Never Say Spy (28 page)

I floated in warm soft semi-darkness, wavering between muddled wakefulness and drifting sleep.  I couldn’t seem to open my eyes.  My limbs were too heavy to move.

At last full awareness returned, and I realized with a flood of terror that I was lying in the bunkroom in Kane’s secret hideout.

I dragged myself into sitting position and hurriedly explored my body by touch in the dimness.  I was clothed.  That was good.  I found no injuries other than those I’d had earlier.  That was also good.  Absorbed in my examination, I yelped and recoiled into the far corner of the bed when I realized the opposite bunk was occupied.

Kane leaned back against the wall, his legs stretched out on the bed.  He spoke quietly, his deep voice soothing.  “Aydan, you’re safe.  Don’t be afraid.”

“What kind of mind-fuck is this?”  I tried to growl, but my voice was thin, trembling with the rapid pounding of my heart.  “What do you want from me?”

“We need to know what happened in the network.  Sandler is dead.  You came out completely hysterical.  You were so out of control we had to tranquilize you.  What happened?”  He leaned forward, and I strained away from him against the wall, my fists bunching.

“You hit me.  You grabbed me.  You shot me.  And now I’m trapped in your secret bunker and nobody knows where I am.”  My voice was rising despite my best effort at control.  “I trusted you.”

He leaned back against the wall, raising his hands.  “I won’t hurt you.  Nobody will hurt you.  You’re not trapped here.  You can leave whenever you want.”  He reached toward me beseechingly, and I flinched away from the gesture before I could stop myself.

“That’s what you were screaming when you came out of the network,” he said.  “You kept saying ‘I trusted you’.  What happened?”

“I’m not a prisoner here?” I asked, my breath fast and shallow.

“No.”

“Good, then I’m leaving.”  I dragged myself out of the bed, staggering against the wall before I regained my balance.  Kane stood quickly, his hand darting toward my elbow.  I jerked away, my fingers stiffening into claws.  “Don’t you dare touch me,” I hissed.

When I forged through the meeting room, Spider, Germain, and Wheeler twisted in their seats at the table to stare.  Spider started to rise, his mouth framing a question, but I was already through the door and struggling up the stairs.  Kane followed, but he made no attempt to stop me.

I reached the main level of the house and headed straight for the door.  When I whipped around to face Kane, he halted instantly, swinging out a restraining arm to stop the others.  They stood behind him in a knot, looking puzzled and worried.

“Can I have my jacket, or do I forfeit it as terms of my release?” I snarled.

Kane’s eyes widened.  “It’s minus ten outside.  For heaven’s sake, take your jacket.”  He picked it up from the chair beside him.  “And here’s your waist pouch.”

He started toward me, but I backed away.  “Throw them to me.”

He frowned and lobbed me the pouch.  I strapped it on stiffly and caught the jacket when he tossed it.

“Don’t follow me.”  I stepped out the door and ran until my strength and breath failed me.  At the edge of the neighbourhood, I hunched over with my hands braced on my knees, gasping and trembling.  The icy air abraded my throat, but it felt clean and fresh, scrubbing away the last remnants of the filtered underground air.  I gulped it greedily, ignoring the pain.

When my breathing steadied at last, I hauled myself upright and forced my shaking legs into a slow walk in the direction of the farm.

Sandler was dead.  He’d told his bosses I was dead.  I was as safe as I was likely to get in the foreseeable future, unless Kane decided to recapture me and beat some information out of me.

The crisp air cleared the last of the cobwebs from my brain.  I shook my head vigorously, trying to drive off the traumatic memories and view the situation objectively.  As I did, my peripheral vision caught a vehicle moving slowly behind me.  Without looking at it, I took a hard right and stepped up my pace.  The vehicle turned the corner and followed me.

I whirled to stride over to the Forester, stiffening my legs and squaring my shoulders to hide my tremors.  Hellhound grinned at me from behind the wheel.

“Hey, darlin’.  Wanna ride?”

“No.  Kane called you, didn’t he?”

He shrugged.  “He’s worried about ya.”

I scowled.  “Sucks to be him.”

Hellhound met my eyes.  “I’m worried about ya.”

“Sucks to be you, too, then.”  I turned and walked away.

I heard the SUV’s door open and close.  A few seconds later, I felt a gentle hand on my arm.  I jerked away, spinning to face him.  “Keep your hands off me.”

He took a slow step back, surveying my face with a troubled gaze.  “Coupla days ago, ya trusted me enough to come home with me an’ fall asleep on my couch,” he said quietly.  “Few hours ago, ya still trusted me enough to be jokin’ around.  What changed?”

Remorse flooded me, and I couldn’t meet his eyes.  I wrapped my arms around my body and studied the Forester instead.  “I’m sorry.  I... can’t talk about it.”

“Can’t talk about it at all, or can’t talk about it to me?”

“Both.  I’m sorry,” I repeated.  “I just need to think.”

“Come sit in the truck an’ think,” he invited.

“No.  I need to walk.”  I turned away.

He matched my pace, strolling by my side without crowding me.  “Who’d ya hit this time?”  He indicated the fresh damage on my knuckles.

“Kane.”  I kept my eyes on the sidewalk.

“Oh.”  I ignored the implied question, and after a few moments, he added, “You’re hell on the good guys, darlin’.”  He walked with me in silence for a few more paces.  “Where ya walkin’ to?”

I sighed.  “The farm.”

“Where’s the farm?”

“About ten miles from here.  You’d better think twice about walking with me unless you’re starting a serious fitness plan.”

Hellhound stopped.  “Aydan, ya can’t walk ten miles.  You’re shakin’ like a leaf.  Come sit in the truck, an’ I’ll take ya wherever ya wanna go.”

I rounded on him, fists clenched.  “I can do whatever I have to,” I snarled.  “I don’t need you or anybody else to babysit me.  I can take care of myself.  I always have.  I always will.”

His face softened.  “Aw, darlin’.  Whatever happened this afternoon, it musta been bad.”

I spun away, swiping angrily at my eyes.  “Don’t give me sympathy!”

He came to stand in front of me and reached slowly to fold me into his arms.  I held myself rigid, fighting tears with all my strength while he stroked my hair.  He murmured nonsense, his soft rasp crumbling my defences, and at last I lost the battle and buried my face in his shoulder.

Wrapped in the safety of his embrace, I drew a few ragged breaths before pushing him away and turning my back so I could wipe my eyes.

I held my chin up when I turned back to face him, but my smile trembled despite my best efforts.  “I told you not to give me sympathy.  All that does is get you a wet shoulder.”

He regarded me searchingly, his ugly face worried.  “Aydan, ya don’t always hafta be strong.  It’s okay to lean on a friend.”

“Yes, I do have to be strong.  Now stop with the mushy stuff.  I mean it.”  I planted my fists on my hips and gave him my best glare.

He chuckled, but the smile didn’t reach his eyes.  “Okay, darlin’, whatever ya say.”

I reached out to squeeze his hand.  “Thanks.”  I turned away.  “I really have to walk now.”

“Okay.  I’ll pick ya up when ya fall down.”  A few seconds later, I heard the slam of the SUV’s door and the engine turned over.  I wandered down the sidewalk, reassured by the vehicle idling slowly behind me and by the presence of a friend I hadn’t even known a week ago.

I gave myself over to deep thought, letting my feet take me where they wanted.  I trusted Hellhound to watch my back, and as that thought occurred to me, I slowed to a stop.

Trust.  Always the hardest thing for me.

I started walking again, separating myself from the events of the day and turning over the pieces in my mind.  I tried to put away the nightmare memory of the constructs’ soulless faces.  That wasn’t Kane or Germain or Spider.  That was Sandler.  They were all Sandler.

Other than the slap in the face this afternoon, Kane had done nothing to betray me.  I’d been around him long enough to believe he wouldn’t hit me without a reason.  And he’d pretty much been forced to tranquilize me.  I’d been ready to rip my own arm off to escape.

And he had let me run away, carrying highly classified information in my head.  He was taking a huge chance.

Trusting me.

I sighed.

Turning back to Hellhound’s cruising Forester, I shot him a smile and stuck out my thumb.

When we pulled up in front of Kane’s office, Hellhound reached for my hand and held it gently.  “D’ya want me to come in with ya?”

“No, I’ll be fine.  But thanks for rescuing me.  Again.  That’s getting to be a bad habit.”

He gave me a cheerful leer.  “Darlin’, your debt’s pilin’ up.  Ya better start thinkin’ about payin’ me back in sin pretty soon, or you’re gonna hafta marry me.”

I laughed.  “A fate worse than death.”

He laughed, too.  “Amen.”

I got out of the SUV and went up the walk.  When I closed the door behind me, the Forester was still idling at the curb.  Still watching my back.

I took a deep breath and faced Kane’s worried expression.  “I’m sorry about running off.  I was messed up.  I’m better now.  We need to talk.”

He smiled, his shoulders easing.  “I’m glad you’re back.  Do you mind going downstairs?”

“Can we do it up here?”

His expression answered the question before he even spoke.  “Aydan...”

I squared my shoulders and gathered every shred of courage I had left.  Suck it up.  Avoiding the source of fear only gives it more power.  “Okay, let’s go.”

I did my best to hide my white-knuckled grip on the handrail in the stairwell, but I knew Kane’s perceptive eyes didn’t miss the trembling of my knees.  I held my mind and my breathing under iron control.  Ocean waves.  Not trapped.

When we entered the subterranean meeting room, Spider, Germain, and Wheeler looked up from three corners of the table.  One corner left for Kane.  The table top for me.  A shudder ripped through me, and I forced the thought from my mind.  That wasn’t real.  That was Sandler, not these men.

“Aydan?”  Germain’s normally humorous eyes were worried.  “Are you okay?”

I kept my voice light.  “I’m fine.  Are you okay?  I’m told I’m hell on the good guys.”

He laughed, relaxing.  “I’m fine.  But I haven’t taken a hit like that since college football.  There’s a great career out there for you if you get tired of bookkeeping.”

Spider snorted.  “She went easy on you.  She tossed me about six feet in the air.”

“Hell of an uppercut, too,” Kane teased, rubbing his chin.

I flexed the split skin across my knuckles, wincing as I turned to Wheeler.  “See, you’re lucky you haven’t had to spend any time with me.  You’re the only one I haven’t taken a swing at.”

He frowned.  “And I’m the one who deserves to have you take a swing at me.”

“Oh, for cr...” I regarded him helplessly.  “We had this conversation.  You didn’t do anything wrong.  You couldn’t have done anything differently.”

“Agreed,” Kane said firmly.  “Now punch him so he can get over it, and let’s get on with this briefing.”

I attempted a laugh and gently socked Wheeler on the shoulder left-handed.  “All better now?”

He gave me a sheepish smile.  “Okay.  I’ll drop it.”

We sat down, and I frowned in silence for a moment, wondering how to start.  Start with the good news.  “I guess I’m clear of Fuzzy Bunny.  Sandler told them I was dead.”

There was a short, shocked silence before chaos erupted as four men asked questions at once.

I couldn’t decipher any of them, so I waved them to silence.  “Sorry, that was a bad place to start.  I’m trying to get my thoughts organized.”

I rubbed the frown lines out of my forehead with trembling fingers, trying not to let the tension in my audience feed my own discomfort.  “Okay.  Point one.  Sandler was not a good guy.”

Spider snorted.  “He was an ass.”

“No, I mean he was one of the bad guys.  I’m pretty sure he was working for Fuzzy Bunny.”

Kane jerked forward.  “How do you know?”

“He was involved in the creation of the warehouse network.  They were developing it as an interrogation tool.”

I shuddered, nausea climbing the back of my throat again.  “It’s a perfect setup.  Create a network environment that exactly matches the room where you’re holding your prisoner.  Bring your victim into the network.  He or she doesn’t realize they’re not still in the holding cell.  Torture them, as much and as long as you want.  If they get too close to death, pop them out of the network.  Their physical bodies are well fed and well treated.  Only the memory remains.”

My throat closed, and I wrapped my arms around myself, staring at the table.  “And then do it again.  Over and over.  Whenever you want.  As long as you want.”  My voice came out in a harsh whisper, and I cleared my throat.  “No physical evidence at all.  They could be tortured for days, weeks, years even.  It would break anybody.”

Silence blanketed the table.  “How do you know this?” Kane asked quietly, his voice vibrating with restrained tension.

I didn’t look up.  “Sandler confirmed it after I figured it out.  I was his field test.”

“But.”  Spider’s voice trembled, and he swallowed audibly before continuing.  “He replicated the meeting room exactly?  But didn’t you notice we weren’t there?”

“You were there,” I said as matter-of-factly as I could.  “Constructs of you.  He made you do,” I paused, searching for words.  “Uncharacteristic things.  That was how I figured it out.”

Kane’s voice was so harsh I started in my chair.  “Exactly what uncharacteristic things?”

I met his eyes.  “I don’t think it’s productive to discuss that.”

Kane’s shoulders bunched as he leaned across the table.  “If wrong was done in my name... no, in my image, then I deserve to know.”

I looked around the table, stalling.  Spider’s face was chalk-white, faint freckles visible.  I’d never noticed he had freckles.

I did my best casual shrug.  “It was no big deal.  Don’t worry about it.”

A glance at Kane’s face proved to be a mistake.  I quickly averted my eyes and added, “It was just a sim.  I knew it wasn’t real almost right away.”

Germain’s dark gaze burned into me.  “We need to know what we did,” he said with quiet intensity.

“You didn’t do anything.  You weren’t even there.  It was just Sandler’s constructs.  It was all him.  Let it go.”

Spider spoke almost inaudibly.  “Aydan.  Please.  I have to know.  Imagination is worse.”

I dropped my head into my hands with a long sigh and spoke to the tabletop.  “Fine.  Five men.  One woman.  You do the math.”  Then I realized how it sounded and hurriedly added, “But none of you did anything bad.  You just held me down.”

Apparently that didn’t help.  Kane slammed his fist on the table with such force we all jumped.  He surged up from his chair, turning away.  His T-shirt strained across the knotted muscles of his back as he locked his arms across his chest.

Spider sprang up, too, and dashed in the direction of the bathroom.  Germain sat as if carved from stone.  His only movement was the flexing of his fist, the knuckles glowing as white as marble.

I didn’t know how to make it better.  “But, guys, it wasn’t you,” I pleaded.  “You couldn’t know what was happening.  You couldn’t have done anything.  You were sitting in the meeting room, watching the two of us staring off into space.  And anyway, I got away in the end.  It’s no big deal.”

Kane turned back to the table, his face rigid.

“What exactly happened?”  His voice sounded like steel cables parting.

I hesitated.  “Well, I should have realized what was going on right away, but you...”

I revised what I was going to say.  “I took a hit and got knocked out for a while, so I was a little out of it.  By the time I recovered enough to know what was going on, I was naked and held down on the table, so I was a little distracted...”

I glanced at his expression and blundered on, completely rattled.  “I got suspicious because you... your constructs were acting so...  Anyway, Sandler grew this enormous...”  I started to gesture with my hands before thinking better of it.

“He planned for me to bleed to death slowly,” I explained.

A muscle jumped furiously in Kane’s clenched jaw.

“So, anyway, I knew it had to be a sim,” I continued hastily.  “And then I remembered that you create your own reality in the sim.”

I bared my teeth.  “It turned out my reality had an automatic weapon in it.”

Spider had crept back to the table, his face ashen.  “You shot him?” he quavered.

“To bleeding, twitching ribbons,” I snarled.

“And he died in real life,” Spider whispered.  “I didn’t think that could happen.”

“He told me if you die in the sim, it looks like a fatal heart attack in real life.  That’s why he planned to kill me in the sim.  No evidence.  He would have gotten away with it, too, if he’d been smart enough to just shoot me right away.  I’d have died without ever knowing it wasn’t real.  Lucky for me he decided to play out his elaborate little fantasy.”

“Lucky,” Kane echoed, his face like granite.

I dropped my head into my hands again.  “I really hope that double-oh-seven license you granted me last night is still in effect,” I mumbled to the table.  “Because I just confessed to murder in front of four witnesses.”

“No,” Kane said.  “You described a virtual self-defence simulation.  Four witnesses sat in the meeting room with you and watched Sandler keel over of natural causes while you sat unmoving at the opposite end of the table.  There’s no stronger alibi than that.”

I gazed around the table at their grim faces, all nodding agreement.  “Thanks,” I said inadequately.  “And I’m sorry I freaked out and attacked you when I came out of the network.  But why did you hit me?”

Kane’s brow furrowed.  “When?  I didn’t hit you.”

“When I came out of the network.  You hit me in the face.  And you were winding up for another one when I fell off the chair.”

He shook his head, still frowning.  “I didn’t hit you.  Sandler had collapsed a few minutes earlier.  Germain was doing CPR.  We knew something had gone seriously wrong in the network test.  We tried to access the network, but we were locked out, so I was trying to wake you.  Usually all it takes is a touch or someone calling your name, but you weren’t coming out.  I was just patting your face, trying to wake you up.”

Understanding dawned.  “And I had my usual shot of pain from leaving the network at the same time.  So I thought you were beating me.”  I met his eyes, embarrassed.  “I’m sorry.  I should have known better, but I was pretty messed up by then.  That’s how the sim started...”  I trailed off as his face hardened again.

“And then you tranked me,” I went on.  “I understand now that you didn’t have much choice.  But from my standpoint, one second I was in the sim, the next second I was in the warehouse with you hitting me, then you yelled ‘shoot her’ and seconds later I was in the bunker.  I didn’t know what was real anymore.”

“I’m sorry,” Kane said.  “You were fighting so hard, I couldn’t hold you without hurting you.  And we didn’t know what had killed Sandler.  I was afraid you’d snapped because of a problem with the network interface.”

“Now it makes sense,” Germain said quietly.  “You kept screaming ‘I trusted you’, and we couldn’t understand why.”

“I should have checked the network access,” Spider mumbled.  “I should have caught that.”  He met my eyes miserably, and then stared down at the tabletop.

Kane’s face darkened.  “And I should have gone in with you,” he added.  “I’m sorry.  This should never have happened.”

I knotted my fists in my hair.  “Guys.  It’s okay.  It was just a sim.  Forget it.”

Kane cleared his throat before speaking again.  “So the warehouse network was never intended to connect to Sirius.”

“Not that I could tell,” I replied, grateful for the topic change.  “If it was, Sandler didn’t mention it.  But I don’t know why the key worked to get me into both networks.  And I still don’t understand where it came from, or what good it is if only I can use it.”

“I might be able to answer that,” Spider spoke up.  “Using your timeframe for when the crystal showed up in your back yard, I went back over last October’s records.  It seems Fuzzy Bunny was expecting an important delivery around mid-October.  One of our agents intercepted the courier.”

“And get this,” he looked around the table, his eyes sparkling.  “Our guy cornered the courier close to Aydan’s neighbourhood.  The courier suicided, and nothing was ever recovered from the body, so it was assumed that he hadn’t made the pickup yet.  But if the delivery was the crystal, he could have tossed it over your fence, intending to go back and recover it later.”

I rubbed my aching forehead.  “But what good is it if it only worked for me, not for anybody else?”

“It looks like it was designed to be used along with a brainwave modulator,” Webb explained.  “You remember how Smith said earlier that a few people may use the right frequency naturally?  Coincidentally, you do.  The rest of us don’t.”

“Oh, so that’s why they were hacking the fob instead.”

“Right,” Spider agreed.  “The key that was inside the crystal can get you into any network invisibly, but it won’t work for most people.  The fobs can get anybody in, but they’re coded to individuals, and they’re traceable.  We think they were trying to develop a generic fob that wouldn’t have to be coded to an individual.”