Owen took the other seat, though he sat down with obvious reluctance. “No. A man named Tucker works with us. He might look like Reasor, but he’s not the same man.”
A laugh huffed from her throat. Even to her own ears it was tinged with the edge of hysteria. “Reasor has a twin? I think that’s my nightmare. Hell, maybe there could be three of that psychotic son of a bitch.”
Owen winced. “No one’s going to hurt you here.”
Anger threatened to overtake fear, and that felt good to her. “No one’s going to hurt me? What the hell do you think you did, Owen? You think I’m not hurt? You think I’m having a blast figuring out that the man I’ve been sleeping with is some kind of criminal? I assume you’re a criminal since you kidnapped me. What I don’t understand is what you want from me. Is it money, since apparently I’ve got an extra million lying around?”
“I believe someone set you up. I know you didn’t steal that money. A man named Levi Green is using that stolen money as leverage to get what we all want,” Owen explained. “Hope McDonald’s research.”
“Fuck you. I’m not giving you any research.” If that’s what this was about, they’d come to the wrong place. They could kill her, probably would, but she wasn’t giving in to them.
“Sweetheart, the police are after you for more than the money.” He opened that ever-handy file folder and slid a picture her way. It took her a moment to realize it was of her. She was standing in front of the portrait of the Duchess of Cornwall. The lady she’d talked to was standing there, too. “This woman is a Chinese spy. She’s also the mistress of the head of the Huisman Foundation. I assume she’s sleeping with him to get information.”
“There’s a lot of that going around these days.” But her brain was working. Something had been happening all around her and she hadn’t seen it until it had been shoved in her face. She still didn’t understand it. If the Chinese had targeted Jean Claude Huisman, there was only one thing they could be after—research. Or intelligence on the doctors who worked there. There was a reason they locked down the private labs. A lot of delicate research occurred there, things the doctors wouldn’t want out in the world because it could potentially be twisted.
“She slipped something into your bag,” Owen explained as though he hadn’t slid the knife in. “It was a thumb drive.”
“I don’t have a thumb drive in my bag.” She could remember how the other woman had bumped into her, had insisted on helping put everything back in her bag. It would have been easy to slip something small inside.
Had she been set up?
“I assure you that you do, and the police have likely already found it,” Fain said. “They’ll use it to prove that you’re working with the Chinese.”
“That’s insane.” She was cold. Why was it so cold?
Owen got up and walked out, the door slamming behind him.
“It’s not, though I’ll admit that I don’t understand the way Green’s mind works,” Fain admitted. “But I can explain part of this to you. Years ago, Dr. Hope McDonald started working on a project called Tabula Rasa.”
“I know that.” She wanted to get to the heart of the matter. “Though she never called the project that in public. She used much more technical terms. Her project was specifically about helping people with profound retrograde amnesia. I was brought in because my own work deals with the same parts of the brain. Those memories aren’t lost. They’re stored in the brain, but the connection has been cut for some reason. We were studying ways to reconnect, to rewire the brain so the patient has access to the memories again. It’s obviously more complex than that, but there it is in a nutshell.”
The door opened again and Owen return with a blanket in his hand. “You’re shaking. You can let me wrap this around you or let me hold you until you’re warm again. Tucker is firing up the furnace and River is making coffee.”
“Well, of course she’s here.” All her new friends were assholes, but she wasn’t so stubborn she didn’t take the blanket from his hands. She didn’t trust that he wouldn’t do exactly what he said he would, and she couldn’t stand the thought of being wrapped in his arms.
“I want to ask you flat out if you knew anything about McDonald kidnapping men, wiping their memories, and forcing them to work for her. I need to ask you about her, for the lack of a better word, super-soldier program. Her goal was to build small military units whose soldiers would only be loyal to their employers,” Fain said. “Although employers is the wrong word. Owners is a better word. Imagine it. Men who could keep their muscle memory so they would know how to fight, but they would have no ties, no memories of anything but their lives in the unit. And if they got troublesome, she could wipe their minds again and start over.”
“That’s ridiculous.” Except Fain didn’t look like he was joking.
“Do you remember a patient named Tomas?” Owen asked.
She nodded. “Of course. He had profound retrograde amnesia. He didn’t remember anything before his accident. Dr. McDonald took him on as a patient. I actually thought I could help him. I worked with him for a couple of weeks and we made progress. He remembered he’d been in the Navy and that he had a brother. I read the report on the accident that occurred. It was traumatic. He was shot in the line of duty and barely survived. He had a traumatic head injury as well. That was what caused the amnesia.”
“He has three brothers and his name is Theo Taggart. He wasn’t in the military at the time of his injury, though he was shot in the line of duty,” Fain explained. “He was on a mission to prove that Senator Hank McDonald was selling out US troop intelligence for cash. Hope McDonald saved his life but put him into her program. Theo proved to be her problem child. She brought you in not to heal him but to try to understand why he wasn’t responding to the drug the way the others did. The way Robert and Jax did.”
This was utterly ridiculous. “I don’t understand why you’re doing this.”
“The way Owen did,” Ezra said solemnly.
She felt her stomach drop. Owen? She looked to him, but he was staring at the table in front of him.
He never talked about his past. He’d avoided it studiously. He talked about work, but never his family beyond the fact that he had a mom and a sister and they’d died.
She forced herself to take a deep breath. She couldn’t be emotional about this. “What proof do you have?”
There was a knock and the door came open, and Erin walked in carrying a binder. The redhead glared her way. “I hope you’re happy. That was terrible. I hate sympathy vomiting. Honestly, I don’t like sympathy anything. Here’s the full report. Alex gave us the go to show her. It’s everything from Dubai to today.”
It was a big binder.
“Thank you,” Ezra Fain said before turning back to Becca. “As I told you before my name is Ezra Fain and I used to work for the Central Intelligence Agency. What you’re about to read is everything a group called McKay-Taggart and Knight has on the McDonalds, specifically Hope McDonald and Project Tabula Rasa.”
“All of which you could have made up.”
A blond man walked in, propping the door open. She’d only worked with him for a few brief weeks, but he was impossible to forget. Big and broad and gorgeous, Tomas looked to Ezra. “I think I have someone who can explain this better than that report. Reports are boring. Hello, Dr. Walsh. I hear we’ve met before. I’m sorry I don’t remember you at all. I’ve got a lot of my past back, but those months with McDonald are pretty muddy.”
“I hope they stay that way,” Erin muttered.
He was in on this, too? He hadn’t been faking. She’d worked with too many patients to not know when a patient was faking. Her head was spinning, and not from the drugs she’d been given. “I saw your records. You had a traumatic brain injury.”