by Toby Neal
Sophie met his gaze. “You’ve thought about this,” she said in astonishment.
The color spread from Dunn’s ears to his cheeks. “My mother was a model. Worked closely with some designers in New York. I got dragged to a lot of shows as a kid.”
“Fascinating. Turns out I agree with you about the pearls, at least. I have a nice pair of earrings at home.” Sophie took a sip of her mug of morning tea. “All right. Where were we?”
“Planning a raid on the compound with the sniffer device.” Dunn stood. “Let’s run this by Bix and see what he says.”
Sophie laughed. “I think you’re starting to appreciate the benefits of the chain of command.”
Dunn glanced back at her from the doorway and winked. “I am, as a matter fact. I’m beginning to like the feeling of having my butt covered.”
It took them all day to prepare: prepping their strategy with Bix, packing and sorting gear, communicating with and setting up the situation with Hilo PD, who agreed to be standing by to move in on their positive ID of human remains biologicals.
Stepping up into the helicopter in the long, slanting rays of sunset, Sophie ticked over the plan as she fastened her four-point harness. Her wardrobe dilemmas were resolved by being decked out in dark, gray-green camouflage wear; underneath she wore the newest, latest version of a bulletproof vest made of lightweight, high-technology fabric that was supposed to be able to stop any bullet. Knowing Sloane and the sniper on duty at the compound, Sophie wished this didn’t have to be her first time wearing it, or that she’d at least had time to watch the demo videos of how it worked.
Before they put on their flight helmets, Dunn leaned over. He smelled like lemon and breath mints. “I’m kind of shocked Hilo PD is standing by at the edge of the valley. I thought Ohale would give us more of a hassle.”
“I think he wants Jackson as much as we do,” Sophie said. “And he knows this is their last chance for someone else to get inside.” They donned the helmets and conversation ceased as Security Solutions’ small, lightweight stealth helicopter rose from the pad on top of their building. Sophie tried to enjoy the sight of the city beneath them, spread like a sparkling carpet of jewels, but the small size of the aircraft, the buffered, silent engine technology, and the sleek shape, built for speed, not stability, all contributed to a rough, bouncy flight all the way across the black ocean to the Big Island.
Sophie’s stomach was churning with airsickness by the time they swooped into the furthest corner of Waipio Valley. Per usual, they would have to work their way closer on foot.
It was beginning to feel almost like a familiar routine to drop out of the hovering helicopter into long grass, give a thumbs up to their pilot, drop the visor of her night vision helmet, engage comms, and follow Dunn’s rapid progress through the jungle. Dunn had a GPS heading on the compound and made a beeline for it—regardless of trees, fences, the river, or taro patches in the way.
They reached the compound in an hour.
The moon was still high, and detection was easily possible as they flattened themselves into deep shadow against the high wooden wall. Dunn carried the cadaver detection device in his backpack, and Sophie carried evidence bags and a trowel to store soil samples in.
The gap they’d made in the razor wire of the fence had been fixed.
“Doesn’t matter.” Dunn’s eyes were invisible behind the faceplate of his visor but he seemed to sense her dismay. “We have to get in closer to the digging area anyway. The compound’s security is going to be on alert with any organics exposed.”
Organics. What a way to describe whatever was left of three beautiful women.
But they needed to reduce their mission to a series of neutral components. Sophie gave a brisk nod.
“This looks good.” Dunn’s whisper went from the microphone, so close to his lips, straight into Sophie’s ear. They worked their way around the compound to the shadowed area directly opposite their target. Per their plan, Sophie loosened her weapon and turned her back to Dunn as he strapped on climbing spikes and took out his wire cutting tools.
The night was silent but for the chorus of coqui frogs, their high-pitched calls creating a backdrop of white noise that screened the soft clinking of Dunn’s equipment as he prepared. In no time her partner was at the top of the fence.
Sophie kept an eye on his movements even as she scanned the quiet area surrounding them. But suddenly Dunn went rigid as sparks flew up from the bolt cutters he’d set to the wire. He flew backward, falling to hit the fence with a heavy thump. He dangled from his climbing gear, head down, arms and legs limp.
“Venomous yak worms!” Sophie exclaimed. They’d electrified the wire!
She jumped up high enough to grasp hold of Dunn, clearly unconscious. Whipping out her combat knife, she cut the rope tying him to the top of the fence and caught his heavy body, breaking its fall and lowering him to the ground at her feet.
Sophie scanned for danger, but heard nothing. Saw nothing.
They had to have surveillance cams or some sort of monitoring system for the electrified fence. They had to know that the current had been breached.
Sophie checked Dunn’s vitals. His heart was beating—rapidly, irregularly. He was still breathing, but unconscious. His color was pale even in the dark. There was nothing she could do for him right now but leave him to rest. Hopefully he’d come around soon.
The thought of going away empty-handed was intolerable. Dunn had breached the electrical circuit. Maybe this mission wasn’t over yet, because it didn’t seem as if they’d been detected.
It could be a trap. But if so, why hadn’t Sloane and his helpers come after them already, with Dunn passed out on the ground? It was worth taking a chance, because it was going to be the last chance they had to gather evidence about the missing women.
Sophie stripped off Dunn’s climbing harness, strapped on his spikes, and removed the backpack with the sniffer device in it from his body. She stowed a few more evidence bags from her bag into his, donned the pack, and hit the fence. At the top, she scanned the compound. All was quiet.
Sophie’s skin crawled with tension as she made the first cut into the razor wire. With her NV visor, she could see the electrified wire that Dunn had cut on his initial attempt. She cleared away a two-foot section of wire and tossed it back down on the other side of Dunn, who had begun to move his arms and legs, making tiny moaning sounds.
She whispered into her comm unit. “I’m going in, Dunn. When you feel up to it, keep an eye out for me.” And over the fence she went.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Sophie hit the ground, her knees bent to absorb the drop. She sank into the soft, dislodged soil of the garden’s disruption and moved forward quickly to a heavy-duty dump truck next to the hole, already piled high with dirt from the digging site.
Watching the daytime surveillance, they’d seen the dump truck already make a trip to the entrance of the bay to empty the garden soil into the ocean. This was the reason they had had to move so quickly.
Sophie swung the backpack off of her back, extracting the sniffer device. A long steel rod ended in the ninhydrin technology unit, a round attachment. A stabilizer clamp around her forearm and a handle to hold gave the device the look and feel of a metal detector. Sophie swung the device along the edges of the deep excavation hole, watching the LED display attached to the rod for a green light that would indicate human remains.
It was hard to keep an eye on both the LED display and the surrounding area with the helmet on. It also inhibited her hearing, which at this point she concluded would be her best indication of someone approaching. She removed the helmet, setting it on the ground, and moved away from the hole to scan the mound of dirt in the back of the dump truck. Her eyes flitted over the destroyed garden, the amber-lit yurts in the distance, the dark shadow of the fence nearby. All of it felt so familiar from her time at the retreat, but menacing now.
The LED display lit suddenly, a strong green seeming to leap o
ff of the small black square to pulse in her vision. Sophie fumbled to take out an evidence bag, and scooped a handful of dirt from where the signal had showed. She hadn’t packed the trowel—that was still in her backpack on the other side of the fence—so she used her hands to scoop the dirt into the bag. Her fingers encountered something hard—probably a stone. She fumbled it out of the soil.
She held a bone, darkened with dirt but still pale enough to discern. Probably a phalange. Smooth, round and about the size of a half-smoked cigarette, it lay like a talisman in her palm.
“I was hoping you’d come back.” Dougal Sloane’s voice was casual. Sophie spun, dropped the bone into her pocket and reached for her weapon with her spare hand—but froze as moonlight shone on the chrome-plated Beretta in Sloane’s hand. “I knew it would be you, Mary Watson.” The way he said her name confirmed he knew it wasn’t real.
It was a bad idea to test her new, untried vest with a 9mm at close range, and her lifeline to help was four feet away in the helmet she’d foolishly taken off. “They say men with big guns are overcompensating,” she said, equally conversational.
Sloane snorted an almost-laugh and took another step toward her. His eyes were dark caves, the bald top of his head gleamed, his teeth flashed white. “Psychoanalyzing me, eh? Don’t think you want to do that, m’dear. You won’t like what you find.”
Sophie fumbled the sniffer detection unit’s forearm grip off, letting the unit drop to the ground. Her mind scrabbled to think of a way out as Sloane took another step closer. “Not sure how you got out of here the first time, but I won’t make the mistake of leaving you alive again. This is an ideal opportunity to bury you with the rest.”
So that’s how it was going to be.
A deep calm settled over Sophie.
Time seemed to slow. The details surrounding her impressed themselves on each of her senses: the rich, loamy scent of the dirt around them. Moonlight on the chrome barrel of the Beretta was oddly beautiful, as was its ominous black bore. Even Sloane’s Scottish accent felt rich, grace notes over the aural tapestry that was the song of the coqui frogs in the background. The humid night air felt like satin on her skin.
Maybe this is where all your struggles are meant to end, the depression whispered. He is going to kill you.
Hello, darkness, my old friend. I won’t give in to you now, or ever. I have to at least try to live.
Sophie gathered her strength from her core, an invisible inward coiling, and leaped at Sloane, the longest standing broad jump of her life. Her hands caught his wrist, deflecting the weapon upward.
The massive boom of the gun going off felt like a bomb in her hands. She felt a blast of heat on her face—then she felt nothing.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Voices sounded nearby but muffled, as if heard through a thick cotton blanket. “You’re going to be all right. Stay with me, Sophie. Stay with me!”
Dunn. He was always so bossy, so demanding. Always wanting more than she had to give.
There was a long stretch of nothing. Perhaps. Or maybe it was only a moment or two.
She was drifting, somewhere gray, like walking in the morning fog through the marsh of a rice paddy, as she’d done as a child in Thailand. The ground was spongy below her, the sky too close and the color of lead. Memories played intermittently, like glitchy videos.
Her mother Pim Wat’s beautiful face close to hers, kissing her cheek, stroking her hair. Sophie had been sick, and it was one of the few times her mother had been well enough to take care of her. “You are going to be beautiful.” Her mother’s voice was so loving, her small hand sliding around the outside of Sophie’s face, stroking the bones. “Even with this hair from your father.”
Her mother’s hair was long, straight, black, and shimmery as a fall of silk. Sophie’s was dense, curly, with the structure she’d inherited from her father’s African-American roots. She’d dealt with it by cropping it short, too impatient to figure out how to manage the wayward locks.
She heard a rumble in the gray mist—her father’s voice. She’d always loved his voice, so deep and melodic, a good part of his success as an ambassador. He could talk anyone into anything with that voice. Now it was nothing but a rumble in the distance, a rumble that felt like home.
But where was home? Certainly not the bare little apartment Mary Watson had rented. She really just wanted to sleep. If she could just lie down and rest, maybe all of this would make sense.
Someone was talking over her head.
Marcella. Her friend sounded upset, with that edge she could get in her tone when something was bothering her. “I’m going to tell you this and assume you can hear me. They say you can hear things. Maybe you’ll even remember them, and you better listen when I tell you…” Marcella’s voice caught. “Don’t do this. Wake up, Sophie. You’re my best friend. I need you.”
Sophie hated the sadness in Marcella’s voice. She looked around in the gray, but couldn’t see a way out. She tried to run forward but her legs felt too heavy.
“Thanks for sitting with her,” Dunn’s voice said.
“You don’t have to thank me. She was my friend a long time before she was your partner.” Marcella sounded harsh, angry.
“I’m sorry I let this happen to her.”
“You should be.”
Dunn and Marcella did not sound like they were getting along, and it really wasn’t fair to Dunn. He was unconscious when she went over the wall. He would have stopped her if he could have; he would have taken the bullet for her. Somehow she knew this.
Remembering that about Dunn felt like it meant something.
The struggle to get through each day, to keep the depression from crippling her, that familiar sense of futility, hopelessness, and loneliness—it was gone. If this was the afterlife, it was boring, but it was peaceful.
Perhaps time passed. She heard snatches of conversation, but not anything that she connected with enough to notice until Waxman.
Waxman was close to her. She could imagine herself, lying on the hospital bed or wherever it was. Her former mentor and boss was speaking directly into her ear on the left side. Maybe the light gleamed on his prematurely silver hair like it used to.
“Sophie. I want you to return to the Bureau. We need your skills. We always did. We can reinstate you with no loss in seniority, I promise. We were wrong to try to take DAVID from you… I should have looked the other way about your use of the program, but I worried about controlling it, about the legal issues…and I’ll be honest. I wanted it for the Bureau. But now I just want…you to come back.”
Sophie honestly wished she could lift a hand and touch Waxman’s face. Reassure him. He sounded so broken. But even when she yelled, nothing happened in the gray.
Another stretch of time. Or not. Maybe she was getting closer to getting out, but she wasn’t sure she wanted to.
“Sophie. Sophie. I know you can hear me.” This voice was speaking from her right side this time. A sensation accompanied it, something tingly, dimly felt and far off, like circulation returning to a frozen limb. “This is Sheldon. I’ve gone through a lot of trouble to come see you.”
Sheldon. Sheldon Hamilton. The Ghost. She felt a small, warm feeling at the thought of that brilliant, enigmatic, beautiful man sitting beside her, speaking into her ear, stroking her hand, her arm. That’s what he was doing, even though she couldn’t feel anything but the far-off knowledge of a sensation.
“We’re all alone in this room, Sophie. I thought I would have so much longer to figure out how to make all of this work.”
What was he talking about? His shady dealings in Hong Kong, his desertion of Security Solutions, the real reason for his disappearance—his vigilante activities? She had to get out of here! The Ghost was sitting right beside her and she could catch him at last. Was that why she wanted to catch him, or was it the crazy attraction she had for him? “I thought I’d have time to build trust, to let you know how I felt about you and figure out how we could meet. From
the first time I saw you, I felt something new. You were a worthy opponent. A worthy—counterpart.”
Sophie tried to call out. She tried to move, and in the gray she was able to, but she knew that in the stubborn, unresponsive body she was trapped in, none of that was visible. It was painful to hear his voice, Dunn’s voice, Marcella’s voice, her father’s voice—even Waxman’s voice—and not be able to respond.
“We could have a future. That’s what I want with you. I know you don’t agree with my methods, but I know you agree with their utility, their necessity. I hoped that somehow we could find our way through all that to be partners. Friends. Lovers.” Sheldon’s voice shook on the last word. “Please come back.”
Oh, she wanted to. How hard she tried.
Fighting the gray was like the worst episode of depression she had ever had, the heavy inertia of it pinning down every limb. She was trapped here, stuck here, and peaceful as it was, it no longer felt like a place she wanted to stay.
She had things to do, and there were people who needed her…people who loved her.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Sophie’s bed was cranked up so she could see the view out of a top floor window of Queen’s Hospital. Poufs of cumulus cloud sailed by over a cerulean ocean dotted with sailboats, white lines of breaking waves at popular Waikiki surf spots a punctuation. High-rises glittered like fool’s gold in the sun, and Sophie could even see the waving palms along busy Kapiolani Boulevard, fronting the beaches.
She’d woken during the night, grateful for the dimness of her room, illuminated only by the LED lights on the monitoring equipment. Her movement seemed to have set off some sort of alarm, because a nurse appeared at once. She pulled up Sophie’s eyelids and shone a blinding light into them, waking her father, whose voice came anxiously from a reclining chair in the corner. “Sophie? Sophie, are you there?”