The Phoenix Project (The Liberty Box Book 3)

by C. A. Gray

Will sighed, exasperated. “I’m just trying to help you, Kate.”

  I made him wait for me, though. The bark sliced up my skin and tugged at the threads of my nightgown here and there. I had a few panicked moments when I thought he might have to catch me after all, but I arrived more or less unscathed on the ground, earning a scowl from Will for my trouble.

  “You want to lead the way, then?” he asked me, an edge to his voice.

  I knew he was hurt that I didn’t obey his orders. To him, I knew, that meant I didn’t respect him—we’d had many a fight about that while we were dating. So rather than respond to his question directly, I did what I knew he really wanted: I hugged him.

  “Thank you for rescuing me,” I murmured.

  He was too surprised to hug me back for a second, but then he wrapped his arms around me too, murmuring into my hair, “I’m just so relieved you’re okay.” Then he tilted my chin up and kissed me. I froze at first—that hadn’t been my intention. I pulled away as gently as I could.

  There will be time enough for that conversation later.

  “There’s a hiking trail behind the gardens,” I said. “I haven’t followed it too far, but my maid Ingrid told me it goes several miles into the forest and ends at a waterfall.”

  “Your maid?” Will muttered, but let it go. “If it’s a trail, the agents will be all over it.”

  I started to head in that direction anyway, glancing back at him. “Will they? Whatever happened to the ‘hiding in plain sight’ strategy?”

  “We have to get back into the Republic, Kate.” He used my name a lot when he was annoyed with me. Apparently the magic of the kiss was broken. “We need to meet up with the other rebels. Not off into the wilderness somewhere. Charlie left a car a few miles out, just off to the side of the road. If he and Jackson haven’t taken it already, it should still be there.”

  Which means we might accidentally meet up with Charlie and Jackson, I thought, feeling a swooping sensation in my stomach at the sound of Jackson’s name. But I had to admit, some form of transportation other than my bare feet for an indeterminate length of time sounded nice.

  Besides, I was with Will—the less I argued and the more I just did what he said, the happier everyone would be. I knew how this went.

  “Fine,” I murmured. “Lead on, MacDuff.”

  “It’s ‘lay on,’ actually,” Will corrected. “Everybody misquotes that. ”

  “Whatever,” I sighed. Again—the less I argued, the happier.

  Chapter 18: Jackson

  It took me a good deal of tugging to get the uniform off the dead guard, flashing back to the time I’d stepped through the ice while ice fishing and soaked my foot in the freezing cold water. I couldn’t feel my foot at all, but still had to strip it of its sock and shoe in order to slowly warm the flesh by friction and fire. Without the muscles in my own foot engaged to help me wiggle out of my wet clothing, it had felt pretty much like playing Chinese handcuffs: the harder I tugged, the less headway I made. That’s about what this was like.

  “One uniform,” Charlie huffed, “isn’t gonna take care of our disguise problem.”

  “Joe—can take the agent’s jacket to cover up the top of his jumpsuit,” I said, straining against the dead man, “And he can take the pants too. You take the cap, so at least at a distance people might mistake you for a guard. I’ll take the shirt under the jacket.” Never mind that it was all bloody. “Maybe I’ll look like I just got in a fight and—lost my jacket or something.”

  Charlie seemed to be doing a calculation in his head that wasn’t adding up. “And…you also lost your pants?”

  I looked down at the prison jumpsuit bottoms I wore. “Well, at least my top half will look respectable.”

  “I can be the one with the jumpsuit bottoms,” Joe offered.

  “It doesn’t matter, the disguise sucks,” I admitted. “We’ll draw attention no matter what we do. Still slightly better than the entire jumpsuits on both of us, though.”

  Charlie shrugged. “It’ll have to work, unless we find another uniform to steal.” And then— “Shh!” The sound of approaching guards, and dogs, drew nearer.

  “We’ve gotta get to some cover,” I murmured, looking around for shadow. I pointed to where the dungeons cast the grounds into darkness, where we’d been talking when we first met up. “Help me drag him.”

  Dragging the guard produced sharp pain in my side where I’d been kicked by Hurst. Charlie had to finish stripping the dead guard of the last of his clothing for me, and I helped as best I could just as the guards rounded the corner. They’d see us if they looked in just the right spot. We all crouched low, clutching the components of the guard’s uniform. Joe hovered behind us.

  “Around here,” I hissed, doubled over and pulling Charlie and Joe behind me to the other side of the dungeons. We weren’t in shadow here, but the building itself concealed us from the guards on the other side.

  Joe and I dressed hurriedly as we heard the voices fading away again. Charlie pulled the pointless cap over his head. I tried to ignore the sticky dampness on my back where the guard’s blood had stained his shirt.

  “Let’s start looking for Kate and Will over there,” I pointed away from the guards.

  “The guards just came from there. If Will and Kate went that way, they’d have found them,” Charlie hissed back.

  “Not if Will knows how to hide,” I said. Kate had told me how resourceful he was—now would be the time for him to prove it.

  Charlie shrugged and took off in the direction I had indicated, at first darting from shadow to shadow. I struggled to keep up, trying to ignore the searing pain in my side every time my feet pounded on the ground. Joe trailed behind us both, wheezing and stumbling.

  “This isn’t gonna work,” I hissed at them both. “Let’s just walk. Act like you belong here.”

  “Oh sure,” Charlie muttered, “Just taking a moonlit stroll on the palace grounds in some bloody rags and half prison jumpsuits… nothing to see here, folks…”

  “You’d be amazed what you can get away with if you do it with confidence,” I whispered back, though I knew he was right. I’d much prefer to stick to the shadows, but since Joe couldn’t run, it was that or ditch him. As disgusted as I was with him, it was too dangerous to leave him in Voltolini’s employ—not to mention that if he were recaptured now, he’d also rat out everything he’d heard Charlie and me say about the rebels’ plans so far.

  I glanced at Joe, and had the impression that he was trying to make himself as small and unobtrusive as possible: shoulders hunched in, hand clutching his side where he presumably had a cramp, head down. He walked on Charlie’s other side, as far away from me as he could get, and seemed to be trying to neither look nor speak to either one of us. He doesn’t want to get in the way, I realized. Of course, he was tremendously in the way, but that couldn’t be helped. For all his obvious discomfort, he didn’t complain, either—I had to admire that. Even if I could admire nothing else about him.

  I tried to guess the best place to start looking for Kate and Will. I didn’t know Will very well, so I couldn’t guess how his mind worked. I knew Kate better, but she was probably still too disoriented to call the shots. Once I caught even a whiff of a trail, I could track them, but I had to have some idea where to start. Plus, my tracking skills were pretty handicapped with all these guards and their dogs running around, obscuring whatever signals I might otherwise have been able to follow.

  “I doubt they’re even still on the property,” Charlie whispered. “Will took her and ran a long time ago, I’ll bet.”

  “But if they’d just run outright, don’t you think they’d have gotten caught?” I said. “Or if not, their escape would’ve been out in the open, blatant enough that the guards wouldn’t still be poking around here. They’d know they were gone.”

  “Maybe they do know,” Charlie pointed out. “Maybe they’re looking for you and Joe now.”

  I don�
�t know why this possibility hadn’t occurred to me.

  If they’re looking for us, we’d better stage a spectacular getaway ourselves, I thought, since there are way too many of them to fight. The only problem was, if we did that, we’d be giving up all hope of finding Will and Kate.

  Why is that a problem? I asked myself. It would have been one thing if Kate had been by herself, but she had protection already. She had Will. Besides, as hard as it would be for Charlie and me to escape the grounds with Joe in tow, it would be much harder for the five of us to all do it together.

  “I have an idea,” I murmured, and then warned them, “It’s pretty insane. But if the guards are as brainwashed as we think they are, it just might work.”

  “Almost anything we’d try at this point would have to be somewhere on the spectrum between insane and stupid,” Charlie whispered back. “Let’s hear it.”

  We circled back to the palace and crept to the front gate. Charlie and Joe traded uniforms—Charlie dressing like the guard while Joe put on Charlie’s t-shirt and jeans. Somehow Joe looked even more skeletal in that than he had in the guard’s uniform. Joe and I lay down in the shadows hoping to avoid detection. If our luck ran out, pretending to be unconscious might buy us just enough time to attack. Charlie took off running for the gate, and I was careful to keep my face to the ground, the bloody back of my shirt exposed.

  Then we waited.

  “I assume Charlie is one of the rebels?” Joe whispered to me. It was the first time he’d spoken in awhile.

  “You know the girl who visited me in the dungeons?” I whispered back, trying hard not to move. “That’s her brother.”

  My heart lifted with cautious hope when I heard the sound of a car approaching. I opened one eye and saw that, incredibly, Charlie drove it alone. Just in case anybody was watching from a distance, I played limp and let him scoop me up with very little assistance, crawling into the backseat and trying not to cry out as the bulk of my weight distributed across my broken ribs. Charlie eased Joe into the back beside me, and both of us slumped down until we were completely immersed in shadow.

  “They’re either idiots or cowards!” Charlie gloated to us as he sped toward the gate. “They’re all focused on finding Kate. They know you’re at large too now, Jackson, but none of them are eager to find you. Your reputation precedes you.”

  “Yeah well, I’m not exactly formidable at the moment,” I gasped, my vision blurred with pain. Moving hurt less when I could carefully avoid my injuries; Charlie’s unceremonious heave left something to be desired.

  When he reached the gate seconds later, Charlie told the guard on duty, “These are the soldiers I told you about. It might be too late already, they’ve both lost a lot of blood.”

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the guard glance in the backseat at us and nod absently, pressing a headset to his ear as he presumably received more important communications than the current state of a pair of unknown soldiers.

  “Go on, then,” said the guard, distracted. He waved Charlie through without even looking at me.

  Thank God the Potentate doesn’t prize independent thinkers, I thought as we sped away.

  Chapter 19: Ben Voltolini

  Voltolini had slept through the night, stirring only when a hand span of light trickled through the thick velvet curtains in his bedroom windows. As soon as he opened his eyes he sensed something was wrong. Then he registered the soft, shuffling voices outside the french double doors of his bedroom.

  One of them was that damn Jefferson Collins—he could tell by the simpering. There must be bad news, Voltolini thought. They wouldn’t be here this early unless something had happened in the night, and they feared to wake him. After all, he’d threatened to have Collins killed after he’d awoken him at three in the morning just to tell him of the rioting in Raven—“There is absolutely no reason why this couldn’t have waited until it was light outside and I’d had my coffee. Is there? What did you think I was going to do about it at three am, anyway?”

  Voltolini knew he could be a little unpredictable. It was just his nerves. Nobody understood the kind of pressure he was under.

  He pressed the buzzer next to his bed.

  “Violeta,” he said to his personal maid on the other end.

  “Coffee and breakfast are on their way, Your Excellency,” she replied. She knew the routine.

  “Bring me some bourbon, too.” He let go of the button, sighed heavily and sank back into his pillow. Just in case the news was really bad, he thought.

  Violeta came in with the tray a few minutes later, ushering in Collins, Williams, and two other agents who looked simultaneously exhausted and anxious, as if hyped up on adrenaline.

  Just as Violeta set the tray down on the table beside Voltolini’s bed, Collins shuffled forward and opened his mouth. Voltolini held up a hand.

  “Not… until I pour my coffee.” He went ahead and spiked it with the bourbon preemptively. Steadying himself, he turned toward the group. “Fine. Where are the riots now?”

  It was Williams who answered. “It’s not that this time.” Pause.

  “What, then?”

  There was another slight pause before Williams answered, “We now know how the rebels are destroying the signals. We’ve captured Kate Brandeis’s parents, who were previously with the rebels. The mother says they haven’t touched the control centers themselves, which is why Barrett and her team could never find anything wrong with them. Instead, they’ve been cutting wires to the repeaters. I took the liberty to send word out to agents across the Republic, since up until now the repeaters have not been guarded at all. Just this morning, we received word that three rebels were gunned down as they attempted to break one of the repeaters in Tallymund.”

  Voltolini’s eyes widened, and he broke into a grin. “But that’s excellent news! Why all the long faces?”

  “That’s—not all, sir,” said Williams. “Kate Brandeis is gone.”

  Voltolini stared at him for a long moment, and shook his head. “I don’t understand. What do you mean, gone? I saw her go to bed after dinner last night. The palace is heavily guarded.”

  The two agents shuffled forward. Now that the light fell across their faces, Voltolini could see they looked much the worse for wear. Not that he’d ever noticed them before now to compare.

  “Brandeis’s parents were with the team that apparently came to rescue her,” one said. “They shot and killed French. One of the guards,” he added, perhaps seeing the lack of recognition on Voltolini’s face.

  “But they didn’t get into the palace?” Voltolini narrowed his eyes and took a swig of spiked coffee.

  “No, Your Excellency, but Brandeis was already on the grounds.” He wrung his hands. “We—” he gestured to the other agent beside him—“were with French when we found her. No idea how she got out. French told us to go back to our posts, so we left them and he was going to take her back inside. That was when we heard the gunshot.”

  The secret passage, Voltolini realized. That had to be how she’d gotten out, but how in the world had she found it? Nobody but himself, Williams, the Tribunal, and the architect who had built the palace for him knew about it, and it was all but impossible to find unless you already knew it was there.

  “So the rebels captured her,” he concluded. “Fine. I don’t want any of this publicized!” he pointed at Collins, who nodded vigorously. He was the main point of contact with the News Syndicate. “No one can know Kate was here to begin with. We still need to use her authority to help quell the riots that have already begun once we capture her again. What time did this happen?” He looked back at the guards.

  “About three thirty am,” one of them said.

  Voltolini glanced at his clock—almost six a.m. Damn. That meant in two and a half hours, they still hadn’t been able to recover her. The more time that elapsed, the harder she’d be to find. “I suppose it goes without saying that her brainwaves have vanished too?�
� He looked at Williams and Collins. Collins looked like he was on the verge of tears. Williams nodded once.

  “Whatever cloaking device the rebels have, they still have it. Yes.”

  Which meant by the time they found Kate again, she’d be significantly less docile. “We must recapture her,” Voltolini repeated. “But—we have her parents, you say?” Williams nodded again, and he went on, “Excellent. As soon as we get her, leverage them to force her to do the broadcast right away. After that, kill her quietly. She’s become far too big a liability.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The group showed no signs of leaving, but Voltolini didn’t think much of this at first. He stood up and paced the length of the brocade rug on the bedroom floor.

  “And I want a media campaign shot on the origins of the Republic,” he added, snapping his fingers in the air like he’d had a sudden stroke of genius. “Over the top, you know… All about the death and disease and corruption and anarchy after the fall of the United States, and how I stepped in to restructure the nation, investing my own money to feed everyone and put them back to work. I want to look like a saint!”

  “Done, sir.”

  He continued to pace, trying to dispel the anxiety he felt with a combination of physical activity and putting both his worries and counter-measures into words.

  “You told me that the control centers in New Estonia were nearly completed, though not quite done,” he went on, pointing at Williams without looking at him or waiting for him to reply. “But the vaccinia vector with Epstein Barr is ready, and we have enough of it, right?” He looked up and saw the nod. “Good. Release it now.”

  Williams hesitated. “But—sir—”

  “Release it now!” Voltolini shouted. He knew why Williams began to protest: the vector bought them only six months. Even if one control center was almost completed, the rest of them might take months more to finish, and since they were doing the whole thing under cover of legitimate businesses, there was no telling how much red tape they might have to quietly dismantle in order to have control centers ready to go across the nation. If the process took more than six months, they’d risk many more cases of signal rejection than they’d faced in the early Republic. That could mean rioting, or even war.