by JL Terra
Taya froze, but the complete incongruity of it gave her back her voice. “Ben.”
He glanced at her, his face nothing like she’d ever seen before. His eyes were…dead. He looked at her like he didn’t know anything about her. He’d been kidnapped, missing for two weeks and finally found. He didn’t remember anything about what had happened to him. They’d tried to be the same after that, but things weren’t. He wasn’t the boy she’d known.
Taya walked toward him, but he slipped out the front door. She ran to it and looked out. He wasn’t on the street. He was gone.
Taya ran up to her father’s bedroom. When she didn’t find him, she raced into the bathroom that still had Mama’s hairbrush in the medicine cabinet. Taya used it sometimes when he was at work and she was lonely.
Daddy lay on the ice-cold tiles, eyes open but unseeing.
She checked his pulse.
Laid her head on his chest.
No heartbeat. No respiration.
She should start CPR. Resuscitate him as he had taught her. She’d practiced on the dummy until she was flushed and sweating, and still he’d made her practice more.
Taya leaned back and sat on her bottom on the bathroom floor, two feet away from where he lay.
And did nothing.
Taya shook off the memory of that night, so long ago. For years she’d thought Ben had to have given him something. Murdered him in some way that meant the police never figured out what happened. They’d called it a heart attack, despite the fact he’d been healthy. Death by natural causes. Like she didn’t understand anything and needed a pat answer to satisfy her.
She’d stayed silent through all of it, never questioning anyone. Off to her brother’s house like she was told to go. No one at her new school had known anything about her. Ben had found her a few weeks later, but he’d been completely confused when she confronted him. He’d denied he had anything to do with it, like he hadn’t been there. What was the point of being friends after that? He’d thrown away everything they had because he couldn’t admit what he’d done.
In her grief, she hadn’t seen the truth.
They’d gone their separate ways after that. Living with Tim had been hard enough with her legalistic moral views and his lifestyle. Her grief. His bitterness at their father. In the end they’d agreed to forgive each other and find a relationship without their father coloring what was between them. She’d learned to love, regardless of conviction, and he’d had grace for her.
Eight years later she and Ben had met up in Beirut on a joint Delta Force/CIA operation where she’d been posing as a medic. He’d wanted to talk. Again. She hadn’t let him. Again. What was there to say? She’d seen him in her house minutes before her father died. Had thought for years that he’d killed him. For her.
Now she knew the truth.
Roger, frail and dying now, was the one who’d kidnapped Ben. Mei had confirmed as much.
The old man’s hand grabbed her wrist. The skin had yellowed, but his grip was surprisingly strong. “I did what was necessary.”
“To win, or to hide what you’ve done? You’re nothing but a throwback to an era that didn’t care who got experimented on if it furthered medical research.” She tugged once, fast, and got her arm out of his grip through the weak point between his thumb and first finger. “You’re right about one thing. It is the end. It’s the end for you.”
“I’ll command it one more time. It will come after you.” He sneered. “Whether I’m alive or dead won’t matter. There’s no escaping it.”
She thought back to the day it was in her hallway and then leaned in close to him. “I’ve already seen it, and it doesn’t scare me. It wears the face of my best friend. So if I have to look into his eyes while I die, that will be a good end to my life.”
“It won’t be him.”
“The brain is a powerful organ. People lie to themselves all the time,” she said. “My eyes will see him, and the death blow will be unavoidable. I won’t care.”
“It seems as though I’m not the only one prepared to die.” Roger began to laugh.
“Tell me, who is Hans?”
His eyes narrowed. “Don’t you dare say that name in my presence!” He coughed. Gasped.
The sound echoed behind her as she walked out of the room. Let him get his own water.
Malcolm strode down the hallway toward her. He swayed, braced one hand on the wall. Continued to stumble in her direction. “Is he awake?” He stopped in front of her. “I have some things to say to him if he is.”
Taya winced at his breath. “That might not be a good idea.”
“I think it’s a great idea.”
She pressed a hand on Malcolm’s chest. “Let’s go get some coffee. Maybe you can tell me while your father gets the rest he needs.” She didn’t need Roger blowing her cover to his son before she got all the information she needed. Tonight had been a milestone in this operation, but it wasn’t over.
Malcolm smiled and slid his arms around her waist. “Coffee isn’t what I want from you.”
Taya smiled, reached up, and applied pressure to the tendon in his neck. His eyes fluttered, and he slumped to the floor, out cold.
She needed to know what was walking around the world with Ben’s face.
And how to stop it.
Chapter 15
Ben swam through the murky waters of consciousness until he could feel something solid—a padded table under him.
Bonds secured his hands and feet.
He blinked but saw only blurry ceiling tiles.
Voices swam around him. He couldn’t make out words.
IV tubes had been inserted in both arms. He felt the sting. Oblivion was as close as a warm pillow. He wanted to move closer to it. Succumb to the comfort.
Instead he fought for clarity. Thought. Consciousness.
“What do we…?” A woman’s voice trailed off.
“...in him now.” This time a man, demanding. In charge.
Warmth washed through him like a wave. Deep in Ben’s mind, something ancient awoke.
And it was unhappy.
**
The head-strap dug into his skin and pulled at his hair. It gave him something to focus on as images flashed in front of his eyes. Black and white, men in uniform. M1903 rifles over their shoulders as they stood at attention for the camera.
Men and women rounded up. The dead, faceless on the ground.
Ben’s brain began to superimpose color onto the images. Hair. Eyes. Green grass. A murky gray sky that hung low with clouds. A snow-covered cemetery full of erect tombstones. Hebrew letters. One grave was brown stone, almost red in hue. Three columns at the base, Hebrew writing across the bottom and middle sections. The top pointed on both sides, like the tips of angel wings.
A white building, the triangle shaped brick roof atop. Two round windows. The rungs of a ladder led up to a small door in the roof.
A tall gray statue of a robed man.
Four Hebrew letters.
The sound of war filled his ears. An air raid siren, the drone of airplanes. Rifle fire. A man yelled in German, and another replied.
Pain radiated through him so fast and sharp his body arced off the table. Ben blinked and looked around. Heat pressed in on him, the desert outside Baghdad.
Hector slapped the side of his helmet. “Better learn to move faster, Private.”
Ben smiled, though the pain robbed him of breath. He probed the wound in his thigh. How bad was it? His fingers encountered hard metal. Ben glanced around. No one was watching. He pulled out his multi-tool, flipped the knife out and pried the bullet from the hole in his leg, tossing it away.
Hector fired a burst of shots out the window and then hunkered down again. “Can you move?”
Ben nodded. “Yes, First Sergeant.”
“Good. Let’s go.”
**
The woman spoke again. “It isn’t working.”
“It will,” the man replied. “It is up to us to actualize God’s
will on earth.”
“For our mothers,” she said. “And for our fathers.”
“For our sisters. For our brothers.”
“For my children,” she finished. “This evil will be stopped.”
Ben’s eyes rolled back in his head, and he slipped into darkness.
Chapter 16
Chicago, IL. Tuesday, 22:35hrs CDT
Remy watched security footage from the hotel over and over. Where are you, Ben? There were no feeds in the center of the parking lot. Only the elevator where Ben had climbed on and climbed off. Waiting in between as though he had all the time in the world. She’d never been that patient, not one second in her entire life.
The camera on the street was no help at all. Not even the ATM across the street—too blurry.
The second Ben’s watch had fritzed—again—she’d known. That amount of voltage nearly fried the device. She’d rebooted it remotely twice. In between, the subsequent jolts of electricity nearly melted it right there on his wrist. She hadn’t been able to get audio, so Remy found a cell phone signal located almost right on top of the watch’s own connection.
Remy had hacked into the phone and switched on the microphone. When it became clear there were two men attacking Ben, she downloaded the contents of the phone to her computer. Should come in handy later.
What now?
Ben had been abducted.
That sickening sound of him hitting the ground. The grunt as the phone’s owner lifted him and put him in the trunk. The slam of the lid closing, and their conversation had made that clear. Then the car’s engine whirred to life.
Electric.
She’d heard it all.
While the audio of Ben’s attack and abduction played on one screen, Remy went through the phone’s contents. Despite not being able to locate an image, she knew who he was. The man’s identity was layered through every part of his cell phone. Colin Sebastian.
Note to self: when performing abduction, leave personal phone at home.
This one needed better bad-guy classes. Whoever had taught him clearly didn’t cover the essential skills of not giving yourself away to the person hunting you. In fact, about the one thing they had done right was remove Ben’s watch and toss it away. These guys thought they were the hunters and Ben was the prey.
As if.
Remy leaned closer to the screen, like that would make her able to see them better. It was a habit from those days in hiding, when she’d worn awful red glasses as part of her “hacker” persona. These days she had four identities: doctor, genetic researcher, a new hacker handle she’d created, and the work she did for Ben. She was working on the fifth at night, studying for the Illinois bar under the name Elenor Wells. If she passed, being deemed “minimally competent” to practice law, she could add that to her repertoire as well. Just in case, at some point, one of them needed legal advice.
Remy opened a new window and started a web search on Colin Sebastian.
Across the table a hard-wired phone registered to the office address rang. She lifted the receiver. “Good evening, Allen and Parks limited. How can I direct your call?” Of course, it wasn’t authentic unless you slurred all the words together as though you said the exact phrase four thousand times every day.
The caller was male. “Extension five-zero-four.”
“One moment.”
Remy hung up, grabbed her cell phone. Five. She called Grant back. Of Ben’s team, Grant was number five since he was the newest hire. Daire was one, Shadrach two, Mei three, and Remy four. The zero-four meant important, but non-emergency.
“Hey.”
She glanced back at the image on her left-hand screen. Search complete. Bingo.
“Remy—”
“Ben’s been abducted.”
There was a shuffling sound on Grant’s end, and he muttered something too low for her to hear. “When?”
“Downstairs, less than an hour ago.” She told him everything she knew, ending with, “One of them was a Colin Sebastian.”
She pushed back a lock of red hair that had fallen loose from the pencil she’d wound it all up in. Never stayed put. She wasn’t one of those model types. Remy had been in a research laboratory since birth, up to the day she’d testified against him. First as her father’s assistant, and then on a project of her own—the one that had landed her in witness protection.
“Where are Mei and Daire?”
“On a new job,” she said. “Searching for a CIA asset. They’re headed to San Francisco to see if they can nail down whether she has even arrived back in the US.”
“And Shadrach?”
Remy’s stomach did that flippy thing it did every time she thought of the former marine. “Halfway to Russia. He’s meeting Malachi there. Which leaves you in Richmond. Go down to the parking lot and find Ben’s watch. When you’re in the right area, I’ll send a message and get it to light up. Bring it back.”
“He’s been abducted and you’re worried about a watch?”
“It’s a prototype. If the wrong people get their hands on it—”
“Okay, I get it.” His breath came through the phone like he was suddenly moving quickly. Taking the stairs.
Four floors down—she was tracking his cell on a 3D schematic of the hospital—the signal wavered. “Where’d you go?”
“I’m still here.”
“No, your cell signal. It ghosted for a second.”
“Probably the stairwell.”
Remy wasn’t sure. She scrolled through all her open windows. Dauntless wandered into the room and came to sit beside her right knee. She gave the dog a scratch and sent him to lay down on his bed as she finished reading.
“Okay, a few weeks ago Ted Tiller dropped off the radar. Handed in his notice at the sales job he’d been in for twelve years, cashed out all his bank accounts, his 401k and a whole life policy, and packed only enough for a vacation. He left all his belongings to be sold by his landlord to cover what he owed in rent.”
Grant said, “Okay, I’m in the parking lot.”
Remy said, “Walk south-southeast.” When he got close enough, she sent the message.
“I hear it.” A few steps and a couple of seconds later, Grant said, “Got it.”
“Hold onto it. Tomorrow go into a UPS store and send it to the PO Box in Wyoming.”
“If you say so.”
Remy didn’t always appreciate the roundabout way they had to live their lives. But if Ben’s abduction proved anything, it was that they were all vulnerable. Even the man who couldn’t be found had been located. Bested. Wherever he was, she hoped Ben wasn’t too mad. She’d read the coroner’s report and the police file from the two deaths in Virginia.
“So what does this Colin guy want with Ben? Is he working with Ted?”
Remy said, “Good questions. Neither of which I have an answer to.”
“But if Colin and another man abducted Ben, we can reasonably assume they used all of us to get to him, right?”
She hadn’t wanted to voice that opinion. “I think they’ve been on Ben since he met with Eric Tiller. The search for the flash drive is supposed to be ongoing. We’re on that job until we either fail, or get paid. I think the CIA has no idea who these people are. So who got in there first, and do they have the flash drive?”
“This is all about Ben, isn’t it?” Grant seethed audibly for a minute. “Maybe the flash drive was never stolen and the CIA has been duped. Maybe the whole operation was about the Tiller brothers getting their hands on Ben, and they just pretended to be CIA to get him in position.” He sounded like he was walking uphill. Remy checked the screen. He was back in the stairwell.
“But that would mean Jeff got duped.” She didn’t think that was likely, considering their handler had been a CIA agent for years. But, who knew? “Someone’s coming down toward you.”
“Okay.” He was quiet for a minute then said, “Morning,” softly.
Remy watched the other cell signal move away down the stairs. “It w
asn’t a professional attack, or they’d have gone to the government agencies who supply us with contracts. Anabeth would have been blackballed. The business could’ve been crippled easily enough, at least on paper. This was personal.” She paused. “But letting Tiller die just to get close to Ben?”
“I know,” Grant said. “Any luck finding out where they took him?”
Remy pulled up the traffic cameras and scanned the footage. “The phone I found has been shut off. I have no footage beyond the abduction, and I have no idea where they’ve taken him.”
“Okay.” Grant blew out a breath. “So they have manpower and the resources to pull this off, but they’re sloppy. Which means they’re bigger than just Ted Tiller, his dead brother, and his friend who helped him abduct Ben. But not government-big. A private organization. And other than that, we basically have nothing. With a side of no idea where Ben is.”
“I’m sorry, Grant.” It had to be said, even though there wasn’t anything to apologize for.
“Keep working. We’re on our own on this one.”
“Hang on the line for a second.” She clicked through to a program she’d designed herself, one that had recently downloaded the contents of the second phone. She used the same program to get into Grant’s phone. It didn’t take long to confirm her suspicions. “Shoot.”
“Don’t tell me you have more bad news.”
She’d found an intruder. They were trying to hack into her system and were currently working on downloading the contents of her hard drive. As if. They’d have to be better than her if they were going to succeed.
He said, “Remy.” Like it was a warning.
“Pineapple slush.”
Remy hung up and then hit two buttons on her keyboard. The computer’s operating system began dumping her files into oblivion. Everything on the Wi-Fi she’d set up would go, too. Whether they got through her firewalls or not, she couldn’t take the risk they’d find anything out about Ben’s company. It hurt to watch the purge, but she backed up everything onto a pendant flash drive she wore around her neck.
