by Erik Carter
Sonya looked to the floor and shook her head.
“No, I didn’t.”
Asa put his index finger under her chin, tilted her head back up. Her skin was angel-soft. He looked into her eyes.
“If you can’t attack a bound man in a controlled environment, how will you be able to do what’s needed tomorrow?”
“I can. I promise. I can be tougher.”
He put his hands on her upper arms. More smooth skin. Soft, shaking muscles.
“Oh, Sonya. You don’t have what it takes, my dear.”
“I do!”
“This is my mistake. I shouldn’t have trusted Cody’s judgment.”
“Don’t…”
“My mind is made up.” He paused a long beat for dramatic effect. “Please leave.”
“No!”
She’d practically screamed it. There was anguish on her face. A tear fell down her cheek.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Please! Let me prove myself to you. What can I do?”
He put his hands back on her arms, back onto that smooth skin. He’d finagled things expertly to this point. And now it was time to wrap things up, to get to his real objective for this encounter.
He stepped in closer, inches away, keeping his hands on her arms.
Sonya gasped. Her mouth opened, lips quivered. She shook harder.
He slid his hands up her arms to her shoulders.
“There’s one more way you can prove yourself.”
He put a bit of gentle pressure on her shoulders.
She looked up at him. Hesitated. Then took his meaning. And went to her knees.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Becker pulled his coat in tighter against the cold and lit a second cigarette.
He stood outside the entrance to his building. Before him was the massive Y-12 complex, a small city within a city, walled off from the outside world. 11:30 at night, and still it was alive. Cars driving through the streets. People coming and going. All the buildings were lit up brightly against the dark nighttime sky—towers and warehouses, short buildings and tall buildings, metal and brick. They stretched out so far away from him that they disappeared from sight. Y-12 sat on a wide swath of land a couple miles in length. After all these years, Becker was still dumbstruck by its sheer size. And Y-12 was only one of the three major complexes in the ORR. They were all massive operations with massive structures—even record-setting. At the time it was built, K-25 was the largest building on the planet.
Becker took another drag from his cigarette and let his eyes bounce around the blinking lights atop Y-12’s various buildings, noticing the radical height differences. Of course, Becker knew all the buildings’ names and had a vague idea about what went on in each one. But as to the science of it all—what really went on behind all those doors and windows—he hadn’t a clue. This was a strange and almost surreal feeling, not understanding what he’d been guarding so vigilantly for so many years.
He heard the door behind him open. It was Burks. She wore a lime green-colored pea jacket that went to her knees, tied around her waist. She stepped up beside him, took a box of Virginia Slims from her pocket, and popped one out. Becker reached out his lighter and lit it for her. She nodded her thanks.
After she took a drag, she said, “Guess where our friend Lutz worked for most of his adult life—the U.S. State Department.”
She caught him so off guard that he coughed on his cigarette.
“What? The State Department?”
Burks nodded. “Yes, indeed. A Field Service Officer. Lutz left Oak Ridge as soon as he finished high school. Seems he couldn’t get out of here fast enough. And he never came back. He got a partial scholarship at NYU, worked as a bartender to pay for the rest. When he graduated, he joined the State Department’s intern program. Climbed the ranks, stationed in Canberra, Ottawa, Nairobi, and finally Copenhagen. Then he left abruptly after nineteen years.”
“Nineteen years. An odd time to quit.”
“Mmm-hmm. And his choice of career after returning to the States was even odder. He became a motivational speaker.”
Becker fiddled with the filter on his cigarette as he pondered. “So, Lutz, a former American diplomat, dealing directly with foreign dignitaries, is also a professional speaker…” He took a drag, giving his mind another moment to process. “And now we have Hendrix out there in the trees giving his speeches. Speeches railing against Y-12, one of the nation’s most highly-guarded secrets, protected from prying, foreign eyes. Interesting, no?”
Burks nodded as she squashed her cigarette into the ashtray topper of the trash receptacle to her right. She reached into her jacket pocket and took out a crumpled Snickers wrapper.
“Where’s Lutz now?” Becker said.
“The record goes cold. Quite abruptly,” Burks said. She found a bite of Snickers remaining in the wrapper, popped it in her mouth, then tossed the wrapper into the trash receptacle. “His motivational work stopped all of a sudden about around two years ago.”
“Two years ago is exactly when Asa Hendrix began giving his speeches.”
Burks gave him a mischievous grin. “I see what you’re thinking, Sherlock, but don’t get too excited just yet. We don’t even know that Lutz and Hendrix are the same person. All we’re going off is the name Asa and a vague similarity between the photos of an eighteen-year-old boy and a forty-something-year-old man.”
“We need a contemporary photo of Lutz. There’s gotta be materials floating around from his time as a motivational speaker. Can you find some?”
“Absolutely.”
“All right, we’ll pick this up tomorrow. Good work, Burks. Go home. Get some sleep.”
Becker gestured with his head toward the building, and they walked back to the entrance. As he opened the door for Burks, he said, “Why did Lutz leave the State Department?”
“Don’t know for sure yet. I’ll figure that out in the morning,” she said. “It appears he was under investigation for some sort of transgression. And it sounds like he did something truly horrible.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
Dale awoke with a jolt.
Voices.
There had been voices from outside his door.
A moment of confusion then he remembered where he was. Asa Hendrix’s resort cabin. The headquarters. And Dale was locked in a bedroom. He also remembered how he’d heard a voice earlier coming from the hallway, how paranoid he’d been.
More paranoia. That’s all it was.
He settled back into his pillow, closed his eyes.
And then there were voices again.
Dale sat up.
They were louder than the voice he’d heard earlier in the night, the one that had come from one of the other bedrooms. This time there were multiple voices, and they came from the hallway, not far from Dale’s door. A pair of voices. Asa Hendrix and Cody Ellis.
There was a small alarm clock on the nightstand by Dale’s bed. He grabbed it, held it into a beam of light coming in through the drapes from the bright parking area.
2:07 AM.
Dale threw back the covers and crept to the door, put his ear against it.
“I don’t understand why this has to happen right now,” Hendrix was saying.
“He said it’s urgent,” Cody said.
“It’s the middle of the damn night.” Hendrix exhaled, frustrated. “All right, whatever he wants.”
Footsteps creaked the wooden floor outside his door, going to the stairs then heading down to the first floor.
Dale sprung into action.
He grabbed his T-shirt and jeans—folded and sitting on top of the dresser—and slid into them. Then he pulled the closet door open and grabbed a wire hanger.
Back to the door. He used his thumbs to straighten the hanger’s hook then inserted the piece of metal into the small, round hole in the center of the brass-colored doorknob. Had this been a pin tumbler lock, he would have needed to get more sophisticated, but this was one of those
simple interior door locks, which were more for adding a layer of separation from children or annoying spouses than for true security.
Dale pushed the wire in until he felt it slide through a groove on the inside then twisted to the right.
There was a click as the door unlocked, amplified by the wooden doors and flooring.
Dale winced and held perfectly still, listening for the sounds of footsteps returning up the steps. None came.
He went to the bed and threw the pillows under the blanket in a shape approximating that of an adult man. Back to the door. He opened it slowly, testing the hinges for squeaking, then stepped out into the hallway where he shut the door behind him and re-locked it.
He headed down the stairs, carefully transferring his weight to his bare feet with each step, trying to minimize the squeaking of the wood. Viewed from above, the setup in the living room, which he was descending toward, looked ominous. The empty chairs. The dais with Hendrix’s podium.
There was a hushed voice in the distance, coming from a far room just on the other side of the kitchen area. The door was shut, and light crept out from the gap at the bottom.
Dale tiptoed through the kitchen toward the door. Some of the complimentary food was still out on the counters. Dale grabbed a chocolate chip cookie as he went by, took a bite of it. Opposite of the counter with the cookies was a large chest-style storage freezer—about five feet across and three feet tall—which sat next to the refrigerator. Dale thought about some of the whack jobs he’d hunted down through the years and how they’d love to own a freezer like that, something big enough to store a hacked-up body. He wondered if Hendrix, the current whack job he was chasing, was that dark of a nemesis.
He approached the door, which was just beyond the tile floor of the kitchen, and plastered himself against the wall. Slowly, slowly he leaned his head to the door, placing his ear against its surface.
The voice was Hendrix, undoubtedly, but there was something odd about the way he was talking. Dale quickly realized that he was using a foreign language. He was speaking in…
Russian?!
There was a pause.
Dale’s heart jumped, and he readied himself to run.
But then Hendrix started talking again. Another pause. Then more talking.
It was a phone conversation. In Russian. At two in the morning.
Dale leaned forward, trying to get a better listen.
And a board creaked beneath his foot.
Loudly.
The phone conversation on the other side of the door stopped abruptly.
A pause.
And then Dale heard footsteps rushing toward the door.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Asa yanked the door open and stormed into the kitchen.
“I know I heard something out here,” he said. “Did you?”
“Clear as day,” Cody said.
“Who’s out here?” Asa shouted.
Nothing in response. Noises from the ceiling above him, creaking wood. He’d woken people on the second floor.
He looked to the adjoining living room. All the chairs. And the curtain, dividing the room in half.
“Check behind the curtain,” he told Cody.
Asa looked to the kitchen. It was spacious and the cabinets were huge, big enough for a person to crawl into.
He grabbed a pair of small brass knobs and swung open a set of the cabinet doors. Plates and bowls, a few serving trays. He rushed through the kitchen, throwing each set of doors open, getting more and more pissed off as nothing but kitchen supplies turned up.
As Asa opened the last cabinet, Cody returned, shaking his head.
“Nothing back there.”
“They couldn’t have gotten outside,” Asa said. “The alarm would have gone off.”
There was a pantry to the side of the refrigerator. The only door in the kitchen that Asa had yet to check.
The only place left to hide.
“Come out and say hi,” Asa said as he threw open the door.
Nothing.
Cans of tomatoes. Boxes of cereal. Bags of flour.
“What the hell?” Asa said, looking over the pantry in disbelief.
“It was probably that possum again,” Cody said, “getting at the trash cans outside.”
“The possum…” Asa said with a sigh. “I wish you’d shot that damn thing when you had the chance.”
He shut the pantry door. And looked over the kitchen again. He waited a long moment for any signs of movement.
Finally, he said, “Come on. Tomorrow’s the biggest day of our lives. We need the rest.”
They left the kitchen.
Just as they’d made it to the stairs, Asa heard another noise from the kitchen.
He doubled back. Looked.
Nothing.
It probably was the damn possum.
Or he was just getting paranoid.
Which was understandable, given what he was about to do tomorrow.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Dale waited until he couldn’t stand it anymore, then he popped the freezer door open and quickly climbed out. The warm tile of the kitchen floor felt like fire against his bare toes that had all but frozen.
He took in several big, choppy breaths. His whole body shook. His jaw chattered. He just stood there, completely immobile. If anyone came into the kitchen, he was screwed. Because, after the surge of energy he’d used to get out of the freezer, he now couldn’t move an inch. He needed to thaw out.
As his breathing slowly came back to a normal rhythm, he considered the gravity of what he’d just discovered. It was something to distract him from the tingling sensation of heat returning to his flesh.
Russian! Hendrix had been speaking in Russian.
Given that Dale’s investigation centered around the U.S.’s nuclear weapons cache, this brought a whole new wave of implications to the case.
Deadly implications.
Dale thought again about The Guide, the mysterious figure leading an ongoing anti-nuclear conference in Knoxville. No one knew who the man was. No one had ever seen him.
Was the guide a Russian? A foreigner who was controlling things from afar, fooling everyone? And having Asa Hendrix handle his stateside operations?
Dale checked the clock hanging over the stove. It was a quarter after 2. If Dale’s memory served him, Moscow was seven hours ahead of the Eastern Time Zone. That would make it 9:15 in the morning in Russia.
Dale tested his legs. Life had returned to them finally. Prickly, pins-and-needles life, but life nonetheless.
Russian implications gave Dale a whole lot more to ponder.
But first he had to get out of the damn kitchen.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
The early morning sunlight was starting to creep through the drapes, but Sonya had already been awake for nearly half an hour, too exhilarated to return to sleep. Because she couldn’t believe where she’d spent the night.
In Asa Hendrix’s bed.
If you had told her three months ago — hell, even three days ago — that this would happen, it would have seemed ludicrous beyond belief.
Yet, here she was. Naked. Lying with her head on his chest, rising and lowering gently with his breaths as he snored lightly.
Initially, when Cody told her she was to go to Asa’s room the previous night, she’d been nervous, a bit frustrated even, having already taken so many commands.
But, more than that, she’d been scared.
Terribly scared.
Sonya was no fool. She knew that going to a man’s bedroom late at night could mean only one thing. Even if that man was one as noble as Asa Hendrix. Even if she’d tried desperately to convince herself that the invitation had been benign.
After Asa had entered the room, she very soon discovered that this fear had been warranted. But once Asa had talked to her, making her realize how much she’d failed her test, she realized that she then had a way to atone for her shortcomings. A second chance.
An
d it was an opportunity to be with the man she’d fallen in love with over the last three months. A chance to be with him physically.
Why had she been so hesitant at first? Why had she been so scared?
She knew that Asa had other female followers who had given themselves to him in this way. She didn’t like it, but she knew it. They’d slept with him in the sexual sense of the word. But how many of them had been invited to also literally sleep with him? To stay in his bed? She didn’t know of any.
And she knew for certain that no one but her had slept with him on the eve of his big day.
That day had now arrived, heralded by the pinkish-golden light growing brighter around her, bathing the two of them in his bed. It was the day he told her he’d been building up to for so long. And she was with him. Sonya O’Neil. Watching him sleep. She was with Asa.
Asa. Her brain was still having a hard time believing that she was addressing him by his first name, let alone everything else that had happened.
Asa stirred, cleared his throat, rolled halfway over. Still asleep. She moved with him, which made her grimace. She was sore down below. Very sore.
She wondered why he’d had to be like that with her. She remembered her initial fear upon entering the bedroom, and she felt a wave of it again. Couldn’t he have been gentler when he—
No, she thought. Stop those thoughts right there, Sonya.
Those were limiting thoughts. Asa had taught her that she had a tendency toward self-defeat. After he’d finished, they’d had a long chat in bed, and he’d taken the time to give his assessments of her character. He said that words were powerful, even the words one tells oneself, and that her inner monologue was what was holding her back. He said she lived in a scarcity mindset. He said she self-doubted and berated herself too much. And he told her that he could help her reach her full potential.
She rubbed her fingers through his chest hair and squeezed in tighter against him, took in his smell, his heat.
This man would help her become the best version of herself.
