Falling Awake(12)
Author: Jayne Ann Krentz

“I didn’t know what else to do. I was desperate.” He banged the first ball on the desk toy so hard the steel spheres crashed into one another. “Look, Beth, I didn’t know there was a rule against sleeping with someone else once your wife has gone to a lawyer. That sounded like the end to me. Thought we had split up for good. I wasn’t thinking straight.”

“You thought it was okay to have an affair with Maureen Sage just because I’d consulted a lawyer?”

“Like I said, I thought it was really the end for us that time. I was trying to drown my sorrows with Maureen, so to speak. It was a mistake, okay?”

Beth fell silent. He dared to hope.

“Go call Ellis,” she said finally. “I’ve got a full schedule this morning. I’ll talk to you later.”

She ended the connection.

He sat there for a while, glumly gazing through the window that separated his office from the main lab and work areas. On the other side of the glass two agents were meeting with a couple of white-coated members of the research staff. Elsewhere people were busy at their computers. There was an air of purposeful activity about the place. Important work was being done. Crimes were being solved. Lives were being saved. Cutting-edge science was happening.

His empire, Jack thought. And he had built it with Beth’s help. If he didn’t get her back, the rest of it would cease to be important.

He hit the phone memory code that would connect him with Ellis.

4

SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA

we’ve got a very big problem,” Jack Lawson announced from the other end of the phone. “Martin Belvedere dropped dead of a heart attack several days ago. His son has taken over the Center for Sleep Research. One of his first official acts was to fire Isabel Wright. She’s gone.”

The news hit Ellis with the shock of a small earthquake. Okay, he thought, get a grip here. This isn’t the end of life on earth as we know it. But it was a hell of a jolt.

Tango Dancer was gone. He cradled the phone between ear and shoulder and set the frying pan down on the stove with such force that the two frozen soy sausages he had been about to cook bounced a couple of times from the impact.

“Everything okay there?” Lawson asked with casual concern. “Sounded like something fell on that end.”

“Just put a pan on the stove.” He was careful not to allow any indication of his reaction to the news show in his voice. Lawson was already worried enough about his mental state as it was. “It’s lunchtime out here in California, remember?”

“Yeah, sure,” Lawson said vaguely. “Forgot.”

Lawson was fifty-seven, wiry and compact, with a completely bald head, a gravelly voice and the haggard, drawn features associated with lifelong smokers and marathon runners, although he did not smoke and never moved any faster than absolutely necessary. Ellis thought about him sitting in his cluttered office deep in the bowels of Frey-Salter, several time zones away in North Carolina.

“That’s because you have no life outside Frey-Salter,” Ellis said. Ignoring the soy sausages, he leaned against the counter and looked at the photo he had attached to the door of the refrigerator. “Time is meaningless to you.”

Lawson snorted. “Time is everything to me. That’s why I’m calling you. I want you to find Isabel Wright and bring her into Frey-Salter. I’ve been thinking about this for a while but there was no reason to rush into such a move. Things were working just fine the way they were. But with old man Belvedere gone—”

“Hang on, let’s start at the beginning. Belvedere’s dead?”

“Yeah. Several days ago.”

“And you just found out?”

“Haven’t had any reason to contact him for a couple of weeks.” There was a shrug in Lawson’s voice.

“Neither have I. Been busy with a new start-up project.” And with his ongoing research into an old problem, but he sure wasn’t going to mention that bit. He didn’t need any more of Lawson’s well-meant but really annoying lectures on the dangers of obsessing over the Vincent Scargill issue.

“As I was saying, the old man’s son, Randolph Belvedere, took over as director of the center the day after he buried his father,” Lawson continued.

“Didn’t know Belvedere had a son.”

“Beth looked into it. Turns out Belvedere and Randolph were what folks like to call ‘estranged’ for years. But the son was the old man’s only heir. He got everything, including the center.”

Beth Mapstone would know, Ellis thought. She owned Mapstone Investigations, a quasi-private security firm with affiliates in several states.

Beth was not only Lawson’s wife, she was his partner in every sense of the word. The pair had enjoyed, or endured, depending on your point of view, an on-again, off-again relationship for over thirty years. At the moment, they were off-again. But when it came to their professional relationship, they were always a team.

The formal relationship between Mapstone Investigations and Frey-Salter was officially that of corporate security firm and corporate client. In reality, however, Mapstone served as both an investigative arm for Lawson’s secret agency and a convenient cover for his agents.

“What does Randolph Belvedere think of his father’s theories of Level Five dreaming?” Ellis asked.

“Thinks they’re pure crap, of course. He’s into sleep research, though. Got big plans for the center. Needless to say, none of those plans involve Isabel Wright.”

“But you have plans for her.”

“I do, indeed,” Lawson said fervently. “I want her right here where I can keep an eye on her.”

“What did you mean when you said she was gone?”

“Gave notice to the manager of the apartment complex where she was living out there in LA, packed up her belongings and took off.”

“I assume this phone call is not because you can’t locate Isabel Wright.”

“Hell, no. Beth found her right away. That’s not the problem. The problem is convincing her to come back here to Raleigh to work at Frey-Salter. I don’t want to take a chance on losing her to some other outfit.”

“That’s where I come in, I take it?”

“I’m counting on you to sell her on the idea of working directly for me.”

“Why would I want to do that?”

“That hurts, Ellis. That cuts real deep. Our association may have started out on a business footing, but I like to think that we did the macho male bonding thing after you came to work for me.”