Promises in the Dark (9 page)

Recruiting family was the best way to keep DMH alive and running smoothly. Perhaps Kieran hadn’t been ready for such responsibility, but he’d been young and strong and reconnaissance was the best way to learn.

Elijah had no idea there were military men in the area, and while he stared at the picture of the blond-haired man and waited for his information to process, he knew that this mess … all of it was because of Olivia Strohm. She’d escaped, done damage to DMH by destroying the clinic and now, if not recovered soon, she could easily fall into the hands of the CIA.

He’d been playing cat and mouse too long, pawing with her, enjoying watching her think she’d escaped his reach. Now he realized that she, like Mariana, had become his weakness.

Mariana, his former lover, mother of his child, had taken his son from him; Olivia, his cousin. Losing the two family members so close together caused a pain in his heart he never thought he’d be capable of feeling. Hadn’t, since his older brother had been killed in combat.

His brother’s death had been the original turning point. From that moment on, Elijah had thought of nothing else but taking the DMH operation global—and of getting revenge on the USA and its military.

He couldn’t get revenge on Mariana, as she was already in her grave, but the doctor was still out there, ready to disseminate information about his operations.

Maybe he’d gotten too far removed from the game. In the beginning, he would’ve been the first one with a pistol in his hand, ready to defend the then small, essentially unknown organization with his own hand, had been willing to give up his life for the cause.

Kieran had reminded him so much of himself at that age, full of bravado, ready to take on the world. Elijah had taken him under his wing, shown him the ropes, even gave him a seat at the poker table, an honor Kiernan understood.

Now that would never happen. He’d given Kieran the best training he could, but his cousin had been no match for this man, this … Navy SEAL. Zane Scott. Elijah stared at the serial number and the official picture of the Navy SEAL who was supposed to be invisible to most of the population.

Thanks to a key player in Homeland Security, Elijah could get any information he wanted. And still, that couldn’t ensure that DMH wouldn’t crumble like a house of cards.

Ace walked into his office without knocking, the familiar sneer on his face. By rights, the son of Elijah’s father’s best friend was second in command—would take over operations completely if Elijah was killed.

Lately, Ace had been looking at him as if he wanted to do that job all by himself.

“You weren’t supposed to allow the program to go online. Now it’s leaked that we’re the ones who have possession of it.” Ace stared at him, the contempt undisguised. “We’ve got a major problem.”

“Then fix it.”

“I was trying to. I’ve taken it offline, so all we have to deal with are the rumors, which are enough. You need to focus on your own problems, not mine.”

“I am.”

Ace stared at the picture of the man named Zane Scott sitting on the desk. “Meddling in military business is not helping us.”

“My source is secure.”

“You wouldn’t need to use the source if you’d taken care of Dr. Strohm properly in the first place,” Ace sneered. “You had to bring in another woman to screw things up. Couldn’t let it rest.”

Elijah resisted the urge to bite back. Being called stupid—even inferentially—was something he was used to from his younger years. But he’d learned to compensate for the dyslexia, and ruled an empire in the making with DMH.

Years ago, it had simply been a dream.

Now Ace was telling him that it was crumbling, and Elijah refused to believe that, to buy into the other man’s panic. “You need to deal with your own situation, or our plans will be irrevocably ruined. Make it work, any way you can.”

He didn’t point out that Ace’s recent attempts to grab the creator of the software had failed miserably, or that he’d been right to tell Ace to kidnap the woman at the same time he took the software. No, Elijah wouldn’t say a word, would save that ammunition for another time and place.

“I’m taking the jet,” Ace announced.

“I’ll join you in a day.” For his plans, Elijah would need cooperation both here and in the States, and he had the perfect contact to make sure neither Olivia nor Zane Scott survived for much longer.

She nodded as if she knew that. She was too smart to think she could, but she was in full run mode still. “If you give the CIA the information I gave you, I can stay here until they do something with it.”

“That could take a while. No one wants you out here unprotected. And I promised I’d get you back.”

“To what, Zane?” There was no pity in her tone, no
woe is me
. Only steel.

Strangely enough, the expression that she made was so strong it made him want even more to pick her up and cradle her. “There’s a lot back there, Liv. A lot of people you can help.”

“I can help a lot here too.”

He sighed. The argument was going nowhere. “Want to tell me how you escaped? I’d like any tips you can give me.”

She didn’t laugh, but she wanted to, despite the inappropriateness. She’d always appreciated gallows humor.

She shifted, leaned her back against the wall as fat drops of rain began to splatter against the roof and the dry ground beyond. “There was a fail-safe security system that locked us in and everyone who wasn’t supposed to be there out. And in case of emergency, we were to evacuate immediately and the building would … take care of itself.”

“The building was wired to blow?” Zane asked.

She nodded. “Funny, but it didn’t seem to bother anyone but me, you know? And we all learned the system—we had to be able to activate it. We were one big damned team. There was a woman there—another doctor, a third-year resident. She’d failed all her exams but DMH hired her for an insane amount of money. It was her first day on the job. I knew the body thing would confuse them, as she’d arrived at the clinic a day early, before the new patients were scheduled to arrive. I was the only one who knew that, shuffled her into the break room, activated the bomb and left the building, saying I needed a cigarette. By that time, the guards knew me well enough.” Her voice trembled, her body shook as she relived that day. “The doctors were all so greedy. Ignoring their oaths. This wasn’t about people consenting and selling their organs. That’s an altogether different debate. No, this was murder in some cases. I’m just grateful I was the one doing the transplanting and not the harvesting.”

“You went through hell.”

She turned away. “Maybe I’m no better than any of them. I had no right to be judge and jury on those people.”

“You did what you thought was right at the time,” Zane told her. “Whatever happens after that—”

“Is on my conscience,” she finished. “I made sure there were no patients in the building. Not one.”

“The two doctors who died in that bombing, they’d both been doing illegal organ harvesting for years. They weren’t forced or drugged. They lured people into their offices. It was greed. Murder. Just like you said.” His voice was fierce when he told her that.

She wanted to believe that with every fiber in her being. And couldn’t. “Sometimes I wonder if I should’ve stayed inside that building too. I almost did.”

“Liv, no …”

She stared at him, her eyes crystal clear. But she didn’t say anything else.

“Did you hear about any other clinics?” he asked.

“There are two more. I was never able to find out their locations. The one I was in was the biggest, from what I gathered.”

She paused and then, “Am I in trouble for blowing it up?”

“Yes. And no.” Zane ran a hand through his hair. “It’s the least of your problems, Liv. That can get sorted out.”

She almost snorted, but raised her eyes to his face at the last minute and was stunned by the sincerity in his eyes. There were no lies there.

He meant what he said, and she wasn’t sure why that scared her so much, more than it should.

“Is there anything else you need to tell me?”

DMH was like an insidious poison she wanted out of her bloodstream. Maybe the more she talked, the faster it would leave her. “One of the doctors, he would check out the girls who’d been kidnapped and sold. They were mostly American girls. Young—between eighteen and twenty, he said—lured at the idea of being models or actresses or meeting rich men abroad. He would get them ready. Make sure they were perfect.”

She stopped then, felt drained. Her head began to throb.

Zane simply gathered her against him, paying no mind to the heat. “It’ll be okay, Liv.”

But it had never been okay, not really, since that horrible day twenty-five years earlier. She’d always suspected that had been a warm-up, some kind of taunt from the universe. Had prepared for it since then as if it had been fact and not simply theory and speculation. Had waited for it, trained for it. And then it had come true.

And when it had, she’d fought like hell to get away again.

“It’s over,” Zane continued to murmur. But no, Olivia knew it was just beginning.

Security had been breached
and the post was on instant lockdown. Caleb’s orders were instantly changed, via Noah.

Get her the hell out of here and use a secure line only
.

Vivienne was to be taken to a safe house off-post in order to make the software safeguard usable in order to stop DMH from using the program. Even though the area where Delta comms were housed was infinitely secured, Noah decided that keeping Vivienne Clare there was too much a threat to the rest of the families in the immediate vicinity.

“You really think this is all about her?” Mace asked in between the blare of the alarms. He’d come into the hallway while Cael was on the phone with Noah, prepared to help his teammate.

“You saw the video feed from her house,” Cael said as he handed his first line gear to him. “DMH needs her.”

“Maybe. But why didn’t they kidnap her when they took the software—cross their
t
’s and dot their
i
’s and all that shit, you know? They’re not known for being sloppy.” Mace still didn’t trust any of this—out of all of them, he was the most suspicious, the one who asked so many damned questions that sometimes they wanted to strangle him.

Most of the time though, they were damned grateful for the way his mind worked.

“Things change. They’re getting nervous.”

“Don’t trust her, Cael. Not yet,” Mace warned, and dammit, Cael wasn’t the trusting type, but he did live and die by his instincts.

“I don’t,” he said shortly. But he did—why, he wasn’t sure, beyond a gut reaction.

The possibilities of what cyber warfare could do to the infrastructure of the United States was no longer just theory—no, in fact, hackers had threaded their way in far too often—and easily—over the past years. So far, the government had been able to keep it quiet so as not to alarm the American public, but news outlets were leaking information faster than the government could plug the holes.

Vivienne Clare could be a part of the problem as easily as she could be part of the solution.

What bothered Cael more was the intrusion on a secure post. “If this is for Vivi, how the hell?”

“We weren’t followed back here,” Mace muttered, but that didn’t matter now. Gray had Vivi’s computer equipment in a truck waiting out front. Mace headed out with the gear. All Cael needed now was Vivi.

Even if this current threat could be neutralized quickly, it didn’t mean there wouldn’t be more. Taking down a power plant—or several—could simply be the beginning of DMH’s plan, and the extra security now in place to stop an attack wouldn’t hold forever. They had to disable the program, one way or the other.

Caleb stared at the door for a moment, knowing that Vivi would have to know everything sooner than later. How she would react to the pressure, he couldn’t be sure.

His hand was on the knob when Gray came barreling down the hall.

“They put tracking devices in her computers,” he said. “I’m running tests now, but I’ve given you new computers to take so she can keep working. I’ll bring you hers when they’re clean.”

“Shit. At least we know how they found her,” he said. “Takes a set of balls to break in here, though.”

Gray nodded. “Noah said to go now—back gate. He’ll get the word out that you can leave, but you might get there before he can do so, given the current confusion.”

That meant Noah was basically giving him permission to break out of the post if orders didn’t filter down fast enough to the MPs who guarded the gates. Keys in hand, truck packed, he needed to grab the most important part of the equation and make tracks.