Beginnings - Djinn 2

Today is supposed to be the day to post the beginning of the sequel to Djinnocide... but the first few pages of Djinn 2 (not the real name... I don't have one yet) are rife with spoilers for Djinnocide.  I still hope to someday get that sucker published, so I really don't want to leave spoilers laying around the internet for potential readers to discover. 

Let's just say the book starts out later in the day where Djinnocide ends.  And Jo's already in deep shit again.  Someone's been kidnapped, someone's lying, and someone's either making the people who know Jo best disappear or wiping out their memories.  She'll have to make friends with an enemy, get help from on high, and do a little business with a guy who may or may not have been Rasputin.  But Jo's not the only djinn at stake here.  And the ultimate sacrifice this time may be the secrecy all genie-kind hold dear.

I really put the screws to her this time.  And some readers are going to hate me...   Bwa ha ha. 

Needless to say, I love this book.  I really wish I could share it with you all.  It's killing me that I can't give you a piece, but the whole damn thing is riddled with spoilers of one kind or another.

Stop by next week when I share the beginning of my last unfinished WIP - Sleeping Ugly.

Beginnings - Djinnocide

And here we are at Djinnocide - which is out on submission to Harper Voyager.  I stopped crossing my fingers - hand cramps, donchaknow - but I'm still hoping that when I finally hear from them, it'll be to tell me they want to publish my book.

Anyway, this is the beginning of Djinnocide after the rewrite had I just finished before the HV submission window opened. So, basically, no one has seen this polished version in its entirety.  Tada!  (Unlike the last few Beginnings posts, this is not the whole first chapter - just the first few pages.)

Enjoy.

Djinnocide

Chapter One

No one ever asked me if I wanted to be a genie. I never even thought such a thing was possible. I was a modern woman living in the Roaring Twenties. Against my mother’s wishes, I wore my hair and my skirts short. I drank at speakeasies. I danced with gangsters. Hell, I even smoked for petesakes. After surviving for almost two whole decades, I had certainly aged too far to believe in fairy stories anymore.

My father, Reggie, he was the dreamer in the family. He was the one always looking for the next big thing and if he could steal it? Well, even better. Me, I spent years looking for the next big party. In fact, I’d been prepping for my own birthday extravaganza when the package arrived. The shipping label said ‘Constantinople’, but whether my thief of a dad could still be found there was anyone’s guess. Odds were he’d moved to the next port of call and his next score. At least he’d bothered to think enough of me to send a gift. After all, it’s not every day a gal turns eighteen.

“Marriageable age,” my mother mumbled at me that morning in lieu of a more sentimental greeting. She’d meant ‘well past the age of finding a husband’ if her previous birthday greetings were any indication. She wanted me married and out of the house before I could graduate high school. To Evangeline’s thinking, she should’ve had at least a couple grandchildren bouncing on her alcoholic knee by the time I reached this age.

I didn’t care about her whims. Lucky for me neither did Reggie. As he often told his dear wife, “Josephine Eugenia Mayweather will marry when she damned well pleases”. I mentally amended that to add ‘if ever’.

If the gifts he sent from abroad were any indication, I’d have no problems in life if I joined the family business. How hard could stealing really be? Reggie didn’t seem too taxed on his infrequent visits home. In his words, he only had the law to worry about and they hadn’t nabbed him yet.

Prison didn’t scare me. Not then. I was young. I was invincible. And I planned to tell Reggie that I was his new partner as soon as possible. If he couldn’t come home for my birthday, I’d go to him. I imagined myself demanding my place in his life. He could teach me how to relieve the world of its monetary burdens.

I was an adult. I would do as I damn well pleased. A fact I planned on telling Evangeline, as soon as my party guests left. I’d board a tramp steamer before the month was finished.

But even before that, I had a package to open.

The small box, wrapped in brown paper tied with twine, sat on the foyer table—waiting for me when I returned from a late lunch with friends. They left with promises to return later and ruin the party for me. Such good friends I had then. The quicker they raided Evangeline’s special plans, the quicker I could start my new life.

I called out to tell her I was home, but she was either soaking her brain in absinthe or sleeping off an earlier drunk. Servants scurried around the place, preparing. Somewhere deeper in the apartment, duck and pheasant and veal waited to be consumed. My stomach rumbled. Too bad for it my curiosity overwhelmed my appetite.

Grabbing Reggie’s gift, I raced up the grand staircase to my room. I kicked off my Mary Janes and flopped onto the impossibly-girly canopy bed my mother thought proper for a female child. Unconcerned with any black smudges the box left, I pushed it across the silk bedspread Reggie sent from the Orient as last year’s gift and wrestled the twine free. The paper tore away to lay forgotten on a goose-down pillow. Packing material tumbled from the upended box along with a beige envelope.

Reggie’s bold strokes graced the front: To my dearest Daughter. I pushed it aside. Time enough later for his birthday wishes. I took comfort in the certainty his note only contained professions of a father’s love—perhaps along with when he would be home again. I knew he loved me. Whether he actually made it home according to his schedule was a crapshoot.

My eyes centered again on the package’s contents. Peeking hesitantly from the remaining shreds of paper, lay a rosewood box. I didn’t have Reggie’s knowledge of antiques, but I knew a prized piece when I saw it. The carvings were intricate, if a little primitive. The inlays centered in each delicate flower had to be ivory.

I lay there devouring every nook and cranny of its beauty. My fingers itched to trace the designs, but I held back, savoring the visual meal before allowing myself to dive in. I held onto the delicious delay as long as I could, teasing my innate impatience until I couldn’t stand myself anymore. I reached out, caressing the silky wood the way a loving hand might slip tenderly over its lady’s cheek.

A gentle breeze ruffled the bangs across my forehead as I lifted the lid. I stifled my disappointment when I realized the box itself had been my only present. Not that it wasn’t a really lovely gift, I’d just hoped to find at least a necklace nestled in a velvet interior.

“Expecting baubles perhaps, my young Master?” said a voice from behind me. No sooner had the words hit my ears then the box filled with a rainbow’s worth of light and color. I flung the possessed thing away, scattering gems of every size and shape across my bed. A single emerald the size of a walnut teetered on the edge for a second and then dropped, clattering on the floor below.

Beginnings - Unequal

Well, we're finally coming near the end of the journey.  I played with this one on and off for a few years, making numerous false starts, until I finally sat down and hammered it out.  Unfortunately, it has not been edited. 

Unequal

Chapter One

Rue Logan’s work boots squelched in the sticky red mess.  Only minutes before, the puddle had grown from a few drops trickled off the edge of a gurney to the size of an area rug.  Moments before that, those drops had been pumping through the body of a healthy young man—healthy until someone else’s steel sunk into his flesh.

She watched as they wheeled away his corpse before stepping forward to clean up the mess made both by his leaking life and by the incompetence of the ones who were supposed to save him.  As she pushed her bucket through the puddle, she hated the fact that this was the only part of the mess she could do anything about.

As she watched the doctor trying ineffectively to staunch the bloodflow, she longed to push him aside.  She knew how to create a simple tourniquet.  She knew how to hold a blood vessel silent while hands worked to repair damage.  Her hands itched to push the doctor away.  Her fingers itched to sew a simple stitch that would save a life. 

She tried once.  Then it had been a woman in the throes of a complicated birth.  All Rue would’ve had to do was step in and two lives would have continued past that day.  She pushed the doctor aside then, and began the work she knew how to do.  He called security. 

After hours of lying and playing dumb, they let her go with a warning to stick to her own job.  If the DOE thought she should’ve been a doctor, they would’ve made her one, they said.  The DOE certainly knows better than some janitor about who can best administer medicine.  When she was released, she learned both mother and child died.

Such stupidity.  Such waste.

Jamming her mop into the bucket with more force than was necessary, Rue began the job she was told to do.  With each slap of the mop, the floor became a shade lighter, but as the blood was cleaned from the floor, it filled her up to overflowing.  She wouldn’t have been surprised to find her face flushed with it, her eyes red with someone else’s life.

“Why do you put yourself through this?” Kyle told her one day as he snuck her leftovers from the cafeteria.  “Go home.  Eat your rations.  Accept this life is the one you were meant to live.”

But she couldn’t accept it.  Accepting this life was as good as it was ever going to get was almost as horrifying as the thought of what would happen if she ever got caught. 

Her Uncle Howard had hidden himself so well.  The hours he spent tinkering in the basement, designing an entire city out of bits no one else wanted, no one knew about except Rue and her mother.  Until the day her father went downstairs. 

Rue never had proof her father turned Uncle Howard in, but she did know he was shoved out of the house to live on his own.  After that, it was only a matter of time before the DOE caught up with him.  Whether he was taken away directly by them, or they got him later, Rue never knew. 

Father told her he was doing the right thing.  She was Unequal enough without her uncle’s influence.  He was saving her from…  Well, no one knew for sure what the fate of the Unequal were.  Everyone just knew they didn’t want to be disappeared, too. 

From that point on, Rue’s father watched her for any sign she was becoming Unequal.  He held her in front of the videoset for hours on end.  When she grew too large to hold, he taped her in place with long strands of sticky gray. 

“It’s for your own good,” he would always say. 

“He’s afraid,” her mother would say hours later when they were alone and Rue was free.  She didn’t need to say of what.  Rue knew.  She was afraid of the same things.  She was just afraid of becoming like her peers even more.

Every day she would march off to be educated, falling into step beside children who were far more Equal than she’d ever be.  Their slack jaws and dull eyes scared her more than reading Dr. Jekyll before bed.  But never more than the idea she would become like them.  When grades came in, her papers would bleed red—marked not where her answers were wrong but where her answers differed from everyone else’s.  It’s not that Rue couldn’t mimic what the teachers wanted.  She just couldn’t make herself flow into the mold they wanted.

“Citizen Janitor?” said a stern voice beside her.  “Are you ill?”

She was, but not for the same reason the nurse thought.  She was sick to death of pretending she was the same.  She was tired of hiding her light under a bushel, as the elders put it. 

“No, Citizen Nurse.”

“Then get back to work before someone calls the DOE.”

The Department of Equalization was too busy to worry about one daydreaming janitor, but Rue couldn’t take the chance that her previous infractions would amount to enough of a reason to become noticeable to the them.  She slapped her mop onto the already wet floor, raining pink droplets across the nurse’s shoes. 

“Sorry,” she mumbled, but the woman was already headed off to torment some other person—most likely a patient.  She watched the thin figure stride along the hall, focused on something ahead of her and nothing at all.  

After three changes of water and two mop heads, the floor was as clean as it ever was—the white tiles tinged slightly pink, the grout tinged faintly brown.  The pink would turn brown eventually, too.  In Rue’s world, the absence of substance wasn’t black.  It was a dim shade of dingy brown.

The emergency doors opened several times through her cleaning, each time regurgitating another wrecked person into the hospital’s gullet.  Each person swallowed whole.  Most who came through those doors left through the back.  Where they went from there, Rue knew but she didn’t like to think about.  Those who survived the excellent treatment they received, staggered home only to return another day with another malady.

While she slapped her mop on the dingy floor and ground her teeth in utter impotence.

At the end of the day, after hours of pointless mopping while she ignored the screams around her, Rue slunk out the employee exit and around to the back.  She slipped through an impossibly thin crevice between two oddly shaped brick additions into a courtyard, long overgrown.  Some nights, she lay on the ground and looked up at the dearth of stars.  Tonight she was too tired to partake in even that small wonder. 

As the rest of her world slumbered in their assigned housing, eating their assigned rations, Rue popped open one loose basement window and pulled herself back into the space she hated during the day.  As impotent as she felt from daybreak to nightfall, she felt twice as effective in the dark.  In the dark, no one saw the janitor from dayshift.  No one wondered why she slipped into patients’ rooms, adjusting the charts with a deft hand.  No one knew how many small mercies she accomplished in the hours before exhaustion took her.  Even she had lost count. 

No one knew because she had lost count, and because no one ever thought one small Citizen would chance being caught out as Unequal.

As Rue pulled on a pair of scrubs she’d stolen from the hospital laundry, she smiled for the first time all day.  Tonight she would check on the mother on the third floor and her baby on the fifth.  Neither one had been expected to live through their first night.  This night made their fourth night, and if everything went well, they would be released before another evening passed.

Clipping on the false identification she created in a different corner of the basement, she stepped toward the elevator she didn’t dare use during the day.  No more ‘Citizen Janitor Logan’.  Now Rue was ‘Citizen Doctor Mason’ and, as Equal as all men were, she still received a measure of respect not afforded to a janitor.

She took the elevator up to the lobby floor like always.  And like always, she expected to step forth and blend into the crowd.  Every other night, she would step off the elevator, cross to the cafeteria and buy a coffee.  Beverage in hand, she would take the elevator once more, but this time heading upwards like any respected Citizen would expect. 

The doors opened and she took a step forward.  The chest she ran into was a surprise, but nothing she couldn’t overcome.  She mumbled an apology and pretended to look at her watch.  Nothing out of the ordinary.

“Slumming, Citizen Doctor?” said a voice.  “I didn’t know patients could be found in the basement.”

Rue kept her eyes focused on a point behind the nurse’s head, but the woman may have already recognized her from earlier.   “Pressed the wrong floor,” she said, letting the words slip out as tersely as she heard any other doctor speak.  “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have rounds.”

The nurse cleared her throat and stepped aside.  “I was only making a jest,” she said as she stepped aside.  “Run along if you think you’re so much better.”

Rue knew she was so much better, but she didn’t speak another word.  She simply brushed past the offensive little person and went on her carefully orchestrated way.  Too bad she couldn’t orchestrate the people around her as easily.

“Citizen Doctor Mason,” the young girl on nightshift said as she entered the third floor station. 

“Citizen Nurse,” she answered.  It wasn’t that she couldn’t remember the redhead’s name.  Actual doctors, she learned, never addressed anyone beneath them by their names.  Occupation mattered.  Names did not.  “The chart for Citizen Mother Houston.”

The redhead’s pale skin grew pink.  “She’s no longer with us.”

She didn’t want to think of the obvious answer.  “On the floor or in the hospital?”

“She passed onto the next existence this morning.”

“And her baby?”  Rue’s voice shook.  She shouldn’t be asking questions.  She should just accept the death of the mother and hope the premature infant lived long enough without his mother to be placed into some kind of home.  She shouldn’t care, but she couldn’t help herself.  They were her patients and she wasn’t ready to accept whatever fate chose for them. 

“How would I know?” the nurse said.  “We don’t have babies on this floor.”

Rue sucked in one deep breath and held it.  Raising her tone to this person wouldn’t do her a damn bit of good.  She just reminded herself the girl was a product of her environment, of this world they all lived in, and let out her breath in a long slow whoosh.  “I realize that, but the charts are connected for a reason, Citizen Nurse.  The child’s welfare is directly tied to its mother’s.”

“You’ll have to call up to five.  They would know more…”

She didn’t bother listening to the rest.  Her feet were already dragging her toward the elevator again.  Waiting here was wasting time when she could be up two floors in less than a minute.

“Citizen Doctor… Mason, is it?” said the pudgy woman at the fifth floor station.  “Who are you inquiring after?”

“Citizen Baby Houston.  He was in intensive infant care.  His mother…  She died this morning…”

“He died,” the duty nurse said without a trace of regret.

“Died?  How?  He was improving when I left…”  Except Rue wasn’t supposed to be on this floor.  Not that it mattered.  She wasn’t really supposed to be anywhere.

“I don’t know anything about that.”  The nurse pulled a clipboard from the wall and scanned down a list of the recently deceased.  “Says here he was blue when the night nurse tried to give him his morning feeding.”  She shrugged.  “Nothing to be done, so we sent him off to the body room.”

“Let me see the chart,” she said, snatching the offending thing away from the nurse before she could react.  Everything in it was exactly as the nurse has said with one exception.  The name on the chart wasn’t Houston.  “You must really need a vacation.”

“I don’t see how my work schedule has any bearing…”  The woman didn’t look up from her work, which amounted to checking boxes on forms Rue suspected had never been read.

“The name on this chart.  It isn’t Houston.  Either you are lax in your work,” she said, “or you are unable to read.  In either case, the DOE might be interested in your performance tonight.”  Rue hated to use the DOE to put fear in others, especially when she was so afraid of them herself.  When the nurse seemed unconcerned, she wasn’t sure whether to be relieved or just disgusted.

“Report me if you have to.  Lord knows disappeared can’t be worse than this godforsaken place.”

Rue’s hands clenched at her sides where the nurse couldn’t see.  Showing any emotion right now would only get her in trouble.  She’d already escaped one near miss on the elevator.  She didn’t need another unfortunate encounter.  It wouldn’t do that poor baby any good and it wouldn’t help the dozens of other patients who still needed her.

“Thank you,” she said, trying to keep the frustration from her voice.  She must not have succeeded because the infant care nurse raised one eyebrow.

“Babies are born every day.  Mothers die every day,” the woman said.  “Why should these two be more important that the others?  We’re all Equal.”

Which Rue took to mean none of them were important enough to care about or mourn.  Hell, she didn’t even know if the poor mother had been allowed to hold her own child.  She knew the child would never be allowed to mourn his mother.  Birth, death, illness, health.  In the eyes of the law, they were all the same.  Equal.

Beginnings - Fertile Ground

Here we are again on another Sunday, and I'm late.  Sorry about that.  I totally planned to have this scheduled and ready to go, but the days got away from me. 

As I said last weekend, I was on a suspense kick.  This is the third of those and the one that didn't get finished.  Someday, maybe...

Fertile Ground

Prologue

As she walked down the produce aisle, Adam could smell her fertility.  Her long brown hair was pulled taut from her face into an unflattering ponytail, but she could have been butt ugly for all he cared.  He didn’t need to look at her for long, he only needed to get inside her.  Plant his seed and be done with it.

Nine months from now, she would bear a perfect child in his image.  They always did.

Seven weeks ago, she had been just another blurred face at a pro-life rally.  He noticed her then, but another already held his eye.  By now that other girl was draped over the porcelain, proving her womb already bore his fruit.  He was finished with her.  On to the next.

She reached out to squeeze a cantaloupe, testing its ripeness.  He smiled at the irony.

Chances were good that she didn’t even know she was no more than fertile soil.  Most women didn’t know their cycles as well as he did.  They never took the time to watch the signs.  They never bothered to understand God’s rhythm or His plan for them.

Only he understood what the Lord’s intentions were.

“Be fruitful and multiply,” he whispered as the girl chose a bag of grapes and set them inside her cart.  Those gentle hands would raise his son.

He could imagine the strong sturdy legs taking their first steps.  A wide smile of too few teeth expressing the first joy of being a man.  For the first few months, he knew, children were little more than the monkeys some assumed humans were made from.  But he knew better.  The beginning of a man’s life was just a test; walking upright was the passage signifying God’s plan.

His sons would all know their true place in the world.

Let the women raise them through those monkey years.  Time enough to claim them once their abilities began to grow.  Once they became men.

And if any females were born, he decided, he would ignore them.  Someday they would bear sons.  After all, it was their only purpose.

“Excuse me,” a shy voice said.

He looked up and caught himself looking directly into the same watery blue eyes he’d seen at the rally all those weeks before.

“Don’t I know you from somewhere?”

This wasn’t the first time one of the girls had recognized him as he followed their paths.  He wasn’t an easy man to forget.

“Oh!  Hi!,” he said.  “Didn’t I see you at the protest in Ann Arbor last month?”

Her lush mouth split into a wide smile of perfect teeth.  “I thought that was you.  Funny seeing you here.”

“I was just thinking that myself.  I travel a lot for work.  How about you?”  His words came out as smoothly as if they were rehearsed, but they were words he’d spoken at least a dozen times.  It helped that they were true, just not particularly true for this occasion. 

“Not me.  I live a few blocks from here.”  She nodded her head in the general direction of her home.  He pasted a surprised look on his face even though he’d been there the night before, watching her.

“Small world.”

“Well, I’ve got to run.  It was nice seeing you.  Next time you’re in town, look me up.”  She tried to make her words sound sincere, but he knew she didn’t really want to see him again.  They never wanted to, but they always did.

In fact, she would be seeing him again tonight.

Beginnings - Nanotechnology

After I finished Manhunter, I got on a suspense kick.  The next book that came out of my head went through a couple false starts, but I think I really had something going here.  I called it Nanotechnology just as a filename to keep everything straight.

I wrote this all the way through to the end, but after I finished it, I set it aside before I edited, and I started something else.  Partway through the something else, I received a rejection on the full for Manhunter (aka Dying Embers) that derailed me and made me doubt whether I could ever successfully write suspense.  Needless to say, I dropped this and the other thing, and went with something I was pretty sure I knew how to write.

I still think this book has potential, but right now there are a few other books in the editing queue ahead of it.  Here's the beginning...

Nanotechnology

Prologue

Payton Landis caressed the service revolver in his lap.  Part of him wanted to believe one bullet would end all of this, but it would only end his involvement.  Whether he lived or not, Project Hermes would move forward.  His death would only stall them for a brief time while Secretary Dougherty brought another patsy up to speed.

Lord knows there were enough of them standing in line to head the Terrorism Task Force when he was gone.  Assistant Director Tweeg—his own underling—practically drooled last year when Landis hinted about retiring.

And then his dream to spend his winter years romancing his wife crumbled like so much asbestos.

Landis’ eyes strayed to the picture frame on the corner of his desk.  His wife smiled back at him like she once had every morning, but no longer could.  Today, though, disappointment seemed to tinge her expression.

“I’ll come see you tomorrow, Sweetheart,” he told the image, but even as the words left his lips, he knew he lied.  Four months ago he’d visited the hospice just in time to see the nurse changing Evelyn’s diaper.  One look at her former voluptuous body turned living skeleton and he threw up in a potted plant.

That was the last time he saw his wife.

A longer time had passed since he laid eyes on the woman occupying the frame next to Evelyn’s.  When the photo was taken, Randi was barely old enough to be called more than a girl.  Fresh from college and new to the academy, she looked so young in her crisp new uniform.  Other than the mischief in her eyes, she looked like the consummate rookie law enforcer.

If he did this thing he was ordered to do, she would hate him. 

He met Miranda Kruz during a guest lecture at Quantico, and in no time at all, she became like the daughter he never had.  In the photo, her smile held so much promise and such innocent hope for the future.  If she could only understand what this decision would mean for the country they both loved, she might see its importance. 

Most likely, she would damn him for the rest of his days.  She wouldn’t be the only one.  Lord knows, he damned himself enough for all of them. 

Back then he wanted her to succeed, but he was so certain she’d fail.  Too pretty, too sensitive, and way too enthralled with the idea justice could always be served—she should’ve fallen apart at Quantico, but instead she excelled.  Even though he recommended her appointment to the Secret Service, he was sure they’d boot her on her ass, but instead she received accolades.  When he requested her transfer to his own Terrorism Task Force at Homeland Security, he was afraid every spark within her would dwindle until she became another mindless drone.  She would’ve been better off it had, but he couldn’t have been more wrong.  Eventually she settled into the mold each organization wanted her to accept, and somehow the fire still burned in her eyes.  

With one hand, he tipped her photo facedown so she couldn’t witness his act of betrayal.

He thought about his friends—the few men he really could call by the term.  With the secret he would carry after today, seeing any of them again would be tantamount to spitting on the values they shared.  Even now, he could never sink so low.  One by one, he ticked off their names and asked for their forgiveness. 

“Why do this at all?” a silent voice niggled in his head.

The reasons were so few, and even those sounded insufficient.  He could blame pressure from Dougherty; he could cite fear of losing his job.  He’d been with the government for so many years he could no longer envision himself as anything else.  In the end, though, only one real reason sprang to mind. 

Evelyn.

Maybe if those men he loved so well thought about his life and this choice, they would understand.  Maybe they, too, had lost a loved one to the country’s growing insanity. 

He picked up his wife’s photo and prayed he was doing the right thing.  He told himself that someone before him should’ve already exercised some courage.  If anyone had the balls to do what he was doing now, his wife would be home cooking dinner instead of lying in bed drooling on herself.  Perhaps the young man who’d been deported three times—and returned after each—could have been stopped before he raped again, before he forced his way into the Landis home to commit yet another horrific crime.

The memory of his wife crumpled and broken at the bottom of the stairs leapt unbidden to his mind’s eye.  A miracle kept her body alive, but nothing would bring back her mind.  If only he’d seen the rightness of this plan when Dougherty first brought the idea to him, his beautiful Evelyn would still be whole.  He couldn’t change what happened to her, but if this project worked, he might be able to stop such a vicious invasion from happening to anyone else’s wife.

Looking at the stack of correspondence on his desk, he deftly pulled out the only mail that meant anything tonight.  Regardless of what either of those letters said, their content probably meant his damnation.

The first bore the insignia of Davis Labs, addressed by hand in the owner’s own bold strokes.  If Jack Davis accepted this project, its timely completion was assured.  Although Payton only met the engineer once, he had no doubts of Davis’s competence.  From their brief acquaintance, he also knew every tiny doubt he himself had would multiply under Davis’s scrutiny until the man couldn’t help but refuse the job.

Hell, only Payton’s insistence even got him to look over the specs.  Less than a week later, the return envelope landed on his desk. 

The Nigerian was a different story.  Casting a sideways glance toward the other envelope, Landis silently wished that particular proposal never arrived.  Only this morning, the beige envelope embossed in gold slid out from his daily pile of mail, and he felt his chest tighten. 

Of the half-dozen companies who received the request for quote, Mertex was the one Landis hoped would never go after the contract.  In every way they were as perfect as Davis Labs, but still, something about the look in Dr. Ahumibe’s eyes turned even his ex-soldier stomach.

The overly proper man in the Armani suit wanted the project too much.  Not like a man who wanted to solve a difficult problem, but for some other reason Landis could only guess at.  And the guesses all filled him with dread.

He balked over opening what he knew would be the winning bid.  He was half tempted to crumple the envelope into a tight ball and toss it into the nearest open flame, but it was no use.  No matter what he did, Mertex would get the contract.

“Get this project done,” Dougherty had told him.  “On time, and under budget.”

Payton knew Mertex would propose the cheapest bid with the shortest lead time for completion.  Even if he was wrong and Davis’s envelope did contain a quote, he knew it couldn’t be competitive.  For some indiscernible reason, Mertex would undercut everyone.  The hyena-hungry look in Ahumibe’s eyes foretold the truth.  The quote would contain a price for which the company would barely make a profit.  If the project ran long, Mertex and its shareholders would lose their shirts.

Without even realizing what he was doing, Landis slumped forward and cradled his face in his hands.  The world would be a better place if none of the companies bid.  Everything would’ve been better if he himself had refused to obey orders and walked away from his job rather than send this project out for quote. 

He might stop this avalanche now by refusing to open the envelopes.  All he would have to do was call the remaining bidders and take the project off the table.  The possibility still remained to walk away from the horror he was about to commit.

Except he couldn’t walk away while Evelyn was…  He shuddered away from the image.

If it could be done, this project could stop another man from arriving home late to find his future shattered.  Bringing an end to this so-called ‘immigration problem’ was within his power.

One little call and millions could be saved.

This is what he told himself as he picked up the phone.  It was what he told himself, but he didn’t really believe it.