His office was ruthlessly organized as well, and she saw immediately he’d run through it quickly. The desk chair was pushed back, and a file box of discs stood with its cover not quite straight.
Nerves, she thought. Nerves that made him not quite so smart and not quite so careful this time. What are you afraid of, Bayliss?
She pulled out her palm-link and, using her badge and identification, ran checks on transportation to Paris. Though she found nothing under Bayliss’s name, she couldn’t be sure he hadn’t used an alias.
She walked to the door, gave a shout to Peabody, who came on the run. “I have the information for you.” She ran it off.
“Good. We’re going to stretch the warrant to its limit. I want you to contact Feeney. That unit,” she said, jerking her thumb back. “I want it gone over with microgoggles. He took data with him, but Feeney will find what’s on the machine. While he’s doing that, I want you going over this house inch by inch.”
“Yes, sir. Where are you going?” she asked as Eve strode out.
“I’m going to the beach.”
chapter seventeen
Eve checked the fit of her safety harness and resisted the urge, the increasingly desperate urge, to simply close her eyes. “I’m not really in that much of a hurry.”
Roarke cocked a brow in her direction while piloting the new Air/Land Sports Streamer through a sky turning soft with evening. “That’s not what you said when you asked me to get you there.”
“I didn’t know you had some new toy you were dying to try out. Jesus.” She made the mistake of glancing down and saw the coastline and its complement of houses, hotels, and beachfront communities whiz by. “We don’t have to be this high, either.”
“We’re not that high.” If Eve had one phobia, it was heights. To his way of thinking, she’d feel better as soon as they landed, so why not open the ALS up and see what it could do?
“High enough to crash,” she muttered and ordered herself to think of something—anything—else. It would have taken her a great deal longer to make the trip to Bayliss’s beach hideaway in her city unit, particularly now that it was acting up.
Even if she’d used one of Roarke’s spiffy cars, the distance couldn’t have been covered so quickly by road.
The most logical solution was to draft him to fly her there. Logical, she thought, if she lived.
“Bayliss is up to something,” she said over the smooth roar of the ALS’s engines. “He was in and out of his place too fast, didn’t reprogram his house droid, and he took files.”
“You’ll be able to ask him what he’s up to yourself in a few minutes.” Testing the controls, Roarke took the sleek little streamer up another twenty feet, executed a turn.
Eve cut her eyes in his direction as he fiddled with controls, manually, then through voice command. “What are you doing?”
“Just checking. I’d say this baby’s ready for production.”
“What do you mean ready for?”
“This is just the prototype.”
She felt the color drain out of her face. Actually felt it. “As in experimental?”
With his dark hair whipping in the air blowing through his open window, he tossed her a wide, delighted grin. “Not anymore. We’re going down.”
“What?” She braced every cell in her body. “What?”
“On purpose, darling.”
If he’d been by himself, he’d have taken the streamer into a dive to check the responses, but in consideration of his wife, he kept the descent slow and smooth, targeting the road, hovering over it.
“Switch to landing mode,” he ordered.
Switch in mode confirmed. Flaps lowering. Retracting.
“Touching down.”
Touchdown confirmed. Switching to land drive.