Fatal Strike (9 page)

“We’re interested in stuff that’s not solid yet, too,” Con said. “Who is this character Hu? Tell me about him.”

“I’ll know more soon,” Miles assured him. “I swear.”

“We’ll be around. We’re still here, at the hotel. Call us. Really.”

“Thanks for the info.” Miles hung up and turned off the phone.

So they’d stayed in Portland for him. Oh, man. Guilt trip.

But he didn’t want company while chasing half-formed hunches. Plus, those guys tended to want to take command, every last one of them. He was un-commandable these days. Better to avoid the strife from the get-go, at least for the next few hours. His friends would have plenty to keep them busy soon enough, God willing. If this was for real.

He started with the big parking garages that Hu might have used, scanning for a white Accura SUV. Who knew if the wife had been admitted already, or if she had yet to arrive? He probably could have teased that out of the database, given more time, but there wasn’t much point in it now. He had nothing better to do, so he cruised the parking lots of the nearby hotels. There seemed to be gazillions of white SUVs, now that he was looking for one. Not a very systematic way to search.

Which was why he was so astonished when he found it.

The Accura was in the parking lot of a mid-level chain motel about thirty blocks from the hospital. It must be psychic magnetism. He was tempted to social engineer himself into the guy’s room right now, and put a gun to his head, but he squelched the urge. That would be stupid and impatient. This was a divine gift. He didn’t dare fuck it up.

He parked around the corner, and dug into the big box of swag he’d collected over the years from SafeGuard, the McCloud Crowd’s security outfit. He selected a slap-on RF trace and strolled through the motel parking lot, hoping Hu’s car was not alarmed. One swift gesture, and the slap-on was stuck to the undercarriage. No alarm.

He pulled out Tam’s ring, pondering it. What the hell. If ever there was a time for overkill, this was it. He twisted off the stud, shoved it into the Accura’s front right tire. It lodged there, hidden between the treads.

He slumped down in the driver’s seat, and checked for Lara. Eager to tell her his news, like a little kid trolling for approval.

He didn’t feel her in there. still there? he typed.

Nothing. No multimedia message left for him with pictures, either. Huh. She’d said she’d stay. That she could not be pried out.

Maybe she’d been compelled. He distracted himself from that chilling thought by noodling around on the laptop, setting up X-ray specs to follow the trace he’d planted, plugging in the code.

He kept on checking for her, obsessively. Nothing. Even with the shield running full force, he couldn’t block his dismay.

Damn. He missed her.

At ten o’clock
P.M.
, Hu emerged from the back entrance, a woman next to him. He looked just like Lara’s picture. The woman was short, thin, Asian, a braid down her back. Hu pulled a wheeled suitcase.

Miles forced himself to wait as the guy helped his wife into the seat and tossed the bag in back. They pulled out, toward the hospital.

When Hu turned the corner, Miles situated the laptop on the passenger seat, counted down from ten, and pulled out after him.

“You want to dose her now, sir? It’s very early. It’s only been—”

“I am aware of the time, Anabel.” Greaves rattled the ice cubes delicately in his glass of Scotch. “Don’t ask me to repeat myself.”

Anabel just stood there like an idiot. Mouth working.

Greaves let out a little sigh. “Is it Hu?”

“Well, he, ah . . . he drove his wife to the hospital. I urged him to make other arrangements, but he was sure he’d make it back in time.”

Greaves sipped his Scotch, and said nothing.

Anabel hurried on. “He’s been worried about his wife, and he—”

“Don’t make excuses for him. Unless you want me to question your commitment, too. Let us begin without Hu.”

“Ah, well, the problem is actually not, ah . . .” Her eyes darted everywhere but at him. “It’s Lara. She’s, ah . . . she appears to be unconscious. Or in a trance, I should say. I can’t rouse her.”

Greaves was taken aback. “You can’t make telepathic contact?”

“I tried,” Anabel admitted, miserably. “There’s nobody home. It happens sometimes when she’s on psi-max, but she’s never done it to me off-dose before. I just can’t find anything to grab onto.”

“And you discovered her like this when?”

“About two hours ago. I’d turned the lights on, since she hadn’t eaten in a while, and I—”

“Two hours pass before it occurs to you that this might be of interest to me. And it was obvious that she hasn’t been eating regularly. How long had she been fasting? Was there any purpose to that, or was it just petty cruelty on your part?”

“Well, we, ah . . . we were following your orders, sir. You said that keeping her stressed and off balance would help create the conditions—”

“And you interpreted that to mean that you should malnourish her. How very creative of you.”

“Sir, I—”

“Shut up. You disgust me. You and Hu both. Take me to her.”

He fumed silently as he followed Anabel through the facility. Angry at himself for giving inferior people too much rein. Letting the situation degenerate to the point where the girl could actually have been damaged. Such a waste. He had an unfortunate tendency to expect the best in his people, and they almost always disappointed him.

Anabel unlocked the door. The room was dank and fetid. Lara Kirk lay on the bed like a saint’s marble effigy, her high, perfect breasts rising and falling slowly. He leaned to admire her face. Translucent skin, lovely bone structure. Too thin, and those splendid eyes were set in pools of bruised shadow, but her haunting beauty was still evident. And her mouth. Perfectly shaped. He looked forward to seeing it painted red as he led her across a ballroom in an evening gown.

She was perfect. Very young, true. He was in his fifties, she was in her mid-twenties. But men of his wealth and stature almost always had younger wives, and he valued her fertility. He wanted to breed that spirit, that intelligence, and above all, her innate psi qualities, into his children. And he deeply enjoyed beauty. He had no interest in women who were not strikingly beautiful.

He approached the mental probe as a talented lover approached a kiss. Not grabbing and slobbering, but circling, taking his time. He had no doubt that he would be able to penetrate her shield. She had first dosed mere months ago, and his psi powers were immense.

They ought to be. He’d paid for them with blood and agony.

He hovered closer, savoring the anticipation of knowing her thoughts, her feelings, her dreams. Closer . . . he reached . . .

And bumped up against a force field. His psi powers bounced right off it. He tried again, digging, probing, thrusting. Then hacking.

It was like fighting air. He could not orient himself against that shield. It deflected his energy, made him feel frantic, almost frightened.

He hung over her, eyes squeezed shut. How the hell had she done this? How
dare
she? Drops of liquid pattered onto her face, her neck, her gray tank top. It was sweat, dripping from his forehead.

He straightened, barely catching the look in Anabel’s eyes before her gaze flicked away. Relief. Spiteful pleasure to see him in difficulty.

“See?” He heard smugness in her tone. “That’s the shield I was telling you about. See what I mean? It’s the same one she uses when—”

Whap.
His invisible hand smacked, knocking her across the room. She hit the cinderblock wall and slid to the floor, holding her mouth.

“Yes,” he said. “I see. What is more important is, do
you
see?”

She nodded hastily, hunched and shaking.

“Get up,” he said. He turned back to Lara. The delicate jut of her nipples were brown shadows beneath the thin fabric.

Time to show everyone in this room who was in control.

He seized the shirt, ripped it right down the middle of her chest with one violent jerk, exposing her bare bosom. He stared down at her body. Like a dancer’s, but with more generous breasts. He splayed both hands over her chest. Angry as he was, her inert body excited him. The harder to tame, the more worth the trouble. To a point.

Lara Kirk was about to learn exactly where that point was.

His hands tightened. “Bring me the electric shock paddles.”

M
iles drummed his nails as he waited for Hu to emerge from the hospital. Hours went by before the white Accura edged out of the parking garage and gave him something else to think about.

Miles waited the shortest possible decent interval, and pulled out after him. Hu’s route suggested that he was heading back to I-84 East, back up the Gorge. All he could do was follow. Gather more info.

Hu stopped at Trout Lake to gas up, so Miles did, too. As soon as Hu pulled out, he called Connor.

Con didn’t waste words. “Why the fuck is your phone turned off?”

“You guys ready to move?”

Surprise derailed Con’s scold. “Where to?”

“I’ve got a fix on the facility where they’re keeping Lara.”

“Oh, do you, now? Thanks for keeping us in the loop!”

“I wasn’t sure till just now,” Miles explained. “And I’m still—”

“Why the fuck did you gut the trace on your phone? We could have been right on your ass! This minute!”

“Um, that would explain why I gutted it,” Miles said. “Look, are you just going to rant? Because if you are, I’ll hang up.”

“Just give me the fucking data,” Con grumbled.

“I’ve got a Specs trace on this guy’s car.” Miles read out the code. “I’m just out of Trout Lake, on eastbound 84. He’s heading toward Kolita Springs. I’m pretty sure that’s where they’re keeping her. It’s Greaves, that piece-of-lying-shit douche bag. It was him all along.”

“How the fuck did you figure it out?” Connor sounded insulted. “We’ve been flogging this thing for months! We got nothing on Greaves.”

Miles let out a hollow laugh. “Dumb luck. You ready to move?”

“Fuck, yeah. Already moving.”

“This guy I’m following is one of her guards. I think he’s heading back to the facility where they’re holding her.”

Miles heard keyboard tapping from the other side. “Got him on screen.” Connor was too interested now to stay mad. “Going eighty-eight—no, ninety-three an hour. Big hurry.”

“He’s late for something. Something that involves Lara.”

“We’d be with you already if you’d left in your trace!” Connor bitched. “We’ll still be forty miles behind when you get to Kolita Springs, even if we push it!”

“Don’t sweat it. I’ll still need you when you get there.”

“What does that mean?” Con’s voice sharpened. “What have you got in mind?”

“I’ve got fuck-all in mind,” Miles admitted. “I’m not really using my mind right now. I’m staying stuck to this guy. That’s all I know.”

“Do not do anything crazy,” Con lectured. “Wait for us, Miles. Understand? You’ll just get yourself killed if you pull another—”

“I love you too, man. Thanks. I’ll put the trace back in as soon as my hands are free. Later.” Miles broke the connection, tossed the phone down. It rang, twenty times or so, then sullenly stopped.

He glanced at the monitor. Hu was gaining ground.

He gave the car more gas.

 

The sudden blow took Lara by surprise. She’d been focused on drafting a floor plan of the upper storey she had seen, then snapping pictures of it with the ridiculous, femmy little hot pink camera he’d dreamed up for her. And
thwack—

She was crashed back into her physical self, into a chaotic hell of racking jittery pain. Screaming, shaking, convulsing—

It stopped, abruptly. She blinked back tears, trying to see, to think.

Greaves hung over her. His reddened face was not flattered by this angle. Wattles quivered under his chin. He brandished shock paddles.

“There we are,” he said. “That’s more like it. Where were you, Lara? Who taught you to shield that way?

“Nobody,” she croaked. “I just—”

“Don’t lie,” he chided. “Not because it’s wrong. Just because it’s useless.”

He slammed into her mind, like a freight train crashing through a plate glass window.

Oh, God, it hurt. He ripped, rended, tossed. She couldn’t scream, or even breathe. Only her heart kept beating, its rapid, stuttering thud echoing louder and louder in her ears as Greaves rifled and kicked randomly through her head.

“Oh, yes,” he muttered thickly, as if it gave him sexual pleasure from doing it. “Oh, Lara, yes. You taste delicious. So deep.”

He redoubled his assault, not as violent, but more lascivious, like a big, wet tongue, licking and probing. Memories were snagged and pulled out, unspooled, hungrily pawed over by that awful, slavering presence.

He was focusing on where she’d gone. Her shield. His telepathic strength was a smothering blanket, crushing her out of existence. Her lungs strained to expand. No air . . .

She fainted. Some time later, she floated back to consciousness to the sound of his voice, talking with Anabel.

“. . . of recent sexual activity. Which is impossible, of course, no?”

“Of course!” Anabel’s voice was indignant. “We never touched her, sir. No one has!”

“Good,” he murmured. “Good.”

Greaves looked down, and saw her eyes fluttering. He stroked her cheek. She did not have the option to flinch away. Her skin crawled.

“Aren’t you the naughty little thing,” he said indulgently. “Sexual fantasies. Mmm. Your dream lover is quite the studly godking.”

She couldn’t have replied if she wanted to.

“No fear,” he promised. “You’ll soon be too busy with reality for fantasies. And a healthy libido fits in nicely with my plans for you.”

I’d rather die
, she wanted to say.

He heard it anyway, of course, and chuckled. “Feisty.” He unraveled her braid, running his fingers over her scalp. “Lovely.”

Anabel was coming at her, brandishing a syringe. Oh shit, no, no, no. “Time for your medicine,” she trilled.

The burning stab, and it happened, like always, but faster. The double vision, the pull . . . but this time with Greaves’ smothering presence clamped down on her.
No no not you not you!.

Oh, yes
was the answering thought, chiming back.
Oh, yes, me. Always me. Fly as far as you can. You will never get away from me.

She fought, but he blocked her at every turn. She went shooting off into anywhere, no direction, no hope. A shriek of utter despair echoed through the bleak, empty spaces in her mind.

Greaves’ light, mocking laughter followed it.

 

It was still an hour till dawn when Miles saw signs for Kolita Springs. He’d stopped only once to screw a silencer onto his pistol and put the tracer chip back into his phone. He’d disabled the ringtone, though. They were welcome to trace him and chase him, but not to scold him. The SMSs were piling up. Not yet.
Later, dudes.

Lara’s long silence filled him with creeping dread. It occurred to him to check the pink camera analog. It took form in his inner vision. It had cables attached to the computer.

He imagined the screen inviting him to download.

One, two, three, four . . . ten . . . thirteen. A flood of JPGs were popping up on the screen. His unease grew. She’d done exactly as he had asked, but she hadn’t been allowed to finish the job. Not good.

He looked at the photos. Corridor, elevator. A carefully visualized floor plan, drawn in pencil. A photo of that dickhead Thaddeus Greaves. Cataloging each piece kept him too busy to freak out. The images she generated sort of . . . shone. They seemed deeper. Three dimensional. The photos of Hu and Anabel had been, too.

Then it hit him. Of course. They were art pieces. Images generated by Lara had a sort of poetry to them. Even the ugly ones.

The photo of Hu made Miles uncomfortable. He had no business feeling sorry for the guy, since he might or might not have to kill him. But Jesus, what kind of asshole employer wouldn’t let a man stay at his wife’s side during a dangerous operation?

The same asshole who would lock a girl in a dark cell for months and do sick, sadistic experiments on her. Duh.

No, Hu was a bully and a dickhead. He had chosen the wrong side, and he was ripe for an ass-kicking. That gave him the first useful idea he’d had so far, and he was elaborating on it when Lara’s presence exploded into his head, with a blast of terrified energy.

He almost skidded into a guardrail. He righted the car, set himself to multitask. wtf?

cant stay was her reply. greaves. got loose but not 4 long he uses electroshock to pull me back

He was aghast. coming 4 u stay sharp

no no dont risk urslf. pls ur the only thing that keeps me alive dont come pls dont let them take u from me

He corrected a swerve. Hu’s turn signal winked, far ahead.

Electroshock? Fuck that! He grabbed the phone, called Connor.

“Goddamnit, Miles!” was Con’s greeting. “Why haven’t you—”

“I’m going in,” he announced.

“No! We’re still forty miles behind you, and you can’t—”

“They’re hurting her, Con. Right now, in real time. I’ll talk to you when I can. If you see my truck, bring it along with you. I’ll leave the keys under the seat. Listen up, these are the coordinates of the complex.” He recited them swiftly. “Point two miles before the bridge, offroading through the woods will get you to the river bank, or close to it. A couple hundred meters downstream, and you can see the building, up on the hill. That’s where she is. I’ll tell you more when I can.”

He hung up on Con’s sputtering. He was driving through Mary Creek Canyon, a subdivision of Kolita Springs that petered out into scattered orchards, and beyond that, dry, scrubby hills. Lara? Lara!

She was still gone, but her desperation lingered in his body, tightening it into knots. Fine, then. Fuck it. Show time.

Headlights off. He speeded up, closing the distance between himself and Hu, his eyes fixed on the guy’s taillights. Five hundred meters, Tam had said.

He stabbed the detonator on Tam’s ring.

 

Not
possible.
Jason Hu hung onto the wheel. “Fuck, fuck, fuck,” he shrieked, as the car bounced off the guardrail, spun, and ended up nose down in the ditch on the opposite side of the road.

Of all times to blow a tire. As wrong as the date of Leah’s surgery, but the doctors had terrified her, and she hadn’t wanted to wait. No way could he slip into Karstow unobserved now. Not that he’d held up much hope to begin with.

He got out and peered at the damage. He was not a man who prided himself on being capable of changing a tire. He’d put in thousands of hours studying chemistry and pharmacology so that he could pay some hairy-knuckled schmuck to change tires for him.

He wrestled the jack out. Fought with lug nuts, wrenches, grease, and dirt in the darkness, the flashlight on his keychain clamped between his teeth for light. He got the bastard on, somehow, more or less. Now to see if his life was still worth something, or if he should just swallow bleach and be done with it.

It only took ten minutes to drive the rest of the way to the Karstow facility. Ten minutes too long. The guard at the gatehouse gave him a bleary-eyed once-over, scanned Hu’s card and waved him through. He accelerated up the hill to the car-park, pulling into his designated slot.

He shoved open the door, and yelped when the door slammed back on him, trapping him against the frame of the car like jaws snapping closed. A cold circle of metal jammed itself under his ear.

“Don’t move,” a low voice rasped.

He gasped for air. “Who . . . who are—”

“Shut up,” the voice growled. “Give me your cell phone.”

Hu struggled to breathe against those squeezing fingers, and pulled out his phone. His assailant took it. His larynx could barely move. “Who are—”

“None of your business. What’s more important is what I can do to Leah.”

Fresh, acid fear made his stomach lurch. “What do you know about Leah?”

“Shhh.” The gun barrel jabbed harder. “Dr. Prateek Singh, Dr. Giuseppe Bonelli. Good team you have there.”

That was Leah’s surgical team. Hu’s legs wobbled. “Who are you?”

“In a few minutes, Dr. Paige Sereno, the anesthesiologist, will come in to do her thing. Quite a tumor Leah’s got. Gonna be touch and go. Lots of chemo in her future. Fucking drag.”

“How do you . . .” His voice quivered. “Who told you—”

“But the one thing I know, but you don’t, nor does Leah’s team at Good Sam, is this glitch in the database.” The low voice took on a taunting tone. “There’s a bug that lets me in to look at your wife from every angle. I’ve seen her bloodwork, the inside of her stomach, sonograms of her liver, her lungs, MRIs of her brain—”

“Shut up! You sick bastard!”

His assailant slammed the door against Hu’s shoulder with bruising strength. “Too bad, about the results of that sentinel lymph node biopsy ten days ago, huh?” he taunted. “Things look bad. Leah’s tough, though. She’ll fight the good fight—if she’s allowed to.”

Hu clenched wet, clammy hands. “What are you talking about?”

“That bug lets me change things in the system. Like that note about the genetic disorder that she inherited from her father. Malignant hypothermia, remember? I did some creative editing in the hospital database, see.”

Hu could barely speak, his voice vibrated so much. “What . . . what—”

“All records of Lea’s malignant hypothermia are gone from her chart. Poor Dr. Sereno has no idea. I fixed it days ago, see. Sereno’s all good to go with routine administration of suxamethonium. Poison, for Leah. They’ll put her under any minute. Soon, her muscles will go rigid. Her temperature will soar. Then heart attack. Circulatory collapse. And finally, death. So sad. But we all gotta die someday, right?”

Hu struggled, wildly. “What the fuck—”

“Shhh,” the voice crooned. “They will only be able to administer an antidote if you are in a position to call them and warn them in time.”

Hu could barely get the words out, his voice shook so hard. “What d-do you w-want from me?”