“Leave it. The cook’s two helpers get paid well to keep the place clean.”

“Oh. Okay, then I guess I’m ready to face the firing squad.” She grimaced, grabbed her purse from the floor beside a chair, and fell into step beside him.

“It won’t be so bad. You were lost and that wasn’t your fault. I, or someone else, should have made sure you had an escort to breakfast. Don’t worry. Nick won’t rake you over the coals until after you’re officially employed and no longer have an excuse not to break the rules.”

She looked up at him in surprise. “Is he planning to offer me a position?”

“Maybe. Let’s finish our talk with him and we’ll see.”

Once they’d settled in, Jaxon relaxed as Nick brought last night’s aborted interview up to speed. Kira fidgeted, outwardly nervous.

“Miss Locke—”

“Kira,” she blurted. “I’m sorry. But it’s Kira.”

He smiled, no doubt hoping to put her at ease. But it only made him appear more dangerous, which Jaxon knew wasn’t intentional at the moment. “Right. Kira. Let’s revisit what you told us before.” He shuffled some papers on his desk, notes he must’ve taken after they’d left last night. “You said you’d become suspicious of Dr. Bowman and Dr. Rhodes. They’d been sending their assistants home, working late, and you overheard them speaking about meeting with Orson Chappell and some of the board members. That correct?”

“Yes.”

“I did some checking on NewLife. Chappell is not only the CEO, he’s the owner and founder of the company. It seems he has a stranglehold on the board and the buck stops with him.”

“That’s what I’ve heard. He’s a charismatic public figure, but he’s rumored to be very tough to deal with and work for one-on-one.”

“But you have no firsthand knowledge?”

She shook her head. “I’ve never met him in person.”

“How long have you worked at NewLife?”

“Four years.”

“And you’ve never met the head honcho?”

“The federal government employs almost two million people, about eighty-five percent of whom live in or around Washington, D.C. How many of those have actually met the president?”

“Good point,” he conceded with a half smile. “So that brings us to the meat and potatoes of the discussion. What was the tip-over factor for you? When did curiosity become suspicion that something possibly . . . unethical was occurring? If that’s the right word.”

“Unethical describes what I thought I might find. What I started putting together called not only ethics into question, but legality and morality.” She looked away from Nick, staring pensively at the wall, as though remembering.

“Quite by accident, I heard Dr. Bowman whisper something in hushed tones to Dr. Rhodes about the restricted area in the basement of NewLife. A security guard found a sanitation worker down there without clearance and the worker was fired, but that wasn’t the interesting thing. I’m paraphrasing, but Dr. Bowman was upset, and he said something like, ‘Remember the media explosion in the nineties when the first successful cloning of an adult mammal was done with Dolly the sheep? If anyone finds out, this will make that scientific breakthrough look like child’s play and that can’t happen—not before we’re ready.’ ”

Both Jaxon and Nick sat up straighter, eyes widening. Jax interrupted. “And you believe they were referring to whatever research they’re doing in the restricted area that the worker almost discovered?”

“I’m sure that’s what they were talking about. But I didn’t catch any more at that time because they moved out of my hearing. A few days later, Dr. Bowman was called away from work to a family emergency and I sort of took the opportunity to, um . . .”

“Snoop?” Jaxon suggested helpfully.

Her cheeks flushed. “Well, I had to get a report he’d forgotten to hand to me in his hurry to leave, and when I retrieved it from his desk, I bumped his computer mouse. Naturally, he’d forgotten to log out and shut down for the day and the screen saver went away.”

“Naturally.” Nick’s lips twitched.

“The computer hadn’t gone to sleep yet, so the screen and all the icons were right there. He had a document running, minimized at the bottom of the screen and I clicked on it. I know, I know,” she said, the blush deepening. “It was wrong of me and I could’ve been fired.”

Nick steepled his fingers and watched her thoughtfully. “You should’ve been and if it were me, unless you had a reason that was a matter of life and death, you would’ve been. But considering what came later, getting fired was the least of your concerns.”

“I did a stupid thing,” she admitted. “But the section I was able to read on the document was alarming. It wasn’t text, like written narrative, but was several pages of formulas. Lines and lines of letters and numbers, arranged and rearranged, like notes on any number of experiments on test subjects.”

Nick frowned. “Like the doctor was recording what worked and what didn’t? Trial and error, and what he or they tried next?”

“Exactly. It took me a minute to realize the patterns that kept repeating on the page were genetic codes and DNA strands. And this is the part that’s going to sound off the wall . . . Some of the codes, or more accurately the strands, weren’t human.”

Jaxon exchanged a telling glance with Nick before he spoke up. “Not so off the wall, from where we’re sitting. Our DNA isn’t exactly human anymore, either.”

She blinked at him. “I hadn’t thought of it that way, but you’re right. Anyway, as I scanned the document, I had trouble believing what I was seeing. If I was interpreting correctly, it seemed that the lines represented genes being spliced and DNA being forced to mutate.” Leaning forward, she warmed excitedly to her topic. “From the very top of the page, each line appeared to represent a strand of traits, the code and DNA mutated in some small way from the strand before it.”

“Hang on.” Nick’s brows drew together as he tried to follow. “You’re saying these lines represented progressive change . . .”

Like Nick, Jaxon struggled to assimilate what she was getting at. Hell, he was a soldier, not a scientist.

“Yes—recorded progression of a single individual from human to something else. That’s what was on the page in black and white. From the data, I inferred that a series of tests must’ve been performed on the individual to get those results.”

Nick’s voice was low and troubled. “To what end? What are they attempting to force the human DNA to mutate into? And why?”

“That’s what I was hoping to find out when I took tissue samples from the lab last night.” Opening the purse on her lap, she reached in, dug around, and brought out several small containers. She sat them on Nick’s desk and they eyed the contents.

Nick and Jaxon each picked up one and carefully turned it this way and that. A piece of tissue—it appeared to be flesh and a bit of muscle—floated in clear fluid in the one Jax held. A label stuck to the side declared the vial as belonging to “Subject 0013.” It also had a string of letters and numbers underneath and was dated almost two weeks ago.

“Freaky,” Jax commented in distaste, setting the thing on his boss’s desk. Nick put them in a row and studied the labels.

“Three of these are from Subject zero-zero-one-three. The other five are from different subjects.” He looked at Kira. “Was there any rhyme or reason to what you took?”

“Zero-zero-one-three was the label at the top of the document I saw on Dr. Bowman’s computer. I grabbed what I could see of those, then some others. I was in a hurry. I had a loose plan to take them to a geneticist friend of mine in Los Angeles and see what he could learn.” Her shoulders hunched. “Evidently I didn’t plan ahead very well.”

“I think you might’ve ended up in the right place all the same,” Nick said, raising a brow. “Were you able to print a copy of the document from Bowman’s computer?”