by Lee French
“Whatever.” Kaitlin shrugged.
“Let’s use channel four,” Riker told his men. They all fiddled with something at their belts. “Hansen and Platt, you’re our getaway drivers.” He handed his car keys over to Platt. “We’re not outfitted for a hostile entry, hopefully we won’t need to be. If this thing goes fubar, aim to hurt, not kill. We’re walking on the wild side here, but that doesn’t mean we have to go all dark side.”
The other four men nodded and two got into the cars while the other two fell in behind Paul and Kaitlin. Liam knew how to do this, leading a group of people through a facility as if he belonged there. Every other time he’d done it, he actually did belong there, because he’d been giving a tour of one of his father’s company’s buildings to Important People.
He still wished he had a clipboard. Especially when they greeted the first hurdle, the security right inside the front door. A soldier sat in a small booth on the other side of the door with glass between them and him. They could see the shiny, red button for opening the door, so close and yet so far away.
Riker knocked on the glass to get the guy’s attention and stood there, staring at him like he ought to be expecting them and should just go ahead and let them in. “Surprise inspection,” he barked, voice full of command.
The young soldier jumped and slapped the button. “Yes, Sergeant!”
Apparently, the guard held a lower rank than Riker. Liam didn’t have much experience with such things and chose to be glad Riker obviously knew what he was doing. He grabbed the door as it buzzed and nodded his approval to the young man. Although tempted to praise the soldier’s efficiency, he had a feeling that would cause problems and kept his mouth shut. Knowing when to not talk helped at least as much as knowing what to say.
“We’re in,” Riker muttered once they passed the guard post, presumably to let Hansen and Platt know.
“Take a left,” Kaitlin murmured. They had no reason not to follow her directions, so Liam and Riker turned down the next hallway to the left. “Go in the next room on the right.” This put them into a small office with minimalist furniture and no occupant. Kaitlin shut the door softly behind them all and stood there with her ear pressed to the door and a finger to her lips to shush them.
A glance at Paul confirmed for Liam that they did this for a reason—the telepath rubbed his temple and stood as far from Kaitlin as he could manage in such a small room. All his own aches and pains had faded into the background, completely overwhelmed by the rush of infiltrating a military facility pursuing secret research projects combined with the anticipation of seeing Elena again—finally—after a month apart.
He’d only met her two weeks before she was taken away from him. They’d been the most intense, wonderful two weeks of his life. After spending years chasing and being chased by skirts he had no real interest in and expecting his mother to find him a wife he’d have to settle for if he wanted to continue to live the lifestyle he’d become accustomed to, he’d fallen hard, in two weeks, for a woman he’d bumped into by accident. The thought terrified him and liberated him at the same time. But she was gone, and he’d done things he never would have otherwise to get her back. Like using his awful ability for total strangers, and breaking into a high-security military facility.
Would she still want him? He’d never been dumped in his life. His relationships—such as they’d been—always ended well, except for a few he had to get stern and unpleasant with. In those cases, it he’d done the dumping. The idea of Elena doing that to him crushed a piece of his soul, and he delicately avoided it. That she might be mad at him because of whatever Privek and his lackeys told her was fine, and he could live with it. Getting past those kinds of lies wouldn’t be too hard. Dealing with the truth was always harder.
Kaitlin opened the door and walked out, beckoning for them to follow her. Liam let her lead without argument. She could, apparently, get them through this place without incident. For Paul’s benefit, he spruced up his expression of blithe confidence as he followed Riker out. The telepath looked nervous and a little green around the gills.
“It’s continuous right now,” Paul breathed at him, staying by Liam’s side. “She’s walking around in the future or something. It feels like her mind is some kind of dragon that’s going to pounce and eat me as soon as we both stand still.”
Liam nodded to project more confidence than he felt. “It didn’t happen in that room, so you should be safe. Stop fidgeting, it makes you look suspicious.”
“First rule of not being noticed is to fly casual,” Hegi murmured from behind them. “Act like you belong and aren’t doing anything worth looking into.”
“Easy for you to say,” Paul grumbled.
Putting a hand comfortingly on Paul’s shoulder, Liam leaned down and said, “Try imagining it’s looking at something behind you it wants to protect you from.”
The telepath blinked stupidly and whipped his head around. Aside from nearly clocking Liam in the jaw, he found himself face to face with Carter, who managed to avoid walking into him. Liam rolled his eyes and shoved Paul to get him moving again.
Kaitlin ushered them all through a door with an admonition to be quiet again. This time, they crammed themselves into a janitor’s closet. Unlike last time, they could all hear the muffled voices moving past the door.
“I can’t believe they’re doing another surprise inspection.”
“Nobody can just trust us to do our jobs anymore, Jesus. It’s like they want to find the stuff they don’t want to know about.”
“Where the hell are these people? We can’t damned well keep them out of the black sections if we can’t find them.”
Black sections? Well, obviously, the government researched things they didn’t want anyone to know about. He wondered if any of the experiments or programs related to them. It couldn’t be a coincidence that Elena had been moved here. Well, okay, it could, but it would be exceptionally unfair if they couldn’t kill two birds with one break-in. Besides, if he understood the very little Bobby had said, Privek’s project managed this site, so it made sense to be related.
They’d been stuffed in so tightly that Liam half-tumbled out of the little room when Kaitlin opened the door. It almost felt like a madcap comedy, except he had no reason to laugh. Being in that tight space with five other people all worried about a hiccup or sneeze giving them away hadn’t improved his already frayed nerves.
They kept going, down a flight of stairs, up a hallway, down more stairs, around and around in what seemed to be a giant circle, spiraling into the pit of Hell. The longer they walked, the more he wondered if this would turn out to be the biggest mistake of his life. Horrible things, the consequences of being caught down here without some kind of official authorization, danced through his head, getting progressively more unpleasant with every minute that passed.
Glancing at Paul, he noticed an obscene amount of tension in the other man’s shoulders and a tight, pinched look on his face. Walking beside a frantic ball of worry probably made things worse for the telepath. He stopped himself from apologizing and instead groped for something else to focus on than how horrible this situation could become.
Elena, the reason for this whole disaster in the first place, came to mind. Instead of thinking about how much he missed her, or how much she panicked him overall, he thought about her face, her laugh, her smile. With her wide hips and strong nose, she would never qualify as conventionally pretty. To him, she stuck out as the most beautiful woman he’d ever met.
She’d be the first person to tell him to stop being stupid, and to stop worrying so much about something he had no control over. Her finger would lay over his mouth and shut him up, and she’d dance for him. With that thought came the memory of their first night together, spent in a grotto he never would’ve found without her.
The two of them lay on a bed of moss together, a gap in the rock overhead showing him more stars than he’d ever seen before. They huddled for warmth when the temperature dropp
ed unexpectedly. Dazed by the incredible whirlwind that had fallen asleep in his arms, his heart swelled with the strange knowledge that he felt more connected to her without sex than he’d ever felt with any of the girls he’d jumped into bed with.
Somehow, the Spaniard who’d stopped randomly to ask him for help that morning had turned out to be everything he wanted. He stroked her hair and sighed. For once, he had no audience or expectations, and it allowed him to relax. That forgotten feeling surging through his veins was so strange that it took him several minutes to identify uncomplicated happiness.
Kaitlin stopped abruptly at a set of thick metal fire doors, jarring Liam out of his reverie. “From here, there’s no evading anymore. Riker, you guys will just have to punch people. I don’t see any way around that. There are cameras. I know how to shut them off, but that will bring people down here, expecting something’s going on. We need to go into the third door on the left. That’s not where Elena is. She’s through the second door on the right. We’ll have to grab her after. I’m not sure what’s through the other door, just that we have to go in there. Maybe there’s someone in with Elena that we need to avoid.”
Everyone looked at Liam. He could tell. Taking a deep breath, he nodded. “Okay. You haven’t led us wrong yet, I trust you.”
“Good.” Kaitlin gave him a firm nod. He wondered if she knew how to smile without it being a smirk. Probably not. “Because I’m not trying to screw with you, I just want to get out of here in one piece.”
“Seconded,” Riker said. “No shooting if we can avoid it down here. No telling what or who you might hit.” He, Carter, and Hegi all switched over to their pistols, safeties on, letting their rifles hang from the straps across their bodies where they wouldn’t get in the way.
Paul swallowed nervously as he watched them. “Didn’t you just say ‘no shooting’?”
Riker got a half grin. “They make good substitute brass knuckles in a pinch.” The statement made Paul go pale, and Kaitlin smirked. For his part, Liam just nodded, because if he said anything, it would probably be a whimper or squeak.
“We’ll follow you three in,” Kaitlin said confidently. How did she manage to stay so calm? Did she know this would work out okay, making panic seem foolish? Maybe she just knew she’d be alright. That struck Liam as a lot more likely, given what he’d seen so far. “The panel to disable the cameras is on the other side of these doors. I’ll take care of that.”
Carter moved up and grabbed the handle for the fire doors, waited for the go ahead from Riker, then heaved it open. Riker and Hegi slipped inside. Carter followed right behind them. Kaitlin stopped Liam and Paul from following immediately. She counted to ten, then opened the door and darted inside. Liam looked at Paul, who happened to also look at him, and wondered if his own face held as much panic as the telepath’s did. Hopefully not.
For a long moment, they both stood there. Then Liam, bolstered by the notion he’d find Elena through there, grabbed the door handle and yanked it open to see the three soldiers dragging bodies through the first door on the right while Kaitlin clicked a panel on the wall shut. “None of them are dead,” Kaitlin whispered. “Come on, no dawdling, this’ll be noticed pretty soon.”
Liam held the door open for Paul, who came through it reluctantly. They followed Riker past the second door on the right. No one else so much as looked at it. Liam couldn’t stop himself from staring, wondering, and stopping. The rest of them kept going while he put his ear to the door. He heard noises on the other side, too muffled to decipher. His heart beat so fast he thought he might explode. Right then, he knew that, no matter what he’d said, he could not leave this door, not even with a gun to his head.
Glancing up and down the hallway, he noted he hadn’t been missed yet. Paul was probably too scared to keep track of him, and the others focused on what lay ahead, not behind. He grabbed the knob and threw the door open. There she was, like Kaitlin said she would be, only he couldn’t have prepared for the incredible amount of anger tearing through him at what he saw.
The room resembled a doctor’s office, with cabinets and a chair, and a rolling bed instead of a fixed exam table. The walls had even been painted a soothing light minty green color, with darker mint trim. Between himself and Elena, a man stood with his back to the door, wearing a lab coat that didn’t hide the light bruising on his right hand knuckles. To complement them, an ugly purple splotch tainted Elena’s dusky skin around her eye, blood stained her lower lip. She’d been knocked out cold, and her attacker held a needle. Once he profaned her hand with it, that needle would probably be attached to the IV bag at the head of the gurney.
The guy in the lab coat turned and looked, then frowned. “Who are you? You can’t—” His eyes snapped to Liam’s, then widened in surprise and horror. It might have had something to do with the pure rage unfurling in Liam’s chest, because that had to be written across his face. Instead of backing away like a sane person should, the very average guy with glasses put up his hands and blocked Liam from coming in any further. “You shouldn’t be here. Get out. She’s not your concern.”
How dare he. Liam had no need to assert his manhood and didn’t feel he owned Elena. But he loved her, and seeing her like that, when this man obviously did it to her… And now he tried to shove Liam away, to get him to leave Elena behind. No damned chance.
Brawling didn’t come naturally to Liam. He’d never had trouble defusing the sorts of situations he found himself in where such things might happen, and thus never had a need to learn to fight. Despite that, Liam threw his fist at the man’s face. There would be no chitchat here.
So much adrenaline pumped through Liam’s body he didn’t really feel the impact as anything more than a confirmation of a solid blow. He used his body to shoulder the man into the wall and hit him again, wanting to make him hurt a hundred times worse than what Elena felt from the blow she took. Idly, part of his brain noticed the sudden end to the dull throbbing he’d managed to push into the background during the car ride. The hundred little aches from the crash evaporated. He felt pretty good, actually, aside from wanting to kill this man.
The moment he realized he actually could kill this man, Liam stopped and let him fall to the floor, panting from the exertion. He was in good shape, but had never done anything like this before, ever. Elena’s attacker crumpled to the floor in what seemed like slow motion, with cuts and bruises on his face that seemed oddly similar to the ones he himself had suffered in the crash. That little slice there was eerie. Liam reached up to touch his own face with smooth, perfect hands where his own slice should be, only to find more smooth, perfect skin.
He’d transferred his wounds to someone else. The thought made him go cold all over and stumble backwards until he bumped into Elena’s gurney. He could take the wounds of others and regenerate the injuries, or he could take his own wounds and give them to someone else. God, that was scary. Worse, almost, than just healing people. Could he take someone else’s wounds on himself and pass them on before he healed them? Could he bring someone back to life by killing someone else?
He didn’t want to think about it. Turning, he let all that wash away at the sight of his girlfriend, lying unconscious with a bruise on her cheek. His fingers brushed that bruise lightly, pulling it out of her, along with the concussion keeping her down. His head split with a blinding ache for a few seconds. He’d gladly take it for an hour in exchange for seeing her eyes flutter open and her lips smile at him.
“Liam, what did you do?” Paul stood in the doorway, staring at the downed man in horror.
Scooping Elena up into his arms and holding her tightly, Liam heard himself say dully, “He hit Elena.”
“Oh.” Paul gulped and gave a weak chuckle. “Remind me never to say anything rude to her. We need to move, though. Before someone comes along and—”
“What’s going‐” Too late. A guy in a lab coat peered inside and blinked, then turned to run.
“I’ll handle it,” Paul said, sounding
really glad to have something to distract him from the contents of the room. He turned away, leaving Liam and Elena alone again.
“They told me—” She barely spoke English and he barely spoke Spanish, so they used French. His mother had made him learn it, and he’d never been more appreciative of that than since he’d met Elena.
He put a finger on her lips. “It can be no worse than what they told me. They lied to us both.” All his life, he’d chased blondes, women who looked like his mother. Sometimes he entertained a brunette or a redhead, but he couldn’t ever get blondes out of his system. Now, he had the most lovely woman imaginable, and she had such dark hair, dusky skin, brown eyes. For those two weeks, he took her for granted, but after a month forcibly apart, he never would again.
“I worked for them.” She held onto him as tightly as he held onto her.
“I know. We’re going to make sure this never, ever happens again. We have to leave, though, and hurry.” He had to force himself to let go of her, and only managed it because he could take her hand. They hurried out of the room together.
Chapter 5
Bobby skirted around the bright lights of Las Vegas until he found the installation he’d come looking for. They hadn’t bothered trying to hide it from above. The airstrip even had its lights on tonight. As the swarm slipped up on the buildings, of which it had fewer than White Sands, he noticed a small plane-thing taxiing into position to take off. That explained the lights. The craft had a weird shape. They must’ve been doing a test flight of some fancy new aircraft. That explained the choice of night for the flight.
Nothing about this base from above, however, explained how much fervent conspiracy theory surrounded it. The installation appeared to be nothing more than an experimental aircraft testing facility. It had a few hangars, an air traffic control tower, emergency services, housing, and a few other buildings that probably served the other basic needs of the folks stationed here. Putting it out in the middle of nowhere meant less danger to regular folks if anything went really wrong, and their planes and stuff could stay out of normal commercial air traffic lanes.
