“And you know this how?”
“I don’t know it, I just think there’s enough data to be suspicious. Prior to being asked to go in for a recovery, I was asked to duplicate the information at the university where the professors were working together with their teams. I looked at the information I was bringing out over the last few months. The original research read nothing at all like the findings sent to the government.”
“So it didn’t work, and they’ve dropped it and gone to something else.”
“They’re dead. All of them. The first professor to die was a woman. She was in a car accident about four months ago. She had one assistant. He died while hiking in the national forest. That happened about three weeks after the first death. The second professor died when he fell from a balcony in what the police said was a ‘freak’ accident. The head of the team was walking along the street when he suddenly fell to the ground, clutching his chest in an apparent heart attack. That was a couple of weeks before I was sent out. Granted, they all died weeks apart from what could truly have been accidents, but if you put that with a couple of other deaths of minor assistants, all dying in similar ways, it means to me that they succeeded in their research and that someone wants to cover it up and sell it elsewhere.”
“So the government was officially notified that it couldn’t be done.”
Dahlia nodded. “The report came in just a few weeks before they all started dying.”
Nicolas studied her face before crossing the room to stand in front of the window where he examined the spiderweb fragmenting the glass. “You’re not an innocent woman working out of a sanitarium, are you?” He stared out the window into the darkness. “You know exactly who you work for.”
Dahlia crossed the room to stand beside him. Close, but not touching him. “I’m sorry, yes. I work for the NCIS, the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. So does Jesse. I didn’t know who you were, Nicolas, or whom you worked for. You showed up the same time my home and my family was destroyed. I’m investigating something that has probably killed several people. Jesse Calhoun has been taken prisoner and is probably being tortured for information. If I were a member of the other side, I’d probably put someone like you in place. I had to be sure you were really who you said you were. It was such a coincidence for you to show up at exactly the right moment.”
“All the time we talked, out in the bayou, you never really answered a single question I asked. It didn’t add up at all. You aren’t the kind of woman not to know exactly who you work for.” He shook his head. “You’ve been feeding me just enough to test me, haven’t you? You really know how to make a fool out of a man, don’t you?”
There was no rancor in his voice, not even a note of bitterness. He just said it and turned and walked out. His bare feet made no noise on the floor as he left.
Dahlia stood quietly at the window for a long time, watching the night, watching the clouds spin across the dark sky. Feeling like the lowest creature on the face of the earth. She shouldn’t have felt low. She was doing her job, just as he did his job, but she still felt as if she had betrayed him in some way. He knew what a security clearance was, and a need to know basis.
Her heart hurt. Ached. It was silly. She wasn’t the kind of woman a man could ever take home to his mother. She could imagine sitting at a dinner table with one of his family members smoldering over the loss of their favorite football team and accidentally catching the dining room on fire. No matter how much she might want to get to know someone, or have a friend or be in a relationship, the bottom line was always the same—it was not possible. She would not feel sorry for herself.