other end of the line, Jessica drew a total blank. Lunch date? She didn’t remember making a lunch date with Arlen. “I was just going to—”
“I can change the time if that’ll make it easier for you to meet me,” he said smoothly. “Noon instead of one o’clock? Would that be better?”
“I—I guess.” Flabbergasted, she didn’t know what else to say.
“Good! I’ll pick you up out front at noon, then. I’m sorry I can’t talk, but you know how it is at work. I’m already late for a meeting. See you at noon.”
At her own desk on the other side of town, Jessica listened to the hum of the empty phone line as she looked down into the safe drawer. The document was back, all right, stuffed down beneath the other folders so that it lay on the bottom of the drawer. If Arlen hadn’t predicted it, she would probably be thinking she was losing her mind. There was no way she could have missed it in her search yesterday, and yet she would have wondered anyway.
And for some reason Arlen didn’t want to discuss the matter over the phone while she was at work. At least, that was the only conclusion she could draw from their crazy conversation. But she’d wanted to ask him what to do, because it had occurred to her that the red folder or the pages of the document might have fingerprints on them. If she called security first, they would probably send someone up to check things out and ruin all the prints. If there were any.
Troubled, she closed the safe and sat back in her chair. Well, she could wait until after lunch to tell security she had the document. It would make her look even dippier, but what the heck. There was evidently no way she was going to come out of this looking good.
In the meantime, she had a great deal of work still to accomplish on her design for this new software project.
And someone had been in her safe again last night. The idea sent chills racing up and down her spine. In that safe were highly classified details about the Western world’s electronic countermeasures systems. There were threat estimates and survivability estimates, all of which would be very useful to America’s enemies.
In defense work, there were three main levels of classification. Confidential, the lowest, was given to information that could cause serious damage to national security if it fell into the wrong hands. Secret, the next highest, was given to information that could cause grave damage. Those were the levels in her safe. Quite a serious problem, to have someone rummaging around in those documents.
But what if that someone also had access to the guarded vault downstairs? That was where the Top Secret documents were kept, documents that by definition could cause exceptionally grave damage to national security, or even provoke war. It was downright scary even to think about.
And whoever had the combination to her safe probably did have access to the vault, because that was where copies of the combinations for every safe in the building were kept. Somehow this person must have gotten to that copy. And that meant everything in the building was open to him.
It was not yet nine in the morning, but Jessica found herself rubbing her temples to ease a growing throb. Take some aspirin and forget it, Jess, she told herself. Just focus your mind on work.
“Hey, Jessica.” Bob Harrow stood in her office door, looking his usual seedy self, with his hair standing up wildly and a stain of some kind on the front of his T-shirt. “Did you finish your part of the design yet?” As project director, Bob had the unenviable task of trying to keep the team on track.
“Not yet, Bob. Sorry. Yesterday blew me out of the water.”
Bob looked sympathetic. “You don’t look any too great this morning, kiddo. Don’t beat yourself over the head about it, Jessica. You won’t be the first programmer up here who’s spaced something out and found it two days later. Why do you think they put the digital locks on the door? I keep waiting for them to come up with retina identification equipment so they don’t have to worry about one of us scribbling the door code on our pant leg or something.”
But Jessica’s mind caught on something he said. “You mean other people have mislaid things up here? When did that happen?”
“It happens all the time.” Bob shrugged. “Well, not every day, but it was…oh, maybe a month ago that Jerry couldn’t find some report or other on some NATO test. It turned up under a stack of papers on his desk the next day. If you ask me, the only mistake you made was telling security about it. Those guys are completely useless. Did they find it for you? Nope. They just drove you crazy, and yet they’re perfectly convinced it’ll turn up today or tomorrow under some papers somewhere. And it will, Jessica. Believe me. Quit worrying about it.”
Jessica summoned a smile. “You wouldn’t really write the door code on your jeans leg, would you?”
“Well, I wouldn’t, but it wouldn’t surprise me if Mike or Carl did something stupid like that. I swear, neither one of them can think except in assembly language. Well, don’t let me keep you from working. And, Jessica, if this has still got you upset, don’t worry about the design. We’ve got a little slack and can wait a little longer.”
Alone again, Jessica took two aspirin and forced her attention to her work. Work, she’d discovered a long time ago, was solace.
Arlen pulled his car up under the overhang in front of MTI’s main entrance to wait for Jessica. He left the engine running and the defroster blowing to keep the windows clear. The day had turned unexpectedly cold and miserably wet. He was glad he had an old umbrella in the backseat, because he suspected Jessica had probably misjudged the weather this morning just as he had.
Jessica. He’d been thinking about her a little too often for his own peace of mind. Such a severe little mouse of a woman, he told himself, and then remembered the unusual brilliance of her brown eyes and the soft shell-pink of her full lips. Or the fact that her loosely cut gray slacks and high-necked white blouse had hinted at a figure that was better than average.
Well, better than average if you liked women with some meat on them, Arlen thought wryly. He guessed he did, to judge by his reaction to the lady. It hadn’t been something he’d really thought about before.
He’d dated Lucy all the way through high school, over her family’s ceaseless objections, and married her a week after graduation. Then had come an eighteen-month separation while he went to Desert Storm with the marines. He’d returned from the Middle East with a couple of medals to rejoin his bride and meet his eleven-month-old daughter, Melanie. And nine months after that, Andrew had been born. Two years later, he was out of the marines and in college on the GI Bill, both him and Lucy working to support the kids. The hard times had paid off in a big way when he fulfilled his life’s dream of joining the FBI.
Sighing, he looked back with a kind of nostalgic sadness. How young and invulnerable he and Lucy had been then, both of them sure that the hard times were over. Life had a hell of a way of grinding out the smugness of youth.
Exiting the building through the electronically controlled glass doors, Jessica caught sight of Arlen just moments before he spied her. In that instant she thought he looked sad. Alone. The way she felt inside all too often. Did she look like that to others?
But he smiled as he climbed out of the car and came around to open the door for her. That lopsided smile of his was infectious, she realized as she felt her own lips stretch and lift in response. Today he wore another, darker, gray wool suit, and he once again looked very much like the FBI agents of her imaginings. Very neat, very correct. Very tall and very imposing. Strange, nervous little tickles danced through her stomach.
