Indispensable Party (Sasha McCandless Legal Thriller No. 4) (3 page)

Sasha cocked her head and looked
at him for a moment. Then, she shrugged and said, “I see.”

He knew what that look meant: she
was really saying ‘I see how it is. When my work comes first, you call me
emotionally stunted, but, when it’s your work, it’s a different story.’

Leo took both of her hands in
his. “Sasha, believe me, I don’t want to go. I’d much rather have dinner by the
fire and then beat you at Scrabble. But, it’s an emergency.”

She arched an eyebrow at him. “Did
I say anything, Connelly? Go. Drive safely.”

Before he could respond, she
extricated her hands from his, stood, and walked to the large window. She
wrapped her arms around herself, hugging the oversize sweater—or dress or whatever
she was wearing over leggings—tight against her body and stared out at the
water shimmering in the dark.

She looked so small and
vulnerable, even defenseless—although that was the last thing she was—that he
suddenly felt a desperate need not to leave her there alone, isolated in a
resort town off-season.

“Hey,” he said, trying to sound
casual, “why don’t you tag along?”

She pivoted from the window. “Why?”

He knew better than to say he was
worried about leaving her alone. If he did, she’d just pull herself up to her
full four feet, eleven-and-three-quarter inches and glare at him. Might even
remind him that the night they’d met, she’d disarmed him, breaking his nose and
one of his fingers in the process—as if he could forget.

He couldn’t lie to her, though.
That was the down side of having a trial attorney as a girlfriend. She had an
uncanny way of sniffing out untruths.

He decided to go with the partial
truth and sell it well. “Because I’ll be lonely on the road by myself for six
hours. And six hours spent in a car with you beats six hours spent missing you.”

Her eyes softened and her mouth
curved up slightly at the corner.

He pressed on. “I’ll drive both
ways. You can read or take a nap.”

She turned to face him full on,
and he could see she was considering it.

“If it’s still open, can we stop
at The Perfect Cup on the way back?”

Leo was more than happy to agree
to the detour to the coffee shop they’d found tucked away in a nearby town, but
to save face he said, “As long as I control the radio.”

Sasha broke into a real smile and
said, “You have a deal, Connelly.”

Colton Maxwell
smiled reassuringly at the small Webcam sitting in the center of the highly
polished conference room table. He resisted the urge to look at the image of himself
projected on the wall-sized screen that hung on the other side of the room. It
was critical to maintain eye contact with the camera so that the anxious board
members who had called this unnecessary, last-minute board meeting would see
how calm he was and realize how silly their panic has been.

“But how can you be so certain?”
Molly Charles repeated, her worried face appearing on the screen in a small box
superimposed in the lower corner, near Colton’s shoulder.

When the IT team had first set up
the Web conferencing equipment for him, they had programmed it so that Colton
saw his own image until someone else spoke, at which point the screen would
switch to a feed of the speaker. That had bothered him. He wanted to be able to
see his own reactions to other people’s comments and input in real time, just
the way he appeared to them. The technical wizards had fiddled with the
settings so that other people appeared in a small box, similar to
picture-in-picture television screens.

Before answering, Colton studied
Molly’s forehead, furrowed with concern and noted the hint of a frown on her
thin, pursed lips.

He nodded, still smiling, and
said, “I understand your hesitation, Molly. I honestly do. It’s frightening to
take bold actions, to lead with confidence. You worry that others won’t share
our vision. And, I also realize that other board members have the same
reservations. But, trust me, AviEx is going to propel this company, not just to
the next level, but to the stratosphere of our industry. This is a medication
that will treat a virus capable of killing hundreds of millions of people. We
can’t afford to think small now. The company is poised to make history.”

He watched as Molly, who’d been
nodding along with him while he spoke, relaxed her brow and softened her lips
into a smile.

“We appreciate, and share, your
enthusiasm, Colton,” Tim Bailey interjected, his thin, rat-like face replacing
Molly’s on the screen, “but the government has flat out said they don’t plan to
stockpile AviEx. They’ve put their money on the vaccine. That’s a reality.”

Bailey narrowed his eyes and
waited for Colton’s response.

“I know what the press reported.
So what?” Colton said. His tone was deliberately dismissive. His weak-willed
board had overreacted to the press report, blowing it wildly out of proportion.
The truth was that the report
was
a setback, but it was, at most, a
manageable speed bump, not the insurmountable roadblock the board was making it
out to be.

“So what?” Bailey repeated. His
untied bowtie flapped against his neck.

He’d made sure they all knew he
was going to be late for his black-tie holiday affair. As if any of them cared.

“Yeah. So what? Surely you aren’t
naive enough to believe the low-level press officer who handled that inquiry
has a finger on the pulse of the decision makers? I’m telling you, Congress is
going to appropriate a tidy sum to purchase tens of millions of doses of AviEx
or more. I guarantee it.”

“You guarantee it,” Bailey said.

Colton reflected that, for a
high-level banking professional, Bailey didn’t add much to a conversation. In
fact, they could have filled his seat with a parrot and gotten the same effect.

“Yes. I can’t go into details as
to amounts or timing, of course. The NDA is still pending approval, after all.
But, the government
will
shift its focus from the vaccine to AviEx. You
can take that to the bank,” Colton said, ending with a hearty chuckle to
highlight his pun for the bank officer.

Bailey chuckled, too, and
shrugged, “Well, I don’t much want to know the details of our lobbyists’
efforts. They’re the experts. And I think this call has gone a long way to
assuage folks’ concerns. You understand why we felt it necessary to talk,
though, right?”

Colton could tell from his tone
that the man was feeling sheepish about the board’s decision to call the
emergency meeting.
Good
.

“I do, Tim. Although I would have
hoped that, by now, this board would have enough trust in me to lead the
company forward without second guessing me.”

He let the chorus of apologies
and compliments about his leadership abilities wash over him, barely
registering.

He didn’t care at all, of course,
what the board thought of him. But it was useful for them to
think
he
did—to believe he had feelings that they could wound and to worry that if they
overstepped he might move on to a competitor.

He suppressed a smile and
considered his next steps. What he’d said to the board had been true: Congress
would abandon its plans to stockpile Serumceutical’s vaccine in favor of
purchasing AviEx.

But, that decision would have
nothing to do with ViraGene’s cadre of unctuous, insincere K Street lobbyists.
No, he would never leave such a critical issue in the hands of someone else. He’d
make sure of it himself.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Anna Bricker
sensed her husband’s presence behind her. The force of Jeffrey’s personality
was such that the air became electrified when he entered a room.

And, when he left a room, he took
all the energy with him. It amazed her, how their home felt so quiet and still
when he was gone—despite the noise and activity their six children generated.

She marked her spot in her
notebook and placed her pen on the table. She stood from the table and turned
toward him with a smile.

He smiled back at her, and she
felt a tingle in her stomach. After eighteen years of marriage, she still
thrived on his attention.

“Leaving already?” she asked.

He shouldered his duffel bag and
nodded. “I’ll only be gone two days.”

“I know.”

She knew how long he’d be gone,
just not where he’d be or what he’d be doing. He hadn’t volunteered the
information, and Anna had learned years ago that there was no point in asking.
Jeffrey would simply tell her it wasn’t her concern or, worse, he would
lie—make up an innocuous story so that she wouldn’t worry about him while he
was out there doing … whatever he did to protect their family.

He jerked his head to the tangle
of Go Bags piled high on the scratched and worn wooden table. “Everything in
order?”

“I’m making sure nothing’s out of
date,” she said. “They’ll be ready to go again by evening.”

He clasped her shoulder. “That’s
good work, honey.”

She flushed at the compliment and
waved it off. “It’s my job to make sure our family is prepared.”

It was a job Anna took seriously.
Every three months, she gathered the eight backpacks hanging on hooks in the
mud room and the eight identical backpacks stored in the back of the family’s
aged but pristine Suburban and emptied their contents onto the dining room
table. The Go Bags were to be grabbed if a disaster struck that required the
family to evacuate in a hurry; they contained essential supplies to get the
family through the first seventy-two hours after any emergency.

Each pack contained toiletries; a
knife; a flashlight with spare batteries; a whistle; a face mask; two bottles
of water and an assortment of energy bars; a small first aid kit; a change of
clothes; and a pair of hiking shoes. Four times a year, Anna checked that the
food hadn’t expired and swapped out the clothes and shoes according to the
season and her growing children’s sizes.

In addition to the items in the
kids’ bags, each of her two bags contained a collection of antibiotics that
needed to be checked for date; a small sealed packet of assorted seeds in case
they never returned to their home and the garden she tended there; a water
purification kit; and an emergency supply of games and activities intended to
occupy bored, frightened children if the need arose. Jeffrey’s bags each
contained the basic items; a map; a journal; and a gun with ammunition.

She sorted through the rainbow of
colored bags until she found the army green ones.

She held one out to him and said,
“Your bags are done. Do you want to take one with you?”

“That’s not a bad thought, Anna.”
Jeffrey reached for it and slung it over his back, bumping it against the
duffle bag he already wore.

He leaned in and kissed her
forehead, pressing his lips against her skin for a long moment. Then he took
her chin in his hand and tipped her head back so her eyes met his.

“I’ve already said goodbye to the
kids. I’ll call you when I can,” he said.

She savored his touch, knowing
she’d ache for it in his absence.

“Have a safe trip,” she answered.

He turned to leave. When he
reached the doorway, he turned back. “The rifle’s in the closet in our bedroom,
should you need it.”

She searched his eyes but saw no
sign of worry.

“Do you expect that I’ll need it?”

“No.” He shook his head.

A wave of relief flooded her.
There was no clear danger, he just wanted her to be prepared for anything that
might threaten their family while he was gone.

“Ammunition’s in your sock
drawer?” she confirmed.

He nodded, pulled open the door,
and disappeared from view. The house immediately felt still and too quiet. She
knew it would remain that way until Jeffrey returned.

She listened as the Jeep’s engine
roared to life outside and waited until the sound faded at the end of the
gravel driveway. Despite herself, she wondered where he was going, who he would
be meeting, what important information he’d received during the
middle-of-the-night phone call that had interrupted the silence two nights
earlier. He thought she’d been sleeping, but she’d heard the undercurrent of
excitement in his voice as he murmured into his satellite phone in the dark
bedroom.

Stop it, she thought. Let Jeffrey
handle his business; you handle yours.

She turned her attention back to
her inventory of the bags. Clara’s feet had grown. Anna removed the too-small
hiking boots from her orange backpack and set them to the side. She shifted
Lacey’s boots to Clara’s bag. Bethany’s old pair should fit Lacey now, she
thought. She scrawled a reminder in her notebook to check whether the same
hand-me-down pattern would work for a Michael to Clay to Henry transfer, which
would mean only the two oldest would need new boots.

Anna often lost herself in the
mundane details of keeping her family organized, fed, and clothed on a strict
budget with minimal waste. She approached the task seriously because she knew
when the day came that the family had only itself to rely on, everyone would be
counting on her most of all.

The SUV slid
along the empty country road lined with dirty, gray snow banks. No one else was
out, and the snow was falling harder now. Sasha watched as thick flakes bounced
off the windshield and melted, leaving skinny wet tracks on the glass. She felt
Connelly glance away from the road and look at her.

She turned. “What’s up?”

Caught, he blinked, then grinned,
“Nothing. Just looking at you.”

She suddenly felt like an eight year
old. She stuck out her tongue and said, “Take a picture. It’ll last longer.”

Connelly shook his head and
turned his attention back to the road ahead. No snow plows had come through the
small town, but Connelly guided the vehicle’s tires into the ruts that had been
packed down into grooves in the snow by cars that had passed by earlier.