Aaron shook his hand in pain and looked at Diane. “You all right?”
Her voice creaked. “I think so. You?”
He flexed his fingers and a hot jolt raced up his arm. “I think I broke my hand on that bastard’s jaw.”
Diane pointed to the motionless pile of olive drab. “Is he… is he dead?”
Aaron turned and looked at Rambo, her snow-white fur now stained blood red. “Not yet.”
He bent down, picked the Colonel's gun off the floor and tucked it in his waistband, behind his back. He went over to where Rambo lay, knelt and looked at the cat's inert form, a small lump rose in his throat and a very large wave of burning rage washed over his heart.
You bastard!
Regaining partial control of his emotions, He shuddered as he gently lifted Rambo’s motionless form, holding her in one over-sized hand.
How could he do that to a defenseless animal!
His face a chiseled mask of suppressed fury, he carried Rambo to where Diane and Brent stood silently staring in shock and disbelief.
“Aaron, I’m so sorry.” Diane said, small tears now rolling down her face. “I can't believe he shot her.”
Giving the tiny, bloodstained creature to Diane, he went back to where Freemont lay. Grabbing him by the hair, Aaron jerked his head up and slapped Freemont awake. He hissed at the semi-conscious man. “Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t kill you right now.”
Anticipating the man’s silence, he pulled the gun out of this belt and placed the business end against Freemont’s forehead.
Diane gasped. “Hold it Aaron. You don't want to do this.”
The metallic click thundered in his head as he cocked the hammer. “I don’t?”
Diane’s pleading voice barely penetrated the red mist thickening before his eyes. “Aaron, listen to me. If you shoot him, it’s murder.”
His hand griped the pistol tighter as he fought for control.
I’ve killed enemies before. This is no different.
Blood roaring in his ears, he eased the trigger back. As he waited for the hammer to fall, a bright light appeared before his eyes, the incandescent glow gathering in intensity. In the center of the brilliant expanse, he saw Heather’s face. She spoke to his mind and her words required no voice. “My love, you are better than this.”
His finger eased off the trigger and she smiled, her radiance enveloping him in a warm softness he never wanted to leave. He blinked and she vanished as quickly as she appeared.
His mind now clear, he took a deep, calming breath, turning his attention back to Freemont. “You have two choices. You can tell me everything you know about where Jennifer Ryan is, or I can make you pay for what you did to my little friend over there. It’s your call.”
The man facing the firearm sat motionless, his chin set in smug defiance. “You wouldn't dare shoot an officer.”
Diane screamed as the windows shook with the sound of the blast.
Chapter Twenty-Two
The Sodium Amytal hit Jenny’s weakened body like a rolling shockwave. Her anxiety melted away and her fragile stomach relaxed as the edges of the room began to close in on her in pink and purple waves. She struggled against her mental bonds, forced to watch in morbid fascination as her world began to stretch and warp. Her surroundings turned into a grotesque canvass painted from a palette of Silly-Putty. Without warning or wanting, sleep washed over her like ocean waves.
Her interrogators watched over her like concerned parents, waiting for the window to open. It took only minutes.
Head lolling from side to side, random flashes of disconnected memory played on the big screen of her mind like movie trailers. Into the rapidly-collapsing black hole of this drug-induced haze, a sound penetrated her increasingly random thoughts. She chased the sound through the maze of her mind. The ‘Will-o-the Wisp’ voice darted to and fro across her consciousness, letting her mental fingers draw close but never quite grasping it.
“Doctor Ryan, can you hear me?” the voice asked.
She willed herself to answer, but she could muster no sound.
The voice grew little louder, more insistent. “Doctor Ryan, can you hear me?”
She heard herself speak, but almost didn’t recognize her own voice, the words sounding so dreamy and distant.
“Yes, I can hear you. You don't have to shout.”
She opened her eyes to small slits. The faces looking down at her seemed to melt and blend in quick succession, first one man and a woman, then several of each. She could see them, but couldn't concentrate long enough to keep the images from dancing before her eyes.
At Clark’s insistence, Trish tied Jenny’s hands and feet to the bed frame, and the two prepared to start the interrogation.
The drugs left her quite pliable and Trish took Jenny on a wild roller coaster ride through her emotions and fears.
She was back at the lab…and she was late.
Jack will be here soon. Maybe it would be better if I met him at his office, keep him out of the lab.
She remembered testing the battery and congratulating herself. Just as she basked in the afterglow of her success, the sequence of events jumped forward in her mind.
I forgot my keys in my coat. Better go get them.
Pushing the door open, she remembered the feeling of unease washing over her, that creeping sensation of being watched. The fear took hold, spreading through her as she entered the lab. Her stomach clenched into a tight knot. She heard a noise. Someone’s here!
Her mind reeled at the images and produced a blood-curdling scream, but it never left her lips. Clark watched her cringe as her fear vaulted. Slowly responding to Trish’s voice and direction, she shivered and shook.
“It’s okay. We’re here to help,” Trish’s comforting words reached her, making her fears diminish. “Just tell us what we want to know and it all will be over.”
“The project will be safe?”
Trish nodded at Clark, winking.
“Yes. The project will be safe.”
“It’s so dangerous. I just wanted to help people.”
“Just tell me what I want to know and I’ll make sure your project is safe.”
“And then I can go home?”
“Yes. Then you can go home.”
The floodgate of her psyche opened and her captor rode the wave like the ‘Big Kahuna’.
“Now she’s ours.” Trish said.
After Jenny stopped her violent trembling and could speak again, the two began questioning her in earnest.
Walking around the right side of the bed and up to the head, Trish looked down at her captive. “Dr. Ryan, I want you to listen carefully, this is very important,”
In her drugged state, it took the scientist several seconds to connect just enough brain cells to respond. “Okay.”
Trish exercised a drug-induced control over the terrified woman and caused her to relate all the details of the Ever-cell project. Two hours later, they knew more about the good doctor than she knew about herself. Trish and Clark immediately came to the same conclusion.
“Murphy isn’t smart enough to come up with this operation on his own,” he said. “If he were, Ryan would already be dead…so he must work for Temple. It’s the only explanation that fits.”
“So, revered leader, what now?” Trish taunted him, as if she didn't already know the answer.
Chapter Twenty-Three
As gray traces of dawn pushed the darkness over the western horizon, Kelly Ingersol stepped from the warmth of her car. She paused next to the dented, rusting subcompact for a long moment before stretching like a waking cat, her sore muscles aching.
She crossed the frozen street, taking care not to slip on the ice beneath her garish platform shoes.
I won’t miss this place. She thought grimly, looking at the window of her apartment three floors above.
The dilapidated red brick building, pollution staining its façade with liquid trails of black and grey, stood reaching into the over
cast sky. Once an affluent section of Frankfurt, Germany, the shift of post-war economics and growing government apathy had left only a blight of urban poverty to replace the thriving residential area.
Taken over by the wraiths of the night, the neighborhood was now so dangerous only hookers, addicts and transients dared trod the streets after dark. Kelly saw their pitiful forms still filled the sidewalks and stalked the shadows on this cold, early morning.
She sidestepped the filthy man passed out in the entry alcove, empty bourbon bottle at his side, and made her way up to the landing. As she approached, the heavy wooden doors suddenly burst open and a tall, heavy-set man shouldered her out of his way as he rushed toward the parking lot. Face covered against the cold wind by a white Cashmere scarf, he looked up and down the empty street several times before crossing.
Alarm chirping, he folded himself into a bright red Mercedes hidden at the back of the lot. The expensive convertible, tucked out of casual sight among a long row of scrap yard refugees, roared to life. Putting the car in gear, the unidentified man sped away, darting down the street in an explosion of flying ice and snow.
Feeling a little guilty, are we?
She chided him as he fled past, shaking her head in evident disgust.
Better get home to the wife…wouldn’t want her to know you’ve been out playing with the naughty girls…or boys.
Climbing the stairs, she unlocked the door to her tiny room in the rundown pension and dropped her purse on a three-legged table standing in the corner.
First order of business, one long hot shower.
The water’s heat penetrated her naked body like a soothing balm, easing her restless thoughts as it unwound her tight muscles.
It’s almost over. After all this time, it’s over. I can finally relax…almost.
She turned off the shower and began to towel herself dry. Looking at her reflection in a cracked mirror on the back of the bathroom door, she eyed the bruises on her shapely body. The ugly purple spots covered her lithe form in a dappled trail from her firm breasts, down the soft curves of thighs, before ending in wide discolored rings around her ankles.
“That asshole!” She muttered incredulously to the otherwise empty room. “Just look at me!”
She was still sore from the beating she’d suffered at the hands of her ‘client’. A former East German Army Major- turned arms dealer, he liked to treat his women rough and she had to play along, enduring his foul brutality on several revolting occasions. Despite the man's vulgar sexual appetites, she found him useful. She didn't feel the least bit guilty about duping him into arranging a shipment of weapons to a group of Columbian rebels, then absconding with the three million dollar payoff.
The rebels would use the weapons to fight the drug cartels, clearly a good thing, and I get rich in the process.
Seeing her reflection again, she emitted a small mordant chuckle, realizing the small contusions made it appear as if her entire body had been dusted for fingerprints.
Returning to the only other room of her cramped accommodations, she heaved a heavy sigh. God, I can’t wait to get out of this dump and go home!
As she began to dress, she noticed how good it felt to wear panties again. Her realistic disguise as a high-priced call girl had been very effective in snaring her perverted target. She was glad to be rid of both it and him.
I can’t believe it’s been three months already.
She smiled inwardly as she remembered the way they parted company the previous day; her with a fortune in a numbered account, and him unconscious, tied to his bed.
The housekeeper will find him in a few hours, but by then I’ll be long gone.
She dropped a small leather suitcase on the threadbare floral bedspread. She turned on an obsolete T.V. sitting on a makeshift stand and half-listened to the English-language news broadcast as she packed her few remaining possessions.
Her eyes settled on a cheap painting hanging next to the wall heater. Hardly fine art, the two-foot square canvass depicted a rolling field, the hills of green grass broken by small multi-colored flowers. She stared at it for several seconds, the scene so typical of the countryside of Central Germany as to be cliché.
Lifting the ugly painting off the wall, she reached into the ragged hole in the plaster it disguised and removed a small plastic box. She lifted the lid and dumped the contents on the bed.
Her American Passport and several hundred dollars in U.S. currency joined the cosmetics already in her clutch-style purse.
Thinking about how she was going to spend her new fortune, she erased every trace of her existence from the tiny hovel. The cable news reports flowed in one ear and out the other as she decided which items she would take home and which she would throw out along the way to the Frankfurt airport. Anything even remotely connected to her false identity, including her alter-ego’s hooker-esque wardrobe, would disappear completely, right down to the spare sets of false eyelashes.
It’s finally over. I’m going home. I get to be me again…instead of Bianca the French whore.
As Bianca, Kelly had met, then seduced, Major Franz Koblenzic and her performance had been Oscar-worthy. In her Bianca persona, she could do and be things without remorse…without conscience. She had enjoyed the fancy cocktail parties and restaurant dinners Koblenzic provided, but still cringed at the things she’d done, or been forced to do, after the lights went out.
She swept her eyes around the room one last time, searching the small space for any items she might have overlooked and found none.
She closed the street door behind her for the last time, breathing a deep sigh of relief. She stopped for a moment to drape a thick blanket over the homeless man sleeping on the steps. She tucked a few left-over euros into his hand and moved toward her car.
Sitting on the tarmac at Frankfurt International Airport, the comforting whine of the 747's idling engines lulled her into a sense of relative safety and she decided to celebrate.
In a few hours I’ll be back home, very safe and very rich.
“Excuse me, miss!” she called toward a flight attendant standing sentinel near the cockpit door.
The perky blond answered the summons in a split-second. “Hello. What can I do for you?”
Kelly guessed her to be about 25, tall and slender. She scanned the attractive woman with just a twinge of feminine jealousy and read her nametag.
“Well for starters Tina, you can open a bottle of your best champagne.”
The attendant cocked one sculpted eyebrow. “Right away.”
Kelly watched her flared hips swing as she moved back toward the galley. She smiled. She always enjoyed the service in first class. Her muscles began to unknot as she relaxed in her comfortable leather seat and thought about all the money waiting for her in New York.
When the pretty flight attendant returned with the drink, she raised the glass in salute. “God bless America.” she said and drained the glass in a single draw.
She handed the delicate flute back to the wide-eyed woman. “Don't stop now girl, you're on a roll!”
The glass was quickly refilled for a second time. She took the glass from the blond and thought aloud, “It's going to be a long flight, and after three months in that upholstered cesspool, I deserve a little me-time.”
The attendant replied, confusion evident on her angelic face. “Yes, Miss. Is there anything else before we takeoff?”
She drained a second glass of champagne before answering Tina’s inquiry.
“Some cheese and crackers…maybe some fruit.” she said. “And the rest of the champagne.”
Several minutes later the wide-bodied jet flashed down the runway with a deafening roar and lifted gracefully into the air.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Trish tuned to Clark, forcing her stomach down from her throat. The hotel room’s papered walls crept closer and her hands trembled, her moral compass spinning out of control over what her “partner” had done to Dr. Ryan.
“Was that re
ally necessary?” she asked.
She might be ruthless, but it made her skin crawl to see him casually walk her through emotional torture like it was beach-blanket bingo. At that moment, she learned the true depths of Clark’s depravity and silently vowed to settle the score.
After this job is finished. Clark might be a pig, but he’s also a very well funded pig.
“What now?” she asked, breaking the silence and fearing the answer to her rhetorical question.
After several tense seconds, he finally answered his cohort, “I can only guess that Murphy has delivered the thing to Temple by now, so we go after Temple.”
“And what about Casey? He might come looking for her. Or he might go to the police.”
“I don’t like loose ends.” He said flatly. “Casey has to be neutralized.”
This latest revelation made goose bumps run over her body.
Stupid, very stupid, she thought.
“You can't be serious. We are supposed to be keeping a low profile,” she reminded him. “Strings of dead bodies don't constitute a low profile.”
“Look Trish, this is my operation. You just follow my instructions and we’ll be fine.”
She felt her cheeks flush with heat as a surge of anger raced through her. “No! You look!” she snapped. “I don't like being kept in the dark. So, if you want my continued help on this little sojourn of yours, you need to clue me in on what your plans are.”
She paused for effect, placing her hands on her hips. “I assume you have a plan…one that doesn’t include multiple murders.”
The sarcasm was not lost on him and he smiled sweetly. “Of course I have a plan, luscious.”
Her stomach clenched in disgust. The endearment only sickened her further.
Ugggh! You arrogant bastard! No matter what, we’re through…for good this time. I can’t believe I thought you’d changed!
Chain Reaction Power Failure Book I Page 16
