Dying for Her: A Companion Novel (Dying for a Living Book 3)

by Kory M. Shrum

  His response was quick, automatic. “My facility was shut down. Only then was I freed.”

  It was a strange response and the voice that accompanied it was flat. I didn’t realize the significance of this conversation at the time, but God how different things might have been if I had.

  “They kept us,” he said. “Tortured us physically, mentally, and emotionally. They wanted to know if we could be controlled, used, and if not, duplicated. They cut us open, studied us. When that didn’t produce results, they created a breeding program.”

  “Are you telling me kids were locked up in that place?”

  “Yes,” he said. “The woman I loved—love—” He stopped.

  I was a drunk bastard, so I didn’t have the good sense to watch what I said. “Please don’t tell me they raped her. I fucking hate rape stories. They’re sad as fuck.”

  “No,” he said. “Not raped in the sense you mean anyway. It was mostly the scientists that dealt with us. But a scientist’s objectivity can be cruel. Believe me.”

  “So what happened to her?”

  “She had a baby. We had a baby.”

  I turned and looked at him. After about two glasses of water from Peaches, my drunk edge was softening. My good sense was coming back to me. “What happened to her?”

  “I paid someone,” he said. “To take her away.”

  “Where is she now?” I asked.

  “Somewhere safe,” he said. “I hope.”

  “The camps are still open?” I asked but it wasn’t a real question. It was just acceptance of a sad fucking realization.

  “At least one that I know of,” he said. “That is why I think it is so important for you to get to the bottom of this. Crack it open and expose them. Not get yourself killed.”

  I snorted. “What do you expect me to do?”

  Reeves sighed like he’d been waiting forever for me to ask that question. “I’ll give you everything you need to bring them down.”

  Chapter 43

  Two Weeks

  I see Jesse coming up the path long before she sees me. I watch her shuffle along, kicking at the dirt as she comes. She is so young. Sure, part of it is the NRD. She’ll probably look seventeen forever if she keeps up with the death replacing. Part of it is the childish way she eats a banana with abandon, shoving huge bites into her mouth as if no one has taught her how to eat like a lady. I try to imagine her as an old woman. All grown up with kids maybe, probably still cranky as hell and maybe plump, but alive.

  Alive.

  The last time I met her in these woods, I’d been with Charlie. I’d called him in to help me figure out why we were being targeted. Charlie, were you acting on Caldwell’s orders even then? Had he already gotten up in your head and messed you around? God I hoped not. I hope at least in the beginning, he’d come to my aid as my friend.

  “Right here,” I say. I step forward so she can see me.

  “What the hell happened to you?” she says. “Are you sick?”

  I shrug and think of Jackson’s warning. You should tell her. How would it sound? I’m going to die in a couple of weeks. What do you think about that, kid?

  No.

  She needs to worry about herself, not me.

  “Not all of us heal in a heartbeat,” I say. If I pull at her guilt strings, she might shut up. It usually works.

  “Where have you been?” she asks and I have my opening.

  I am looking for a way to give her information on Caldwell. This secret is not the kind to take to the grave. But I also don’t want to get her hopes up and make her think I have answers that I don’t.

  “Arizona,” I lie. “At the old base where Eric Sullivan was last seen. I got this.” I open my jacket and pull out the piece of paper I printed neatly for her this morning. I’ve listened to her bitch about my handwriting enough to know that if I want her to read it carefully, I can’t just scribble it down.

  She gives me the hard drive I’d sent her to the Lovett’s for.

  “He’s going to know it’s gone,” she says.

  “Of course he’ll notice. A computer won’t work without a hard drive.”

  “Oh he’ll know long before that,” she says. Her cheeks tinge with red.

  “Jesse—” I start, my heart speeding up at the idea that she’s done something to bring attention to herself.

  She wails. “It was the best I could do just to get the drive into Ally’s hand and jump in front of that tree.”

  I try to soothe the hammering in my chest. I am getting too old for this, yet I expected to last longer, didn’t I?

  “Tree attacks child. That replacement must have made headlines.” I hope my voice doesn’t betray my unease.

  Her eyes widen and she looks up from the paper I gave her. “Is this a medical record? Eric Sullivan, 34,” she says. “But he’s got to be at least fifty now.”

  “This is from his file when he was detained in the camps.”

  “But Caldwell could pass for much younger,” she argues. “Almost twenty years younger.”

  “So he’s been dying,” I say, testing her with another bit of information. Tell her everything a part of me begs. Tell her everything you can. She’s going to have to pick up where you left off.

  “I just don’t understand why Caldwell would infiltrate the Church and secure a high position. And how can he do death replacements with all the media attention that’s on him? He’s watched constantly.”

  “He could be working off the radar. They might not be replacements, just dying—for other reasons,” I say, but I have a very good idea why Caldwell thought securing the topmost position within a powerful organization was the perfect disguise.

  I think of all his propaganda, how he is remaking himself as the messiah of this age. I have no doubt that dying and coming back to life is part of that scam.

  She puts the picture away. “Caldwell is my father.”

  “Jesse—” I want to stop her. Don’t look at him that way, I think. Seeing him that way will get you killed, kid.

  “No,” she argues. “I need to accept the fact that the guy who wants to kill me is also my dad. If I don’t get it through my head he’s going to catch me off guard again.”

  “A father and a dad are not the same thing,” I say. Christ, what could I say? I was never meant to have children. Every kid that crossed my path was damned for it. Aziz, Gideon, Jesse. No matter what I do for them, it is never enough.

  “This is encrypted,” I say, my heart still thrumming in my chest.

  “Suckfest,” she says, looking up at me from her sneakers. The overwhelming urge to hug her tight washes over me.

  “In the meantime, I want you to go see Gloria, all right?” I say before I lose control of myself. “She knows what our next move should be. I’ll check back with you once I get the hard drive open.” The kid hesitates, looking at the photograph of her father one more time.

  “Go on,” I tell her. “Go on.” Before I screw up and tell you.

  When she gives me a little salute and turns on her heels, she looks like the perfect child soldier.

  I watch her grow smaller as she gets farther and farther away from me. In one desperate moment, I call out after her.

  “Jesse!” I say.

  She stops and turns. “What?”

  I think of all the things I could tell her. All the apologies for my impending death and subsequent abandonment, of my history with her father—any and all of it which is owed to her more than anyone. At the very least, I should tell her about her sister, who Jackson and I are fairly sure is dead.

  With an impatient shrug, she asks again. “What?”

  I raise the hard drive like a coward. “You did good, kid.”

  Her face breaks open into a beautiful, heart-breaking smile.

  Chapter 44

  Thursday, April 3, 2003

  I woke in my own bed, but could not remember how I got there. The first thing I saw after the ceiling came into focus and stopped spinning long enough for me to tu
rn on my side was the brown envelope on the bedside table. I pinched the corner between my fingers as if I wanted to be sure it was real. Bits of memory from the night before came back to me.

  I remembered being drunk and stumbling out of the bar. Reeves came up behind me and offered to help. Then when falling into my bed without ceremony, Reeves had been here. I remembered him saying something but couldn’t recall his words with any kind of clarity now. Had he given me this? Were there instructions?

  I considered the envelope for a moment longer. I knew that if I opened it, there was no going back.

  I sat up and placed the brown envelope on the bed in front of me. I stared at the chicken scratch of my name and the way it stretched from one corner to the other across the brown paper. I flipped it over and inched a dirty fingernail under the flap.

  The sound of paper ripping and the contents rubbing against the inside of the paper came before a soft thump on the bed. Photographs slipped against one another spreading out over the coverlet. I realized then that I still wore my boots and had smeared mud against the end of the bed.

  “Fuck,” I grumbled and my headache intensified with the rumble of my voice. I hated to do laundry.

  I lifted one photograph and then another, noting the timestamp in the upper corner of each. I wasn’t sure by looking at it, as I’m no photography expert, if the timestamp indicated a digital camera was used or if these were taken from a security camera.

  The outside of a brick military facility was framed in several photos. I recognized the building, having seen it long before the high fence and razor wire had been erected to enclose the place.

  There was also a copy of a document which read: 42 U.S. Code 13724, conversion of military installations into federal prison facility.

  That was how they did it then. False arrests.

  You could still actively recruit for your science experiment if you pulled “criminals” off the street. And if only we had a dollar for every time someone was wrongly accused and locked away. So this is what Reeves wanted me to expose? The entire operation: the false imprisonments, the hidden in plain sight facilities, the wrongful detainments, the torture.

  I let out a long, laborious exhale. “Fuck.” This was no small order.

  But it could lead to Sullivan. Not that I’d cared much for finding the man until now. I was more worried about Maisie and Rachel, I knew, but Sullivan was still a problem that had to be solved. After all, either Charlie was right, or Charlie was misinformed.

  If he was right then Sullivan had escaped his detainment and might strike out against us sooner or later. Exposing the torture could placate him or even slow him down. If he felt he’d received even a drop of revenge, it could take the wind out of his sails. That would save innocent lives caught in the crossfire of his retribution and buy me more time to find him and decide if he was really a threat, or just a victim on the run.

  Because that was the other side of this coin. If they were hiding the fact that they were running internment camps in the open, they could also be lying about Sullivan. He may not be a terrorist at all, but instead, simply a threat of exposure.

  I thumbed through the photographs and my headache grew worse. I recognized the facility because I had trained there. Could Reeves had possibly known that? It was unlikely. If he had, perhaps he was counting on nostalgia or my intimate knowledge of the facility. But I hadn’t been there in decades.

  According to someone’s meticulous notes enclosed along with the photographs, in 1992 Fort Diq was sold to the government, but conversion was delayed beyond the original 1994 projection date. The funding for the project didn’t come through until 1996. It would have definitely been up and operational by January 1998 when the under-the-radar detainees were transferred there—and that was what these pictures suggested. 4500 souls inside, the note said. At least.

  It was a huge sprawling campus and the level of security around Fort Diq was intimidating. There would be no ridiculous or covert operation to infiltrate the place and march the prisoners to freedom. I wasn’t fucking Moses. But maybe there was another way to save them.

  I lifted my cell phone from the bedside table and called the number I retrieved from the internet.

  A perky woman answered on the second ring.

  “The Daily Gazette. How can I direct your call?”

  Chapter 45

  12 Days

  I use a favor to get what I need from the hard drive.

  Most of it is junk: church records, finances, and the like. I have to read every document to be sure. I’m in my bed, resting. Today I woke up tired and sore. Old injuries were stiff and my head just wasn’t as clear as it could be. What could I say? The machine doesn’t work as well as it used to. With the covers pulled over my legs and laptop on, I read the data until my eyes are raw with the effort.

  Then I see it.

  A list of names nearly 44 pages long. I hit print and the machine on the desk across the room clicks to life, spitting out one page after another.

  The list is almost printed when I find a file on a man named Jeremiah. It pops up alongside Alice’s name. A growing suspicion in my chest, I throw back the covers and go to the printer. There on the first page is her name, Alice Gallagher.

  My phone rings and I answer.

  “I think I’ve identified Caldwell’s next target,” Jackson says. “If we get her first, maybe it will trip him up or slow him down. I’ve been getting some pictures, but nothing definitive yet.”

  “Good work,” I say, searching the list for more names I recognize. Jesse is there, and Rachel. Jackson is not far down. “Let me know what you need and then you and the kid can go pick her up.”

  Jackson is quiet.

  “Is there a problem?” I ask.

  “Why not you?” she asks.

  Because all the people I care about, save Gideon, are on this hit list. If Caldwell is hunting them, I have to kill him first.

  “I’ll tell you when I see you,” I say and hang up. Then I call Gideon.

  He answers. “You are right. He is hard to kill.”

  “Gideon,” I growl.

  “I am being careful,” he says. “I am a ghost.”

  I grit my teeth and let it go. For now. Mostly because I know that no matter what I tell him, he will do as he pleases anyway. “Alice Gallagher. She is Jesse’s assistant, best friend, lover, whatever the hell she is. Find out what she is doing. She’s done something to piss off Caldwell and I want to know what it is.”

  “Alice Gallagher,” Gideon repeats then he is quiet. I think he’s hung up. “You only have twelve days.”

  “Don’t rub it in.”

  Chapter 46

  Friday, April 4, 2003

  When I arrived at the bar, it was up in flames. I’d seen the black smoke billowing up into the sky blocks before and it had set me off into a jog. My SIG Sauer slapped against my ribs beneath my leather jacket. A firefighter tried to stop me from coming closer as I rounded the large truck blocking off the road. Pedestrians crowded in on the place despite the men trying to push them back to a safer distance.

  “Sir, please, you have to move back,” the young man said through the visor of his helmet.

  “I’m an agent.” I flashed my badge even though the FBRD had no jurisdiction over something like this. Why should he know that? “What the hell happened here?”

  “Some wacko firebombed the place. The barkeep said a regular patron came in and—”

  “That’s him. I’m telling you that’s him.” I heard Peaches’ voice over the din—the sound of water splashing against the bricks and flooding through the broken street-front window. I turned toward the sound of his voice and saw him jabbing a finger my way.

  “Brinkley,” he screamed. “Brinkley.”

  Thinking that he needed my help to navigate this circus, I started to approach him. But when he took a step back as if afraid, I stopped. Several patrons I recognized and others I didn’t, they stepped back too.

  “Are you all ri
ght?” I asked him.

  “That’s him!” Peaches yelled again, his paunch jiggling with the ferocity of his words. “Agent Brinkley, right there. He’s the crazy motherfucker who burned down my place.”

  It was as if someone had punched me in the chest. “What?”

  “Arrest him,” someone said. A roar of assenting murmurs grew louder. I felt the firefighter beside me grab onto my arm and I shook him off.

  All of the faces I saw were trained on me with a mix of horror and anger etched into their features. “I just got here.”

  “Sir, you’ll have to come with us,” said two uniforms as they pressed in on me. I knocked one back before I had the good sense not to do anything stupid and damning.

  With the uniformed officer out of my way, I got a clear look at the sidewalk behind him. There stood Chaplain. A smug grin lit up his face as firelight danced across his dark features.

  Run, I thought. You should run away before they can catch you. Run. Run. Run.

  That was exactly what I did.

  Chapter 47

  Friday, April 4, 2003

  I made it all the way to the office before I realized what a moron I was. Fleeing a crime scene was the exact opposite of what I should have done. There was no way I was going to convince the authorities that I’d simply panicked, not a man with my background and training.

  “You fucking idiot,” I said to myself, busting through the front doors of the FBRD building. Charlie’s door was closed and he was on the phone with someone. I slipped past his window without being seen. I’d almost made it to my chair before I realized someone already occupied it.

  “Jackson,” I said.

  She looked relieved. “Good. I’m glad I don’t have to hunt you down.”

  “You’re the only one,” I said.

  Confusion furrowed her brow. “What?”

  I told her about the bar, the firebombing, and being accused by Peaches himself. “Not just Peaches,” I added. “They all seemed to think I’d done it. Everyone on the street.”

  “Shit,” she said. “We have less time than I thought.”