Dangerous Dreams (A Dreamrunners Society Novel) (10 page)
Read Dangerous Dreams (A Dreamrunners Society Novel) Online
Authors: Aileen Harkwood
No. Jack had refused to believe it. Refused to let her go. He would not accept this. He had spent several minutes calling to her. He shook her shoulder, rubbed her uninjured arm, stroked her hair. Three minutes passed, during which he struggled with his rage at her captors.
She’d been battered before when she’d made the run to his safe house, but the newest signs of torture rivaled what he’d expect done to political prisoners, or someone being worked over by a Mexican drug cartel. Electrical burns covered her arms and abdomen. Blood painted the side of her neck and face, caked the T-shirt, matted her hair. Raised, red needle marks lined the insides of both elbows. The skin around her split lip and bruised eye had begun to yellow. Worst of all was the injury she’d incurred on her previous run. Hastily bandaged, the wrappings were a damp, solid red; the hand was grotesquely swollen. Infection must have swamped her immune system.
Were the Greys really capable of abominations of this magnitude? They might be a rogue faction of the government, but if so they were still government, and Lara was a U.S. citizen on U.S. soil.
Jack’s relief had been monumental when she finally stirred, took a shallow breath, and murmured something unintelligible. Weak as she was, emotions leaked from her again, agitation the strongest of them, fear at her pain-clouded mental state. Her connection to reality was tentative at best.
Jack slid into bed beside her, held her in his arms and basically willed her to live, sending her as much of his own energy as he could.
“Am I dead?” she’d asked.
He lied to her without hesitation.
“Not even close.”
He’d given her antibiotics, cleaned her of much of the blood. Done what he could for her fever with cool cloths and aspirin. A part of him kept up a steady drumbeat of futility.
This is her twin. This isn’t Lara you’re trying to treat. It’s just her twin
.
In his desperate need to make her healthy again, though, he rationalized what he did. If physical injury to a twin could cause permanent injury to the original, why couldn’t the opposite happen? Why wouldn’t medical treatment given to a twin help a runner’s true body, too?
When she went back to herself, she’d be covered in the same blood he’d just removed. Her hair would be as matted and tangled as when he found her, but perhaps the respite he gave her from that, however brief, would aid her spirits. Perhaps battling her fever here, the swelling and infection here, would have an effect there. However slight the difference in outcome, he’d decided he had to try.
Cutting open the bandages and examining what had happened to her hand from her contact with the doorknob, plunged him into a dark state he doubted he’d successfully concealed from her. She would need major reconstructive surgery. Skin grafts. Nor did he like the coloring of her two smallest fingers, which evidently weren’t receiving the same blood supply as the others. She might lose them. She could still lose the entire hand. If what he’d seen in her twin represented what her real hand looked like, no one had bothered to treat the injury. It meant her captors weren’t concerned if she died. To them, she was disposable.
He’d clasped her possessively to him for more than an hour. He had to find where they held her. He had no idea how much time she had left before gangrene set in, or worse, she succumbed to sepsis and died. He would not let her go. He wouldn’t allow her to lose the hand to amputation. She might not ever see full functionality restored, but he’d be damned if he’d let her suffer the alternative.
Their conversational back and forth, his questions to her replies and the questions she had in turn, had been separated by minutes at a time while she slid in and out of consciousness, a fact of which she seemed unaware.
So the Greys did have her, but where had they gotten the photo they showed her? How had they known the image of that particular room, unremarkable in design, would be of use to them? Jack could almost put the pieces together, yet felt like one or two of them were upside down or didn’t fit with the rest of the puzzle.
From the start, he’d known he couldn’t hold her there indefinitely. The feverish energy that had fueled her dreamrun home to the comforting environs of her bedroom would run down and out. As with her earlier death-like state, her departure was equally disturbing. Her twin didn’t free itself from his embrace, open the barrier to the fields and leap through. No barrier appeared. He detected no opening to the fields at all, no trail he might follow. She dissolved in his arms like a sandcastle worn away by the ocean, all while he soothed her, allayed her fears, made her think this was normal. It wasn’t normal. Nothing like it.
Distinct edges to her became softer, losing definition. Entire parts of her crumbled, wore down and were sucked into nothingness, until she disappeared and the only thing he had left was the plea he spoke to thin air.
“Stay alive, Lara. Survive for me!”
Jack’s eyes blinked open. The view through the car window was not the same one he’d left behind. Instead of the bronze roof of the sedan that had been parked next to Gavin’s SUV and the brick wall of the abandoned dry cleaners, he saw the underside of a massive concrete overpass. Heavy traffic rumbled over the bridge, vibrations shaking everything below it, ground, car, atmosphere.
“Finally,” Gavin peered over his shoulder at Jack and said. “You’re back. Do you have any idea how long you’ve been gone?”
Jack couldn’t move. Not right away. His body lay contorted across the back seat. The usual after-run spasm, like a vicious fist reaching in and knotting his back, rendered him immobile. Not that he would confess his temporary helplessness to his boss.
“How long?” he asked.
Gavin checked the stopwatch app on his phone. “Just over six hours.”
Not so long. I’ve gone longer. What’s the big deal? Isn’t that about average?
“Sorry,” he said. “Didn’t mean to keep you waiting.”
“And?”
“I was right. She wanted her own bed. They didn’t know she was there.”
“Okay, but six hours?”
“She’s dying.”
Or died. Just now, in my arms
.
Jack lifted a very shaky hand and covertly wiped away the wetness that filled the corners of his eyes. He sat up awkwardly.
She’s
not
dead. Repeat it. Make it your mantra. Not dead. You’ll find her. Not dead
.
“I’m sorry,” Gavin said, shutting down his phone’s screen. He laid the phone on the seat next to him, put his hands on the steering wheel and stared straight ahead. “What did you learn?”
“The Greys took her,” Jack said. “But we already knew that. I’m just confirming. They’ve alternately tortured her and drugged her. I guess as a way to access her latent abilities as a dreamrunner. She doesn’t know what’s going on or what she’s doing. She thinks she’s either hallucinating or already dead.”
“Did she tell you how she found the safe house?”
“A photo they showed her. What else? She’s not a finder, Gavin. At least not in the traditional sense.”
“Does she know where the photo came from?”
“No. She described it as poor quality. Something that might be taken by a cheap camera, except this photo had defects. Random glitches of color. I was wondering…”
Jack paused, swung around and sat up straight in the seat. He massaged his forehead, the sudden migraine taking him by surprise. He didn’t usually get headaches after a trip, just the spasms. Why was he so exhausted, more so than was warranted for a run that required minimal time in the fields and little physical exertion?
“You were wondering,” Gavin prompted him.
“Who had my safe house before me?” Jack asked.
“A newlywed couple from Falls Church.”
“No. Which of
us
was there?”
Gavin’s instant change of expression said it all. His lips pressed into a hard line and he slammed the steering wheel with the butt of his hand. Jack waited, but already knew the answer.
“Taylor,” Gavin said.
“Tell me, I don’t know any of the details about what happened to him. Did you recover his phone?”
“No. No, phone.”
“I love the guy, he trained me as a finder,” Jack said, “but Taylor isn’t the most responsible.”
Gavin’s voice grumbled like a mountain of rock about to let loose. “He wouldn’t.”
“Obviously he did,” Jack said. “He took photos of the safe house. The question is why?”
“Who the hell cares, why?” Gavin said.
He snatched up his cell phone off the passenger’s seat and tapped “4” on the screen’s keypad for speed dial. Jack only heard one side of the conversation, Gavin’s side.
“Pull up a list of every safe house Taylor has used since he last switched to a new burner,” Gavin ordered. “Got it? Right. How many?” He stopped to listen. “Demo all three. What? I don’t care if they have tenants. Get the people out and tear them down. The townhouse? Okay, agreed. Demolition isn’t an option, but send a team over to gut the interior down to the wall studs. Yes,
today
.”
He ended the call, replaced the phone on the seat and his hands on the wheel. This time Jack didn’t wonder about the silence. He could see Gavin thinking, calculating odds, sorting through probable futures, one likely disaster at a time.
Jack decided to add his input.
“Part of this doesn’t make sense,” he said. “If they have Taylor’s phone, and he used that phone to snap pics of the safe house, wouldn’t the Greys already have the GPS coordinates of the cabin? Why send Lara there and ask her to find the address for them? I mean can’t the Feds just pull the last 10,000 locations or whatever where a phone has pinged off a cell tower?”
The Society drubbed certain rules into every finder. Never come within five miles of your safe house with the battery installed in your phone. Remove it every time and leave it out. If something happens and you have to put it back in to make an emergency call, securely dispose of the phone and purchase another.
“Not quite 10,000. But at least the last several hundred historical geolocations,” Gavin said.
“10K, several hundred, same difference.”
“You’re right. It doesn’t jive. Having Taylor’s phone gives them the location.”
“Unless Taylor did as ordered and destroyed his phone before they got him, but had a camera on him?”
“Unlikely. It’s his phone.” Gavin ground out the words. “I know it.”
“Okay,” Jack said. “Let’s go on the assumption they do have Taylor’s phone, but for some reason they’ve been unable to pull as much information off it as they want or need. The historical locations associated with his phone could be in the hundreds or thousands and they don’t know which are relevant, which aren’t. Maybe the data dump provided by the cell carrier is incomplete. It could be Taylor knew they were coming for him, was in the process of destroying the phone, but was stopped. The Greys now have it and they’ve succeeded in recovering a few partial files, the photo of the safe house among them. It would explain the glitches in the image they showed Lara if the card had damage.”
“Yes. Great. Wonderful,” Gavin said in high irritation. “Brilliant logic, Jack. But what I want to know is what else, who else and where else did that idiot photograph?”
Jack went cold. The House? Would Taylor have been stupid enough to activate his phone to take pictures of the Society’s most secret and vulnerable location?
This could be the end of us
.
“Did they show your Lara any other photos?” Gavin asked.
“She didn’t mention it, but I didn’t ask. She’s in rough shape, Gavin. I thought her twin was dead when I first saw her.”
“What?” Gavin said. “You know that’s not possible.”
“Nor is losing consciousness as a twin, but she spent the last 6 hours slipping in and out of it,” Jack said.
“How can that happen?” Gavin said.
“I don’t know. She’s not like other runners. And when she went back, it wasn’t the normal way. Her twin literally dissolved in my arms.”
Gavin studied Jack’s image critically in the rear view mirror. Jack felt himself being weighed and judged. For what? Truthfulness? Mental instability? PTSD?
“Okay,” his boss said, and Jack knew the meeting had ended. “You’re over there.”
Gavin gestured with a flick of his head toward another agent, who stood leaning against Jack’s Land Cruiser parked a few yards away.
Gavin started his engine, already putting the vehicle in gear before Jack could set a foot out the door. “Go back to the hotel and rest,” he said. “I’ll call you when you’re needed again.”
As Gavin’s SUV jounced over rocks, through ruts and piles of garbage, rapidly exiting the vacant lot beneath the bridge, Jack approached the tall, athletic agent who’d driven his car here and looked supremely bored with the mundane task.
“Rafe,” he said to the man in greeting.
“Jack.”
Rafe continued to lean against the driver’s door, arms crossed, Jack’s keychain dangling from one hand. The man may have put up a façade of boredom, but Jack knew him better than that. Rafe was worried. He wanted to know what was going on.
Jack wasn’t up for giving a second briefing. He held out his hand and Rafe dropped the keychain into it. Lazily, the agent moved away so Jack could open the door and slide behind the wheel.
“Have they started evacuations?” Jack asked.
“Not yet.”
“Dammit, what are they waiting for?”
“A frickin’ miracle would be my guess.”
Time for me to rescue that miracle
.
He had to find Lara.
Jack slammed his door, jammed his key in the ignition and drove off, so preoccupied he failed to notice Rafe pulling out his cell phone and making a call, while watching to see which direction Jack took.
“Yeah,” Rafe said into the phone. “It’s like you thought.”
Rafe signaled to a car that waited behind one of the bridge’s massive concrete pillars. The vehicle came and picked him up.
“Right. We’re on it.”
Chapter 17
Though awake, Lara couldn’t muster enough energy to get to her feet when the door to her cell opened and Grey Man walked in. A man carrying a heavy medical kit trailed him. Face down on the cement she observed both through heavy lidded eyes that wouldn’t remain open for more than seconds at a time, no matter how hard she tried to stay awake.