Free Fatal Heat: A Navy SEAL Novella by Lisa Marie Rice Page A

the man overseeing the Argentina project out of Buenos Aires.
    Paige looked at the message Silvia had left for her @Barbie1. It was nonsense with a tinyurl in it. Clicking it brought her to a site dedicated to the restoration of Assyrian artifacts, and then to a specific section of the site. Smart girl.
    She isolated the section, which was huge—at least six hundred pages, over six hundred kilobytes. But the kicker was in the first ten pages. Paige skimmed the intro to the section, her heart starting to thump in panic.
    The test fields of HGHM-1 in Argentina had been planted five years ago, the minimum time the FDA required before applying for permission for human consumption of a new variety. Test results on animals had shown no anomalies. Human testing had not yet begun. But Silvia had gathered data from hospitals and clinics in the surrounding area. The data was preliminary, not all of it collation-ready, but serious enough to warrant an immediate halt to the test trials.
    Cancer rates in a radius of two hundred miles had increased by 400 percent over the past five years. Argentinian newspapers were calling it “The Cancer Epidemic.” Silvia was the first to connect it to the test fields, which had been kept confidential. Even on a hasty reading, Paige could see that there was a strong case to be made for the fact that her company’s new plant variety was massively carcinogenic.
    The project had to be terminated immediately, the plants uprooted and destroyed. A whole department of the company would have to shut down, a $30 million dollar investment wiped off the books, the legal department advised that probably a multi-million dollar lawsuit was in the offing. Heads would roll.
    Silvia had also sent her a personal message.
On Monday, a car tried to drive me off the road. It was that twisty, winding road I sometimes take to get to Santa Maria. The car tried to run me off the road twice, but there were other cars on the road and it drove off. I was shaken. When I got home, my door was open. They’d trashed my apartment. They took my computer. I took one look and ran. I’ve kept my cell off so they couldn’t track me, and turned it on only to try to call you, but they must have some kind of homing device, because a few seconds into the call, I get static. By “they” I think it’s a little rogue operation inside the company’s security division. I don’t dare use any friends’ cell phones. These guys mean business.
I’m in BA right now, staying with friends for a night or two, then moving on. I’m sending this to you from an internet café.
I need to get home somehow. Can you help? I don’t think security at headquarters is involved, but you never know, so don’t contact them. Right now, I’m thinking FBI.
I’ll be checking for a message from you a couple of times a day. Remember it’s GMT +3.
God, Paige. Help me. I need to come home. I need to put this into someone’s hands.
     
    Her own hands were trembling. Her mind was racing as she eliminated the restoration of Assyrian artifacts section and downloaded only Silvia’s file onto her hard drive and then onto her thumb drive. She watched the bar filling while trying to figure out who could be after Silvia.
    The most obvious choice for bad guy was the overall project’s team leader, Jonathan Finder. He had the psychological profile for it, too. Ambitious and greedy. This was his project and he was making his name with it. It was going to have to be scrapped and would probably cost the company huge amounts of money in reparations. It was the kind of blow that could destroy a career.
    Paige had always considered him a lightweight, but even wusses could be driven to violence by fear and greed.
    Paige didn’t even know where Finder was. He wasn’t at her lab, but that didn’t mean anything. GenPlant Laboratories ran facilities all over. Four research centers in the continental United States, including the high-security facility on Santo Domingo, and three