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“We get the diagnostic run, we keep our balls.” Jamie was in heaven. Not only were they about to do something beyond chilled, but he was standing around talking the trash with cops. “Infected unit’s a snail, and the filter program’s complex. It’s going to take ninety-three seconds to download the shield,” he said to Roarke. “If you start the diagnostic while it’s loading, you’d—”
“Jamie, are you under the impression that this is, so to speak, my first day on the job?”
“No, but while the diagnostic’s running, you want to upload the results onto—”
“Go away.”
“Yeah, but—”
“Jamie, lad.” Feeney laid a hand on his shoulder. “We’ll be monitoring from outside. You can badger the man from there. Ten minutes,” Feeney said to Roarke. “Not a second more.”
“I’ll be running a time sequence.”
“No, ten minutes, not a second more.” His jaw went firm as stone. “I want your word on it.”
“All right. You have it.”
As satisfied as he could get, Feeney nodded. “If we see anything worrying in the medical readouts, you’ll shut it down.”
“If you’re thinking I’m willing to have my brains come spilling out my ears, let me reassure you.” Then he flashed a grin. “But if such a thing should happen, I’ll have the satisfaction of knowing Eve will be sending the lot of you to hell right behind me.”
“She’ll go easy on me.” McNab worked up a smile. “I’m handicapped.”
“Don’t count on it. Now if you’d all get out, we could get this done before we’re all old and gray.”
“You’ll wait until I give you the go-ahead. I want a check of your medicals first.” Feeney stopped at the door, glanced back. “Slainte.”
“You can say that again, over a couple of Guinness in just a bit.”
When they’d gone out, Roarke engaged the door locks. He didn’t want his associates to panic and burst in on him again. Alone, he unbuttoned his shirt, then attached the sensors that would monitor him.
Lost your mind, haven’t you? he thought. Not just working for cops, which is bad enough, but risking your bloody brains for them.
Life was a damn strange business.
He wouldn’t lose his brains, or his life, like a lab rat, if it came to that.
He sat, faced Cogburn’s machine, and felt under the work counter, let his fingers play lightly over the weapon he’d secured there.
He’d chosen t
he nine-millimeter Beretta semiautomatic from his collection. It had been his first gun, acquired at the age of nineteen from the man who’d been pointing it at his head. A banned weapon, of course, even then. But smugglers weren’t so picky about such things.
It seemed to him, should things go wrong, a properly ironic cycle if he ended it all by doing himself with the very weapon that had started his collection, and had helped him on the road to riches.
He didn’t anticipate anything going wrong. They’d taken all possible precautions, and those who had taken them were some of the best e-men—and boy—available. But there was always a chance, however slim.
If push came to shove, he would decide his own fate.
Then he took his hand away from the cold steel, and put it out of his mind.
“Going to run a check on your vital signs.”
Roarke glanced up at the wall screen, nodded at Feeney. “Fine. Cut the audio in there when you’re done. I don’t want all of you nattering at me when I’m working.”
He slid his hand into his pocket, rubbed a small gray button between his fingers for luck. For love. It had fallen off the jacket of the very unflattering suit Eve had worn the first time he’d seen her.
“You’re good to go,” Feeney told him.
