Fallen Rogue Read Free Page B

dangling her legs over the side.
    After setting the box on the floor next to her, she unfolded the cloth to reveal a tiny computer flash drive and a full syringe.
    “Great,” she grumbled. “Just great.”
    Whatever these were, Bobby was murdered for them. So that made these two objects the most important objects in the world. If Bobby had faith in her to know what to do with them, then by golly, she’d figure it out.
    Harper smiled. Maybe Bobby did know what he was doing. Although she trained as much as possible, swimming didn’t pay the bills. But programming part-time at a video-game company did. She knew computers inside and out. If this drive had as many convoluted layers of coding as she suspected Bobby had dumped in there, she’d probably be the only one in the world able to read this thing. Maybe he was counting on that. Maybe it held the answers. It had to.
    She picked up the syringe in her other hand, watching the syrupy amber liquid glisten in the clear tube.
    What did it do? Bobby was a scientific genius, having graduated at the top of his molecular biology class. He had landed a coveted government research job right away. Harper knew he worked on highly confidentialprojects, but she really had no idea exactly what he did. They never actually talked much about it. Now they never would.
    Shaking off that haunting thought, she focused on the syringe. She had a job to do. She had to find answers and strike back.
    “Freeze,” a cold voice said, startling her.
    Harper’s gaze shot up to see ten burly men, covered head to toe in jungle camouflage, standing in a semicircle about thirty feet away from the train car. Carrying massive guns. All pointed at her. They looked just like the guys who’d chased her. And the ones who’d killed Bobby. Her blood boiled as she sat rigid.
    “Hands up,” the brute ordered. “Slowly,” he added.
    No way. There was absolutely no way she was doing anything these guys told her. She kept her hands closed in her lap and her mouth shut.
    The guy fired a shot right past her head. It clanged off the back wall of the car. Though it made her flinch, she still wasn’t going to give in to them.
    “Do it now,” came the command. “We just want to talk.”
    Right. Talk. That’s why they tracked her down and brought so many guns.
    But maybe they did just want to talk. Maybe that’s why they hadn’t shot her on sight. They thought she knew something.
    She couldn’t get justice for Bobby if she was dead, so she made a choice. “Okay,” Harper answered steadily.
    “Open your hands flat.” Another stern order.
    Her fingers closed tight around the small flash drive and snapped it apart. “Here you go,” she said with a cool smile and threw the broken pieces at them. The plastic bits scattered in the dirt and rubble that covered the ground.
    “That was a big mistake.” The leader sneered. “Now open your other hand,” he demanded tersely.
    Harper did as he said, revealing the syringe in her palm. She watched their faces intently as she did so. Several of them, including Mr. Bossy, gasped in surprise and then quickly tried to hide it. So the syringe was completely unexpected and extremely important.
    “Drop the needle.” The demand was spoken deliberately and carefully.
    “Let’s just shoot her,” the thug to his left piped in.
    O-kay. Really, he was right. They could just kill her and take it.
    But she couldn’t let them have it.
    The men took a few menacing steps forward. She stood and held up her free palm in a nonthreatening gesture, clutching the syringe warily in the other as her brain whirled to come up with some kind of solution.
    More steps closer. And then they lunged, tackling her.
    She hit the floor hard and tried to squirm away from their grabbing hands. But they were all over her. At least three, maybe four of the men clutched at her hand, trying to pry the needle away. She grasped the syringe as tightly as she could, her knuckles white with the strain.