Free Midnight Fire by Lisa Marie Rice Page A

money and power.
    “About an hour. What?” This with a sidelong glance at him.
    He couldn’t hide the wince. It would have taken him maybe half an hour. “Nothing.”
    “Don’t you ‘nothing’ me, Mr. Secret Agent man. I’m not about to get pulled over for speeding. Blake is dead. Nothing is going to change that. Speeding will get us nowhere.”
    Except it would get them to Casterly Blake fast. Jack hated slow driving. He was all about speed. And there was something tingling in his system, some kind of sixth sense that something was happening and he needed to move fast.
    Or it could be the woman at the steering wheel, carefully taking corners, beautiful face very serious. Maybe it was a different kind of tingle he was feeling. Not that operational tingle but one farther down.
    Long time since he’d felt that tingle.
    Think of something else.
    “So,” he said. “
Area 8.
”
    “Yep.” She took a neat turn, an excellent driver. He relaxed a little. He didn’t trust too many people behind the wheel. But she clearly knew what she was doing.
    He wanted to know more about her. The extraordinarily pretty, nerdy girl had grown into a gorgeous and fascinating woman who wasn’t giving him jack shit about herself.
    “Where’d you get the name?
Area 8?
Is that like Area 51?”
    That coaxed a faint smile out of her. “Nope, not at all. Area 8 is a part of the brain discovered by a scientist called Korbinian Brodmann. It processes uncertainty and, interestingly, it processes hope, or rather expectation in conjunction with uncertainty. We live in an uncertain world that holds out some hope.”
    “Hence,
Area 8
.”
    “Yep.”
    “And the blog? You didn’t study journalism.” He frowned. “Or did you?” He hadn’t been too concerned with the majors of the women he bedded in those days.
    She shot him an ironic glance, perfectly aware of what he paid attention to in college. “I studied political science. My parents dragged me to some very unsavory parts of the world. I saw exactly what chaos and disorder could do. It wrecked lives, stunted lives. I wanted to figure out what made some societies stable and prosperous and what made some societies brutal and volatile. The ruling class is the obvious answer but there’s more there. A lot of it has to do with what people expect from their society and that’s what I wanted to dedicate my life to. I expect a lot and say so.”
    “You must get disappointed a lot, too.” The unexpectedly bitter response was impossible to repress. Jack hadn’t had too many kumbayah moments lately. More or less everyone he knew was venal and power hungry and the few who weren’t had the bad habit of falling dead.
    Her hands tightened on the wheel. “I think I had lower expectations than you, Jack.”
    That shut him up. Because, yeah, she’d had a lot of crap in her life at a very young age. Her parents had both come from rich families but they were druggies and had died young, but not before dragging Summer all over. She’d had no stability and God knows what she’d seen when she was a kid.
    Jack, on the other hand, had grown up in a great family. Stable and loving. He’d been in his twenties before he’d had anything bad happen to him. And it hadn’t even happened to him. They’d found the body of an Iraqi informer he’d recruited floating in the Tigris River, sans a lot of body parts. Body parts that had been cut out of him while still alive.
    He’d seen a lot of bad shit in his NCS years, really bad shit. But he’d had a bedrock of love and stability in his early life that had acted as a shield. Summer hadn’t had that at all.
    So Summer was right to call him on his bullshit. “I read
Area 8
all the time,” he said quietly. “It’s great. Looks like you’ve got a wide range of correspondents.”
    “And informants,” she answered. “Lot of wrongdoing going on. I didn’t mean for
Area 8
to be a whistleblowing site. I wanted to pursue deep policy issues in an