PhD Protector Read online

  She stared at his back for a long while, then stood and walked to the window. He could focus on work all he wanted, but she was going to focus on finding a way out of here.

  In different circumstances, she might have enjoyed the view out this window. The cabin sat on a slight rise at the edge of a valley. Feathery junipers and piñon pines dotted the rocky ground amid a thick blanket of snow. A few hundred yards beyond the cabin the land fell away in a steep precipice. Across from this gorge rose red rock mountains, the peaks cloaked in white, the setting sun painting the sky in brilliant pinks and golds. How ironic that such a peaceful-seeming place could be the source of potentially great destruction.

  A cloud of white off in the distance, moving in their direction, caught her attention. “I think someone’s coming,” she said.

  Mark was by her side within seconds. “That looks like Duane’s entourage,” he said, as three black Humvees slowly made their way up the narrow, rutted track. A guard who must have been seated on the other side of the door rose and walked to the edge of the narrow porch, an automatic rifle cradled in his arms. When the vehicles stopped in front of the cabin, the guard snapped off a salute.

  Erin didn’t even realize she had backed away from the window until she bumped into Mark. He rested one hand on her shoulder, steadying her, and she fought the urge to lean into him. She didn’t even know the man, and didn’t fully trust him, yet she felt safer with him than with any of those on the other side of the door.

  Men piled out of the first and third vehicles, all dressed in camo and bristling with weapons. One man unpacked a wheelchair and set it up next to the middle vehicle, while another man opened the back door of this Hummer, leaned in and lifted out Duane Braeswood.

  Mark sucked in his breath. “Is that really Duane?” he asked. “What happened to him?”

  Instead of camo, Duane wore a black suit and turtleneck. His thin body was twisted and hunched, and tubes trailed from his nostrils to an oxygen tank that one of his goons hooked to the back of the wheelchair.

  “You didn’t know?” She had been shocked, too, the first time she saw this sick, diminished version of her stepfather. But he was diminished in physical stature only. His spirit had struck her as stronger than ever.

  “I haven’t seen him in almost a year,” Mark said.

  “Don’t let his appearance fool you. He isn’t weak.” Despite his disability, the man in the wheelchair radiated power, with every man out there focused on him.

  The group headed for the cabin, two of the men lifting the wheelchair, with Duane in it, onto the porch. Mark pulled Erin into the middle of the room as locks snicked and the door opened.

  She forced herself to look at her stepfather, to meet the blue eyes that burned feverishly in his withered face. “Erin, dear.” The sound of her name on his lips made her flinch. “Your mother sends her greetings.”

  She bit back a curse, aware of the guards looming on either side of him. She had found out the hard way what they thought of any slur on the man they viewed almost as a religious figure. “How is my mother?” she asked, because she wanted desperately to know, though she knew Duane would tell her the truth only if it suited him.

  “Helen is fine.” He rolled his chair toward the lab. “Renfro!” The strident voice seemed incongruous coming from such a weakened frame. “What progress have you made?”

  Mark walked to the workbench, unhurried, his hands in the pockets of his lab coat, the picture of the singularly focused genius who couldn’t be bothered to worry about anything outside of his work. “I’ve almost perfected the refining process,” he said. “And I’m accumulating the quantity of uranium I’ll need for the project.”

  “You need to finish within a week,” Duane said.

  Mark’s expression didn’t change. If anything, he looked even more bored, eyes hooded, his expression guarded. “I can’t promise that. The process takes as long as it takes. I can’t change physical laws.”

  Erin didn’t see any signal from Duane, but he must have given one. Without warning, two men seized her arms, while a third forced her head back.

  “Leave her alone!” Mark shouted, all semblance of boredom vanished, but the fourth guard held him back.

  Erin tried to struggle, terrified her captors intended to cut her throat. But the two men who held her remained immobile, impervious to her kicks and shouts. A third man wrapped something hard and cold around her throat. She heard a click, and all three men suddenly released her.

  “I wouldn’t make any sudden movements if I were you, Erin.” Duane’s voice had its usual smooth cadence. “The mechanism in your new necklace is fairly sensitive.”

  The three goons stepped back and Erin grabbed at her throat, grasping the thick metal collar now fastened there. The edges chafed her skin and the weight of it dragged at her. “What have you done to me?” she demanded.

  “You’re wearing an explosive device,” Duane said, as calmly as if he had been commenting on the weather. “It has a timer, and is set to go off exactly one week from today.” He turned to Mark. “You deliver the product as promised by then and we will remove the collar.”

  “Why such a hurry now?” Mark asked. “You’ve waited all these months, why not a few more to make sure things are done correctly?”

  “I’m done with waiting.” Duane’s voice was strident, his face red with strain. “You will have the device for me in a week.”

  “And if I don’t?”

  “Then the bomb goes off and you both die.”

  Chapter Three

  Mark stared at the man in the wheelchair. The eyes that looked back at him were as cold and untroubled as a mountain lake. Erin had been right—whatever physical ailment had reduced Duane to a husk of his former self, it hadn’t diminished his madness. A man with eyes like that might very well kill his own stepdaughter just to make a point. But delivering what Duane wanted within a week—or even within a year—was impossible. Mark chose his words carefully, wary of upsetting his kidnapper more. “Mr. Braeswood, building a...an apparatus such as you require isn’t like baking a cake. I can’t just throw a bunch of ingredients together and come up with a viable product. I need time and—”

  “You’ve had time,” Braeswood snapped. “If I don’t have what I want in one week, you both die.”

  And even if I could deliver your bomb, we would still die, Mark thought. Duane wouldn’t leave any witnesses to his plans. “You’re asking for the impossible,” he said.

  “You’ll have your bomb. Next week!” Despite the constricting collar Erin turned her head to face Braeswood. “Mark is being a typical scientist—overly cautious. He was telling me earlier that he’s almost ready to assemble it. With both of us working together I know we can meet your deadline.”

  “Erin.” Mark sent her a warning look.

  Her gaze burned into him, pleading with him to go along with her lie. Her terror swamped him. Maybe he would feel the same if he had a bomb at his throat. “Sure,” he said, dropping his gaze to the floor. “There’s still some work I need to do...with the plutonium-catalyst ratios.” There was no such thing, but Mark had learned that Braeswood appreciated it when he threw around scientific jargon.

  “Excellent.” Braeswood’s voice sounded much stronger than he looked. Floorboards creaked as he turned his chair and rolled back to the door. “I’ll see you next week, then.”

  “You can’t just leave me like this!” Erin’s voice rose, on the edge of panic.

  “So impatient.” Braeswood regarded her coolly. “You were that way as a child, too, never content to wait for a reward, no matter how hard I tried to teach you. I would have hoped that maturity would have curbed that unfortunate character trait, but I see it has not. This should be a good lesson for you.” He nodded to his henchmen and one opened the door while two others hoisted the chair.

 
The locks snapped into place again after the door closed behind the entourage. Car doors slammed, engines growled and the pop of tires on gravel gradually faded away.

  Erin sank into one of the kitchen chairs, as if her legs would no longer support her, her hands clutching the collar. “I can’t believe this is happening,” she moaned.

  Mark’s hands knotted into fists and his heart hammered, emotion rocking him back on his heels. He recognized rage—something he hadn’t felt, something he hadn’t allowed himself to feel, in months. The intensity of the feelings caught him off guard. He was furious with Braeswood and his men, but also with himself. Why hadn’t he done something to stop them? Why hadn’t he protected Erin? And what was he going to do to help her now? He may have given up on life, but she deserved to live.

  He pulled his hands from his pockets and moved to her side. “Can I take a look at the collar?” he asked.

  She dropped her hands to her lap and looked up at him. “Do you know anything about disarming bombs?”

  “Not a thing, unfortunately.” He studied the collar, which was gold colored—plated, he imagined, with platinum or aluminum or some other sturdier alloy beneath. About three inches wide, it fastened at the back with a locking mechanism similar to a seat belt, the halves fitting tightly together. The explosive device sat front and center, the size of a pack of playing cards, comprised of wires and button batteries and a glob of yellowish plastic he suspected was the explosive. Who had made this horrible yet ingenious device for Duane? Did he have a combination jeweler-explosives expert in the ranks of his followers? Or was he holding another man prisoner, compelling him by threat or force to do Duane’s malevolent bidding?

  Mark brushed his fingers along the sides of the collar, the hot flutter of Erin’s pulse beneath his fingertips sending a jolt of awareness through him. The contrast of her silken flesh with the unyielding metal made her seem all the more fragile and out of place here—like finding a lily blooming in the middle of a minefield.

  “Can you cut it off?” she asked.

  “I don’t think we can risk it,” he said. “It looks as if there are wires embedded in the metal and running all the way around. My guess is if we sever one of those the bomb would go off.”

  She swallowed hard, her eyes as big and dark as a terrified deer’s. “What are we going to do?”

  He looked away, at the lab equipment arranged neatly on the workbench, at the sparse furnishings and barred windows of the place that had been his prison for the past fourteen months. “We need to get out of here,” he said. “We need to get you to someplace with people who know how to disarm something like this.” The FBI had experts who could deal with this kind of thing. If he could get to Luke, his brother would know what to do.

  “How are we going to get away?” she asked.

  If he knew that, he would have left months ago. Escaping from the cabin might not even be the most difficult challenge. Once they were free, they would have to cross miles of wilderness in freezing weather before they could even reach a road, or a telephone they could use to summon help. “I don’t know.” He dropped into the chair across from her. “I tried everything I could think of when I first got here. I was always caught.” Caught and punished. He closed his eyes. He understood now that it wasn’t merely confinement that wore down prisoners—it was the utter helplessness, the loss of control over even the simplest aspects of life.

  “How many guards are there?” she asked.

  “Two at a time—one on the front door and one on the back. They work eight-hour shifts, so that means six men a day, plus two others that rotate in and out when one of the others needs to take a day off. They’re armed with semiautomatic rifles and unlike the men in books and movies, they don’t fall asleep or get distracted.” He had spent many hours in the early days of his captivity studying his guards and trying to learn their patterns and spot any weaknesses. Unfortunately, he hadn’t identified any of the latter.

  “So Duane has eight men stationed somewhere near here, but only two of them are up here at a time,” she said. “There are two of us now. That evens the odds.” She sounded stronger, and some of the color had returned to her face.

  “Except we’re not armed,” he said. “And where do we go when we do get out of here? We’re miles from any major road, we don’t have a map and, in case you haven’t noticed, there’s snow out there.”

  “I’d rather freeze to death in the mountains than sit here waiting to be blown up.”

  Until she showed up, Mark would have opted for sitting. Truth was, he had given up months ago. Without his wife, without his daughter or his work, he had nothing to live for. But Erin was young. Not that much younger than him in terms of years, but she was so full of life. She had every reason to avoid death.

  “Why is Duane doing all this now?” he asked. “Why lure you back to him after years away? Why demand a bomb in a week after I’ve been working on it over a year? He hasn’t shown any sign of impatience with the project before now.”

  “Maybe he’s tired of paying for all the man power needed to keep you up here,” she said.

  “He hasn’t balked at paying the money before. Has something happened to make him worried about finances?”

  She shook her head. “Duane’s grandfather was some kind of robber baron who made a killing in insurance in the twenties. Apparently, even the Depression didn’t touch his fortune. His father parlayed those millions into billions with a string of tech companies. Duane apparently inherited their knack for business and invested in everything from highways to high tech to fund his more nefarious activities—the actual source of the money all neatly hidden in various shell companies and shadow corporations. Add to that the donations he receives from people who support his cause and he’s got an endless supply of bucks. All this—” she swept her hand around the lab “—probably only qualifies as a footnote on a spreadsheet somewhere.”

  “If it’s not money, what else is driving him?” Mark asked. “Has something happened on the world scene to make him think now is the best time to strike? I haven’t heard a news report in the last year, so we could be ruled by Martians right now and I wouldn’t know it.” He’d been like a castaway on a deserted island. He had told himself he didn’t miss knowing what was going on in the rest of the world, but now that Erin was with him, he fought the urge to bombard her with questions: Who was president of Russia these days? What was the dollar worth? What was the hottest tech gadget? Who was hosting the next Olympic Games? Who’d won the World Series?

  But he had held back, and now, with that horrible collar around her neck, didn’t seem the time to worry about trivialities.

  “There’s nothing much new in the world situation that would have set him off,” she said. “Though maybe his accident has him thinking about his mortality, and that’s given him this sense of urgency.”

  “What kind of accident?” Mark asked. “I’ll admit I was shocked by his appearance this afternoon—I haven’t seen him in months. I thought maybe he had cancer or something.”

  “I’m not sure what is wrong with him, but I don’t think it’s cancer,” she said. “I only heard bits and pieces of the story from my mom or from things people said when they didn’t know I was listening. It’s something to do with the FBI—he was injured when they tried to capture him or something like that. It’s one of the reasons he hates them so much.”

  “Did you overhear anything else interesting, about Duane or his plans?”

  “There was some rumor about a power struggle between Duane and his second in command, a man named Roland Chambers. He lived with us for a while when I was a teenager and he practically worshipped Duane, so I don’t know how much truth there was to the rumors that he was trying to take over after Duane was injured. But Roland was killed last month, so Duane doesn’t have to worry about him anymore.”

  “So no money problems,
no political upheaval and no rival.” Mark ticked off the possible reasons for Duane’s sudden change of plans. “Maybe you’re right and it is a mortality thing. I guess it doesn’t matter why he’s putting the pressure on us, only that he is.”

  “We’ve got to find a way out of here,” she said.

  “If you think of a plan, I’ll try it.”

  She surprised him once more by leaning over and gripping his hand. “We’ll think of something,” she said.

  Her conviction both stunned and moved him. A wave of emotion—regret, longing, even hope—welled up in him, so strong he had to look away for fear of betraying his weakness. Five hours ago he had been contemplating ways to end his life. Now, thanks to Erin, he was desperate to hang on to all the time he had left—to not only survive, but to live.

  * * *

  THE COLLAR WASN’T tight enough to choke her, Erin reminded herself, fighting the panic that lurked at the very edge of consciousness. But the thick metal band felt like Duane’s hands around her throat, threatening to squeeze the life from her.

  Mark had returned to his workbench, bending over his experiments as if the previous hour hadn’t happened. She supposed his work was his escape, the way some people lost themselves in television shows or books. But she had no escape, only a hyperawareness of the weight around her throat and the fear that a wrong move could set off the bomb that would tear her to pieces. She had lived with fear so long she thought she had grown accustomed to it, but Duane had found a way to ratchet up the terror until it was almost unbearable.

  She replayed every conversation she had had with him since she had returned to his sphere of influence—not so much conversations as arguments and debates, often exchanged at top volume while her mother hovered nearby, a diminutive referee prepared to throw herself between the opponents should they come to blows.

  Erin’s refusal to follow Duane’s dictates or believe in his worldview had always annoyed and even angered her stepfather. As a teen, his attitude had only egged her on. As an adult, she saw a hatred she hadn’t noticed before, lurking beneath the surface ranting. Maybe this whole charade with the kidnapping and the collar was an elaborate revenge plot. Maybe she was the primary target of Duane’s latest ultimatum, not Mark and his bomb-building assignment. He was collateral damage incurred along the way.