Athena Force 9: Payback

by Harper Allen

  “One quick twist and you’re dead,” she grated as the pain inside her head intensified. “It’s what I was trained to do, do you understand…what I am!”

  “Not anymore.” The arid tones of Aldrich Peters came from the end of the hallway. Looking quickly up from the man whose life she held between her hands, Dawn saw Peters set down a briefcase and reach into the pocket of his suit jacket. “The assassin you once were wouldn’t have hesitated to kill scum like that.”

  His hand came out of his pocket. He raised it and fired the gun he was holding. The guard kneeling in front of her gave a violent spasm and then slumped sideways to the floor. Peters fired again and the guard who had been clutching his throat kicked once and went still. The Lab 33 director dropped the gun into his pocket again and picked up the briefcase.

  “You see?” he said with an austere smile. “You’re not even worth the price of a bullet to me anymore, Dawn. You should have done yourself a favor and stayed unconscious a little longer.”

  “The serum.” The hallway lights felt like knives stabbing at her eyes as she took a dizzy step toward him. “You lied to me! You said I would receive the serum, damn you, and then you left me to die!”

  “What are you experiencing right now?” He sounded genuinely curious. “Wang and Sobie predicted excruciating headaches, maybe nausea. Were they right?”

  Leaning against the wall for support, she ignored his question. “You know I need it to live, Doctor. Where is it?”

  Peters looked disgusted. “Right here.” He patted the briefcase. “Please don’t insist on playing out this little farce to the bitter end, Dawn. I knew within days of your making contact with them that you’d aligned yourself with my enemies, and when you returned to Lab 33 professing your continued loyalty it was all I could do not to give the order to have you eliminated right there and then. But with or without your help my days at Lab 33 were coming to an end, thanks to the women of Athena Academy. Rainy Miller’s dearest friends. I saw a way I could use you, and by so doing insure my retirement fund received one final influx of cash.” He checked his watch before turning his cold expression once more her way. “You might be interested to know that the old man’s research created quite a heated bidding war between the parties I offered it to. It’s amazing the sums some of those groups of wild-eyed true believers can scrape up.”

  “You sold the regeneration research to terrorists?” Again the pain behind her eyes rose to a crescendo, nearly causing her to lose her balance. “Sir William said that as the formula is now, it could change the way a normal human’s body heals after accident or illness. After a few years of accelerated testing your clients might well find a way to insure that every killer they send out is virtually invincible, dammit!”

  “That’s not my concern.” Again Peters glanced at his watch. “The time, however, is. It’s nine o’clock, and according to the tap we put on that gas station telephone—one of several we installed along the route I knew you would have to take from London’s research facility—your friends should be arriving just about—”

  A muffled explosion from some far area of the complex cut across the rest of his sentence. Aldrich’s eyebrows lifted fractionally. “Such militarily precise timing could only be Captain Asher’s doing. You did know that the Athenas contacted him to lend support to this mission, didn’t you? My sources tell me that your sisters went to see him in the hospital where he was being treated for the wounds he received during the action at London’s lab three nights ago. It seems he recovered far more quickly than expected. They asked him personally to join this fight.”

  “If you know about Lynn and Faith then you know I want the serum as much for them as for myself, Doctor—and you also know I’ve been told the truth about my origins and theirs.” Dawn’s voice was flat with hatred. “You’ve torn our lives apart from the moment we were conceived, but I won’t allow you to destroy us anymore.”

  “I don’t think you can stop me. I intend to walk out of here by an underground escape route that no one knows about but myself, and in your condition, there’s really nothing you can do about that.”

  As briskly as a man heading for a business meeting, Peters turned on his heel and began heading down the hall, briefcase in hand. She willed her legs to stumble after him, but try as she might she couldn’t catch up before he turned down one of the smaller corridors branching from the main hallway. Her weakness wasn’t merely a by-product of the sedation, Dawn thought desperately, it had to be a precursor of the final stages of her symptoms. Aldrich is right, she told herself with grim determination. In this condition I probably shouldn’t even be capable of walking, let alone stopping him. But there’s one factor he hasn’t taken into consideration: how much I need to avenge myself on him. If I have to crawl through hell on my hands and knees to kill him, dammit, I’ll make myself do it. Pain lancing sharply through her head, she staggered into the smaller corridor, only to come to a halt.

  It was a blind alley. No more than six or seven feet in length, it ended at a smoothly plastered wall. And it was empty.

  During the past minutes the sounds of fighting had been coming closer, level by level. The shaft of the elevator was a perfect conduit for the shouts and gunfire that signaled the descent of the battle from the main entrance floor where the Cassandras and their FBI SWAT team would have gained access, down to the level directly above her. Now Dawn heard booted feet running down the hall she’d just been in and caught a glimpse of a cadre of Lab 33 guards speeding by, their weapons at the ready. In a few moments she would be caught in the middle of a pitched battle, she realized tensely. Peters hadn’t vanished into thin air—there had to be an exit from this odd cul-de-sac.

  She felt the walls for any impression, any secret release mechanism. Nothing. Quickly she dropped to her knees and ran her hands over the carpeted floor. Her fingers found what she had been looking for: an almost-imperceptible division in the shape of a square sliced into the carpet’s short pile. She yanked on the fibers and the square lifted up to reveal a twisting set of stairs crudely cut into bare rock.

  At any other time she would have dropped instantly into the opening, pulled the trapdoor closed above her and run down the stone steps after her quarry, but with her limbs feeling like lead and her vision blurring from the pain in her head, it took her precious minutes to make her shaky way down to level ground. Although level underground was a more appropriate term, she thought as she stared around her. All of Lab 33 was built below the surface of the arid and desolate area of New Mexican desert in which it was located, but this was even more subterranean than the rest of the complex. Despite the desert terrain above, it was dankly damp here, the tunnel she was in lit by sporadic bare bulbs strung along the ceiling.

  “If I’m right, this eventually comes out on the far side of the canyon that’s beside the main entrance to Lab 33. Peters must have built this as an escape route if the time ever came that he needed one,” she said, anger giving her the strength to make her way along the tunnel. “But he never bothered to inform anyone else.”

  From up ahead came the sound of a heavy door closing. Dawn clapped her hands to her ears as the noise echoed through her already pounding head, but she forced herself to go on. A second door slammed just as the first one came into view, and a fierce joy temporarily overrode her pain.

  Her final target was almost within reach. Everything else—the battle raging through Lab 33, the Cassandras and her sisters, even the serum itself—was suddenly swept aside by the hatred that surged through her.

  She wrenched open the door and stumbled through it into darkness. As it swung heavily shut behind her, she realized she was wading through shallow water and, disoriented, she moved forward, but instead of the rough rock that the rest of the tunnel had been carved from, her feet slid on a smoothly unstable surface. She banged into what felt like a glass wall.

  A brilliant bank of lights above her went on, illuminating the glass walls of the cube that surrounded her. Aldrich Peters stood
on the other side of the sealed glass door ahead of her.

  She looked upward just as the first icy jets of water began spurting from the massive stainless-steel head above her.

  “Do you understand now, Dawn?”

  Swinging her gaze back to Peters, she saw he was watching her. His voice seemed to be coming from one of the top corners of the glass cube, but she didn’t bother to look. It was apparent there was some system that allowed an onlooker outside to communicate with whoever was in the glass cube, and presumably vice versa.

  “That this is a trap? Yes, Doctor, I see that,” she said. “And one built just for this particular rat, am I right?”

  “It’s been tested on others, but yes, it was built for you. Since the only sure way of killing you is by cutting off your supply of oxygen, drowning you has always seemed the most decisive method of eliminating you,” acknowledged the man standing on the other side of the thick glass. “Even as a child you showed frightening promise of the powers you would grow into…and even more frightening signs that you might one day reject Lab 33 and all it stood for and begin thinking for yourself. Your doctors at the time concluded that if that happened, there would be two people most at risk from you. One of those people was myself, of course.”

  “And the other was Craig,” finished Dawn. The water had risen to her calves by now, and surreptitiously she glanced at the corners of the chamber where the glass walls met, hoping to discern some weakness. She had vowed she would take Peters down if it was the last thing she did, and she intended to keep that vow. There had to be some way she could escape, dammit.

  “Don’t waste your final minutes.” Seemingly Aldrich had read her mind. “It’s all one solid piece of glass, not tempered but of a technology my own people came up with. No seams, no joins, no place where you can break through, and the doors are triple thickness. Don’t forget, it was made to withstand Lab 33’s lab rat at her full strength, and you’re hardly at full strength anymore, are you?” He didn’t wait for an answer, but instead unsnapped the clasps of the briefcase he was carrying, extracting from it the vial of colorless liquid she had last seen sitting on the table beside the gurney in the procedures room. “I didn’t totally trust the assessments of Wang and Sobie. I thought I needed to bring this along as bait to lure the rat into my trap, but the good doctors were right. In the end, the serum and the fact that it could save you and your sisters’ lives wasn’t what drove you to your own destruction—it was your desire to kill me. So I suppose I don’t need this anymore.”

  His eyes met hers through the glass. He lifted the vial high and then opened his fingers, watching her intently as the container smashed into a thousand glittering shards on the rocky floor outside her prison. His gray eyes widened slightly. “Interesting. You’ve just seen your last hope of survival destroyed and yet you show no reaction at all, just as the psychologists predicted. I’m glad I allowed myself time to conduct this last experiment on you, Dawn. The results will be useful when I set up my next lab and set about choosing new candidates for another gene-enhancement program.”

  She barely heard him. The leather of her catsuit was pressing wetly against her thighs now and her hair was plastered to her skull, soaked through by the splashing of the water pouring from the ceiling. Clumsily wading to one of the cube’s corners, Dawn ran her hands along the curved edges. Peters had told the truth about that, if nothing else, she thought tensely. It was sharply curved, with no join between the walls that could be weakened by a well-placed kick. She turned her attention to the huge showerhead installation above, ignoring his words as they filtered through the speakers.

  “According to the doctors’ findings from the tests they ran when you returned to Lab 33, the pain in your head must be unendurable by now. It’s really too bad your old mentor Lee Craig isn’t here. He always told me it was him you would hate the most if you ever learned how he’d deceived you.”

  Her attention was temporarily diverted. “As you said a moment ago, the doctors who studied me when I was a child predicted there would be two people I’d want to destroy if I ever learned the truth—you and Craig, Doctor. You may have given the order for him to kill Rainy Miller, but he carried it out, knowing full well she was my biological mother. For that alone I wanted to—”

  “Oh, no.” His voice was silky with malice. “I didn’t give Craig the order to kill your mother—he insisted on taking the assignment. That order was supposed to be yours to carry out.”

  “Mine?” The cold water rising around her suddenly felt warm compared to the icy shock that reverberated through her at his casual revelation.

  Of course Aldrich Peters was capable of ordering Lab 33’s lab rat to kill her own mother. He’d ordered her to kill the man she’d later learned was her father, hadn’t he? And although her mission to kill Thomas King had been aborted before she’d completed it, nothing would ever take away the guilt she felt over her actions. If she’d killed Rainy Miller and later discovered who her unknown target had been, how would she have been able to live with herself?

  You wouldn’t have, Dawnie. That’s why I took on the assignment…because I once promised you I’d stay strong enough to keep them from owning you, even if it cost me everything I cared for in this world. Thing is, kid, all I cared about was you. Lee Craig’s voice had occasionally been in her head in the months since his death, but now it seemed to be reverberating through her whole being, Dawn thought wrenchingly, as if the man she’d once thought of as a father had a desperate need to communicate with her one final time. She pressed her hands to her ears and squeezed her eyes shut, but she couldn’t blot out his words or stop herself from seeing his face. But I knew one day you’d end up hating me…and that you’d have every right to. All I could hope for was that you wouldn’t end up hating—

  “Damn straight I hate you, you bastard!” She didn’t know she’d spoken aloud until she saw Peters’s thin lips lift in chilly amusement. She tried to cover her confusion with a sneer. “If Lee Craig took over my assignment to assassinate Rainy Miller, it was because he was a stone-cold killer and not for any other reason. The shrinks were right. If he were standing here now I’d want to kill him just as much as I want to kill you!”

  Still smiling slightly, Aldrich shook his head. “I’m afraid you misunderstood me. Lee was never in the equation at all, according to the psychologists. No, the other person they knew you would want to destroy was yourself…and it seems you’ve fulfilled their prediction.”

  Dawn stared at him. Then she turned away, throwing her snarled words over her shoulder at him. “You’re crazy, Doctor. Instead of using up your breath telling me more of your lies you should save it for running. Because I’m going to get out of here—and when I do it’ll be payback time at long last.”

  She directed her attention to the ceiling again, but this time it was harder because her headache was blurring her vision. Dimly aware that she was no longer standing but keeping herself afloat by paddling, she tried to propel herself upward so that she could reach the metal conduit from which the water was gushing. She missed, and slid underwater as she fell back. Taking a deep breath, she tried a second time, and then a third and a fourth…

  “Gonna…gonna see him die.” This was better, Dawn thought minutes later. She didn’t even have to jump anymore, all she had to do was put out her hand to touch the conduit. She was pushed under by the deafening torrent of water and languidly she kicked herself to the surface again, her face upturned to the glass ceiling. Her nose bumped against it. Yeah, any minute now she would be standing in front of Peters, deciding how she was going to take the bastard down. Strangling? She frowned. Too crude. She was Lab 33’s assassin, after all, and she had a reputation to consider. A gun would be too fast—the moment would be over before she could savour it. She giggled suddenly and watched the bubbles float from her mouth with glee. She’d freakin’ drown him, that’s what she’d do! It would be perfect justice, perfect revenge, perfect…payback.

  But first she needed to
rest for a moment, and what better place to rest than here at the bottom of this incredible cube that looked as if it had been carved from ice and filled with a square of ocean. Where had she seen such a color before? It looked like beach glass, like aquamarines, like Des Asher’s eyes just after he’d taken a bullet for her and just before he’d watched her walk away from him. He’d hoped they could have a future together, she thought hazily. What he hadn’t understood was that she couldn’t have a future—not with him, not with anyone, because she was Lab 33’s assassin and Lab 33’s assassin had one last hit to carry out.

  A hit in which she was both the killer and the target.

  “No!” A violent convulsion seemed to run through her body, and her legs, bent beneath her as she lay on the bottom of the water-filled chamber, jackknifed suddenly, shooting her up to the surface. Except there wasn’t any surface anymore, Dawn thought frantically. The cube was almost full. All that remained was a sliver of space between the water and the ceiling.

  She arched her neck, dragged in a shallow lungful of oxygen and felt herself sinking again. Through the wavering distortion of the water she saw Aldrich Peters’s spare figure still standing on the other side of the glass.

  He wants to make sure you die, O’Shaughnessy. Kind of funny, wouldn’t you say—since according to him your death warrant was signed when he dropped that vial of serum. You think he knows something about your so-called gene-breakdown symptoms that you don’t?