Twin Targets. Jessica Andersen

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      Again, his smile held no humor. “Consider it a hunch, based on what I know of Tiberius’s women.”

      “I wasn’t his lover.” There was little heat in the denial, though she was tempted to ask why that had been his first guess. She wondered how he saw her, what she looked like to him.

      After almost a year of interacting solely with the guards and Tiberius’s people, it seemed suddenly strange to be speaking with a man—a tongue-draggingly handsome man—who wasn’t part of that world.

      But that was the point, wasn’t it? He wasn’t entirely out of that world—he was simply on the other side. She wasn’t sure she could trust John Sharpe. She’d trusted Tiberius, and that hadn’t turned out well at all.

      “But you’re right that I haven’t been arrested,” she conceded his point. “A few parking tickets and a stern warning for doing sixty in a thirty-five zone outside Bethesda, but that’s it. And yes, I needed government clearance.” She paused, trying to gauge how much to reveal, how much to hold back. Finally, she went with what she figured he could get from her prints and a quick background check. “My name is Sydney Westlake. I’m twenty-eight, my twin sister, Celeste, and I were raised together in foster care and we own a house together in Glen Hills, Maryland. Up until a year ago, I worked in the genetics department of the Advanced Institute of Science in Bethesda, investigating the causes and possible cures for a rare genetic disease called Singer’s syndrome.”

      She paused when the boat’s engine note changed and their momentum slowed. There were no windows in the small galley, but she thought she heard the clang of a marker buoy, indicating that they were nearing land.

      “What changed a year ago?” Sharpe prompted.

      “As you might guess from the fact that I was swimming like hell to get away from Rocky Cliff Island,” she said drily, “I went to work for Tiberius. About a year ago my funding was cut, thanks to my lying rat-bastard of an ex-boyfriend. A few weeks after that happened, a representative of the Tiberius Corporation made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. I’ve been working in a private lab on the island ever since, the last three months of it under lock and key until tonight.”

      He’d gone completely and utterly still as she spoke, making her think of a predator freezing the moment it sighted prey. His voice was inflectionless—and damning—when he said, “You developed bioweapons.”

      She wanted to flinch from the condemnation, but didn’t because it was the truth. A far more complicated truth than he made it sound, but the truth nonetheless. “Not intentionally, and not willingly once I figured out what he actually wanted me to do…but yes, ultimately I developed a new DNA-based vector for Tiberius, and yes, under certain circumstances, it could be used for illegal purposes.”

      She couldn’t quite bring herself to call it a bioweapon. It should’ve been a cure, a salvation. Instead, it was a direct threat to national security.

      Sharpe set his coffee aside, very deliberately, and folded his hands on the table. “What is the target? How long do we have?”

      Incongruously, she noticed that he wasn’t wearing a wedding ring. Even more unsettlingly, she found that she was glad.

      It’s only because he’s the first male nonfelon you’ve seen in eleven-plus months, she told herself. That, and she appreciated how he’d stayed one jump ahead of her in their conversation. He didn’t repeat himself, and didn’t fill the air with useless questions and chatter. He was cool and calculating, yes, but she could already tell he was extremely intelligent.

      Which could make him very dangerous. He was smart, he had an agenda and he had the law on his side. It was up to her to make sure she got what she needed without pushing so far that she got herself locked up, leaving Celeste unprotected when Tiberius came for her. Because he would come for her. There was no question of that.

      Even now, the need to get to her ailing twin sister beat beneath Sydney’s skin, along with the fear that the time taken up with her rescue and the boat ride had been too long, that Tiberius would have already figured out what Sydney had done before she left.

      If she were in his position she’d grab whatever her adversary held dear, demand the computer password in exchange and then disappear with the technology.

      Since this was Tiberius they were talking about, he would probably do exactly that…and then once he had the password, he’d kill her and Celeste outright because she’d dared to cross him.

      “Sydney, how long do we have until he sells whatever you developed?” Sharpe pressed.

      “You have some time,” she answered. “I corrupted the lab reagents and jammed the computers on the way out. Without the password, it’ll take another scientist weeks, maybe months to re-create what I did. With the password…” She trailed off, trying not to consider that possibility but knowing she had to. “With the password, he could be up and running in a few days. Maybe less.”

      He muttered a curse as the boat engines cut out and the craft drifted for a few seconds, then bumped up against the dock. Above decks, they could hear the sound of tramping footsteps and men’s shouts as coast guard crewmen fastened the lines and secured the cutter.

      “And the target?” Sharpe asked.

      Sydney kept her eyes on his, refusing to look away even though she wanted to hide her head and pretend it was all a nightmare, that she hadn’t really handed this sort of power to a man like Tiberius. “The eventual target is, indirectly, the entire United States legal system.”

      “Go on.”

      Telling herself this was the only way, Sydney said, “I built a viral vector that was intended to treat the effects of Singer’s syndrome. Under orders—threats, really—from Tiberius, I altered the vector so it mimics the twenty marker sequences currently used for a standard DNA fingerprinting profile.” She paused, saw from his dark expression that he got it, and nodded. “Exactly. Once someone has been infected with the viral vector, any samples coming from his or her body will yield incomprehensible blurs with standard forensic DNA analysis. The police labs will be completely unable to match his—or her—DNA to crime scene samples or DNA fingerprints already on file.”

      He muttered a low, vicious oath. “In other words, you’ve single-handedly given one of the most ruthless criminal businessmen on the planet the power to render the CODIS DNA database—and a good chunk of modern forensic analysis—completely useless.”

      Now she did look away. “It’s pointless to say how sorry I am. I thought the job was a legit front for his other dealings. I thought I could use his money—use him—to help people.” To help Celeste, and others like her who were often overlooked in favor of efforts to cure more common—and therefore more commercially lucrative—diseases.

      “You’re smarter than that,” he said without inflection, and for some reason that stung more than all the names she’d called herself in the dark of night back on the island, when she’d realized exactly the same thing.

      She wasn’t just smart enough to know better, she had known better and she’d taken the job anyway, because she’d been so desperate to find a way to help Celeste, so obsessed with the goal of prolonging her sister’s life and making up for the fact that the disease had struck one of them but not the other.

      As Celeste had accused her on more than one occasion, she’d been so sure she was right, she’d bent СКАЧАТЬ