Shadows (Black Raven Book 1) (24 page)

“Stop apologizing,” Root snapped as she stood up and started pacing in an eight-foot line, directly in front of Barrows’ wheelchair. “I’ve negotiated with the best. I know how to assess relative strengths and weaknesses. Right now, our strength is that we—you—have something that he wants. We need to give this man what he wants, and it certainly isn’t you saying you’re sorry. Let’s figure out a way to give it to him where he has to keep us alive. What we have has value to him only if it is operational. That’s
his problem. God knows how long he’s had your data, but he needed you to tell him that he had an incomplete data set? Don’t you see?”

Barrows stared absently at her, his head turning slightly as she walked, following each step. “See what?”

“Come on, Richard, would you please use some of your magnificent brainpower and think. He needs your knowledge to make LID Technology work, so that he can access Shadow Technology and break into PRISM and the databases that integrate with PRISM. That’s our ace. His people aren’t smart enough to manipulate the programs or diagnose problems. Even if you give him the data, he’ll need to keep you alive to run the systems.”

Jennifer Root was making perfect sense. Trask just wished Barrows would see it that way.

All color drained from Richard’s eyes. “No. I’d rather die.”

Root stopped pacing. She stood directly in front of Barrows, as the door opened and four men wearing white jumpsuits and white masks walked into the room. “You bastard. He’s going to kill me before he kills you.”

Root said it like she believed it, and the reality was she was right. As Trask’s fingers itched in anticipation of a kill, Barrows and Root locked eyes.

“Richard,” she said, backing away from the two men who walked towards her. “Listen to me. It is only a matter of time before he has Skye and Spring.” She ran from the men. When they caught up to her, she slapped at their hands and punched at them to get away. “He won’t stop trying.”

A few minutes later, mask in place, Trask walked into the examining room as his men strapped Barrows to his wheelchair. His aides had restrained Root by strapping her to an examining chair. The aides had left her clothes on, but in her attempt to break free her robe had come untied. Her left breast was exposed. It was full and, because she wasn’t a young woman, the gentle curve of it slightly sagged.

Still tantalizing, though, with a light pink nipple that complimented her easy-to-bruise, creamy-white skin. The arms of the chair were wide enough for her hands to be splayed out, palm down. Each finger of her right hand was separately tied to the table with zip ties that were locked so tight they were cutting her skin.

“Richard. Please listen to me.” Her eyes were focused with horror on his mask, but her words were for Barrows. The woman had balls. She wasn’t going to panic. “He knows that you told Skye to run. It is only a matter of time before he finds them. You do not want this man to have your daughters. Don’t you understand that cooperating is inevitable?”

Barrows averted his eyes from her.

Trask went to a drawer, selected a knife, and went to Root. He bent to examine her hand, smelling the sweet smell of fear that was now rising from her body, enjoying the fast pace of her breaths. “You think about which finger is your least favorite, as I tell Richard a few things.” He turned to Barrows, a blistered and broken man in a wheelchair. He walked closer, took the man’s chin in the cup of his hand, and gently lifted his face. Barrows’ blue eyes were wide with fear, and he wasn’t even fighting his restraints. Nor was Barrows fighting his touch. More than fear, he saw resignation, and that bothered him.

He gentled his tone, realizing that the brilliant Richard Barrows was no different than any other man. He needed empowering. “I want something that you can give me. You have the power here. You have my word that if you give me the code, I will never harm your daughters. I’m close to them. I know who is protecting them. You need to understand me, so nod a bit, okay?” Dear God, the man had no spine. “The lives of your daughters will depend on your understanding exactly what I’m saying.”

Barrows nodded.

“Sebastian Connelly and Black Raven are good, but they’re not perfect. They have delivered your daughters to a safe house that I control. Nod if you understand that.”

Barrows, wide-eyed and sweating profusely, nodded. He returned to Jennifer, but his words for Barrows as he lifted the knife to her hand. “Even if your daughters would somehow manage to escape, there’s a big problem. While the U.S. government would be fascinated to know the drama that is unfolding with their technological intelligence, the secrecy that they demanded for the project is now working against them. No one knows what is happening, so no one with the government is offering your daughters the type of assistance they would really need to protect them from me, the kind of assistance that would keep them off the grid for years to come. For them to disappear again, they need to rely upon their own devices, and I know all of that. I know all assets that are in their current, past, and next names. I know that you had carefully crafted backup plans for them, with alternate identities.”

“There is no way you know their next identities.”

“Bridgette and Brandy Tillman.” As he rattled off the names, Barrows slumped further in the chair. “The only thing that I don’t know, is where, in the goddamn universe you created, with bank deposit boxes in every major city, with more houses than an abacus can count, with storage units and safety deposit boxes that number in the thousands, what I don’t know, is where you may have hidden the backup for the LID. Jennifer,” he said to her, but his eyes were focused on Richard, “have you decided which finger?”

“Please, Richard,” she screamed, as he pushed the sharp point of the knife into her index finger. Minimal blood, maximum pain. It would get worse, much worse. Slicing the skin was easy. Goose-bump thrills ran down his spine as he scraped the tip of his knife through flesh and weaved it into her knuckle. He smelled the flood of urine that escaped from her body as she howled with pain. “Richard! Tell him what he wants,” she panted, screaming in pain as he pivoted the blade down and pressed hard, into the knuckle. “Tell him what he wants.”

“There’s backup that includes the code that you don’t have,” Barrows yelled over Jennifer’s screams.

“Yes?” The metal had cut through the edge of delicate bone, but he hadn’t started sawing at it. He leaned on the knife, the metal grinding deeper, as she shook her head and screamed as loudly as she could. His eyes locked on Barrows’ eyes. “Well,” he said, having to yell so that Barrows could hear him over Jennifer’s howls of pain, “where’s the backup?”

They’d left their intermediate stop, a private airport, ten minutes earlier, and on the dark hilly roads they now travelled she was losing her sense of direction. The 5:45 a.m. message from her father would be critical. Getting to the message depended upon Skye finding her way back to the interstate. If there were road signs, though, she didn’t see them. Plenty of trees stood tall at the edge of the road—mostly skinny pine trees, with other foliage in the mix. There was another left turn, and a right. With no streetlights, the night was inky dark. Two Black Raven vehicles led the way. The state troopers had departed once they pulled into the hangar. Two other Black Raven vehicles were in back.

Once inside the hangar, Sebastian had stepped out of the Range Rover, stretched, and gestured to her to climb into the back seat with Spring and Candy. He got into the front passenger seat, and an agent, who called him sir and so far had not uttered another word, had slipped into the driver’s seat. Sebastian hadn’t stopped working for one minute. He was either listening intently or talking to Ragno. He’d had a few conversations with someone named Zeus. If his arm hurt, he didn’t show it. She doubted he’d show if he was tired, hungry, bleeding to death, or horny. The man was a robot.

Focusing on the sequence of turns that they’d made since exiting the interstate —two right, one left, another right, one left, one right, another left— helped Skye block out the bare-chested man. Hell on earth was what he was, because his good looks were an irresistible lure, from his penetrating, blue eyes, to his golden-brown, wavy hair. His broad, muscular shoulders, and taut abdomen that was ripped with muscles would make a sculptor itch for a mallet, chisel, and a fresh block of stone. All of that exposed skin and muscles, just inches from her, made her acutely aware of how long she’d gone without sex.

In her partying days in the fast lane, she’d had plenty of it. She’d had so much of it that she’d started taking it for granted. For years, Dr. Morris, one in a long line of therapists that her father insisted she see, had insisted that her sexual escapades were self-destructive. Dr. Morris had theorized that she was stuck in a pattern of being attracted to unavailable men, as a way of protecting herself from serious emotional attachments. Her grief over her mother’s death was the root of her problems.

It was an interesting theory, but it didn’t make her stop doing anything she usually did. She continued partying, until three things happened in the space of three months: she’d become aware of her father’s legal problems, the tabloid press had published a bare-breasted photo of her readying herself for a dive off a yacht while she was on a date with a famous, and very married, movie producer, and she’d gotten into the car accident in the Keys. The three occurrences rattled her so much she decided to slow down, which meant giving up the pursuit of men and sex. She had a lot to think about, and men complicated life. So she gave them up. Abstinence had been easy.

For a while.

As of this morning, easy was officially over. Easy had ended when Sebastian had walked across the street with Candy in his arms. Even though she didn’t like one thing that had happened since he showed up, he had awakened a deep-rooted awareness of her need for good sex.

Focus on turns.
Not on the fact that any soap he had used in his last shower had worn off and now, the fresh, powerful woodsy fragrance that his body emitted—reminding her of a long ago hike through a redwood forest—was pure him. If she’d had any doubt in her life about the powerful pull of pheromones, sitting in the SUV with him dispelled it. Without even glancing at her or touching her, his presence was inspiring a steady pulse of desire, between her legs and deep within.

Two right, one left, another right, one left, one right —

He glanced back at her, frowned, and continued his telephone conversation.

“What?” he asked, talking not to her, but on his communication system.

He shifted in the seat, as though his tall, long-limbed body craved movement, and there just wasn’t enough room for him in the SUV.

Dear God, would he just stop moving and shut up?

“Is he crazy?” Sebastian asked. “See if you can get Minero on the line. I’ll tell him exactly what I think of that idea.”

She needed to forget that he existed, because now she wasn’t certain if a left followed the last right that they’d taken, and she usually didn’t forgot things like that. Sequences were like codes, and she remembered most codes she had ever created or learned. But if he wasn’t talking, he was listening, and even when listening, a soft-spoken comment to Ragno was only going to be a few breaths away, and she found herself waiting for his next comments, caring about hearing the rich timbre of his low voice as much as what he was saying. Except when he was talking to Skye, he defaulted to a low, steady voice. When he talked to Skye, tightly-controlled irritation seemed to be his default, as though he knew she was concealing something from him.

She didn’t blame him for being irritated with her.

After all, he was dead right.

Spring had finally nodded off, her head resting on Skye’s shoulder. Candy was snoozing, her head in her sister’s lap, the chewed-to-death, soggy rawhide half in her mouth, like a loose cigar, as she slept.

Two right, one left, another right, one left, one right, one left
.

Maybe.

“Well, when you do get Minero on the line, tell him no. He’s not interviewing Skye tonight. She’s had enough for one day. And he’s never interviewing Spring. Dispel that notion now. You can give him reasons why, but he should have the medical reports that we provided on the sisters, shouldn’t he? You provided that this morning, before the attempted kidnapping, right?”

As Sebastian paused, Skye asked, “What medical reports?”

He shot her a glance. “Anything my people managed to get.”

His eyes back on the road, he asked, “Did Minero even read the material that we sent? No. Don’t bother answering. Tell him he’s not interviewing Spring. Not on my watch. She’s off limits. There’s no option on that.”

Profound gratitude flowed through Skye at the dead-on protectiveness she heard in his voice, but the gratitude was mixed with hopeless exasperation. He was a hard man to dislike, yet he represented an insurmountable stumbling block in the most important task she had ever tried to accomplish. “Do you know everything
about us?”

“Only what others know,” he said, serious eyes on her, “and reduced to writing that is stored in databases.” He refocused his eyes forward, his attention refocused on the phone caller. “Schedule the interview between Skye and Minero for 8 a.m. We set it up. Secure lines. You know the drill. Schedule a chopper lift for me after the interview, which shouldn’t take long. Skye and Spring will stay at Last Resort two nights, then we move them to an isolated safe house, one not associated with any Black Raven assets. I’ll head to headquarters in the morning, after the interview, and run things from there.”

The convoy finally turned off the two-lane highway onto a one-lane, black top road. About one hundred yards into the woods, they stopped at a tall brick wall that faded away in the darkness. An iron gate with pointy metal spears opened as the first SUV approached it.

Jesus Christ.

They were entering a guarded fortress. She’d be trapped on the inside as much as others were unable to enter.

Cataclysm. Run. Now.

When she finally caught up to her father—and there had to be a time when she would, because if she imagined otherwise she’d break down, and if she broke down Spring would freak out—she was going to give him one hell of a mouthful for coming up with this impossible task.

Act first, worry later? Get to the lake house as fast as you can? Take care of your sister. Keep her safe. Take charge if the worse happens, if cataclysm happens. You can do this, Skye. Figure it out.

All wonderful ideas for an idealist, one who’d never actually been in the cross hairs of an assault weapon, one who never had to get around a man as tenacious as Sebastian Connelly.

At a guard station, two men and one woman wearing Black Raven logo jackets stood ramrod straight, arms at their sides, with serious expressions on their faces as Sebastian drove past. They wore assault rifles on their chests and pistols strapped to their thighs.

“We’ve made it. You can breathe easier. Nothing will happen to you here.”

Breathe easier?
Right.
She was suffocating, because she was trapped. Once through the guard station, Skye only saw dark woods. She lowered her window a few more inches. The extra-fresh air, though cool and crisp and scented with the sweet essence of pine, helped her fight the encroaching panic-driven anxiety attack. “Where’s here?”

“Last Resort. A training facility.”

A big training facility.
After a mile of a drive on a wooded street, two of the guide SUVs turned left. The other two turned right with them. They reached a clearing with a large two-story house that looked like a country French chateaux, with symmetrical, arched windows, a double front door, and tall potted plants. All three SUVs stopped in the bricked courtyard that was flooded with light, where there were four other SUVs.

A dozen men and women were outside, standing at attention. Pistols were strapped to their thighs. They wore cargo pants, and light windbreakers. All eyes were on Sebastian, yet he was oblivious to the attention. The driver put the car in park. As one agent opened the door for him, Sebastian glanced into the backseat and said, “This will be home for you and Spring tonight and tomorrow. After that, we’ll move you. We’ll keep moving you, until we figure out where your father is, and who is after you.” He paused. “Until your father is back in prison, and you and Spring are safe.”

“Wait just a second,” she thought, feeling a glimmer of hope. “You’ve brought us to a safe house run by trainees?”

He glanced at the line of men and women. “Those are instructors. If it makes you feel better, we train both new and existing agents here. New ones only get here if they’re coming in skilled.”

“How skilled?” Hope came with the thought that maybe, just maybe, ‘skilled’ for Black Raven recruits meant training as security guards at Wal-Mart.

“Training with Special Forces. Seals. Marines.”

Hope faded. “Why is it called Last Resort?”

“Due to the difficulty of the projects for which they’re receiving training. A lot of our clients have run-of-the-mill security problems, but some come to Black Raven with lives that are royally fucked-up. That percentage requires top talent and creativity. We’re their Last Resort.” He gave her a serious look as he stepped out of the SUV. “When we came up with a name, Last Resort sounded one hell of a lot better than Lost Causes.”

The house only looked like a gracious country-French chateaux on the outside. In reality, it was a well-guarded fortress. The first floor wasn’t a house at all. It was a workspace, with concrete floors, stainless steel desks, and sleek metal light fixtures. Along three sides of the first floor, there were offices with glass walls, so operations on the wide-open center floor were visible. The center of the first floor had computer equipment, monitors, and a dozen or so work stations. The instructors who had stood guard as they pulled into the driveway entered the building, presumably resuming their work positions. After being in darkness for hours, the bright light of the workspace was blinding.

The second floor, which they accessed by climbing sleek, stainless steel stairs and entering thick doors, was different. High ceilings, creamy-white walls, and coffee-colored wood floors filled a living room with soothing light and natural-colored linen furniture. Sebastian directed them down a hallway on the right, where there were two bedrooms and an adjoining bathroom. He nodded to a female agent, who entered the living quarters with them. She had blonde short hair and big, almond-shaped brown eyes. He introduced her as Dr. Claudia Schilling and left the doctor with them before disappearing down a hallway on the left.

That was an hour ago. She hadn’t seen him since, and the doctor had examined Spring, then introduced them to Agent Reiss, the agent in charge of the house and their needs—from cooking for them to walking Candy. Agent Reiss had a Superman tattoo on one substantial bicep, a Black Raven tattoo on the other, an easy smile, big green eyes, and short-cropped, auburn hair. Freckles made him seem young, and the Superman tattoo made him just plain adorable. When Reiss returned from walking Candy, the doctor left them.

By 2:00 a.m., they’d had showers, and Spring had eaten a turkey sandwich. Skye had tried to eat, but couldn’t. Despite not having had a bite of food all day, her stomach was a tight ball of nerves and disappointment at failing to fulfill her father’s simple instructions.

She’d blown the deadline.

She couldn’t get to Tennessee by 5:45 in the morning, but she had to get there as fast as she could.
Had.
To.

Candy had downed a bowl of kibbles like it was her last supper, and Reiss had walked her again. He had pointed to a phone on the bedside table and told her to call, if Candy needed a walk during the night. The phone was an inside line to central operations, downstairs. 

As soon as she was sure that Spring was asleep, with her earphones on and the audio dictionary on Q, Skye sat on the edge of Spring’s bed, and set the alarm on her watch for 4 a.m., because Dr. Cavanaugh had said to wake Spring every two hours. Claudia had also pointed to the phone, and told Skye that if anything seemed off, at any time, to pick up the phone and request her.