“I thought I was too.”
“What happened to you?” Ling began to grill him. “How did you survive? Did you escape? What are you doing here? Why did you kill Stefan Varga?”
Lorenzo shook his head. “Give me a minute, will you? This is a lot to process. Where are we going?”
“Wels. A city just over an hour northeast of here. We have a house there that we’ve been operating out of, owned by a real estate shell company the organization uses. It’s as safe a place as we’re going to find.”
“It’s getting harder and harder to get around Europe,” I said. “Police checkpoints are popping up all over. There are riots and mass protests happening all over the place. Terrorist attacks are on the rise, too.”
“I heard,” Lorenzo said simply. He fell silent then.
“So, uh, listen,” I said, struggling to find the right words. The last time I saw Lorenzo, it was through a rifle scope from several hundred yards away. He was taking cover behind the decaying wreckage of a Soviet bomber as Sala Jihan’s forces surrounded him. He’d run some kind of diversion, leading the pursuers off so that the few survivors of the raid on Jihan’s compound could get away, and had gotten shot in the process. Ling and had tried to hold them off, but we were running out of ammo and there were just too many of them. I had offered to shoot Lorenzo, then, with the thought that it’d be more merciful than letting Jihan have him. He declined the offer. We had retreated and he’d been captured.
Like a cockroach, you just couldn’t kill this guy. Believe me, I had tried.
As if reading my mind, Lorenzo raised a hand. “Don’t worry about it. I told you to leave me. You got Jill out. That’s all that matters.”
“For what it’s worth, I’m glad you’re alive.” It was Shen, looking at us in the rearview mirror.
Lorenzo nodded. Shen never had much to say, but I learned that he and Lorenzo had . . . well, I don’t want to call it bonded, but they’d understood one another. “I’m glad you guys made it out, too.” He looked back at me. “Before I tell you my story, you tell me yours. What the hell are you people doing in Austria? Why were you tailing Stefan Varga?”
“We’re trying to track down Katarina Montalban. Our intel suggested Varga knew how to contact her.”
Lorenzo simply nodded. “What happened after the Crossroads?”
Ling took a deep breath. “Exodus is . . . not at its strongest right now,” she said honestly. “We got our asses handed to us, as you might say. Katarina is a lunatic, and all indications are that Project Blue will have apocalyptic repercussions.”
“What the hell is Blue?” Lorenzo asked.
“We still don’t know,” I admitted. “We’ve tried to find your brother, he probably knows, but haven’t had any luck.”
“Maybe. Probably. I interrogated Varga. He squealed on Kat’s location, no problem, but Blue? He took a swan dive rather than talk.” He pointed directly at me. “But what the hell are you doing here? These people—Exodus—I get. They’re idealistic do-gooders who think they can unfuck the world. No offense, Shen.”
“None taken.”
“But why you, Valentine?”
“It’s a long story.”
“Sounds like we’ve got a long drive ahead of us. Talk. And this time, I want to know everything.”
Chapter 4: The Princess in the Tower
VALENTINE
Exodus Compound, Azerbaijan
Several months earlier . . .
“Well? What do you think?”
Dr. Bundt turned off the flashlight he’d been shining in my eyes, and glanced down at his iPad. “Mr. Valentine, you’re very healthy. The last time I examined you, you were underweight and injured. You have made a remarkably swift recovery. Aside from some scar tissue and the fact that I performed the procedure myself, I wouldn’t have guessed that you had been treated for a traumatic brain injury.”
“Okay, that’s good, right? So what’s wrong?”
“Wrong?”
“Something is obviously bugging you, Doc. What’s wrong?”
Dr. Bundt looked at his iPad again. “I’m not sure how to explain this.”
“Okay, now you’re scaring me. Do I have cancer or something?” That would be a hell of a way to go, after everything I’d been through and survived: fucking cancer.
“Cancer? No, no, my boy, you’re as healthy as a farm horse. That’s just it: you shouldn’t be this fit. You should have barely been able to participate in the battle of the Crossroads, given your condition when we recovered you from North Gap.”
I couldn’t stop myself from wincing at the mention of the black site where I’d been held, interrogated, and had God-knows-what-else done to me.
“Have you read the files on you that we found there?”
I shook my head. “I kept meaning to, but . . . you know.”
“I understand.” I guess there’s no shame in not dredging up unpleasant memories. “Dr. Silvers was conducting certain, ah, procedures on you. The notes we retrieved are vague, but she was working off of a template, a plan of action. The program is called ‘XK Indigo.’ Have you heard of it?”
Now I was scared. “XK what? Was she experimenting on me or something?”
“I wouldn’t call it experimenting. She knew exactly what she was doing. I have not been able to find any real specifics on XK Indigo. A search on the internet reveals nothing but rumor and conjecture from conspiracy theorists. As near as I can tell, though, it’s a mental and physical conditioning program.”
I suddenly felt uncomfortable. I didn’t want to talk about this. “Hey, maybe this is my superhero origin story. That’s basically how the Canadians made Wolverine.”
Dr. Bunt raised an eyebrow. I don’t think he got the reference.
“So you’re not a comic book guy, Doc? He was a mutant, one of the X-Men. The second greatest Canadian ever, behind Wayne Gretzky.”
Dr. Bundt cocked his head slightly to the side, ignoring my attempt to change the subject. “Tell me . . . how much do you remember about the program?”
“Almost nothing,” I lied. You can block some of it out, but you don’t exactly forget months of drug-cocktail fueled torture sessions. “It doesn’t matter now anyway.”
The doctor wouldn’t let it go. “Mr. Valentine, you have been a patient of mine for some time. I need you to be honest with me, and tell me how much you remember. It does matter. It matters a great deal. You’re not the only one who has been through such conditioning.”
What? “There are others?”
Dr. Bundt nodded. “I can’t give you any specifics, for privacy reasons, but no, you are not the only one. However, you have dealt with the aftereffects of that program better than most, I believe it’s due to your ability to enter into a serene mental state during extreme stress—”
“I’ve always called it the Calm.” To me it wasn’t anything special, it just was what it was. When things get really dangerous, I get detached. Not from reality, if anything I was even more rational when I was Calm, but things seemed to slow down, or maybe I processed everything faster, but it was handy in combat.
“Indeed. I have friends in the mental health industry who would love to be able to bottle that and sell it. Regardless, you’re the only one who has been through this Indigo program retaining much at all. So please, tell me what you remember.”
I took a breath, and looked down at my lap. “It’s hard to remember a lot of it. It’s like a dream, how it slowly fades after you wake up. I wrote a lot of it down in a journal, like you told me to, last year. I haven’t gone back and read it. I get . . . I don’t know, I get itchy thinking about it. It makes me uncomfortable.”
“It is good not to dwell on such trauma, but I think there is more to it than that. This aversion to recalling the process, to discussing it, I believe that is part of the conditioning. I believe the same of the memory loss. I was concerned such a thing would happen, which is why I asked you to keep that journal after your recovery. You really should go bac
k and read it.”
“No. Like I said, it makes me uncomfortable.” I squirmed on the exam table a little. I wanted to get up and walk out of the room. I didn’t like it when he dug like this, but Dr. Bundt was the man who put the people Exodus rescued back together, both physically and mentally. He wasn’t going to let it go, but I didn’t like thinking about what would have happened had Exodus hadn’t gotten me out of there. What kind of brainwashed, screwed-in-the-head asset for the Majestic organization would I be today?
So the doctor and I had a bit of a stareoff for a while. He folded his arms and looked like a really disapproving Albert Einstein. Sadly, he was such a nice guy that I couldn’t just tell him to buzz off.
“Are you done with him yet?” someone asked, startling both Dr. Bundt and I.
Ariel was standing in the examination room doorway. There wasn’t much left of the terrified adolescent I’d first met in Mexico. She was a lovely young woman now, with platinum blonde hair and intensely blue eyes. I suspected that if not for being sequestered in the Exodus estate in the middle of nowhere desert of Azerbaijan, she’d have her pick of young men.
“Yes, my dear,” the doctor said. “Not to worry, he’s quite physically healthy.”
“Note, he specified physical. I’m still a mental basket case.”
“Okay great, Michael. Will you walk with me? We need to talk.”
Relieved at the distraction, I stood up. “I need to go, Doc. Thank you.”
Dr. Bundt seemed reluctant, like there was more he wanted to ask me, but he let me go. The Doc was a really important man in Exodus circles, but everybody around here usually gave in to Ariel’s wishes. He wasn’t the only one. I’d gotten used to all of Exodus’ secretive paramilitary badasses deferring to a kid, but that didn’t make it any less weird. I’d spoken with her several times, and had even saved her life, but the girl was still a mystery to me.
She led me to the garden. The Exodus manor was built in the restored ruins of a medieval fortress. The modern part of the structure was U-shaped, with a nice garden in the middle. Being out in the desert, the garden was well watered, climate controlled, and protected from the blowing sands by a glass ceiling. It was, essentially, a large, beautiful greenhouse.
Ariel ditched her shoes. “I like to walk barefoot on the grass,” she said idly, even though I hadn’t asked.
“You’re a weird girl.”
“I like you the best because you’re at least honest to me. Not wearing shoes reminds me of when I was small, when I was home.”
“Where are you from anyway?”
She smiled at me but didn’t say anything.
I cocked my head to one side. “What is your deal, kiddo? The sworn Exodus people won’t say a word. Why all the hocus pocus and mystery? I mean, look, I don’t know anything about you. Why are you even here? Why are you so important to Exodus? Why—”
Ariel shushed me. “So many questions.”
“Well nobody else is going to answer them for me. They just tell me you’re so observant you see patterns other people don’t.” Even Ling wouldn’t tell me the whole deal. It isn’t fun to ask your girlfriend questions and get blown off with BS like about recognizing patterns. “Asking why you’d have a little girl planning combat operations seems like a pretty reasonable question to me.”
“You’re right to ask them. I know so much about you, and you don’t know anything about me. It’s not fair.” She looked sad for a moment. “Okay, I’m from Fresno, California. I haven’t been there since I was a toddler, but that’s where they say I’m from. I don’t talk much about my past, mostly because I don’t remember a lot of it.”
Ariel was young, but her eyes looked older. Sad. Seasoned. I knew that she was frighteningly intelligent and almost unbelievably observant. She was probably a certified genius, if there was any sort of certification for that. She was weird, too. Like, sometimes you got the vibe she acted the way she did just because she was trying to mimic the people around her, to blend in. I didn’t spend a lot of time around teenagers, but remembering how things were back when I was in high school, I could tell she wasn’t typical. She almost reminded me of myself at that age, but only after my mom had been murdered, and after I had taken a human life. That was a crappy thing to be compared to, but there it was.
“When I was a little girl I was kidnapped. Like you, I was taken, tested, experimented on. They changed me, just as they changed you.”
My heart sank for the poor girl. “Who took you?”
“You know them as Majestic, but that’s not really what they’re called.”
“Oh, I’ve got plenty of names for them.”
“The one I’ve heard you use the most is fucking assholes.”
“Language, young lady.”
That made her smile. She paused to smell some white flowers. Then she plucked one and stuck it in her hair just over her ear. “You’ll laugh at why they took me. It was because I was good at chess, puzzles, math problems, that sort of thing. I don’t remember most of those days. It’s like there isn’t room enough in my brain for things like that anymore. They had problems with me, I know that. When they were done, they put me with a family to be monitored. I guess I needed a normal environment to see how I’d turn out. It was under a fake name. I don’t even remember my real one.”
Now that really was sad. “How did you end up on a Russian arms dealer’s boat in Mexico?”
“Federov wasn’t just some gunrunner, Michael. He was an asset of Russian foreign intelligence. They watched me for years, and then they grabbed me one day while I was walking home from school.”
“What about your foster parents?”
“I don’t know if Doug and Linda were working for Majestic or not. Either way, it’s better to let them think I’m gone forever. I never even asked to go home. I don’t have a home to go back to. None of that was real. It was all a puppet show, a fabrication. It was fake.” Her tone and her pretty face both darkened. “It’s not real and it’s not my life.”
I took a deep breath. I could certainly sympathize with her situation. “That’s a tough break, kiddo.”
“Exodus was watching Majestic’s program the same way the Russians were, so after they grabbed me, Exodus grabbed me back. I’ve been with them ever since. It’s not so bad, you know. I have a good life here. I don’t want for anything.”
“This isn’t a life. This is a gilded prison.” I looked around the lush garden make sure no one was listening, and leaned in closer to her. “Are you being held here against your will?”
She laughed at me and shook her head. “No, Michael. You’re such a sweet man, though. You were going to try to rescue me, weren’t you?”
I didn’t admit to anything, but as a matter of fact, the gears had already been turning in the back of my mind.
“I’m not a princess locked in a tower. I’m here of my own free will. This is where I belong, for now. This is where I can do the most good.” There was an uncompromising certainty in her voice that made me understand how grown men could take her advice seriously. She didn’t sound like a teenager just then. “But I think that’s changing, which is kind of why I had you brought here.”
“I thought Exodus invited me here to stay off the radar.” Majestic’s best operative, Underhill, was hunting me. I’d gone out on a couple operations in the last few months and had had some close calls. Exodus probably didn’t want me dragging them into a war they couldn’t win against Majestic. “I’m confused.”
“I know, but just listen. There are things happening out in the world right now. Big things, and they’re not good.”
“That’s . . . not really helping.”
Her intensely blue eyes almost burned holes in me. The shift from out-of-her-depth teenager to commander was a little unnerving. “The time has come for you to find Katarina Montalban. You need to stop this Project Blue, whatever it is, from happening. If you don’t do anything, if you just sit here in exile, she will succeed.”
“There’
s like half a dozen people in the world who know what that even is, and none of them are talking to us. How do you know all this?”
“Because I know, Michael!” she snapped. “Okay? I can see things other people can’t see. I know things other people don’t know. That isn’t just some line Ling feeds you to get you off her back. It’s hard to explain. I see lines of causation, strings, patterns, whatever you want to call it, and I can see where it’s all leading. You have to find her and stop her. You will probably, like, have to kill her though, but that alone might not stop her plan. She’s very smart, but she’s crazy and she’s dangerous. The important thing is you stop Blue.”
I really wasn’t sure what to say. “Um, okay then. Take out the leader of a powerful organized crime family, but first dismantle her wacky scheme that nobody understands first. I’ll get right on that.”
She shook her head. “I know you think I’m crazy. I’m not. You asked me why Exodus thinks I’m valuable, why the Russians thought I was valuable, and why Majestic thought I was valuable. This is why. I know things and see things and feel things that other people can’t, and I’m usually right.”
“So . . . you’re like a psychic?”
“No! I’m not . . .” She was obviously frustrated. She pointed at a nearby bench. “Sit down.” I did, and she plopped down next to me. There was a little fountain gurgling in front of us. The garden even smelled nice. It was a rather pleasant place to talk about the apocalypse.
“I hate when people call me psychic. Making what I do sound like magic is insulting to my intelligence. Look, I don’t read tarot cards or palms or whatever. It’s about facts and probabilities. Some things fit and others don’t, but everything goes somewhere, and when you get enough things together, it is pretty easy for me to see what comes next. No offense, I don’t know how to explain this to you in a way that you’ll really be able to understand. Regular people just don’t get it. You just have to trust me.”
“I do trust you. I’m just trying to understand. You know, wrap my feeble mortal mind around it all.” I shot her a lopsided grin.
Alliance of Shadows (Dead Six Series Book 3) Page 7
