Casca seemed determined to help. Still, without fully understanding whatever motivation was driving his newfound benefactor, Talon would keep his guard up. He planned to delve deeper into Casca’s background later but at the moment his first priority was tracking down Becky Oakes.
Traffic was light during the mid-afternoon hours and it didn’t take long for Talon to arrive at Becky’s apartment complex. He waited in front of the main entrance. As soon as the first person stepped out of the building, he used the opportunity to slip through the open door. If Becky was around, he hoped to catch her off guard and not give her a chance to cook up some cover story.
Becky lived on the third floor and Talon easily located her apartment. He determined that the door was unlocked – it didn’t bode well. Glock leading the way, he walked into the unit.
Broken furniture, overturned shelves and piles of computer books lay scattered on the floor. There was no sign of Becky. Did she escape in time, or was she now in the cult’s clutches?
His cellphone vibrated and Casca’s voice grew audible on his headset. “What’s the situation?”
“Looks like we’re running a few steps behind. They broke into her place and tore it apart. Girl’s not here.”
“This cult isn’t big on hiding the bodies. She could be laying low somewhere.”
“My feelings exactly.”
Talon studied the apartment, his eyes roaming. Who was Becky Oakes? Who were her friends? What would be her options, given what they knew about her?
“Any theories as to where she might be holed up?”
“My assistant is going through Ms. Oakes’ phone records as we speak.”
Once again Talon didn’t know if he should be impressed or worried about Casca’s ability to attain private information.
“Besides her boyfriend and parents, the one phone number that keeps coming up belongs to Janice Goldstein. They both interned at Google a few months ago. Judging from her social network activity, they’re best friends. Last call between them was two days ago.”
The day Michelle was murdered, Talon thought. If there had been any doubt about Becky’s involvement, this seemed to erase it. It was all beginning to make sense in his mind. In the wake of Michelle’s murder Becky had gone off the grid, ditching her phone and avoiding all social networks. That was wise — the people after her were computer wizards and could track her digital footprints.
Janice Goldstein was Talon’s best lead. With any luck she could lead him to Becky.
An hour later, he was staking out Janice’s workplace, some new app developer called Snapshut with offices on Freemont Street. Like Becky, Janice had recently graduated from intern to assistant. Most likely, she’d be working crazy hours. Talon knew he’d better brace himself for a long night.
He found a coffee shop facing the Snapshut offices and sipped on a cup of bitter black brew that set him back four bucks. The price made him cringe – what was happening to this country?
Keeping track of the steady flow of people on the sidewalks had a soothing, almost hypnotic effect on Talon. His new detail couldn’t have been more different from the arid monotony of Afghanistan.
As he kept watch, a Google bus pulled up to the curb and dropped off a boatload of Silicon Valley workers. They carried themselves in a casual and carefree manner, dressed like eternal teenagers with fat allowances. Distressed jeans, expensive sneakers and grungy t-shirts that all came with designer labels easily spotted by the knowing eye. Every one of them sported backpacks containing tablets or laptops.
Talon figured they’d been putting in some quality time in front of their computers during their air-conditioned commute. He’d read about the private shuttles that scooped up workers from their San Francisco neighborhoods and brought them to their Silicon Valley tech enclaves. Late at night the buses would return and so would the workers.
The tech elite had become shadows who barely participated in their local communities. The big companies provided food, haircuts, dental appointments, gym equipment, laundry, dry cleaning – there was no need to shop or interact locally. In many ways, companies like Omicron had already become cults that indoctrinated their disciples with an ideology designed to separate them both physically and psychologically from the rest of the world. Technology was their God and material success their salvation.
Janice suddenly emerged from her workplace. She headed straight for the coffee shop – just another part of her daily routine. A quick pick-me-up at the end of a long day. Phone cradled under her ear, she approached the barista.
Talon stealthily pointed his cell at her. He pulled up an app Casca had told him to download earlier and scanned the shop for Bluetooth signals. He selected Janice’s phone from the list and pressed “Force-Pair.” Once that was done, he pushed a button labeled “Install.Exe.” A bar filled the screen as his phone hacked into Janice’s.
By the time Janice grabbed her drink and left the café, the installation of the hacking program was complete. Talon followed while he listened in on Janice’s conversation. Her voice sounded concerned. Talon felt like a creep for spying on the woman’s private exchange.
When Janice addressed the other party on the line as Becky, however, Talon’s eyes widened with triumph. Judging from the phone number on his spy app, Becky wasn’t using her old cell. She had probably purchased a disposable phone with a prepaid SIM card. Smart girl. It sounded like she wanted to meet up with Janice at nearby Yerba Buena Garden.
Talon rushed toward his motorcycle. He would beat Janice to the rendezvous point.
Darkness encroached Yerba Buena Garden as his bike sidled up to the curb. The park covered two blocks with well-tended gardens and provided a much-needed escape from the hustle and bustle of San Francisco.
Talon combed the park and within minutes located Becky near the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Fountain. Spotlights inside the waterfall cast Becky in stark silhouette. Water gurgled as she paced up and down the shining slabs of glass inscribed with excerpts from Dr. King’s speeches.
Becky’s paranoid gaze swept the surrounding area and lingered on Talon. He sped up his approach and Becky turned on her heel, heading off in the opposite direction.
Shit! She’d made him.
As Becky surged up a nearby flight of stairs that led away from the fountain, Talon cranked up his pace. Had his over-eagerness betrayed him? Or was he not used to stalking targets within an American city?
Talon reached the top of the stairs and spotted Becky as she shot down a walkway.
She was crossing the next street when a black van zoomed toward her. Tires screeched as the van ground to a halt and the door was flung open. Two men decked out in black hoodies jumped out of the vehicle and snatched a shocked Becky. She immediately went limp in the kidnappers’ arms and Talon realized that they must’ve Tasered her. Bastards! The hooded abductors whisked Becky’s convulsing form into the van.
Talon considered his options. He could pull his gun and prevent them from getting away, but his rescue attempt was liable to backfire. There were too many witnesses, not to mention the possibility of the cops showing up before he could question Becky’s attackers.
Talon opted to follow the van instead. He’d deal with them in a more private setting. Nevertheless, he experienced a twinge of anxiety as the doors slammed shut and the vehicle burned rubber. If he lost them and something happened to Becky, her death would be on his conscience.
Talon rushed back to his motorcycle, eyes trailing the black van as it rounded the park. Seconds later, he eased into traffic and picked up the chase. He kept a safe distance but never lost sight of the vehicle in front of him. Talon prayed that Becky’s captors wouldn’t harm her in transit.
Hopefully he’d made the right call. A vision of dead Michelle popped into his mind, and this only sharpened his focus. He wouldn’t let these freaks get away with murder a second time.
He trailed the van for half an hour until it finally pulled up to a sleek, expensive-looking house. It wa
s one of the growing numbers of eco-homes that were in vogue in the Bay Area: oblong windows, high-quality wood, solar panels and plants on the roof. The low-impact materials were designed to reduce the home’s carbon footprint.
Whoever lived here wasn’t hurting financially, that was for sure.
The van rolled up the driveway and into the garage. Talon slowed down. His lips twisted into a merciless smile and his soul turned to ice. He was looking forward to getting better acquainted with Becky’s abductors.
CHAPTER EIGHT
BECKY OAKES EYED her kidnappers inside the moving van and knew she was staring at her future murderers. Her body ached and throbbed and she could barely move, muscles useless in the wake of the vicious Taser attack. When her abductors first snatched her, Becky had recognized one of them. His name was Jeff and he was a star engineer at Omicron. She suspected that the other men were her fellow co-workers, too. What had happened to these programmers to make them turn into cold-blooded killers?
She’d been asking herself that question since the moment she first walked into Omicron’s assembly hall and witnessed a murder unspooling on the HD jumbo screen. Her boyfriend George was one of the coders in the auditorium, busily programming away as Zagan dominated the horror show onstage. Seeing he beau as an indifferent witness to the slaughter shattered her world and wounded her to the core.
To be fair, their relationship had been falling apart for some time now. George had become cold and they stopped making love. At first she assumed he might be dating someone else and the distancing was his passive-aggressive way of working up to an official break-up. But it soon became clear that something far more disturbing was unfolding here.
One clue was the strange binary tattoo on George’s forearm; a tattoo she noticed on a growing number of tech workers at Omicron. Becky confronted George about the tattoo, but this only pushed him away. He stopped calling her and soon she only saw him at work, when it couldn’t be avoided.
Their relationship was over. So what possessed her to follow her ex into the main auditorium that fateful night, when she was working late? The presence of guards near the doors of the assembly hall made her frown. Fortunately, she knew of a back way that led to the auditorium’s balcony.
Giving in to curiosity, she made a go for the less-guarded second entrance.
This turned out to be the biggest mistake of her life.
After witnessing that monstrous scene inside the auditorium, she found herself at a loss. What should she do? Who could she reach out to for help? She feared that if she went to the cops they would laugh at her and word would soon get back to Omicron. Who knew what might happen if her colleagues realized she had witnessed their crime. Nothing good, that was for certain.
A day later George committed suicide and obviously this news rattled her further. The man she’d started dating three months ago was full of life and hope for the future. Like many of the young computer talents in start-up land, George was driven and empowered by a sense of manifest destiny. He was going to play his role in shaping the technologies of the world to come. The George she knew was a far cry from the man who took a dive off the Golden Gate Bridge.
Becky’s first sign of hope came when Michelle rang her and wanted to talk about George’s suicide. It didn’t take much convincing for her to break down and spill her story. But somehow the cult found out about the meeting. And now they’d found her.
The van stopped and the door was opened. Rough hands reached for her and she felt herself being dragged out of the parked van and into a garage. She fought back weakly but her muscles were still recovering from being zapped by the Taser. Once inside the living area, one of the kidnappers switched on the recessed lights, revealing a tastefully decorated home. Incongruously, a plastic tarp had been laid out over the hardwood floor in anticipation of Becky’s arrival.
The three hooded men hefted Becky’s limp body onto the plastic and her eyes grew wet with terror. She held no illusions about what was going to happen next. The news stories about Michelle’s grisly murder popped into her mind. All she could do now was pray that the end would be swift and relatively painless.
The ring of urban monks slipped on their robotic skull-masks and whipped out their knives.
“Please you don’t have to do this-”
One of the cultists taped her mouth shut with duct tape, silencing her.
Oh God, let it be over soon…
The blades drew closer. Becky closed her eyes.
And that’s when the van’s alarm shattered the silence of the sleepy nighttime neighborhood outside.
***
The glass-paneled front door swung open and one of the hooded kidnappers emerged from the eco-house. Without the intimidating robot mask, his harmless countenance stood in sharp contrast to the brutal act he’d been ready to commit moments earlier. He stalked up to the SUV and killed the alarm.
Talon lurked in the thick bushes that lined the driveway. Features hidden by a black balaclava, hands covered in leather gloves, silencer mated with his Glock. The moment the cult member turned his back on him, he darted into the open home.
Outside, the cultist finished his inspection. Reassured that no car thief was hanging around the property, he headed back into the house. As soon as he closed the door, Talon’s gloved hand reached for his throat from the dead corner of the door. He wrenched the man‘s neck back with a bone-snapping crack and caught the lifeless body before it could slump to the ground.
Without making a sound, Talon lowered the cultist to the floor and edged deeper into the house.
The other cultists never turned around as Talon stepped into the living room. Their attention was entirely devoted to the upcoming blood sacrifice.
Talon met Becky’s terrified gaze.
The two men must have read the change in their victim’s expression, because they finally spun around. Talon never blinked as he fed the first cult member two bullets.
The robotic mask erupted in a hail of fiberglass, blood and brain matter, the bullet punching out a fist-sized exit wound.
The cultists hit the tarp and painted it red. Only muffled sounds emanated from beneath the duct tape covering Becky’s mouth.
The third cultist faced Talon, blade up, aware that he stood no chance against the Glock aimed at him.
“Drop the knife and you’ll live,” Talon said.
He was lying.
They’d forfeited their lives when they murdered Michelle. Talon was merely hoping to interrogate the last man before permitting him to join his two buddies in hell.
Talon was a soldier, not a vigilante. He’d killed his share of terrorists and enemy combatants but didn’t go around taking out civilians, much less Americans. But he felt zero regret about showing these two bastards the high cost of war.
The cultist straightened and uttered a few words in a language Talon didn’t comprehend. Whoever was hiding behind that freaky mask was smart enough to know that you didn’t bring a knife to a gunfight. Nevertheless, what he did next caught Talon off guard. Without hesitation, the man drove his own blade through the bottom of his jaw, straight into the base of his brain. He collapsed in a writhing mass of gushing red.
Talon could’ve put him out of his twitching misery with a quick bullet to the heart, but the Delta Operator was fresh out of mercy. Talon watched in silence as the man drowned in his own blood.
CHAPTER NINE
BECKY FACED TALON and her haunted eyes blinked back tears. The woman was in shock, shutting down. Who could blame her? Minutes earlier she’d stared down certain death. Now she sat at the oak dining-room table in the adjoining kitchen, eyes fixed on nothing.
Talon wished he could offer her some coffee or a drink to settle her nerves, but the risk of leaving circumstantial evidence behind was too high. Better if they got out of here as soon as possible. Talon doubted that the neighbors had heard anything that would make them call the cops, but why press his luck?
Appraising Becky’s condition, he concluded tha
t she was in no state for a ride on his motorcycle. Talon called Casca and the billionaire picked up on the second ring.
“How did it go?” he asked.
“Becky is safe and the cult is three members short.”
“Didn’t want to spare at least one for questioning?”
“I tried, but he wouldn’t play ball.”
“Where are you?”
“Still at the house. I could use a pickup.”
“I’m sending a car from my downtown office. Expect them to arrive within minutes.”
Casca clicked off. Talon’s gaze shifted to the quivering woman. He removed his balaclava. The poor girl needed to see a human face, not another masked assassin. Becky didn’t strike him as the type that would repay her rescuer by picking him out of a police lineup.
“Who are you?” she asked.
Talon considered how to answer. He could be the one asking the questions and risk Becky retreating into her own bubble. Or he could tell the truth and hopefully earn her cooperation. Talon opted for the second approach.
“Mark. I’m Michelle’s boyfriend.”
It took a moment for the words to register. A tear trickled down Becky’s cheek as the pieces clicked together in her mind. “I’m so sorry. It’s all my fault. If I hadn’t contacted her…”
She broke off.
“Tell me what you know,” Talon said.
Becky complied. In a halting voice that gained confidence as Becky went deeper into her terrible ordeal, she recounted what she’d witnessed at Omicron. When she reached the part where she contacted Michele, Talon interrupted. “How’d the cult find out you were talking to the press?”
“I’m not sure. After I told Michelle what I experienced, she asked me to get some tangible evidence. Without proof she wouldn’t dare run my story. I needed to bring her something that we could take to the cops. I never got a chance.”
Occult Assassin: Damnation Code (Book 1) Page 6
