Willpower

by Anna Durand

  JT lounged in his big leather executive chair, hands dangling off the chair's arms, a relaxed half smile curving his pale lips. Despite his deathly complexion, he seemed fully at ease and confident. He believed they had no way out of the office and that his lackeys would rescue him in short order.

  David ground his teeth. He'd had enough of JT.

  Grace settled a hand on his arm. "It's not worth it."

  "Yes," he said, striding around the desk to JT, "actually, I think it is."

  He smacked the gun into JT's head. The bastard grunted. As his eyes drifted shut, he slumped in the chair.

  "Feel better?" Grace asked.

  He crossed around in front of the desk again. To Sean, he said, "Do you know another way out of this room?"

  The boy nodded. He pointed a finger toward the left rear corner of the office. "Hidden door over there. I've seen him use it, when he doesn't want anybody to know what he's doing. There aren't any cameras in here. He sneaks out to a secret control room where he can spy on everybody in the facility."

  Grace made a disgusted noise. "Of course he does."

  Sean led David toward the secret door, which was well concealed, given the fact that David saw nothing but blank wall in that spot. Peripherally, he saw Grace snag the blood-stained gauze from JT's desk before hurrying toward David. Knowing Grace, she couldn't stand the idea of the lunatic billionaire licking her blood off the gauze. When she got home, she'd probably burn the damn thing. Hell, he'd light the fire for her.

  Stuffing the gauze in her pocket, she halted beside Sean. David stood on Sean's opposite side. Close up like this, David noticed a slender crack in the wall that was practically invisible unless a person knew to look for it.

  "Oh," Sean said. "Forgot about the code."

  Before David could ask what code, Sean darted over to the desk. He flipped open the laptop computer. Fingers hovering over the keyboard, he stared at the screen. His expression went blank.

  "The video feed," Grace said in a voice so quiet he strained to make out the words. What video feed, he wanted to ask, but the question could wait.

  The door knob rattled. Voices murmured on the other side of the door.

  David said, "The code, Sean."

  The boy kept staring at the screen.

  A fist, or a similar blunt object, banged on the door. A hard male voice said, "Sir, are you in there?"

  Bang. Another fist thump.

  Sean blinked several times in quick succession. He switched his focus to the keyboard as he punched keys for letters and numbers.

  JT had clearly taken no precautions against travelers spying on him in his own office. Overconfident as he appeared to be, he likely thought he had all of the travelers under control, drugged into near-comatose states or so beaten down by the experiments that they lacked the energy for extrasensory spying.

  Mostly, JT was right. David clenched his hands into fists. Even he and Sean had trouble pushing through the drug-induced stupor.

  Sean tapped one final key.

  Inside the wall, a mechanism thunked. A door-size panel separated from the wall with a faint hiss, opening away from them on silent hinges. Lights came on automatically to dispel the blackness beyond the portal. The doorway revealed a passage that extended for perhaps thirty feet, then made a ninety-degree turn to the left.

  David motioned for Sean and Grace to enter the passage. They crossed the threshold single file, Sean leading the way.

  Half turning, David looked at the laptop computer on JT's desk.

  "Coming?" Grace asked.

  "Yes." David raised the gun and fired three rounds into the laptop. Splinters of plastic and metal spewed from the computer. "I'm coming now."

  He walked through the doorway toward Grace.

  A swishing sound drew his attention back to the doorway. He paused to look back.

  The door shut with a dull thunk. David hoped destroying the laptop would at least slow down JT's efforts to track them. He had a hunch the jackass kept the program that controlled the secret door on his computer and no other. David had bought the three of them time, though how much, he couldn't say.

  "Where are we going?" he asked Grace.

  "JT's private control room."

  "To … "

  She looked straight into his eyes and said, in a matter-of-fact tone, "To destroy the facility."

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Are you insane?" David seized her arm, dragging her to a stop. He gaped at her, eyes wide and locked on hers. "Say that again, in case I was having a stroke and didn't hear you correctly."

  "You heard me," she said. "I'm going to destroy this facility."

  Between gritted teeth, he said, "I repeat, are you insane?"

  "Possibly."

  "Destroy it," Sean said in a quiet, almost reverent tone. "Get rid of all their research, so maybe nobody can do to anyone else what they did to us."

  "Exactly," Grace agreed.

  She'd considered the possibility that a computer wiz like Jackson Tennant might've backed up the data off-site, but then she realized if he'd done that he wouldn't need the flash drive her grandfather left for her. Maybe he viewed the facility's research as too explosive to risk letting it outside the facility's computer system, even for backup purposes. JT clearly didn't like to share.

  It made no difference either way. She must destroy this place, even if it proved to be but one head of the hydra. They could chop off the other heads later, one by one. Destroying this facility was, she felt certain, vital to tearing apart JT's clandestine empire.

  "We can't do this," David said. "There are human beings inside this facility."

  "They're evacuating," Sean pointed out, "so we won't be hurting anybody."

  "We have to be sure everyone's out."

  Grace studied David's expression. He looked tired, harried, and vaguely annoyed, but no longer in shock over her plan. She laid a hand on his cheek and said, "We will be sure."

  His skin felt different. She couldn't quite describe the difference. He felt more … real.

  Sean led them through the network of corridors with a confidence she'd never seen him in before. He knew exactly where he was going. And he knew freedom was no longer out of his grasp. She had an idea of what that felt like because, though she hadn't been physically held prisoner, her amnesia had boxed her in like a cage. Now she felt the bars weakening.

  No doors opened off the corridors. The emergency lights cast a pulsating red glow on the blank gray walls. They rounded another corner and there, at the end of a short corridor, stood a metal door that bore no markings and had no knob. A keypad affixed to the wall beside the door restricted access. Shawn trotted up to the doorway, hesitating with his hand raised over the keypad.

  Grace and David came up behind Sean. Just as she started to wonder whether he knew the password, Sean tapped a series of keys on the pad. A blooping sound heralded success, and the door swung inward with a thunk and a hiss.

  They walked into a room measuring ten feet wide by ten feet long. A huge flat-screen TV occupied one wall, its screen divided into eight square sections that displayed rotating, full-color views from the security camera feeds. Beneath the TV screen sat a surprisingly modest metal desk equipped with a new-looking desktop computer, complete with a wide-screen monitor and a wireless mouse and keyboard. A nondescript office chair completed the room's furnishings.

  Sean sat down on the office chair and began typing on the keyboard.

  "What are you doing?" Grace asked.

  "Checking the thermal sensors." His fingers tapped out a fast, irregular rhythm on the keyboard. "If anybody's left in the facility, we'll see them here."

  An image appeared on the computer screen — shades of blue, red, green, and yellow.

  David, standing beside her, pointed at the colorful blobs on the screen. "These are hea
t signatures given off by human bodies. The facility is equipped with infrared sensors that can detect them." David bent down to squint at the screen. "Where is this, Sean?"

  "JT's office, and the corridor outside it."

  "Is there anyone else left inside the facility?"

  Sean shook his head. "Just us and the nine people at JT's office."

  "Six guards plus JT, Waldron, and Battaglia."

  Grace knelt beside Sean, her eyes focused on the screen. "Can you bring up the camera feed from JT's office?"

  "Told you, there isn't one." Sean hunched his shoulders. "JT likes his privacy."

  "Of course he does." She gnawed the inside of her lip, staring at the colored blobs on the thermal sensor. "What about the cameras in the corridor? If the door to JT's office is open, maybe one of the outside cameras can see inside."

  "Maybe," Sean said, as he set about punching keys and tapping the mouse button. The images on the big-screen TV changed. All but three of the feeds disappeared from the screen, and the remainder expanded to fill the space. The feeds offered three slightly different views of the corridor. The closest camera was posted above the door to JT's office, aimed out at the corridor. The next camera out pointed toward the office at an angle. The third was at the end of the corridor furthest from the office, aimed straight at the office door. It was too far away to see much, though.

  "Can you zoom in?" she asked. "With the camera at the end of the corridor."

  Sean fiddled with the mouse and the feed from the camera furthest from the office expanded to fill the entire TV screen. The guards milled around outside the office, but between their bodies she spied the interior of the room. Battaglia was out of sight, probably to one side of the doorway. Waldron stood at the desk, his hands on the wooden surface, bent over as if conversing with JT. The billionaire lounged in his executive chair, gesticulating with his hands. Although she couldn't see their faces, their body language hinted at an intense and not entirely cordial discussion.

  Waldron threw up his hands and spun away from the desk. He stalked out of the office, past the guards, and out of sight. At his desk, JT retrieved something from a drawer.

  "Can you zoom in more?" she asked Sean.

  Sean tapped a button on the keyboard.

  The image pulled in tighter. It had enough resolution to show JT's face with only a little fuzziness. In his hand he clasped a syringe filled with light blue liquid.

  "What is that?" she said, not really expecting a response.

  David, bent over the desk, turned his head to look at her. "It looks like the drug cocktail they used to give some of their test subjects, back when they were trying to find ways to enhance psychic abilities. They stopped using the concoction because it had nasty side effects. Several people died."

  Her chest tightened as if a phantom hand clenched her heart. "Did they give you the cocktail?"

  "Once." He straightened, stepping away from the desk. "I survived."

  She almost made a sarcastic comment about stating the obvious. Something in the tone of his voice stopped her. Later, she might ask him what the drugs had done to him. She might ask a lot of questions about his time in the facility. For now, she asked a different question. "What is JT doing with those drugs?"

  "I remember," David said, "there was some discussion about using the drug cocktail to trigger latent abilities. The scientists had a theory that everyone has the potential for extrasensory faculties buried deep inside them. They theorized that if the drugs could enhance existing abilities, then perhaps a higher dosage could also bring out latent abilities."

  "A higher dosage? More than what killed people?"

  "Not everyone died. Andrew survived multiple injections."

  "Who would be willing to risk that?" She glanced at the TV screen, which showed JT lowering the needle to his arm. A lunatic would risk it, naturally, for the chance to gain untold power. She rose from her crouch and said, "JT's been injecting himself. That's why he can only use his abilities to harass me sometimes, and that must be why he looks like a man who's not just knocking at death's door, but standing in the threshold. The drugs are killing him."

  "Not fast enough."

  The anger in his voice snapped her attention to his face. He looked tense, though not vengeful.

  "He's killing himself," she said. "We don't have to do it for him."

  David remained silent for a few seconds, then he took in a long breath and, as he let it out, turned to face her. He said, "How do you intend to destroy the facility?"

  "The armory." At his puzzled expression, she explained, "It's full of ammunition, which is essentially explosives. I'm going to find a way to set it off."

  He practically shouted, "Set off an explosion?"

  "Keep it down, will you?"

  In a calmer voice, he said, "And how do you plan on detonating the ammunition?"

  "Not sure yet."

  "Well, as long as you have a plan."

  Sean had switched back to displaying three camera feeds on the TV screen. The guards were jogging down the corridor away from JT's office.

  "They're coming for us," David said. "We have to get out of this facility while we still can."

  "I agree," Grace told him.

  His mouth dropped open as he stared at her. "You're abandoning your plan that easily? I was prepared to argue my case — " his expression went blank, and then he closed his mouth, clenching his jaw so tightly he probably could've squeezed charcoal into diamonds between his teeth. "You're not abandoning anything, are you? The plan is to remote view the armory, spot a way to set off an explosion, and manifest in order to accomplish the task."

  Oh, she wished he didn't know her quite so well. Everything would've gone much smoother if he hadn't figured it all out.

  "Yes," she said, "that's the plan."

  He motioned toward the door. "Let's go. You can do that from outside the facility."

  "In a minute." Looking at Sean, she pointed at the big TV screen. "Show me the armory."

  The boy complied, tapping keys until another feed replaced the images from the corridor outside JT's office. This feed showed a dimly lit room packed with metal boxes, racks of guns of all sizes, and shelves of Kevlar vests. She let the image burn into her mind, until she felt certain she could recall it later.

  Then she let David usher her out of the room. Sean pushed past them to take the lead, guiding them around corner after corner. Minutes passed as they wended their way through the network of passages, but finally they reached a sturdy door identical to the one Battaglia had led her to after he captured her outside the facility.

  Sean entered the code on the keypad, waited a few seconds, and entered a second code. The locking mechanism chunked. The door swung outward several inches.

  David shoved the door open all the way. He tiptoed across the threshold into the blackness outside the doorway. Fluorescent lights flickered on, illuminating a narrow passage carved out of the bedrock.

  Grace followed David into the passage, with Sean trailing behind her. The kid paused long enough to shove the door closed again.

  Eyeing Sean, she asked, "If you knew the way out, why didn't you escape before now?"

  "Couldn't get into JT's office. Anybody who wants in has to swipe their ID card and enter a passcode, but that's just for show. See, what nobody knows is that JT looks through the security camera to see who's there. Then he decides whether to let you in."

  It made sense. JT was paranoid, secretive, and possibly the biggest control freak the world had ever seen. And he loved messing with people's heads.

  They started off down the passageway. It was narrow, so they half walked, half jogged single file through the rough-hewn tunnel. The air grew stuffy and thick. She felt cramped, like she couldn't get enough room or breathe enough oxygen. The sweat evaporating from her skin did nothing to cool her. David and Sean a
ppeared unaffected by the conditions. She watched them pull farther and farther ahead of her, and though she tried to call out to them, her vocal cords emitted no sound. Her head felt heavy, her thoughts fuzzy. This was wrong, all wrong.

  Pain stabbed through her head. She cried out. As the sharp pain dissipated, a crackling sensation erupted inside her brain. She fell to her knees on the floor, clutching her head in her hands, willing the crackling pain to end. It kept going, like an electrical storm in her brain.

  The pain vanished. She sobbed with relief. But something was still off inside her, something that felt dark and alien and intrusive.

  She dropped her hands to rest them on her thighs. Her mind felt numb and disconnected from her body. Had she traveled without realizing it? Was she really here? Where was she?

  A hard object pressed against her right palm. She looked down at her hand, where it rested on her thigh. She was gripping a knife. A shiny, curved blade. Long and wickedly sharp. The wooden handle pressed into her palm.

  David ran up to her, dropping to his knees in front of her.

  Kill him, do it now, you want to, so go ahead and do it.

  She rammed the knife into his gut.

  "No!"

  The word burst out of her as an anguished howl. She tried to yank the knife out, but it refused to budge. Tears streamed down her cheeks, blurring her vision. She shouted wordless cries of rage and grief.

  Hands grasped her shoulders, drawing her into an embrace that felt warm and strong and familiar.

  "David?" she asked, though she knew it couldn't be him. But oh God, please let it be him.

  "I'm here," he murmured in her ear. "What's wrong? What happened?"

  He stroked her hair and rocked her gently in his arms. Her face was tucked against his neck, and the scent of him filled her nostrils. The feel of his body, so warm and real and alive, broke the spell. It had been a vision, terrifying and vivid, yet not real. The thoughts had come from her own mind, yet not her own mind. Different. Colder. She could feel the other mind, the invader, touching her psyche. Grasping for a handhold. A way to control her. She'd almost given it to him.