Veil of Justice, Shadows of Justice Book 3 (4 page)

His hopeful bubble burst when the guards
shoved him into another cinderblock box. This room was bigger and
well lit, but as his eyes adjusted, he discovered he was only one
steel table away from the primary target of the case profile.

Dr. Leo Kristoff extended a hand in greeting.
“Ah, Nathan. You’re all grown up." He dropped his hand, seeing
Nathan's shackles. "Pardon me if I point out you're in a rather
tight spot from the looks of things."

Nathan struggled for composure as he willed
his spine back into correct alignment, feeling the pop and sigh of
each vertebra. Standing tall, he remained mute against the latest
twist of his floundering mission.

What did it mean that Kristoff could come and
go at will? The latest intel said the vile doctor had been forced
into hiding. Unfortunately, with no idea how long he'd been in
solitary confinement, Nathan couldn't know how things had changed
on the outside.

"I’d offer you a seat, but they seem to think
you’d use it against me."

Nathan ignored the lack of furniture and
stared at a seam in the wall to the right of Kristoff’s head.

"None of this ordeal was necessary, son."

Nathan knew the gentle voice was designed for
strategy rather than comfort. He wouldn’t take the bait, no matter
how well presented. For fun, he pushed at the table with his mind,
just enough to scrape it an inch along the floor.

Sympathy softened Kristoff’s aristocratic
features. "They’ve weakened you." He shook his head. "I don’t
condone these sorts of measures. You can be sure I’ll file a
complaint as soon as you’re out of here. Wouldn’t want any backlash
beforehand, would we?" Kristoff paused for a dramatic, shuddering
breath. "They tell me you’ve been down there nearly a month. A
month! I couldn’t believe it. A day is too much in such squalor.
That's why the Special Housing Unit was outlawed, you know. But a
month for
you
must be an eternity."

Kristoff's brand of comfort only exacerbated
the agony. Nathan almost fell for the concern and exaggerated time
line. At least he hoped Kristoff was fabricating the time. Though
he recognized the tactic, he was ashamed at how hard it was to
resist. He fisted his hands, digging his nails into his palms. The
sting squelched the surge of gratitude that threatened to place
Kristoff on the liberator's pedestal. More, it depressed Nathan to
have slipped so far from the man he'd been. It should’ve been
effortless to hold himself apart from such obvious manipulations.
Instead, this meeting was another energy-sapping trial.

"What do you want?" Nathan snapped. It was
all getting to him. Even with the light and the cleaner air, the
room was too small. The walls were starting to close in on him.
This was the contact they’d hoped for in planning the mission, but
after his time in solitary, he couldn’t remember how to capitalize
on the opportunity. This simple encounter overwhelmed his senses
and diffused his normally relentless focus.

Kristoff’s head tilted, his brows drawn over
saddened eyes. "What did they do to you, son?"

Nathan gritted his teeth, focused again on
the wall. "What do you want?" he repeated. Anything further would
reveal too much. Kristoff was the enemy.

"I want to help you."

"How?"

"I got you up here didn’t I?" He spread his
hands. "Up into the light and air. Just what you needed. Here you
are, back among the living. That helps doesn’t it?"

Nathan nodded, but for different reasons.
Being out of solitary would help Kelly, would ease the escape if
she was close enough. How far was she? He didn't dare reach out,
Kristoff was too dangerous. Yes, being up top helped, but he
wouldn’t give Kristoff the words.

"I can take it one step further."

Nathan’s gaze jerked back to Kristoff. The
older man’s eyes blazed with the excitement of a hunter closing in
on his prey. Kristoff was an expert at knowing which buttons to
push, how hard, and when.

"I’m listening," Nathan admitted, though it
wasn’t necessary.

"You can leave with me. Today. Right now, if
you’d like."

If
? Hell yes he’d like. It was the
price that concerned him. He knew enough about body language to
understand Kristoff was leaving out too many important details.
Time to risk a little mental probing to determine just how
malignant the offer was. The doctor's reputation and penchant for
genetic research pushed the envelope and meant Nathan would have to
balance cleverness with caution.

"Well, son. What’ll it be?"

"What’ll it cost me to leave with you?"
Nathan used the quick and direct question to distract from his
mental prodding. His first impression was a mind guarding huge
secrets. No surprise there. He ventured further, vaguely listening
to Kristoff’s litany of the rigors of prison life while he searched
for clues to the man’s intent.

A cold, vicious spike of pain in his temple
jerked Nathan back into himself.

"I knew you’d try to poke around." Kristoff
tapped his forehead, then leaned across the table until Nathan
could feel his breath fanning his face. "And you should’ve known
I’d be ready for you."

Nathan saw the plan unfold too late to move
or resist the hypospray aimed at his arm. He watched the room spin
slowly into a dark haze as his body slid into a strange
paralysis.

He heard Kristoff summon the guards with a
concerned voice, heard the excuses given and accepted. He knew he
was being lifted and moved only because the view changed. He
stretched his mind through his nervous system, head to toe,
yearning for any of his muscles to obey. No response. He stretched
his mind again, this time reaching for Kristoff, a guard, even
Kelly, but there was no one. He saw what his unblinking eyes took
in, but his mind was in lockdown now. He was more alone than he'd
been in the hole.

A hand passed over his face, lowering his
eyelids. He swore a blue streak, but his vocal cords couldn't push
out the words. Left with only his hearing, he listened as another
voice muttered, swore, and then pronounced him dead. Then even his
hearing was impaired by whatever they used to cover his body.

He wasn’t dead. He tried to scream, to move,
to will a nearby mind to look closer, but nothing changed. Nathan
forced himself to relax. He had to think. He had to find some way
to break through because he sure as hell wasn’t going to survive a
month in the hole just to get buried alive by his primary
target.

* * *

Kelly surveyed the terrain surrounding
Leavenworth Federal Prison. She'd get no help from the flat
landscape that provided armed guards with miles of visibility. If
she'd harbored any hope of an easy or conventional breakout, that
was history now.

"When will you learn to say
no
?" Kelly
asked herself as she cruised along the two-lane stretch of highway
running parallel to the east wall. Nathan's Mustang purred across
the open road. It would've been fun to really let the engine off
the leash, if there weren't police cruisers and the occasional
tractor on the same road.

It was her third day in town and she felt a
little guilty that she hadn't let him contact her. Whatever they’d
been putting him through, she was sure it wasn’t getting better. He
had to be beyond antsy, but his anxiety didn't help her confidence
or planning, and she wanted to break him out without taking
innocent lives if she could.

Based on what he’d shown her, she did the
research to confirm he was being kept in an outdated, illegally
punitive cell known as the SHU – Solitary Housing Unit. In her
sheltered life experience, prisons and prisoner conditions never
mattered much to her. She'd learned about the reformations during
her required studies in school, but prison systems never topped her
list of major concerns.

Now there was no reason to delude herself
that it wasn’t a deeply personal issue. Though they'd met only once
in person, she'd recognized Nathan the first time he'd reached out
telepathically. It may have started as a fun, mental pen-pal sort
of thing, but experience soon proved their connection was special.
Until she'd had to shut him out.

So the gut clenching fury she felt for the
system that was hurting her friend shouldn't be all that
surprising.

Except you’ve worked all your life to
diffuse your temper, Calisto.

It was only right to lecture herself since
neither her father nor her brothers were alive to provide the
service.

Shaking off the grief that threatened to
swell into tears, she turned at the next intersection and then
turned again several minutes later onto a dirt track scratched out
between cornfields. The escape plan was far from ideal. And the
timing sucked. Not even the local farms could provide much cover.
The fields had been harvested weeks ago and the grazing cows were
munching their way through the dried stalks.

She thought about the double fence topped
with razor wire and the sheer prison walls in her immediate future.
What was one more challenge? Hadn't trying to out-train her
brothers prepared her for anything?

She didn’t fight the anger or resentment,
needing the emotional heat to spur her forward through one more
sleepless night. She did fight off the regrets, they would only
slow her down and, if all went well, there’d be time for them
later.

Coming to a stop mid-field, she shielded the
car from view with a net woven with leaves and debris from the
field. Not foolproof, but certainly better than nothing.

Kelly crawled beneath the netting and leaned
over the front seat. Tripping the lock under the lip of the rear
seat, she prayed Nathan would overlook this latest modification to
his antique Mustang. Raising the bench seat revealed her stash of
escape-assisting equipment and she put her mind on task.

What would serve her best?

The guns were definitely out. She refused to
multiply her troubles by killing anyone, or giving Nathan a chance
to blindly exact revenge. The guards couldn't know Nathan was an
undercover operative. They saw him simply as a violent offender
bent on escape. The men of her family had died in the line of duty
and she wouldn't make more widows of honorable men tonight.

She clipped one tranquilizer hypo-spray onto
her ankle boot and a second on the back of her waistband. Eyeing
the modest assortment of weapons, she wished for a
Keris
.
With that unique blade she could've made any lethal result look
like Simon, Dr. Kristoff’s pet killer, had been in town.

Kelly reminded herself death wasn’t the point
tonight. Anyone could kill with the proper training or motivation.
While she might have both, at heart she wasn’t the
"kill 'em all
and let God sort it out"
type. She'd been trained to rise above
primal instinct to exact potent, appropriate, and immediate
justice.

And she'd start by freeing an innocent man
who was drowning on his assignment.

Muting her internal analyst, she finished
outfitting herself and loaded her 9mm with non-lethal rounds. The
modified ammo would allow her to neutralize any opponent without
wasting energy on hand-to-hand combat.

After securing the back bench again, she
swiveled around to the passenger seat and pulled a thin makeup case
out of the glove box. A few swipes of dark paint blurred her
features and she was nearly ready.

Climbing out of the car, staying under the
net, she rounded the trunk, popped it open and peeled back the side
wall liner to reveal two new license plates.

Switching the plates only took a minute.
Making the new plate as dirty as the rest of the car took a little
longer. She shook her head, imagining Nathan’s face and certain
misery over the car’s appearance. She'd ease his shock with a
promise to help him detail it as soon as they were far away from
here. Then she’d move on with her own agenda, hopefully with
Nathan's help.

As dusk fell, she gathered up the camouflage
netting and drove closer to the prison. Better to leave the car at
a safe distance, but she wasn't sure how mobile Nathan would be.
She couldn’t expect to waltz out with an unhealthy prisoner as
easily as she expected to waltz in to the facility.

With the car hidden once more, she scooted
closer to the west wall. Clouds scudded across the sky and slivered
moon, helping the cause, if not her mood. She could blend with the
shadows, the grounds, everything outside. It was all the things
Nathan didn’t know about the inside environment that gnawed at
her.

A review of security patterns, a hack into
the system and her onsite efforts these past days led her to break
in through the prison infirmary on the west edge of the facility.
Security was a bit lighter there since access was restricted from
the inside. According to the blueprints, the original solitary
confinement cells were under the medical wing. On the designs, the
SHU looked like a series of wells. It didn't take a vivid
imagination to understand why prisoners referred to solitary as
'the hole'. Creeping closer to the fence, she said yet another
prayer that none of the recent wardens had been industrious enough
to dig new cells elsewhere.

Using wire cutters and a looping circuit, she
bypassed the electric fencing and slithered under it. She waited
for the next slash of the flood light, then followed in its wake to
the bottom of the southwest corner guard tower. Cleated gloves and
toe clips made ascending the impossibly smooth wall almost easy.
Almost. Catching her breath, she palmed the tranquilizer, and
withdrew the security card she’d ripped from an amorous guard in
the local bar two nights ago.

Staying low, she swiped the card through the
reader, paused, then pushed inside. She had the hypo-spray pressed
to the guard's neck before he could turn. As he collapsed, she
eased him to the floor, and secured him with his own plastic cuffs.
Then she helped herself to his access card.