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Joey chuckled, and they started moving toward the front door. “I’m glad you were here. I don’t think Patrick would have appreciated the midnight wakeup call.”
She felt his eyes on her and looked to find him staring. “I’m glad I was here, too. The way he was hurting you though…” His eyes darkened and his jaw tightened. “Are you sure I can’t fire him?”
Joey stopped walking. “You really would, wouldn’t you?”
She was trying to piece this information in with everything else she knew about Kensington. But the pieces didn’t fit. Why would someone in the Syndicate care if she got hurt? She tried to read his tortured expression as he searched for words.
“I… I don’t want you hurt,” he said gruffly. “I know I hired you to do this job. But you can’t get hurt on my account.”
She grabbed his hand without thinking, which turned him toward her and brought him closer. She looked up at him, searching his face for any sign of deceit. He had to be playing her, right? But all she saw was concern. And weariness. His hair was tousled and his chin was covered with a dark shadow of stubble.
She squeezed his hand and released it so they could keep walking. “I’m not hurt. But are you okay? It’s awfully late, and you seem… agitated.”
He ran his hand through his hair, and Joey realized why it was so messy. “Yeah,” he sighed. “Seeing that giant with his hands on you didn’t help, but yeah. My nerves are pretty well shot tonight. Just a few complications with the project. We’ve got a deadline we didn’t have before. Come on, I’ll tell you about it on the ride home.” They crossed the lobby and exited the front doors.
Jared stood by the car with the door open. His expression revealed nothing about his thoughts on Joey getting into his boss’s car at midnight, but Joey felt herself blush. “You remember where my house is, Jared?”
He nodded. “Yes, ma’am.”
“Take the scenic route. We have a lot to discuss,” Cole directed as Joey climbed in the car.
“My pleasure, sir.”
CHAPTERNINE
Later that week,Cole twisted his pen tightly as he listened to Laura Conwell. She stood across the executive conference room just outside his office. Her slides were well-organized, her presentation flawless.
But the information? That had him attempting to grind his poor ballpoint to dust.
“Give it to me straight, Laura. Are we back at square one?” He’d been working with Laura for two decades, since they did their graduate research together at Harvard.
Laura glanced back at her slides before responding. “Honestly, Cole? I don’t know. I can’t figure out what’s happening. Sometimes I think I’m going crazy.”
He frowned. He’d never heard Laura sound anything more than confident in her research conclusions. “What do you mean?”
“It’s like…” She pressed a hand to her forehead and then waved it through the air in front of her. “Our vector trials were moving right along. Adenovirus vector 81B7 was showing really remarkable deliverability. But when we got to the final tally, it was less impressive than we thought.”
“What about the sister vectors?”
She shook her head. “Same results. It’s almost as if when I look at small pieces of data, everything makes perfect sense. And then as we aggregate the results, there are these anomalies. Results in the data that don’t fit the pattern we expect. I know better than to trust the excitement we get during an individual test. Because the numbers don’t lie in the end. I just wish I had better news to share. The CPB-PGI can’t work if we don’t pinpoint the right vector.”
Or maybe they do. He glanced to his left, where his COO and CFO were sitting, taking in the update. “Can Laura and I have the room for a few moments?”
He gestured for his long-time friend to have a seat. He had to make a call about whether to trust her or not. Could he trust his gut? What would Joey do?
He stared at his pen. He knew exactly what she would do. She’d dig into Laura’s entire life and try to figure out if there was any way she was sabotaging the project.
“I know you wanted this to be the one, Cole.”
“I want every single one to be the one, Laura. You know that.” She knew that better than most people here. There was a lot of his job that required him to be detached and logical. To make decisions based on facts and figures rather than on emotions.
Usually, he was disciplined about it. He hated to let go of two hundred employees when he acquired a company and folded them into Zia. But the redundancy made it inevitable. It was business.
“We’ve been close before,” he continued, “but I really thought this was it.” He still thought this was it. But the data leak was going to ruin everything.
“Yeah. Me too. I’m sorry this didn’t turn out better.”
Cole took a deep breath. He wanted to trust her. For crying out loud, he’d been at her wedding. “I need five minutes to make a call. Wait here.”
