Taken By Choice (Taken Trilogy Book 3)

by Jessica Frances

  Most of what I can see isn’t in English, but what I see in English doesn’t actually make sense; it’s all random words and numbers that have no meaning to me.

  Then floor plans load, plans for a bank; the HSBC bank in England. There are notes all over it. They mention codes, security cameras and money amounts next to certain times. After that there are headshots, clearly taken without the person realizing, with descriptions of who they are, their homes, their families and what job they have at the bank. This is about a bank robbery?

  I quickly unplug the USB, putting another one in.

  This is the same, but of a bank in France; the BNP Paribus.

  Have we found the wrong Intel or is this what Stan is really after? Are they going to rob banks to steal millions of dollars? Or are they going to sell the information on to other people to do the work? Or is this about preventing the robberies?

  Plugging in the final USB, I see this one has information about a bank in Germany. No American Banks on here.

  I look over the pages beside me, not one of them is in English.

  “Holloway, we’ve got to move, now.” Ethan moves into the room. Then I hear loud footsteps approaching. “Shit,” he swears, grabbing his gun tightly in his hand. “Listen, Holloway, there are four men approaching. Stall them for me and I’ll fix this.” Ethan holds his hands out, halting me from asking any questions, and then he does something impossible.

  He disappears from my sight. One second he is at the doorway, the next, he’s gone. That is not possible.

  “Ethan, what is going on? Where did you go?” I squeal, my body shaking with the implications of what I’ve just witnessed. Ethan is one of us? Was his mother tested on, too?

  Yelling bellows from outside the hallway and I feel completely exposed. Has Ethan just left me for dead?

  My hand is shaking; I know there’s no way I’ll get a clear shot off. Especially not when there are four of them. I step away from the entrance and keep moving until my back hits the wall behind me. I’m trapped in here, a sitting duck.

  “Ethan?” I whisper, hoping he hasn’t left me.

  A man steps around the corner and his glare moves from his laptop to the clearly moved USB’s and then to the stack of pages that I roughly shuffled through.

  He says something to me in his own language, but I have no idea what he is saying.

  “Please…”I quietly beg as he brings his gun up to my level.

  “Amereecan?” he questions, his voice thick with his accent. He speaks quickly in his own language, but I hear one word that I recognize. “… Ztan Goodeens?” Stan’s name rings out clearly.

  “You know Stan? Stan Goodings?” I gasp, almost stepping forward in my shock, though halting when I see the gun still trained on me.

  “Ve have zeal, he vant dis, he need pave me.” He points with his gun at the USB’s and then quickly moves it back to pointing at me. His other men crowd the doorway, one with their back outwards. I have no idea where Ethan is, but it’s clear I’m stuck in here on my own.

  “He’s evil.” I wonder if there is a way to get this man on my side. Maybe if he realizes I hate Stan, he won’t shoot me? Then again, if I’m dead, then I can’t help Stan and P.A.G.E. do any further horrible things. Maybe I should be antagonizing him?

  He snorts at me, a smile playing on his lips. “He vill die,” he says, moving the gun to aim at my head.

  Before he squeezes off the shot, a gunshot sounds from the hallway. Then another. Two guards drop.

  The final guard yells in his own language, his confusion evident, and then I hear another shot blast along the hallway.

  “Vou lone?” he demands, his gun no longer pointed at me. He is waving it madly at the entrance. I know this is my chance to grab my gun from the table and shoot him. I wouldn’t even have to see his face as I pull the trigger.

  Yet, I can’t. I’m frozen in place.

  I almost jump out of my skin when another shot rings out through the small room and our target falls to the ground, dead. A bullet wound to his head, blood already oozing out from under his fallen body.

  Ethan’s voice breaks the silence, telling me to hurry up and then I finally see him.

  He’s deathly pale, his breathing is labored and his nose is gushing blood.

  “What the hell?” I gasp, rushing over to him as his legs fall out from under him. “Are you okay?”

  “I think… I don’t think so,” he gasps, his voice fading quickly.

  “Hold on, we need to get you to Stan,” I say, wrapping his arm over my shoulder and forcing him to stand.

  “Wait, the Intel,” he pleads. Just to please him I pocket the USB’s. He surprises me by lifting his arm up and shooting the laptop twice through the keypad. “In case he had a backup. Burn the pages.” He takes a lighter from his pocket and holds it out to me. I take it, needing three tries to get it to light. I hold it against the pages and wait for them to alight.

  “We need to get you out of here,” I say, moving us out of the hallway and back the way we came. Ethan thankfully is able to keep his legs under him and he enables us to move quickly. He’s way too heavy for me to lift on my own.

  We make it back to the stairs, and I go up first. The tunnel lid is still open and I carefully look at my angles as I come out, making sure the coast is clear.

  It is. I jump out fully this time, leaning on my side to grab hold of Ethan’s vest to pull him up as he weakly tries to move upwards.

  Just as we make it up, gunfire sounds close to us then I feel something fly over my head and I know we’re in trouble.

  “Move, move, move!” I yell at Ethan, adrenaline pulsing through me. We sprint into the woods and find a trail. We stay on it as I try to make contact with Stan. My ear piece is either dead, or they’ve cut communication off between us.

  “Can you get Stan?” I ask Ethan, my arm pulling him along.

  “No,” he gasps out, his voice sounding shaky and weak.

  Footsteps and further gunshots alert me that we’re being followed, and I know we can’t stay on this path. It’s too obvious and easy to follow.

  “Come on, this way.” I pull his arm to the side. While my plan has been to run down the side of this hill, we instead slide—and in Ethan’s case fall—down the hill. I knock my shoulder into an unseen tree and lose my grip on him.

  When we reach the bottom there is a lake full of rocks with water that is no higher than ankle deep. I see Ethan fly out from the hill and land face first into the water. I land far more gracefully next to him, and quickly pull his head back when he doesn’t move. While the water washes away some of the blood from his face, his nose keeps bleeding freely.

  Yelling sounds above us and I wrap his arm around my shoulders again. “We need to keep moving. Come on, Ethan,” I huff, already feeling out of breath. I propel us forward, knowing he is trying to keep himself standing upright. His eyes are closed and I feel him putting the only energy he has left into moving us forward.

  We stay running inside the lake, letting the large trees and shrubs give us cover. When I notice the area clearing up ahead and a foot bridge, I force us to climb so we’re not in view of the men chasing us. My shoes are soaked through.

  We continue doing this for at least an hour, moving upwards and forwards. Slowly the voices begin to disappear. When I count to a thousand and don’t hear a single noise—other than our own breathing and feet hitting the ground—my panic slowly begins to recede.

  Another hour and I’m sweating to the point that I think my clothes are dripping wet. Ethan has slowly let his weight move onto me; right now he is barely able to stand. I move us back down the hill towards the water and lie him down on the side of the bank. I cup water in my hands and wash his face with it, grateful to see his nose is no longer gushing. I sit him up, leaning him against a tree stump and pinch the bridge of his nose, realizing I perhaps should have done this earlier when it was gushing blood. I hold it tightly, waiting for it to stop. Dana used to sometimes get bloody
noses and she would do this to make it stop.

  He still looks deathly pale, but I don’t really have the best lighting out here. I moved my night vision glasses onto my forehead a while ago after finding my eyes able to see clearly enough in the moonlight.

  While Ethan’s eyes are still shut, I grab the satchel of water we have in our bags, slowly pouring it into Ethan’s mouth, and he gulps it down. When it starts spilling out the edges of his mouth, I give him a rest and drink the rest myself. The small amount left doesn’t feel anywhere close to enough, but I ignore my thirst.

  I take out the USB’s in my pocket, knowing what I have to do. These are plans for breaking into banks. This is in no way US military intelligence. Stan lied, and not only that, he was obviously in negotiation to buy the information himself. He risked all our lives so he could double cross a bad man. Blake was right to question what we were stealing, and he is right that we shouldn’t just follow blindly.

  Our side trip has provided me with the perfect excuse to make sure Stan never gets this information.

  I drop all three USB’s to the ground and stomp on them. Once they’re destroyed I kick them into the lake, knowing they’ll never be salvageable now. I take out my knife and carefully place a rip along the pocket in my pants. Now I’ll be able to say my pocket got ripped and the USB’s just fell out. We were being shot at so he can’t expect that I would have noticed a branch ripping my pant leg, right?

  I send up a silent prayer that Rose and Charlie don’t suffer because of what I’ve done and then I focus my attention back on Ethan, who has completely passed out.

  Why didn’t he tell me he was one of us? He wasn’t part of the group Ocean spoke about, so is there another group out there? What is going on?

  ***

  Hours later, Ethan begins to stir. Light is moving over the trees surrounding us and I assume it’s early morning. Stan has not come for us yet, but they must know where we are. I have a tracking device implanted in my arm after all. One Martha bragged would mean they’re able to find me anywhere. However, I suppose it’s possible we’re in a dead zone, given that we’re tucked away between two large hills. We might need to move to higher ground.

  “Holls?” he slurs my name.

  I sit up, having been resting next to him to keep us both warm. “Ethan, you’re awake! Are you okay? What the hell did you do back there?” I bombard him with questions, unable to stop myself.

  “Head… hurts,” he cries, his hands slowly moving to his head to cradle it.

  “Your nose was gushing blood so badly; were you hit? Are you okay now?” I crouch over him and lean closely to his face, not seeing any bruising around his nose or eyes.

  “Tired,” he says, his eyes closing again.

  “Wait, we need to move again. Think you can stand on your feet?” I ask him, already moving his arm around me and using whatever strength I have left to pull us both up.

  “Sleep, Holls…” he murmurs.

  “Soon. First, you’re going to tell me what the hell you did back there. Are you one of us, Ethan? Was your mother tested on?”

  He’s silent for a while, and I think he either didn’t hear me or can’t find the energy to answer me. We take several awkward steps upwards, having to lean on tree trunks along the way to not fall back down.

  “Not my mother. I volunteered,” he pants out.

  “You volunteered to be experimented on?” I gasp, freezing us in place and almost losing my balance because of it. “Why?”

  “To help serve… my country,” he says slowly, his breathing coming out heavier. I stop to give him a break, leaning him against another tree.

  “And now you’re able to turn yourself invisible?” My mouth falls open.

  “It’s the first time… I’ve been able to… do that. Usually, it’s just… my arm or some… thing, I even managed… clothing.” He smiles weakly at me. I get the feeling that if he had the energy he would be jumping up and down right now in excitement. “It knocked me… around at first… it’s why I took… so long to attack,” he continues, pausing to take deep breaths.

  “So why do you look like death right now?” I ask, seeing his pale features clearly now.

  “It takes a lot… out of me.”

  “But you’ll be okay?”

  “I… hope so.” He closes his eyes again and I pull him away from the tree.

  “We need to keep moving.”

  We walk in silence, our speed slower than a snail. Eventually, we make it to higher ground and I lay Ethan down on the damp soil.

  “That bloody nose you got, were you hit?” I ask him again, my brain linking the image with another.

  “It happens… sometimes.” He still sounds out of breath, even though he’s lying down, resting.

  “Corby got a bloody nose, too, when he was attacking me and Will could barely get him off me. Will is superhuman in strength,” I lead him, piecing in my mind that perhaps Corby has been experimented on, too.

  “All of us in our team… are the same.”

  I pause to take that in. “How many are there?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “When were you tested on?”

  “Two years ago.”

  My heart speeds up at his words and then breaks. More experiments are being run, even now? P.A.G.E. needs to be stopped, and somehow we have to do that without getting Rose and Charlie killed.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Top secret,” he whispers, his voice getting smaller now.

  “So you can go invisible, Corby is super strong, what else can people do?”

  “I’ve heard many… rumors… a guy can walk… through walls… one guy can enter past dreams… one dude turns his… skin blue. I’ve seen… him, it’s kind… of hilarious.” He coughs roughly then and I sit him up, watching the painful look cross his face as his lungs abuse him inside.

  “Wait, you said a guy can enter past dreams?” I ask, my hands shaking all of a sudden.

  “Yeah.”

  “Has anyone doubled up on their abilities?” My voice is shaking now, but Ethan doesn’t seem to notice.

  “Yeah, I think so… Three soldiers are… really strong.”

  “What did you say about the guy who can enter past dreams? What does that mean?”

  “I’m not sure, Meredith told me about…” His voice trails off and I watch his eyes roll to the back of his head before he falls to his side and stops moving altogether.

  “Ethan? ETHAN!” I scream at him, shaking him to try to get him to wake up, yet he doesn’t stir.

  Chapter 22 – THE COMA

  May 29th

  I’m sitting next to Ethan back at The Ranch. Thankfully, Stan found us shortly after Ethan passed out, and after a lengthy stay in Scotland, we were able to move out and back to here. I haven’t mentioned to anyone what Ethan told me. I’m not even sure I’m able to process it correctly. When we broke into The Jail to try to free Will and Charlie, I had seen all of those people in those rooms. Were they test subjects? Were they being experimented on?

  The whole thing gives me the creeps, and the feeling that we need to put a stop to this gets worse.

  Stan had been furious that I had lost the information, but he did seem to accept my story. He didn’t make any threats towards Rose and Charlie. I managed to catch Blake’s eye and we shared a look. He knew what I had done, and while we didn’t outwardly show any emotion to each other, I knew he was relieved and happy at what I had done. He suddenly didn’t feel alone.

  The whole operation had been a mess, but as I pointed out to Stan, at least the enemy didn’t have any information about our military, since that was what they had. He glared at me and, while anyone else would have just thought he was angry about the mess of a situation we landed in, I knew it was really because he knew there was no such information there. He was after that bank information and no doubt without it, he can’t rob any of those banks. He just lost a hell of a lot of money from our failed mission.

  N
o one else had been seriously injured, although it seems Corby had another attack while in there. Not so bad that he needed medical treatment when he got back, but Blake mentioned that he had gotten out of control. With the three Ethan killed, eight guards total were killed, many others were injured badly. Plus, our target was taken out.

  On our side we had three gunshot wounds, none fatal, and one broken arm. Ethan was our biggest loss; he is currently in a coma due to his injuries. The doctor they found us in Scotland said he had suffered a bad knock to his head, which explained the coma. I could see through his lie easily, but I didn’t contradict him. After he said Ethan was safe to move, we came back here and I’ve sat with him after training every day.

  I’m not sure exactly what I feel towards him—if we’re friends now or not—but I know I don’t want him to die. He doesn’t deserve it. He was tricked into this, and maybe with what he knows, we can stop this from happening again.

  “Good evening, Ms. Holloway.” Doctor Pratt enters Ethan’s room and this time she’s alone. I’ve been waiting for this since we got back.

  “Doctor Pratt, how is he?” I ask, watching her check Ethan’s vitals. Her fingers linger over his arms as she checks where the IV is. I see the hurt in her eyes looking at him. I definitely think Ethan has it wrong that she likes Stan. I’ve only ever seen her have eyes for him.

  “He’s doing better today, his vitals are up and he is getting his color back,” she says, again her eyes not leaving him.

  “Can I ask you something?” I slowly question, knowing I’m going to be treading on thin ice here. If she freaks out at my question and rushes to Stan, then he might question what happened to that information on our mission. Maybe, though, I can get the answers from her that I need.

  “Yes.” She finally looks away from Ethan, writing something on his chart.

  “Ethan mentioned something to me, something you told him.”

  She pauses her writing, now giving me her full attention.

  “It’s to do with the experiments that were done to him—”