Veil of Justice, Shadows of Justice Book 3 (5 page)

Swiping it through the reader on his
computer, the prison systems opened like a book, ready to tell her
everything.

Familiar with the system from her preliminary
hacking, she found and skimmed the inmate database for Nathan’s
record. The latest entry had been filed less than two hours before
her arrival. Next to his inmate number was the single word:
Deceased.

Kelly's body quaked with the shock. She
couldn't deal with being late one more time. Couldn't cope with the
loss of another good man. Was she cursed to fail everyone? Tears
she didn't know she was shedding fell from her eyes into the
guard's keyboard. DNA evidence was a distant concern. There was no
record of her existence anyway. She was truly alone. One warrior
against a lethal and unidentified enemy.

Her parents should've named her Futility.

Behind her the guard groaned, forcing Kelly
to make a decision. She could accept the prison’s record, or see
its truth for herself. Not wanting to believe the report didn’t
automatically make it wrong. Then again, this was the same system
that officially didn't impose archaic measures like solitary
confinement on inmates. She stilled her shaky hands and selected
the option of viewing the full report on Nathan’s demise.

Supposed
demise, she amended while the
computer system worked to load her request.

'Inmate B2117 died in conference room four
during routine meeting with staff counselor. COD cardiac arrest
determined by infirmary physician #11-1205.'

"Can’t anyone use a name anymore?"

'Body moved to morgue. Family notified.
Reports filed internal and external.'

She wasn’t buying it. Maybe it was their
tracking system. The elimination of names in favor of
privacy-protective numbers bothered her. People were people, young,
old, law-abiding or not, they should have the dignity of being
addressed by name.

Quieting this lamentable quirk of her nature,
she paged back to a layout of the facility. Common sense and her
memory of the blueprints proved the morgue was situated between the
infirmary and the loading dock. Her original plan was still good
enough. She peeked through the tower windows down into the dark
prison yard.

She refused to accept his death until she saw
Nathan’s body. Her own concerns aside, she owed Petra that
much.

In her mind, her father’s voice grumbled
about stubborn girls with more will than sense. Simple parental
disapproval over her decisions didn’t scare her any more. Failure
terrified her. She would bring Nathan out, hopefully alive, so he
could help her in turn. Always better to assume the positive.

She reached into her pocket for the paper
packet. Unfolding a corner, she held it to the guard's nose and
puffed a fine powder into his nostrils. He'd sleep long and hard
enough the system might just declare him dead as well. Rolling him
under his computer, she dismantled his gun and jammed the firing
pin into an external port on the computer monitor.

She eased over the wall, timing her silent
descent with the swipe of the flood lights. She crossed the yard
without incident and used the guard's badge to enter the door
closest to the infirmary. She found the stairs and raced down to
the first of the prison’s many sublevels.

Here, another guard protected his comrades
from any security breach. She watched, timing him through a short
seventy-five second route. She waited through three cycles, finding
his rhythm, and then she wiped her face clean and made her
move.

Sweeping her pilfered card through the
reader, she put herself into his path, cocked a hip and smiled with
all the seduction she could muster on short notice.

His surprise quickly morphed into
suspicion.

She held her palms up in universal surrender,
then held his gaze hostage while she reached up and loosened her
hair. As it fell past her shoulders, she tossed her head, watching
his suspicion melt into lust.

He stepped closer. She held the pose. He
remembered to ask for ID. She twirled the card and then crooked a
finger to invite him closer. He walked straight for her. With his
eyes glued to her breasts, he didn’t see her trap snapping
closed.

Bigger than the guard upstairs, he didn’t go
down as gently, but he did go down when she activated the
hypo-spray. She relieved him of his security card and weapons, tied
her hair back and then took a moment. Calm and patience were the
watchwords for the next step. If security was up to advertised
standards, things were about to get tough.

Crossing to the guard's console, she created
a diversion by tripping a fire alarm in the neighboring cell block.
When she heard the resulting commotion, she darted back up the
stairwell and into the infirmary.

The open ward revealed several empty beds and
a willowy blond nurse hovering over a patient at the far end –
precisely where Kelly had hoped to go unnoticed.

"You're here for Nathan," the nurse
whispered, waving her to the exit across the medical bay. "The
morgue's just through that door. Then the ambulance dock."

Kelly followed the gesture, but braced for a
conflict. "You're on Nathan's team?"

"In a manner of speaking. Go on now."

Kelly nodded and ran, accepting the
unexpected grace. She pushed the questions away, hoping the nurse
was indeed special ops here to keep track of Nathan. Entering the
morgue, she gagged as the repugnant odor of the austere clinic
assaulted her senses.

A large, walk-in cooler with a small window
in the wide stainless steel door took up an entire corner. With no
typical wall of drawers, she assumed any remains would be there –
in the cooler. She skirted the stainless work table to peek into
the window. Her stomach rolled at the sight, but she raised the
handle anyway. Locked.

Dammit.

She hesitated to use either guard’s card,
afraid it would register on the prison’s computer and someone would
realize the walls had been breached. Well, breached by someone
other than the nurse.

Kelly considered going back to ask for the
code, but there wasn't time. She crossed to the small desk beneath
a bank of cabinets and hoped for the best. Rifling the folders on
the desk turned up nothing on Nathan, so she searched for a
password cheat sheet. She found numbers scratched into the side of
the second drawer.

Praising the gift of poor memories, she
entered the code and lifted the handle. This time it lifted with a
soft swish. She entered and ignored her entirely prissy shiver. It
wasn't the cold that had the hairs on her arms standing at
attention. It wasn't even the adrenaline. It was the racks of
bodies laid out on rolling shelves beneath gray sheets, only tagged
toes exposed.

Ick.

She’d memorized Nathan’s inmate number and
her heart simply stalled when she saw it scrawled in black marker
on the stark white tag. Bracing herself, she reached for the sheet
and pulled it back from the immobile head. Her heart kicked back
into rhythm. This man was blond. Not Nathan. She drew the sheet
back a bit more, just to confirm the substitution. She checked the
faces of the others and blew out a sigh.

Nathan wasn’t here.

THREE

The farther backward you can look the farther
forward you are likely to see. Winston Churchill

Nathan felt the gurney pause and in the
quiet, he used the only senses left – hearing and scent – for
clues. No one spoke, but he knew Kristoff by the slight wheezing
and there would be at least one guard or orderly handling the
gurney. A
bing
, followed by a soft
whoosh
let him
know they were near an elevator. During his pre-mission recon,
Nathan knew the only elevators, aside from the loud freight lifts,
were in the hospital wing and the prison's administration tower. It
was doubtful Kristoff was taking him to visit the warden.

His gurney bumped and jostled over the
elevator threshold. Inside the confined space made it easier to
hear individuals. He counted four during the short ride, one who
had just popped a breath mint, but that was the only information he
could glean. Up and down were lost to him.

Beside him Kristoff's breath stuttered and
Nathan reached out with his mind, only to get slapped back for his
trouble.

"Give me that bag," Kristoff ordered. "Damned
twin phase obsession. Plans and prophecies my ass."

Nathan heard him rummaging and mumbling and
knew he'd gone too far. If one dose of Kristoff's cocktail had
paralyzed all but his mind, what would the next dose do? Trying not
to panic, Nathan dove deep inside his mind for the safest place he
knew.

"Ah-ah. You stay right here." Kristoff peeled
Nathan's eyelids open. "I want to see this one take effect."

Yanked from safety, Nathan willed his muscles
to activate but couldn't flinch away from the icy pressure on his
inner arm. He sent every dark thought he had at Kristoff's mind, to
no avail. Was the man blocking him or did drug affect his telepathy
too?

"Not feeling quite yourself, Nate?" Kristoff
wagged the hypospray in front of him. "I made you. You owe me." He
thumped the tool on Nathan's chest, emphasizing each point. "You
will join me."

Kristoff leaned closer, nose to nose, his
muddy breath choking Nathan. Nathan wanted to cringe, to breathe
clean air, to close his eyes and shut out the nightmare. He pushed
back, against the drug, against the man, with every scrap of his
waning strength.

It wasn't enough.

"Finally," Kristoff said, straightening. He
tossed the sheet over Nathan's face once more, then snapped his
medical bag closed. "Open us up," he ordered the guard who'd been
holding the elevator.

As the gurney rolled ahead, he praised
himself for a job well done. Nathan was stronger than any of the
projections. While that clearly posed problems in this initial
dosing phase, it meant nothing but positive results in the end.

With a stronger stride and confidence, he
followed the gurney through the deserted prison corridors. Winning
the game – the most important game of life – was the point, after
all.

* * *

Considering the ugly twists her life had
taken and this blatant corruption, Kelly left the cooler to find
vials for the samples she intended to take. The mismarked body
might have evidence Nathan could use later against Kristoff. She
returned to the body to pluck several hairs and cut away a
fingernail. Safely stowing the vial in a pocket of her combat vest,
she exited the cooler, waiting a moment for the lock to click back
in.

In the total silence of the morgue, she heard
the all-clear signal from the fire team. Her diversion was spent.
She checked her watch and realized the hyposprays she’d given the
guards would be wearing off any time now. While the amnesia dose
would help keep her anonymous, they wouldn’t help her get out. She
had to think! Where else would they take a prisoner everyone
thought was dead? And why would a staff counselor haul Nathan up
out of solitary?

His trial and sentence had been as high
profile as his real mission had been deep undercover. If his team
even knew about the assignment, would they interfere by faking his
death to get him out of a corrupted mission?

Face it, you’ve got no clue
. Intrigue
wasn't her thing. Kelly’s fingers brushed her phone, weighing her
options. Surely, Petra would know if her brother had really died.
Knowing Petra's gifts, would Nathan’s team risk the bogus
report?

Naturally. Covert's what they do. Come on,
think
!

Since he’d convinced her to help him, he
hadn’t made further contact. Was the current silence by choice? She
didn’t believe that, not in light of the imposter in the
cooler.

She thought back over the report. The key had
to be in Nathan’s last meeting. Out of time, she swiped the card to
open the prison records again. This time she looked for the day’s
video records. Barring an entrance like hers, Nathan’s visitor had
to pass by a camera somewhere en route to the conference rooms.

It took too many excruciating seconds and an
alternate angle, but she got a look at the face. Chills danced over
her skin. Dr. Leo Kristoff, reported dead six months ago, was live
and in color, strolling through the prison under a bogus name.

Two not-so-dead people in the same place were
more than mere coincidence. From her work with Petra, Kelly knew
Kristoff wasn't the benevolent physician the public had idolized.
His presence didn't mean anything good for Nathan. Or the rest of
humanity, for that matter.

As she cued up the visual-only record of
Nathan's conference with Kristoff, she reached for the screen – a
reflex to warn him – when she saw the guard drugging him. "Sneaky
bastard," she muttered. With a few clicks she was fast-forwarding,
trying to get a current location on Kristoff. Beneath her feet, the
floor rumbled. She could hope it was just climate control, but her
instincts told her time was short.

Her hands flitted over the keyboard, calling
up live feeds for the entire facility. When the search proved too
much, she narrowed it to just this wing. Maybe he'd recognized the
logic of leaving through the ambulance bay as well. She cheered
softly when she caught sight of Kristoff moving toward the service
loading docks.

Before she could enter the code to lock down
the prison, four guards rushed into the morgue. The first two moved
to flank her and the other two remained at the doors blocking her
only egress. Red hazed her vision and her hand automatically
dropped to the short sword sheathed on her hip.

"Down on your stomach." The lead guard took a
step closer. "Now," he snapped when she didn’t move.

She raised her hands over her shoulders and
jerked her chin to the clock above the door. "You guys are waaay
behind schedule. That’s not gonna look good."