Nike's Wings

by Valerie Douglas

  He would have, if he’d known.

  His heart tightened and his jaw clenched.

  Buck glanced at him.

  “The video…it’s difficult to watch,” Byron said, his voice tight and thick.

  Reading the file had been hard enough. It had been one thing to imagine, another to look at that girl as they tormented her… Byron had felt ill, as he’d watched it.

  Victor Torrance had been and still was a brilliant behavioral psychologist, an expert in his field, but he was cold, which made him an excellent researcher.

  As long as you weren’t one of his test subjects.

  Nor had Callie Martin been Torrance’s only victim; she’d just been the first of many. She’d merely been the initial experiment upon which all the others had been based. Each of the others had been carefully selected based on what they had learned from her. They’d experimented on her extensively, learning what worked and what didn’t, before they’d applied it to the others.

  It wasn’t simply difficult. It was horrible to watch.

  He had difficulty understanding how the men who’d worked for Torrance could have done it. It was another form of torture, and he wondered what it had done to them to do it.

  Ty hadn’t been there for her then, he wouldn’t turn away now. He needed to know exactly what they’d done, what had turned bright sweet Callie into stoic Nike. He would stand as witness to it.

  “You know they considered you for their program, Ty?” Byron said suddenly.

  Looking out onto darkness, Ty nodded. He hadn’t missed that. He looked down at the page.

  After Qatar.

  Like the others they’d chosen, the men who’d been damaged by the war, by what had been done to them, by what they’d seen. Like Niki…Callie…

  Buck glanced at him in shock until Ty passed him the next page.

  According to the records they’d decided Ty wouldn’t have made a good subject…his ideology didn’t match their criteria – something they’d learned from Callie. Torrance had felt that that, along with Ty’s experience in the field, would have been too difficult to overcome.

  “Just so you know, I have, with the Secretary’s permission,” Byron said, “launched an investigation into the DIU, Direct Intelligence Unit, or Dies Irae, as Torrance called it. The Day of Wrath. His vision of revenge for what was done on 9/11.”

  Ty kept reading as the video played, then stopped and looked up at the screen, unable to turn away. Voices shouted… His chest went tight as memories burned through his mind.

  The girl in the video was so much thinner than he remembered, but something of the Callie he recalled was there in her green eyes. The softness and the sweet innocence was long gone, though. Both had been stripped away. His heart ached to see it, to know that, however inadvertently, he and Buck had left her there to lose them brutally, forever. In the video she had a watchfulness to her gaze…a wariness.

  Her conditioning had started almost from the first moment she’d arrived at Torrance’s compound.

  Almost all clandestine officers who served overseas in high risk areas – if they weren’t post-military, having been given similar training already – went through some training in coercive techniques to prepare them in case of capture. That included simulated water-boarding, sleep deprivation, forced positions, pushing the limits of what each person could endure. Not so that they could defeat it, that wasn’t possible – every human being had physical limits – but so they could hold out as long as they could, giving any possible rescue time to arrive.

  As Ty himself now knew, there was a difference between training and reality. As intensive as the training might be, some intrinsic part of you was aware that the trainer wasn’t seriously trying to kill you, however tough it might seem at the time. You might doubt it sometimes, but some part of you clung to that fact. It was an entirely different order of reality to experience it for real, when they did want to hurt you, when they didn’t care if you lived or died, and might even have welcomed it if you had.

  It took a different kind of human being to want to do harm to another, to willingly turn another sentient being into a thing, to demonize them, to find a sense of satisfaction in inducing pain and suffering to such a level that you broke them down until you shattered them.

  Niki…Callie…hadn’t needed the training. She’d experienced it for real, and then had been plunged into the simulated version.

  It was a new and different kind of torture, pure and simple. For her it would have been like reliving it all over again, only at the hands of those she trusted. Until trust broke down. They would have known that. From the psychiatrist’s reports, they would have known exactly what it would do to her. Ty couldn’t imagine going through that after what he’d been through. If she hadn’t been damaged by then she almost certainly would have been by the time they were finished with her.

  Every hint of emotion in her had been discouraged or ruthlessly squashed. They’d even used sensory deprivation, locking her into a darkness where she couldn’t escape the memories, where she would relive them in one way even while they forced her to relive them in another.

  On the video, they dragged her from her quarters, kicking and fighting, stripped her bare before all of them… There was no prurience to it…, but even so she was naked, exposed… She maintained her pride, made no effort to cover herself…refusing to be shamed by them.

  Ty’s jaw tightened until he had a headache. He had to force himself to continue watching.

  He remembered how she’d flinched at his words in the park, and how she’d held him that morning in Austin, how she’d touched him. When she’d asked him to touch her, trembling. To touch the scars that had been put on her… And what had come after, her mouth beneath his, her body against his.

  It was terrible and heartbreaking to watch what they did to her. Watching as they hurt her… As they bound her, poured water over the cloth covering her face. Her body shuddered, twisted as she fought to breathe... As she stumbled from lack of sleep… As they battered her…forced her to kneel, to crouch… As they heaped degradation, humiliation on her…knowing all too well what it had been like to be on the receiving end.

  And these people were supposed to be on his side. Their side. Her side.

  Once this had been training for high-risk service members, those who might be caught by the enemy, using the enemy’s techniques to prepare them for capture. Techniques like these had been used to startling effect on men in Korea, to break them down, coerce them into false confessions.

  Here it was just used to break down the individual.

  In the video, there were no tattoos to hide her scars. Those on her back were clear and defined, starkly white on her faintly golden skin.

  On the screen, her green eyes glared steadily, defiantly. She wouldn’t break…

  Then they locked her alone in the dark, into the silence…into her thoughts, her memories… her nightmares.

  A soft voice spoke, nearly sub-audible… Victor Torrance’s voice, whispering of horrors, reminding her of what had been done to her in Santiago’s camp… Everything that he’d learned during his ‘therapy sessions’ with her.

  Ty’s throat tightened as he looked over the file. His chest was tight… Niki… Sweet innocent Callie… What they had done to her…?

  Qatar.

  They hadn’t told her who it was that she went in after, but her orders had been clear. If she couldn’t get him out, she wasn’t to leave him in the hands of the terrorists. He wasn’t to ‘be allowed to suffer’ as she had at all and any cost.

  Ty knew the moment when Buck stopped reading and why.

  His voice soft, his words melodic, Buck swore softly but eloquently in Spanish, before he looked at Ty.

  Those words… She’d been ordered to kill him – subtly, but the order, the suggestion, was there.

  Looking at Buck, Ty nodded. He knew.

  It was chilling.

  Ty flipped through the pages, grimly. He handed Buck the next page.r />
  Going still, Buck looked at him. His friend and partner took a breath.

  “No, Ty,” Buck said, looking at him. “They may have wanted her to do it, may have ordered her to, but she told me she wouldn’t. She didn’t know who you were when they sent her in, but she told me herself she wouldn’t do it.”

  Buck paused. “Before she even went in.”

  Ty closed his eyes.

  It was torture of another kind for Ty to go through this, remembering her joy, the slow blossoming, that night in the honky-tonk bar and her laughter…

  Somehow Callie had held against it, against them. She hadn’t broken, not completely. Some part of her remained intact.

  “They want her back,” Byron said. “Torrance wants her back.”

  From the file it was clear that it had frustrated and infuriated Torrance that he hadn’t been completely successful with her. He wanted another crack at her.

  Just the idea chilled Ty, sickened him.

  “Given her skills? Of course, Torrance wants her back. And she quit. She left. Torrance doesn’t suffer failure well.”

  Listening to her talk on the tape about what Santiago and then her own government had done to her, Ty wanted to punch something or someone.

  He’d left her there…and here.

  Someone was playing with them.

  Outside the velvet summer night had closed around the building, the air outside still warm and humid compared to the artificial cold within. The lights of the city drowned out the stars. Ty stared out instead at the streaming lights of cars and buses on the streets below.

  Fate had never given Callie a chance. It had delivered her first into the hands of Santiago and then Torrance. Alone, she’d somehow survived, had fought, tried to find a way to survive. Even without the file, Ty knew the abuse she’d suffered, the degradations, the things she’d likely done and been forced to do to survive. After all, he’d survived them himself.

  Something was missing, though. He went back through the pages, quickly.

  Despite it all she’d never betrayed him. Not once. She’d told no one of the night they’d shared. It had been and remained their secret. He wished he could express his pain and fury as beautifully as Buck did. It just sounded better to swear in Spanish.

  He looked at Buck and their eyes met in mutual understanding.

  “Where is she now?” Ty asked. “Does anyone know?”

  He reached in his pocket for his phone, to call her, to try to find her…

  Byron said, “On assignment… We had a request to put Alpha on standby while you were in Texas. I approved it, postponing any decisions until we discussed the situation with Elizabeth.”

  Something inside Ty went still and quiet as he looked at Byron, knowing the other man truly didn’t understand what had been done. Not as Ty did.

  Callie… Niki…had been programmed as a suicide bomber of sorts. They’d stripped everything away from her systematically – home, family, emotions, hope – until there was only duty, until all she had was that, and what she could do…

  He’d watched her open up to trust, to hope. She’d blossomed in front of his eyes, Galatea turning from marble to flesh…for love… In memory he felt her yield to him again, move beneath him. He was buried inside her as she looked up at him in wonder. Giving her maidenhead to him again, as archaic as that sounded, although he’d already taken it.

  Ty closed his eyes, remembering the expression on her face as they’d stood on the Mall, so still…so bleak… He remembered watching her slide the glasses back over her eyes, disappearing behind them once again, and ached.

  He’d been angry. She should have told him who she was…

  Now he understood why she hadn’t. The shame she’d wanted to hide. He understood that all too well, remembering that morning in Texas…and what she’d given back to him.

  They’d stripped everything away from her again. In the face of the Secretary and Byron, in the face of his own hurt…they’d left her alone. Abandoned her. Until there was only duty left. The next mission.

  “Byron?” he said, cautiously. “Where is she?”

  Byron heard something in Ty’s voice…and understanding dawned. His breath caught, too.

  Dear God, he thought.

  “If they reached her then she’s on her way to the Carolina border with Alpha,” Byron said, slowly, carefully. “The Stem Cell Bomber the newspapers reported? The one that blew up the lab? The local LEO think they’ve found him in the mountains there. Word came through earlier, asking for Niki and Alpha ASAP. Since we hadn’t talked and Elizabeth hadn’t specifically requested Nike’s removal from the NIO yet, I gave permission.”

  Ty went cold.

  He thought of everything he knew of Niki, of everything he’d read, of what they’d done to her and reached for his phone. His eyes on Byron, he called NIO headquarters.

  “Has the team left for the Carolinas?” Ty asked.

  “Sure has, boss,” Toby said, “with Byron’s approval.”

  “Is the chopper back?” he asked.

  Ty could almost hear Toby’s sudden concern through the phone. He’d picked up on something in Ty’s voice.

  Bewildered, Toby said. “Not yet, Ty, he just dropped them off.”

  “Call up the other helo,” Ty said. “Call Alan in. If he’s not available, have Mark hold until we get there.”

  Buck was already moving, running to get the car…

  “I’ll need radio and visual feeds,” Ty said to Toby with a nod of his head to Byron as he followed Buck out the door.

  He closed the phone.

  As much as he wanted to, as worried as he was, he couldn’t call off the response now that it had been made. People’s lives were in danger. Contacting Niki or Mitch now was only liable to make the situation worse. She was the best of the best. If nothing else, Niki was a professional. She’d never risk the life of another. Herself, yes. Someone else? Mitch? Brad, Andy? Never.

  That was there in her file as well, confounding Victor Torrance. She wouldn’t risk innocent lives, had gone back time and again to help.

  He had to let it play out.

  The one thing Ty hadn’t failed to notice, throughout the file, was that no matter what they’d done to her, no matter how hard they pressed, she’d never once spoken of what had passed between them that long ago night. She spoke of them coming to the camp, of his kindness to her – he closed his eyes at that, wincing internally, his heart aching as he remembered the expression on her face – and of their return to the camp while she was forced to watch, but not that. She’d only asked, repeatedly, whether he, or he and Buck, had been told she’d survived. Through pain and isolation, she’d kept that one secret.

  Fear for her ran through him, though.

  Alone, abandoned again, there was the chance she was looking to die, to find peace at long last. He hoped he was wrong. He dreaded what he’d find when they got there.

  Buck drove like a madman to get them to Headquarters.

  “Martin’s on his way, Ty,” Toby said as Ty walked in the doors, following as Ty went to the armory. “The team is on site. They’re still negotiating with those inside, trying to get the women and children out if they can before anyone moves in.”

  It was a small blessing, but Ty would take it. It gave him time.

  Callie. Niki. Whatever her name, it didn’t matter. He had to talk to her, to see her…touch her, hold her again. And tell her that this time he wouldn’t leave her… That he loved her, and he wouldn’t leave her alone again.

  All he could do, though, was wait.

  Chapter Thirty One

  It wasn’t hard to determine where Alpha was headed, the woods of the North Carolina-South Carolina border beneath them were garishly lit by the flashing lights of police cars and imported high intensity construction lights. They could see a cluster of those lights, and from a distance in the darkness they could also see more lights scattered in a perimeter around the area.

  The local authorities had ele
cted to bring them down in the new high school football field. The nearby parking lot was lit by standing poles with bright orange sodium vapor lights, providing a landmark. A big police SUV waited to greet them, its lights flashing.

  It was still a little funny for Mitch to watch a cop’s face as Niki went to meet him, obviously a little startled as most men were by her, not used to seeing someone her size ready to kick ass and take names.

  Mitch had always suspected that was why she dressed the way she did, in boots, leather and tats, putting everything out there in their faces where they couldn’t ignore them or her.

  He remembered a moron on one operation who’d challenged her to an arm wrestling contest.

  The man had been massive, ripped, muscled and belligerent, with arms like hams, a classic case of ‘roid rage.

  Everyone had been astonished when she’d agreed, and they’d sat down at the table, the big guy straddling his chair, leaning to get his arm in just the right position. He’d been grinning, happily anticipating crushing her.

  As she’d sat she’d snapped a hard sharp kick into the guy’s ‘nads, exposed by his stance in the chair and then she watched him topple from his seat dispassionately.

  She’d cocked her head at him and said evenly, “I’m small, not stupid,” before she’d walked out.

  They reached the command center.

  Nike strode through the cops, flanked by their escort, peripherally aware of heads turning as she walked past with Mitch and the team at her back.

  She held her out one hand.

  “Agent Nike Tallent, NIO,” she said, holding up her ID with the other, her voice flat. “This is my team.”

  Something inside Mitch went cold as she introduced them. Nike, not Niki.

  What the hell?

  She’d been characteristically quiet the whole trip, staring out the doors of the helicopter. Something was wrong, but Mitch hadn’t felt he could pry. This, though, was the old Nike, contained, cool, reserved. Withdrawn. He didn’t know what had changed, but he didn’t like it.

  Nothing showed on his face, though, as he shot a glance at Andy and Brad. Both gave him a look back, disquiet in their eyes.