AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Poppy’s not involved,” she reassured him. There was no way possible that she’d do more than break the speed limit.
He’d kept up with her through friends. Stories about Poppy abounded with equal parts amusement and fondness.
“Are you sure you can do this with a clear mind, Jack?” Ian asked, his voice much harder than his wife’s. “Going in emotionally involved won’t help anyone. Especially her. This is a military operation, and it has to stay that way. You cannot reveal your true purpose for being there.”
Emotionally involved? He would have laughed if he could have dredged up any humor in the situation.
“I’m certain.” He nodded, lying out his ass. “It has nothing to do with emotion. I keep up with home on a regular basis, and everyone knows her. If she was capable of being dirty, there’d be a hint of it elsewhere. As for Caine Crossfield or River Dawson, either would be capable of it.”
“At the very least, she’s in danger,” Kira pointed out. “They buried one of her friends last month. A young officer with the city that we know stumbled onto something or someone involved in this. He was killed before we could get to him. She works with them. If she stumbles onto anything, she could end up just as dead.”
No doubt Poppy was fixing to get into trouble. Someone was becoming overconfident, careless. And Poppy was as curious as a damned puppy. Always had been.
“Her position with the two suspects almost ensures the same could happen to her. Both Crossfield and Dawson feel betrayed by their country due to their time in the Special Forces. Their discharges for ‘medical with extenuating circumstances’ left them bitter and angry.” Ian breathed out roughly. “They were blamed for their commanders’ fuckups, hence the extenuating circumstances.”
Yeah, it happened. Crossfield and Dawson had been able, natural leaders. Their commanders had been head cases. The two men hadn’t taken it well.
They’d returned home and built the Crossfield-Dawson properties, and according to the evidence gathered thus far, one or likely both men were using those properties as staging points for other parties to smuggle drugs, arms, and a variety of other highly illegal items across the nation.
“One of our men got into her house when we first began the investigation. There was nothing to be found in the house that could lead back to Crossfield or Dawson or indicate her guilt in their suspected crimes,” Ian stated. “You’ll need to check it again, make certain nothing’s changed.”
Jack rifled through the files, his gaze narrowed. There were files of each person in Poppy’s circle of friends. When he found nothing, his gaze lifted to Ian’s.
There was more; he sensed it. Something dangerous enough to pull Jack from a life behind bars and sign the orders necessary to ensure he stayed out.
He was charged with the murder of three contract black ops agents, and he didn’t deny killing them. He had. They’d all participated in the rapes of four young girls as their families were forced to watch. Supposedly an exercise in extracting an admission of guilt from the older male members of the family in regard to terrorist acts against the US.
Those families hadn’t been involved in shit other than trying to survive and managing to piss off the commander of that little group.
Yeah, Jack had killed each of them without remorse. And what he’d do to anyone that dared to hurt Poppy would be worse. But to protect her, he had to get to her. To get to her, he had to finish this little meeting.
“You’ve left something out here,” he told the other man.
Ian stared back at him, his gaze chips of ice as he held Jack’s.
Jack knew what Ian was doing. It was something he was damned good at himself. They couldn’t read minds, but Jack, like Ian, could read men.
Experience, hunter’s instincts and knowledge, an elevated inborn, preternatural survival instinct, whatever the hell psychologists were calling it these days. It was the ability to evaluate and read a man’s strengths and weaknesses and determine their risk almost instantly.
Turning to a file cabinet behind him, Ian pulled another file free, one much thicker than the files Jack had before him, and handed it over.
Taking it, Jack placed it before himself, opened it, and for the first time in years found himself genuinely surprised and completely aware of the danger in this assignment, not just to Poppy, but to the country.
Artificial intelligence.
It was a word, a subject, that even those working on it tended to shy away from discussing. They’d heard rumors of advances in the area, and they had seen the mechanical canines the Army was trying to introduce. They’d laughed at them, of course, but in the back of every man’s mind was a hint of trepidation when they saw them.
This wasn’t a mechanical canine.
This would be undetectable, such a true replica of a human that it could destroy all sense of security in the nation if it were known to exist.
“Sentient?” he asked, feeling the ice, the granite hardness of the killer he was settling into.
“We’re not certain.” Ian and Kira pulled two chairs to the table and sat down. “Our scientists say no, but the man that built it was radical. His ideas were so outside the box that no boundaries existed as far as he was concerned.”
Heinrich Gustav had been a man born out of time, Jack realized as he scanned through the pages.
He’d terrified some of his fellow scientists, acknowledged geniuses in Gustav’s fields of research, to the point that he’d been cut out of every research project he’d worked on. Then, he, his wife, and their young daughter and son-in-law had disappeared and never been seen or heard from again.
