Carol (Carol Schmidt Series) by Lori Cook Read Free Book Online Page A

something about any concepts I was working on were understood
to be shared with Strange freely and as part of their development process,
yada, yada...”
    “Jesus, no!”
    “Yep. After I realized what I’d done, I left. Used the money I’d
saved to pay for a contract lawyer, who was pretty impressed with Strange’s setup,
and could do nothing about it. Then I sold my car to pay a tech lawyer, who
looked at my code and the stuff plagiarized by Strange Tech, and he advised me
to walk away. So,” Jason said, “that’s what I did.”
    She couldn’t take it in. To her it sounded like theft, nothing more
and nothing less.
    “Were there others like you?” she asked.
    “Sure! Some of them moved on and did well in tech, kind of forgave
Strange, rolled with the punches. Most of us, though, we’re teaching, or
designing websites, or pumping gas or whatever...”
    He got up, waddling off down a pigsty of a living room, and returned
with not one but two bottles of beer in one hand and a family bag of Doritos in the other. Carol saw for the first time how he’d developed a flabby gut at
the front, and wide, pudgy hips. Ten years of beer, disappointment, and junk
food.
    He was a wreck.
    And it was Alex Strange’s fault.
    They said their good-byes, Jason already slumped on the sofa and
getting ready for another evening of baseball.
    She turned off the iPad, poured herself a drink, and yanked a leg
off the lobster, twisting it hard until it snapped clean away.
    Strange Tech, she told herself, as she cracked the leg open and
sucked the white flesh out, was about to get one hell of a lot stranger.

Chapter Five
    The street was
noisy and congested. Every truck in the world seemed to be making its morning
deliveries there, and taxi drivers wove fast and tight between them, riding
their horns and swooping around each new obstacle with just inches to spare.
Motorbikes and beat-up scooters buzzed in and out of the traffic, adding to the
chaos, which seemed impossibly disorganized, yet clearly part of the daily
routine.
    She looked at the long, pallid face of the Cardinal, his black hair
shining in the sun, combed severely back over his scalp, not quite Dracula, but
not far off. And she remembered how he had been a decade ago. Different? Not
really. The complexion might have been a touch rosier, his features a little
less drawn, but it was essentially the same dour, humorless face that had intrigued
and unsettled her back in Mexico.
    Ah! Mexico! They were not all that far away now, hop on a plane and
she could be there in little more than an hour. But she would not be going back
to Mexico City any time soon. For Carol Schmidt, that was a lifetime away. For
the last ten years, ever since her eighteenth birthday, she had travelled so
far and wide, and seen so many unexpected places, that she sometimes wondered
whether it was indeed a life, or simply a strange, achingly luxurious dream. It
was real enough, though, and it had all been possible because of the man now
sitting patiently in front of her.
    The Cardinal was concentrating, a cell pressed to his ear. He could
barely hear himself think, never mind listen to someone speaking in another
language.
    A moment later he slipped the phone into his pocket.
    “Nine o’clock this evening,” he said, then took a drink from a cup
of iced tea in front of him. “They’ll be there at nine. And they don’t seem to
speak English. You been keeping up your Spanish?”
    She drank from a glass of white wine.
    “My Spanish is fine, although I don’t think there’ll be much to talk
about.”
    He nodded.
    “Good, good. I can leave the rest to you, then?”
    “Of course.”
    “A bad business, this. If you can deal with her, that would be
excellent. Our information is that we will not have another opportunity soon.
She’s preparing to leave. It has to be tonight.”
    “Everything will be ready this evening.”
    She drank some more wine, wishing she’d ordered iced tea as well. It
was too hot