Revelation Day (The Fall Book 6)

by Joshua Guess

  As far as Mason could tell, he was just in jail. No games or frills.

  He was in the cell for a day and a half before the quiet routine was broken. Three heavily armored soldiers showed up, decked out in riot gear with shields and all. Two of the regular guards joined them, each bearing thick plastic zip cuffs.

  “Hey fellas,” Mason said, sitting on his bed with legs crossed beneath him. “You came dressed to dance. I’m honestly a little flattered.”

  “You’re wanted in the lab,” one of the helmeted guards said. “The doctors need some blood samples.”

  Mason didn’t move from his perch, but did gesture at the shield the man held. “Hit me hard enough with that and you can just scrape some from the floor.”

  The man bristled. “If you come with us peacefully, there won’t be any need for violence.”

  Mason burst into laughter. “Son, you took me prisoner. Your people invited me here and broke their word. You seem to be under the false impression that I’m not at war with you. You open that door and I’m gonna put my fingers through your eye sockets and whip your head around like a bowling ball. You specifically, but tell your buddies not to worry. I’ll make sure they get a turn.”

  Every person on the other side of the bars reflexively tensed up, a group cringe away from him. Mason continued to sit unperturbed. In an ideal world, he would have remained unknown to Rebound and could have presented a different face. But the actions he and the others had taken against their research facilities hadn’t gone unnoticed. Mason’s fighting abilities were documented, so instead he went the other direction.

  It took a lot of effort to feed those fears, especially from a distance. He couldn’t make himself less known, but he could at least massage the facts. The reputation he had in this part of the world made them afraid enough that the fear made them overly cautious. It interfered with their thought processes.

  He was not at all surprised when the tranquilizer guns were brought out.

  Mason raised an eyebrow when he saw them. “Bunch of pussies.”

  An indeterminable time later, he woke up strapped to a table. Saying he was tied down would give the wrong impression. Those words conjure images of soft cuffs with some play in the straps, allowing the prisoner to jerk against them. This was not what Mason woke to. He seemed to have been restrained by an obsessive-compulsive dominatrix with a hatred for scarred men. When the world faded back in, Mason couldn’t even look down to verify his condition. His head was tightly bound and strapped, with similar lines of pressure across his arms and legs in several places, crisscrossing ones over his hips and shoulders, with at least two more on chest and belly.

  “Buy me a fuckin drink first,” Mason said groggily.

  The doctors milling around him paid no mind. He became aware of a dull, hot pain in one arm. A needle of some kind. Felt like an IV line, but probably just them tapping a vein for a sample.

  “Pay attention to meeeeee,” Mason said in his best impression of a five year-old. No one did.

  All he could do was watch and listen. Technically, screaming his head off or being otherwise annoying was also on the table. Mason, however, had a longstanding policy against overly irritating medical professionals—or really, anyone handy with a blade—in situations where he was under their control. This was coincidentally a lesson learned the hard way in another prison, though on a different continent.

  Society, mostly through entertainment, had romanticized the espionage trade. Many elements translated well, Mason would happily admit as much, but the classic portrayal of spies as men in fancy suits attending parties was a distortion at best. Sure, some guys did that. But almost every possible profession and social situation was within the domain of people trying to ferret out information for their government or agency. People forgot—or just didn’t care—that the romantic version was only a tiny fraction of the job.

  Mason had never been one of those guys. He was recruited into the CIA for more blunt work, mostly utilizing his combat experience. Which didn’t mean he missed out on training. He picked up an enormous skill set, because even Special Activities sometimes needed a light touch, or to trail a target. Gathering information was a huge part of the job.

  Someone who looked like Mason would be constantly underestimated. Even before the scars, few would have considered him intellectually capable, much less dangerous.

  Good.

  He memorized faces. Every doctor and nurse, every person who walked by at all. He continued to do it when they started taking samples from all over and inside his body. The pain sucked in five languages, but it was only pain. It didn’t stop him from noting the clothes worn beneath lab coats and what those clothing choices said about the person. The liver probe—seriously, these guys were assholes—was no fun at all, yet it allowed him to smell two of the nerds doing the job. They had the same scent, a cheap flowery body spray over top a deeper vanilla lotion scent. One of the two, a man, was older and wore a wedding band. The other, a youngish woman, was free of jewelry.

  She held Mason’s head as the guy jammed a piece of metal between his ribs. Mason watched her expression, and even upside down the quiet intensity was obvious.

  He wondered if he’d have a chance to use that information, then thought it unlikely. Most of the information he gathered wasn’t exactly useless, but more accurately the situations and context in which it was most useful rarely came up. That was the curse of the intelligence agent; sifting wheat and chaff.

  About five seconds into the next sample, when someone decided to drill for bone marrow in his hip, Mason let himself pass out.

  He was back in the cell and awake for nearly an hour before another visitor showed up. This time it wasn’t in the form of armed soldiers.

  Al Hauser stood outside the bars, well away from Mason’s reach. Not that he had the inclination to attack anyone at that moment. His body ached from the pokes and prods. “Hey, Al. I guess I can thank you for this?”

  The older man had a serious look on his face. “No. Believe it or not, I argued against this entire line of decisions. I was the one who suggested Bobby take over as your liaison while you were outside the facility. I thought you’d like being around someone with a bit more in common with you than me. At the time, I had no idea my superiors were planning on doing any of this.”

  Mason kept his face neutral through an effort of extreme will. He wondered whether Al meant Bobby and Mason had being gay in common, or more broadly in that they were both survivors. He leaned toward the latter. Al was good at reading people and making you believe his sincerity. Too smart to insult someone, even a prisoner, thoughtlessly. “I gotta say, I’m not a fan of the accommodations. Spent a lot of time working on this trip and being a lot more reasonable than I’d normally be inclined toward after the sort of shit your leaders have been up to.”

  A look of what could have been real sorrow flitted across Al’s face. “And now we’ve got you in a cell. Yes, I understand. If I were in your place, I would feel the same way. If it helps, you won’t be making any more trips to the lab. I’ve made sure of at least that much.”

  Mason snorted. “How touching. Now that I’ve had blood taken, bone marrow drawn, spinal fluid drained, and a dozen other pieces and parts cut and cored out of me, I’m safe. Good to know.”

  Al stared at Mason for a long few seconds, then seemed to come to a decision. He glanced around as subtly as he could manage, trying not to move his head and make the gesture obvious. “I can tell you this much,” he said in a low voice. “Your friends are here. Right now they’re being shown video of what happened to you in the lab. I believe it’s an attempt to extort them into going along with something, though I have no idea what.”

  Mason pursed his lips in thought. His first instinct was to laugh and explain to this soft little man that Kell and the others knew better than that. They would let Mason be tortured to death before giving in to that sort of emotional terrorism, because Mason would want them to. It seemed likely that Al was play
ing another role, if one that came across as truly genuine, and was fishing for exactly that kind of information.

  Instead, Mason remained noncommittal. “Let me know how that works out for you.”

  Al shook his head. “I’ll be by again if anything changes. Personally, I’m hoping everyone comes to their senses and starts behaving like adults.” He grimaced. “Or even close to sane. I’d settle for that.”

  Mason stretched out on his cot and stared at the ceiling. There was no position he could find that was comfortable given how widely poked and prodded his body was, but the best was flat on his back with his elbows at his sides and hands laced together on his chest.

  Did Al realize how much he’d let slip during the short conversation? Emily would have known Mason was imprisoned well before reaching New America’s borders. Their agents had probably transmitted the news within hours. It meant she and Kell had good reason to still come, and Al made it pretty obvious whoever ran Rebound wanted to make sure they had leverage against Kell when he got here.

  For what? The cure seemed like the logical answer, but Mason discounted that. All Rebound had to do for that was not go nuts and start imprisoning people. The cure would have been theirs as soon as some kind of treaty was finalized. Of course, Mason couldn’t discount the possibility they just wanted to make certain they got the cure, but the idea was far-fetched. No reason to rock the boat when sitting still would have had the same effect. It wasn’t like Rebound’s leaders couldn’t have just broken the agreement after getting what they wanted...

  Which meant they didn’t want anything. They needed something, or had convinced themselves they did. Something only Kell could provide.

  Put that together with the aggressive—some might call it sociopathic—degree of sampling Rebound’s doctors had performed on him, and the leap wasn’t an especially difficult one. They needed Kell’s skills to fix something. Maybe a rogue Chimera mutation. God knew there had been enough of those over the years.

  Whatever it was, they were desperate. Enough to divide the leadership here. What else explained the wild swings in decision-making? Mason had no proof, nothing solid he could use to build a new strategy with, but that was okay.

  A good operator used what time he had to set up the board to give himself the advantage. Mason and Emily had done everything they could to position agents in New America so any number of potential strategies could be used. That was the advantage of having time to plan and skilled people to use.

  And unless he missed his guess, the time to use them had finally come.

  Kell

  A funny thing happened when their convoy finally reached Rebound: Kell found a deep well of rage and tore the covering from it. Half an hour before he would be shown the video of one of his only real friends being medically tortured, he stood in front of the truck he had just exited and refused to stand down.

  Quite a few guns were trained on him. No part of Kell was especially worried about that. His lack of concern didn’t stem from the knowledge that they wanted him alive, something he’d forgotten in the heat of the moment, but from the blinding fury demanding violence against these people.

  “We’re not your fucking prisoners,” Kell said. “None of us.”

  It never occurred to him to wonder what people saw when he lost his temper. He was an academic at heart, albeit one who had suffered the same as any other survivor. Kell adapted to the world around him, but the ability to fight, to kill, even to endure were learned behaviors. Give him the choice between some idiotic display of male dominance or a good book in front of the fire, and he’d pick reading every time.

  No matter how he thought of himself, reality was a different story. The dozen soldiers pointing weapons at him recoiled at his words. Not much; just enough to let their fear show. Anyone facing a giant of a man with the hard, flat muscles of a proven survivor while he hovered on the edge of attacking would be afraid. It was the only rational reaction.

  “We have our orders, sir,” one of the guards said. He pitched his voice low, so Kell’s companions couldn’t hear. “We’ve been instructed not to hurt you. The rest of them weren’t mentioned.”

  Whatever reaction the man expected to the unsubtle threat, grim laughter clearly wasn’t it. He flinched at the sudden, booming sound.

  “You try to take my people down and I’ll make you shoot me,” Kell said. “You just fucking try me.”

  In truth, part of his reaction was inspired by Emily, who only a few hours earlier needed to deliver a similar ultimatum. That whoever was in charge had given in struck him as a good sign. His expectations were raised. Even he, bereft of training in psychology or the politics of power, understood that something was off here. Trying to reassert dominance this way stank of desperation or at the least a badly fractured command structure. Years of watching Will Price run Haven and take a strong hand in shaping the Union had given Kell a practical understanding of how good leaders worked.

  Before the situation could devolve, Emily spoke from behind him. “It’s okay. We’ll disarm. Will that be enough?”

  Kell shot her a questioning look over his shoulder. She replied with a shrug. “Look, we wouldn’t let them come into Will’s office with weapons, right? It’s only reasonable, Kell.”

  His eyebrows knitted together in confusion. “What changed?”

  “Nothing,” Emily said. “We made our point. We won’t let them walk all over us. We have to be realistic in what we can expect. My guess is we give up our weapons and they’ll let us stay together, hang on to our other gear. We’ll be something like guests instead of you being shot and the rest of us dead.”

  The guard, listening to all of this, put a hand to the earpiece on the right side of his head. Apparently Rebound’s grounds were wired for sound, because he got instructions before Emily was even finished talking. “I’m being told that will work. Three of you, including Doctor McDonald, will be allowed to meet the council. The rest will be given quarters and kept under watch, but won’t be harmed. They’ll be free to move around the section we put them in.”

  Emily twitched an eyebrow at Kell, who took if for the encouragement it was. “Fine. Let’s get this over with.”

  Only Emily and Kell went into the deeper levels of Rebound. In the brief time they had to discuss it privately, he had pointed out that if anything went wrong, one extra body wouldn’t help them. They’d be too far down and too outnumbered for one person to matter. Better to keep as many as possible together in the upper level where they could try to escape if a worst-case scenario popped up.

  They were left alone in a conference room, which was where they saw the video of Mason. It came on without warning or explanation, rendered in high definition and with sound.

  Aware that their hosts—captors, if he was being honest with himself—were looking for an overt reaction, Kell remained quietly neutral throughout. He wondered briefly if the inconsistency of his anger would throw them off. After all, hadn’t he just taken a stand for his people? Wasn’t he going to get pissed off at what they were forcing him to watch?

  Please. Any intelligent person would take a look at Mason’s scars and understand how very little tissue samples would bother him. There were few unmarked inches of skin on the man. Comparatively, this was nothing.

  “Think he’s still alive?” Emily asked after the video ended.

  Kell couldn’t help chuckling. “For their sake, they better hope not. Mason doesn’t hold many grudges, but when he does he gets kinda stabby.”

  They were not forced to wait long. The door to the conference room opened to reveal more armed guards, though none were pointing weapons this time. Well, at least things had improved that much.

  Rather than usher in the people Kell was there to meet, the guards hustled them out of the room so fast he nearly left his pack behind. That wouldn’t do. It contained his laptop and other things needed for his work.

  Near as he could tell, they were at least four levels down. The elevators weren’t marked in wa
ys that made determining depth easy, and given the size of the huge storage rooms near the surface of the bunker, Kell wasn’t certain there was any consistency in how large the levels were. Not that it mattered, in the final equation. Being fifty feet underground was as bad as five hundred.

  They traveled in what had to be a freight elevator for much longer than seemed possible. He tried to build a mental map of the place through the bits and pieces he had seen and came up short. Rather than wrack his brain, Kell did the logical thing and just asked.

  “How big is this place?”

  “Kind of ridiculously big,” the guard said in a conversational tone Kell didn’t expect. “A lot of it was built into existing caves, you know. Building is a lot easier when you don’t have to dig everything out first.”

  Kell chewed on that. “But how far down does it go?”

  The guard squinted thoughtfully. “Not really sure. Main levels, not that deep. The lab complex is separate. Below the main complex. You can only get there through this elevator.”

  “That’s where we’re going?” Emily asked. The guard nodded.

  The doors opened on a short hallway. The guard standing at the front of the elevator car put his arm out to the side to prevent anyone from stepping forward. He reached over to the control panel and tapped a code into the number pad there. There was no obvious effect, but a slight tension Kell hadn’t noticed drained from the guards.

  When they walked down the hallway, Kell looked around. It immediately became clear why this trip made people nervous.

  The hallway was a kill box. Two turrets were mounted in the corners over the elevator doors, stubby barrels perfectly angled to fill the center of the space with a torrent of bullets.

  “That seems a little extreme,” Emily mused.

  The guard in front of her looked over his shoulder. “Not down here, it isn’t. The work is too important.”

  It dawned on Kell for the first time that the lab was a weird place to meet Rebound’s ruling council. In the excitement and rush, his brain simply hadn’t parsed the two facts into one coherent whole.