskill.

The thought had William checking his watch again. “You’re going to be late if you don’t get going, and we both know Raine doesn’t do late.”

William liked Max’s wife a great deal, but she fell square into the high-maintenance category in his brain. Not because she liked expensive clothes and makeup — hell, he liked his women to look like women, and that required some mirror time. But Raine also ran a company of her own, and since the wedding, Max had been putting as much effort into Rainey Days as he was into Vasek & Caine.

William understood that a man had to protect what was his, but he had a strong feeling he wasn’t going to like Max’s solution. Mentally bracing himself, he said, “Come on, give with the favor. It can’t be that bad.”

“I want to take on someone to help you. Someone who can do the data crunching while you pound the pavement.”

William shrugged. “Tempting, but we can’t afford a receptionist, never mind a —” He broke off as he made the connection. His mind clicked on the image of a tall, lean woman with a killer body, three earrings in one ear, a mean-ass attitude and a fondness for tight black leather. His blood flared hot, then cold, and he said, “Oh, no, you don’t.
Hell
no. You’re not saddling me with that know-it-all
Matrix
wannabe.”

“Ike is hell on wheels with computers,” Max argued. “She knows way more than either of us about data mining and she’s got sources we can’t even dream of. She could help you find the names. Maybe even identify the next target.”

I already have a name,
William thought.
I’ve even got a meeting set up.
But he kept that to himself, instead saying, “The Nine already went after Ike once. What’s to stop them from trying again if she gets involved?” He might find her annoying, but a woman’s skin was a woman’s skin, and it was no place for a bullet wound. Worse, a man had died when The Nine had attacked Ike earlier in the year. The Vermont cops had ruled the ski slope shooting a random homicide, and Grosskill and the rest of the FBI had agreed, but Max, William and Ike knew better. They knew it had been a warning from The Nine.
Stay out of our business or else.

Max grimaced. “Trust me, I don’t want her involved. But she’s got another opinion.”

“Now there’s a surprise,” William muttered, leaning back in his chair. As far as he could tell, Ike Rombout was all about opinions. “And in case you missed it the first time, no. I don’t care how good she is with the tech stuff, I don’t want her anywhere near The Nine.”
And I don’t want her anywhere near me.

He wasn’t sure where the thought came from, but it struck a chord. Ike wasn’t his type of woman — she was too brash and in-your-face. And she wasn’t his idea of a coworker for a potentially dangerous op — she had breasts.

He wasn’t proud of the chauvinism, but he figured he had a damn good reason for it.

“She’ll stay in Boston, I promise,” Max persisted. “Give her some data to crunch, some leads to dead end, I don’t care. Just let her feel involved. She needs this, William. They killed someone she cared about.”

That resonated, but William was no fool. “If all you wanted was some long-distance data crunching, you would’ve just turned her loose. Hell, that was how she found Forsythe for you. So give. What do you want from me?”

Max grimaced. “I need you to keep her busy and I need you to make sure she stays in Boston.”

A chill skittered through William. “You don’t think she’d actually go looking for —” He broke off and muttered a curse. “Of course she would. Hell. I don’t have time for this.” He glanced at Max. “And neither do you. But you’re still trying to save her from herself, aren’t you?”

Max shrugged, rueful amusement tugging at his lips. “Ike calls it my DIDS. Damsel in Distress Syndrome. I can’t stop myself from trying to save them.”

William could relate to that, but where Max saved people one at a time, William focused on the big picture, which sometimes demanded individual sacrifices in the name of the greater good.

Like Sharilee?
a small thought prompted from within, bringing the smell of blood and gunfire and the sound of a soft body hitting the floor.

“Fine,” he said before the memory could form. “You owe me big-time, but I’ll keep an eye on Ike for you, starting tomorrow.”

He already had plans for tonight.

H
OPING NOBODY HAD
seen her sneak across the dark, deserted seventeenth green, Ike shimmied up the side of the brick building, her breath adding white puffs to the clinging fog.

She couldn’t believe she was actually doing this on her own, but what other choice did she have? Educated guesswork and an intercepted e-mail ghost had convinced her that several members of The Nine were meeting here at the Coach House, a posh country club restaurant outside Greenwich, Connecticut. She’d thought about asking Max to meet her, but given the way he’d been behaving lately, all Neanderthal and pat-the-little-woman on-the-head, she’d nixed that idea and driven down from Boston alone.

It was just recon, after all.

But as she hauled herself up to a narrow ledge of stone trim that ran most of the way around the second story of the brick building, her doubts crowded closer. She was a computer geek; she wasn’t trained for this sort of thing. Sure, she’d done surveillance before, both for freelance gigs and for HFH. And, yeah, she’d been on the edge of the action once or twice, even before Max had stumbled over evidence indicating that The Nine really existed.

This time, though, she was on her own. There was no employer backing her, nobody waiting for her to check in.

You’ve got your gun,
she told herself.
You can handle this.
More importantly, she
had
to handle it. Zed deserved more than he’d gotten in the way of justice. She owed him.

Taking a breath of damp air that threatened rain, she edged across the brick wall. A series of lights set high on the building were tilted to illuminate the golf course beyond, their beams furred with mist. That same mist slicked her hand- and footholds as she pressed herself against the flat surface and began to move, using her black-gloved fingers to grip a thin pipe overhead while she clung to the narrow stone ledge by the toes of her black rubber-soled running shoes.

Her destination was a half-open window about fifty feet away. Based on her assessment of downloaded blueprints, the window should open into the meeting space. Even better, the rear wing angled off the main building near the window, forming a corner where she could fade into the shadows.

Score one for all black,
Ike thought, comfortable in her trademark tight dark clothes, one of the few constants she allowed herself.

“Over here,” a male voice said unexpectedly from below.

Ike froze. Too late she heard the sound of footsteps on wet pavement.

Pressing herself against the building, heart hammering, she held her breath and tried to become one with the rough bricks.

Don’t look up,
she thought.
Please don’t look up.

“You got the stuff?” a second male voice asked, higher and a little nasal.

“You got the cash?”

She relaxed slightly at the sound of crinkling paper and plastic. It was just a drug buy, she thought, then quirked her lips at the
just.
Under other circumstances, she might’ve waded in and tried to scare some sense into the idiots. As it was, she’d wait them out.

She was after a bigger score.

Once their business was concluded, the men moved off. One headed out across the golf course on foot, past the pro shop where Ike had hidden her Jeep. The other disappeared around the corner. Moments later, a car door slammed and an engine started, revved and then faded with distance.

After a minute, Ike started breathing again, though her pulse stayed high at the near miss. She resumed her careful journey, crabbing sideways on the narrow ledge until she reached the shadows near the half-open window. Then she paused and listened.

In the room beyond, low-voiced conversation was punctuated by the clink of glasses. The quiet, civilized sounds suggested the meeting hadn’t started yet. Perfect.

Unperturbed by the height, Ike leaned back in the vee formed by the connecting stone walls and braced her feet on the molding. Once she was relatively stable, she spun her black leather fanny pack around to her front and dug out the palm-size telescoping mirror she used at work to look at hard-to-reach computer connections.

Praying she wasn’t about to bounce a reflected beam of light into the room, she edged the mirror past the frosted glass windowpane, to the open spot where heated indoor air hit the damp, cool outdoors and created a faint mist.

The mirror fogged momentarily, then cleared, showing her an expensively furnished room, all wood paneling, burgundy leather and a huge Oriental carpet she thought might be Heriz, based on a childhood spent haunting the antique shops of Vermont with her mother and father, before —

She cut off the memory before it could form and focused on the job at hand, angling the mirror and fighting to keep her hand steady as she located three gray-haired men seated at a large table set for six more.

All three were white guys in their late fifties, maybe early sixties, well-groomed and wearing expensive suits in shades of blue or gray. They exuded a homogeneity, a sameness she would have found vaguely creepy under other circumstances. As it was, all Ike felt was a burn of hatred. An ache for revenge. For justice.

The bastards had killed Zed with a bullet meant for her, and she planned to make them pay.

W
ILLIAM REACHED THE
Coach House a few minutes late for the meeting, thanks to Max and his “favor,” along with the Friday night traffic between NYC and western Connecticut.

He parked his ride — an ice-blue BMW convertible he’d borrowed from a friend of a friend and disguised with fake tags that matched equally fake DMV records in the name of Emmett Grant. The cover was solid.
It’d better be,
William thought with a grimace.
I paid enough for it.

The free cover stories were one of the few things he missed about working for the feds, but the money had been well spent. All but the most in depth background check would show that Emmett Grant was a slightly shady entrepreneur who’d cashed out just before the Internet bubble burst and was now looking to reinvest in the pharmaceutical market. William had the car and ID to match the image and he was dressed for the part in a custom suit — also borrowed — and the good watch his father had given him when he’d left for the Marines. High-quality fake facial hair and a touch of silver at his temples completed the disguise.

He figured he looked like new money and he’d done plenty of research to back up the cover story. He didn’t need to have any medical or scientific expertise, he just had to know the money talk, and that was second nature after his years undercover inside the Trehern organization.

When memories of that other assignment threatened to surface, he shoved them down deep and climbed out of the sports car, slamming the door harder than necessary. Then he took a breath and looked up at the Coach House, which was carved stone across the front, ivy-draped brick on the sides.

Unlike his cover story, the building reeked of old money.

William straightened his tie, a splash of lemon yellow against the suit. Then he said, “I am Emmett Grant.”

The identity settled over him like a cloak, an invisible weight that would remain until he consciously dropped the persona. He
became
Emmett Grant, a sharp-minded hustler who’d come from humble roots and didn’t mind sidestepping a few laws to get himself the best of everything.

As he walked across the parking area, past four other high-dollar rides, he mentally reviewed his e-mail exchange with his contact, Dr. Paul Berryville.

After Frederick Forsythe’s arrest, William had put out feelers through a carefully cloaked e-mail address, pretending to be a businessman who’d heard rumors that The Nine were for real. Over time, he’d filtered out the respondents until he was left with Berryville, who’d led him in a careful dance of innuendo and double meaning that had finally culminated in an invitation.
Meet me at the Coach House at 8:00 p.m. sharp Friday. Some people want to meet you.

Berryville was waiting for him at the door. The silver-haired scientist’s career had been on the brink of complete collapse a few years earlier, when new evidence had conveniently surfaced clearing him of major ethics charges. Now he was the head of a major R & D group, thanks to the power of The Nine.

Berryville frowned, the expression stretching his face-lift-tight skin. “You’re late.”

“Sorry,” William said. “Traffic was a bitch.”

“They’re waiting for us.” Berryville hurried ahead, nerves evident in his quick strides and his silence as he led William through the front rooms of the wood-paneled Coach House, where tables and cocktail rounds sat empty.

“Did you guys buy out the whole restaurant just for this meeting?” William asked, pausing at the base of a flight of carpeted stairs and peering up at the equally deserted-feeling second floor.

“We value our privacy,” Berryville replied. Then he stopped and turned to look down at William from six steps up. “When we get in there, don’t say anything. Speak when spoken to and think before you answer a question. You’ll only get one chance to make a good impression.”

William’s scalp tingled with sudden foreboding as he realized he’d miscalculated. Berryville had hinted that he carried weight within the group, and William had taken that information at face value. But a powerful man wouldn’t have a faint sheen of sweat on his brow or a nervous tremor in his hands right now, would he?