Covert M.D. Read Online Free PDF

covers would keep them separated for the most part. At night he could investigate the depths of the hospital, where he was positive the real machinations were occurring. During the day, he could keep watch over her and make sure she didn’t get too close to the danger he could feel fermenting below the surface of this case.
    And sleep? He’d never needed much of that. Like Tony had always said, I’ll sleep plenty when I’m dead.
    “Dream well, old friend,” Rathe murmured to himself, forgetting for the moment that Tony’s daughter sat opposite him.
    “What was that?”
    Rathe shook his head. “Nothing.” He stood. “We’ll meet after the transplant, compare notes and divvy up which one of us will follow which line of inquiry. That’ll save us from duplicating efforts.” And allow him to keep her on the outskirts of the heavy lifting.
    “Fine.” She tipped her head, considering. “But we shouldn’t meet in public again. It would look strange, don’t you think?”
    Irritated that he hadn’t thought of that first, which just went to show that mixed-sex partnerships were needlessly distracting, Rathe scowled. “You’re right. There’s no reason for a visiting lecturer to socialize with a janitor.” He tried not to let their respective roles annoyhim, but Jack Wainwright had no doubt laughed long and loud when he’d decided on their cover stories.
    Rathe McKay, legend-turned-janitor.
    Oh, well. That made it a hell of a cover.
    “We could meet in my office this afternoon,” she suggested tongue in cheek. “You could bring your mop and pretend—”
    “I got it,” he growled, trying not to see the absurd humor in it. “But your office won’t work every day—it’ll look suspicious. Why don’t we meet at your apartment at change of shift, instead?”
    “No. Absolutely not.” She tipped her chin down, eyes suddenly dark.
    Rathe shrugged, trying not to care. “Fine. We’ll figure it out later. You go do your thing, Doc. I’ll be around.”
    He watched her walk away and saw a hint of the young woman who’d once sat down beside him on the beach and showed him a book about Bateo. Like that teenager, Nia was still unsatisfied with who she was, where she was, always looking for the next thing that was just out of reach.
    They were, Rathe acknowledged with a wry grimace, entirely too alike.
    He swept her empty coffee cup off the table and crumpled it in one hand as he hesitated at the café door. He could return to the warren of corridors and small rooms in the basement that were the realm of the maintenance workers, the laundry crews and the other tradespeople who came and went through the large hospital. Rife withgossip and the occasional scoundrel, that was where he’d find the information he sought. He was sure of it.
    He glanced over at the big bank of brushed-steel elevator doors that would carry him up into the ivory towers, to the wide, straight corridors and large airy rooms of the treatment and research floors where Nia belonged.
    He muttered a curse and turned his back on the temptation. She would have to keep herself out of trouble for an hour. She could do it. She was a big girl now.
    Or so she kept insisting.
     
    OVER THE NEXT HOUR, Nia couldn’t cobble the information into a decent theory no matter how hard she tried. The failure grated on her as she shut and locked her office and headed down to the café. She barely had time to grab a quick snack before she observed Dr. Talbot transplant a healthy donor kidney into a young woman who had been born with small, subfunctional organs.
    Nia rubbed at the faint scar above her hipbone while she waited for the elevator, her mind still on the mystery she was supposed to be unraveling. She had plenty of questions, but her theories were anemic at best.
    The missing supplies made some sense—almost any medical item could be sold on the black market. And it was possible, if not likely, that the laundry hamper was being used to transport the