Page 65 of The Alpha Experiment
I nodded and got settled with my own coffee. Her incredibly loud neighbors were the bane of her existence.
She took another sip. “I finally talked to Tony, my friend at PharmaTestics? He’d been out of the country and he got back to me earlier. Apparently Initech’s been having some trouble. Their last two attempts at getting FDA approval for new products failed, and Tony’s heard that the board’s looking for a scapegoat. So I think what’s going on is that Greenwald’s grasping at straws. He’s desperate for a quick win, something that’ll interest the board and make them look elsewhere for their sacrificial farm animal, you know?”
I frowned down at my coffee. “That makes a lot of sense, and it definitely explains why he’s so aggressive. But I don’t know how that helps.”
A wicked little smile crept across Meredith’s face. “I’m getting to that. Like I said, it sounds like he’s desperate. He’ll be ready to run with anything that looks plausible. I think you need to falsify your results somehow, enough to look good but not good enough to lead anywhere. Something that’ll send him down into a research quagmire that’ll bankrupt his department and piss the board off completely. If you do it right, he’ll spend the rest of his miserable life living on a bus bench cursing the day he ever heard your name.”
That startled a genuine laugh out of me, and I sputtered a mouthful of coffee. “Jesus, Meredith, vindictive much?”
She shot me a look over her mug. “What, and you aren’t?”
“Point. And that sounds awesome. But I don’t think it’ll work. My results are sketchy enough as it is, and so falsifying them isn’t…I mean, how do you further obscure something that’s already murky? I mean, yes, it’s possible. But he also probably wouldn’t buy it. He’d be suspicious, no matter how desperate he is. I mean, he’s an asshole, but that doesn’t mean he’s stupid or that he doesn’t know his stuff.”
Meredith grunted and went back to contemplating her coffee—and possibly the idea of Greenwald being tossed out of Initech by security, never to work again.
I sipped on my own cup, letting the heat and the familiar bite of it soothe me, as much as I could be soothed. Flashes of Colin’s face, Colin’s voice, Colin’s smile and his hands on me and the way his body felt against mine and—
I made a little pained sound and covered it by taking a drink. “Too hot,” I said, when Meredith looked up.
No, I had to think of anything but him. Anything else, even how screwed I was if I didn’t come up with something for Greenwald.
Since I no longer had an experiment.
And probably no longer had a best fr—no, fuck no. Not thinking about that. At all.
All right, deal with Greenwald, the less gut-wrenchingly painful of my problems. I forced myself to consider Meredith’s idea logically. The problem was, almost no one took my research seriously. Yes, Greenwald did seem to believe I was on to something, but he also wouldn’t be convinced by something that didn’t add up. He’d be skeptical.
And his board or colleagues might share that attitude. Everyone else in the world did, from my parents, who took a ‘why bother, werewolves are werewolves and humans are humans’ attitude, to my grad-school adviser, who’d tactfully refrained from telling me directly that I needed to get a grip and a more grant-friendly specialty, to the head of the department here at the university, who fake-smiled, shoulder-patted me, and always spelled my last name MacEwan.
Shit, the only person other than Meredith, Colin, and Greenwald who’d shown the faintest flicker of interest in my research in years was the grad student in the lab the other night, who’d been trying so hard to get a peek at my screen. Much as a colleague other than Meredith giving a crap might’ve flattered me if it’d been anyone else, that guy—what was his name? Kyle something?—had been embroiled in a departmental scandal last year. It ended up getting swept under the rug, since no one could prove anything, but the other student who’d accused him of taking credit for her work wasn’t the type to make things up. I was sure she’d been telling the truth. And Kyle was also generally a dick.
Make things up. Taking credit for her work…
I set my coffee cup down on my desk with a thump, jolting up straight, like a bolt of lightning had lanced through my spine.
“Meredith!”
She jumped and stared at me. “What? Is there a spider?”
“No, there isn’t a—I had an idea. You know that grad student, Kyle? Pinker, maybe? With the bleached-blond hair?”
“Yeah,” she said, nodding. “Kyle Perkins. What about him?”
I felt a slow smile spreading across my face—more of an evil grin, really. And it felt so goddamn good to have a spark of hope, something to look forward to. The inkling of at least one aspect of my shit-show of a life starting to have a light at the end of the tunnel.
“I think he might be the answer to my Greenwald problem.”
Chapter 20
We Have It Handled
Meredith and I spent two hours hashing out a plan and working through all the possible permutations to make sure we hadn’t missed anything, but it couldn’t be put into action that night. For one thing, we both had some work to do creating a set of fake lab results and prepping some other documents, something she’d offered to do most of, since she had some bright ideas about how to falsify the data. For another, it all depended on my managing to be in the lab at the same time as Kyle. We had matching evil grins by the time we’d finished, though.
Both of us were good at thinking through contingencies. And Meredith had a real gift for revenge, it turned out. She couldn’t stop chuckling and rubbing her hands together like a genuine villainous mastermind.
Since she had actual work to do that didn’t involve plotting to take down a dastardly pharmaceutical executive and a lying, credit-stealing asshole grad student at one fell swoop, I reluctantly left the office, with a promise from her to regroup the next day.
I didn’t want to go home, but I also didn’t have anywhere else to go.
