by Rachel Grant
“Not a lot of people know about the incident,” Alec added. “Relations with Russia are bad enough without that becoming a headline, and ICMP wanted to keep it quiet. It’s already difficult for them to gain entry into certain countries without false rumors of espionage circulating. But my staff and certain members of the Senate know because I pulled strings to get Hazel out of the country, fast. After what happened with Ivy in Palau, no one wanted to take chances with slow diplomacy.”
Hazel let out a soft shudder. “I thought they were going to kill me. They threatened as much—to make an example of me, in an attempt to scare ICMP into dropping the investigation of Russian atrocities.”
Sean took her hand in his. She was icy cold. He knew Eastern Ukraine had been a bad trip for her—it had preceded Grand Cayman, and she’d said some things that indicated it had been an ordeal, but she’d never shared details.
She squeezed his fingers. “It was the scariest day of my life—until yesterday’s car chase and this morning’s fire. Dr. Parks thinks I have PTSD from that incident, but I’m dreaming about the kids’ graves because it’s the safer stress to face.”
“Why have you never told me any of this?” Sean asked.
She shrugged. “I really don’t like to think about that day. I’m doing my best to forget it.” She glanced up and met the gazes of the other women in the room. “And after what Isabel and Ivy went through, it seemed pretty whiney for me to freak out about it when no one hurt me. I was just scared.”
“You were terrorized,” Isabel said. “It scars you. No one will rank what happened to you versus me or Ivy or Mara or Erica. Part of our bond is that we’ve created a safe place to share as much or as little as we want and everyone listens and supports.”
“Thank you,” Hazel said softly. “Maybe I’ll join you for the next wine tasting.”
“We’d all love that,” Ivy said.
To Sean, Hazel said, “After a horrible thirty-six hours, I was released and put on a flight for the Netherlands, where ICMP is headquartered. I was told if I ever returned to Ukraine or entered Russia, I would be taken into custody and tried for espionage.” She met her cousin’s gaze. “Remembering how much you did to get me out of that situation makes me feel a little shitty for being so pissed at you today.”
Rav smiled. “I love you, Hazel. I love Ivy and Laurel too. I do whatever it takes to protect my family.”
Hazel swiped at her eyes. “Love you too, cuz. You’re forgiven.”
“You should have worked it longer, Hazel,” Isabel said in a stage whisper. “He gets very generous when he feels guilty.”
Hazel laughed. “He already bought me a microscope. I’m good.”
“It didn’t blow up?” Keith asked from the doorway. They all turned toward the door as he entered and stepped toward the map on the wall, staring at it as if drawn like a magnet.
“No,” Hazel said. “We brought it here along with the bones on Thursday. They’re locked in the basement lab.” Her gaze flew to Rav’s. “Unless Chase could get in there? He was in Sean’s locked room.”
Rav frowned. “The lab is locked tight and unused most of the time. After Alaska, I had Lee change all the codes so only a few of us have access. Sean. Keith. Ian. Me. Anyone else?” he asked Keith.
“Josh and Ethan, when he’s in town. He’s in Hawaii right now.”
Ethan was a firearms instructor who rotated between the Hawaii, Alaska, and Virginia compounds.
“Is Josh in the compound?” Rav asked.
Sean nodded. “He’s living here full-time.”
“Send him to check the lab and have him report back.”
Keith called Josh and gave the instructions. Call complete, he took the seat at the table next to Hazel and said, “What else did I miss?”
It took a few minutes to bring the CEO up-to-date. When told about Sean’s fake relationship with Hazel, Keith let out a bark of laughter. “How’d you like Trina’s prize package?”
Hazel snickered.
Sean kept a straight face—barely—and said, “Your wife has very good taste. Tell her I said thank you.”
Keith laughed again. “You’re welcome.” His phone buzzed, and he answered it, all traces of humor gone, back in operative mode. After a moment, he said, “Lab checks out. Bones are fine.”
Hazel let out a relived sigh.
He met Rav’s gaze, a brow raised, and nodded toward the phone. Rav somehow understood the unasked question and nodded.
Into the phone, Keith said, “Yeah. Park yourself outside the lab and guard it until we head down. Take names of anyone who enters that corridor who shouldn’t.” He hit the End button and set down the phone.
“I’m very sorry about the annex, Alec,” Hazel said, “but I’m so relieved the bones are fine.”
“Me too, Haze,” Rav said. “We’ll deal with the mess at the estate later. Right now, this is all that matters.”
“Anything else I need to know?” Keith asked.
They went over the maps and Hazel’s detention in Ukraine, bringing Keith fully up to speed with what had been shared so far, then they came back to the letter.
Finally. Sean was beyond desperate to know what else it said.
“Okay. So the spy line could indicate Hazel or Matt,” Isabel said, “But the ‘Manchurian candidate’ part is, frankly, what alarms me the most.”
Rav nodded. His gaze went from Hazel to Ivy to Matt. “You need to know, there was a cover-up of what happened in Alaska, and part of what was withheld from the public could have led to Manchurian candidate kinds of speculation, as I was running for the Senate at the time. Sean and Keith know most of the details because they were there at the end, but even they don’t know everything Isabel and I went through.” He frowned. “I was abducted for several hours and tortured.” His jaw snapped shut, then he took a deep breath and said, “And during that time, I overcame and killed one of my abductors, but I didn’t remember that until several days later, when we found the place where I was tortured and the memory blocks dissolved.”
31
Holy crap.
Hazel had known Alec had undergone something big, but she’d never guessed anything like that. He’d killed a man and didn’t remember it for days? She could see why that would raise questions for voters.
What did it take to make a man forget he’d killed someone?
“I want to be clear,” Alec said. “We didn’t cover up the events in Alaska to protect the campaign.” He grimaced. “That was just a…side benefit. If it had only been about the campaign, I would have insisted on the world knowing everything. For Isabel and for Vin.” He glanced at his wife, and she nodded. Her eyes took on that sad yet proud look she always got when her brother was mentioned.
Hazel had always wished she’d had a chance to meet Vincent Dawson. She grieved for him in a way that was similar to how she grieved for the souls of the bones she’d examined. The men, women, and children she met in death, but never in life. Every single one stayed with her, whether she observed an anomaly in their femur or zygomatic arch, she remembered and mourned them. The ones who had names, and the ones who would never be identified.
Especially the nameless, because if she didn’t mourn them, who would?
“The cover-up was about national security,” Alec said, pulling her wandering brain back into the meeting. “The CIA and DIA were convinced that if Russia knew Westover had been successful in his infrasound tests, they would do everything they could to replicate the results. A method of torture that broke a person down in a matter of hours but didn’t leave a mark on the body, and in which the victim didn’t remember the interrogation, is too powerful a weapon to let any country have in its arsenal. So the CIA and DIA cleaned up the mess, and the FBI put out the cover story you’ve all heard.”
“But clearly, Russia found out anyway,” Ivy said. “Wasn’t the attack on the US Embassy in Cuba an infrasound attack?”
Rav gave a noncommittal sort of nod. “It was similar, for sure, but
it might’ve been microwaves. It’s possible Westover was sharing his data and inspired Russian scientists, or it could be the other way around. Russia would have an easier time getting human test subjects. Westover was limited to people like Chase—a man no one knew well, so his odd behavior was taken as normal for him. To be truly successful with experimental weapons like Westover was using, he’d need a lot of humans to run experiments on.”
Alec had one hundred percent of Hazel’s attention now.
Test subjects.
While some medical studies required diversity of the human sample, for others, having multiple people of the same age, race, and gender was ideal. Perhaps with an outlier here and there to act as a control.
All else being equal, did two individuals have the same reaction to infrasound? Many studies had shown that women have a higher tolerance for pain than men. From what she’d read, most forms of torture relied on terror combined with pain to break the subject, so a study that only included men would have different results from those conducted on women.
“What’s up, Haze?” Sean asked.
She looked up sharply and realized everyone was staring at her. She must’ve made some sort of sound when the idea hit her. She shook her head. “Nothing. Just a theory. Something I need to consider when I’m in the lab.” She looked to Alec. “What else was in the letter?”
He looked at her with concern, then lifted the paper again and resumed reading. “Resign, or the redhead will pay the price. You are a traitor who doesn’t deserve your seat. Killer of men and babies. We will tell the world what we know. The bones in the cave will be identified. The redhead will expose you. The spy will strike. No one is safe. Do the right thing, or your family will get smaller.”
He paused in the reading and met Hazel’s gaze. “The reference to the redhead exposing me along with the line about bone identification seemed like a reference to you, even though there’s no need for you to examine those bones. Isabel and I found the remains of the man I killed in Alaska in the back of the cave where both Vin and I were tortured. As far as I know, once the case was closed, the remains were released to next of kin for burial or cremation.”
“I can see why you weren’t ready to rule me out as the target,” she said.
“Yes. Add to that the line about the spy striking, and Matt was back in play and a suspect. Or again, they were referring to you with the idea you would expose the cover-up in Alaska. But really, it’s the final line in the letter that prevented me from sharing everything with you and Isabel.”
“What is it?” Isabel asked.
Alec closed his eyes for a long moment. He took a deep breath, then focused on the paper. His voice was hard and flat as he read the last sentence. “Resign, or we will wake the sleeping monster with the ring of a silent bell.”
Isabel gasped.
Alec set the paper down and took her hand. “Silent. That’s the word that had me on the phone to Sean, sending him to the reservoir to pick up Isabel. Infrasound is inaudible to the human ear. Some animals communicate with it, but humans aren’t among them. It’s sound that’s felt by humans. A bell that’s silent must be referring to infrasound.”
“Wake the sleeping monster?” Ivy asked.
“Chase Johnston,” Sean said. “The way he’s behaving. He’s still in their control.”
“I think so,” Alec said. “When I first read it, I thought it referred to Isabel, that Westover had planted something in her mind that last day.” He met her gaze. “But I also knew it could be an empty threat, to freak us out. To freak me out. I didn’t want you terrorized again when it might not be true.”
“Holy shit, Alec.” Isabel had turned white. Even her many freckles appeared to have lost their pigment.
“I’m sorry, honey.” He closed his eyes and took another deep breath. He opened them again, his focus entirely on Isabel. “I will find these motherfuckers and destroy them. It’s not simply someone who knows what happened in Alaska. Whoever wrote this note, whoever is messing with Chase, they worked with Westover.”
Hazel slowly stood from her seat. “I think it’s time I examine the bones and see if I can figure out why they didn’t want Isabel to find them—or me to examine them—so badly they risked everything by coming after me and blowing up the annex.”
32
They stood as a group in front of the locked steel door to the lab. Josh had reported that no one visited the corridor under his watch, and was dismissed. Now, they were ready to enter.
“The large incinerator and hazmat disposal system is built in and can’t be removed. There are sprinkler systems for decontamination and other state-of-the-art equipment. I didn’t want to destroy it, but given the experimentation Beck was running down here,” Rav said, “and the secret lab room we found in Alaska, access to this area is granted only to our most trusted personnel.”
“Any chance there’s another secret lab here?” Matt asked.
“Five years ago, the FBI scoured every inch of this building before I was allowed to take possession of the compound. Three years ago, after we found the Alaska lab, we did another search here and of the other compounds and didn’t find anything. Under Beck’s ownership, only the Alaska and Virginia compounds had labs. The other facilities are much smaller, mostly housing for operatives working for our bigger security clients. We’ve reviewed blueprints and measured and pounded on walls, finding some hidden storage spaces but nothing like the hidden lab in Alaska.”
“You should get Ivy’s mapping equipment in here,” Matt said. “CAM can see through walls.”
Ivy shook her head. “CAM can’t see through steel. Plus there’s no way to calibrate to the natural landscape when nothing is natural here.”
Rav punched in the security code on the number pad next to the door, pressed his thumb to the biometric scanner, then pulled out his set of keys. “The lab requires a code, thumbprint, and a key.”
“Which I’m thankful for right now,” Hazel said. “Chase had no problem entering Sean’s quarters, locked with just a code.”
“Yeah,” Rav said. “I’m going to ask Lee to go over the system and see if Chase has access to one of the master bypass codes.”
“Good idea,” Sean said as Rav pushed the heavy door open. No whooshing Star Trek door for the lab. In the event of a catastrophic power outage, all electronic doors in the compound unlocked and could be easily slid open. This door had old-school hinges that could only be accessed from the inside. Rav hadn’t messed around when sealing off the lab.
The lights came on automatically, and Hazel let out another sigh of relief as she approached the bones laid out on the big metal trays. As far as Sean could tell, everything was just as they’d left it Thursday night.
She made a beeline for the stool in front of the microscope and flicked the switch to light the bright light bars that hung from the ceiling above that table. She ran a hand over the neck of the microscope. Sean recognized the touch as a caress, one he’d felt several times from that same hand, and he smiled.
She liked him at least as much as she liked her fancy new microscope, and with Hazel MacLeod, that was saying something.
She lifted her glasses, letting them rest on top of her head, then leaned down and put her eyes to the lenses. Her dark auburn hair slid down, curtaining her face. She tucked a lock behind her ear and adjusted something on the scope. The bright light above haloed her, bringing out the deep red lights in her hair, and Sean felt a kick in the gut and a fierce male pride.
His.
That long, slender neck. The narrow chin. Those soft, sweet pink lips.
His. All his.
Her incredible, magnificent brain. Her compassionate soul that guided her to choose a line of work in which she gave a voice to long-silenced victims.
He was absolutely crazy about her.
When this ordeal was over, he was going to take that vacation Rav had talked about as part of his cover, but for real. He’d take Hazel to a cabin or a beach or wherever the hell s
he wanted to go, and they’d spend a week experimenting with all the toys they’d won.
He’d wasted a hell of a lot of time these last few years. He wasn’t about to squander another minute.
Isabel, Ivy, Alec, and Matt asked questions about the bones on the table, while Sean stood back from the group, watching Hazel.
“Doesn’t look so fake now,” Keith said softly, stepping to his side. “Given the way you look at her.”
Sean kept his gaze on her as he smiled and said, “I’m thinking when my sister is done with chemo, I won’t be going back to Dubai after all.”
Keith nodded. “The client will be disappointed, but your replacement will be glad for the extension.”
“You upset that Rav didn’t bring you in the loop on the threat sooner?”
He shook his head. “Nah. It’s all part of the job. And given that Chase is involved, it’s good he didn’t bring Raptor in officially.” He glanced toward the door. “Speaking of. I’m useless here. I’m going to check on Chase, see if he’s woken up.”
Rav turned. “When you’re done there, I want to meet in your office. Isabel needs a computer to research forest or other fires in the vicinity of the reservoir in the years since Beck and Small purchased the land, and Matt’s going to do some dark web searching for us.”
Keith gave a sharp nod and left the lab. The others followed, as there was nothing they could do to help Hazel. Only Sean would stay in the lab with her as she worked.
The thick door closed, and Sean engaged the dead bolt. He turned to face her. “Alone at last.”
She laughed. “If you think I’m fooling around with you in this creepy biohazard lab in front of a bunch of human remains, you’re nuts.”
He circled the table and pulled her into his arms. “The biohazards were cleaned years ago.” He winked and pressed a kiss on her lips, then cradled her head against his chest. “But no fooling around when you have work to do. I’m not a fan of skulls watching either. Might give me performance issues.”
