“What do you think he wants this time?” she asked as Landon drove his F-150 pickup through the security gate of Chadwick-Thorn. Located south of Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling and the Naval Research Laboratory, it was half corporate offices, half defense research facilities, and heavily guarded.
“I have no idea,” her husband said. “I just hope it doesn’t involve getting dirt on someone so he can use it as blackmail again.”
Ivy silently agreed, shuddering at the memory of the most recent job they’d done for Thorn in which they’d followed a Virginia Supreme Court justice around for days until they’d gotten pictures of him taking part in an orgy. Ivy was never going to be able to forget the things she’d seen that night.
Digging up blackmail evidence on a state judge—or anyone else, for that matter—wasn’t a typical job for most operatives in the DCO, but especially not for Ivy and Landon. They were trained to track down terrorists, rogue military leaders, and psychotic killers. The stuff Thorn had them doing lately was a far cry from the usual.
She and Landon had gotten on Thorn’s good side after the part they’d played in the destruction of a hybrid research lab in Tajikistan back in March and the deaths of the two doctors who were the only people who could tie the former senator to it. Thing was, she and Landon hadn’t intended for those doctors to die. As much as Ivy hated them for using science and her DNA to create volatile man-made versions of shifters like her, she’d wanted to take those men in alive so they could testify against Thorn. Before the mission, Thorn had asked Ivy and Landon to make sure the two men never got a chance to talk. When they’d ended up dead, he’d assumed she and Landon had killed them as he’d asked. Nothing got you on a scumbag’s Christmas card list like cleaning up his garbage for him.
So at the urging of John Loughlin, the director of the DCO, she and Landon had spent the past few months using his trust to get close enough to find the evidence they needed to put the man in prison for life. But just because you wanted to find something didn’t mean you could. Ever since they’d recovered Thorn’s fancy hard drive from the thief who’d stolen it, they’d focused all their attention on finding the encryption key and password to access the data inside it.
They’d checked out Thorn’s home on Embassy Row as well as the vacation house he had on St. John’s and the place he kept in Paris. When they hadn’t found anything in those, they’d moved on to the small office he kept near the Capitol to handle Committee business and schmooze with his congressional buddies. That hadn’t turned out any better.
The only place they hadn’t looked yet was the Chadwick-Thorn corporate offices.
They parked on the second level of the underground garage and took the elevator to the top floor of the main building, where Thorn had his office.
“Are there even more guards than usual around?” Landon asked quietly as they walked down the hall.
Ivy frowned as she took in another pair of security guards coming their way. Neither man was wearing a sign that proclaimed them security, but if their thick necks and broad shoulders weren’t giveaways, the distinctive bulges under their jackets certainly would have been.
“Yeah,” she said softly, reaching up to smooth the bun she’d put her long, dark hair in. “I’ve counted six of them since we came off the elevators, and I saw four more roving around the parking garage. But they don’t concern me as much as the new cameras.”
The worried look Landon threw her way mirrored her own. They’d broken in here several times but hadn’t found anything useful. She and Landon had been able to search some parts of the building, but other parts, like the classified storage area, computer server rooms, and Thorn’s office, had been too secure. Ivy had no idea how they were going to get in with the extra layers of security now.
Thorn’s head of security, Douglas Frasier, met them outside Thorn’s office. Ivy’s skin crawled the moment she saw him. She’d read enough of the old DCO files to know that Frasier had been one of the earliest members of the DCO. In fact, he’d been paired up with Adam, the first shifter the organization had ever discovered. She didn’t know what had happened between them, but whatever it was, it made Adam go off the grid.
“He’s been waiting for over an hour. What took you so long?” Frasier snapped, then glared at her. “And what the hell are you looking at, EVA?”
Beside her, Landon stiffened. Back in Frasier’s day in the DCO, shifters weren’t even considered human. Instead, they were known as Extremely Valuable Assets—EVAs. Thankfully, things had gotten better at the DCO since Landon had come to work there. People rarely used the demeaning term anymore, at least to Ivy’s face. But hearing Frasier use it reminded her what it was like to have people look down on her and every other shifter simply because they were different. It wasn’t her fault a latent gene had flipped on in her teens, turning her into a feline shifter.
“What am I looking at?” she asked. “Absolutely nothing.”
Letting her eyes flash green, she walked ahead of Landon into Thorn’s office, but not before she caught her husband’s smirk.
Ivy expected Frasier to follow them. He usually stood in the back of the room during their meetings with Thorn. But this time he pulled the heavy oak doors of the office closed. Ivy listened as his footsteps disappeared down the hall. Today’s meeting must be about an unusually sensitive subject if Thorn didn’t want his vicious right-hand man in attendance.
Behind his desk, Thorn looked up from his computer. “You’re here. Good. Sit.”
Did he want them to beg and roll over, too?
As Ivy slipped into one of the chairs in front of Thorn’s desk and Landon took the other, she was once again struck by the older man’s powerful presence. The former senator was nearly sixty, but with his athletic build, dark hair, and good looks, he appeared much younger. Dressed in an impeccably tailored suit, he exuded pure charm and charisma. It was hard to believe he was a man whose ego and ambitions had led to the murder and torture of hundreds of people over the years.
Ivy had faced a lot of evil men in her time at the DCO, but Thorn scared her at a gut-deep level that none of the others had ever come close to. Psychos like Johan Klaus and Jean Renard, the doctors who’d tortured her in their hybrid experiments, employed violence because at some level, they enjoyed hurting others. While Thorn was capable of inflicting the same kind of pain and suffering, he did it for business purposes. Killing, maiming, and torturing were simply a means to an end for him. That complete lack of humanity was terrifying.
Thorn handed her and Landon two photos of an older, dark-skinned man wearing a suit and tie. One showed him talking to a younger man in a white lab coat. In the other, he was coming out of a quaint, one-floor home.
“This is Doctor Kamal Mahsood,” Thorn said.
Ivy exchanged looks with Landon. His dark eyes filled with surprise. “Isn’t that the name of the doctor who headed up the hybrid research team in Costa Rica?” she asked.
Back in November, a DCO team had gotten ambushed and very nearly killed there by a group of ferocious hybrids.
Thorn nodded. “Yes. Based on your previous reports, all that we’d been able to say with any certainty is that the man disappeared at some point before everything fell apart. I’ve had people looking for him ever since, but we hadn’t found him until recently.”
Ivy started getting a bad feeling in her stomach. After the deaths of Klaus and Renard in Tajikistan, they’d been sure there was no one left who possessed the knowledge of how to make hybrids. Something that was confirmed when a DCO operative had died a horribly painful death only minutes after being given a hybrid formula created by Chadwick-Thorn a few months ago.
Now it looked like they’d all been wrong. Of course, Dr. Mahsood hadn’t been on anyone’s radar. Other than knowing he’d been responsible for leading the research team that had developed the wild second generation of hybrids in Costa Rica and that he’d been working for someone on the Committee not named Thomas Thorn, they knew very little about the man.
