PhD Protector
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Cindi Myers
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17
Chapter One
What’s the worst thing you would do to protect the ones you love? Would you lie—steal—even kill?
It was a question from a party game, the kind you played over beers with a bunch of buddies, the answers all alcohol-fueled machismo, backed by the knowledge that you would never really have to make those kinds of choices.
Mark Renfro had had to choose. To protect his daughter, his innocent only child, he had lied too many times to count, and though he hadn’t stolen or killed—yet—he had joined with a group of men who were working to kill thousands, maybe even millions of people. They called themselves Patriots, but he knew they were terrorists. They had murdered his wife, and if Mark didn’t do what they wanted, they would kill his daughter, Mandy, as well.
He closed his eyes and rested his forehead against the cool metal of the laboratory hood. Formulas scrolled across his closed eyelids like a particularly boring and technical movie, the complex and intricate calculations of energy transfer and nuclear fusion, pages from textbooks he had read long ago and committed to memory, fragments of scientific papers he had written or read, and columns of computations that lodged in his brain the way phone numbers or the memory of a wonderful meal might take up residence in the brains of others. His photographic memory for all those numbers and calculations had allowed him to breeze though his undergraduate and graduate education and excel at the research that had propelled him to fame and even a little fortune.
All of that worthless, with his wife dead and his daughter far away from him. Amanda had been four when he had last seen her. She’d be five now—a huge chunk of her life he would never get back.
The door to the cabin that had been Mark’s prison for over a year burst open, but Mark didn’t even jump. The people who held him here were fond of such scare tactics as bursting in unannounced, but he was numb to that all now. “Renfro!” The man Mark knew as Cantrell had a big, booming voice. He was always on the verge of shouting. “We brought you a surprise.”
A muffled cry, like that of a wounded animal, made Mark whip around to face Cantrell. But instead of the dog or deer or some other nonhuman victim he had expected to see, he came face-to-face with a furious woman. Her hazel eyes burned with rage and hatred, and the tangle of auburn hair that fell in front of her face couldn’t obscure the high cheekbones, patrician nose and delicately pointed chin. She was young—midtwenties, he guessed, with a taut, athletic frame, every muscle straining against the man who held her, a baby-faced goon named Scofield. They had taped her mouth and bound her arms behind her, but still she struggled. So far her efforts had earned her a purpling bruise on one cheek and a torn sleeve on her denim jacket.
Mark half rose from his stool, an old, almost forgotten rage burning deep in his chest. “What do you think you’re doing?” he demanded.
“The boss figured you needed some help to speed things along.” Cantrell nodded and Scofield shoved the woman forward. She stumbled into Mark and he had to brace his legs and wrap his arms around her to keep them both from crashing into the lab table. “She’s your new assistant.”
Both men laughed, as if this was the best joke they had heard all year, then they retreated, the locks clicking into place behind them.
Mark still held the woman, though they were both steady on their feet now. It had been so long since he had touched another person, longer still since he had felt a woman’s soft, lithe body beneath his hands. She was almost as tall as he was, with small, firm breasts and gently curved hips, and she smelled like flowers and soap and a world very far away from this remote mountain cabin.
She wrenched away from him and stumbled back, staring at him with eyes filled with hatred. He got the feeling she had no more of an idea why she was here than he did. “Turn around and I’ll untie your hands,” he said. “But you have to promise not to strangle me when I do.”
Her eyes made no such promise, but she turned and presented her hands to him. He clipped through the plastic ties with the pair of nail scissors—all his captors would allow him in terms of sharp objects. Though his kidnappers had provided him with a laboratory full of the most up-to-date equipment, they had been very careful to exclude anything that might be used as a weapon.
Ironic, considering the purpose of the laboratory itself.
He pocketed the nail scissors and the woman brought her hands to the front and rubbed them, wincing, then picked at the corners of the tape on her mouth.
“Trust me, the best way is to just rip it off,” he said. “It still hurts, but you get it over with quickly.”
She hesitated, then did as he suggested and jerked at the silver rectangle of duct tape. “Ah!” she cried out, followed by a string of eloquent curses.
He retreated to his stool in front of the lab bench, fighting the urge to smile. She wouldn’t get the joke, wouldn’t understand how good it was to hear someone else express the sentiments that had filled his mind for months now. “I’m Mark Renfro,” he said. “Who are you?”
“I’m not your assistant,” she said, her voice low and rough. Sexy.
She went back to rubbing her wrists, the movement plumping the cleavage at the scoop neck of her T-shirt. Mark felt a stirring below the belt, his libido rising from the dead, startling him. He had thought himself past such feelings, that part of him burned away by grief and the hopelessness of his situation.
“I didn’t request an assistant,” he said. “That must have been Cantrell’s idea. Or someone higher up the chain of command. I’m sorry they dragged you into this, but I had nothing to do with it.”
“You work for them.” She moved closer, scanning the array of scientific equipment on the table. “You’re their scientist.” The disgust in her voice and on her face showed just what she thought of a man who would do such a thing.
“There’s a difference between being a slave and an employee. I didn’t have any more say about being here than you did.” He glanced at her. “Maybe less. You still haven’t told me your name.”
“Erin. Erin Daniels.”
It didn’t ring a bell.
“You don’t have any idea who I am, do you?” she asked.
He shook his head. “Should I?”
“I don’t know. But I would hate for anyone to associate me with this scum.” She began to move about the one-room cabin, taking in the double bedstead in the corner where Mark slept, the open door beside it that led to the single, windowless bathroom, the three-burner gas range and round-topped refrigerator and chipped porcelain sink on the other side of the room, and the table and two chairs that provided the only other seating, aside from the laboratory stool he currently occupied. Her intelligent eyes scanned, assessed and moved on. She tried the sash on the larger of the cabin’s two windows.
“They’re screwed shut from the outside,” he said. “And there’s reinforced wire over the glass. If you broke a pane, all you would accomplish would be to let in the cold.” He had endured a freezing month right after they took him, when he had tried to cut out one of the panes of glass, in hopes of fashioning a weapon. The glass had shattered and Mark had shivered for weeks before he had persuaded Cantrell that the low temperatures were detrimental to his lab work, and his captors had repaired the pane.
“There must be some way out of here,” Erin said, moving to the back door.
“The doors are locked and dead bolted from the outside, plus there’s an armed guard out there at all times. The floor is a concrete slab. The gas is shut off, so the stove doesn’t work. They bring in food, unless I’m being punished for something, then I don’t eat.” They had kept him on short rations for a week after the glass-breaking incident.
“If there’s no gas, how do you heat this place?” she asked. “It’s in the forties out there today, but it feels fine in here.”
“There’s electric heat,” he said, pointing to the baseboard heating unit along the side wall. “A solar panel charges a battery for that. If the sun doesn’t shine for a few days then too bad. I had better learn to like working in the cold.” He had spent whole days in bed under the covers in the middle of last winter—he didn’t want to think about going through that again.
“How long have you been here?” Her expression was guarded.
“What month is this?” He had tried to keep track at first, then gave up. What did it matter? His captors weren’t going to let him leave here alive.
“January,” she said. “Today is the ninth.”
“Then I’ve been here fourteen months,” he said. The weight of all those months rested on his chest like a concrete block. Crushing.
Erin sank into a chair at the table. “Why?” she asked. “What are you doing here?”
He wanted to say “as little as possible” but he could never be sure the guards weren’t listening. He suspected Cantrell or his bosses had the place bugged. She might even be a plant, sent to learn his intentions, though her anger felt very real. Maybe his captors’ paranoia was rubbing off on him. “First, tell me your story,” he said. “How did you end up here? Are you a scientist?”
“No. I’m a teacher.” She straightened a little, as if one of her students might be watching. “I teach math to seventh and eighth graders in Idaho Falls, Idaho.”
“Then what are you doing in the middle of nowhere in western Colorado? Do you know anything about the men who brought you here?” What had she done to end up on the wrong side of a group of terrorists like the Patriots?
“Oh, I know about them all right.” Her expression grew even more grim. “Their leader is my stepfather.”
* * *
ERIN KNEW SHE had succeeded in shocking Mark Renfro. Frankly, he had shocked her, too. She had heard so much in the past weeks about the famous scientist who was going to help Duane Braeswood and his group of deranged thugs bring the world to its knees. She had expected him to be like them—a hardened, arrogant braggart whose cruelty showed in knotted muscles and cold expressions. She had been prepared to have to fight him—possibly to the death—to prove she wanted no part of his “mission.”
Instead, she had found a thin, weary-looking man in a dirty lab coat, with despair weighting his eyes and slumping his shoulders. He might have been handsome once, before deprivation and grief and whatever other emotions had etched lines at the corners of his eyes and mouth and drained the life from his expression. “You’re Braeswood’s daughter?” he asked.
“Stepdaughter.” At least she didn’t have to claim any of that madman’s DNA ran through her veins.
Mark sighed and let his hands rest loosely in his lap. “Maybe you’d better start at the beginning,” he said.
The beginning. Once upon a time there was a girl named Erin, who had everything she wanted. Then her father died and her mother made some very poor choices.
“My mother met a man online when I was twelve,” she said. “My father had died two years before, of liver cancer. She moved back to Idaho to be closer to her family and started hanging out on a survivalist message board. Who knows why?”
“And she met Duane Braeswood through these survivalists?” He nodded. “I guess his ranting might appeal to the more radical factions in that group.”
“Do you want me to tell the story or not?”
He looked sheepish. “Sorry. I haven’t had anyone to talk to in a while, so I’m rusty at conversation. I won’t interrupt again.”
She hugged her arms over her chest. “Mom didn’t meet Duane on the message board. She met a guy named Amos or Abe or something like that and they dated for a while. She started going to meet ups and gatherings with him and at one of those she met Duane Braeswood.” Just remembering the way Duane had come into their lives and taken over made her sick to her stomach. “Among that bunch, he was already a big celebrity. Maybe Mom was flattered by his attention, or impressed by the way he threw money around. Maybe she was just lonely. I don’t know.”
“Ah, Duane.” Mark said the name the way he might have referred to a notoriously badly behaved public figure.
“Yeah. My mother’s second husband.” Erin gave him a hard look, ignoring the sympathy in his expression. Maybe he was just a good actor. “Obviously, you know him well.”
“No. I’ve only seen him a few times. He reminds me of a televangelist. One who prefers camo to shiny suits. Though his charm is lost on me, I can see he has a kind of creepy charisma.”
“Exactly.” She rubbed her arms. “He gave me the creeps from day one, but my mom fell for it. Next thing I knew, she had married him and we moved to this big house with a bunch of other like-minded people, sort of a commune for survivalist types. At first I thought we were just going to stock up on dried food and hunt our own meat and that kind of stuff. I was a kid who wanted to fit in and I thought it might even be fun.” Looking back she could see how pathetic she had been, wanting love and approval from her stand-in dad, playing right into his manipulative hands. “As I got older, I figured out he had a more sinister plan.”
“The government needs fixing and he’s the man to do it,” Mark said drily.
She nodded. “He tried to recruit me as one of his loyal followers, but I balked.”
“I’m guessing that didn’t make you very popular,” Mark said.
“I told my mom he was a terrorist, plain and simple. We had a big fight about it. She just couldn’t see it.” The memory of her mother’s rejection still stung. “The day after I graduated high school I left the compound and swore to my mom I wouldn’t see her again until she came to her senses and got out of there, too.”
Her stomach still knotted when she remembered that day. She had walked out, sure the next time she saw Helen Daniels Braeswood she would be either dead or on the news, arrested for her involvement with some plot of Duane’s.
“That must have been tough,” Mark said.
“Yeah, well, we didn’t speak for four years. Then she called, out of the blue one day, to tell me Duane and the others had left her and moved to Colorado. She sounded worn-out. She asked if she could come stay with me awhile. I was thrilled. I moved her into the house I was renting in Idaho Falls and after a few weeks she was a new woman. She was the mom I had known and loved before. She still refused to admit that Duane was evil. She called him ‘misguided but sincere.’ She said she had loved him very much but that she was determined to get over him.”
Erin fell silent again, remembering all the hope she had had in those months.
“What happened?” Mark prompted after a moment.
“She stayed with me about eighteen months. I thought everything was great. Then one day I came home and found her bags all packed. She said she had had a call from Duane. He had been injured in an accident and he needed her. They were still legally married, so she was going back to him. I went a little crazy. I screamed and yelled and threatened to call the police. She was perfectly calm through the whole thing. She told me one day I would be in love and I would understand. Then she got in a taxi and left.”
“How did that lead to you ending up here?” Mark asked.
“I’m getting to that.” She took a deep breath, steadying herself. “About six weeks ago, I got a call, from a man who identified himself as Duane’s personal assistant. He said he thought I would want to know that my mom was very ill. In fact, she was dying of cancer. She was in hospice and didn’t have long and had been asking to see me. He gave me the address he said was for the hospice and suggested I might like to visit her before it was too late.” She covered her eyes with her hand, fighting back tears—of grief and rage and shame.
“Did you see her?” Mark asked, his voice gentle.
“She wasn’t even sick! It was a trick, to get me to a place where Duane’s men could grab me. He showed up, too. He was in a wheelchair, with an oxygen tank. He’d clearly been messed up somehow, but that didn’t seem to lessen the power he had over everyone around him. He told me I needed to be punished for upsetting my mother so much, and that he had a job I could do to make up for all the trouble I had caused.”
“And his men brought you here.”
“First they took me to a fishing camp somewhere in the area, and we stayed there for a few days. I guess they were waiting for some signal from Duane or the stars to align or something. Then they took me to a house in Denver. I stayed there for weeks, in a locked room with the windows blacked out.” She glanced around the cabin. “At least this isn’t as bad as that.”
“Do you know why I’m here?” Mark asked. “What it is that you’re supposed to assist me with?”
“Duane always referred to you as his scientist,” she said. “A genius he had working for him, I assume on one of his crackpot schemes. What is it this time? A truth serum? Some potion that allows him to see in the dark? A new weapon?”
Mark shifted on his stool and cleared his throat. “You don’t know what kind of scientist I am, do you?”
“Duane just told me you were a scientist, and you obviously have some kind of laboratory here.”
“I’m a nuclear physicist. Duane Braeswood is holding me prisoner so I can build him a bomb. A nuclear bomb.”
