Meanwhile, Samuel took the remote and tried the other news apps. "Nothing so far on any other news channels."
“It’s all right.” Eve hit play on the video from the Post’s website. As soon as it started playing, Eve saw Zoey and Gabriel clasp hands and turn away. She lowered the volume and turned the computer screen away from them.
An apologetic look clouded his face when Zoey and Gabriel looked from him to Eve.
"This was part of your plan?" Gabriel asked Eve. "To show the world what they did to us?"
Just as she rose to go to them, her phone buzzed and vibrated inside her jacket pocket. "It's a message from Niles," she said. "It's done. He has the file and AJ."
"Are we really doing this? Is it going to work?" Samuel looked worried. "Is it going to work?"
She smiled and stuffed the phone inside her pocket. "It is, Sam."
"Eve," said Zoey. "Is this part of your plan? The video?" She pointed at the television.
Eve turned to her and Gabriel. "Agent Yu showed us what they did to you. She recorded this. I didn't want them to get away with it, so I sent it to your media contacts. I'm sorry you have to see it, and I wish I could've stopped all of this before it happened. But people need to see what they've done."
Zoey leaned against Eve and cried, sniffling and coughing. As she held Zoey, she stared at Gabriel. She could see he was trying to be strong for them.
"I don't mean to interrupt," said Samuel. "But we don't have a lot of time, Eve. We have to get to Niles."
Although she didn't want to let go, she released Zoey. She cleared her throat and wiped her own wet cheeks. "There's a shower past the kitchen. Get cleaned up and, afterward, I'll tell you everything. I promise. This is almost over."
"Eve," said Samuel, and they all turned to him. "Can I also suggest a slight change to the plan?"
She regarded him with curiosity. "I'm listening."
He held up a tiny black hairpin and smiled. "I hope you're okay with becoming a YouTube celebrity."
***
Eve studied the outside of the building where she'd been held and tortured not long ago. From behind an azalea bush alongside a boarded-up and abandoned house, she watched several men in military fatigues make their way to the side entrance of the facility. The men's weapons weren't drawn, and they weren't running. If they were responding to the presence of Niles and the escape of AJ, they seemed rather calm.
She adjusted the hairpin to make sure it could capture everything in front of her.
"What's your game plan for getting in?" asked Samuel, his voice loud and piercing through the earplug.
She wiggled the wireless earplug in her left ear and pulled the cell phone from her pocket to turn the volume down. "You don't have to yell. This thing is loud enough in my ear. Can you see everything clearly?"
"I can see. You know we're way outgunned, right?"
"Yeah, but I don't think Niles and the others have been detected. So that's good. Also, thanks for the idea about using the hairpin Agent Yu left behind."
"You're welcome."
She smiled. "Don't be smug. Are you live-streaming this right now?"
"Yeah, from your YouTube account." He paused. "Eve, are you sure about this? There are at least a dozen men over there, and who knows how many more inside already. It's suicidal."
She held up her hand to quiet him. "I know. Just give me a minute." She whipped out the cell phone and opened her email.
"What are you doing?" asked Samuel.
She clicked "reply all" to the email she'd sent to the press contacts, typed in the address of the facility, and hit send. She figured she had a half-hour at best before press began to show up at the location. "All right. I'm going in."
After fading, she sprinted across the street to the building, repeating the room number Niles had texted to her. Room A3330. Room A3330. I got this. I got this.
Before she realized it, she was standing inside an office and tripping to avoid running into a solid wall. Lightheaded, she held her arms out to balance herself. Okay...accidentally teleporting wasn't part of the plan.
"Eve, what happened? Are you already in the room?" Samuel's voice came through the earplug.
She focused her eyes and waved her hand in front of her face. Good. At least the fade's still working.
As she turned around to take in the room, a lump settled in her throat. Doctor Thomas and Agent Grobeck were standing behind a desk, and a middle-aged man with gray-streaked dark hair lingered next to them.
"Did you hear something?" asked the man.
Doctor Thomas and Agent Grobeck looked around and shook their heads.
Taking a step back, Eve hit a wall. Someone gasped.
When she turned around, her face was inches away from AJ's bruised face. Eve moved aside, watching AJ blink and peer around in confusion. Standing next to AJ, Niles had a gun pointed at Agent Yu and another pointed at the trio around the desk. Eve's eyebrows went up as her gaze swept over the guns and his determined face. Damn, Niles. Impressive.
Turning to Agent Grobeck and Doctor Thomas, Eve fixed her attention on the strange man. He casually stroked his well-groomed beard. Something about that mannerism made a light bulb flicker on in her mind. Indeed, the déjà vu of the scene knocked the wind out of her, and she covered her mouth to silence her panicked breathing.
"Eve? What the hell...?" AJ exclaimed, ogling at her.
Agent Grobeck and Doctor Thomas gasped.
"Fuck. The fade wore off. I'll explain later," Eve replied. She reached for the gun in her pocket, all the while keeping her attention on Agent Grobeck and his colleagues. To her surprise, neither he nor his two colleagues were armed. Rather, they were standing close together at the desk. Like cornered dogs. Niles and AJ had caught them off guard, she surmised. A smile pursed her lips as she pointed the gun at Agent Grobeck. "So, who's your friend?"
"This is Charlie Ford," said Doctor Thomas.
"I wasn't talking to you, Doctor." Eve moved the gun to the left a few inches to point it at the woman. "But thank you for the lovely video. It helped speed things along. Now we have the list of trained faders, the Special Project files, and your little torture video has gone viral. It'll be playing on every single news station."
"You have no idea what you've done, Miss Cooper," said Charlie Ford.
Ignoring him, she kept her eyes locked on Agent Grobeck and Doctor Thomas. "It's over, at least for you two," she added, before shifting her gaze to the other man. "As for you, I don't know who you are, and I don't care."
Agent Grobeck shook his head. "You foolish girl."
"The whole country knows who you are, you and Doctor Thomas. Everyone with an internet connection and a Twitter account has seen what you did to Zoey and Gabriel Ellis. People saw it. You know, there's just something about seeing a person tortured. Folks don't forget that kind of shit. Not to mention the optics of a couple of sadistic white people torturing two defenseless black people." She smirked, bringing the gun closer to his head. "You're pariahs now. You won't be able to go anywhere without people seeing you for the monsters you are. How does it feel?"
He looked at her with a hint of admiration in his eyes. "While what you've managed to do is impressive, don't start thinking you're smarter than you actually are. You may have been clever enough to elude us since Philadelphia, but you're not that clever. Do you think we didn't have a contingency plan in the event of your escape? Do you think we were unprepared for that? I have to give Olivia credit. She read you well."
Eve looked over her shoulder at Agent Yu.
"SPI’s decision not to pursue you right away was her idea. The hope, as Olivia put it, was that you would gather the other faders and help them hone their skills. Sure, you might attack SPI in your desperation to stay free. But it was a risk we accepted. We knew we were ill-equipped to train your kind, and with the program being so new, we had no elder pool of faders to enlist as trainers. If we could put you in a position to train other faders, even outside the agency, and
then bring you in—"
Eve snickered. "That's the dumbest idea."
"I know. It wasn't the smartest. I didn't say it was my idea," he retorted.
Agent Yu glowered at him.
"But we were desperate, you see. The potential that your kind offered to our efforts....We had to exhaust every option."
"What about the flash drives? Why did you send us searching for them?" Eve asked.
He sighed. "Stopping the dissemination of the data on those drives, that data from our experimental attempts to replicate the ability, is crucial."
"So you lost a bunch of your own research, and we were expected to do damage control?"
"You could say that. We set out to reacquire those drives before they could fall into the hands of terrorists."
"I'm afraid that ship likely has already sailed," said Doctor Thomas.
Agent Grobeck went on. "When we failed to recover Salazar's drive, I knew matters had already gone beyond our control. I realized then that we needed to evolve. We'd been playing offense for so long that we'd forgotten the importance of defense. We needed you and your kind as soldiers, as our first line of defense against those who seek to destroy this country."
"And to that end, you thought torturing us would encourage what...loyalty?" Eve replied. "How stupid are you people?"
"It was a short-sighted strategy, I admit," he said, shrugging. "As you know, we tried softer methods. But apparently a generous salary, excellent health coverage, a 401k, and paid vacation wasn't enough for you and your peers."
Eve rolled her eyes.
"You really are an entitled generation," Doctor Thomas replied.
"Right, we totally turned all that down because we're entitled. Not because we have, say...a conscience, a moral compass."
Doctor Thomas chuckled and stared at Eve with the look of a disappointed mother.
"Anyway," said Eve, ignoring the woman and looking at Agent Grobeck. "You mentioned the drives contain information about how to replicate the ability. So by 'evolve' you mean make more of us, create your own enhanced military of people like us so we can continue doing your dirty work."
Agent Grobeck's head tilted to the right, and he smiled.
"We were initially hoping to prevent exactly that by stopping the trade of the information on those drives. But you've unfortunately left us with no other choice, Miss Cooper," said Charlie, placing his hand on Agent Grobeck's shoulder to silence him. "Let me give you some background here that David has neglected. SPI discovered those like you—the ones you call 'faders'—several years ago when there was an incident in a small town in Alberta."
"Canada?"
"Yes, Miss Cooper. In that small town, an ordinary family man walked into his neighborhood grocery store, just as he did every Sunday afternoon, to shop for the next week. But everything changed this Sunday afternoon in October. From the moment he entered the store, he became invisible, unseen. He didn't realize this, of course. And when another shopper bumped into him and fell, naturally he bent to help her up. Not surprisingly, the woman screamed and caused quite a racket when this invisible man grabbed her hand. The man apologized profusely and tried to help the woman up, but she kept screaming and flailing about until she'd drawn a sizable crowd in the store. Unbeknownst to the man, he began 'flickering'—coming in and out of sight second by second—and this rather terrified the crowd as you can imagine. They screamed and threw things at him, forced him to flee from the store and speed off in his minivan.
"Of course, this story made the local news, and SPI took notice. As an agent at SPI at the time, I went to that town, spoke with Canadian intelligence, and viewed the security camera footage that had been shown on the local news corroborating the townsfolks' story.
"When Canadian intelligence and our agency located the man, which didn't take long, he was brought in and quarantined. Since he was American, originally from Florida, he was turned over to us. He was the first...that we discovered anyway. Through my leadership, SPI studied the man and began to watch for other extraordinary incidents in other towns and cities. The agency began searching for other people like this man."
"Dude, have you ever considered doing audiobooks? Because that was riveting," AJ quipped.
Eve glared at him. "So a normal man trying to live a normal life had some weird shit happen to him one day. And now he's dead. Because of you people."
"Dead?" said Doctor Thomas.
Eve regarded her with increasing venom. "Forest Sherman deserves justice, and I'm going to make sure he gets it."
"Ah," Charlie replied. "Please let me clarify, Miss Cooper. This was before Mr. Sherman. You know this man as Mauricio Candela. He came to work for SPI shortly after the incident."
"Why is there no record of him in our personnel files?" Agent Yu interrupted, and everyone turned to her. "Or in any of our files, actually. The records show Forest Sherman as the first one of them we found."
"Because Mr. Candela’s employment with us was not what you'd call 'official'," said Charlie. "For our purposes, he was a ghost and of no concern to you."
Agent Yu stepped forward, but AJ held her back. "Are you serious? I was second in command over the development of the project—"
"Keyword: second. I was in charge of matters relating to these people. And David was hired to replace me as lead. As such, Mr. Candela was none of your concern, Agent."
Eve looked between an incensed Agent Yu and an extremely smug Charlie Ford. For a brief moment, she sympathized with the agent.
"Mauricio was just the beginning. When Charlie found Forest Sherman in Louisiana a year later, I thought we might be able to use him to find out more about the ability, where it comes from. That if we ran enough tests on both of the men, we could get to some answers. But Mr. Sherman was less resilient than Mr. Candela. We went too hard on Mr. Sherman. His death was a major setback," Doctor Thomas chimed in, throwing a cautious glance at her colleagues.
Charlie cleared his throat. "Afterward, SPI continued locating subjects with this extraordinary ability and spent months observing them from a distance, to no avail. Meanwhile, I transitioned out of SPI and Agent Grobeck took the reins. Eventually and thanks to Agent Yu’s guidance, he decided to deploy the recruiting and training program that you became part of last year, Miss Cooper. This would enable SPI to bring more of those with abilities under our control so that we could learn about you."
"Hold up. If you don't work at SPI anymore, what the hell are you doing here now?" asked Eve.
"I'm the CEO and founder of FordTech International, a security consulting firm. Agent Grobeck enlisted my company's help in studying the trainees. Unfortunately, just before your training began, FordTech was breached. One of our own employees decided it would be worthwhile to sell to Salazar and our other competitors the information we had compiled for SPI regarding those with your ability. Somehow, this employee breached all of our safeguards.
"As Agent Grobeck indicated, we never found the perpetrator. The employee was gone before we even noticed the breach. I alerted Agent Grobeck, and he smartly created a set of assignments for the operative trainees. You would be responsible for retrieving the information from our competitors and other illegal purchasers. We believed others would use the information to create—or, at the very least, gather—individuals like you and use these enhanced individuals for God knows what purposes. We at least needed to try to stop that from happening.
"With someone like you on board, we were hopeful. We needed a person with abilities who could lead the others, teach them. We had high hopes, until your resignation. And then Samuel Kim resigned not long after. I assumed all was lost at that point. But Agent Grobeck refused to give up. He reverted to old methods, methods we had abandoned after Mr. Sherman, for obvious reasons. I was intrigued to learn that during interrogation you responded a lot like Mr. Sherman. Your blood pressure was not as elevated after a round of shocks. Your brain wave patterns showed little change during questioning and conditioning. And you were tough. All rep
orts indicated you were special.
"At any rate, we don't know how many flash drives are out there. But we knew people like you were the only hope for getting them and shutting down the black market. Unlike me, Agent Grobeck still had a slight bit of hope that we could retrieve the drives and stop the spread of the information.
"And we were making progress until you leaked to the media. Anyone who didn't know we were actively searching for and retrieving the stolen information now knows, including the illegal purchasers. You've shown them our hand, Miss Cooper. You've effectively undone this whole operation and put everything and every person in this country, on this planet, in great peril. You've put us all at the mercy of people who will stop at nothing for money, power, or revenge."
Eve snorted, looking at Charlie, Agent Grobeck, and Doctor Thomas. "You mean people like you."
"If you think we're the ones you should be worried about, you really are naive," said Charlie. He looked disappointed with her.
Agent Grobeck shot her an annoyed look. "We're stuck playing defense against terrorists now, thanks to you."
Her mind looped and turned, digesting all that she'd heard from them. Then, it grabbed onto the one thing that puzzled her most. "But Mauricio...if he was working for you, why did he help me escape?"
"Mauricio's only job was to remain a ghost and keep an eye on your kind. See, I may be in the minority here, but I never trusted you or any other faders," said Agent Grobeck, sneering. "If it weren’t for the drives, I'd be ready to put your kind down. You're a threat to all of us."
"Where is Mauricio now?" she asked through clenched teeth.
Agent Grobeck shrugged.
Confusion mixed with indignation rushed through Eve, filling her veins, as she stared at him. Without trying, she vanished, teleported several feet forward, appeared again, and clasped her hands around Agent Grobeck's beefy neck. His eyes widened, and a look of terror clouded his face for the first time.
But the fearful look was gone in an instant and replaced with a smile. When Eve squeezed, he coughed, and the fearful look returned. He stared at her with petrified eyes as his hands grasped her wrists, trying but unable to detach her grip.
Eve and the Faders Page 25