Replica (35 page)

Cursing the damned piece of technology that was supposedly in “silent” mode, Nate pushed himself up to a sitting position and grabbed it. He pulled his hand back to throw it, but before he did, he noticed the flashing icon that told him he had more than a dozen missed calls. Groggy as he was, the realization still sent a burst of adrenaline through his system. According to the phone, it was just past eight in the morning, and a dozen missed calls at this hour was not a good sign.

Shaking his head in an attempt to clear the fog, Nate answered even though he didn’t recognize the number.

“Hello?” he croaked, using his free hand to rub the grit out of his eyes.

“Nate! Thank God I finally reached you.”

Nate shook his head again, having failed to clear the fog the first time. The voice was familiar, but whatever part of his brain matched voices to names was still asleep. “Who is this?”

“Dante.”

Dante? What the hell was Dante doing calling him? And how’d he even get Nate’s private number? Of course, he was a professional spy in training, so the latter probably wasn’t that much of a mystery.

“What’s going on?” Nate asked as more adrenaline worked its way into his system.

“Nadia’s been arrested.”

The trickle of adrenaline became a flood, and suddenly Nate was wide awake. “What?” He shoved the covers aside as he scrambled to his feet.

“She’s been arrested. It’s all over the news. They took her from her apartment this morning, about an hour ago.”

Nate was already rushing toward his closet, planning to throw on the first clothes he got his hands on. He had
promised
not to let Mosely hurt Nadia or her family, and he was going to keep that promise. Somehow.

“She’s supposedly been taken to Riker’s Island,” Dante continued. “That’s what the news says, at least. But that’s not where they took her.”

Nate pinched the phone between his face and his shoulder as he struggled his way into a pair of pants. The fingers of his right hand were stiff and swollen, and Nate fought to bend them enough to manage the button and zipper.

“Do you know where they
have
taken her?”

“Yeah. She’s at the Fortress somewhere.”

“Why?” The Fortress was not a place for prisoners. Its entire purpose was to guard the Replica technology. It was where you went to get your backup scans, if you were privileged enough to warrant them, and where Replicas, like Nate, were made. It hardly seemed like an appropriate place to be taking Nadia after her arrest.

“I don’t know.”

“Well, you’re the spy. Find out!”

“I told you, I don’t have that kind of access. I’m still in spy training wheels.”

Nate would have torn into Dante for the flippant words if he didn’t hear the concern behind them. And if he didn’t recognize the same kind of inappropriate wisecrack he was well known for making himself.

“Then how do you know they’ve taken her to the Fortress?”

Dante hesitated a moment. “Because I put a tracker on her last night.”

Nate paused in the act of sticking his arms into a shirt. His swollen fingers curled into a painful fist, and he wished Dante were here in front of him so he could punch the asshole again. Never mind that it would hurt him way more than it would hurt Dante.

“You what?” he growled.

Dante cleared his throat, and sounded unsure of himself for the first time since Nate had met him. “Um, I put a tracker on her. We weren’t sure she wasn’t going to panic and tell Mosely everything. We thought if we could keep track of her movements, we’d, uh, have an early warning if she did something stupid. An insurance policy.”

If Dante was going to be a professional spy, then he needed to learn how to lie better than that. Nate gritted his teeth against the pain as he buttoned his shirt, realizing he should have gone with a pullover to spare himself the effort.

Why would Dante have put a tracker on Nadia? And why would he try to feed Nate this lame explanation? The answer to the latter was obvious: because he didn’t think Nate would like the real one.

Why put a tracker on Nadia? It was an insurance policy, all right. Only not in the sense Dante had suggested.

“You put a tracker on her so that your resistance buddies could find her and kill her if she was captured.”

Dante sighed. “We couldn’t let her talk. We have … people at Riker’s. People who could arrange for something to happen to her before she was questioned. Kurt and I figured if worse came to worst, we’d fess up to our mistakes and our superiors could … make the appropriate arrangements.”

“You set her up to die.” Nate wanted to kill Dante, wanted to pummel his face until it was nothing but a bloody pulp. And then he’d start in on Kurt, for agreeing to this plan.

“I’ve seen what Mosely does to people, Nate. Trust me, she’d be better off dead.”

“One: that wasn’t your call. And two: my name is Nathaniel. Only my friends call me Nate, and you’re not my friend.”

“Fine, Nathaniel. But we have a rather urgent problem right now. Mosely didn’t take Nadia to Riker’s Island, remember? The resistance might have been able to get to her there, but they can’t get to her in the Fortress. I don’t know why Mosely took her there, but it’s not for anything good. If she talks, I’m going to have to swallow this cyanide tablet I’m staring at, because I absolutely can’t allow them to question
me
. And you’re going to meet with some kind of unfortunate end yourself, because Mosely can’t afford to let you live with what you know.”

Nate shoved his feet into a pair of shoes, not bothering with socks. He knew Dante’s reasoning made a sick sort of sense, but that didn’t make it any more acceptable. Nate cursed himself for ever getting Nadia involved in any of this. Ever since the night of his murder, she’d been stuck between a rock and hard place, and he’d done nothing to make her situation any easier. Hell, he’d done plenty to make it worse.

“I’m going to the Fortress,” Nate announced. “I’m getting Nadia out of there.”

“Oh yeah? How are you going to manage that?”

Nate’s hand tightened on the phone as another surge of anger flowed through him. Dante was so lucky Nate couldn’t reach him right now. Of course, if Dante was telling the truth, he was contemplating suicide, so perhaps he wasn’t really that lucky after all.

“That’s why you called me, isn’t it?” Nate asked instead of answering. “You’re hoping I can get her out of there.”

“Hoping, yeah. But I don’t know what you can do. Mosely isn’t going to let her go just because you tell him to. And if he realizes you know about him, he won’t let
you
go, either.”

“Well, if everything is so hopeless, you go ahead and take your little pill, and I’ll see you in hell.”

Nate ended the call. He didn’t have time to hold Dante’s hand, nor did he have the inclination. He had to get to the Fortress and find Nadia. He had to save her. He’d
promised
to protect her.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Nadia
broke out in a cold sweat as she sat across the table from Mosely, waiting for him to react to her statement that she’d met with Bishop. Unlike Nate, Mosely had iron control of his reactions, and she could tell nothing from the look on his face. Was he surprised? Or had someone followed her and seen the entire meeting?

Nadia took a deep breath, trying to calm herself. If whoever had been watching her had actually followed her to the rendezvous and overheard the discussion, Mosely wouldn’t be asking her questions. If he knew exactly what had happened last night, he’d just kill her, not interrogate her.

“You met with Kurt Bishop?” Mosely said after chewing it over for what felt like forever. “How, exactly, did
that
come about?”

The evaporating sweat on her skin made Nadia shiver. She hated the sign of weakness, but no matter how determined she was to be brave, her body had its own ideas. And maybe looking weak wasn’t such a bad idea after all. The less Mosely respected her, the more he would underestimate her—and the more willing he would be to say something that would eventually cost him his freedom, if not his life.

Nadia thought carefully about her answer, frantically trying to figure out which truths she should reveal and which she should hide. If she wanted
any
chance to convince Mosely not to torture her, she had to tell him enough truth to satisfy him. That meant giving up on protecting Bishop. And much though she hated to admit it, it meant giving up on protecting Nate, too. Mosely might not know what exactly had happened last night, but Nadia would bet her life that he knew Nate had been with her.

That left Dante, and the resistance movement to which he was connected. If Dante was arrested, not only would he likely die, but he’d be questioned like Nadia, and he’d tell Mosely who else was in his cell. And those cell members would be arrested and talk, and so on. She might not be convinced this resistance movement was on the side of the angels, but if she could save their lives, then at least she would die knowing she had saved
someone
.

With the decision made, Nadia’s racing pulse calmed, though she still shivered. Not because of how scared she was, she realized, but because the room was cold. No doubt kept that way to make prisoners more miserable.

“It’s a bit of a long story,” Nadia said, still mentally piecing together exactly what she was going to tell him.

“Don’t worry,” Mosely said drily, “we have plenty of time.”

She nodded, then sneaked a glance at the torture table, shivering and emphasizing to Mosely how terrified the threat made her. Hopefully helping to convince him that she would tell him the whole truth rather than risk his wrath.

“Bishop didn’t want Nate to find him,” she said in a small voice. “When Nate got beaten up the other night, Bishop was behind it. Trying to convince Nate he was really the killer so Nate would back off.”

As usual, Mosely’s face gave away nothing, but Nadia thought she detected a sharpening of the interest in his eyes.

“Bishop got hold of the locket Nate was wearing and found the tracker you had me plant in it. He made the assumption that I had put it there, and he contacted me.”

“How?” Mosely asked, leaning forward.

Of course he would immediately ask the one question she didn’t dare answer truthfully. “Through an intermediary,” she said, starting with the truth. “No one I knew, and he never identified himself. He cornered me when I was out shopping and told me to stay out of it or else.” Nadia’s pulse rate picked up as she watched Mosely watching her. She couldn’t say what had changed about his facial expression, but she got the distinct feeling he didn’t believe her. Or maybe that was just her own fear speaking, making her panic for no reason. Maybe that was why Mosely was so good at his job—because of his reputation for discerning truth from lies, those who lied to him got extra nervous and gave themselves away.

Knowing her best chance was to get past the lies and into the truthful—and, she hoped, even more interesting to Mosely—part, Nadia hurried on.

“I told him that, despite his best efforts, Bishop hadn’t talked Nate into not looking anymore, and that’s when he decided to set up the meeting.”

“Miss Lake, I thought I made it clear that it was in your best interests to tell me the truth. The
whole
truth.”

Nadia’s heart sank. She could give him more details on this mysterious intermediary she was making up, but she’d probably doomed herself as soon as she’d said he’d cornered her while she was shopping. There were enough security cameras in lower Manhattan that he could probably retrace her movements over the last week, and he would find no evidence that she’d been out shopping.

Nadia fought to stave off panic. She would worry about how to protect Dante later; right now, her first priority was to get Mosely to incriminate himself while she was of sound enough mind and body to manage it. Which meant she had to redirect Mosely’s attention, at least for the moment.

“Don’t you want to know about what happened last night when Nate and I met with Bishop?” she asked. She tried to fold her arms, but the handcuffs wouldn’t let her.

Mosely frowned and tapped the table with one restless finger. Nadia held her breath, and she had to suppress a sigh of relief when he took the bait.

“Don’t think we have finished with the current topic of discussion, but please do tell about last night.”

Nadia tapped into some of the fury she’d felt at everything she’d learned last night, letting it steal into her face as she leaned forward. She gave Mosely the most steely look she could manage, stoking her anger, urging it to well up and overpower her fear.

“Bishop told us that he wasn’t the one who killed Nate.
You
killed Nate, because of something he overheard you talking about with the Chairman.”

In the best-case scenario, Mosely wouldn’t bother denying the accusation, might even blithely admit to it. After all, he was planning to kill Nadia anyway, so what did it matter? But perhaps admitting to murder was against the spy’s code of conduct, because Mosely merely laughed at her.

“An interesting theory,” he said, still chuckling. “What would you expect the murderer to do, if not to point the finger at someone else? Very clever of him to point it at someone you were already predisposed to think ill of.”

The door to the interrogation room opened, and a security officer peeked his head in. Mosely turned toward him in obvious annoyance. The officer’s eyes widened in alarm at the look Mosely shot him, but he didn’t retreat.

“I’m sorry, sir,” he said, “but there’s a … situation you should be aware of.”

Mosely looked even more annoyed as he shoved his chair back. “This had better be of the utmost importance.”

“Yes, sir.”

Mosely stood up with obvious reluctance. “I’ll be back soon, Miss Lake,” he warned.

Nadia shrank back into her chair, cold and scared and alone, with the hulking torture apparatus that would surely be part of her future looming in her peripheral vision.

*   *   *

Nate
still didn’t have much by way of a plan when he arrived at the Fortress. He didn’t technically have the authority to give Dirk Mosely orders, and considering what he now knew about the man, he didn’t suppose Mosely would follow them anyway. Not to mention that Mosely was obviously willing to kill him if necessary.