by Leslie North
He turned her around, her back to his front and demonstrated the proper arm motion to snap the fastener. “Firm up your stomach. Yank your elbows down like you’re going to strike you hipbones. One fast motion. Everything you’ve got. Ready?”
Angela nodded.
He took a step back.
She planted her feet wide, wanting more than anything to appear stronger and more capable in Samson’s eyes. Determined the ties would snap on the first try, she channeled all her strength into the motion.
The plastic bit into her dermis then released. It took a few seconds for her mind to process that she had been successful, about the same amount of time it took her to realize that Samson may not know the Periodic Table by heart, but that he was a genius in his own way.
“I did it.” She didn’t recognize her voice—so vibrant, so infused with energy.
He didn’t take time to celebrate. Brakes squealed. The van stopped.
For good.
Doors near the cab slammed.
“We just ran out of time.”
Chapter Eight
Samson expected a cold-storage warehouse with impenetrable doors or a sparse, high-tech interrogation room or a pit where they could bulldoze dirt on top of him and make him part of a landfill.
He didn’t expect Julian Simkins’s private office.
After the informal meet-and-greet at their destination, three of Julian’s men probably wished they hadn’t come to work that day. And Samson’s right hand was, most likely broken in several places. His main objective, to keep Angela with him, had been successful, right up until Julian let her loose in a stocked laboratory and instructed her to recreate JNXN. From the crow’s nest of Julian’s office, Samson followed Angela’s movements like a mouse in a cage.
“We meet again,” said Julian, by way of opening old wounds. “Seems if we’re moving in the same circles, we should be on the same side.”
“We’re not in the same circle. Not anymore.”
Angela donned a white lab coat and busied herself with toggling various switches on the machines. She paused long enough to glance up through the wall of windows and make eye contact with Samson. Her eyes were so wide they damned near filled the lenses of her glasses.
Fuck. How was he going to get them out of this?
“I’m not the enemy, Caine.”
Julian’s milky, pallid skin, took on a greenish hue in the unnatural laboratory light bleeding in from below. He moved behind his expansive desk and lit a cigarette—a pretentious fucking gray one with a tiny gold band near the filter. He held the cigarette like he’d picked up the foul habit in the LeMarais district of Paris on leave, summer of ‘06—delicate-like, as if he had sucked off half the guys around.
“I’m the last patriot left in the South African province of which you’re so fond.”
“Patriot?” Samson choked out a laugh. “You’re delusional. Patriots don’t allow innocents to die.”
“Don’t talk to me about innocents.” Julian’s words erupted from his dour mouth with a hushed, psychotic sibilance. His nostrils bloomed wide and red. “I was down the road when the rebels ambush the embassy. I ran when I heard her screams, like an animal at slaughter. They bound my hands and feet and did the same to the others—a translator, a secretary, some coward the State Department sent in for training purposes that cried the entire time. But not Marianne. Her goddamned blond hair. They obsessed over it.”
Samson’s throat swelled. He wanted Julian to shut up. He couldn’t bear to hear the details he knew were coming. Riley loved Marianne like a sister. They had met when Riley was a missionary and Marianne was a conversationalist with a degree in political science. Marianne was butchered because she was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Still, Samson tracked Angela’s movements.
Julian shot to his feet, unable to navigate the delicate tightrope he had established of a wealthy, political vigilante under complete control. He paced, stopping to brace himself and take a shaky drag every so often.
“They made me watch as they raped and sodomized and took turns pissing on my wife, and when her spirit broke and no sounds came from her open lips, they doused her with lighter fluid and set her hair on fire.”
Samson tried to block the onslaught of words. He didn’t want Julian’s dark memories any more than he wanted his. But the images ambushed him, others in Marianne’s place, first Riley then Angela, and his throat burned like he had swallowed accelerant.
“Five American sub-level diplomats died that day and our government did nothing out of fear it would imbalance the region. After I’m finished with them, those who killed Marianne will know imbalance and justice.”
Samson tried to speak, failed. He cleared his throat. “At the cost of more innocent lives.”
“This is war, Caine, backed by a secret alliance of nations with political and economic interests in the region. In war, natives are nothing. With nothing. These villagers grow up in pestilence and poverty and see no hope but the meager survival these rebels promise. I’m doing them a favor. All of them.”
Julian withdrew a photo from his pocket—the same photo his thugs had lifted on a shake-down of Samson’s possessions—and dropped it on the table beside Samson. The same photo Riley had carried on her every day after they had come across the young African boy selling bags of ice on the road to his village to make money for his family. The same photo Samson carried on him since the day Riley died, as a reminder of what emotional attachment gets you in this life.
Pain. Crippling, debilitating, soul-shattering pain.
Samson reared up, gripped Julian’s fancy blue lapels and shoved him, bodily, against the pristine walls of his office. Julian’s bodyguard, stationed at the door, stormed the tangle of two men until Julian plucked himself free and Samson corralled his mind back from the verge of wanting to choke the same prick who once called Riley a whore while on a bender in Cape Town.
Julian brushed his palms down his wrinkled suit and fished his half-length cigarette from the Armenian rug where it landed. “I thought that might get your attention.”
“Leave Manny out of this.”
“Emmanuel, as well as the others, will be given a choice. Leave when warned or die with the rebels.”
“The people in Mthatha and the surrounding villages don’t have the resources to leave. You know that. They have no more choice than you gave Angela’s brother. Had there been doctors in the region that day--”
“Marianne still would have died.”
Samson watched Angela load a vial containing a mossy liquid into a centrifuge and close the lid. Her wild-eyed expression was gone, replaced by confidence and an unyielding concentration he had only ever seen when she emptied six rounds into a target.
“What do you want, Julian? I must be part of your plan or you would have killed me by now.”
“You were a surprise insurance policy. A guarantee of sorts that Angela McAllister would play right into my hands and not go to the authorities. I know the disdain Rockwell feels for the usual government channels of law enforcement. We both bend the rules a bit to get what we want.”
“And now?”
“I’m in a position to return the favor.”
“I’ll never accept favors from you.”
“Surprising, given that the loves of our lives were such good friends and, coincidentally, both taken too soon.” Julian sat in the leather chair opposite Samson and crossed his legs. “I’m prepared to make you a proposition. Emanuel Jacobs and full papers allowing him protected status in the United States. Effective immediately.”
“And what of Angela’s brother?”
“Reunited on home soil by week’s end.”
“And in exchange?”
“I want you on the ground in the region. You know the terrain, the people, the language, the infrastructure. You know the soft spots, the weaknesses, the enemy’s jugular. I want you to lead operations. Eliminate the rebel faction responsible for Marianne’s death. Think of
it as a higher purpose. Here, you protect but one. But in Mthatha and the remote villages that have no voice, no power, you’ll be protecting them when they cannot protect themselves. And, you’ll have the chance to atone for your…choice…in leaving Emmanuel behind.”
He might as well have said selfishness for the distaste with which he infused the word. Samson cut his eyes away from Angela to focus eye-darts Julian’s direction.
“Yes, Riley told Marianne everything in letters. How you weren’t ready for the responsibility of raising a boy. How you wanted time, alone, with your bride.”
Below, Angela shifted her eyeglasses further up her nose. She had hustled him—twice—to achieve her desired outcome. Why couldn’t he do the same to Julian?
“Angela wants no part of this,” said Samson. “It’s a perversion of everything she set out to do.”
“Her formula is a means to an end. Without her, there will be other ways. She’s smart. She’ll understand, in time, that choosing what benefitted her was really never a choice at all. Her brother will be returned. She will have no more call for protection and will resume her life, believing she saved her brother. The event will be isolated. A few international news agencies may pick it up. Largely ignored by the western world and masked as a climatological anomaly. It will take scientists years of posturing about global warming to uncover the truth. By then, nature will take care of all evidence.”
“In large doses, everyone on the planet will know.”
“That’s the beauty of aligning yourself with someone principled, Caine. I’ve witnessed the brutality of needless suffering. I simply want the concentrated and unequivocal justice our government is too cowardly to carry out.”
“And if the rebels simply move? Change locations to survive?”
“They’ll be contained by an alliance of warring factions.”
Samson rose to his feet, memorizing Angela’s movements as if he, too, would someday need to recall the formula to such a mysterious woman.
“You care for her.”
“I made a promise to protect her.”
Julian couldn’t know it went beyond mere duty the moment she disappeared at the open-air market and he knew loss. Again.
“Quite the martyr. I suppose no one understands this more than us. Those who have known love and lost it. Our lives ended the day theirs were taken. This is your opportunity to give Riley what she wanted all those years ago. And help someone you care about.”
“And if Angela learns the truth?”
“The deal is off.”
Samson watched Angela scribble something on a piece of paper. Christ, he hoped it wasn’t the correct formula. If it was, they were all as good as dead.
He opened his mouth to speak. Words of acceptance stalled on his tongue.
“You still have questions,” Julian said, more statement than anything.
“Just one.” Samson turned to Julian. “How soon do we go wheels-up?”
***
The laboratory had always been Angela’s safe zone: the second skin of a white coat, the residual heat of the burners, the ability to manufacture outcomes based on knowledge, nothing left to chance. Julian’s laboratory was no ordinary facility. His equipment and organization and materials were a chemist’s dream.
Except when that dream turned out to be a nightmare.
The only constant in the creation of her faux-formula was the frequency with which she sought out Samson in the windows above her. Every time she glanced up, without fail, he watched her. His words gyrated in her memory: my objective is you. She sank into the reassurance of those words. The lab may have been her element, but this world belonged to him.
“Doctor McAllister?”
Her skin rippled from the stark intrusion into her work-zone of humming machines and private calculations. Tension pooled in her gut. She turned.
“Yes?”
A ginger-haired man in a suit and tie stood beside the lab’s cornea-scan entrance. “Follow me, please.”
Angela glanced up at the wall of windows.
Samson was gone.
Her belly ache sublimated to the outer reaches of her body like a vapored carcinogen in a corked flask. “Where are we going?”
The red-haired man remained stone-faced.
She laid the glass stirrer she held forgotten in her hand on the cobalt surface, rearranged her lab coat so it felt less like a straight-jacket at her shoulders and squeezed the moisture from her palms against the pocket fabric.
He led her down a sterile hallway with no natural light source. They might have been underground for all she had seen after Samson bested half of their abductors. The remaining thugs had cinched blindfolds around his face first then hers. After a maze of three such corridors, the red-haired man paused at a door with a gallery of graphical warnings posted. He ushered her inside a storage room then retreated back the way they had come.
The silence was absolute, but for her stressed heartbeat against her eardrums.
A scuffle sounded in the corner.
The whom-whom-whom in her ears grew louder until she saw Samson round the far-end stainless steel cabinets. He cleared the distance to her before her instincts could pull back her internal defenses at being ambushed. Once he had her in his arms, a full-bodied hug that lifted her feet from the ground, she melted into him.
“I was so scared when I didn’t see you…” she said.
He set her down and threaded his fingers through her hair to her scalp. Forehead to forehead, breaths tangled, his eyes closed as if he fought off some explanation, some demon warring inside him for control. His memorable, comforting scent assailed her. She didn’t know if he wanted to ring her neck or…
His mouth parted to say something. Instead of releasing words, he captured her lips. The heat of his hands at her scalp was nothing compared to the fire he unleashed in his kiss.
The kiss was not born of relief, for that would have manifested as a brief brush of lips. It was not a kiss born of charity, for Samson demanded as much as he gave—the hot sparring of tongues, stroke for stroke—nor was it a kiss born of the scattered synapses fired off in the brain under duress. His body was fully engaged—arms that released his hold only to draw her against the full, solid length of him, hands that splayed low against her back and slid south ever-so-slowly, a knee that invaded the tight, parallel of her thighs.
“For once, don’t think so much, Curie,” he said against her mouth.
His hushed plea was like a gift from William Harvey, himself, for at that moment, Samson’s words reimagined everything she knew about circulation. Heart, core, sex—impossibly, they all demanded blood flow at once. She kissed him again, this time schooled by the desires awakening inside her.
A groan played at the back of his throat. Another gift—that someone as inexperienced as she could elicit from him, a beautiful and unattainable man, such a sound.
He ended the encounter as if she was a desert oasis and he feared never drinking again. Of all the ways she should be punished for getting them into this situation, this might be the worst. Feed the starving fantasies of a deprived woman and forevermore, there will be hunger. His fiery exhales unraveled the nerves along her neck, a sweet node of connection that elicited gooseflesh along her inner thighs. He trailed two soft, drugged kisses against her cheek before he pressed his lips against her ear.
“Don’t let anyone—ever—make you feel undesired. If we weren’t…” His head dropped in defeat at the backlog of words on his tongue. Something close to regret stitched his labored declaration.
“Samson?” To her ears, she sounded fragile, overburdened.
He pressed a finger to his lips and whispered, “I’m sure this place is bugged.”
“What’s happening?” What her response lacked in volume, it more than made up in urgency.
“You have an out. Leave what you have—an imperfect formula that won’t work. We’ll tell him it’s finished and you walk out of here, right now.”
“What abou
t you?”
“I can stop him, Angela, from the inside. He’ll lead me straight to Mike. I can save your brother, but we have to say goodbye, here, now.”
“No. No. Absolutely not.”
“This is my training, Angela. This is who I am. You know how many men I’ve extracted from bad situations?”
“And when Julian finds out you betrayed him?”
“He won’t. Not until I have your brother in safe hands.”
“You didn’t tell me you knew Julian.”
“I wasn’t sure until I saw him. We have a shared history.”
“That he’s using to set you up.”
“Maybe, but I’m using him, too. Don’t fight me on this, Angela.”
“I created this formula. You need me.”
“I need to picture you here, safe, tangled in the sheets of a warm bed.” He tagged a lock of her wild hair behind her ear and kissed her forehead. “Even if it isn’t mine.”
Her heart crashed into v-fib at his insinuation.
“Now, go…before Julian changes his mind. Back the way you came, but head straight at the lab and exit the metal doors. Julian has a car and driver waiting to take you to Damian, another of Rockwell’s agents. He’ll stay with you until this is over.”
“Samson—”
“Go.”
“But—”
“Now, Angela.” He crushed her into one final embrace and backed away, one step then two, reversing the path he had come, his unyielding gaze on hers as if he could hold her that way, in that moment, forever. He turned and disappeared.
His footfalls faded to silence.
And Angela knew a new intimacy to the word nightmare.
***
Angela lasted a few miles.
In the back of a vehicle, this time a stretch, luxury SUV with midnight tint and a glass partition separating her from the driver, she watched an isolated mountain in the distance shift position along the windy roads. All this, while Samson boarded a plane bound for South Africa to save her brother.
