Echoes (27 page)

She turned to run, but John stood behind her, pointing the remote.

“Inside,” he said, a little smile playing about his lips.

No way in hell was she entering that room.

“Go ahead and zap me. Your buddies already did it a couple times, though, so you'd better be careful. Whatever freezing did, I can't imagine an overdose of electricity could be that much better for your long-term plans.” Her muscles tensed, anticipating the pain, but it didn't come. Instead, a damp, sweet-smelling mist surrounded her head. She choked, sucking the drug into her lungs before she could stop herself, and the world disappeared in a rushing cloud of black-winged butterflies.

***

The bitch hit the floor hard, but he wasn't worried. A soft Persian rug he'd bought on a trip to Morocco covered the hardwood, so her body wouldn't be overly damaged. Falcone's boys should have stuck around to help him shift her to the lab, though, instead of running down to the Paradis to try to retrieve their precious cargo themselves. They'd pay for that once he had her safely stored.

He bent over and pulled her into a sitting position so he could wedge his shoulder under her arm and hoist her into a fireman's carry.
Cow
. He felt a moment's fear as he strained beneath her weight. What if her slovenly lack of care for her appearance infected him? Could a woman who exhibited such lack of restraint in her eating habits really be the one? He hadn't had time to research her thoroughly. What if she had an addiction or some form of illness?

And she'd doubtless been fucking his former brother-in-law. God knows what she could have picked up there. The man was total scum. Could he have passed her something so quickly? Something that might lurk in her blood?

Then you'll be well and truly screwed, won't you, buddy boy? You'd better hope she's not tainted like the one your precious daddy kept for himself. Weak genes. Pretty enough, but flawed. Just like him.

“Shut up!” John stumbled, pitched forward, almost lost his footing. “Shut fucking up! You're dead. Dead!”

But laughter echoed in his head even as he made his way into the secret lab.

***

The ground beneath Mac's hands went from dirt to grass in an instant, and he called a halt to their progress. Nash inched up next to him, and both men pulled off their helmets. They'd reached the edge of Lewis's property. A wrought-iron fence lay between them and the expanse of manicured lawn. The fence, at six feet high, presented no problem. The lawn might. Or, more accurately, the two guys with machine guns patrolling it might.

He could shoot them, of course. And if he were certain they'd been assigned here as part of Falcone's organization, he might. But if they were just hired muscle, working for some European or American security company like Nash's, they didn't deserve to die for doing their job. Too bad he and Nash hadn't brought tranqs, but Mac rarely found himself in need of such exotic weaponry.

“I'll circle around, create a diversion, then meet you inside.”

Mac shook his head. “They're heavily armed, and we don't know how many there are. You can't take them on, and these two may not budge if there are more up front already.”

“Have I mentioned how much I hate ops without adequate intel?”

Despite the knots in his gut, Mac couldn't help but grin. “A time or two.”

Nash grunted. “All right, then, what do you suggest?”

Mac watched as the two guards met in the center of the yard, spoke briefly, and continued on their individual paths. One paused at the northwest corner of the house, his head swiveling to watch the back and side of the property, while the other continued patrolling, passing out of view around the northeast corner. A few minutes later, the walker returned and the one who had paused disappeared and walked up the west side, where he seemed to stop and speak to someone beyond Mac's line of sight. Then he returned.

“So three at least. Probably four. Concentration on the front.” Nash's words echoed Mac's thoughts. “Wonder how many he has in the house.”

“Probably none. Maybe some of Falcone's inside guys, but no low-level hired help. Not if he's holding Callie prisoner.” Please, God, let her just be a prisoner. As long as she was alive, they could deal with anything else.

“Your op,” Nash reminded him. “How you want to do this?”

“Work our way around. As I recall, Lewis has a hot tub on the west side of the house with palms around it. Papa Lewis planted them for privacy with his model bride.” He remembered using the tub with Nikki in the early days of their relationship. She'd insisted they sneak in, though John would have given them permission. It was all part of the game to her, part of what gave him the rush he got from being with her. In hindsight, he wondered how he could have imagined such a passing adrenaline high could last a lifetime. How he could have wanted it to.

“The trees will give us some cover, especially at this hour when the sun's still low enough there will be plenty of shadow. We can take out whatever guard John has on that side. We won't have long, though, because these guys check in with each other on every pass.”

“Let's do it.”

Lizards and rodents scurried away as the men continued pushing through the growth, heading east. They rounded the corner, and Mac sent up a prayer of thanks for the brush that continued to hide them as they made their way toward the grove of trees around the hot tub. But while Lewis had left the tangle of plants between his property and his neighbor's alone for a measure of privacy, both men had erected fences, leaving only a narrow strip for Mac and Nash. The plants would move with their passage, and any alert guard would notice.

And if said guard started shooting, they'd be dead meat. Nowhere to run.

They had to go over the fence.

***

John winced at the sight of the cow's pale, fat flesh as he stripped her. Looking at her lying there on the table brought all the doubts back. She was so far from perfect. How could Father have meant her to perfect him? But then, he didn't need her outside. He'd tried that before.

He'd read her résumé. She was smart and didn't have any apparent vices. If she'd gotten lazy about taking care of herself, if her body was unattractive, that served his purpose. It meant she'd probably polluted herself less than others like Nicole with her perfect figure and flawless skin, who'd had men trailing in her wake since her early teens.

He pushed the cow's unresisting feet into the stirrups, then grabbed a roll of duct tape and taped her legs to the metal extensions from ankle to knee. He couldn't have her trying to get out during the surgery. After testing the strength of the tape, he locked the stirrups to keep her legs open.

Satisfied with her legs, he moved up her body and wrapped tape tightly around her hips. He'd have preferred to coat her head to toe in the stuff, but he couldn't afford to. He was no gynecological specialist, and he had to leave himself other ways into her body if his first attempt went awry. Not that he expected it to. He'd been studying for a long time, ever since he realized that as his psychological weakness came from his mother during the months he spent in her womb, he would need to perfect it with uterine cells as well as brain matter from the chosen one.

Still, he didn't want to cut her open too soon. Abdominal surgery was risky if you cared about keeping the patient's blood flowing to the brain. Better if the uterine tissue could be extracted vaginally, so her brain would remain perfect right up to the moment he cut into it.

He'd wanted to try the process with Nikki, but he'd been forced to kill her too soon. The hand, well, that had been a last-ditch effort to make lemonade. No, this was the way it had to be. Living tissue, dying breath.

He snapped her wrists into restraints.

***

Callie woke to hell. Bright lights blinded her, but when she tried to shift her head to the side to avoid them, she realized that what she'd first felt as a bandage around her temples was actually some kind of restrictive device. In fact, she couldn't move any of her limbs. She'd been strapped to a table, her feet in those stirrups she'd found so shocking. And she was naked.

A gag had been stuffed into her mouth, but she tried to scream around it.

“I thought you might do that,” said John, appearing above her. “Which is the reason I had to gag you. The room's soundproof, so screaming when you're not even in pain won't do anything but make me angry. I would rather do surgery without it, so if you promise to behave, I'll take it out.”

Behave? This lunatic wanted her to behave?

“Nnn-hnnn” was the best she could manage behind the gag. The headgear prevented her from nodding, though she could still shift her upper body a bit. Too bad she didn't need to shrug.

“Good.” He stood over her and pulled a piece of duct tape off her mouth. She almost screamed again, this time from the pain, but she held it in. Instead, she pretended to be coughing, choking on the gag. But the ruse didn't work. John took long forceps and grabbed the cotton wadding. She'd been hoping he would use his fingers, giving her a chance to bite them off his hand. That have would put an end to his surgical dreams for a while at least.

“What do you want from me?” Her mouth was parched, all liquid absorbed by the cotton, but talking was the only weapon left to her. “You could have asked. Are you sick? You need an organ transplant or something?”

“I'm not sick!” John snatched a scalpel from the tray and held it over his head, aiming down at her chest. She shrank back into the cold metal table as best she could. “She made me weak. It's her fault! Now you're going to make it right. That's why he created you. Why he created all of you.”

“She?”

But something happening on one of the monitors on the wall behind her head had caught his eye. He laid the scalpel back into the tray with a frown.

“I'm afraid I have a few things to take care of before we can get started,” he said, suddenly calm. She followed him with her eyes as he moved toward the door and left, carefully sliding the panel back into place, closing her in.

***

As the patrolling guard reached the corner of the house and paused to speak to a second man, Mac and Nash hoisted themselves over the wall ten feet apart in perfect synchronicity, each landing in a patch of thick shadow. The guard turned, casually surveying the yard, and Mac tensed.

But the man's eyes skimmed over the shadowed areas without pausing. He'd had time to grow bored, to tell himself his employer was overreacting to some threat. Unlike the two guards in the back, this one carried his gun strapped to his back, not at the ready, which told Mac everything he needed to know about the man's character. Up for a good fight, but slightly resentful of the luxury he had been hired to protect, the guy wouldn't think a rich, cultured man like John Lewis could have serious enemies. He'd underestimated Lewis, just as Mac himself had.

Which was a big fat plus as far as Mac was concerned. He slipped forward a few feet in the shadows to hide behind the trunk of a palm. The guy didn't notice. Nash, who had a more complicated path to reach the cluster of palms, remained in position.

The guard paused by the kitchen window, peered inside for a second, then turned to saunter back toward the corner of the house. Mac waited. One step. Two. Three. Then the man was in range, and Mac was on him.

Killing him would have been easy. Disabling silently, as always, was more difficult. He took the guy from behind, hoping to lock his arm around the man's neck. But at the last moment, the guy must have felt something, caught a movement from the corner of his eye. He turned, started to call out a warning, and Mac punched him instead, spinning him around. The guy stumbled backward, right into Nash, who wrapped an arm around his neck and choked him out.

Within seconds, they'd disarmed the guard, trussed him with duct tape ankles to knees, gagged him, and hidden him behind a freestanding bar by the hot tub. Without a word, Nash headed toward the front to deal with the guard there, while Mac pressed his back to the wall of the house and darted a look around the back.

Two guards, walking away from one another. Not ideal, but workable. The approaching guard's steps were audible in the early-morning hush, and Mac counted them off to himself. When the guy reached the corner, Mac stepped away from the wall, grabbed his arm, and pulled him forward, shoving his palm up beneath his chin at the same time to knock him out. Not a sound escaped to alert the other man, and Mac quickly dumped him with the guy they'd left behind the bar, using the same binding and gagging method to keep him still and silent.

Mac assumed Nash had dealt with the guard at the front of the house, which left the other man he'd seen in the back, who was probably returning from his round up the west side, if Nash hadn't gotten to him. Mac headed for the west side at a run. But the guard must have realized there was a problem—he was waiting, gun drawn, when Mac rounded the corner.

“Stop right there!”

Mac stopped. Held up his hands in the most reassuring manner he could. “What's going on? Where's John?” he asked, aiming to confuse the guy a bit. If the guards had been given even a vague description, it wouldn't work—there was no hiding the scar—but if not, it could provide him an opening.

“Where did you come from?”

“Down the street.”

The guard narrowed his eyes. “How did you get onto the property?”

“I walked, man. I come here all the time. I was hoping to use the hot tub, but when I knocked on the kitchen door, there was no one there. So I came around the back.” Mac saw Nash's head pop around the corner, but the guard glanced back over his shoulder, so Nash withdrew.

The guard pulled out a walkie-talkie and tried to radio his companions. When he couldn't raise any of them, he pointed the gun at Mac's head and ordered him to the ground.