by Ladew, Lisa
“Pearson,” he breathed, the sudden thought of his lawyer warming him. Pearson had helped them escape Dylan Phillips back when the man had been a lunatic police chief who had it out for them. But even as he thought about it, he knew this situation was a hundred times worse than that one. Would Pearson be able to handle it?
On the bed, Katerina whispered, “Craig.”
Craig Masterson! Why hadn’t West thought of the FBI agent before? They’d done the agent a huge favor recently, and the man had certainly seemed to know his stuff. Fear worked little wormholes of worry into the plan though. The man was a government agent. Just like Raven. What if he knew about Operation Arma and, instead of helping them, decided to deliver them right back into the serpent’s mouth?
West sat heavily on the bed, rubbing his eyes against the exhaustion that threatened to floor him. He knew he had to trust someone. What had happened to them was huge - way too big for them to claw their way out of by themselves. Without some major help they would be recaptured, or just killed, the moment they showed themselves.
Now that there was no immediate danger shoving a gun in his face, and he had Katerina safe beside him, thoughts about the hopeless nature of their circumstances crowded into his brain. How could they fight the U.S. Government and win? How could they escape something like this, that threatened to be a scandal to rival Watergate or Iran-contra? West’s tired mind tried to insist it had to be true. The American people wouldn’t stand for a government that kidnapped their own citizens and held them in secret, underground facilities, using military forces to do it, would they?
West felt his eyelids drooping and knew he needed to make a decision. His mind cast a tired net over everything he knew about Craig. The man had dealt with scandal before, and fearlessly worked to put the bad guys in jail, one of them a U.S. Senator. Plus he was married to Emma, one of the most trustworthy people he’d ever known in his life.
Decision made, West stood up and grabbed the phone again. He stared blankly at the wall, realizing he didn’t know Craig’s number. He had it in his cell phone, but that was dead.
“555-4389,” Katerina whispered from the bed, her voice heavy and thick, like she was about to drift off.
He turned to her. “Is that …?”
“Craig’s cell number, yes. I memorized it when we were working with him last month. You know, just in case.”
West blessed her memory and bent to give her a kiss. Katerina clutched at him like she was drowning and he was the life guard. But only for a moment. She knew how dire their situation was as well as he did.
West dialed the number and waited, his teeth on edge. Answer, answer.
“Masterson.”
When the rough voice cut through the static of the line, West almost couldn’t react. Were they saved? He managed to force some words out. “Craig, hi it’s West. Me and Katerina are in trouble man. Deep trouble. We need your help.”
Craig didn’t answer for several long seconds and West held his breath. A thousand scenarios flashed through his mind in an instant, each worse than the last. The man already knew what was going on with them and he wanted nothing to do with it. Or he already knew and he was part of it. Or he didn’t want to know. Or he would find out and turn them in.
But when Craig spoke again, West was able to relax, almost slumping against the tiny table the phone sat on.
“Sorry about that. I had to step into my office for privacy. What’s the trouble?”
Chapter 18
West watched out the window, terror gripping him mercilessly as evening deepened into night and still Craig hadn’t shown up. Katerina snored lightly behind him but he hadn’t let himself sleep, not yet. Someone had to be awake, watchful. Not that they had any chance of running if the wrong people showed up.
A nondescript white sedan pulled into the parking lot just beyond the building where they had checked in. West narrowed his eyes and pressed his face to the glass. He’d seen only three vehicles enter and two leave today, and none had been Craig. Craig had promised he’d be there as soon as possible. West had done the math and figured the earliest Craig could have arrived would have been four hours, but that time had passed five hours ago.
His fingers itched to pick up the phone and call someone, anyone, but Craig had admonished him not to do that. Craig said the government had the ability to monitor every phone call placed in the entire country for certain trigger words, and if the computer heard the trigger words spoken, the call could be listened in on by CIA or other spying agencies the government employed. “What if they are already listening in on this call?” West had said and Craig’s response had not encouraged him. “Then we’re screwed.”
West watched as the car reversed again, disappointment spreading through him, but then the car pulled past the main building and headed towards his trailer. West stared openly, but reached behind him and jiggled Katerina’s foot. “Babe, wake up.”
It had to be Craig, but just in case ….
The car stopped and the driver side door opened. Craig Masterson got out and West released the breath that he had been holding. Craig walked up the steps and knocked on their door.
West let Craig in and turned around to see Katerina groggily sitting up. “Hi,” Craig said gruffly, then pulled a rag out of his pocket, handing it to West. “Everything you’ve touched, and I mean everything. Wipe down the walls and the windows if there’s a chance you touched them. Wipe off all of your fingerprints. We are out of here in three minutes.”
West’s words of thanks died on his lips. So they were still running.
Exactly two minutes and thirty seconds later, the three of them were in the car and Craig reversed it out of the parking lot, heading away from the Little A’Le’Inn. West thought he’d never been so glad to see something disappear behind him in his life.
“Where are we going?” Katerina asked from the backseat.
“Dallas,” Craig said, his voice hard and a little forbidding.
West stared at him. “Dallas? Why Dallas?” A sudden foreboding told him he probably wasn’t going to like the answer.
Craig took a deep breath and glanced at West, then back at the road. “Look, we need to have a very serious conversation. I’ve been pulling every string I know, every favor owed to me, and picking the brain of every friend I have. You two are mixed up in some seriously bad business. This Operation Arma doesn’t exist. Every level of government I’ve approached insists there is no subterranean base under Area 51.”
West began to stammer his protest and Craig held up a hand. “I believe you. I’m just telling you what I’ve been going through the last few hours. I’ve only found one person who was willing to talk about it, and she says it doesn’t exist, but that anyone who escaped from there might as well be dead. She told me that the government will do everything in their power to silence you. You won’t even be taken back there. You’ll just be shot in the head and left in a ditch.”
West winced. “I’ve been thinking about that. And our best solution has to be to go to the press.”
“You can try,” Craig said. “But I’d be willing to bet you’d be dead within an hour of talking to your first reporter.”
“No!” West yelled and slammed a fist into his door. “I refuse to believe that! This is the United States of America! We’re not supposed to do that to our own citizens.”
Craig didn’t say anything, just drove on.
West licked his lips. He knew Craig was speaking the truth, but he didn’t want to believe it. He tried another tactic. “We could run. Go to the press in another country.”
Craig nodded like he expected that. “One of two things will happen if you do that. The US government will fabricate a murder or treason charge and present it to the foreign government for extradition. You’ll be back here before you know it.” West tried to protest again and Craig spoke louder. “OR! Or, your family will start to disappear. Everyone you know and love will suffer the fate that the government had reserved for you, until you com
e home in a panic, and then they’ll finish you off and be done with it.”
West shrank against the passenger seat, his exhaustion and discontent weighing him down. “So what do we do then?”
“Did you notice that it took me longer than it should have to get to you?” Craig asked.
West nodded, peeking at Katerina in the back seat to see how she was taking this. Her eyes followed both men avidly.
“I stopped at the field office in Las Vegas to put a few ideas into effect. On the flight over, I did as much research as I could and came to a decision of what would be best for you two. I had my friend, the one who was willing to talk about it, look into the situation there. Apparently the entire facility has been gutted. Everything is destroyed, and the fire is still raging on, taking out the base above now. There are pipelines feeding the gas into the underground system and all of them are ablaze, causing huge sinkholes and fire to spurt up out of the ground from anywhere with no warning.”
West heard a small noise from the backseat and reached back to take Katerina’s hand. Who knew who she was mourning over: Dylan, the monkeys, the computer. Any of them were a safe bet with a heart as tender as Katerina’s.
“That’s why no one has come after you. The entire place is in absolute chaos. From what you told me, there’s a good chance that they think you are dead, burned to nothing but ash somewhere below the ground.”
Craig stopped talking, letting the fact sink in. “The way I see it, now that you are dead, your only hope is to stay dead.”
“And just how are we going to do that?” West asked, his entire life disintegrating in a flash.
“My friend? The one who told me all of this – she can set you up with citizen identities in another country. In fact, she already has. She hasn’t told me which country, and I haven’t told her who you are. No one knows the full story, which should make you safe.”
Craig was silent for a long time.
“It’s the best we can do.”
Chapter 19
Two months later
Jordan walked into Blaise’s home office, finding him bent over paperwork on the desk. She rubbed his shoulders and smiled as he stretched like a cat and pressed into her. “Is that the paperwork from the attorney?” she asked.
“It is,” he said fanning the papers at her. “He says it’s too early to file a lawsuit. We have to have them declared legally dead first, but as soon as that happens were going to move. The sooner the better, to force them to open Operation Arma files before they are all destroyed.”
Jordan’s hands tightened on Blaise’s shoulder and he looked backwards at her. A lone tear dropped from her eye and he squeezed her hand and pulled her to him. She had cried a lot in the last two months, and he didn’t blame her.
His phone rang, cutting off his thoughts. He looked at the screen, feeling that familiar zing of hope that the caller id emblazoned there would say West. It was Brody. He handed the phone to Jordan. “Can you talk to him? Tell him I’ll get the full report to him tomorrow. It will be mailed at eight a.m., express mail.”
Jordan nodded and took the phone, retreating to another room for the conversation. Blaise watched her go, appreciating her liquid feminine stride, and then turned back to his work. Brody had paid him a crazy salary to quit his job and investigate this atrocity full time, but he wasted too much of Blaise’s time trying to hash things out, going over things they’d gone over a dozen times before. Jordan had to run interference between them frequently.
Blaise had been glad when Brody had offered him the job. Blaise had a hard time trying to face the thought of going back to his job at the police department after what had happened to West and Katerina. He knew he would never rest until the bastards that kidnapped them and held them till their fiery death were called out, brought to justice.
Blaise bent over the file again, but the one tiny piece of evidence that had never been officially logged called to him, like it always did. He pulled out the piece of paper that held the screenshot of the missed call on his phone and stared at it, his fingers caressing it. “West,” he whispered. “If you’re out there somewhere, why haven’t you ever tried to call again?”
He slid the piece of paper back into its hiding spot underneath his paper tray. He knew that screenshot didn’t mean West was alive. He’d traced the call number to the Little A’Le’Inn in Rachel, Nevada, even driven out there with Brody, but no one ever remembered seeing West or Katerina that day. The establishment had insisted they hadn’t let anyone fitting that description use the phone. In fact, the owners had eagerly cooperated and let the men look at their records. No one that could have been West and Katerina had rented a room that day either.
But the biggest mystery came when they examined the phone records of the Inn. No call to Blaise’s phone was recorded. Brody hired a hacker to break into the phone records and his best guess was that the records had been tampered with and two calls had been removed from the records, but no matter how much money Brody threw at him, the hacker couldn’t come up with the two phone numbers.
It didn’t fit. None of it fit. So he pushed the call to the back of his mind again and concentrated on the evidence that did fit. Which was precious little. Only what West’s text message had said, what Agnes could tell them, and what one lone former agent had come forward and provided. Blaise read the transcript of that conversation again then leaned back in his chair with a sigh. There would be a break eventually, he just had to find it. And he would find it.
He made a deal with himself. He would work for one more hour, and then he would go find Jordan to ease both of their pain in the only way he knew how. With gentle touches and long, soulful kisses that always led to them forgetting about the early demise of their best friends for at least a short while.
Chapter 20
Two years, eight months later
“Come on Noemie, were going to be late!” West roared up the stairs in French.
Nothing. He didn’t understand what was taking her so long. She was graduating at the head of her class in the first phase of her veterinarian degree today. She’d been so looking forward to it – to moving on to the hands-on portion.
But she had been acting strange all morning, not talking much, and moving slow. She’d taken forever just to get out of bed. West felt a thin stripe of fear strike him right in his midsection. Did she know something she wasn’t saying? The sudden anxiousness that their identities were compromised and Kater— Noemie knew it somehow struck West full in the chest. He took the steps two at a time chiding himself for calling her by her real name in his mind. It had been years, but he still did it sometimes. And he always thought of himself by his former name. A dangerous habit, he knew, but one he had yet to shake.
The sound of the TV upstairs matched perfectly with the sound of the TV downstairs. They had both TVs in the house tuned to CNN twenty four hours a day, always looking for any sort of indication that either there was some sort of a search on for them, or that someone had found out something new about Operation Arma. There had been a bit of an uproar in the days and weeks following their escape and subsequent flight to Switzerland with two new identities and seven thousand dollars in cash that Craig had provided for them. The uproar had been caused by Brody and Blaise, but hadn’t lasted long. West wondered every day if his best friend and his brother had gone underground, or if they had been threatened … or both. He knew they were both still alive. He followed Brody in the business pages but Blaise was harder to watch. He’d quit the police department for some reason and West still couldn’t tell what he was up to or what he’d been doing since they’d been gone. West also had no idea what was going on with his father. All he knew was that he’d never seen an obituary for his father, and he prayed that meant the man was still alive.
West reached the second floor of the simple house he and Noemie lived in, and looked in the only bedroom. She wasn’t there. That left the bathroom or the attic. He ran to the bathroom door and stopped short, hearing noises ins
ide. Crying.
West’s heart lurched in his chest. They had a good life. A simple life, but a good one. They had each other, and although they missed their friends and family, most of the time they were happy. They were free, and they were alive.
Noemie still gave thanks every day that she was a normal person with no more powers, although she did get powerful premonitions that always turned out to be correct from time to time - and she knew nothing about West’s powers. He’d never told her. He’d never used them again since that time in Nevada.
But Ka-Noemie was crying? Alone in the bathroom? Why?
He knocked lightly on the door. “Baby,” he whispered. “What’s wrong?”
She didn’t respond, but her soft noises stopped immediately. West jiggled the doorknob but it was locked. Desperation clawed at him and he considered busting in the door. But he could hurt her …
Something flew underneath the door between his feet. Something long and white. He bent down to pick it up.
It was a pregnancy test. A positive pregnancy test.
West’s heart glowed full and strong as a fierce sense of longing and excitement gripped him. Pregnant. Katerina was pregnant. He was going to be a father.
They’d never talked about children since the dinner, the day before the wedding when his father had asked Katerina where she stood on the issue. When they arrived in Switzerland, they’d had their hands full learning the language, finding jobs, and just surviving. When things had finally settled down, he’d wanted to broach the subject, but never did, taking his cue from his wife, knowing she would approach it when she felt ready. But also seeing her faithfully take her pill every day.
“Baby, open the door. I’m not mad. I’m overjoyed. Come here and let me kiss you. Let me touch you and talk to my baby. I want to teach him or her the ABCs.”
