Chapter 28
Vlad drove out of the hospital parking lot, aware that he was still growling under his breath. That wouldn’t do. Not at all. He needed to take a firm grip on himself. Never before had he come so close to losing control.
Those men had made Helena’s life miserable for years. He wanted to rip their heads off. The growls revved up again, so he cut off those thoughts. He had done what he could to ensure she was protected today. All he needed was one little excuse to stomp them into the tile.
With a faint trace of humor, he was willing to believe those men were well aware of the fraying leash of his control. They better learn fast that he would not tolerate them anywhere near Helena. He’d make them fertilizer faster than they could blink. Hopefully the idiots understood.
If not, he’d be happy to reteach them.
He caught sight of his smile in the rearview mirror. It was feral.
“That man was your boyfriend?” the new woman, whose name she couldn’t remember, asked. She sounded awed and a little fearful. They were working at an island bench across from each other.
“Yes.” She looked up with a smile and was startled by the cold look in the woman’s eyes. It disappeared so quickly it might not have been there, but its affect on her, the resulting chill, lingered. That meant she hadn’t made it up. The cold black benchtop couldn’t have been icier than the look in the woman’s eyes.
She hadn’t been expecting to see that look in a colleague’s eyes. Especially in a woman who worked in a lab and appeared on the geeky side. Did she have a rival for Vlad’s affections?
Hopefully not.
The carnage that ensued would not be pretty. She’d take out SEALs in her attempt to keep Vlad. He belonged to her.
Just as she belonged to him. She paused in extracting a sample to be tested, her pipette hanging in the air, tube open as she stared off into space.
Yes, definitely they belonged together. Despite her doubts, she was feeling better about that. And it wasn’t just that she appreciated his help with the jerks. It went deeper than that. It wasn’t even that he was unbending on the matter of her safety. The man was obsessed with her remaining safe at all times. To where it seemed he went overboard on his measures to ensure this.
The thing was, he hadn’t gone over the top with any of his measures. He protected her yesterday from that car. Today he did the same, only from speeding, obnoxious mouths that spoke before they thought. At least that’s what she always told herself about the threesome in this lab. The other four had been marginally better, but the three woman had all hated her for some reason, and the last man had been interested only in climbing to the top and hadn’t been concerned about who he stepped on to reach the pinnacle.
There had been no ally in any of them. After she left she heard one of the women’s husband had been transferred, while another decided to retire. She didn’t know or care about the fate of the third. That one in particular had been nasty. A single woman, not unattractive physically, but she became outright ugly when she opened her mouth. Helena also heard that the position climbing man ended up changing careers. Whether that was true or not, she didn’t know. Or particularly care.
The woman across from her smiled gently. “Do you need help over there?”
“What?” She glanced at her, and then at her pipette and the sample tube. “Oh, no. Sorry, got lost in my thoughts.” She reddened, chagrined that she was caught woolgathering at work. There was no sign of the frigidity now but she better stay on guard anyway.
Not that woolgathering hadn’t happened in the palace, only the audience there was a lot more forgiving. This lab wasn’t conducive to forgiveness. Of course, they had now met Vlad, so maybe they were more understanding about her tendency to slip into thoughts about him.
A happy warmth surged through her. With a smile, she took her sample and continued her work. This wasn’t as complicated as their tasks at the palace, so she gave herself a break on her thoughts.
This was routine at best, really boring at worst.
She grimaced and set about taking the rest of the samples. With little effort she managed to breeze through the samples and move on to the next chore. Yet she couldn’t shake the uncomfortable feeling that the woman working across from her wasn’t harboring any warm fuzzies for her.
***
“I met the creeps in Helena’s old lab.” Vlad glared at the computer screen as he announced this.
“Creeps?” Shively swiveled to look at him.
He offered a succinct rundown of his impressions of Helena’s current colleagues. Like the trained professionals they were, he was certain the SEALs each filed his information away for future use.
“You hated leaving her there,” Ben stated. It certainly wasn’t a question.
“You could say that.” A tight feeling of unease had followed him out the door and remained.
“What is your gut telling you?” Beaumont didn’t look up from the computer in front of him. He appeared enmeshed in whatever data ran on the screen.
“To grab her and carry her as far away from that lab as possible.”
No one laughed. They must all be feeling a similar sense of unease. They, like him, respected a person’s instincts, that gut reaction. It kept them alive.
“Why are you feeling that way?” Ben also turned away from his computer. It wasn’t because he was bored.
“That’s what I’m wondering.” There was something there, something he should look into.
“You didn’t like the feel of the lab, or the feel of the people in the lab?” Tigger dug a little deeper.
A good question. “I didn’t like the feel of the people in the lab.” As he thought on it, that niggling question finally became substantial enough for him to sort through. “There are four new members.”
“Four new ones from when?”
“Since Helena moved to the palace lab.” His thoughts raced. “She’s worked at the palace lab less than three months.”
Ben glanced sharply at him. “And there are already four new people?”
Beaumont asked a few pertinent questions and as fast as he answered them, added the info to his database.
It didn’t take their tech wizard long to discover the hospital personnel records and soon he was scrolling through them. In a few heartbeats Beaumont segregated the seven people who worked in the lab with Helena.
“Here they are.” Beaumont sent the info to their computers.
He scrolled through their employee pictures and then the extensive info that followed.
Tigger grunted. “There’s a lot here.”
“Their intel is as good as ours,” Ben agreed.
“I wouldn’t go that far, but my dad tends to be careful.”
They all turned to stare at him.
When he looked up, he encountered three sets of speculative eyes. “My dad runs the hospital, remember?”
Beaumont’s eyes narrowed. “Does your dad interview every person who is hired at the hospital?”
He shook his head. “He meets them, even briefly, but he doesn’t have time to do the interviews.”
“So he’s met the three men who have been giving Helena trouble?”
That question yanked him out of the file he was perusing. “I’m sure he has. He knows everyone’s name.” Leaning forward, he picked up the phone and dialed his father’s work number.
“Graham Wellington.”
“What do you know about the three men working in the hospital lab with Helena?”
“Good morning to you too, son.”
Vlad grinned. “Good morning, Dad. Now can you please answer the question?”
“Let me guess, you’ve been working since the predawn hours.”
“I have no idea,” he prevaricated. He wasn’t about to tell his father that until this mess was finished, he was never off duty. They took breaks to eat and sleep but that was it.
“Can’t tell me then. Now, the three men you’re interested in…” The tapping of computer keys was steady on his dad’s end. “What exactly are you looking for?”
“Are you aware that they harassed Helena for months, if not years?”
“I suspected, but until I could prove it, as per bureaucracy, I couldn’t do a thing.”
“Why didn’t you ever ask her?”
“What makes you think I didn’t?”
He frowned at his father’s answer. “You did?”
“I sent your mother into that lab a few times and she heard enough to validate my concerns.”
“That’s why Helena was sent to the palace lab.” His smile was more of a grimace.
“Yes. I also managed to remove some of the people in that lab, but the three men who harassed her were really careful. Plus, one of them is a top guy in laboratory systems. I couldn’t get rid of him without a lot of evidence.”
“Of which you had none.”
“Correct. I had no way of proving what was happening. Other than employing illegal listening devices.” His dad sounded frustrated.
“Thank you for moving her to the palace lab. Why did you also choose Mom?”
“She was having similar trouble in her lab. Not to the extent Helena suffered, but there were some women there who made life pretty miserable for her.”
His jaw hurt because he was clenching his teeth. “You couldn’t do anything about this?”
“I moved both women and Jorge to the palace lab when the opportunity arose.” His dad’s voice and inflection didn’t change.
All of his friends were staring at him with varying degrees of surprise. Like they couldn’t quite believe what they were hearing. What did they expect? This was his family.
“Thank you for that.” He wiped a hand over his face. Maybe he needed more sleep. Usually he didn’t get this emotional. In fact, he couldn’t remember ever getting emotional while on a job. Or off it, if he was being honest. But that family thing changed everything.
“You’re welcome. I’ll also have you know that those people I knew were giving others a hard time did not receive bonuses. Thought that might offer the message that we were well aware of their treatment of others.”
“I see. That was probably good. Did any of them refute this?”
“No, because their bonus was determined by the annual employee review. I made certain to sit in on a select few. With me there, they knew then that I was aware of the complaints.”
“Yet those three idiots are still in Helena’s lab.”
“Yes, they’re there. Unfortunately there are four new people in that lab…” his dad kept talking but a light snapped on in his brain.
He scrambled for the notepad lying beside Ben and quickly scrawled his note. Then he held the pad up and the three SEALs read it quickly then nodded. Their eyes, as a collective, turned dark and cold. This is the other part that was bothering him.
“Why are there four new people in that lab?” From the abrupt silence on the other end, he must have cut that good man off, but he was in the zone right now. He was all business, emotions were shoved deep and locked down as of now.
“Because the four who were there have all moved on. We shifted Helena to the palace lab where I understand she is doing extremely well.”
“She is. She loves it there.”
“Right, that’s what I’ve heard. Your mother is every bit as happy. And from what I gather from Jorge, he’s enjoying his work again.”
“He wasn’t happy in the hospital either?”
“No, he kept being passed over for promotions. I still haven’t sorted that out. The man should have been heading a lab by now, but in each case, someone younger and female, and incidentally, attractive usually snagged those positions.”
“We can guess what happened.”
“Right. And I can’t remove the head lab man because there isn’t anyone else who can do his job at the moment. We’ve got feelers out. He also didn’t receive a bonus and I told him right to his face why. Now that he knows I’m well aware of his lecherous ways it seems he’s being careful.”
“How do you know?”
“Because the woman who leads Jorge’s old lab is happily married, with kids, and is extremely competent. She doesn’t carry a high opinion of the lab head, but she’s very good at what she does. When I personally recommended her to the lecher, I made certain that she was the only person I expected to see in that position.”
“So she did get the job.”
“Oh yes, because I implied he’d be out of a job if she didn’t.”
“She’s who you’re grooming to head the labs.” He smiled because he understood exactly how Graham Wellington thought. His brain worked in similar patterns.
“That’s correct. She holds a Master’s degree and is smart, decisive, and capable. But she’s not quite ready, even though I believe she’s probably doing the bulk of the work anyway.”
“How will you get rid of the top man?”
“We’ve enough complaints against him now to fire him.”
“Is he aware of this?”
“I don’t know. But I have noticed the complaints have stopped recently. He appears to be more circumspect with the younger women.”
Lechers were usually not people they investigated but he asked for the man’s name. This type of man didn’t have many scruples so working with a terrorist group who hated women wasn’t a stretch. His early note had been about the traitor possibly hiding among the hospital staff. An ongoing, uneasy niggle pointed toward this being somehow related to terrorists. His instincts told him he was on the right path even though it made little sense.
During the conversation with his father, he noticed Beaumont working hard at his computer. He didn’t doubt they’d have a full dossier on each of the members in Helena’s lab. He scribbled the man’s name on the notepad and passed it to Beaumont.
Without any further communication, Beaumont added the man to the list. In a few minutes, they’d know more about the lecher than his own mother did.
“Thank you for this info.”
“Is it useful to your investigation?”
He grunted in answer.
His dad’s voice was threaded with amusement. “Can’t answer that, can you, son?”
“What do you think?” Amusement appeared in his own tones.
“Do you think there might be a problem, a much bigger one, at my hospital?” This time there was no amusement, just utter professionalism.
“We’re checking everything.” He shouldn’t have even said that much.
But if there was one trustworthy man in Rurikstan, it was Graham Wellington.