61

 

THE LAB, TUESDAY MORNING

Gwen parked her Mustang. She swung her long, denim-clad legs out, grabbed her bag, and headed into the Lab. In the light of day, the terror she had felt the night before had burnt off, replaced by simmering fury. She felt half sheriff, half maverick, wholly out to get whichever bastard was fucking with her seventy-eight-year-old neighbor and friend, not to mention fucking with her. Whichever bastard had the blood of two women on his hands. Whether that was the mysterious Haas/Hans, or Gabriel Messenger, or one and the same.

She flashed her key card at the reader, input her PIN, pushed through the glass doors, and strode through the central atrium. Preoccupied with the visions in her head, she didn’t notice that her office was occupied.

She swung through the open doorway and froze. Gabriel Messenger was sitting at her desk. Her desk drawer was open and the laptop he had given her was on the desk, open and running.

Gwen felt her heart slam against her ribs. She just stood and glowered at him, willing herself not to speak, not to say something irrevocable.

Messenger leaned back in her chair, raised his hands in a gesture of surrender.

“Whoa, stop there! What’d I do?” A faint smile played on his lips, but his eyes were wary.

“Don’t you have your own office?” demanded Gwen. “I mean, this is the second time I’ve come in to find you just sitting at my desk as if—” Gwen cut herself off. She was sounding ridiculous, she knew, but that was a cover of sorts.

“As if I owned the place,” supplied Messenger, amused now. “Goodness Gwen, I had no idea you were so proprietorial.”

“And how’d you get into my desk drawer? I suppose you have some kind of master key?” she continued, hands on hips.

“I do, as it happens. Goes with owning some of the place.”

“But not the people!” declared Gwen.

Messenger got to his feet. He kept his distance, noted Gwen, skirted around her. He stopped at the doorway.

“Better now?” he asked.

Gwen said nothing. She moved past him and sat at her desk. Her body ached from the collision of the night before. Now her head pounded. Had it been Messenger? She needed proof, one way or the other.

“What rattled your cage?” asked Messenger. “I do not think I own you or anyone else here.”

Gwen blew out a breath. She was going to have to get a serious grip on herself if she wasn’t going to blow everything.

“Bad night,” she replied. “Sorry. And yes, I am proprietorial, I guess. I’m an only child. We don’t do sharing.” She nodded to the laptop.

Messenger’s eyes hardened. He was running out of patience, Gwen noted.

“I wanted to see what you had done to the model,” he replied, voice clipped, clearly unused to having to explain himself. “I didn’t have much time,” he continued. “We’ve been summoned. You and I, and Peter and Kevin. Sheikh Ali Al Baharna, who I suppose you could say really does own the place, has requested our company this morning aboard his yacht. He wishes to hear about Project Zeus, and so I was updating myself.” Messenger paused, tilted his head to one side like a hunting dog, listening.

“And if I’m not much mistaken, that’s his helicopter approaching. So get your bag, bring your laptop, and if I might suggest, find and bring some good humor. Sheikh Ali is not the kind of man you want to offend.”