by Lexi Blake
He’d always preferred the darkness. He could pretend in the darkness, pretend he wasn’t where he was. In that bald, raw light, there was nowhere to hide.
He almost felt sorry for Green.
He knew what it felt like to be locked inside a cage with people staring at him from the outside. He knew what it was like to watch his brothers dying and to not be able to get to them. He definitely knew what it felt like to be watched, to have no privacy at all.
Green sat in the cell Clive Weston probably used for sexual games and stared right back at Tucker. “You’re sure you want to do this with her in the room?”
He wasn’t sure of anything. The answers he’d been waiting years for were about to be revealed and he wanted to run. He wanted to take Roni’s hand in his and leave. Fuck the past. He wanted a future.
But he couldn’t have one if he didn’t do this. He was trapped again. He only knew one thing for certain. “She stays if she wants to. I’m not hiding anything from her.”
Good or bad, she was part of this and had every right to know.
She sat beside him, their arms brushing.
“We’re all here now and you’ve had dinner, so could we get to talking?” Ezra wasn’t sitting. He’d paced for the last hour like he was the one stuck in a cage.
Levi had made a bunch of diva-like demands that hadn’t gone over well with Ezra. Solo had argued that they should just give him what he wanted so they could get things moving. What Levi had wanted was a shower, fresh clothes, a three-course meal with wine pairings, pillows and blankets made of specific materials, and access to Netflix. He’d gotten the shower and clothes, a sandwich Nina had made for him, and Solo had sat right outside his cell drinking an expensive red wine straight from the bottle and flipping the bird his way every time he talked.
Tucker thought it was a misstep on her part because Levi seemed perfectly happy to get any sort of attention from her. But then maybe that had been her point. Solo was smart enough to know she was at least part of the reason Green was here. They all needed to remember that.
Green sat back looking relaxed for a man in a prison cell, but then he’d spent the last several weeks in one. “What do you want to know? My life is an open book.”
His life was highly classified, and it was obvious that there were things not even Solo had been privy to. He believed her when she said she hadn’t known he’d worked for Green.
Rupert Milbern was seated on a bench that probably had been the site of many a spanking, a notepad in his hand. He’d taken off his jacket but not the tie he was wearing. He looked very British and important. “You could make it easy and tell us where the subject left the intelligence he stole from Kronberg.”
The German intelligence officer was sitting close to Dwyer. He was still in his full suit. He’d been the quietest of the three. “Yes, I don’t understand why we need all this drama. Mr. Dwyer has the date the intel went missing if that will help this fiasco along.”
“The dates are meaningless since I have no idea where…what should we call you?” Green asked in an amused voice, staring Tucker’s way.
“How about my name?” It was as good a place to start as any. His real name. It would be so odd to hear it. Would he recognize it? Or would it be one more meaningless fact that didn’t connect to him in any way? That was his real fear. He would hear the truth and it wouldn’t mean anything. “What’s my real name and why was I at Kronberg?”
“I don’t want to give away all my secrets,” Green said with a smirk. “After all, the sandwich here was much better than my last prison. Bologna is another form of torture. And the view is superlative.”
Ezra’s face had gone red because that last bit had been directed straight to Solo. “You can talk or I’ll make sure your view is of me waterboarding you. You like that, don’t you, Levi? Does the Agency know how you waterboard female operatives? Did you put that in your report? Or did you leave it out like the part where you shot me?”
It was a reminder of how much evil this man had done. Tucker had gotten the full report on how Green had treated Kayla Summers during a mission in Mexico. He’d had her waterboarded the same evening he’d put a bullet in Ezra and left him for dead. He’d been trying to find a way into The Garden at the time. At the time they’d thought he simply wanted access to the Lost Boys. Now it was easy to see what Green had wanted. Access to Tucker.
“In my defense, I wasn’t the one doing the torture part. I did question her, but I was gentle about it,” he said, affecting an air of innocence. “The nearly drowning her over and over was the drug lord’s part.”
“Who you were working with,” Solo pointed out.
“Allies can be found in the strangest places.” Levi’s head swung Tucker’s way. “Rather like I found you.”
“Where did you find me?” He needed answers. No matter where they led. “I wasn’t working for the CIA?”
“Heavens no. You were in the last year of your residency at a highly rated hospital,” Green explained.
He could feel the softness of the scrubs on his body, smell the fabric softener. He wore them pretty much everywhere. There wasn’t time to do much more than sleep when he wasn’t working. But it would all be worth it when he got home. He liked the city, but he missed the town he’d grown up in. He missed the way the mountains looked during wintertime.
“What hospital?” He shoved the memories away. They’d been there all day, playing and teasing at the edge of his mind. Tempting him. It would be better to view this all academically. He was investigating, nothing more.
“If I tell you what hospital you’ll send one of McKay-Taggart’s hackers in, and I might have missed something when I erased you from existence,” Levi said with a shrug. “You’re the special one, Tucker. You got erased twice. See, I went to the trouble of creating the Steven Reasor persona from top to bottom. Do you know how hard it is to create a person from nothing? It’s not like the old days. I get so sick of boomers telling me how easy millennials have it. You know what those bastards had to do when going undercover? Fake ID, fake a couple of basic records, and they were in. Now I have to deal with the fact that every single record is online, and I won’t even go into social media. Do you know how long it took me to fake those pictures of you summiting Everest?”
“We couldn’t find any evidence of me.” It wasn’t like they hadn’t all looked. They had facial recognition software scouring the web for any sign of him.
“McDonald erased Steven Reasor, and she did a damn fine job of it,” Levi revealed. “I mean she did it with the others too, but in Robert’s case he was in the military and her dad was on the Armed Services committee. That’s pretty powerful. But what she did to Reasor, being able to erase my work, well, that was impressive. Of course by that point in time she knew there was something smelly going on in her lab.”
“You’re going to string this out as long as you can,” Ezra said with a frown.
“I don’t think this is what we agreed to.” Arthur Dwyer looked up from his tablet. “He’s supposed to give us the data we need, not turn this into some kind of weeks long holiday. It’s important we do this quickly.”
Green groaned. “I told you this wouldn’t move fast. The data we need is stuck in Tucker’s head. He’s not going to simply remember if I tell him he’s from the Western United States and he was the valedictorian of his high school. Will explaining he came from a small town help him find that data? Though I will note that it made things way easier when it came to erasing him from existence. Hamilton High School was so easy to hack.”
Hamilton High. He’d been a year behind his brother. There was something funny about that because he was years younger than his brother, but he knew somehow that he’d been a junior when Ace was a senior. “Tell me my brother’s name. I know my mom called him Ace. I think that’s a nickname.”
Green’s eyes lit up. “There it is. You see, it’s coming back.”
He really had a brother. The thought made every muscle in his bod
y tense. Please let my brother be alive. “I want to know his name.”
Roni sat forward. “Are his parents alive? Do we know if he was married?”
Of course she would worry about that. He put a hand on her back. “I don’t think I was married, baby. I get flashes of someone who I think might be my mother, and I’ve had a vague recollection of a kid who I think is my brother, but there’s no girlfriend or wife in my head. Only you.”
“You can’t be sure though,” she whispered, gently biting her bottom lip. It was an easy tell that she was nervous.
“He wasn’t married, but that’s all I’m giving you. If I told you everything, then you wouldn’t need me anymore,” Levi mused. “I think I’ll keep those names to myself. But how about I do tell you that you were involved in this case for more than a paycheck. I didn’t have to give you the old ‘do it for your country’ speech. When you realized what I’d found out about Dr. McDonald, you would have done anything to bring her down.”
Green watched him expectantly, as though he should do something now.
But there was no whisper along his brain. There was nothing but that sense of something veiled in his head. Like his past was hiding right under the surface of the ocean and all he needed to do was swim to find it. But the fucking water was full of jellyfish waiting to sting him.
A soft hand covered his and he immediately relaxed. He glanced to his right and Roni was there, giving him an encouraging smile. He wasn’t alone.
It gave him the strength to turn back to Levi. “So you’re going to pepper this conversation with hints in order to tease my brain? Or is it torture? Because it feels a lot like torture.”
“Levi, you said you would cooperate.” Solo stood, glaring into the cell. “If you’re not going to, I can have Sparks take you home. I don’t think he’s left the country yet.”
“I am helping.” Green stood, walking to the cell bars and grasping them while he stared at Solo. “I told you it won’t work if I lay it all out to him like the plot to a movie. That’s not how the cure works. And you’re welcome for that. Ariel, could you explain this to them? I’m surprised Rebecca isn’t here treating her precious patient.”
Ariel looked to Solo. “Earlier today I received a couple of documents that supposedly make up the protocols surrounding the cure Dr. McDonald may or may not have created.”
“Why would I lie about that? You wound me, lovely Ariel.” Green put a hand to his heart in a dramatic gesture.
“I can wound you.” Robert offered the threat with a low drawl. “And none of us will let Rebecca around you. Not after what you did to her last time.”
A frustrated growl came from Green’s throat. “Again, not my idea. I didn’t kidnap her. Minions. You can’t find good ones these days, can you? But back to the issue at hand. The cure and its protocols were among the treasures we found at the former black ops site known as The Ranch.”
He felt his teeth grind. The Ranch had been their op. Jax had risked everything for that data and Green had swooped in to take it, leaving a swath of destruction in his path. “You stole that.”
Green shrugged. “You say potato and all that. Now, Ariel, what did the protocols require when the subject is in the first few weeks of transition?”
“To wake that part of the brain up, it’s suggested that the subject be allowed to recover the memories using hints of the truth,” Ariel admitted grudgingly. “What I believe the drug did was close off the pathways to long-term memory storage. It’s been suggested that even though the pathways are now clear, the brain has to relearn how to use it. To rewire itself. If we simply give Tucker the full story, his mind will work with whatever we say rather than what’s actually there. It’s why I agree this might have come from McDonald. It’s rather insidious. We could present Tucker with memories and he could potentially think they’re his. I believe this was McDonald’s endgame.”
The ramifications hit him hard and fast. Was this what she had been working toward? “She erases our memories fully and then she cures us, gives us new identities, and we don’t even know what existed before.”
“Was that what she was planning to do to you?” Roni asked.
“Maybe,” he replied.
“She wanted to create soldiers without ties to anyone but their commanding officers, and I believe she wanted to also create sleeper agents. He would be the perfect sleeper agent because he doesn’t ever know he is one,” Green agreed with what sounded like admiration. “She could rewrite a whole human life. Is that what you want me to do with Tucker here and now? Because if I fill this out like a report, he won’t have nuanced memory. He’ll have what I tell him.”
“I want to read those protocols,” Ezra announced. “Does Rebecca have them?”
“She’s already sent me her notes, and our friends have read them, too.” Ariel placed careful emphasis on the word friends to let him know exactly who she was talking about. The ones who definitely weren’t friendly.
“I agree that we should attempt to follow the prescribed treatment according to McDonald’s work,” Arthur said. “But her work was also incomplete. I have some thoughts on a few pharmaceuticals that could help the process along.”
“Yes.” The intelligence officer beside him nodded. “We’ve talked this over between the three of us and we agree this is the best route to take.”
Roni stood. “You are not giving him any drugs. Definitely not any drugs created at Kronberg. And we’re going to read everything that Mr. Green sent. I might not have Rebecca Walsh’s stature in the medical world, but I have a stake in this. And Tucker was an amazing doctor. He’s not an experiment.”
“I think reading Dr. McDonald’s scholarly works could help enormously,” Green agreed. “It’s one of the things I was going to suggest you do. But she did mention some drugs she thought could help the process along.”
“No drugs,” Roni insisted.
He reached up and laced their fingers together. He would likely do anything, risk anything, to get those memories back, but he wasn’t the only one making the decision. “No drugs.”
He could make this work.
“We won’t wait forever.” Rupert stood. “You should think about that. Arthur is offering you a way to speed this process up. The longer you wait, the less patience we all have, and don’t forget you have a friend in a holding cell. We can only keep him for so long before we turn him over to the proper authorities. It’s obvious to me this is going nowhere tonight. Hopefully tomorrow morning will yield better results.”
The German officer stood with him. “I agree. I think this is all a mistake. He shouldn’t be in civilian hands.”
Arthur seemed to understand the evening was over, too. “I will write up my suggestions and let you all read them. It’s ridiculous to discount what the drugs could do for him. Steven, when you’re ready to get serious, talk to me.”
They walked out the door. Solo stood, frustration evident in the set of her shoulders. “I’ll talk to them. You don’t have to take anything you don’t want to, Tucker. I’ll make that clear.”
Solo stalked out of the room, both Green and Ezra watching her the whole time.
Robert moved over, taking a place beside Tucker. “I promise I won’t let them near you with more drugs.”
“What did Rebecca say?” She was the expert. Roni would still make the final decision, but he thought they should listen to the doctor who was probably closest to McDonald’s research. Well, the closest one who could remember anything about it.
“She said she wouldn’t allow you to take anything manufactured at Kronberg,” Ariel replied.
“She doesn’t trust easily.” Green had to throw in his two cents. “I wonder if that was because she spent that night under the influence of the time dilation drugs. I think I have your notes on that experiment somewhere. I could be coaxed into sharing. How about it, Tucker?”
Shame washed over him. He didn’t even remember what he’d done to Rebecca and he already hated himself for it. What w
ould it be like to read his own notes on the subject?
Ezra moved in close to the cell, every movement predatory. “This is your game, isn’t it? You’re going to parse it out until there’s nothing left and that’s when you’ll strike. You’re a snake in the grass, waiting to sink your fangs in.”
Green didn’t back down. “Oh, I’ve been waiting for this particular game to start for years, Beck. Years. Do you understand the patience I’ve shown? Lesser men would have caved, would have blundered when it all fell apart. Not me. So yes, at the end of this I’m going to strike. But I assure you, you’ll get everything I promised. That intelligence will come out and we’ll move the game along. So what are you going to do about it, Beck? Ezra? Whatever you want to call yourself, you can’t get away from the fact that you weren’t strong enough to hold her.”
Ezra’s hands went through the bars and he pulled Levi roughly against them. “I held her just fine. I’m not the one moving heaven and earth to get her back. If I wanted her in my bed tonight, she would be there. You’re the one she doesn’t want.”
“If that’s true then why did I have her? She was good, you know. Solo’s good at everything, and sex is no different,” Levi replied with a smirk. “I will admit, it’s hard to not compare every single woman I fuck with her.”
“Ezra, please don’t kill him.” Ariel sounded like she was talking to a tiger who hadn’t decided to pounce or not.
“I can probably figure the whole backstory thing out myself,” Tucker offered. He would have slit Levi’s throat by now. “And the flooring looks pretty easy to clean.”
Robert gave him a nod. “If there’s one thing we’ve learned at McKay-Taggart, it’s to put down tarp if you’re on carpet. This is some well-sealed wood. Go for it, man.”
Ezra let go and took a step back. “He’s not worth it. But I swear if you say one more vile word about Solo, I’ll change my mind. Now you’re going to answer a few questions and you’re not going to play around.”
“But playing is so much fun.” Green seemed upset that he hadn’t gotten the fight he so obviously wanted. “Isn’t that what you all call it? Playing? I like to play.”
