"Lissa, sweetheart, I didn't expect you to answer. I was going to leave a voice message," Merrill scolded lightly.
"Didn't you have the talk with Griffin?" I asked, licking more frosting off my fingers.
"Lissa, what are you doing right now?" Merrill asked.
"Eating a cinnamon roll," I answered honestly.
"Perhaps Griffin needs to provide more information than he has," Merrill muttered. "He can be cryptic at times and this was certainly one of those times. He can't interfere, but from the conversation we had, I got the idea that Director Jennings needs to contact a friend of mine—a werewolf named Daniel Carey. He was working with Admiral Hafer not long ago. He may be back in Corpus Christi; he's the Second for the Pack, there."
"I've met him," I nodded. "He's Shirley Walker's Second."
Winkler's ears perked up at Merrill's message; he was hearing it almost as well as I was. He knew Daniel Carey, too, I realized. Daniel and Shirley had come to the beach house when I was working for Winkler. Winkler pulled his phone out and dialed a number before Merrill could hang up the phone. And he did hang up—a little abruptly, I thought. I wanted to ask about Greg, but didn't get the chance. I hadn't asked Gavin to borrow his computer lately, either, and I wanted to see if there were any emails from Franklin and Greg.
Winkler was talking with Daniel Carey while my mind wandered a little, and I realized I was more tired than I thought. "Admiral Hafer's been kidnapped," Winkler told Daniel, bringing me back to a normal orbit.
"I heard," Daniel said on the other end.
"Someone named Lawrence Frazier was kidnapped as well," Winkler said. "Do you happen to know if they knew each other?" There was a lengthy silence on the other end. I was watching Winkler's face carefully, now. Daniel decided to talk.
"This involves state secrets," Daniel said. "A vampire helped me out with this, otherwise Anthony Hancock's name would have been splashed all over the media and the President might have gone down with him."
"Which vampire?" I got in on the conversation now.
"Is Lissa there with you?" Daniel asked.
"She's here and we're working with Director Jennings on this," Winkler said.
"Merrill helped me with this," Daniel sighed. "Hafer had dirt on Hancock—said he approved a risky experiment on six top agents. The agents were dying, the last I heard. Hafer wanted you, Lissa, and if he didn't get you, he was going to cause a lot of trouble. I think Dr. Frazier was his informant on the whole experiment thing."
"I guess Dr. Frazier was trying to cover his own ass," I grumbled. "Since it was his experiment. He was the one to go ahead and try his little concoction on humans without going through the proper procedures."
"You know about this?" Daniel asked. Winkler still held the phone but Daniel was talking to me, now. Winkler handed the phone over. He could still hear the conversation, after all.
"Yeah, I know about it," I muttered into the phone. I was hip deep in the middle of it at the time, since Frazier was taking my blood to do his little experiments. "Those six agents are still alive as far as I know, because I got outside help to cure them," I added. Winkler's eyebrows lifted at that information. "Do you know how well Hafer knew Frazier?"
"Frazier was Hafer's physician a few years back. Hafer had a hip replacement, plus one or two serious repairs done on his heart. The whole thing was hushed up and never made public. Frazier was the perfect person for that, obviously."
"I don't know why Bill doesn't have that information," I told Daniel.
"You have no idea what can be erased from the records if you're high enough up," Daniel replied. "Poor health could have forced Hafer into retirement, and that would have kicked him off a lot of defense committees. He didn’t want that. I don't know why, he never told me. That's all I know, Lissa. And remember, you never talked to me about this."
"Of course not," I said and hung up when Daniel terminated the call.
"Let's go find Bill," Winkler said, tossing his coffee cup into a nearby wastebasket. I dropped the rest of my cinnamon roll in the trash, too. It had gone cold and my appetite disappeared while I spoke with Daniel.
* * *
"Hafer was planning on exposing the experiments?" Bill paced in front of us. Gavin, René and Tony had wakened and Roff and Michael, who were sharing a room, sighed happily and went to dinner. They were planning an early night. Tony was growling until René got him calmed down—he hadn't known about Larry's duplicity, either. His friend had been willing to let Tony take the fall, even though he was more responsible, in my opinion. He was the physician and the research biologist; he should have known not to take shortcuts. Vampire DNA would kill humans if introduced into their body in small amounts. I gasped, I think, when the thought hit me.
"Lissa, what is wrong?" Gavin came to my side quickly and began rubbing my shoulders.
"Who came up with the idea to introduce vampire DNA into the flu vaccine? Who told Rahim and Xenides how to do it? Do you think that Larry Frazier was under Xenides' thumb all that time?"
"Lissa, I think you're jumping to conclusions," Bill said.
"Larry was in Oman, tending to a few patients who'd been brought in from Afghanistan. That's why he was on the Navy ship afterward when the pirates hit," Tony said. He was trying to piece this together, just as I was.
"They knew he was on that boat," I muttered. "Those pirates were out there, waiting, I think, for somebody to come and get them. They didn't seem interested in going anywhere with their hostage."
"Rahim may have paid them to take Larry—he was the only one they kidnapped, but they shot several others getting him off the ship," Tony nodded.
"So, Xenides, or one of his brothers or children placed compulsion on Larry while he was in Oman? Is that what you think?" Bill asked. "That Rahim may have gotten a vampire into the country and close enough to Frazier to do this?"
"That's what I think, but since I don't have proof, right now it's just a theory," I said. "Regardless, somebody figured out how to put vampire DNA into the flu vaccine and now at least two vampires have Larry Frazier and Admiral Hafer. Frazier probably pointed those vampires in Hafer's direction, so he'd be taken. How does that fit into the equation?" My breath was shaky, now. How much damage could Xenides do with Dr. Larry Frazier in his clutches? What did he want with Hafer? I couldn't figure that out unless it was for information of some kind. That made me even shakier. Tony, I learned, was thinking the same thing. Only he was in a better position to know what Hafer might be able to hand out as far as information and state secrets went.