by Jaime Rush
He hadn’t wanted Hammond taken out, though. The asset, known only as Steele, reported that Hammond took him off guard and he had to change the plan. Gerard hated losing even one of the Offspring. Each was useful, either voluntarily or not. Except for Eric Aruda. He had to be removed.
Robbins returned and stood beside one of the chairs in front of Gerard’s desk. Half circles of sweat beneath his armpits darkened his white cotton shirt. “He’s got a connection to Amy. He felt someone chasing her.” He wore a questioning look.
“Cyrus just betrayed all of us by telling her about DARK MATTER. We can’t let her go back to the Arudas with this information.” He gave Robbins a hard look. “Diamond has left the program.”
“You’re firing him?”
“I’m afraid it’s worse than that.”
Fear robbed the man’s face of color. He looked at the monitor, where Lucas was again banging on the glass with the flat of his hand. “What should I tell him about Amy? We promised we wouldn’t hurt her.”
“If she kept her nose out of our business.”
Damned connection to Amy Shane. He wanted to get as many missions out of Lucas as he could, for as long as Amy was alive and as long as Lucas’s sanity held out.
Frustration at the slow progress of the war ate away at him. Now, after twenty years of watching the war on terrorism flounder, he had a chance to make something happen. He needed this to succeed. Not for the glory his older brother sought. No, he needed success because it filled an emptiness he’d always felt inside him. Patriotism gave him purpose. It didn’t matter that his father or brother would never know what he’d achieved. He would know.
“Amy Shane, we can see you. Come out and you won’t be hurt,” a man called.
She crouched behind a tree, trying to hear her pursuers over the hammering of her heartbeat. No matter how clever she had been in escaping her spy guys, she knew she wasn’t going to get away from these men. She was going to die or, worse, be captured.
I’ll be with Lucas. Not with; they won’t put us together. But near.
A sterner voice said, You can’t save Lucas by being captured and shot up with whatever they’re giving him. And you damn well can’t give up. And don’t, for God’s sake, think about Cyrus lying there with bullets in him.
The sharp pain in her chest had nothing to do with exertion.
They might be able to see her, but with all the trees in the way, they wouldn’t have a clear shot at her. If she could get to her car…but that was only viable if there wasn’t an officer left behind to watch it.
“Hey, what’s that?” one of the men said to another.
She took the opportunity to run. Branches whipped against her face, stinging her skin. A loud flutter exploded beside her. Birds? Whatever it was made a racket. She saw a light in the distance. The gatehouse? She had no idea where she was in relation to the road. Her shoulder rammed a tree trunk, shooting pain down her arm and throwing her to the side. Branches beat her up. Here in the woods the moonlight barely penetrated. She was running blind in an obstacle course. She needed to get out in the open, or no, maybe not, or—get to the highway. Stop a car and pretend she was being chased by a rapist. Yes!
With a plan and hope, she didn’t even feel the bite of the branches. She ran toward the light. Several minutes later she came upon a building that looked like it held maintenance equipment for the park. One large light illuminated the door and part of the parking area. She ran for the corner, planning to be out of sight in seconds.
“Hold it right there!” a voice barked from way too close behind her.
She turned, heaving in oxygen. Her body sagged at the sight of two men emerging from the woods with guns pointed at her. One of them whispered, “If she moves, nail her in the knee.”
Guess I’ll go with Plan B: get captured and find Lucas from within.
She reluctantly raised her arms. She saw the night vision goggles around one man’s neck. How could she, Eric, and Petra hope to win against the CIA?
“We’ve got her,” one of the men said into a phone earpiece that reminded her of Star Trek. “Alive.”
They wanted her alive.
The other man kept his gun aimed at her. Both men advanced slowly.
Grief and fear crashed through her the same way she had crashed through the trees. Her knees wobbled. She felt light-headed. So she thought she was imagining the odd light that suddenly appeared on the right man’s sleeve. Until he jerked his arm with a painful yelp.
The other man backed away. “What the hell?”
The first man’s arm was on fire. Just as bizarrely, another fire erupted on his pant leg. Both fires intensified as though someone had thrown gas on them. He dropped his gun, fell to the ground and rolled. The other man just stared in horror, and she stared as well, though part of her brain was screaming, Run!
Despite his rolling efforts, the fire grew worse. He was now screaming in pain. The other man stripped off his jacket and threw it over him, but it, too, flared up. The air filled with an acrid scent—
Oh, God, the man’s burning flesh.
The presence of someone nearby jarred her, and she jerked around to find Eric watching the flames with a look of eerie satisfaction on his face. Not just watching, but mesmerized.
“You did that?” she whispered fiercely.
The man on fire stopped moving, his screams dying. The other man looked up, his face ashen. He saw her and Eric, and then he ran—away from them.
“Let’s go,” Eric said, grabbing her arm and hauling her around the side of the building. They ran down the short road, through a copse of trees, and out the other side, where a car waited. The Barracuda roared to life. He opened the door and shoved her into the back while Petra pulled out of the hiding spot.
Eric said, “Those two won’t be following us, but I don’t know if they have friends.”
Petra jammed the gas pedal and raced down the road.
The horrors of the past twenty minutes bombarded Amy as she trembled in the backseat. As on the night Lucas had been taken, the adrenaline drained from her and left her a boneless lump.
“To the tomb?” she heard Petra ask.
“Yeah.”
“What happened?” she asked him.
“She met with Diamond. I wish you’d been there; I couldn’t hear what they were saying. Then these two guys appear out of nowhere, shoot Diamond, and go after Amy.”
“And then Eric set one of them on fire!” Amy said, unable to hold in her horror any longer. She would never forget the man’s writhing and screams and the smell, God, the smell.
“What?” Petra said.
“We’ll talk when we get home,” Eric replied.
Amy’s teeth started chattering, and she clamped down on her jaw and curled up into a ball. She had to get herself together before they got back to…had Petra called it “the tomb”? She just wanted to go home.
Home. She could never go home, could never again be Amy Shane of Disc Angel, slightly dysfunctional but mostly a normal person. Yes, she had made the decision, but now it was real. Cyrus was dead and she wasn’t who she thought she was. Her only allies were two people she couldn’t trust…and one was a double murderer.
Gerard Darkwell watched Lucas’s monitor while he impatiently awaited word from the two officers. He didn’t know what Amy’s skills were, since Cyrus had probably lied to protect her, but he didn’t think she was dangerous. She wasn’t an Ultra.
Lucas suddenly stumbled to the chair, tilted his head back and closed his eyes. His features relaxed and Gerard could see relief on his face.
He exchanged a look with Robbins. “He’s not worried about the girl anymore. Why?”
He hated this. Everything had gone smoothly until the Rogues got involved.
His phone rang. Finally.
“Sir…” The man was trying to catch his breath. “Oh, God.”
Gerard stiffened in his chair. “What is it?”
His voice sounded strained. “They set Stepha
no on fire. First his arm and then his leg and suddenly…he was covered in flames and screaming, and I couldn’t do anything to help him. It happened so fast. I never saw anything. The flames were just there.”
“You said ‘they.’”
“We were chasing her, and then Stephano went up in flames and then there was this guy standing next to Shane, just standing there watching. The son of a bitch was smiling!”
Anger suffused Gerard. Eric Aruda. He must have gone with Shane. The idiot had lost her again at the apartment complex, but they’d tracked Diamond through the GPS in his vehicle after he’d given them the slip. When the officers reported that he was meeting with Amy, Gerard knew he had officially crossed the line to traitor. He harbored no hard feelings toward the man, though. Cyrus had given him his project back. In fact, he’d always been concerned about Cyrus’s dedication to the cause, even back then. Robbins was another one who needed to be watched.
The most dangerous, though, was Aruda. They had to step up their efforts to find all three Rogues and dispose of them accordingly. Now Amy was one of them. She would be treated accordingly.
“Report to me immediately. Say nothing about what you saw. We’ll take care of Stephano.”
He would tell the officer that Aruda had some kind of device that shot flames from a distance. The two men he’d tapped had been removed from active duty because they went off half-cocked on a mission in Afghanistan. The Agency was trying to figure out what to do with them. He hadn’t told them they were acting unofficially or about the abilities of their quarry.
“Robbins, go check on our friend, see what you can find out.”
Obviously annoyed at being left out of the loop, Robbins exited with a huff.
Gerard phoned Steele. “I need you over here as soon as possible.”
Steele was a free agent the CIA used on unofficial business, though he was semiretired now. If he were ever caught during a mission, he couldn’t be traced to them. In addition, Steele knew what the Offspring were and exactly what they were capable of. He would have no problem eradicating “those freaks,” as he’d called them twenty years ago.
Gerard walked down the hall to Lucas’s “quarters.” Robbins was there, too. Gerard smiled after the guard locked the door.
“I found out what happened,” he said to Lucas, who gave him a wary look.
Not knowing what Lucas knew, he had to stick as close to the truth as possible.
“The two officers who went after Amy thought she was someone else.”
“Petra? I don’t want her hurt either. She’s as innocent as Amy.”
Tough thing, human emotion. It always got in the way, made one vulnerable. “Eric is the only one I have a problem with.”
Lucas started to say something but stopped himself.
“You and I both know he’s not innocent, don’t we? I’m not going to protect him. He’s interfering with my plans. He’s already killed two of my men. That makes me very unhappy.”
That shocked Lucas, or he pretended it did. “Killed them?”
“Set them on fire.”
Robbins’s eyes bulged at that. But that shouldn’t have surprised him. He knew what Eric’s mother was capable of.
Lucas cringed but said nothing in defense of the man he’d grown up with.
“Did you know Eric could set fires psychically?”
“No.”
“Come on, all the fires that sprang up in your neighborhood, and the deadly one that destroyed your home, your stepmother…that’s how he set those fires when he wasn’t in the vicinity. We found Gladstone. Fried to a crisp.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Sure you do.”
“We left that man alive.”
“Maybe you did, but Eric went back and killed him.” He could see that Lucas’s disbelief was genuine. “Eric’s always been trouble for you, hasn’t he? Once he’s out of the picture, the girls won’t be snooping around anymore.”
Even with their history, Lucas still looked pained at Eric’s demise. “Look—”
“No more bargains, Lucas. If you want Amy and Petra kept safe, you’ll do your part. We’ll get back to where we were in an hour.”
Robbins followed him, and when they were out of the guard’s earshot, said, “Two men? On fire?”
Another of Robbins’s weaknesses was his fear. It would eventually destroy him.
“Do you see why we have to find them? They’re not only a danger to our program—they’re a danger to us.”
And now they would be dangerous to the Rogues.
CHAPTER 14
Amy used the drive to collect her scrambled thoughts and put her emotions into a box to deal with later. She recognized the neighborhood as the one where Lucas’s gallery was located. They passed that and turned down a gravel lane that went between the commercial and residential areas. Eric cut the lights and pulled into the driveway of an old house. Petra jumped out and hoisted the garage door, then Eric drove inside and she closed the door behind them, dousing them in darkness.
They slipped out the side door and through the backyard to a vine-covered shed at the back edge of the property. This is their hiding place? Amy thought as she followed them through the silvery night. Eric reached beneath the vines, unlocked a dead bolt, and opened the door, nodding for the two women to precede him. They ducked beneath the vines to enter. When they were inside, he pulled the chain, and a dim bulb lit the cramped space, which she saw was filled with rusted junk. The three of them could barely fit inside.
Eric turned to her with a hard look on his face. They were mere inches apart. “You’re one of us now. Not exactly by our choice, I might add. But you have nowhere to go now.”
She caught herself about to apologize. She wasn’t sorry, not half the time she felt compelled to say it. “Is that supposed to make me feel warm and fuzzy?”
He laughed despite himself. “You might have noticed I don’t do warm and fuzzy.”
That brought back the scene at the park. “No, just pyro tricks with a dash of psychopath.”
Petra looked confused by the comment.
“We’ll talk about that later,” he said, his expression serious again. “You can stay in our hideout, but don’t do anything stupid to give it away to our enemies. It’s all we’ve got.”
“Yes, sir.”
If he was expecting blathering gratitude, he would have to wait awhile. He moved a derelict lawn mower aside and pulled up a piece of the rotted wooden floor, revealing a hole about four feet wide. Petra went down first, then Eric nodded for her to go next. She did, thinking again, Down the rabbit hole I go.
She climbed down for several minutes in darkness, feeling her way down, understanding why Petra had said tomb. Eric’s footsteps echoed above her, Petra’s below. With every foot they descended it grew colder. The first stirrings of claustrophobia tingled inside her, and she took a deep breath. She heard Petra’s feet land on a solid surface, then a dim light was snapped on, lighting a vertical tunnel.
Petra waited while she and Eric joined her, then he took the lead down the tunnel. He flicked a switch and several more small lights lit the rest of the way. They walked for a few minutes, their shoes scraping on rough concrete and echoing along the walls. At the end of the tunnel stood an enormous steel door. Eric blocked her view as he punched a code into a keypad. The entire door slid to the right. She followed Petra into a huge room—a room she recognized. Except, on the wall where Betty Boop once hung, she now saw a sailing regatta painting.
“This is where you took me when you kidnapped me.”
“Now you understand why we couldn’t tell you where you were,” Petra said.
The door slid closed, looking now like a wall.
Amy took in her surroundings. “What is this place? Wait a minute. It’s a bomb shelter, isn’t it?”
Eric came up behind her. “Smart girl. Back in the fifties three families in the neighborhood went in together to build this thing. At least that’s what we surmised, given
the access from three different houses. Lucas found it a couple of years ago when he was renovating the first floor of his house into the gallery.”
Petra added, “The house where we parked the car is vacant. We’re renting it from a woman who now lives with her son in Alabama. Under another name, of course.”
“What about the third house?” Amy asked.
“Obsolete,” Eric said. “Years ago the owners, probably unaware of the shelter, tore down the shed and built a garage over the entrance. The access from Lucas’s house enters into his bedroom.”
“No one knows about this place?” Amy asked.
“It wasn’t exactly publicized. They didn’t want the whole neighborhood crowding in during an emergency.”
Petra walked into the kitchen, nodding for Amy to follow. “They set it up for three families to stay here as long as necessary for the radiation to clear.” She opened a pantry door, revealing a room with stacks of white buckets and several cabinets. “These are filled with nitrogen-sealed food. There’s a generator and all of the communication equipment we need, and down one level, more rooms, a water tank, and a gym.”
“Wouldn’t we be trapped if they discovered us?” Amy asked.
“They wouldn’t take us alive,” Eric said, his mouth in a firm line. “The doors are one-ton blast capable. We have weapons if we need them, but I doubt they’d be able to get in.”
So they’d eventually run out of food, Amy thought.
“It’s home away from home,” Petra said in a cheery voice that didn’t match her expression.
“You called it the tomb.”
“Okay, tomb away from home,” she replied, letting her real disdain show.
Eric said, “That’s why we get beat over the head with color.”
“I couldn’t stand the bland walls. I need color. Scenery.”
“Change,” Eric added. “She changes the paintings every other day.”
Petra looked at the sepia-toned painting of the woman and man. “These are from Lucas’s personal collection. Sometimes I sneak upstairs and change them.”
