CHAPTER TWO

Shea fingered the dirty linen curtain aside to view the rainy street. Everything looked so normal. Mundane. All except for the man in the black tweed hat on the corner. He might be watching the internet cafe, the way his eyes kept shifting in her direction. He might have seen her dash inside the front door.

The gray-haired guy in the ratty gray sweater looked suspicious, too. Even the young couple with their hands all over each other on the park bench across the street looked like they were putting on a show.

Who are they trying to kid? They’re all after me.

She bit the inside of her cheek and closed the curtain. She’d told Gordie to meet her here, that she’d bring Phoenix’s laptop, but now she wasn’t so sure it was a safe place. She was scared out of her mind, no longer able to distinguish good people from the evil ones, not after witnessing the barbaric death of Phoenix. That awful man in the black robe. He’d killed Phoenix right under her nose. She could still see the despair in Phoenix’s blue eyes.

Taking two full steps back from the curtain, she clutched his laptop to her chest, her stomach ready to heave. This murder had to be about the research he’d stored on this computer, the invention they’d all sworn to protect from prying eyes, and now a killer.

The café was quiet for a change, but the smell of espresso and lattes spiked her nausea. She’d never forget the despair in her friend’s eyes as long as she lived. Poor Phoenix. Why would anyone want to hurt him, a harmless, cute guy with shaggy blond hair that hung into his eyes? The kind of guy most girls wanted to take home and play house with.

Only he didn’t care for girls.

Phoenix had come to Amsterdam from Buffalo, New York, the same as Gordie Mikkelson, another wannabe scientist. Gordie was the athlete, the primper, and the weightlifter. He shaved from head to foot every single morning, said it made his body sleeker. The coconut scented oil he slicked himself down with every day didn’t hurt. It had surely made Phoenix take notice.

Lust hit them hard. Then destiny.

While uncomfortable at times, their openly gay relationship had allowed Shea to maintain her anonymity. Her friends were too caught up in each other and their energy displacement project to look beyond her dumpy clothes long enough to realize she wasn’t just another geeky man. She wasn’t a guy at all.

Finn, the fat suit she wore every day, was the person they thought they’d asked to room with them. She went along with it, content to be the third wheel to two fun loving geniuses who needed someone to cook for them. Better yet, a friend who knew how to midnight requisition a few extra dollars now and then. Never from honest, hardworking people though. That wouldn’t be right. She was very selective whose bank account she pilfered.

Living with Gordie and Phoenix had taught her a few lessons about life. Respect for personal borders. One hundred percent honesty. Compromise. Always compromise. Most importantly: Money could buy most things. Friends. Influence. Access to more money.

That was the reason Gordie and Phoenix were selected to participate in the solar energy project. Because of Finn’s dabbling, they were able to bring a certain level of capital with them. The cost to the university went down. They got the equipment and the lab they needed to continue their work.

All three of them had spent long hours at the university, not because they had to, but because they were onto something. Call it serendipity. Phoenix called it a gift from the universe. Even Professor Grover, their research mentor, named them his lucky stars the day Phoenix inadvertently stumbled on a way to bounce back expended energy, a paradox of sly Mother Nature.

At least that was what Phoenix said. He hadn’t been exactly forthcoming with how his force field worked, not that Shea would’ve understood it if he had. Dabbling she could do. Not science.

Professor Grover’s bright gray eyes had all but glowed with pride, but holy crap, did that discovery open up a new field of science no one saw coming. Einstein’s theory came to life in a big new way. Everyone already knew that matter consisted of energy, but mankind’s problem was always how to harness that energy without unleashing the power of the atom.

At least that was what Phoenix had said. He might not have discovered affordable solar energy, but he’d done the impossible. He’d discovered dynamic energy displacement, a natural bounce back effect that focused and reflected dissipated energy back onto the force expending it, neutralizing the point of origin in the process. By any other name a natural force field. One anyone could manipulate if they possessed the means to focus and amplify the initial source of energy.

At least that was what Phoenix said.

Shea wondered now. She’d always detected an undercurrent of something she couldn’t pin down to his claims. Doubt niggled at the back of her mind. Was this discovery all he’d claimed or had he gotten himself killed for something else?

Gordie never appeared to notice, and that always quelled Shea’s touch of anxiety. He was the practical side to Phoenix’s hyper. She dabbled in hacking and came up with more funds. Phoenix and Gordie dabbled in science. It was the same thing. Kind of.

But why did that monster demand that Finn be turned over within forty-eight hours? For what? Another execution? Why me? I know nothing.

The only thing that came to mind was the dabbling she’d committed against one particular Mideasterner, Basheer Bagani. Shea shivered at the rash of goose flesh rippling over her shoulders, just thinking of waking up on his satin sheets. It still gave her a morgue-like chill. The man was a predator—for flesh. The female kind.

True, it was her fault for being in a drunken stupor when he’d found her, but it was his fault for tying her spread-eagled to his four-poster. Finn thanked God for whoever had interrupted Bagani’s evil plans that night.

Later, after she’d pulled herself out of her inebriated state, she’d Googled him. What do you know? Bagani was none other than a Saudi prince, one of many sons of a powerful wealthy sheik. The only difference between father and son? The father was decadently rich. Basheer was just decadent.

He’d been investigated in the whereabouts of two missing starlets. Shea had her suspicions where those two women were, especially if the lines of white powder on his coffee table were what she thought they were.

At first, she’d taken just enough out of his bank account to maintain get back on her feet and to maintain a decent lifestyle. Then, like a modern-day Robin Hood, she’d given some to Phoenix and Gordie to keep their research afloat and to get them to Amsterdam.

When confronted with the spectacle of cold-blooded murder, she’d infused a large amount into the bank account of one honorable Alex Stewart, the one he used to pay his taxes, judging by the quarterly allotments going to the State of Virginia and the Internal Revenue Service. He might not qualify as a charity or a research grant, but she needed his kind of assistance.

She knew if Mr. Stewart wanted to find someone, he could and would do it. He had a hard reputation in the covert ops world, but was known to work miracles when others could not. The man had phenomenal resources. He leased satellite time. He also employed her ex-husband.

Eric.

Shea’s heart fluttered with palpitations at the name that always stole her breath. Just thinking about the man she’d left behind reduced her to befuddled and—chilled. Never to be warm again. She’d hurt him in the cruelest way possible. She’d lost hope and faith in the darkest of times, when she should’ve been holding on tight to him. Trusting him. Instead, she’d deserted him without warning or an honest reason, like a captain deserting her sinking vessel without regard to her sole shipmate.

The day after Phoenix discovered dynamic energy displacement, their professor, Morell Grover, went missing. That was when their world had changed forever. They’d no more than heard that disconcerting news, when Gordie called her at the university’s research lab and told her some bad-assed dude was after her. She needed to run for her life. Hurry! No time to explain. Just run! Hide!

How he knew, he’d never said, but by then, that bad-assed dude was already in the hall. With nowhere to run, she’d forced her bulky fake body into the cabinet under the lab sink. Poor Phoenix had been cruelly tortured. He was barely able to walk. The black-robed assassin kept asking one question, “Where’s Finn?”

Phoenix kept crying, “I don’t know. I thought he was here. You’ve got to believe me.”

The killer’s question never changed. Neither did the answer. Only the level of terror in Phoenix’s sad voice.

Shea couldn’t close her eyes any more. She couldn’t sleep. Every time she tried, the sounds and smells and sights came back to her. Every detail of his brutal death had been carved into her mind. After his head had been severed from his body, his eyes had kept blinking while a pool of red poured from his neck. It spread under his cheek. His lips kept moving, but there were no words. Only gurgles. When he’d needed her most, she had cowered like a—coward. Shaking like a little girl. Like she was now...

Paralyzed with fear, her thoughts had flown across the Atlantic to that one man in a million who would’ve fought to rescue Phoenix if he had been there.

Eric.

That was the way he was made, to stand up to bullies. To take down despots and despicable men. To fight the world if need be.

The murderer had made one mistake. After he had killed Phoenix, he’d placed his head in a plastic gym bag, then walked across the expansive lab to wash his hands at the sink. In those precious few seconds of heart-pounding terror, Shea had summoned every last ounce of her courage and light-fingered the SD card from the assassin’s camera while he wasn’t looking.

While Phoenix’s body twitched, and although her fingers shook so much that she’d almost dropped the card, she’d still done it. Then she’d hid under the sink again, her trembling arms wrapped around her padded legs, praying she hadn’t been seen. That the murderer wouldn’t check his camera before he’d left.

Whoever he was, he had a good reason to want her dead now, but that was the mystery.

Unless he works for Bagani...

Even that didn’t make sense. Bagani couldn’t possibly know she’d transformed herself into an over-weight, bumbling man with bad hygiene. Could he?

Unless he followed you…

She eased the curtain aside and peered down at the street. Maybe it did make sense. Bagani had the resources. He could’ve had her followed.

Gordie had better hurry it up. They needed to talk and they needed to plan a quick getaway. Maybe it was time she came clean and admitted to him that she was nothing more than an American housewife on the run. A fool running from the man who loved her, maybe running from the only one who could save their lives.

Oh, hurry Gordie!

She almost sighed in relief, until those fake lovers on the park bench glanced directly at her draped window. A guy in a black turban had just crossed the street, coming her way. His gaze rolled to where she stood as if he too knew exactly which window to look at.

He’s found me.