Twin Targets
Jessica Andersen
www.millsandboon.co.uk
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Table of Contents
Cover Page
Title Page
About the Author
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Epilogue
Copyright
Though shes tried out professions ranging from cleaning sea lion cages to cloning glaucoma genes, from patent law to training horses, Jessica Andersen is happiest when shes combining all these interests with her first love: writing romances. These days shes delighted to be writing full-time on a farm in rural Connecticut that she shares with a small menagerie and a hero named Brian. She hopes youll visit her at www.JessicaAndersen.com for info on upcoming books, contests and to say hi!
Chapter One
Sydney Westlake made her move a half hour before the shift change, when the armed men who guarded the compound on Rocky Cliff Island would be at their least vigilant.
She hoped.
Tiberius was too smart to have a clockwork-regular schedule for something as important as security, so the armed forces that guarded the mansion and surrounding grounds worked randomly staggered shifts. After eleven months on the island, thoughthree of them as a prisonerSydney had found patterns in the randomness.
Today they were on what shed dubbed Schedule C, which meant the guard post located directly between her quarters and the boat dock would change shifts at 1:40 a.m. God willing.
You can do this, she said to herself. You have to do this. For Celeste. Her sisters name had become a mantra, something she held on to when her bravery faltered.
At first Sydney had told herself she was helping her ailing twin by staying on the island off the Massachusetts coast and working for Tiberius. Shed been trying to find a cure for the insidious genetic condition that was slowly killing Celeste. The obscenely large income being funneled into an offshore account was an added draw, allowing Celeste to stay in their wheelchair-friendly, restored Victorian in Maryland with a personal aide, rather than moving to an assisted-living facility of some sort. It had all seemed like a godsend when Tiberius first contacted her through his figurehead company, Tiberius Corp.
Now, though, she knew better. Tiberius wasnt a philanthropist and he wasnt a visionary. He was a monster, a sociopath, a self-professed businessman who wanted to use her discovery to do terrible things. Or rather, sell it to other criminals, who would use it as a smokescreen, hiding their identities while they did God only knew what.
She had to stop it from happening.
Trying not to betray her nerves, she crossed the high-tech lab Tiberius had ordered built and outfitted to her precise specifications. When shed first arrived, the huge room, filled with the latest cutting-edge biotech equipment and analytical devices, had seemed like paradise. Now, it was a prison.
Sitting down at the bank of a half dozen networked computers, each of which controlled several of the big machines and analyzed the resulting data, she tried to block awareness of the security cameras blanketing the huge room, tried not to think about the men who were undoubtedly watching her image on-screen.
Shed done her prep work well. Theyd gotten used to her returning to the lab around 10:00 p.m. and working until one or so in the morning. If she were lucky, all they would see now was their tame lab rat pulling up the last set of results and then powering down the big machines for the night.
In reality, she was executing two programs shed managed to sneak onto the island. One was an uncrackable lockdown program that would freeze all of the lab computers and machines until she typed in a password. The other would shut down all of the networked computers on Rocky Cliff Islandincluding the ones running power and securityfor the space of five minutes, and then go back into hiding, supposedly untraceable by all but the original programmer.
Celeste had developed the routines just before shed gotten sick; she was the techie, Sydney the bio-geek. Together, theyd used to joke, they were a nerd superhero.
Now, those powers would be put to the test.
Okay, kids, do your thing. Sydney powered the lab computer down right after shed fed the programs into the network. In ten minutes, the lights should go out. Then, the next time someone turned on one of the lab computers, the only thing theyd see on the screen would be a text prompt that read: Password?
If she made it off Rocky Cliff Island, she would use the password as leverage to keep her and Celeste alive long enough to grab the money out of her accounts and disappear. Then and only then, she would contact the authorities and tell them about Tiberiuss plans.
If she died trying to escape, she could only hope Tiberius or his tech experts would try three wrong passwords, whereupon the worm would corrupt every piece of data on the network and fry the computers.
If she lived and was recaptured, though
She shuddered. Shed seen what happened to people who crossed Tiberius. The image of what hed done to Jenny Marie, the softhearted cook hed caught sneaking e-mails between Sydney and Celeste, would remain burned on Sydneys retinas until the day she died. Unfortunately that day could be far sooner than she hoped, because crossing Tiberius was her only option right now. She couldnt allow him to use her scientific discovery for the purpose he intended; she had to stop him. Which meant it was now or never.
Sydneys fingers trembled as she hung her lab coat on its hook near the airlock-type passageway that was the only way in or out of the windowless lab. After pushing through the first of the pressurized doors, she touched the intercom button beside the second. Out, please.
Shed long ago learned not to bother making small talk with the guardsit only made them suspicious. Nowadays, she stuck to her routine and they stuck to theirs, little suspecting that she was studying them and waiting for her chance to escape. Or maybe theyd suspected all along, and she was doomed before she even began.
The door unlocked with a click. Sydney held her breath as it swung open automatically, then exhaled in relief when she saw the hallway was empty. If theyd sent an escort she wouldve had to scrap her plan, but the armed escorts had gotten fewer and further between with every week and month she behaved herself, as shed pretended to cooperate with Tiberius and his mad plan.
Forcing herself to breathe evenly, she stepped out into the hallway and headed for her quarters, trying to look like all she had on her mind was a few hours of sleep. When she reached the gray, featureless door leading to her two-room suite, she pressed another intercom button. In, please.
The door clicked and opened, but instead of entering, she reached around the corner and fumbled for the thin wire shed installed in the wall panel earlier that day, in the ten minutes shed bought by accidentally blocking the view of the single camera in the main room of her suite by hanging a towel over the lens. By the time one of the guards had buzzed himself in without knocking, removed the offending item and groused at her for her continued sloppinesswhich shed carefully cultivated over the past few monthsshed done what needed to be done with the circuitry.
Concealed alongside the molding, the wire led to a simple gadget shed Mickey Moused out of parts filched from the lab, using the diagram Celeste had sent via Jenny Marie. A sharp tug would form a bridge between the two main power lines in the wall beside the door, creating an obvious short and giving Tiberiuss engineers no reason to look further for the source of the electrical failure.
At least that was the theory.
Here goes nothing, she whispered, heart pounding. She checked her watch. Nine minutes fifty-five since shed fed the kill program into the network. Fifty-six. Fifty-seven. As the door to her room started to close on its soundless mechanism, she yanked on the wire and jumped back.
There was a sizzle and a blinding flash in her room. Two seconds later the lights went out in the hallway, plunging her into utter blackness.
Sydney didnt think. She ran.
She heard muffled shouts and pounding feet as she bolted along the hallway and slammed through the door at the end, where shed jimmied the lock earlier that day.
She was out!
The night was cold and rainy, which she hadnt anticipated. Sucking in a lungful of the wet, cutting air of springtime off the Atlantic coast, she plunged down a short cement staircase and bolted past a tarped-over swimming pool. Taking the direct route shed mapped out during her daily guard-escorted walks around the compound, she headed for the dock at the bottom of the hill. The boats were little more than a collection of shadows against a misty backdrop of rain, dark against darker in the moonless, drizzly night.
She was halfway there when the backup generators kicked in, circumventing the primary network shed crashed. Emergency lights flared to life and alarms whooped, the noise seeming to come from nowhere and everywhere at once.
Heart pounding, legs shaking with fear and adrenaline, Sydney ran for her life.
The drizzle had slicked everything with a thin layer of water, making the cement walkway slippery beneath her sneakers. The sharp wind cut through the jeans and light turtleneck shirt shed worn in the climate-controlled lab. She hadnt dared trigger the guards suspicions by dressing more heavily than that, and she paid for it as she pounded down a short incline to the water. Her teeth were chattering by the time she reached the first boat.
Stop! a voice shouted from behind her. Booted footsteps approached from the side at a run as the guards surrounded her. Gunfire chattered, kicking up stinging pellets of concrete directly ahead and to both sides of her.
They werent aiming to kill. Not yet, anyway.
Ignoring the warning shots, Sydney took two running steps across the dock and flung herself toward the nearest motorboat, which was one of the small, fast two-seaters the guards used for shoreline patrols. She untied the craft from the dock and clambered aboard, ducking with a terrified scream as bullets smacked into the side of the boat and peppered the interior of the craft.
Her heart rocketed in her chest and for a split second she wanted to give up, wanted to put her hands up and say, You win, I was just kidding. Take me back to the lab.
But she didnt. She couldnt. Still, her fingers shook as she punched the ignition buttonher complacence had made the guards sloppy enough to leave the console unlocked, thank Godand the engine roared to life.
Coming from the other side of the island, past the cliff-side mansion, she heard the rotor thumps of Tiberiuss helicopter preparing to lift off. She wasnt sure if he was evacuating or coming after her, but the sound added to the chaos of siren whoops and shouts as a dozen guards hit the dock, running flat out toward the other boats. The gunfire was silent for the moment, though, indicating that the security detail had orders to recapture her, not kill her.
Shed figured Tiberius would consider her far more of an asset than a liabilityat least until it looked like she was going to succeed in escaping. Then hed have his men start shooting for real.
Thank God for the rain. It would give her a layer of covering fog, and hopefully spoil their aim. The idea of being shot atof being shotterrified her, but she couldnt turn back now.
She slapped the throttle forward, blessing the summer she and Celeste had spent with a foster family on Moose-head Lake, where theyd learned the basics of boating. The motorboat leapt forward, spraying the dock with a plume of water that made the guards shout and curse, sounds that were quickly lost beneath the roar of the motorboat engine and the growing thump of the helicopter.
Sydney glanced back, to where the mansion rose high on the crest of the island, a dark, hulking shadow that was barely visible in the fog. Then the chopper swung up and over the building. Its searchlights cut through the mist, and the bumps of rockets were clearly visible on either skid.
That gave Sydney her answer: Tiberius wasnt fleeing. The bastard was coming after her.
Trembling with terror and adrenaline, breath sobbing in her lungs, she sent the little boat west, toward where the shoreline of northern Massachusetts ought to be. She couldnt see any town lights through the wind-driven rain, which was coming down harder by the moment. The pellets stung her face and throat, quickly soaking through her light clothing and plastering the fabric to her skin.