Elite 2: The Wrong Side of Revolution (13 page)

Daniel nodded in understanding, refusing to feel foolish for asking what seemed like a logical question.

“I will be safest at the Elite complex,” he pleaded. “Richfield can protect me. Your director can ask me questions there.”

She laughed again. “No way that’s ever going to happen.”

“Well then let me out,” Daniel demanded. “You can’t force me to go with you.”

“Oh but I can,” Stone corrected him. “You are now under protective custody.”

She then turned and smiled at him. “You’re mine.”

Daniel turned and tried to look upset, but for some reason he wasn’t. In his mind Elite was the most logical place for him to go right now, but a part of him wanted to see what the FBI had in store for him. He was now very curious as to exactly what it was he had been caught in the middle of, and how Richfield and Demérs both played into it.

“I’m guessing your director knows Richfield then,” Daniel suggested.

“That’s classified,” Stone responded.

Daniel paused, not expecting her response though he probably should have given the cryptic nature of her brief interrogation in the woods.

“What exactly is it you’re after Benze and/or Demérs for?” He asked, expecting the agent to throw up another brick wall.

“Also classified,” she said. “But with your help I think we may be able to put away a lot of really bad people for a long time.”

Daniel was still confused, but he supposed the answers could wait. Right now he was just happy to be alive. He couldn’t believe Demérs had tried to have him killed. How did Jordan never notice that her fiancé was evil?

Jordan!

He had to call Jordan and tell her what happened. He needed to tell her to be careful and get away from Demérs the first opportunity she got. She was in danger!

He pulled out his phone and opened his contacts.

“Whoa, whoa!” Agent Stone shouted, grabbing his phone out of his hands. “Absolutely no phone usage! Are you kidding?”

She took Daniel’s phone and turned it off. “You know who we’re dealing with here. You don’t think they have means to track you?”

Daniel panicked. He understood her concern, but he couldn’t leave Jordan in danger.

He tried to convince the agent to hear him out. “Demérs’ fiancé—she’s a friend of mine. I have to warn her!”

Stone sat quietly in the drivers’ seat and contemplated. “The teacher?” she finally asked.

Daniel jumped up. He should have known FBI would be aware of her.

“Yes!” Daniel responded. “I need to make sure she’s safe.”

The agent let out an exalted breath. “When we get to the safe house and I call the director to let him know that I have you, I will also let him know to assign someone to get the girl out.”

Daniel slunk back down into his seat. It wasn’t preferred but it would have to do.

When the conversation had finished, Stone pulled the car into a random subdivision. Daniel hadn’t been paying any attention to where they were going.

“We’re here,” she said.

Chapter 8

Agent Stone swung open the front door to a two-story home smack dab in the middle of the subdivision. She stepped aside and gestured for Daniel to enter the house.

The inside of the house looked remarkably normal, as though it were taken straight out of a family sitcom from the nineties. Just inside the door was a plain wooden staircase that led to the second floor. The entryway had old wooden floors that creaked with every step.

The house was dimly lit as all of the blinds were currently closed, allowing only a few small strands of light to pass through. Though there was a thin layer of dust on most of the surfaces, there was next to no clutter.

“I’m going to report in to my supervisor,” Agent Stone told him. “There are drinks in the fridge, help yourself then wait for me in the dining room.”

The FBI agent locked the door behind her, generating a bit of unnerve within Daniel. She then did a quick one-eighty and started jogging up the stairs.

“Don’t go anywhere if you want to stay alive,” she yelled down to Daniel as she reached the top.

Daniel moved past the stairs and made his way through the wide, open entryway which led into the kitchen.

It seemed that the FBI had bought into the idea that the best place to hide was in plain sight. Anyone who saw the house from the outside or in would suspect it to be the household of your typical suburban family.

The floors of the kitchen were the same wooden floors as the entryway. It was fully equipped with a stove, dishwasher, refrigerator, wooden cabinets, and even the kitchen sink—all of which appeared plain and ordinary.

On the back wall of the house was a sliding door that looked out over a fifty-foot by fifty-foot backyard, separated from the neighbors’ by a short chain-link fence.

Across from the kitchen but in the same general room was a dining area with a simple, round wooden table placed directly in the center with four chairs situated around it. Beyond the dining room a single step led down into a living area where the floor changed from wooden flooring to off-white carpeting.

The house was exactly that—ordinary. There was nothing about it that stood out as being any more or any less than ordinary. It was perfect for those who preferred not to garner any added attention.

The refrigerator offered a rather limited selection –either bottled water or cola. Daniel opted for a soda and carried it with him to the dining room table. As soon as his butt hit the seat he heard Agent Stone making her way back down the staircase.

“The director should be here in a half-hour with reinforcements. We’ll just hold tight until then,” she told Daniel as she entered the room and made her way to the fridge. She had changed out of her snowsuit and was now wearing a white blouse tucked into her blue jeans underneath a tan leather jacket. Her dark hair cascaded over her shoulders as she strutted across the floor with leather boots that matched her jacket.

“I require reinforcements?” Daniel asked accusingly.

Agent Stone smiled as she pulled a bottle of water from the refrigerator. “Once Demérs’ men find out you’re still alive they’ll come after you. When that happens you’ll have both them and the remainder of Benze’s gang after you. If I were you, I would be grateful for reinforcements.”

Daniel swallowed, still not absorbing the full gravity of his current situation.

“Agent Stone,” Daniel began.

“Call me Eva,” she interrupted.

Daniel shrugged and acknowledged the agent’s request. “Eva…why me? What did I do to warrant this attack on my life?”

Eva contemplated for a moment before answering, mentally formulating an answer that would not reveal any classified information.

“Well you’re Richfield’s top man, aren’t you?” She responded cryptically.

“So this has to do with Richfield?” He countered with another question of his home. He got the feeling that Eva’s answers to his questions were not going to be very helpful in explaining what was happening to him.

“I can’t answer that right now,” she admitted. “The Director can give you more detail when we get you back to H.Q.. What I can tell you is that we need your help.”

“My help?” Daniel asked more confused than ever. “To do what exactly? Is that why you’re protecting me?”

“Well, yes,” Eva conceded. “Your position within Richfield’s organization gives you the unique ability to get close to a lot of key targets. Having you on our side could change everything.”

“Change what?” Daniel demanded. “Who are these targets?” He was growing very tired of all the riddles. Whatever was happening here it clearly led down a very dark and dangerous path, and he wasn’t entirely convinced that he wanted to jump down that rabbit hole.

Eva again carefully formulated her response.

“That part is classified.” She was beginning to sound like a broken record. “I will tell you that this thing goes deep—very, very deep—and that there are a lot of very bad people that you can help us stop from doing a lot of very bad things.”

Daniel dropped his head into his arms which were folded in front of him on the table. He was completely overwhelmed by the situation. His assignment with Demérs was supposed to be simple.

“What makes you think I even
want
to help you?” He asked, his voice muffled by his arms.

“Because she said you would,” Eva responded plainly.

Daniel’s head shot up and he asked the obvious question. “Who is
she?”

Before Eva could tell him that the answer was classified, there was a loud knock at the door.

She craned her neck, turning her ear in the direction of the sound. She looked down at her watch.

“It’s way too soon for the director to be here,” she commented.

She stood up and made her way to the door. She put one hand on her gun which was holstered on her belt right next to her badge. Keeping a moderate pace, she moved to the front door, attempting to peer out the small side window as she approached.

Daniel remained seated in the kitchen, feeling rather nervous about the intrusion. It was probably something as simple as a neighbor stopping by to see who had returned to the house that was constantly sitting vacant, but with the number of people who were currently trying to terminate his life, he couldn’t help but be afraid of who might be at the door.

Why would a killer knock?
He thought to himself.

As he asked himself the question, he began to remember his first day in the classroom with Richfield, in which the ex-CIA agent had told Daniel a story about a pair of federal agents assigned to protect an American Ambassador on foreign soil, and how the agents had fallen victim to a distraction created by an assassin, ultimately allowing him to eliminate the target. The moral of the story had been the root of the number one rule of protection—never leave the client.

As he remembered the story, his stomach fell to the floor and he began to prepare his brain for combat. He stood up and shouted to Eva, who was now reaching for the doorknob. “Agent Stone, wait!”

Hearing Daniel’s warning, Eva stopped herself short of the doorknob. Then before she could react any further, a metallic canister came crashing through the front window. Daniel could see as some sort of greenish-grey smoke began pouring out from the cylinder.

“Eva!” He called for the agent, but he could not see her through the smog.

Daniel quickly covered his face and turned to find an escape. As he turned he jumped back at the sight of a short, stocky figure standing just outside the now open sliding door. The figure was wearing all black, including a black gas mask, and was pointing a thin rifle at Daniel.

Before he could move out of the way, the mysterious intruder fired a dart, hitting Daniel square in the side of the neck. Daniel reached up to remove the small metallic dart, but found himself already falling to his knees as he did so.

He tried to use his control over his bodily functions to keep whatever chemical had been in the dart from taking effect, but it was too late—the drug had already done its work.

The room began to blur as he collapsed onto the floor. It took everything he had to roll himself over onto his back. His eyes were heavy—he wanted to sleep. It felt as though he had swallowed a fistful of sleeping pills.

The person who had shot him stood over him as Daniel continued to fade. He was just lucid enough to see a second person also wearing all black and a gas mask run out of the cloud of smog.

“I told you he didn’t have what it takes to be number one,” the man who shot Daniel said to the other, his voice muffled under his mask. The same man then removed his mask, revealing his face to Daniel just seconds before he would lose consciousness.

As he drifted into darkness, Daniel managed to say, “Jitters, you fuck.”

The room was black. A purple haze filled the air. In the distance there was a single point of white light.

“Wake up Daniel,” a soft, feminine voice echoed out.

Daniel spun around, trying desperately to locate the source.

“We have work to do still,” the voice rang out again.

Daniel continued to search, almost calling out to it but finding himself unwilling. The voice was incredibly vivid, and so very…familiar.

“Wake up.”

This time the voice was not all around him, but rather directly behind him. He turned to face it.

A shadow stood directly in front of the single white light off in the distance so that Daniel could not make out anything more than the figure of a female body. Though cloaked, the shape of the shadow elicited some lost and forgotten feelings within Daniel. Suddenly, he recognized the voice that called out to him.

“Norma,” he spoke softly.

Suddenly the room began to spin—or the source of light began to revolve, it was unclear which—and the light settled behind Daniel, lighting up the face of his lost lover.

“We’re not safe here,” she spoke to him, a purple mist floating all around her.

“Not safe…where? Where are we?” Daniel asked the apparition.