Protecting his Witness (HERO Force Book 9)

  Protecting his Witness

  A HERO Force Novel

  Amy Gamet

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  1

  Why can’t snow boots and sweat pants be sexy?

  Summer Daniels sighed as she carefully placed her high heels on the perforated steel stair treads, climbing her way to the office overlooking the testing floor of Daniels Aerospace.

  She cursed her misguided sense of vanity and her determination to look pretty today, having been depressed by the frump monster who'd stared back in the mirror this morning. But she was an engineer and a chemist—damn it—not a fashion model, and she wasn't kidding anyone in this outfit.

  She’d been thinking too much about her appearance lately. Men had never hit on her often, but sometime between age thirty and thirty-five, not often had changed to rarely, forcing her out of her comfort zone, quite literally. She’d stopped shopping in the men’s department and even bought herself a box of blonde hair dye, though she hadn’t had the balls to use it. And while there’d been a definite uptick in male attention, she wasn’t attracting anybody she actually wanted to date.

  Her heel stuck in a metal slit and she tripped, the sawtooth edge of the next tread digging into her shin as a cool breeze touched the backs of her thighs.

  “Shit.”

  At least most of the employees had left for the day and she wasn’t flashing ass to the entire company. They would never let her hear the end of that one. She stood, yanking her heel from the offending step, tugged her skirt back down, and climbed the remaining stairs to the office door.

  Her father was still here, sitting in his captain’s chair and facing the wide windows overlooking the large room. He’d promised to head home hours earlier, and she bit back her annoyance. He was just as excited as she was, and she couldn’t blame him for that.

  At seventy-four, he did too much, refusing to be sidelined by the blood-clotting disorder he’d been diagnosed with last year after an episode that could have killed him. He insisted on running the company that bore his name for as long as possible, and while she wanted him to be happy, she’d much prefer he play golf and take naps in the afternoon. Stress riled up his immune system, which aggravated his disease.

  She moved beside him and kissed his cheek, his familiar cologne tickling her nose. “Tell me you took your pills.”

  He grumbled. “Of course I did. You reminded me three times.”

  “Did you take them on time?”

  “Yes, even though you left them in the glove compartment and I had to traverse the damn Arctic Circle to get them.”

  “You should have brought them inside. I don’t think they should get cold.”

  He lifted one eyebrow. “They were well insulated.”

  “It’s four degrees outside.”

  He sighed. “I’m not going to die because my pills were cold.”

  “So you hope.” She wondered again if it was time for a nurse to help him full-time, though she’d yet to mention the idea.

  “I’ve had it with this polar vortex nonsense. We should use Jacques’ big fan to blow this cold air at the companies that continue to use CFCs. Freeze them right out of business, the bastards.”

  She smiled at the image. The chief engineer’s fan was nearly twenty feet wide. “The cold snap is supposed to last another week, and we’re getting a storm on Friday.”

  “Fabulous.” He sighed. “Did you stop and see how he’s doing down there?”

  She looked to the distant part of the massive room where Jacques de Marquis, their chief engineer and her father’s old friend from Boeing, was putting Alloy 531 through the paces. She was trying desperately not to count their chickens despite the large number of eggs about to hatch. “Good. He’s like a kid on Christmas Eve. He won’t stop talking.”

  There was a nervous energy in the air these last few weeks. So much of what they did was theoretical—spending days, weeks, even months working on a project before it came to fruition. This was the payoff.

  The tests had already been going on for more than two months, failure tests that literally waited for the material to wear out, but three days ago they’d passed the threshold of sustained heat resistance of any other alloy in use in the aerospace industry to date. Every moment Alloy 531 withstood the stresses was another moment of victory and future financial gain, and she suspected they needed the money more than her father would admit.

  The government contracts that had been the bread and butter of their client base had suffered in the last generation as funding for space exploration dwindled. They’d refocused their vision on the high-end commercial aircraft industry, but they were struggling to innovate in a field already populated by established brands. If Alloy 531 performed in testing as well as she believed it would, Daniels would finally have the foothold they’d been struggling to secure for a decade.

  From a distance, the oscillating friction accelerator in the corner of the testing floor looked like a small-scale carnival ride, with three steel branches coming off a central trunk and metal spheres the size of bicycles rotating around each limb. But up close, it was an intricate assembly of the different metals, extensive heat shielding, and rays of tightly focused light energy, and Summer stared at it like a mother might watch her child on a carousel.

  "I can't find my damn papers,” he grumbled behind her. “I know I put them here someplace."

  “What are you looking for?"

  "The data from the shielding test. It was here this morning, or else I'm losing my damn mind."

  She frowned. Over the last year, he’d sometimes been confused, failing to understand the basic properties of the alloy she’d developed or the testing parameters she’d designed. Each time, she’d blamed it on something minor. He was tired. He’d misheard. He’d forgotten something that was easier for her to remember. But all totaled, they added up to a growing concern, and she was worried.

  He was the only family she had left. Her brother died in Afghanistan and her mother a year later from pancreatic cancer. Now her father’s health was slipping away, and she would do whatever she could to stop it.

  She pushed the thought out of her mind, combing through paperwork in an attempt to help him find what he was looking for, instead seeing only detritus and seemingly random office files. A newspaper sat open and folded, the headline reading, "Navy SEALs for Hire.” She jerked her hand back. Her brother, Edward, had been a SEAL, the unexpected mention of the elite group the equivalent of reaching into a laundry basket and stabbing your finger on a pin. “What’s this, Dad?"

  “That’s great, isn’t it? A group of retired Navy SEALs started a business in the city.”

  “Just what we need.” Her eyes skated over the article. "HERO Force. ‘The Hands-on Engagement and Reconnaissance Operations team.’” A deprecating laugh rose from her throat. “Talk about a God complex."

  "You should read it. Those men have a real sense of purpose, bringing their skills to people who need them."

  She clenched her jaw, tossing the paper aside. “No thanks. You want some dinner?”

  “Jacques and I went to The Distillery for chicken wings.”

  She rolled her eyes. “You know you're not supposed to be eating that stuff.”

  "Why? Because it will kill me? If I'm one chicken wing away from death, take me now.”

  She sat down in a smaller version of her father’s chair. “The titanium failed at eighteen hundred hours, as expected. Alloy 477 made it just past twenty-five hundred before it failed. But 531 is holding its own." She didn’t need to consult her notes to remember the numbers. She was so damn proud.

  Alloy 477 was the current industry standar
d for heat resistance, and 531 was surpassing its performance with flying colors. She checked the clock on the wall behind her. “Twenty-eight hundred hours.”

  “Almost twenty-nine.” He eyed her, a smile in his stare. "We did it, you and me."

  "And Jacques and the rest of the team."

  “I shouldn’t even take credit. We all helped, yes, but the science was yours. The innovation."

  “You suggested using the brancium as a focusing agent. It never would have worked without that."

  They stared at the accelerator in silence for a long moment. “Why don’t you go on home?” she asked. “Get some sleep. I’ll hold down the fort tonight."

  “I think I might have to, as much as I’d like to stay.” He stood, getting slowly to his feet and grabbing his carved wooden cane. "Don't get old, Summer."

  He'd been saying that for as long as she could remember, easily back to when he was her age. "Too late.”

  He bent and kissed the top of her head. "Enjoy this moment. You’ve earned it.”

  “Thanks, Dad. Be careful on the steps.”

  She stayed where she was for several minutes after he left, staring at the newspaper across the room like it was a wasp waiting to sting her. She stood, resigned to the task at hand, and read the article from start to finish.

  Just words on a page.

  Just men in an office building in Manhattan.

  But the existence of the group of Navy SEALs a stone’s throw away from where she stood made her heart ache because her brother wasn’t one of them. Those men had survived their tours of duty and gone on to other things. They’d grown up. They’d lived.

  Edward had not.

  She reread the article, the men's names unfamiliar to her, and wondered if any of them had served with him or known him. But the SEALs used nicknames with each other, so even if one had been her brother’s best friend, she wouldn't recognize his name.

  Unless it was Wiseman.

  He was an explosives expert from Boston who didn’t have anyone to write to him while they were deployed.

  Wiseman’s jealous I get so many messages. Think you could write him one?

  A simple enough request. She’d been happy to do something to cheer up one of her brother’s friends, even though she was in grad school and up to her eyeballs teaching chemistry to undergrads. After all, it was only one email.

  So she’d blabbered on about her favorite sports team (the New York Knicks, even though she lived in New Jersey) and just how much it sucked to live in a dorm room at thirty, though she got it free for working at the university. She told him about her dissertation and her plan to work at her father’s aerospace engineering company when she graduated, then she thanked him sincerely for his service, hit send, and promptly forgot all about him.

  But he wrote her back the next day with a detailed explanation of how each player on the Celtics could whoop the ass of every other player on the Knicks, and how living in a dorm room at thirty sounded better than the apartment he’d had in Southie before joining the navy. It had a window that overlooked a bus stop between a porn shop and a church, and how he didn’t need cable because the bus stop was more than enough entertainment, especially after the porn shop closed at four in the morning and the first mass started at six.

  She closed her eyes. God, he’d made her laugh.

  An emergency siren sounded on the testing floor, slamming her attention back to the present. She whipped around, instantly on high alert. A quick glance at the panel in front of her told her Jacques had sounded the alarm, and indeed a red light flashed near the giant fan where he worked.

  She launched into emergency mode, racing from the room and hanging on tightly to the metal handrail to keep from falling as she hurried down the steps and jogged through machinery, coming up short when she nearly collided with a blond-haired man running in the opposite direction.

  She gaped. “You!” It was Steven Galbraith, an engineer she’d fired months before. “What the hell are you doing here?” He pushed her against a twenty-foot stainless-steel tank and kept on running, knocking the wind out of her and banging her head.

  She had to get to Jacques, suddenly sure Galbraith’s presence was the reason for the alarm. Had he interfered somehow in the alloy testing? “No, no, no…” she chanted, weaving through equipment, her ankle twisting painfully from those damn high heels. She gasped, reaching down reflexively to touch the angry tendons.

  A deafening explosion filled the space with light and sound, the blast wave knocking her to the ground. Debris hit her, tiny bits of metal and glass, smoke and acrid chemicals filling the air. She coughed, choking on the noxious mix as she stood. Multiple alarms blared, smoke and dust making it difficult to see.

  What the hell is happening?

  “Jacques!” She had to get to him. He was like family, her father’s best friend, her own godfather. She’d known him her whole life. She squinted against the smoke as she called his name, her hearing compromised from the explosion.

  She couldn’t get enough air. The smoke was too much. She dropped to the ground and continued on her hands and knees, crawling on debris. Her lungs burned so badly she considered turning around, but she couldn’t do that, couldn’t leave him here to die alone.

  When he came into view lying on the ground, she feared the worst and rushed to his side. There was blood on his head and to the side of his torso, spreading onto the concrete in a sickening pool. She sobbed, feeling for a pulse in his neck and finding nothing.

  He was already gone, and she feared she would be next.

  Her focus shifted from helping Jacques to surviving this scene. It was so hot, what was left of the alloy radiating heat. She pushed herself through the dense haze, desperate to get her bearings in the space that had been devastated by the blast. The smoke blocked the emergency lighting, no sight line to her office or the hallway beyond. Her need for fresh air was the only thing that mattered.

  I have to get out, or I’ll die.

  She found a wall and followed it, knowing it would eventually lead to an exit. But the going was slow and sharp pieces littered the ground, her shoes long since lost in the chaos. Finally, a metal threshold. A door. She pushed it open, taking a great gasp of frigid air.

  She pulled out her cell phone from her pocket, her hands shaking violently as she called 911. “Send help! There’s been an explosion!” She gave them the address. “I don’t know if there’s anyone else in the building.”

  “Help is on its way. Stay on the phone, ma’am.”

  She looked down at her legs, bloodied knees leading to bare feet sunk in several inches of snow. It should have hurt but it didn’t. She was in shock.

  “Jacques is dead,” she told the operator. “He’s the chief engineer.”

  “The emergency personnel will be there momentarily.”

  Thank God my father got out in time.

  The testing of Alloy 531 was ruined and she feared the extent of the damage to the building, but none of that compared to her grief. Galbraith had done this deliberately. Killed Jacques. Ruined her dreams and hammered the final nail in the coffin of her family’s company.

  Fat snowflakes blew on the howling wind and she realized she was shaking, the irony that she’d almost been cooked just minutes before not escaping her. The wind kicked up and she squinted against it, wiping away tears that fell from her eyes before they could freeze on her cheeks. “I’m cold.”

  “I know, sweetie. They’re on their way. Do you have any shelter?”

  She looked around. Her car was parked on the other side of the building, only deliveries coming in this way. Much too far to walk without shoes. “No.”

  “Keep moving. Try to keep warm.”

  She heard an engine in the distance and looked frantically around. A white van rounded the building and headed toward her. “There’s someone coming.” She waved her arms over her head. “Help!”

  Relief flooded through her when the van came her way, but it wasn’t slowing down as it got c
lose. Confusion turned to fear in a flash, and she dove behind a dumpster to avoid being hit, dropping her phone in the process.

  The van crashed into the side of the building and she moved to the driver’s window. “Are you okay?”

  Steven Galbraith turned to face her.

  She screamed. The van’s engine roared to life and it backed up, tires nearly running over her feet. She ran, her feet slipping in the snow. She heard sobbing, only vaguely aware the sounds came from her mouth. She nearly reached the dumpster as the van caught up to her.

  I am a witness. I saw him inside moments before the explosion, and he wants me dead.

  She lurched sideways, hurtling her body in a desperate attempt to survive, and the world went black.

  2

  Summer was dirty, her skin covered in chemicals and God knows what else from the explosion. The last nine hours were a blur of medical personnel and police. Her father arrived, and the only thing more difficult than accepting the night’s losses herself was watching him try to do the same.

  He’d lost so much in his life. They both had.

  So she’d held him and told him it would be all right, wondering when she’d become the caregiver and he the recipient, only knowing that now it was clearly the case. It was as if a card had been flipped, and she knew nothing would ever be the same for them again, the weight of it along with the horrors of the day threatening to sink her like Ophelia’s gown pulling her deeper into the lake.

  There was insurance. They could rebuild. But that would take time, and in her heart she feared the company had been dealt a death blow. She insisted her father go home, then a nurse helped her undress and shower before she fell into a dreamless sleep that lasted fifteen hours.

  “Do you have somewhere safe to go?” asked the weary-eyed middle-aged detective who was there when she awoke.

  She shook her head. There was no place safe, no bed where she could curl up and pretend she was protected. She swallowed against her sore throat. “No.”