Page 10 of Hunted

She shrugged. “How do you know all that?”

“It’s my job to know.” It wasn’t. Not anymore.

She inhaled nasally, nodded as if making a decision. “My father was suffering severe dementia. The onset was sudden, the progression rapid. I resigned from the clinic to take care of him. And when he got it into his head that he had to come up here, I didn’t have a choice but to come with him.”

Romano had no idea the elder Dr. Stoltz hadn’t been on solid mental ground. That hadn’t come up in the background research he’d been given.

“I didn’t know he was sick. Dementia? He got, what, forgetful, absent minded?”

“In his case, it manifested as extreme paranoia. He thought people were after him.” She glanced through the open door, toward the stairs, and shuddered a little.

“Yeah, well, all due respect to your medical expertise, Doc, but that wasn’t dementia.”

She blinked at him. “Yeah, I was just coming to the same conclusion.” Then she turned to wash her hands. But he was too astute not to notice that she only turned on the cold tap, or that she held her wrists turned up to the flow to counteract the shock. “What is it you think my father was working on? What are all you people after?”

He didn’t like her lumping him in with the others, and almost said so. But he stopped himself. He didn’t give a damn what she thought of him.

“He created a virus that could be weaponized, and as a weapon it would be more devastating than the A-bomb.”

She shut the water off, dried her hands with a towel and met his eyes in the mirror. “He would never be involved in anything like that.”

“He was involved in something just like that. He must have changed his mind right at the end. Maybe he finally understood what the repercussions could be. He took all his notes, removed the hard drives from the computers he used at the University lab and vanished from the face of the earth. Problem was, he was sloppy. He told someone.”

“Who?”

He shook his head. “Don’t know. But the information was leaked and now every two-bit despot and terrorist leader in the world is itching to get their hands on this thing.”

Clutching the towel in her hands, she turned to face him. “And which two-bit despot or terrorist leader sent you?”

He blinked. Her voice was stronger now. Her eyes had gone as cold and hard as eyes that big and brown could get, he figured. “The good guys," he said. “Anything more than that is classified.”

“Then so is anything I might know.”

He rose slowly from the chair, recognizing a standoff when he saw one. He hadn’t expected it. Seemed there was some toughness in her after all. Buried … deeply buried. But there. The path to her steel lay in her old man. Say something bad about Elliot Stoltz, and arouse his daughter's anger.

“I can’t tell you.”

“Then you might as well leave.”

He smiled just a little, knowing he had her beat. “And what do you plan to do with those two downstairs, Dr. Stoltz, or the backup crew who are probably on their way right now?”

“Nothing. I’m leaving, too. If I didn’t learn another thing from my father, I learned how to disappear.”

Now that was more in keeping with his initial impression of her. To scurry away into the woods. To burrow into a den somewhere in the forest with the other wild things.

“I found you,” he told her. “They found you. They’ll find you again.”

“I’ll run again.”

“That’s no way to live.”

“That’s my problem, isn’t it?”

She was tougher than she looked. She wouldn’t tell him. He could read that much in her eyes. He battled a grudging admiration for her.

“All right,” he said slowly. “I’ll tell you this much. The people I work for want to get their hands on this thing, but not to use as a weapon. They want it so they can develop the antidote. Once they do that, they’ll make sure every trace of the virus is destroyed.”

“If you believe that,” she said, “then you’re way too naive to be in the job you’re in, whatever it is.” She stepped closer, staring so deeply into his eyes that he felt her digging into his soul. “If they’re going to destroy every trace of it as you claim, then why would they need an antidote?”

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