“Moriarty isn’t exactly an obscure reference. The majority of ten-year-olds know who he is.”
She smiled and her eyes sparkled playfully. “That doesn’t make what I said any less true. Besides, I wouldn’t be too sure about that. I’m not convinced the majority of adults even know the name of our Speaker of the House.”
A slight smile played across Desh’s face. “So tell me about the robbery?”
Desh tensed as a fit man in his thirties with a serious look on his face approached the hostess station and began scanning the restaurant carefully, his eyes moving in an arc that would soon include their booth. “Duck!” whispered Desh as he slipped the gun out from under his sweatshirt and braced himself for action. Kira slid down in the booth as if she had dropped a coin on the floor.
Seconds later the man’s eyes stopped shifting as his gaze settled on a booth two over from where they were seated. An attractive woman who was seated with two preschool children waved at him happily. He raised his hand in acknowledgment, his face becoming relaxed, and he hurriedly joined his family.
Desh let out the breath he had been holding. “False alarm,” he whispered. “Sorry.”
Kira returned to a fully upright position. “Don’t be,” she said, shaking her head. “Better to err on the side of caution. Besides, I’m sure my pulse will return to normal in an hour or so,” she added with a grin.
“You were going to tell me about the robbery,” prompted Desh.
“Right,” said Kira. “I came home from work one night and my place had been broken into. I had a bottle with twenty-three gellcaps and my lab notebook stored in the false bottom of a dresser drawer. Both were missing.”
“You had a dresser with a false-bottomed drawer?”
“I thought putting valuables in a safe would be too obvious. I measured the drawer and had someone at a hardware store cut a platform to my exact specifications. I wallpapered it to match the bottoms of the other drawers and stacked some sweaters on top.”
Desh raised his eyebrows, impressed. “Did they take anything else?” he asked, chewing absently on the breadstick he had taken and continuing to watch the entrance.
“Nothing. They knew exactly what they were after.”
“Any ideas who it was?”
“Not when it happened, no. I was stunned. I had been careful not to leave a trail. I routinely disposed of the rodents I was using and I never let my lab notebook out of my sight. Until then, I wouldn’t have believed it possible that anyone could have known what I was doing. On a hunch, the next day I hired someone at an executive protection agency, like yours, to look for listening devices.” She frowned deeply. “He found several in both my office and home. That’s the day I truly began to get paranoid.”
“That would do it,” muttered Desh.
“It was a disaster. Whoever he was, having twenty-three doses of my therapy instantly made him the most formidable man on the planet. I began to take elaborate precautions, learned everything I could about bugs and how to find them, and took some pains to spread my fortune across various accounts. The next time I was enhanced it became clear to me I needed to create a number of flawless false identities as well as invent technologies that would help me stay hidden if I was forced to disappear.”
“Enhanced intuition also?”
She nodded. “Intuition is just your subconscious putting together subtle clues and coming to a conclusion that your conscious mind hasn’t quite reached. Since my rewiring gives me access to all the memories buried in my subconscious, it unleashes the full power of intuition.” Kira paused. “As later events were to prove, this intuition was right on target.”
Desh said nothing as he finished the breadstick and drained the last of his soda. There was certainly no arguing this point.
“Three days later,” continued Kira, “my boss, Tom Morgan, was killed in a car accident.”
Desh nodded, almost imperceptibly. Interesting, he thought. Another piece of the puzzle that was now—possibly—explained.
“I was never able to find any evidence, but I suspect Morgan stumbled onto what I was doing and was responsible for having the bugs planted. My guess is he later approached someone powerful to sell what he knew and access to some of the gellcaps. My unknown enemy. Moriarty, as you called him.”
Desh frowned. “And Moriarty had Morgan killed so he would have an exclusive on your treatment.”
“That’s my guess.”