Chapter 21 #2
“What about other hotel guests?” Daisy found it hard to believe any of her colleagues would willingly be in league with an arms dealer when they knew the dangers involved with radiation.
“We can’t rule them out, and SIOC are running background checks.” Alex opened his laptop and projected the screen onto the whiteboard. “This shows a floorplan and the guest names for each of the rooms between the elevator and Tremblay’s room, all the way up to the end of his corridor.”
Daisy peered closer and her heart sank.
“The ones highlighted in red are the people who had rooms on Tremblay’s floor but were not seen on the video downstairs in the immediate aftermath of his death.”
A ball of numbness expanded in her chest making it difficult to breathe. “Five of those eight are from my lab.”
“Correct. Wilson Williams, Roger Thompson, Mira Jahood, Amed Hussein, and Emilia Osbourne.”
“Amed and Roger shared a room as did Mira and Emilia. Les Poplar had a room on the sixth floor. He didn’t make the banquet. Said he felt sick—probably still hungover from the night before.”
Mac rested his hip on the desk. “You and Les were the only ones in your group not to be situated on the fifth floor. Was that intentional on your part?”
She shook her head. “A lot of the others arrived a day earlier than I did, and I didn’t want to share a room with Les.” She glanced at Jordan. Remembered their cover story. “For obvious reasons. Plus, I got a nice view of the ocean.”
“The cynic in me wonders if someone made sure the daughter of a senior member of the FBI was not on the same floor as they were,” Mac mused.
Daisy made a fist with her right hand. “That, I couldn’t tell you, but everyone knew who my dad was after that plane went down in Zimbabwe.”
Mac’s shiny leather shoes creaked. “How well do you know your colleagues?”
“No.” Jordan glared at Mac, but she didn’t know why.
She shot him a look. “I’ve been there since September, but busy with a literature review most of this term.” She bit her lip. “I’ve deferred a lot of course work with everything that happened with Dad. My supervisor has been very accommodating.”
“In addition to the work Granger and Lucy did yesterday, we have agents digging into the background of everyone on the shortlist, looking for something, anything…and we’ll begin actively monitoring them and their communications as soon as the subpoena comes through.” Mac looked down at his hands.
The reality was gradually seeping in that the Russians might be planning some sort of attack, probably under the guise of a terrorist organization.
And the fact he’d shown up at a nuclear engineering conference led to the inevitable conclusion that any attack would involve either a nuclear device, a dirty bomb, or the deliberate sabotage of a reactor.
It was a horrifying thought, exactly what she’d dedicated her life to preventing.
“We’d like your help.”
Her heart sank. “You want me to spy on my lab mates?”
“No way.” Jordan’s jaw was clenched so tight it looked like it might break.
She wished he was worried about her as much as he was worried about the promise he’d made to her dad.
And the fact she wished that meant she was getting more entangled than she’d intended.
Time to make it stop. The sex was great but not worth the heartbreak that would surely follow if she allowed herself to care for him.
“It makes sense.” She shrugged. “I have to go back at some point anyway. This way I can search offices or plant bugs or whatever it is you want me to do to enable better access.”
“It’s too dangerous.” Jordan’s voice was flat.
She understood his concern. “It’s not the same as what you did in Chicago. I’m not pretending to be on their side. I’m going about my studies the way I should be anyway. There’s nothing suspicious about that. It’s only a matter of time. You know that.”
“And what if one of them is the bad guy and working with Bocharov and suspects you’re working with the feds?” Jordan challenged.
“Then we’ll know who the hell the bad guy is, won’t we?” Better than never knowing whom she could trust.
“This is a foolish plan. She’s an untrained civilian.” Jordan sounded quietly furious.
She bristled. “She can take care of herself, especially when armed—which I will be, when not on campus.”
“You think those Chicago Police Officers who were slaughtered weren’t armed?” Jordan stood as if unable to contain the energy inside him while seated. “You think they felt the bullets that pierced the back of their skulls?”
Granger flinched.
Tears pricked Daisy’s eyes because she knew where his anger came from.
From guilt and grief. “What I know is that if one of my co-workers is planning to sabotage a nuclear plant then we need to figure out who, fast, before we are all scheduled to help insert a new type of fuel rod at Moses Lake Nuclear Power Facility this week. If I’m in a position to help stop them, then I damned well will, whether I’m an untrained civilian or not. ”
Silence fell like an axe.
“We could shut the site down,” Jordan insisted.
Harry Marcus spoke for the first time. “If we shut down the facility too early, they’ll go underground.
We might not discover the next plot until it’s too late.
And we need to remember, Daisy’s coworkers are not the only potential suspects.
We can’t shut every facility indefinitely.
That’s a win for the terrorists. Next thing we know, we’ll be fielding threats across the US on a continuous basis.
We need to figure out who is involved and shut them down.
But we can delay whatever is supposed to happen this week if we don’t ferret them out beforehand.
And we can pull in other experts to make sure everything is legit. ”
“Then I’ll go with you,” Jordan stated.
“No one will speak to me if they think I’m still seeing an FBI agent.” She shook her head. “We need to break up.”
“Daisy,” Jordan implored.
“We can make this work,” Mac insisted.
“Would you put Tess in this position?” Jordan snapped.
Mac’s mouth hardened. “She’s been in worse.
” He shook away whatever he was going to say.
“Whether we like it or not, Tess and Daisy are both in potential danger regardless of whether or not Daisy goes back to school. If there’s a nuclear incident who knows how many it might kill?
Not to mention it could poison the entire eastern seaboard with gamma radiation for the next hundred years.
It would destroy the United States as we know it and reshape world order. ”
“Property devaluation would be a bitch.” Regan smiled, but it didn’t reach his eyes.
“No pressure.” Alex sent her a wink.
“It’s not fucking funny,” Jordan snarled.
Alex held Jordan’s stare. “I have a wife and child that I would die for a thousand times a day who live not fifty miles from Moses Lake. If you think I find this funny, you are not the man I thought you were.”
Jordan closed his eyes. “There has to be a better way.”
Daisy stared at him. “I don’t see what harm it could do.
I’ll play the weepy blonde whose asshole boyfriend cheated and dumped her.
Regan can give me one of those invisible earpieces and maybe a camera and tell me what he wants me to do.
The least I can do is see how everyone reacts to me being back. ”
“We can be right outside in the van,” Regan suggested. “We can have agents inside posing as maintenance workers planting monitoring devices. She won’t be unprotected.”
“It’s a Saturday. It will be a lot quieter to go in there today. We should be able to get some serious snooping done, especially if we can maybe get into some of the offices that are usually locked.”
“We can do that,” Regan confirmed. “Get us the warrants, and we can do any damned thing we need.”
“In the meantime, we can maybe bait a trap for a bear elsewhere,” Alex suggested.
Daisy glanced sharply at Jordan.
The thought of him being in danger made her want to throw up and that was another reason to get out now. She had enough to worry about with her dad constantly doing things he wasn’t allowed to talk about.
“I still don’t like Daisy being involved.” The ghosts were back in Jordan’s eyes, wreaking havoc as he held her gaze. “I promised your father I’d protect you.”
The pain was unexpected, like an icepick to the heart. The fact she wanted him to care about her for her own sake was ridiculous. She knew who he was. A man of unbendable honor, dedicated to his career—one who didn’t want any complicated relationships.
She’d used him for sex.
No strings. No emotional hangups. The perfect setup.
Until it wasn’t.
Somehow, along the way, she’d misjudged the situation.
It made her next words easier rather than more difficult.
“I’m sorry, Jordan. This thing between us isn’t working any longer.
It’s not you, it’s me.” With that she stood and walked out to the washroom so the rest of them could fight about the details, and she could deal with the fact she’d begun to develop feelings for the idiot.
She looked in the mirror and hated the grief she saw reflected in her own eyes. There was no way she was going through heartbreak again. Been there, got the T-shirt. It was time to move on and put Jordan Krychek firmly in her rearview, where he truly belonged.