Page 49 of Savage Beauty

The plan is to wait until Arrow overtakes the stream of the one camera by the front door. They’ll replay the footage from the night before, which consists of views of the parking lot with palm fronds swaying gently in the breeze in the background.

In the messenger bag slung over my shoulder, I have flash drives to copy the files I need. I also want to find my hard drives. Every Sunday, I backed my research up on the hard drives as a safety precaution. In theory, yes, the cloud is a secure storage location. But multiple storage locations are safest, and I know people who have lost significant work on the cloud.

“You ready?” he asks.

I’ve been avoiding looking at him because his black shirt is made of something akin to Lycra, and it clings to every single curve of his muscular form. It’s not fair how good looking he is. Men like him belong on covers of books or in movies, not out and about in the real world.

“Do you remember the plan?”

It’s a simple plan. “Of course.”

Yes, he flusters me, but not so much I can’t remember his rules. Watch for his hand signals. Be quiet. If he tells me to stay with a stop sign hand signal, I stay. If he motions for me to go with a wave of his hand, I move. Get in. Get out.

If we find them, I’m allowed to take my laptop and hard drives, but nothing else.

Our dark clothes ensure we don’t stand out, but there’s a nearly full moon overhead, and it’s a clear night. We blend into the shadows, but someone could easily see us. Darker clothes don’t make us invisible.

The hope is there’s no one here to see us. The cameras are hijacked. Although I’m not sure anyone watches those, anyway. As I told the Arrow team, I’m fairly certain those cameras are more for after-the-fact review, as in if there’s any theft, someone can review them later to determine who walked out with lab equipment. And in the eighteen months I worked there, nothing was reported stolen. We aren’t one of those labs dealing with highly addictive substances.

If someone notices something is missing, and looks at the tapes later, thanks to the tape hijacking efforts by Arrow’s tech team, they won’t see anything except two identical nights, and it would take someone with astute observational skills to notice that two nights are identical.

When we first arrived, Max parked up the street. He left me in the car while he scoped the property. And now he’s back at the car, opening the door for me, confirming my readiness.

There’s no one out here. It’s a business district, and all the businesses are closed. It’s just the two of us. He holds out a gloved hand for me, and I take it. Oddly enough, the leather between us does little to soften the prickling sensation.

He’s got a gun in a holster on his waist and one strapped in a shoulder harness. If I looked harder along his legs or crotch, I might find more guns, but I won’t stare at him. To do so risks distraction.

I pat my shoulder bag with my ID card, pocketknife, throwing star, and three sharp, flat blades. I, too, am prepared.

There are two men with Arrow covering us tonight. They have comms with Max. They’re positioned on opposite sides of the building. If anyone approaches, they’ll notify Max through his earpiece. He’ll give me a hand signal, and no matter what I am doing, I am to stop and follow him.

We cross the street like two normal people crossing the street in the middle of the day. Because that’s what makes sense. If anyone is out and about, there’s no need to look like we’re thieves in the night running from cops.

Max approaches a side door with a basic lock. There are no cameras on this side entrance, but the reason the team selected this door for entry is the ease of picking the lock. Shrubs line this side of the building, and the prickly leaves stab my back.

Max’s cargo pants drape over his glutes, but I can’t help but think if he wore jeans, he’d be sumptuous. His gluteus maximus is so well-developed that even a gun holster doesn’t detract from his yummy factor.

He fumbles with a brown suede cloth, rolling it and placing it into a pocket in his pants, then gives me the waving hand motion. Just in time. Standing around looking at him simply doesn’t work well for me in my current pheromone-overloaded state.

In the narrow hallway, I lead. The lights are off in the building, but thanks to the moon outside, there’s enough light I can easily find my way through the halls. I push into my lab and frown at the pristine state. The counters are clean. As is my desk. It’s as if I never existed. My work never existed. What did they do? Throw everything away?

I rush to the biosafety cabinets and am instantly relieved when I see the incubators. They didn’t throw out the tissue samples. I itch to bring a sample to a microscope, but that’s not why I’m here. And I’d need light, and we’re keeping the lights off.

The pen drawer in my lab desk is empty. In the file cabinet to the right of my chair there are hanging file folders, but none of the papers I stashed. The only thing I stored in these folders were receipts that I never got around to submitting for expense reports. Why would someone take those?

They wouldn’t. It was mostly trash. I frantically move the hanging folders, most of which I never used, looking to the back of the long, unwieldy drawer.

I can’t see a thing, so I shove my arm to the back, face planted to the top desk drawer until my fingers touch plastic. I grip wires and tug.

Thank god. When I stored my hard drives here, I hadn’t been trying to hide them. The lab desk simply didn’t have any drawers that would hold the drives and the long wires. The sight of the orange plastic and silver sided rectangle has me grinning. If I can’t find my laptop, I’ve got my research.

As I’m stuffing my messenger bag with the hard drive and the wire, I remember I hadn’t downloaded that Sunday. Which meant the report that theoretically caused so much trouble isn’t on this hard drive. Frock.

I push up off the ground. Max holds up his thumb. Then flips it down. Then up. The gesture questions if I’ve gotten everything I need.

With a quick shake of the head, communicating that no, I do not have everything I need, I scan the room. There’s no sign of my laptop. If they took my receipts and invoices, whoever packed up my lab obviously took my laptop. Where do they store former employee belongings? In a storage room?

The only storage rooms I remember had shelves holding supplies. One storage room on the second floor had a small square table that William and I made use of more than once.

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