Thorn’s deceptively sweet voice made Trevor’s teeth ache.
“Of course, Mr. Thorn. If you need anything else, just let me know.”
“Damn, she’s smooth,” Tanner said as Vivian left the room. “John should have put her in the field.”
Trevor chuckled. “No kidding. Maybe he intended to. John was always ten steps ahead of everyone else when it came to knowing who’d be a good field agent.”
“He was good when it came to seeing other people’s futures,” Evan said softly. “I wish he had spent a little more time worrying about his own. Then maybe he would’ve foreseen somebody planting that bomb.”
The mood in the small office immediately changed as the humor that had been there a moment ago disappeared. They stared at the blank screen of the laptop, listening to the men in the conference room drink their coffee and talk about whether they preferred cheese or apple Danish.
“I’m surprised you didn’t bring Alina with you,” Evan said. “Zarina told me she helped get Sage back, so I figured she was a newly accepted member of our little rebel alliance.”
“She stayed behind to take care of Sage,” Trevor said, the lie sliding wet and slimy off his tongue. Great, now he was lying to Evan like he’d lied to Alina. At this rate, he was going to end up no better than Thorn and his a-hole friends.
“But everything is good with her right?” Evan probed. “She’s on our side, isn’t she?”,
Trevor didn’t know how to answer that. His head was still advising him to proceed with caution, while his instincts shouted at him to trust her. That disconnect had him tied up in knots, not sure what to do. Why the hell did this have to be so difficult?
He shrugged. “I’m leaning that way, but in truth, I’m not sure.”
Evan frowned in confusion, while Tanner gave him a look that said he thought Trevor was full of crap. He knew the feeling. He was confused, too, and pretty sure he was full of shit.
Thankfully, the door opened, and Vivian stuck her head in, saving him from fielding any more questions about Alina.
“We good?” Vivian asked.
Trevor motioned at the laptop. “We have audio, but it remains to be seen if we’re going to grab any video from the projector. Regardless, you did good.”
Before she could say anything, the screen on Evan’s laptop flickered to life.
“We’ve got video,” the analyst announced excitedly.
Vivian nodded. “I need to go out and man the desk in case anyone else walks in late for the meeting. Hope you get what you need.”
“Me, too,” Trevor said. “Thanks again.”
As she closed the door behind her, an image of some kind of chart appeared on the laptop screen. The timeline along the bottom stretched back at least four years, while the rest of the slide was filled with a bewildering array of stars, numbers, and various horizontal lines. It didn’t look like some kind of diabolical scheme concocted by Thorn to take over the world—or whatever the hell he was up to. In fact, it looked like something involving a weapons development schedule.
Trevor cursed. This was probably going to end up being a huge waste of time. He’d screwed the partnership he’d been building with Alina for nothing.
A man’s voice came through the speaker. Even with the guy explaining the chart, Trevor was still lost. All the scientific terms might as well have been Greek as far as he was concerned.
“The program has grown in leaps and bounds since the minor setback we experienced at the end of May when our test subject was unable to sustain a full transition,” another man said.
The picture on the screen changed to a man lying twisted and motionless on an exam table.
Trevor did a double take. Shit, that was Aaron Moore. He’d been an agent at the DCO right up until the moment he’d volunteered to take the hybrid serum Thorn’s doctors whipped up in their test tubes and died in horrible, screaming pain as a result.
Now the chart made a whole hell of a lot more sense. It outlined how long they’d been working on the hybrid serum.
“We still don’t know why Agent Moore responded so poorly to the serum,” the man continued. “While it was a reduced dosage, Agent Harmon displayed absolutely zero side effects when given the same treatment. In fact, it appears the serum failed completely in Harmon’s case. I admit, having a test subject die from such a small tweak in the formulation continues to confound our failure review team.”
Trevor ground his jaw at the total disregard for human life apparent in the man’s voice as he talked about Moore’s death. Former Special Forces lieutenant turned DCO agent Jayson Harmon should have died, too. What Thorn’s doctors didn’t know was that Zarina had injected Jayson with her own experimental drug minutes before they’d administered the hybrid serum. Only her drug hadn’t been meant to turn him into a snarling beast with a mouth full of fangs. It’d been meant to counteract the serum.
Unfortunately, Zarina didn’t have a chance to inject the same drug into Moore, since no one had a clue the guy was going to do something as stupid as volunteer for the protocol before anyone had even figured out if it worked on Jayson.
“As a consequence of the failure with Agent Moore, the team made the decision to go back and restart the project with raw hybrid material gathered by operatives in Tajikistan,” the man explained.
