Thirty Nights Page 3

  A log shifted on the fire, creating a shower of sparks. Appearing openly grateful for the diversion, George leaped from his bark brown leather chair and began jabbing at the fragrant applewood with the poker.

  Gillian was not to be distracted. “I asked you a question, Father. Does Hunter know something you’ve neglected to mention? Was there something about the project you two were working on—”

  “We weren’t working on any project together!” George’s ruddy cheeks were made even brighter by his anger. “Hunter St. John was a graduate lab assistant. No different from hundreds of others who have worked for me over the years.”

  “He was obviously more intelligent than most,” she pointed out. “While flying back from New Zealand, I read in Newsweek that many in the scientific community consider him a genius.”

  Wondering how old a woman had to get before she outgrew schoolgirl crushes, Gillian had been disgusted by whatever knee-jerk impulse had made her read the entire cover article. Twice.

  The bombing that had nearly killed him had made the news, and although details had been sketchy, reports at the time had suggested that the assassination attempt was due to some top secret government project he’d been working on. The Newsweek journalist had reported that while Hunter had recovered well enough to resume his work—which had relieved Gillian greatly—he’d subsequently become more reclusive than ever. The fact that he’d refused to be interviewed for the article had not surprised Gillian, who remembered Hunter being very private.

  “The man’s bright enough,” Cassidy allowed, his grudging tone jerking her wandering mind back into the murky conversational waters. “In that respect, he obviously inherited his parents’ genes. But Isabel Montgomery and David St. John were logical, scientific thinkers. Neither could have ever been described as given to emotional tantrums as St. John unfortunately is. Even during his student days, the boy was far too headstrong for his own good….

  “He refused to follow my instructions, always thinking he knew best. And he wasn’t dependable.” The still-firm jaw jutted out defiantly. “Which is why I had no choice but to let him go.”

  “So you said at the time.”

  That afternoon, like everything else about Hunter, was emblazoned on Gillian’s memory. Even now, thirteen years later, she could recall with vivid clarity how livid he’d been when he’d stormed out of the laboratory.

  “So.” She sat down with a flurry of flowered gauze skirt that was too thin for the frosty December Massachusetts morning, but had been just right when she’d boarded the plane in Auckland fifteen hours earlier. “Since there’s no basis for his threat, why are you so concerned?”

  “Because he can make waves.” George tossed back the whiskey, then refilled the glass, this time nearly to the rim. “St. John always was a loose cannon. A damn troublemaker. If he costs me my tenure—”

  “That’s ridiculous.” While her music was emotional, Gillian had always prided herself on being a woman of unwavering logic. “You achieved tenure years ago, before I was born. The only conceivable way you could possibly lose it would be to…”

  Her voice trailed off as a flicker of comprehension began to tease at the back of her mind.

  No, she assured herself. It couldn’t be true. Nothing had ever been as important to her father as his work. Not his colleagues, his students, his wives, nor his daughter. Gillian had long ago given up trying to win a love he was incapable of giving. But she’d always considered him to be a man of honor.

  Unfortunately, as she watched him gulping down the Irish whiskey like a drowning man going under for the third time, she had to wonder.

  It made sense, she considered grimly. She’d never believed her father’s unpersuasive explanations regarding Hunter leaving the project. And, even more surprisingly, MIT. Students were taken off research projects all the time, for all sorts of reasons. She’d witnessed varying levels of disappointment and frustration. Yet never had she seen the murderous depth of rage she’d witnessed in Hunter that day.

  “Father.” She leaned forward and put her hand on his knee. “Look at me.”

  When he reluctantly dragged his gaze to hers, Gillian saw something that looked horrendously like guilt flash across his red-veined eyes.

  “Hunter was working toward his doctorate that year,” she said slowly. Carefully. “He had his own project—”

  “It was a radical, unproved idea.”

  “Knowing Hunter, that could well be. You always said that he thought outside the box. But if he’s as intelligent as everyone says he is—”

  “He was on the wrong track,” George said, cutting her off with an impatient wave of an unsteady hand. “It wouldn’t have worked. It didn’t work, until…” This time he was the one to stop in midsentence.

  Gillian closed her eyes and rubbed at her temple as the truth struck home.

  Dear heavens, she didn’t need this. She’d just come off a grueling nine-month tour; she’d caught a cold in London that had stayed with her for weeks; she’d been traveling for hours; and exhaustion was beginning to catch up with her, along with the jet lag she’d been struggling to outrun as she’d raced around the world performing to standing-room-only crowds, talking to the press, trying to remember what she’d said one day in Sydney so as not to repeat herself exactly in Melbourne….

  “You stole his project.” Her flat tone revealed a deep disappointment she felt all the way to the bone.

  “He can’t prove a thing,” George insisted, dodging the question.

  Gillian sighed and allowed herself a moment of profound sadness as her last illusion regarding her father shattered. Then, with a strength of spirit that had gotten her through far worse than this, she began to think the problem through.

  “Given Hunter’s fame and reputation these days, he wouldn’t need to prove his accusation,” she mused out loud. “It would be his word against yours. And I’m afraid that just may be a battle you couldn’t win.” It had, after all, been a very long time since her father had been featured in Newsweek.

  “That’s what I was trying to tell you, dammit,” he said grumpily. “The devil’s going to cost me everything I’ve spent my life working for, Gilly.”

  The headache that had been threatening hit with jackhammer force, pounding at her temple, behind her eyes. As she looked out at the sleet that was being driven against the window, Gillian desperately wished she was back in New Zealand. Or Rio. Anywhere but here.

  “I wonder why he waited all these years?”

  “That’s simple.” The alcohol had him slurring his words. “I didn’t have anything the black-hearted devil wanted until now.”

  “I see,” Gillian said, not really seeing anything at all. Bone weary, she’d intended to fly straight from Kennedy airport to her beach house in Monterey, where she could spend a restful few weeks recovering from both her cold and the rigors of her tour by sitting out on her deck, watching the whales migrate. She’d been sitting in the first-class lounge, drinking a cup of honey-laced tea that she’d hoped would clear her sinuses but hadn’t, waiting to board the flight home, when her father had tracked her down, claiming a life-or-death emergency.

  He’d stubbornly refused to be more specific, but concerned enough by the uncharacteristic tremor in his voice, Gillian had immediately changed her plans, taking the plane to Boston instead. Only to discover that the problem wasn’t honestly life-threatening at all, merely career-threatening.

  Then again, Gillian reminded herself wearily, her father’s work had always been his life.

  “What does Hunter want, Father?”

  He stared at her through blurry, glazed eyes. “Didn’t I tell you?”

  “No.”

  “He wants you, Gilly. The heartless, amoral bastard says that if I don’t send you to Maine to sleep with him for thirty nights, he’ll ruin me. He gave me seven days to get you there. That was three days ago. I’ve only got four days left before I’m ruined.”

  He shook his head. Then, muttering something about devils and the lowest circles of hell, George Cassidy passed out.

  3

  Castle Mountain

  TWENTY-FOUR HOURS PAST the deadline, Gillian still hadn’t shown up on the island. Frustrated and disgusted with himself for the way he’d been watching the clock, Hunter had driven to the think tank located a few miles from his house, where he’d tried, with scant success, to concentrate on work.

  “I figured you’d be working at home today,” a familiar voice said.

  Hunter glanced back over his shoulder and saw Dylan Prescott standing in the doorway. Dylan, the founder of the think tank, was extraordinarily brilliant and unrelentingly good-natured. His sister was police chief and he was married to a science fiction writer whose stunningly cool beauty defied every nerdy stereotype regarding the mostly male genre.

  More important, Dylan was also one of the few individuals Hunter trusted without hesitation. They weren’t working in the same fields—Dylan’s area of interest and expertise was space and time travel—yet Hunter enjoyed running hypotheses by his friend. Invariably, the imaginative scientist would come up with a new twist that Hunter hadn’t considered.

  “Why would you think that?”

  Dylan shrugged. “I dropped into the Gray Gull for coffee this morning before coming here. Ben Adams mentioned something about having to pick up a guest of yours from the mainland on his mail packet.”

  He was too polite to ask, and too good a friend to probe into personal matters, but Hunter knew Dylan was curious. Especially since Hunter wasn’t known to entertain all that many guests at his remote, well-guarded home.

  It was his turn to shrug. “That’s up in the air,” he said vaguely.

  Dylan gave him a probing look, then, knowing his friend well, apparently decid
ed that there was no point in digging. “It’s just as well you’re here,” he said. “Since you’ve got a visitor.”

  “Oh?” He wondered if Ben had actually brought Gillian here, instead of to the house as he’d instructed.

  “It’s that GQ guy from State,” Dylan revealed. “He’s currently cooling his heels in the reception area.”

  Hunter shook his head. A government bureaucrat was just what he needed to top off a less-than-perfect day. He cursed. Then, remembering that the government was paying the bills for his research, sighed with resignation.

  “I suppose, since he’s come all this way, I’m going to have to see him.”

  “I’ll go tell Janet to send him in, then,” Dylan said.

  As the receptionist ushered the man into his outer office, it crossed Hunter’s mind that if Hollywood ever went looking for someone to cast in the role of a rising player in the high-stakes world of international diplomacy, James Van Horn would be perfect for the part. His hundred-dollar haircut and cashmere coat suggested the family wealth Hunter knew had made him a legendary undergrad at Princeton. The British accent he tended to affect was a reminder of his days at Oxford, and his shoes—wing tips, for God’s sake—were far more appropriate for walking the marbled halls of the State Department than wading through Castle Mountain’s snowdrifts.

  “I wasn’t expecting you.” Annoyed by the intrusion, and even more irritated that the man wasn’t the woman he’d been expecting for the past twenty-four hours, Hunter didn’t bother with pleasantries.

  “I suppose you wouldn’t believe that I was in the neighborhood and decided to drop in and see how the work was progressing.”

  “Not on a bet.”

  Without waiting for an invitation, he took off his coat, which he hung with precision on the coatrack, hitched up the legs of his wool suit slacks, sat down in a leather chair, crossed his legs, then ran his manicured fingers down a knife-sharp crease.

  “I had business in New England.” Shoulders clad in a subdued gray pinstripe shrugged. “You weren’t that far out of my way.”

  It was a lie and both men knew it. Hunter waited him out.

  “So, are the rumors true?” Van Horn eventually asked.

  “Which rumors are you referring to?”

  “The ones circulating around Washington that you’re on the verge of finalizing the project.”

  The project in question was an offshoot of the gene studies Hunter had been doing when George Cassidy had gotten him kicked off the MIT project. Simply put, he’d created a program in which he detailed the political and economic history of a region, plugged in sociological factors past and present, along with a genetic profile of the inhabitants obtained from DNA studies, then ran them through the computer. With the collected data, the program, in theory, was then able to predict how any given population would respond under various circumstances.

  There was another, darker side to his research that Hunter fully intended to keep under wraps. If the detailed DNA model he’d created fell into the wrong hands, it could theoretically be used to clone a genetically perfected warrior lacking in any social or moral conscience. An assassin class.

  While he disliked working with bureaucrats, Hunter wasn’t in any position to turn down much-needed funds. He’d always eschewed the money-raising circuit, but after that incident in Bosnia that had cost him half his face and a hand, he figured hostesses wouldn’t exactly consider him a plus at their fund-raising dinners or cocktail parties.

  His current work was being funded by both the State and Defense Departments, Defense wanting the data in order to predict wars and to discover how to map winning battle strategies, while State was seeking to defuse international skirmishes before they blew up into full-scale wars.

  “I still have some work to do,” he said obliquely. “The Middle East, for example, is still problematic.”

  They also didn’t like him in that part of the world. He’d been shot at more times than he cared to think about during his stay in the region. And although he liked most of the population personally, he’d been warned on more than one occasion that he was considered a traitor for including various warring factions into his model. The trouble with that was that in too many parts of the world, people viewed as traitors tended to disappear. Or get blown up.

  Hunter hoped like hell that he wouldn’t have to return to Lebanon anytime soon. Beirut might have once been the Paris of the region, but there were still neighborhoods that could only be described as shooting galleries.

  Then there was Kosovo. Hunter sighed. Good luck keeping any negotiated peace in that place. And Bosnia. And Afghanistan. The list went on and on, and while he had uncharacteristically high hopes for the project, Hunter was also pragmatic enough to know that trying to halt any outbreaks of violence around the world was akin to attempting to plug a hole in Hoover Dam with a finger.

  “The powers that be are getting impatient,” Van Horn warned.

  “Tough. The work will be done when it’s done. And not a minute before.”

  “They have to justify the expenditures to the budget committee. I doubt you’d enjoy being the target of a congressional investigation.”

  Hunter lifted a brow. “Is that a threat?”

  “Merely an observation.”

  “My budget is chicken feed compared to the bucks you guys spend. Hell, the price of your expense account lunches at all those high-priced trendy Washington restaurants alone could fund me for another six months.

  “And if there do happen to be any mumblings about expenditures up on the Hill, then it’s your job to quiet them. You guys aren’t the only game in town, you know.”

  A scowl darkened Van Horn’s classically handsome WASP face. “Then the other rumor about you meeting with the Russians is also true?”

  “I haven’t met with them.” And wouldn’t. But Hunter had perversely enjoyed the momentary panic he’d viewed in Van Horn’s eyes. “But I have received some inquiries regarding certain aspects of the project.”

  “You realize that sharing information with them—especially information that’s been classified—could get you arrested for treason.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  Van Horn gave him another hard look, as if trying to determine whether or not Hunter was jerking his chain. Which, of course, he was. It was one of the few side benefits of working with bureaucrats. They were so marvelously predictable. And competitive.

  “There’s something else.” Van Horn had begun working that crease again, Hunter noted.

  “I rather suspected there might be.” After all, a blizzard had been predicted and Hunter didn’t figure the guy had come all the way to Castle Mountain to sip hot toddies beside a roaring fire at the Gray Gull inn and watch the winter wonderland occurring outside the lace-curtained windows.

  “I heard from one of my sources at the CIA that you’re on a terrorist hit list.”

  “Why don’t you tell me something I don’t know?”

  “I just wanted to pass the warning along.”

  “Consider it passed.” Hunter stood up, effectively ending what had turned out to be little more than a fishing expedition. “And now that I’ve been properly warned about Congress and terrorists, I’m sure you won’t mind if I return to work. After all,” he said as he plucked the soft cashmere coat from the rack and held it out to James Van Horn, “as you’ve pointed out on so many other visits, time is money.”

  With that he ushered the dapper diplomat out the door. Then, giving up on getting any work done when he couldn’t keep his mind off the damn clock, he locked the door to his inner office, set the secret code on the security system, then headed home to wait for Gillian’s arrival.

  FIVE DAYS AFTER her father’s incredible revelation, Gillian was sitting in the back of a car crawling its way up the cliff leading out of the quaint village that could be used as a movie set of a late-nineteenth century New England fishing village. The narrow gravel road, which was currently packed with crunchy snow, would soon become impassable for days during winter storms. Which was, Gillian thought, probably just the way Hunter liked it.