Hostage

by Kay Hooper

  Hollis shook off the tangent. “Okay, so Thomas went for Mr. Alexander, and once again he decided to fix things so nobody in the house looked bad.”

  Owen sent her a brief glare, but it was rather halfhearted.

  Anna said, “He was very concerned that no scandal touch the family. It was his way, his conviction that such things could be harmful to the family and the business. And she was gone, took her own life, so what harm would it really do to call it an accident instead? A fall, perfectly understandable. They were able to—to cut her down and move her to the bottom of the stairs before any of the other servants were out of their rooms.”

  Evenly, DeMarco said, “And the ligature marks around her neck?”

  Anna’s hands twisted even more in her lap. “There . . . weren’t really any marks. Her uniform had a high collar, you see. And she’d used a twisted bedsheet rather than a rope. The doctor Mr. Alexander called in said that a little bruising from a broken neck was natural, especially if she—if she died instantly, as he believed she had. He signed the death certificate.”

  “And the county sheriff accepted it,” Hollis murmured. “Because how could it have been anything but an accident?” Before anyone could respond to the rhetorical question, she frowned and said, “Why did Mr. Alexander decide to close off that door?”

  “He never said.” Anna shrugged. “I doubt anyone ever asked.”

  “Even though it made the servants’ job harder with just the one door to serve the dining room?”

  “No one would have questioned him. Whatever was said belowstairs, I’m sure Thomas kept speculation to a minimum.”

  “I’m sure,” DeMarco murmured.

  “Belowstairs.” Hollis shook her head. “I feel like I’ve wandered into Masterpiece Theatre.”

  “You’re not alone,” DeMarco told her.

  “I suppose much of this does sound old-fashioned,” Anna allowed, “but as long as Mr. Alexander was alive, things were done much as they had been for generations. The only real difference was that the emphasis on farming and livestock gave way to his various other business interests away from the property, from the land, and so he flew into Knoxville or Nashville two or three times a week.”

  “Flew?”

  Owen said, “The company helicopter. Obviously, being this far out meant travel was more difficult.” He shrugged. “It was a necessity rather than a convenience. After our father died, Daniel and I also flew to our offices at least a couple of times each week.”

  “And you still do?” Hollis asked.

  With another shrug, Owen said, “It isn’t so necessary now. Daniel and I were never as driven as our father was, so we gradually gave up controlling interests in most of the companies. I still attend board meetings and the like, but the day-to-day running of the businesses was turned over to others a long time ago.”

  Vaguely curious, Hollis asked, “Do you still use the helicopter?”

  “When I need it, it’s flown over from Knoxville. Or if Anna needs it, of course.”

  “I hate the thing,” she murmured. “I’d much rather be driven, even if it does take a lot longer.”

  Hollis looked at her for a moment, then forced her mind back to the recently unveiled family secret. “So . . . nobody outside the family—and Thomas—ever knew that Claudia killed herself. But what about Burton? I suppose Mr. Alexander found a way to keep him quiet? I mean, probably not with the family a long time, like Thomas, so loyalty couldn’t be counted on, especially since he was being fired. A nice severance package?”

  She looked at DeMarco and said, “Can you believe we’re having a conversation like this? In this day and age?”

  “Not really,” he replied, his gaze on Anna’s still-writhing fingers.

  Owen said, “Burton never came back. From his walk that morning. None of us ever saw him again.”

  TEN

  Luther was still too shaken to say much on the way back to the cabin, but once they were there, he asked one of the many questions swirling around in his mind.

  “It’s Friday? You said it was Friday.”

  “It’s Friday,” she confirmed, using an antiseptic wipe from her first-aid kit to clean the almost invisible cut on her neck.

  Almost invisible. To Luther, it looked like a murderous slash. And it could have been; that was what scared him. Callie had picked up his knife and carried it back here because he didn’t want to touch it. He looked toward the door, where Cesar lay on his accustomed rug, watching Luther but without apparent malice or even visible tension.

  The other three dogs, who had remained in the cabin during an outing whose purpose and destination was still a blank to Luther, were lying around the living area of the cabin, each on a thickly folded blanket or rug that served as a bed. They all looked completely calm and relaxed.

  In fact, Lucy was snoring.

  “What happened to Thursday?” Luther asked.

  Callie frowned slightly and, finished with her neck, went to pour out two cups of coffee. She brought Luther’s and set it on the coffee table in front of him, then sat down in the chair opposite him and sipped hers.

  “Callie?”

  “Well, I’m no doctor so I don’t know the technical term, but my guess is that you experienced some kind of whiteout.”

  “I’ve never heard of that before.”

  She shrugged. “It’s known to be a side effect of some drugs. And we’ve documented a few cases on the psychic end of things, apparently caused by exposure to energy, electrical and otherwise. It’s the opposite of a blackout, in a sense. You walked through yesterday, and as far as I could tell, you were completely yourself. Acted normally. Spoke normally. Nothing to indicate you weren’t completely here. Mind you, I had and still have my shields up; maybe I would have noticed something odd otherwise. Or maybe not.”

  “I don’t remember anything.”

  “Yeah, that’s what makes it a whiteout. To everyone around you, you’re behaving normally. To you, it’s like you dozed off sometime late Wednesday and slept all the way through Thursday and through this morning. What’s the last thing you remember?”

  He thought about it. “Lunch. Wednesday. We’d more or less arrived at a plan to stick close to the cabin for at least another day to give my leg a chance to heal. I thought we should call for backup and/or haul ass out of here. And you were going to contact Bishop. In fact, you started to contact him.”

  Callie sipped her coffee again. “Yeah, about that.”

  “What about it?”

  “You don’t remember?”

  Luther concentrated, searching through maddening wisps of memory or knowledge. “You were . . . There was a shot I was supposed to give you if something went wrong when you contacted Bishop.”

  “Except that never happened.”

  “The shot?”

  “Or any contact with Bishop.”

  Luther stared at her, then said, “Christ, I didn’t do anything to hurt you then, did I?”

  “You’d have more than a leg wound to worry about if you had. Cesar was watching, remember. And I hadn’t given him a hold command.”

  “You told me . . . he’d react if something negative happened.”

  “Yeah. And he didn’t. But when I dropped my shields to make contact with Bishop and Miranda, there was . . . definitely something wrong. Something out there. Almost but not quite pushing back. Not close exactly, but wherever it was, it was a kind of barrier preventing me from reaching out. It was like tuning in to a radio station but getting nothing except static. I couldn’t get through.”

  “At all?”

  “No. And the harder I tried to push through, the worse the static got. I decided I’d better back off and get my shields back up, so I did. And kept them up. When I opened my eyes, you were clearly worried and Cesar was calm. So whatever it was, he didn’t sense it—or wasn’t bothered by i
t. Maybe because whatever it was, it really wasn’t here. I reached out—and it stopped me somewhere outside myself from reaching further.”

  Luther picked up his cup and took a long swallow, hoping the caffeine would help clear his head. It didn’t. Much.

  “Okay. I’m assuming nothing much happened Thursday. Yesterday.”

  “No. Cesar and I took the other dogs out a few times, but they didn’t want to go very far from the cabin, so we didn’t. He and I went out once alone, just to scout a bit farther. The rest of the time, you and I talked some. Cleaned our weapons. Swapped a few war stories.”

  Luther was sorry he had missed that. He had a strong hunch that Callie’s “war stories” would be varied and fascinating.

  Callie finished with a shrug, saying, “You were up on your feet by the afternoon, first using a makeshift crutch and then pretty much under your own steam. Even took a hot shower last night, and if you needed help, you didn’t ask.” She lifted her coffee cup in a slight salute. “So you do heal faster than the average bear.”

  He grunted. “So where were we headed? Before.”

  “My idea. In hindsight, not a good one. But among other things, I was bothered by that blood I’d found, and that plus the dogs’ fear of Jacoby made me curious. I wanted to find out if that negative energy around Jacoby’s cabin—or around him—was closer than it had been before.”

  “I think we can safely say it was. We were no more than a few hundred yards from this cabin when . . . it . . . happened.” Luther felt more than a little grim. “That crack in my shield?”

  “I’m assuming that’s why it targeted you, because mine was still up. I’m also assuming that during what happened out there, your memories of all the hours you lost were taken away from you. That’s when it happened, I think. Just like the agents transporting Jacoby.”

  “I wonder if either of them turned into a raging maniac first,” Luther muttered.

  “Oh, you were too controlled to be a maniac.” Callie’s voice was utterly matter-of-fact. “I had my shields up, but I still got the sense that you were listening to something inside your own mind. Something very clearly telling you to cut my throat.”

  “Jesus, don’t remind me.”

  She leaned forward, elbows on her knees, and gazed at him steadily. “Look, hard as it is, we have to go over this. You have to remember whatever you can, because we need to understand as much of this as possible. I can’t contact Bishop and Miranda, and I’m not at all sure we should even attempt to hike down the mountain to town, not with that negative energy apparently expanding the way it is.”

  “What about your Jeep?”

  “That’s one of the other things that was bothering me. When I took Cesar out alone yesterday, one of the reasons was to check on the Jeep. All four tires have been slashed. It’s not going anywhere.”

  “Jacoby? He was that close?”

  “I don’t know. No definitive evidence it was him. Generally speaking, people up here are respectful of vehicles, since you never know when your life might depend on one. But there’s no way to know for sure it wasn’t pure vandalism by some hunter or . . .”

  “Or?”

  “There are rumors of a few militia groups scattered about in these mountains. But I’ve never seen any sign of them up here, and I can’t think of a reason why they’d target my Jeep.”

  “If they knew you were a fed, it’d be reason enough,” Luther pointed out. “They have no love of the government, and no love of cops. Finding a federal cop parked in what they consider their own territory might at the very least cause them to leave some kind of warning.”

  “True. But that assumes they found out somehow. And I’d rather assume they don’t have that kind of intelligence operations. Which is what our intelligence operations have told us.” She smiled faintly. “Stop stalling. What do you remember, Luther? In those minutes before you . . . came back to yourself, what do you remember?”

  “Blackness,” he said almost involuntarily. “Like some goddamned alien ooze out of a horror movie inside my head, creeping over my mind, trying to smother it, take it over. And there were voices. Whispers, what seemed like hundreds of them, but all saying the same thing at the same time, almost a chant, all telling me—”

  “To kill me.”

  “Yeah. To kill you. That I’d have . . . power. Power to do anything I wanted, more than I knew I could do . . .”

  “If you killed me.”

  Don’t. Don’t let her stop you. Stop us. We have to do this. You know we do. It feels right, doesn’t it? All the strength? All the power surging through you? Making you invincible? And it’s all yours. You’ll be able to do amazing things, Luther. You’ll be able to do anything you want. Anything.

  “Luther?”

  He looked at her, shoving the stark memory of those seductive promises out of his mind. Hoping they were just memories. “Yeah. That I’d be invincible. If I killed you.”

  * * *

  COLE JACOBY—OR, rather, the shell of that man who retained just enough awareness to know who and what he had been before—wiped his brow as he dug the shovel into the ground upright and more or less leaned against it.

  He was tired. He didn’t think he’d ever been so tired.

  Just a bit more, Cole. Just a bit more, and then you can truly be part of us. You can be one of us.

  “I buried her,” he heard himself say sullenly. “What was left of her. All the pieces. Nobody’ll ever find her up here.” He didn’t allow himself to think about what he had done. To her. And not because he didn’t remember, but because he did.

  Except it hadn’t been him. It had been like . . . almost like watching a movie. Or being in a nightmare. Something had used his body, his hands, to do those terrible things.

  Something that was taking him over, bit by bit.

  Something that was going to win.

  Because he hadn’t the strength or will to stop it, even if he knew how to try, even if . . . Even if he still cared.

  But he was mostly numb.

  And mostly just no longer gave a damn.

  Yes, you did well. And you felt stronger afterward, didn’t you, Cole?

  “I don’t feel strong now.”

  It only lasts after you’ve become one with us. After that . . . after that, Cole, you’ll be invincible. You’ll have more power than you can even imagine. All the power you could ever desire.

  He had the vague notion that there was something wrong with that offer, the dim understanding that if they . . . it . . . whatever . . . had to use him as a tool, just how powerful could they or it really be? But it was a fleeting thing, that question, gone almost as soon as it appeared, like a wisp of smoke.

  “I never wanted power,” he said. “Just money. Just enough money. I didn’t need that . . . what you made me take. What you made it possible for me to take. I never needed that.”

  But we did, Cole. We needed it.

  “If you have so much power, why do you need money?”

  It takes money in your world. To buy . . . necessary things. To buy a safe place. To be left alone.

  “I don’t understand.” He really didn’t, but he also didn’t really care.

  You will. When the time comes, you’ll understand all of it, Cole. Now spread brush over the grave so it won’t be so obvious. And then go back to the cabin.

  “So I can sleep?” he asked yearningly.

  For a little while.

  * * *

  CALLIE LEANED BACK and sipped her coffee, frowning. “Well, that’s interesting.”

  “Interesting? Jesus Christ, Callie.”

  “Well, it is. It’s certainly not your average burst of negative energy. This thing definitely has a consciousness. More than one, from the sound of it. Which could explain its strength. And it likely would have been seductive to someone like Jacoby, who wouldn’t have had th
e mental or emotional strength to resist as you did.”

  “I resisted? Because I had my knife to your throat, and that doesn’t sound like resisting to me.”

  “I’m still alive. You resisted.”

  Luther really didn’t want to talk about this but knew they had to, that she was right about that. “Did you help me, there at the end? To shove that energy out of my mind?”

  “I was about to try, even though I didn’t want to drop my shields, but you were able to do it alone.”

  “It felt . . . it almost felt like I had help.”

  “Not me. I don’t know who else would have done it. Are you connected to anyone else? Linked? Psychically?”

  “No.”

  Her brows rose slightly. “That sounded definite.”

  “It is. Probably like your unit, Haven operatives go through periodic tests and . . . challenges. To find our strengths and our limitations. Whatever may or may not have happened to change my abilities out here, until now I was a touch clairvoyant with a pretty strong shield. Our strongest telepaths had trouble reading me, and the other clairvoyants got nothing.”

  “What about empaths? What about Maggie?”

  “Maggie says I protect my emotions, consciously or not, so she didn’t probe. No other empath has tried.”

  Matter-of-fact, Callie said, “Probably because you’re former military. Most with experiences like yours keep themselves pretty buttoned up emotionally.”

  “I suppose,” he said, without saying anything more.

  Callie didn’t push. “Well, given that, it had to be your own strength that pushed that black negativity out of your mind.”

  Luther suddenly remembered her voice calling his name just before he shoved the blackness out, but he decided to keep that knowledge to himself, since he didn’t quite know what to make of it.

  “Maybe,” he said. “Or maybe it was just a test. To see how far I could be pushed. How well I could be controlled. How can we really know either way? All we can know is that it got in. In me. And took control of my mind and body.” He paused, then added, “I cannot begin to tell you how creepy and unsettling that is.”