Page 34 of Shadow Burn

The oak table where she’d spent six weeks of her life was already half bare, but at least nothing was missing. The intruder hadn’t come here.

Yet. Her mind supplied the image before she could stop it: black ski mask, dull brown eyes, the gun lifting through the crack in her bedroom door. She gripped her bandaged palm around the stun baton ignoring the pain.

Jasper appeared in the doorway. “Ready?”

She turned off the lights, locked the rear exit of the library behind them. She dropped the key through the metal Returns slot and climbed into the truck without looking back.

She didn’t know what to say on the drive to the compound. Jasper kept his eyes on the road, as if the silence didn’t bother him. As the darkness slid by the window, she felt a few of her muscles unwind.

Until they reached the compound. They passed through an open gate that closed behind them. Gravel crunched under the tires, and the main building materialized out of the dark, a few lit windows making it look like a ship at anchor.

Dr. Montgomery met them at the entrance. She stood in the foyer in slacks and a dark sweater, her hair pulled neatly back. She looked like she’d never gone to bed. Katherine doubted that.

“Katherine.” Vivi stepped forward and took her hand briefly. “I’m glad you’re okay. Come in. I’ve set up a guest room in the private quarters wing for you and your cat. Would you like some tea to calm your nerves?”

Tea sounded wonderful, but Katherine didn’t want to put the doctor out any more tonight. “No, I’m fine.”

Vivi turned to Garrett and Jasper. “The conference room has plenty of space for the boxes.”

Katherine trailed after them, keeping a firm grasp on Priss’s carrier. The room had panels along one side and an interior window facing the corridor. She could see the long table inside, the rolling chairs, and a whiteboard. It was a professional space. Clean, well-lit, accessible.

Accessible was the problem that tugged at her now. The library had been a safe place. Katherine’s rental had seemed safe, too. “Is there anywhere more secure?” she asked.

Vivi paused. “This is one of the most secure compounds in the state. No one on this property is going to touch your boxes. You have my word.”

Katherine believed her. She did. Vivi Montgomery was former NSA. She headed this private security group. She’d opened her doors in the early morning hours without hesitation and was now standing in a hallway offering reassurance to a woman she barely knew. Nothing about the doctor warranted distrust.

Katherine still couldn’t make herself say yes to the conference room.

“My office,” Jasper said from behind her. He was carrying one of the archival boxes. “There’s room for all of this along the far wall. There’s a table you can spread papers on, and a couch if you want to stay near the documents. The door has a biometric lock.”

Vivi looked at him, and something passed between them that Katherine couldn’t read, and then Vivi nodded. “That could work. Katherine? Is that suitable?”

It was as close to CIA parameters as she was going to get tonight. Katherine turned to Jasper. “Does it open only for your biometric data?”

“Yes, if I lock it, but I never do.”

She heard what he was really saying--he never used the lock because he trusted the people around him. She was sure he dealt with confidential information regularly, but didn’t worry about anyone snooping. He was offering it to her because she needed it, and he wasn’t making her feel ridiculous about it.

She was aware of how she must look to them. A woman in wrinkled sweats clutching a cat carrier and asking for biometric security in a building staffed by security operators who had better things to do than rifle through boxes of a dead man’s memoirs and correspondence. She knew she was being paranoid.

She also knew that someone had tried to kill her, and the part of her brain that had spent ten years handling classified material was not going to calm down unless the papers were under a secure lock that she controlled.

Dr. Montgomery would no doubt surmise that it wasn’t so much the papers Katherine was trying to secure as her own safety and well-being. But Katherine didn’t feel like psychoanalyzing herself at the moment.

“That will work,” she said to Jasper. “If I won’t be in your way.”

He gave her a slight smile that suggested she’d been in his way since the moment they met.

She lifted her chin. His smile grew and he gestured with a tilt of his head for her to follow him.

She’d imagined his workspace as a dark room full of screens. She was half right. The room was larger than she’d expected. Three monitors sat on a long desk against the far wall, all currently dark. A set of six more was mounted on a wall, each showing views of the grounds from security feeds.

Equipment she couldn’t identify lined a shelf near those, mostly black boxes with small indicator lights. Two bookshelves flanked the door, and she stopped when she saw them. Actual books. Not manuals or reference guides, but novels and histories and what looked like a battered copy of Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea wedged between a naval tactics textbook and a volume on cryptography.

A leather couch sat along the opposite wall, soft and broken in, the kind of furniture that had absorbed a lot of late nights. A floor lamp and a coffee table with a single mug ring on the surface sat beside it. The room smelled faintly of him, the clean woodsy scent she’d been trying not to notice since yesterday.

She set Priss out of the way while Jasper and Garrett carried in the boxes and stacked them along the wall in the order she directed. She pointed, they placed. They worked quickly, and when the last box was set down, Garrett clapped Jasper on the shoulder, said goodnight to Katherine, and left.