She whirled around, splashing water in all directions. “You’re what? I saw Whitney’s…” She trailed off. “Lily Whitney asked you to do this?”
“No, she wasn’t involved at all in the beginning. Eric and I were looking at the idea of using the external bionics the army is experimenting with. Eric made a few cracks about a couple of old television shows and how it really was possible to have internal bionics. He said that it had already been tried using a ‘smart sleeve’ to pick up and register movements of the existing muscles and use that to trigger movement of the appropriate part, but in theory it was possible to regenerate or stimulate existing nerves so the bionics would work completely with my own brain and body. The idea took off from there.” He caught her chin when her gaze dropped away from his. “What did you see in Whitney’s office? What were you going to tell me?”
She closed her eyes briefly, shaking her head, not wanting him to know, but realizing she had no choice. Not if she was going to keep him safe. She was beginning to realize that loving someone was really difficult. She scooted away from him just in case, because she was going to have to confess to planning a premeditated execution. If Jess condemned her, if he couldn’t understand, then there was no hope at all for them. She stared down at the bubbling water.
“Whitney gave me orders to take out a United States senator and his wife. I knew I had to escape. There was no way Whitney would just let me go. Eventually he’d run me down and either kill or reacquire me, so I decided that since I was an assassin and the best way to save my life was to kill Whitney, I would have to do it before I escaped.”
She stole a look at his impassive face. Jess waited in silence, giving her no hint of what he was thinking or feeling. She moistened her lips and forced herself to continue. “I knew his schedule at the facility, so I waited for him to come back. He always went into his office late at night to work. The security was unbelievable and he had his own personal guards-enhanced soldiers.”
“How many do you think take orders from Whitney personally?”
“Maybe ten enhanced. He has two teams that he keeps with him at all times. They travel with him and answer directly to him for his personal use as well as for his protection. He has others, but they’re sent out on assignments for the government. The men who are with him are completely different.”
Jess sucked in his breath sharply. “So you’re saying aside from Ryland’s team and ours, there are others?”
“At least two other teams that I know of for certain and then Whitney’s guards. The men on the teams aren’t your enemy, Jess. They’re in the same situation you are. They’re military and they run covert missions.”
He nodded. “Keep going. What did you see when you went into his office?”
“He had a couple of files lying on his desk. One was a file on bionics.”
Jess shifted, his eyes sharp and piercing. “What was the other file?”
“The senator and his wife. My targets. He had a picture of them circled with a red marker and the file was very thick.”
The only sound was the flow of the jets and the clock ticking on the wall. Jess’s gaze met hers. “Could you read the files?”
She nodded her head. “I did. I thought I’d wait for him to come back, so I positioned myself beneath his desk and spent the time reading. He didn’t come back. Apparently he had locked the office and left the facility on other business.”
“Saber.” Jess studied her face, his eyes like that of a hawk, so intent they burned right through her-except that they were cold and distant. “Dr. Whitney’s files are encrypted in numerical code.”
Saber let her breath out slowly, a chill skittering down her spine, although she was sitting in hot water. “You don’t believe me.” She crossed her arms over her br**sts, suddenly aware of her na**d body. She had tossed the shirt aside, it was somewhere, but…She looked around a little helplessly.
“He changes the code all the time, but it’s always numerical. Always.”
Her chin lifted, and her teeth came together with a small snap, but she forced herself to breathe away her anger. How many times had she believed he was her enemy? Not after making love, but still. “It wasn’t code, it was typed neatly in plain English and I lay under that desk for four hours reading both files.”
“One of the reasons we have such a difficult time knowing what he’s doing is because we have to decode everything on his computer. Lily knows him best, her brain even works in numerical patterns, but it’s still time-consuming.”
Okay, now her temper was kicking in. She smacked the surface of the water before she could stop herself, sending a plume right at his face.
The water stopped in midair, hung there, and dropped back into the Jacuzzi. There was a small silence while she just stared at him.
“Holy crap, Jesse.” There was genuine awe in her voice. “Why couldn’t I get to do something like that? That’s just awesome.”
“It isn’t nearly as useful as you’d think. It takes too much concentration. If anything else had been going on I wouldn’t have been able to do it.”
“Besides being an anchor, you’re a shielder too, aren’t you?”
He raised an eyebrow. “We’re getting a little off the subject, don’t you think?”
She shrugged as casually as she could. “What’s the point? I’m obviously not going to convince you, so anything I say is suspect, isn’t it? Because, you know, it makes so much sense that Whitney sent an assassin to spy on you. That’s not a waste of a serious weapon, is it?”
Jess could see the raw hurt in her eyes and no matter how hard he tried not to let it get to him, his heart was in serious jeopardy. He swore under his breath as he suddenly comprehended the implication of her question. “Saber, you’re a shielder. That’s why in all the months you lived here, I never felt a rise in energy.” He hit his forehead with his hand. “How can you shield, but not anchor?”
She cleared her throat. “He said his masterpiece was flawed.”
His fists closed and he kept his hands out of sight. It made more sense to him now, the way she could kill and not suffer immediate and severe repercussions. A shielder was rare. They could keep an entire team from detection. They could shield areas from weapons attacks for a short period of time. Whitney wouldn’t want her dead. But if he thought she was flawed…“He’d want another one, to work with,” Jess murmured aloud.