Athena Force 7-12

by Carla Cassidy, Evelyn Vaughn, Harper Allen, Ruth Wind, Cindy Dees

  “I can see it wasn’t the news you were hoping for,” Terry said as he reached her. “I wish we had time to talk about what you’re going to do now, angel, but we’ve got to put some distance between us and this phone. I think I saw Mr. SAS in the cafeteria, and what’s worse, I’m pretty sure he saw me. Your next stop is the lab, right?”

  “I’ll be there all afternoon.” She fell into step beside him, thankful for his assumption that her manner was due to disappointment over not getting the fictional job. When really I’m acting this way because I’m encased in ice, she thought with detachment. Except instead of feeling cold on the outside, the cold’s coming from deep inside me. I wonder if I’ll ever feel warm again…and I wonder if I’ll ever care whether I do or not.

  Because right now she didn’t. Having ice in her veins meant she felt nothing over the Cassandras’ possible betrayal. It meant she could shut herself off from the events she would have to set in motion tonight. It numbed all feeling, gave her cold strength, turned her back into the woman she had been before her world had been ripped apart by an earlier betrayal.

  You’ve been trying to be someone you weren’t, O’Shaughnessy, Dawn told herself, barely noticing Reese’s concerned glance as she left him and the soldier who had just arrived to relieve him at the door of the lab. She strode sightlessly past a group of scientists and technicians, coming to a halt at the back of the room where a row of wire cages lined the wall. You thought you could make amends for the things you did, maybe one day be accepted by the Cassandras as one of them. But you were raised to be the Cipher’s protégé, a genetically altered killing machine, Lab 33’s lab rat. You’ll never be able to put the past behind you, so you might as well accept what you are.

  She unlatched the first wire door, lifting it open with one finger. The two creatures inside cowered momentarily at this unexpected interruption to their routine but excitement overrode their caution. They scurried to the threshold of the cage, hesitated for a second and then ran out along the table. Dawn wasn’t watching them. She was already unlatching the second cage, and then the third and fourth ones. Only when the tenth cage had been opened and its occupants released did she stand back and look at them as they scurried down the table and across the floor.

  “It feels like freedom, doesn’t it?” Raised voices and a few nervous shrieks came from the room behind her, but she kept her eyes on the excited ex-prisoners and addressed her low words to them. “You think if you run fast enough and far enough they’ll never catch you…but you’re wrong, little brothers and sisters. You’ll never be free. You’ll never escape. And just when you think you have, those bars will come slamming down again, stronger than ever.”

  It would take the lab a long time to round up all those rats and get them back in their cages again.

  “And I know how long,” she said aloud. “Nine months, fifteen days and fourteen hours. It doesn’t take much time at all to put a lab rat back into her cage.

  “All you have to make her understand is that it’s the only place she belongs…the only place where she’ll ever belong.”

  Chapter 13

  Status: four days and counting

  Time: 0001 hours

  Dawn Swanson was dead. Dead, buried and never to be resurrected, Dawn thought as she stared at herself in the full-length mirror on her bathroom door. “Ain’t gonna miss you, babe, that’s for sure,” she said softly. “You cramped my style way too much. And I really, really hated wearing your clothes.”

  Not that the ones she had on were what she would have chosen had she a choice, she told herself with a grimace. She’d soaked the stains from the skintight zipped top she’d been wearing the night she’d been shot, but there had been nothing she could do about the blasted-out hole in the fabric at the top of her rib cage and the exit hole at the back, and try as she might, she hadn’t been able to totally clean the blood from the left sleeve. The former two problems she could live with. The latter she’d solved by hacking off both sleeves with a pair of scissors. Her shoulders were now exposed in the cutaway garment, but the impromptu tailoring had given her greater ease of movement.

  Her army-issue boots laced up well past her ankles and had been filched a few hours earlier from the bedside of a sleeping female soldier, a feat she’d accomplished by using her air shaft mode of travel one final time. A quick detour to the men’s quarters on the way back had resulted in the bowie knife that was now strapped to her thigh, unwittingly supplied by a Ranger whose overheard nickname of “Blade” had suggested to her that he might have an interesting collection of unofficial weaponry in his locker. It was a supposition that had proved correct, since besides the bowie knife she’d relieved him of a wristband-mounted switchblade and—Freudians would have a field day with this one, she thought wryly—a short, scabbarded sword that came with its own spring-release back-holster.

  All in all, the Swanson chick had definitely received last rites, along with her baggy sweats, her cumbersome bottle-lens glasses, and best of all…

  “Is it true blondes have more fun?” she muttered to her reflection, taking in the honey-colored braid that started high at the back of her head and swung halfway down to her waist. Several shampooings had eliminated the brown rinse from her hair. “Or is that just an urban myth, like a woman’s favorite weapon is poison? The rest of this arsenal might come in handy, but give me a gun any day.” She checked Reese’s Beretta, shoved the pistol into the snug waistband of her black pants and pulled her top concealingly over it.

  She looked like what she was, she thought assessingly—Lab 33’s assassin, the protégé who had inherited the position Lee Craig had so abruptly vacated when Samantha St. John’s bullet had taken him down last October. The woman in the mirror was leanly muscled, armed to the teeth and clad all in black. Eyes the arctic green of pack ice stared unblinkingly out of an expressionless face. She exactly fit the description that had been circulated in the urgent and confidential e-mail Kayla Ryan had shown her months ago.

  Her immediate objectives hadn’t changed. She still needed to get Sir William’s notes to the scientists who could utilize them to save her life—hers and her sisters’, whether she could trust the women sworn to avenge their biological mother or not.

  Crossing swiftly to the bathroom, she reached above the sink and felt behind the frosted glass shade of the light. She unscrewed the bulb enough to break the connection and the light went out. She moved back to the bedroom, stepping onto the bed to reach the overhead fixture.

  Her actions in the lab this afternoon had been regrettable but not disastrous. She’d implemented a hasty plan of damage control. Sinking to her knees, she’d covered her face with her hands and let her shoulders heave in silent sobs, only raising her head when she’d felt Roger’s tentative arm around her.

  “I’m sorry,” she’d gulped, throwing an appalled glance at the scurrying rats around her. “I don’t know why someone would do this! Ever since the break-in I—I—”

  “You’re suffering from stress,” Roger had said with uncharacteristic fierceness. “And it hasn’t been helped by having an armed guard follow you around everywhere you go, either. Is it really necessary to have your people dogging Ms. Swanson’s every step, man? Can’t you see the toll it’s taking on her?”

  His angry questions had been directed at Asher, who was watching her performance with an unreadable expression on his face. Aqua eyes held hers for a moment, and before turning on Roger.

  “I see that something’s taking its toll on our Ms. Swanson,” he said evenly, “although I’m willing to bet my security precautions aren’t to blame. I’ll have one of my people escort her to her room where she can regain her composure.”

  At that point Sir William had arrived on the scene. In the middle of his bellowing tirade against the loose rats and then his nephew’s high-handedness Asher had walked away, and a few minutes later Dawn, with a gruffly solicitous Sir William at her side and a guard ten paces behind her, had headed for her room.

&nbs
p; “His methods are overbearing, I agree, but he means well,” the old scientist had said awkwardly as they’d paused outside her door. “When I learned he’d assigned a security contingent to you I thought it would reassure you, but I should have realized how unsettling it might be.” His veined hand had rested on hers and he’d lowered his voice to a confidential level. “I’m telling tales out of school again, I suppose, but maybe it will put your mind at ease if you understand why there’s no chance of any thugs coming after you for my notes. Asher’s locked them away in his own office safe. Knowing my nephew, he probably stands guard over them all night himself. Does that make you feel any better about this whole situation?”

  “More than you know, Sir W,” Dawn said under her breath as she unscrewed the lightbulb and dropped it onto the bed. “I thought I was going to have to use you as my hostage to force Asher to lead me to the notes and hand them over. I didn’t want to do that, and the woman I was twenty-four hours ago wouldn’t have been able to, but to spell it out in terms you’d understand, I’ve regenerated. I’m back to who I was before I’d ever heard of a group called the Cassandras, much less put my trust in them.”

  She passed by the dresser, swept her hand across its surface, and gave a good facsimile of a muffled and cutoff scream as assorted toiletries and a clock-radio crashed to the floor. Almost immediately she heard a sharp knock on the room’s door.

  “Everything okay in there, ma’am?”

  Unlike Reese and the hapless private whose phone-sex conversation she’d so abruptly terminated four nights ago, her guard this evening had looked to be in his mid-thirties, she recalled, and presumably his extra years had taught him extra caution. Although Terry had taken pains to assure her that Asher’s briefing to her guards hadn’t raised their suspicions about her, some of the more experienced Rangers had treated her like a possible hostile rather than a civilian in jeopardy, including the one who was even now unlocking her door.

  “Stand away from the entrance, ma’am,” he ordered from the hall. “I’m coming in.”

  Suspicious or not, he thought he was dealing with the Swanson chick, she reflected as she saw the door begin to open. He would take an unwary second to hit the light switch and then she would—

  He stepped in, hesitated in the doorway as she’d predicted.

  From her position behind it, she gave the door a powerful kick. It slammed against the Ranger, who stumbled back a pace over the threshold, and before he could recover his balance she leaped from her hiding place, wrested his weapon from him and brought its stock crashing down on his skull.

  He crumpled to his knees to fall face forward on the floor. Swiftly she reached down to the pulse at the side of his neck.

  It was slow but steady. He would live, although for the next forty-eight hours he’d have one mother of a headache, Dawn decided as she dragged him farther inside the room.

  She stepped away from him, and as she did she caught a shadowy glimpse of her reflection in the dresser mirror. For a moment she felt oddly disoriented, as if she had nothing to do with the grim woman who had just taken out one of her own country’s soldiers so emotionlessly.

  What the hell am I doing? Whose side am I on here? This is all—

  The frantic voice inside her head was abruptly silenced as the ice that surrounded her choked it off. Dawn made her way to the door with a frown. She was on no one’s side but her own, dammit. Her affiliation with Lab 33 was a thing of the past and, if her assumption about the appearance of the Athena Academy pin was true, her alliance with the Cassandras had been broken by their actions, not hers. She would use both organizations for her own ends and then dispose of them before they could dispose of her. Her frown smoothed out into blankness and she edged a glance around the side of the door.

  The video camera was mounted high on the wall at the end of the hall, its gleaming lens sweeping slowly from left to right and then back again as it scanned the width of the corridor. Taking only a split second to assess the speed of its tracking rhythm, she jerked her head back into the room and slipped the bowie knife from its sheath on her upper thigh as the lens swiveled her way again.

  For the space of a heartbeat she waited. Then she made her move.

  She stepped fully into the corridor, noting as she did so that the camera was temporarily pointed away from her. Her arm came up and her wrist bent back in a fluid throwing motion just as the lens was nearly facing her again. The bowie knife left her grasp smoothly and flew like the deadly missile it was straight for the camera’s lens.

  It hit dead center, shattering the glass and penetrating the body of the camera. Like some lumbering beast that didn’t know it was mortally wounded, the camera kept slowly tracking back and forth, the knife’s wickedly long blade quivering from it.

  Walking to the end of the hall, she grabbed the hilt of the knife and pulled it out of the camera before sheathing it again and pushing open the door to the stairs.

  Ten minutes later, after disabling the camera on the ground floor in a similar manner and taking out the two soldiers posted at the entrance to the military building, noiselessly Dawn closed the door to Asher’s office behind her. Contrary to what his uncle had said, he didn’t stand guard over Sir William’s locked notes all night, she realized, remaining very still and letting her glance travel around the shadowy room. He didn’t have to.

  Because the whole area, starting from where she was standing just inside the door, past the metal, paper-strewn desk six feet away and continuing right up to the steel safe that was positioned behind the desk, was crisscrossed with glowing red beams that looked like strands of silk from some radioactive spider. The place was wired to the max with infrared trip-alarms.

  “Crap.” Her lips barely moving as she spoke, she made rapid calculations based on the scene in front of her. She took a shallow breath, tucked her braid into the neckline of her top so that it wouldn’t swing free and began contorting her slow way through the maze of infrared beams.

  The summer she’d been fourteen she’d accompanied Lee Craig on a mission that had taken him to Prague. To her adolescent fury, as soon as they’d arrived he’d informed her that he intended to work the job alone and that he’d made arrangements for her to take specialized training during the time he would be occupied. Her fury had lasted only until he’d dropped her off at the small, family-run circus that was to be her home for the next two months.

  “Papa Wisznewski thought those grueling eight-hour gymnastic sessions he put me through were to teach me how to walk the high-wire like I’d been born to it,” Dawn breathed as she carefully lowered her torso under a beam while balancing on one leg. She lowered herself full-length to the floor and kept her eyes on another beam only millimeters above her face as she slid below it. “Wonder what he’d think if he knew how I was putting them to use right now.”

  By the time she made it to the desk she could feel a thin sheen of sweat coating her limbs and trickling down between her shoulder blades. She hesitated for a second, then began the last phase of her journey to the safe—a distance of only three feet, but bristling with a barbed-wire effect of red beams. Her worst moment came when, her head down and both her hands splayed out on the floor for balance, she felt her braid slip free of her collar. As it swung by her face she caught it in her teeth before it interrupted the path of one of the red lines of light.

  Then her ordeal was over and she was standing in the blessedly clear area in front of the safe. Spitting the tail of her braid out of her mouth with a sense of relief, she hunkered down in front of the combination lock, laced her fingers together and stretched them out until her knuckles popped, and then got to work.

  Compared to the high-end Rose-Jackman model in his uncle’s study, Asher’s safe had been about as hard to break into as a cigar box, she thought with a frown a few minutes later. In fact, if it hadn’t been for the infrared sensors that had made it so hard for her to make her way across the office in the first place, she would have suspected a trap…or at least c
onsidered the possibility that Sir William’s papers were secreted somewhere else. But they weren’t. They were right there in plain view as the safe’s door swung open.

  “Bingo,” she whispered hoarsely as she grabbed them up and began to unzip her top to secure them next to her body.

  The red sensors suddenly shut off, and as she turned quickly around, the room’s bright overhead lights went on.

  “Checkmate’s more like it, love,” replied Asher from beside a filing cabinet near the doorway. He took his left hand from the light switch and closed the small metal door of an alarm panel, the Sig Sauer in his right hand never wavering from her. “I suppose I could have collared you as soon as you walked in, but it was a real education watching you beat the sensors. Besides, I’ve got a fatal weakness for green-eyed blondes, as I think I might have mentioned to you when your hair was a different color…especially if they’re wearing skintight black instead of baggy sweatshirts and pants.” His tone hardened. “You’re damn good, Swanson. Drop the papers, put your palms flat on the desk and spread your legs as wide as you can.”

  “Sorry, I never go that far on a first date,” Dawn said with a cold smile. She shook her head. “I’ve got no quarrel with you, Ash, but believe me when I say if I have to take you down to get out of here with these notes, I will. All you have to decide is whether we’re going to do this the hard way or the easy way.”

  “And all you have to decide is whether you want to risk another gunshot wound over a pile of papers that are absolutely worthless to you.” His grin was tight. “Hell, Swanson, did you take me for such a fool that you thought you had the real thing in your hand? The introduction’s the same, but after that it’s all scientific rubbish, cobbled up by the ever-obliging Roger at my request. Even the artistic blood spatters on the first few pages are faked. They’re not yours from the other night, they’re mine, courtesy of a deliberately careless shave the morning after your first robbery attempt. You’ve been set up. Don’t worry, though, you’re in good company. My uncle’s also under the impression that this is where his notes now are. I was counting on him letting the cat out of the bag to you, and it seems I was right.”