“You can’t tell them how we know each other,” Ian finally said, drawing her attention away from his dog. The words sounded like he’d had to rip them from somewhere deep inside himself.
“What? Afraid your new friends won’t like you anymore if they knew you were one of us?” She scoffed and turned away. “Don’t worry. I don’t plan to tell them anything.”
“You will tell them what you know about Danny’s murder.”
She wheeled back to face him. “Oh, you think so?”
“I’ll make you,” he said with absolutely no expression on his face.
A chill swept over her. He could do it, she knew. She’d seen exactly how adept he was at making people talk. After all, he’d learned from Harrison Stead, the maestro of torture.
But, fuck that. She wasn’t afraid of him. He may have learned “enhanced interrogation” from the best, but her life had been one continuous torture session. He could do nothing to her that hadn’t already been done.
She marched over to him and got into his face. She hated that she had to stand on her toes to do it. “You lay one hand on me, Reinhardt, and I’ll spill all of your dirty secrets.”
His lip curled. “Your loyalty to Harrison is misplaced.”
Her stomach flipped. Sebastian had said pretty much the same thing to her not all that long ago. “At least I am loyal,” she snapped. “You left. The only one who did without a death warrant hanging over his head, and my baby brother admired you for it. He wanted to be just like you.”
For the first time, Ian’s scowl faltered. “Xander.” Her brother’s name came out barely a whisper. “Fuck. Did he—”
“Yeah, he did.” Her voice grew thick and cracked. “He tried to follow in your footsteps and hasn’t been seen in almost a year.”
He didn’t respond. No apology for filling her brother’s head with nonsense ideas, but then she hadn’t really expected one from him. Ian Reinhardt would sooner shoot you than apologize.
His sneer returned in full force. “I did what I had to do to survive. I sold my soul to Harrison for my freedom.”
She huffed out a breath in disbelief. “And then what did you do? You ran off and joined the enemy.”
“You’re fucking right I did.” He backed out the door and whistled softly between his teeth for his dog. He waited for the animal to join him in the hallway, then grabbed the handle. Before shutting the door, he looked at her one last time, his gaze cold and hard. “Harrison Stead is going to die, and I’ll be the one to pull the trigger. Which side you want to be on when that happens?”
…
Marcus jolted awake at the hand shaking his shoulder. He’d drifted off in the recliner, but now he sat bolt upright and looked at Jesse. “What?”
“We got a location.”
“Ostermann?”
Jesse nodded. “Harvard’s already given the coordinates to Garcia in the cockpit. We’re headed there now. ETA ninety minutes. Lanie wants everyone in the war room for a briefin’.”
He shoved out of the chair. “It’s about damn time.”
Everyone already waited around the conference table by the time he and Jesse got there. He started toward his normal spot, but Carreras already sat there, and Devlin was in Jean-Luc’s usual seat. He wasn’t sure how he felt about that. Not like there were assigned seats or anything. Everyone always just gravitated to the same ones. He had half a mind to kick Carreras out, except that would cause a scene and Lanie already thought he was one sandwich short of a picnic.
Instead, he chose a different seat, and asked, “What do we know?”
Lanie nodded to Harvard, who took the floor, tablet in hand. “While we were searching for Jean-Luc and Dr. Oliver, Sami stumbled onto something weird.” He swiped a finger across his tablet, and the wall screens at the front of the room filled with photos. “Any of you recognize these people?”
Carreras pointed to one photo of a man with dark, tousled hair and a neat beard. “Lucas West. Author. What?” he asked when Devlin quirked a brow at him. “I read. He writes damn good sci-fi novels. One was even made into a movie a few years ago. Uh…” He snapped his fingers a couple times. “Hang on. It’ll come to me.”
“Memnonia,” Harvard supplied.
“Yeah. That’s it. About colonizing Mars with the best people humanity has to…” He trailed off and narrowed his eyes at the screens. “No shit. No fucking way. Is that what Ostermann’s doing?
Harvard motioned to the array of photos. “These twenty people have all disappeared in the last six months. All of them are widely considered the best in their fields. We think Ostermann’s holding them, so we should expect more hostages than just Jean-Luc and Dr. Oliver.”
Marcus held up his hand in a hold up gesture. He was still blurry from sleep and they’d lost him. “Wait, I’m not following. Ostermann wants to colonize Mars?”
“Not exactly,” Lanie said. “We think he means to re-colonize Earth. Harvard, you want to explain it?”
Harvard touched his tablet again and one of the wall screens filled with screenshots of an online message board. An old black-and-white photo of a small family from the late sixties or early seventies showed on another screen. “Sami and I had to go deep into the dark web to piece this together. There’s a small sect of the population who believe the world has gone completely to hell. These people think the only way to fix things is to essentially reboot. Ostermann has posted extensively on these message boards, under various screen names, about how the best way is with a bioweapon. He goes on and on about how the Black Plague created a golden age in the fifteenth century. Higher wages, more land and food, positive changes in medicine—”
“The Plague was a bacterial infection,” Jesse interrupted. “Unless he’s found a super-bacterium resistant to all antibiotics, he won’t be able to replicate it in the modern world.”
“So he developed a virus instead,” Marcus said softly and tried to shove the image of all those body bags at the MSF field hospital out of his head. “A virus that kills everything. That’s why he wants Claire’s research, to help protect himself and the people he chooses to save.”
Harvard made a sound that could’ve been an agreement. “He’s a calculating man and I’m sure he factored that all into his decision to use a virus for his weapon, but it wasn’t the only reason. The scars on his face?” He motioned to the family photo with his stylus. “When he was twelve, his family traveled to Yugoslavia, where he and his nanny, a Nigerian native named Kwento, caught smallpox during one of the last known outbreaks. The nanny died. He survived but was left disfigured. As far as we can tell, he blamed Kwento for getting him sick.”
Marcus sat back in his seat. “Explains why he used Nigeria as the testing ground.”
“That’s also when he became obsessed with viruses, and his obsession has only grown as he’s aged. On these message boards, he goes on and on about how viruses are humanity’s perfect catharsis. It’s…disturbing.”
“Well that’s awesome,” Marcus said and couldn’t help the sharp edge of impatience in his voice. “But knowing about the man’s past and his freaky fetish for Ebola doesn’t do shit for us if we don’t have his location.”
Harvard’s mouth turned down at the corners as he glanced over, and Marcus winced inwardly. Okay, he was being an asshole. The kid had done a lot of work and here he was brushing it all off as useless.
“I mean…” He trailed off because, yeah, he’d meant what he said. Maybe he could’ve phrased it better. He tried gentling his tone. “Do we have his location?”
After a second, Harvard returned his attention back to his tablet. “While Sami dug into Ostermann’s past, I looked for his base of operations. He owns a lot of properties all over the world, but I narrowed the parameters to places big and secluded enough to hold a bioweapons lab. Assuming he’d want his lab somewhere near his primary residence in Vienna, Austria, I also looked for any of his Austrian properties with a history of receiving medical supply shipments.” He tapped his tab
let and the screen behind him filled with a castle on hill, surrounded by a moat. It looked ancient, with a lone turret spearing the misty sky, surrounded by high stone walls. The kind of place knights on horseback defended.
“This is Wasserfestung. Google tells me the literal translation is Water Fortress. It’s located on a small lake in the Austrian Alps. Built as a defense fortress in the fourteenth century—the same century as the Black Plague, which is probably why Ostermann bought it in a private sale twenty years ago. Weird thing is, the family he bought it from up and disappeared right after the sale. Now as far as official documentation goes, nobody lives there, but it’s received regular shipments from medical supply companies all over the world since it came into Ostermann’s possession. This is our place. This is where he took Jean-Luc and Dr. Oliver, and it’s probably where he’s holding his other hostages.”
“It’s a fucking castle,” Ian said and slowly stood up. “On a mountain. With a moat. How the hell do we storm a castle?”
“Carefully and with much forethought?” Carreras suggested.
Lanie shrugged. “Same as we do anything else.”
There was a moment of silence, followed by a crack of laughter from everyone that did wonders to ease the tension in the room. Even stoic Devlin’s lips twitched.
“Nah,” Carreras said and slapped his friend on the back. “You know that’s not how we do things at HumInt, Inc. We’re sloppy, but effective.”
Ian dropped back into his chair and studied the picture of the castle for a long moment, then grinned. It was kinda scary when he did that—the crocodile before he bites your leg off. “About time I get to blow shit up.”
Chapter Forty-One
Claire looked at the clock ticking softly on the wall. Nearly one a.m. and no sign of Ostermann since he left her in this lab. She’d told him it would take time to study the effects of Akeso and produce it in quantities large enough for his purposes, and apparently he expected her to stay a prisoner in this lab until the job was done.
She had other ideas.
She sat back from a microscope and sneaked a peek at Audric, who had stood guard over her since arriving in the place. Hours ago, she’d tried talking sense into him.
“I hope you know Ostermann doesn’t plan to save you or your friends. You’re expendable to him.”
“Just shut up and do your work.”
Audric hadn’t shown even a flicker of unease. He trusted his employer completely, and it would mean his death if Ostermann’s plans came to fruition.
Now the man was watching something on his phone, unconcerned with her as long as she didn’t try to leave the lab. He didn’t see her as a threat.
His mistake.
She wasn’t a shrinking violet, but she’d played the part convincingly enough that he believed it. Her career had taken her to some of the most dangerous places in the world, and she’d learned how to defend herself.
And she had a whole lab full of lethal possibilities.
She got up from the microscope and walked over to a cabinet. She glanced over her shoulder, but Audric didn’t even bother to gaze up from his phone.
The cabinet contained anything she could possibly need to create Akeso. Ostermann had spared no expense in gathering supplies, and now she had a pharmacy at her disposal. One of the sides of the cabinet was refrigerated, and she checked the shelves for options. She needed something fast acting. Something that would drop a man the size of Audric in seconds.
She smiled to herself as she spotted the box of vials on the middle shelf. Succinylcholine. Sux, for short. An ultra fast-acting muscle relaxant used during anesthesia and lethal injection. She grabbed a couple vials and pocketed them. Picked up several other random bottles and a box of syringes and shut the door.
Audric stood right beside her.
She yelped and nearly dropped the armful of supplies. She wished she could say it was all an act to fortify her shrinking violet persona, but he’d truly startled her. She hadn’t heard him move. Hadn’t sensed him so close. A man who moved like a ghost had to be dangerous.
Without saying a word, he took the bottles from her hands and deposited them on the workbench. Had he seen her slip the sux into her pocket? She trailed after him, her heart banging in her chest. He took up position at he end of the bench, and seemed intent on watching her work.
Shit. He’d figure out she had no use for all these bottles she’d just taken out of the cabinet. And how was she supposed to get the sux into a syringe while he eagle-eyed her every move?
He lifted a brow at her.
Inspiration struck. This man wasn’t a scientist or medical professional. If he was, he’d know the bottles he’d helped carry meant nothing. He was hired muscle and had no idea about anything she was doing in this lab. She stepped forward and opened the box of syringes. Although her insides quaked, her hands didn’t shake as she withdrew a vial of sux and filled a syringe right in front of him. Just as if it was the most natural thing in the world for her to be doing.
“Before I continue,” she said conversationally, “I need to draw more blood from the test subject.”
He watched her cap the syringe, but didn’t ask questions. Instead, he took out his phone again and walked away from her, speaking in German to whomever picked up his call.
She uncapped the syringe and tiptoed up behind him. She couldn’t do it while he was on the phone. It would set off too many alarms if he suddenly stopped responding. But the moment he hung up…
She lunged, sticking him in the side of the neck with the needle. He swung out at her, a sloppy, last-ditch effort at defending himself. He was already losing control of his muscles, but his fist still caught her on the side of her face. She felt her lip split and tasted blood as she watched his legs give out from under him. He landed face first on the floor.
She had to hurry. No doubt Ostermann had cameras everywhere.
She knelt down and shoved Audric over to his back. His eyes bulged as he tried to draw breath and failed. That was the thing about succinylcholine. It was a paralytic, not a sedative. He’d be alive as he suffocated to death. He had killed Dayo and planned to take part in mass genocide. Maybe he deserved every agonizing second of his death, but she’d forever feel the weight of it on her conscience. After all, he was only the unwitting pawn in Ostermann’s chess match.
She searched his pockets and found a small ring of keycards. One of them had to open Jean-Luc’s cell.
…
Just…a little… more…
Finally, after hours of trying, the paperclip slipped into place and there was a soft click that sounded gloriously like freedom. Jean-Luc twisted his hand around to shove the lock out of his wrist restraint. With one hand free, the others were a piece of cake.
He leaped out of the bondage bed from hell and looked around for something to wear. He had no idea where on earth he was, but he wouldn’t get far outside these walls without some kind of clothing to protect him from the elements. So first order of business: clothes. Then he had to find Claire.
The place was set up like a surgical suite, all sterile and empty. He pointedly ignored the wall of torture devices and tried the rolling cart parked against the other wall. All kinds of surgical instruments, but not so much as scrap of clothing. Not even a hospital gown.
The scuff of a footfall outside his door caught his attention, and he froze. The lock gave a soft negative beep as someone swiped a card. Then another. And another.
He grabbed a scalpel and flashed back to the field hospital. At least there he’d had a hope of taking on the militants with nothing but a scalpel. Here? These guys were trained badasses. He was fucked without a real weapon.
He glanced over at the bed. Maybe it’d be better to fake it, pretend he was still restrained. He took a step toward it when the door gave a positive beep and swung open to reveal Claire. She still wore the lab coat over scrubs and her hair had mostly fallen out of a ponytail. Pink flushed her cheeks and her chest heaved like she’d run. Her li
p was split and bleeding down her chin.
She was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen.
He didn’t think. He just spoke the words that had been banging around in his head since last night: “Holy hell, I love you.”
She gave him a look that said, You’re saying that now? Really?
His timing didn’t suck that badly. After all, this may very well be his last chance to tell her. “No, I mean it, Claire. I love you.”
She tossed him a pair of scrubs and turned to scan the hallway behind her. “We have to go. I killed one of his men to escape. As soon as they find him…”
He froze with one leg in the scrub pants. “You killed…?” He should’ve been there for her. He should’ve taken that blood onto his hands for her. Killing another human being, no matter how despicable that person was, would’ve stolen a piece of her soul. “Oh, cher.”
She whirled around in disbelief. “Why have you stopped? Jean-Luc! Get dressed! If he catches us, he will infect you again and I can’t—” Her voice broke.
Yeah. Yeah, she was right. He had to focus here. He didn’t want her to fall back into Ostermann’s hands any more than she wanted him to. He quickly finished dressing and followed her out into the hallway. “Did you see what he did with my rucksack? I need weapons.”
“I have no idea.”
“Do you know where we are?”
She shook her head. “It’s a castle, but I only know what he’s shown me. I woke up in a room down the hall. He took me to a lab and the room you were in, and that’s it.”
“That’s okay. You did good.” He threw out an arm to keep her back against the wall and checked around the first corner they came to. No guards. Just another long, harshly lit hallway lined with windows overlooking other rooms. The lack of windows to the outside made him think they were in some kind of basement. Which meant there had to be stairs somewhere.
He turned to Claire and held a finger to his lips, then motioned for her to follow him. Keeping the scalpel ready, he crept down the hallway.
“He has other hostages,” Claire whispered as she fell into step behind him. “Twenty people.”
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