by Alex Howell
Admittedly, now she was probably thinking too crazily for her own good, she knew.
But perhaps the server would have some information.
Lowering the light on her computer so she wouldn’t wake up Serena, she booted up her laptop and logged into the home database, constantly checking over the screen to make sure that Serena hadn’t woken. In her efforts, she soon came across a list of contacts from her dad’s SEAL days. She knew how thick the brotherhood of former SEALs was, and became encouraged at the idea that some of them just might be able to help. They wouldn’t know where he was, but they sure as hell could help Onyx locate him in the city.
She was a bit surprised, however, to find that the list was shorter than she remembered it. A pang of sadness then struck her as she realized that this was most likely because several names that were previously active on the list were not alive anymore or…
They were part of the squad that helped kidnap me.
Calling them up would just result in the dream I just had coming true.
No, no more of that. It’s good the list is short. Good. Less people to call, more easily able to focus on a few.
Steeling her emotions, she continued to scroll down the list of remaining contacts until she saw the name of Tessa Rogers. The one whom Mason said helped save me before getting into the hands of General Jones.
Crossing her fingers, Clara dialed the number that she saw. If she remembered correctly, Tessa had some lengthy rehab she needed to go through for the wounds she suffered at the tail end of the mission, but, frankly, she didn’t have time to worry about that.
Clara waited and listened, desperately hoping to hear Tessa pick up on the other end. But as the phone rang and rang, she realized there would be no such luck. Once again, Clara had no one to help her.
She soothed herself, took a deep breath before the tone, and spoke.
“Hi Ms. Rogers, this is Clara—Mason Walker’s daughter. I’m calling you out of concern for my father. I haven’t heard from him in awhile. I was wondering if you could reach out to Luke Simon and offer your help to find him. I think you’d know where to look and what not, or, I hope, at least. Please let me know. I appreciate it. Thank you so much.”
After ending her call to Tessa, Clara sighed in frustration. Who else can ignore my messages?
No, don’t get that attitude. Stay with it, Clara. Come on!
She then continued to look down the list until her eyes settle upon a name she’d only heard stories of, but someone who might be able to lend a helping hand.
Matthew Benton. He was a comrade in arms that her father was rather fond of and had spoken highly of in the past. He referred to Benton as the “Ghost” because of his knack for being about to come and go out of tight situations that would have ensnared others without so much as making even his supervisors aware.
And now, more than ever, Clara needed him to answer his damn phone or she’d lose her mind and get on a plane herself back to the East Coast, constitutional history classes and party-raging roommates be damned.
Staring at Matthew’s number, Clara took a deep breath.
She crossed her fingers as she waited for the first ring. There were no other numbers she could call that seemed promising, so she desperately hoped to get through. She said a silent prayer for her father—hoping that God would send an angel to rescue him.
Or, if not an angel, at least a Ghost.
At this point, Clara was starting to think she’d take a demon to get her father back.
But there was no answer.
Once more, Clara was left with rapidly diminishing options—but this time, there didn’t seem to be a way out.
19
Date Unknown
Time Unknown
Location Unknown
Mason still felt heavily sedated as he stirred to consciousness, but his tenacious will sought to resist the chemical restraints that had been placed upon him. The specter of sleep weighed upon him heavily, but his training as a former Navy SEAL gave him the finely focused determination that he needed to shake himself out of it.
That, and because he suddenly had a second chance at being conscious, he wasn’t about to screw it up by being too weak to stay awake.
His brain was coming back to full awareness as he became aware once again of the bright light bulb dangling overhead. He cracked his eyes open just enough to see his immediate surroundings. He was still apparently all alone under the spotlight of the room’s only light bulb.
But he knew better than to believe that was the case. Already having opened his eyes was a mistake, and he kept them closed, no matter how great the risk was that this meant that he might fall asleep. Until five minutes had gone by without a word in the room, suggesting he’d been left alone, Mason wasn’t going to move an eyelid, let alone an entire muscle.
He needed information and he needed it bad. He needed to know if there was even any point in continuing to fight; if the enemy had released the Ebola virus, there was nothing Mason could do but try and kill the men in revenge.
“There’s no way he’s waking up. That sedative was enough to put an elephant out. He’s still asleep.”
They still think I’m out. Good. And their tone is not one of happiness.
Besides, if they had accomplished their mission, I don’t think they’d care much if I was asleep, dead, or awake. They must not have launched the attack yet.
But don’t get too comfortable.
“You guys better be careful, we don’t want to give him so much sedative it stops his heart. He’s no good to us if he’s dead.”
So they need me alive.
That’s… interesting. Won’t be able to fake being asleep forever.
Mason still had a headache, but the brunt of the pain had subsided considerably. Now his chief complaint was the stiffness of his restrained joints and his almost unbearable thirst. But all those years Mason trained himself in focus paid off, because with a little mind over matter, to everyone in that room, Mason appeared to be in deep sleep.
And that’s all he needed to do right now was focus on remaining passed out. He didn’t want the enemy to know of him doing anything other than being asleep. But he had a lot he needed to figure out.
Mason kept his ears wide open—listening very carefully to everything that was going on around him. He could make out three distinct voices talking to each other, and they seemed to be coming from somewhere in the back of the room. He again heard the older man speaking, and again, that voice sounded familiar… but his mind had not yet caught up to his body to let him know who it was.
But when he found out… boy, was he going to give them hell. Boy, was he going to make them suffer for what had happened.
It sure as hell wasn’t going to be pretty.
“I just don’t know how you could be so careless,” the older man growled. “How many times have I told you to watch your back! I mean—you led this guy right to us. You should have known better than that! Damnit! Then again, maybe I should have known better for ever picking your sorry rear ends up! If you don’t straighten up, I’ll have the government ship you right back to your little Italian mafia ring!”
Mason resisted the urge to smile. These two men were indeed apparently of Sicilian heritage—different from the Iranians, suggesting a deeper than expected plot, but in line with what he had suspected when he was first knocked out. While the threads didn’t mean anything in a vacuum, he had a feeling that if he could just back to Onyx and show them all of the information he had gathered, he and the team could piece everything together, hunt down the guilty parties, and bring them to justice.
Assuming all of D.C. wasn’t afflicted by Ebola by then.
At that point, some murmurings went back and forth that Mason couldn’t pick up, but he just told himself to be patient. Eventually, more information would come out, whether because the assumed leader lost his cool or because his underlings simply couldn’t contain themselves as they spoke.
That was the hope, at
least.
As time went by and not much was said of relevance, Mason wondered why they hadn’t just interrogated him and tortured him. Granted, they probably didn’t know who Mason was, or at least they didn’t know how much of a threat he was to them, but the fact that Mason had followed them should have told them that he was a man not to be trifled with.
Well, they trifled with me pretty good. But they’re foolish if—
“Because of you two,” the old man shouted, causing Mason to cut off his thoughts. “It won’t be long before the American forces all come down on us, so you just better be prepared! You got that, friends? When I give you instructions, you are supposed to follow them! I told you to keep your eyes peeled and your butts covered and you failed at both fronts!”
The leader’s choice of words caused Mason to take another mental note. Both fronts? Whoever this guy was, he used military lingo. His voice seemed to have a familiarity with language, inflection and tones that would familiar to someone in the service.
Mason was getting bad flashbacks to General Jones—it certainly wasn’t General Jones, as Mason would never forget that voice, but he was getting tired of U.S. military officers betraying their country in the name of money or fame or infamy. Don’t jump to conclusions. It could be someone in a different country’s military.
But… let’s be honest, how likely is that?
Damnit, I’m going to have to let Luke and General Thomson know. They’re going to have to do a clean sweep of the generals and everyone below them.
It’s gonna be real fun when President Richards has to go through all these guys.
“All right,” the older man snapped. “I’ve got to step out a minute—I’ll be back. Try not to screw anything else up while I’m gone, would ya?”
Mason let one eye open just slightly to see if he could get a blurred view of what was going on. He saw a door open and a man step out before shutting the door, but there wasn’t anything else he could identify, and he wasn’t willing to risk being caught at this point. He trusted his skills to get him out of this predicament when the time came.
As soon as the door had shut, one of the men grabbed something—probably a pencil or pen—and threw it against the wall. The other man, in an Italian accent, tried to calm down the first, but both were clearly on age from the chewing out they had just received.
“Hey Marco! We don’t have all day, no? We got to get busy!”
“Why don’t you settle down Carmine? You just relax, okay?”
“You say relax Marco! You say relax! But while you are relaxing—we miss the speech! You just heard the boss—he says Pierce Richards is speaking tomorrow! If we don’t strike then—we’ve missed our chance!”
“So don’t you tell me to relax!”
Wait… so it’s… it’s been how long since I’ve been out?
No wonder I’m so damn hungry.
Three days…
The first thought that came to mind for Mason was that they weren’t kidding when they said they had used an elephant-sized tranquilizer to knock him out; normal ones were meant to put someone out for a couple of hours at most, but for him to have slept for three days as a result of getting hit in the head and then being hit with a tranquilizer…
It was kind of a miracle, actually, that his vitals hadn’t just shut down completely.
The second thought that came to mind was that his worst fears, the ones he had expressed with Kyle and Raina, had come true. The terrorists truly did intend to strike at the next speech for Pierce Richards, and there was no waiting for him to get elected or for inauguration day. Undoubtedly, they knew those days would cause more damage, but they had smartly decided to move up their attack. Too smartly.
Onyx, you guys had better have continued to work on what I told you. If you fell through, there’s going to be hell to pay.
Mostly to myself.
The third and final thought Mason had was that he couldn’t waste any more time. He had to figure out a way to get out of there now. If an attack within 24 hours was imminent, there was no more playing around. He had to act now, no matter how great his chance of getting killed was.
He tested the ropes on his hands, which were still tight—but not as tight as they had been before. The lack of food and water, it seemed, had slimmed Mason down, making it more feasible for him to escape. It wasn’t going to be easy, but—
“Marco! Carmine!”
It was the leader, the military guy. Mason quickly closed his eye and pretended to be all but dead, even if he knew that the traitor—he assumed—wasn’t paying attention to him.
“Get over here now!”
Mason heard some indecipherable chatter, but he could pick up on their tone, and their tone was hurried and anxious. It was not the kind of voice that suggested confidence in the plan, which gave Mason a glimmer of hope.
What followed next, however, did not.
“I don’t care! You hear me? I don’t care! You will do it—and you will do it tomorrow!”
The attack would go on as planned.
Mason was running out of time.
And Onyx was nowhere to be seen.
At this point, Mason was on his own, once again, to save the country.
20
September 19th, 2028
3:30 p.m. EST
Richmond, Virginia
Matthew Benton, as a former Navy SEAL, had quite a bit of experience in the cloak and dagger world of special operations.
Most of the things he did in his three-decade spanning career, he still couldn’t talk about to this very day, even to people in the SEALs. The only ones he could share stories with were the ones who had been on the ground with him, and such a person was a rarity—and even rarer was the one who would have wanted to reminisce about such a story. Nevertheless, those that knew him knew that he was a legend.
His ability to find a target, infiltrate it, and get out unscathed was nothing short of uncanny, so much so that his brothers in arms called him “Ghost.” Matthew Benton had the gift of stealth, so much so that often times, his commanders just gave him free reign to do what he wanted on his missions. Although he had remained retired for some time, he always remained just a hair anxious to get back into the field; life at home wasn’t quite as good as he had hoped.
And so it was on one unusually heated September afternoon when he was mowing his lawn, not thinking anything of the day, when his phone rang, alerting him that someone with a Baltimore area code was calling. He at first assumed it was a telemarketer and ignored it; he wasn’t one to suffer fools much these days, if he ever did.
But then the number called back again.
And again.
Matthew could not ignore the call anymore, if only because no telemarketer ever called back three times in the span of just a couple of minutes. Matthew killed the lawn mower, grabbed his water from the cup holder, and answered.
“This is Matthew,” he said in a tough, gravely voice.
“Hi Mr. Benton, this is Clara.”
That is a name I have not heard in ages.
It was a name that had made Matthew both proud as a friend and sad; proud, because it had given his brother in arms, Mason, a reason to fight. Sad, because it had ultimately taken him away from the teams. But like all brothers, Mason had promised Matthew that he would be there to help if anything should ever arise, and the reverse was true as well. There were no hard feelings from Matthew; if anything, there was a certain joy he hadn’t felt in some time to hear from the daughter of someone he hadn’t talked to in over a decade.
“Mason’s daughter?”
“Yes, sir. I, uh, hope this isn’t at a bad time.”
Matthew smiled. It would’ve been nice if Rebecca had ever met her.
Matthew tried his hardest not to go down the dark path that thoughts of Rebecca and his wife led to, but it was too late now.
Why did he drag his family all the way to a war-torn country like Afghanistan? How could he have been so stupid? The idea was that he w
ould have his family on hand instead of across the globe; his wife was a peace activist anyway, so it wasn’t like they were just taking space up in the military compound.
And then a terrorist strike on the base had come, killing both of them, wiping out everything Matthew loved and his only family in a heartbeat.
After the loss of his wife and child, he felt immeasurably guilty that he had survived. So guilty, in fact, he couldn’t even put it into words. When his worried friends and family spoke to him, they couldn’t understand what it was that he was feeling. Most were at a complete loss to sympathize with his trauma.
For his part, Matthew did what he always did—he retreated into the world, refusing to engage with it, taking a job as a security guard where social contact was minimal, and what contact he had was minimal.
But he had heard of Bree’s passing, and though he was not able to reach Mason, he visited Bree’s grave and remarked how he hoped that she was now with Rebecca and Laura, playing with them and trading stories.
This, however, was a chance to get back in the game and help someone who understood him well. And sensing from Clara’s somber tone of voice, Matthew readily perceived that he just might be of service. He could tell that this was no courtesy call—and that she was perhaps in need of some sort of aid herself.
“Hey, Clara, no worries. Is everything all right? How are you doing?”
“I’m fine,” she said, which Matthew immediately knew was a lie—but a lie many, many, many a person said in stressful times. “I’m worried about my dad. I haven’t heard from him in over three days. It’s not like him. It was bad enough to have to go several hours without hearing from him, it’s so unlike him, but this long, and no one on his current team knows where he is, and—”
Matthew, knowing Mason better than most, would have to agree. He knew that Mason would never go that long without speaking to his daughter. He knew that even if the guy was in the middle of a firefight, he would probably be pulling the trigger in one hand and dialing Clara’s number with the other.
