Joan nodded, making her short gray hair sway along her chin. "That's why I was sent here. The department doesn't want to lose you and your freakish brilliance, but we just can't afford the additional expense right now. Since your salary comes out of the Linguistics Department budget, we had the final say. I'm so sorry."
Noelle closed her eyes. What would she do now? Finding a job that didn't require her to say, "Do you want fries with that?" was going to be nearly impossible. It wasn't as if she had employers beating at her door, begging her to come to work for them. Mathematical linguistics wasn't exactly a booming field. Someone in an obscure career like hers would need months, if not years, to find another suitable position—likely one that would have to be built specifically for her. What would she do until then?
She had racked up tons of debt in student loans just to get her Ph.D. The loan payments by themselves were more than her other living expenses combined. She could hold off the bill collectors for a while, but she was going to need a decent income—not the kind she could make flipping burgers.
Noelle swallowed past the panic that clogged her throat. It was just money. She'd find some way around this obstacle.
"You could always take the grant," suggested Joan.
Noelle wished it was that simple. She was sorely tempted just to give in and make her life a whole lot easier. But for someone who started college at sixteen, easy clearly wasn't her modus operandi. "I can't do that. It's blood money."
"Don't be so dramatic," scolded Joan. "No one's asking you to hurt anyone. In fact, it's entirely possible that doing this could save lives."
"And if you're wrong?" Noelle stood and shoved her laptop into its black nylon tote. "I can't take that chance. I wouldn't be able to sleep at night wondering if my work cost the lives of innocents."
"This is your career we're talking about—your entire future rests on this decision."
"Now who's being dramatic?" scoffed Noelle.
"I'm serious. If you walk away from this grant, chances are you won't find another position anytime soon. If you take the job, then you stand the chance of becoming famous in academic communities as the woman who revolutionized mathematical linguistics."
Noelle rolled her eyes. "I'm sure they'll write that on my gravestone, right next to the part about how I helped kill thousands of innocent civilians in some country where the children don't even know what math is."
"I can't let you do this to yourself" said Joan. "You're too brilliant to slaughter your career because of something that might happen."
"It isn't your choice to make. You've been by my side, supporting me when everyone else pointed fingers and laughed at the scrawny kid with more brains than social skills. You are more than just my mentor, you're my friend, but you can't ask me to do this. I won't be a part of killing, no matter how necessary some general thinks it may be."
Noelle shoved students' homework into her bag, refusing to look at the woman who had given her nothing but good advice and steadfast support.
"I'll call you mis weekend, after you've had some time to think," said Joan.
Noelle didn't bother to tell her that she'd already done all the thinking she needed to. Her mind was made up. And just to be sure she wasn't tempted to change her mind when the financial panic truly set in, Noelle pulled her laptop back out from its case and typed the command that would kill every trace of data on her hard drive tied to the project.
There was no going back now.
She'd be out of a job come spring, but at least she'd be able to live with herself and that was something no amount of grant money could buy.
Fired or not, Noelle still had a job to do until spring, and she had just settled in for a wild Friday night of grading clumsily executed Calculus I homework when the hghts in her tiny rental house went black. With a sigh that came all the way from her toes, she pulled open a drawer that held one of many flashlights in her home. She'd always been told that old houses possessed great amounts of charm and character, but in her experience, they simply possessed noisy plumbing, abundant drafts and faulty wiring. It was the third time this week that she'd blown a fuse in the house's ancient fuse box.
Making her way to the basement more by memory than sight, Noelle descended the bare wooden stairs. With the speed of much practice, she unscrewed and replaced the same fuse she'd put in just two days ago. Mentally, she made a note to speak to Mr. Hasham about this problem when she paid him next month's rent.
Even with the new fuse in place, the lights didn't come on. That had never happened before.
Above her head came the crash of breaking glass, followed by the muted tinkle of brittle shards falling to the hardwood floor.
Noelle jumped, then froze, listening. The sound had come from her back door.
Someone was breaking into her house.
CHAPTER TWO
Noelle's heart slammed around inside her chest as she rumbled to switch off the flashlight so she could hide in the dark basement. Overhead, she heard the slow, methodical step of at least two people walking over the floor.
She prayed that they'd just take whatever they wanted and go.. As silently as she could, she tiptoed over the dusty floor toward the stairs. The basement was relatively empty and the only hiding place was behind the creaky stairway.
Noelle held her breath until her lungs burned, listening as the footsteps came near the top of the stairs. A beam of light flashed into the basement, falling on the spot where she had been standing only seconds before. In the center of the white pool of light sliding slowly over the floor was a tiny red dot—the kind cast by a laser pointer like she used when lecturing.
Or like the laser sight on a weapon.
Noelle sucked in a silent breath as the realization hit her. These weren't just some punky kids out to make a few bucks off a stolen TV. Whoever was in her house was armed in a serious way.
Noelle heard the faint rattling of the batteries against the plastic case of the flashlight held in her trembling hands.
The white spot of light swung to her left, casting the shadow of steps—like jagged black teeth—onto the floor near her feet. The red dot glowed brighter and she could see the streak of laser light bouncing off the dust particles floating about in the grimy basement air.
A soft gasp escaped her mouth against her will and blood pounded loudly in her ears. Noelle watched the white light, saw it gather and grow smaller and brighter as the wielder stepped onto the stairway.
The old wood of the top step creaked under the man's foot. She could see his heavy combat boots through the open back of the steps as he descended.
Noelle tried to catch her breath as she shrank back into the smallest space possible. She clutched the flashlight knowing that it was her only weapon. She knew also that it was going to be a poor match against men armed with real weapons.
A sharp pop, followed by a muffled thump sounded from what Noelle thought was her living room. The foot on the step moved, pivoting as if the man had turned around to look behind him. The column of light disappeared for an instant. She heard a grunt and the sickening crunch of breaking bone, then the body of the man at the top step slowly tumbled down, bouncing limply off the hard edge of each wooden step.
When he landed at the bottom of the steps on the dirty floor, his dark eyes were open, staring right at Noelle.
She froze with fear. It took her several frantically fast heartbeats to realize that the man was dead. Most of his face was covered with a black knit ski mask, but she could see his eyes, glazed and fixed in death.
The small flashlight mounted to the top of his rifle cast a brilliant cylinder of dusty light against the wall immediately to Noelle's left. The dust kicked up by his body's landing on the dirty floor swirled in the air, clawing its way into her lungs. The need to cough strained her chest as she fought to remain silent.
The groan of old wood sounded directly above her head and her chin shot up in time to see a new pair of boots land stealthily on the top step.
This time the boots were larger.
The man moved down the steps, staying to the outside edge so that the wood made as little noise as possible. Noelle forced herself to remain quiet, pressing a hand hard against her mouth and nose to keep herself from coughing. He moved with caution and a practiced grace that told her he'd done things like this before. A lot.
No flashlight was mounted to this man's weapon, but now that he had descended the steps far enough for her to see him through the wooden slats, she realized that he was wearing headgear—likely the Starlight scopes the military used for night vision.
He knelt before to the dead man at the bottom of the steps and pressed two fingers against the side of the fallen man's throat. Even as he checked for a pulse, his eyes never lowered.
He plucked something from the dead man's head and fitted it into his ear—probably some sort of communication device, she guessed.
He scanned the room and as soon as he spotted Noelle through his night-vision goggles, his body went still.
Cold sweat slid down between her breasts. She clamped her fist around the plastic flashlight, gripping it as she would a baseball bat. Slowly, she forced her trembling legs to straighten and began inching her way to the only escape
—the steps.
"Dr. Blanche?" asked the man in a near whisper.
He knew her name. That had to be good, right?
"I'm not here to hurt you. I'm here to get you out before the bad guys can." He extended a gloved hand. His body was entirely encased in black. Even his face had been smeared with black paint behind the eyeholes in his mask. He held the rifle with the unconscious confidence of a man who had spent a lot of time handling weapons.
She prayed he wasn't lying. She wasn't used to running on instincts, so hers were rusty, but they told her that he was telling the truth. He was here to help.
Intellectually, her best option was to make a break for the stairway to get out and let the police sort out good guys from bad. It was a good plan. Her only plan. But as if he anticipated her moves, his body shifted so that if she wanted to get to the stairs, she'd have to go through him. She'd taken enough statistics classes to know the chances of that happening were almost as bad as her chances of winning the lottery.
Painful, ragged heartbeats punctuated her scattered thoughts. Above the thud in her chest came the faint creak of aging floorboards. Someone else was up there.
Noelle's heart did a flip-flop and settled low in the pit of her stomach.
The man in front of her didn't even flinch. He raised one gloved finger to his lips for silence and knelt to switch off the dead man's flashlight.
Instantly, the basement was plunged back into dusty blackness. Noelle's eyes widened, but there was simply no visible light available. She was blind.
Noelle resisted the urge to flip the small plastic switch on her own flashlight and sweep away some measure of terror with the brush of light. She knew that would give away her position not only to the man here in the basement, but also to the one above.
Those rusty instincts screamed at her to get out of the house. Too bad they hadn't started shouting five minutes sooner.
Cautiously, Noelle reached out a hand to feel for the stairs as she stepped forward. Before her first step had fallen, the man in the basement with her had crossed the distance between them, covered her mouth with his gloved hand and used his body to flatten hers against the brick wall behind her.