by Cliff Ryder
“I’ve learned a few things from years of leading men and asking questions,” Dayne said. His voice had softened, but somehow the shift was sinister rather than comforting. “I have learned that there are never questions you can’t get an answer to. I have learned, as well, that it isn’t always necessary to get an answer in so many words to find out what you need to know. Do you know another thing I’ve learned?”
Dayne turned. His expression had darkened. His face was flushed, and his brows knotted like lightning bolts ready to strike. Dayne seemed to sway slightly, and the motion was mildly hypnotic. Alex didn’t like breaking eye contact, but he did. He glanced toward the wall, away from the bright light.
Dayne stepped closer. He reached behind the holster on his belt, and Alex heard a snap released.
A moment later, Dayne had pulled free a long, slender blade. It gleamed where the light hit it.
Alex had used a similar blade before. He had used it on fishing expeditions for filleting fish. The blade could strip off very thin strips of flesh with almost no effort. Such knives were razor sharp and could reach bone with only a slight effort on the part of the wielder. Very slowly he swallowed. He had to clear the lump from his throat, but he was still unwilling to give Dayne the reaction he sought, despite the twitch that rippled through his muscles at the sight of the cold, honed steel.
“You are suffering from a misunderstanding,”
Dayne said. “You are assuming that I need information that you possess, and that my purpose here is to question you, grill you until you break and hand over your secrets. I would imagine you expect me to use drugs, torture, to pin your eyes open and shine this light directly into them until the retinas burn, and to employ other such tactics.
“I won’t lie to you. I would enjoy all of those things very much. I have spent a lot of hours studying the use of various tools on the human anatomy, but there are still breaks in my research, and I’d like nothing better than to fill those in.
Still, though you denied me information before I even asked for it, showing your fear, I have no questions for you. Instead, I have lessons to teach.
“The first is, you never come into another man’s house uninvited unless you are willing to pay the price. As you see, I am still employed, but you have caused me a great deal of anxiety and stress, and I intend to return these to you in kind. I will find out everything that I need to know about you, one way or another, but I find that any sort of conversation including questions and answers is best left until a much later point. It is better to establish guidelines up front, to put things in their proper context.”
Alex tried not to listen to what the man was saying. He thought about Brin. He thought about Savannah. He felt the power in Dayne’s soft, sibilant voice, and fought against its influence. He had to keep his mind clear. There were things that didn’t make sense, and he knew he had a short amount of time to put them in order before whatever Dayne had planned was put into action.
It made no sense that the man wasn’t more concerned about the explosives. It made no sense that he had made no attempt whatsoever to identify Alex, or to find out about the force behind him. Everything about this setup screamed at Alex to pay attention to some detail he couldn’t quite put a finger on.
Dayne rolled the hilt of his blade slowly over the palm of his hand and into the other, then back, watching the glitter of the blade as it rolled. He seemed to be lost in thought, as if something more important had suddenly occupied his thoughts and he was considering it carefully. Alex felt sweat bead on his forehead and dampen his underarms.
His pulse pounded through his poorly bandaged shoulder. He wanted to distract Dayne, to bring him back to the moment and ground the threat, but he could think of nothing to say that would not convey the wrong message, and he was fairly certain that Dayne was waiting for just such a chink in his armor.
“I’ll be up front with you,” Dayne explained. “I find it inefficient and a waste of my time to question a prisoner in the first session we spend together. There are levels of pain, and one can achieve results with a variety of threats, but the truth is that a threat is just that. Until there is understanding, it is possible to be brave in the face of a threat. I like to erase that inadequacy in the process up front.”
He stepped forward and reached out. Alex felt a soft tear, and Dayne held a bloodied strip of bandage in his hand.
“You are a fortunate man,” Dayne said. “The bullet only nicked your temple. It’s a nasty cut, but I don’t imagine that I have to explain to you what a 9 mm slug would have done to your brain had it been a more direct hit. It is fortunate for both of us that you survived. I know you don’t believe this, but it is true.”
Without warning, Dayne gripped Alex suddenly by his hair. The blade shot out, and Alex watched in horror as a thin slice of his scalp—a slice that showed a furrowed slot in the middle that could only have been the bullet wound, dropped past his eyes to the floor. Dayne’s smile widened. He leaned and skewered the bit of flesh, holding it up to inspect it. Alex’s stomach churned, but he bit back the bile. This new pain was sharp and hot. It sharpened his senses further and helped him focus.
“Now I see I have your attention,” Dayne said, flicking the bit of scalp off of his blade with one finger. “It is time to begin.” He sheathed the blade in a sudden, quick motion and turned back to the workbench. He rummaged through the tools, lifting some, examining them and replacing them, fondling others. When he turned back he held a large soldering iron in one hand. In the other he held the open end of an extension cord. Alex swallowed again and struggled to free himself. The pain that shot through his hands and his legs drove him near the edge, and he embraced the sensation.
As Dayne approached slowly, testing the tip of the soldering iron with the tip of his finger, Alex twisted his wrists cruelly.
Pain shot up his arms. His stomach churned with nausea and he twisted harder. It was a crazy ploy to gain time, but it was all he had. There was a white-hot flash deep in his mind, and then, again, he dropped into blackness.
Brin glanced up, saw that it was time to close the lab and sighed with relief. Never one to watch the clock, she’d found herself glancing up compulsively every few minutes if she didn’t check the urge. She couldn’t access the e-mail site where Alex might reply to her through the firewalls and security of MRIS without setting off flags, and she didn’t want to draw any attention to herself, or her problem, until she had a better handle on it.
Thankfully, the work she was preparing was tedious but not taxing. The research had been done, and it had been done well. Case studies lined up perfectly with the numbers and graphics. The reports on the results were spectacular. In fact, the one thing that kept dragging her back to it when she started worrying too much about Alex was the possibility that this technology—these nanoagents—might even lead her to a cure in time to help the man she loved.
The distractions made her feel guilty, because she knew they were counting on her—had in fact handpicked her from a great number of good, qualified candidates—to analyze this data, validate it and to shift it into the next stage of testing and research required to bring it to the world. It was an incredible trust that had been granted her, and she felt the weight of it keenly.
She shut down the laptop with a last glance at the page she was working on. It was a study involving a viral agent that had been introduced into control hosts. The host cells were mutated in two control sets by the viral agent, and then the nanoagents, programmed to reverse the mutation, were introduced into one set. This gave three sets of data—control, mutated and those mutated and then treated with the nanoagents. The results looked more as if there were two control sets and one mutated set. The nanoagents had literally achieved a one hundred percent rate of repair. No anomal-ies. It was incredible. In other studies, data like that would have caused Brin to pause and consider whether the numbers might have been skewed, but she’d been through enough of the data from the Chinese branch of MRIS to know t
hat if it had been skewed, then the entire study was a fiction.
The perfect score she’d just analyzed was the rule, not the exception. In all her years of research she’d never seen anything so absolutely conclusive.
She closed down the equipment and checked the cultures contained in the climate-controlled chamber. The cultures would become the last portion of her work on the project, as it stood. She would actually get to perform a series of experi-ments that paralleled what had been done. She would provide the final validation—repeating the results of her colleagues, and developing new tests on the specimens. She wondered if she could justify choosing MS degeneration on cells in those tests and, assuming Alex made it back safely from wherever the hell he’d gone, if she could find a way to get those nanoagents into his system. She shook her head to clear the unethical thoughts and turned off the lights. She still had to pick up Savannah, and she wanted to get home and check that e-mail site, even though she doubted she’d find anything waiting when she did.
AFTER DINNER, Savannah determined that she was going to draw pictures for Daddy. She had her art case and a pile of washable markers and was scribbling furiously on the floor in front of the television. Brin had dug out a DVD of Scooby Doo episodes for the girl to distract herself with, and was relieved at the momentary break. She took the opportunity to sit down at the computer and check for replies to her e-mails. The messages remained unread, and Brin slapped a hand violently on the desktop in frustration.
“What’s wrong, Mommy?” Savannah asked.
The girl looked up with wide eyes. Brin doubted Savannah had ever seen such an outburst from her mother, and she wasn’t sure how to explain herself.
She decided on honesty.
“I just miss Daddy,” she said.
Savannah nodded. “Me, too. I don’t hit the table, though—I draw.”
Savannah went back to her drawing, and Brin watched her, lost in thought, until the villain said,
“You meddling kids,” a final time. It was time for her daughter to close the art shop and head to bed.
Brin’s heart ached. She wondered how long it would be before she was raising the girl on her own. No matter the amount of time, it would be far too soon.
It was a long time before her tears cleared enough for another fruitless check of her e-mail. By the time she was back at the computer’s main desktop, the tears had dried and she was growing angry again.
She didn’t exactly know how to bring up the Room 59 chat room, and she’d been warned not to do it. She knew they might be watching her—
might have been clued in to her presence the second she logged on to Alex’s computer. The last time she’d been reading an e-mail addressed to them when the man who supposedly worked with her husband had appeared and the window had opened on its own. If that didn’t happen pretty quickly, she intended to go searching until she found some trigger.
She’d gotten a clue from the method they used to hide the secure chat entrance. She took the mouse and very slowly began panning it over the screen.
Alex’s wallpaper was a picture of the family, taken on the beach a year earlier, Savannah holding up her plastic pail of sand tools and grinning widely, Alex tanned and strong with his arm around Brin’s shoulders. Brin tried to ignore the memories flooding her mind and concentrated on the motion of the cursor across the screen. She started at the bottom right, where the first Easter-egg entrance had been hidden, and she slid her pointer slowly across the bottom of the monitor screen, then back, moving it only a fraction of an inch higher. It would take a while, but she had the feeling she was on the right track. When the cursor reached the point on the screen directly over her own heart, a small circle appeared around the arrow point. It took her by surprise, and she didn’t stop moving her hand in time to catch it on the first pass, but when she brought it back, the circle returned. Brin clicked the mouse button, and the initial chat room window she’d seen during her first visit to Room 59 appeared.
She waited a moment to see if anyone would make first contact, but the cursor blinked in the room, unanswered. Brin moved the cursor to the input window and typed.
“Is there anyone there? This is Brin Tempest.”
There was no answer. She thought about repeating her question, and then decided against it. She was wasting time. She dragged the cursor down to the point at the bottom of the screen where she knew the hidden entrance link was located, and when it appeared, she clicked it. She entered Alex’s en-crypted password and waited. She had been afraid it might be changed or locked out after they allowed her access the first time, but apparently they didn’t really want to keep her out. The password was accepted, and the secure window opened. Again, she was alone in a chat room, but she was in.
She repeated her message.
“Is there anyone there? This is Brin Tempest.”
She clicked on the send button, watched her message appear in the empty screen of the chat room and sat back to wait. It didn’t matter how long it took, she decided; she was going to remain logged in to the site until someone noticed. Every few moments she repeated her message to make sure the system didn’t lock her out for inactivity.
The blinking cursor continued to mock her, but her mind was set. This was her husband and her life and she wasn’t giving any of it up without a fight.
Denny stepped into the doorway of Kate’s virtual office and waited patiently for her to join him.
Finally she appeared and said, “Denny, you wanted to see me?”
“We’ve got a problem,” he said.
“You have no idea how tired I am of that statement,” she replied. There was no trace of a smile on her face. She had a folder open on her desk, and Denny knew it was the MRIS operation report.
“It’s part of the same problem, I think. Mrs.
Tempest has found her way back into the Room 59
chat. So far we’ve ignored her, but we’re going to have to figure out how to deal with this. She may have information we don’t have—Alex may have found a way to contact her. We need to make contact.”
“You warned her not to contact us,” Kate said.
“You ordered me not to change the access,”
Denny shot back.
Kate almost smiled. “I did, didn’t I? Get in there and see what she knows. If she’s heard he’s been captured, all hell could break loose, and we’ll need a plan for damage control. This one is already running way outside safety parameters.”
“You don’t have to tell me that,” Denny grunted.
“We’re on the verge of needing a total scrub, and with the initial threat still intact. I don’t want to have to send another asset out on this one. The risk of exposure is too great, even if the threat is nullified.”
“Yeah,” Kate said, turning back to her file, “it’s bad. Do what you can. Report back when she’s out of the system.”
Denny nodded, but Kate never saw it. She was already immersed in a copy of the plans for the MRIS complex in Beijing. Denny left her to the work, and returned to his own office and the console where he was currently logged in to Room 59.
He sat down and began to type.
When the words appeared on the screen, Brin nearly jumped out of her skin. She’d been sitting alone for nearly an hour. Every two minutes she’d reentered her message to keep the screen active.
She’d considered giving up but then the words appeared from nowhere.
“Hello, Brin.”
“Who is this?” she typed at last. “Is this the same person I spoke to before?”
“Yes, Mrs. Tempest, this is the same person.
You were warned not to return to this chat room.”
“Yes, and I was asked to contact my husband,”
she returned quickly, typing furiously. “How did you expect I would reach you with that information without coming here? I don’t have a business card for you, do I?”
There was nothing for a moment, then a new message popped up.
“Has Alex be
en in contact?” he asked.
“No,” Brin typed immediately. She decided that at this point she had no other allies in this, so there was no sense holding anything back. “He and I have a private, anonymous e-mail drop,” she typed, thinking quickly and trying to word the message as clearly as possible. “I’ve left dozens of messages for him, but there has been no response.
He usually doesn’t respond or leave messages there. We only created it for emergencies. I always thought he was at least checking it, but now I’m not sure.”
“I’m sure he checks it if he can,” he replied.
“What the hell is that supposed to mean? Why couldn’t he? What kind of security job keeps you from being able to use a phone or check e-mail?”
“I’m not at liberty to discuss the nature of your husband’s work,” he typed. “There are security concerns, and I hope you’ll believe me when I tell you that lives could be at stake. One of those lives belongs to Alex. I’m not surprised he hasn’t contacted you.”
“Where is he?” Brin typed. She didn’t really expect an answer, and for a moment after she received one, she stared at it dumbly.
“All I can say is he’s operating in the Far East.
Even that is more than you should know.”
“The Far East?” She typed the words before she thought about it, then added, “Not the Middle East?”
There was a hesitation at the other end, and Brin’s anger bubbled over again. She slammed the computer desk for the second time that day and pushed away from the screen. Was anything she’d been told true? Had Alex lied to her about every aspect of his work, down to the location? If he’d been able to do that without giving himself away through guilt or tripping himself on a lie, how much else had he lied about? What kind of man had she married, and who was he? Really.
