by Vicki Hinze
Still, she knew that camel-like thirst. It would take days to quench it, and a lifetime to forget it.
The lieutenant returned with a radio and six bottles of water. “Sorry it’s not cold, sir. We’re primitive.”
“Not a problem. Thanks.” Mark took the items, cranked a top off one bottle, swallowed long and deep, and then took off. “Where do we go first?” he asked Amanda.
“Hangar Row,” she said, weary to the bone. “I know we weren’t far from there when they blindfolded me. Were you taken to Kunz’s office?”
“No, I wasn’t,” he said, swerving to the opposite side of the road to bypass the twisted remains of something metal and no longer identifiable. “I was in a cabin some but they had me in a holding tank mostly. All-white padded cell. Empty, except for the cameras at the ceilings in the corners.” He grunted. “A lot like the tomb except it was never dark.” Sensory deprivation and constant light induced a type of dementia. People lost track of day and night and time, and the disorientation played with their minds, weakened their ability to resist interrogation or input. She reached over and clasped his hand, grounding him in the now so he could let go of the then.
It was a small gesture, but it made all the difference in this situation. Appreciation and warmth shone in Mark’s eyes. He lifted her hand and kissed her swollen knuckles. “Reese?” She nodded, knowing the bruises on her face said far more than any words. “You should see the other guy.” Her record remained intact.
“I did.” He let out a low whistle. “Remind me to never tick you off when you have a weapon in your hand.”
Cruising down the road between the hangars, she grunted. “Baby, don’t you remember survival school? Anything can be a weapon.”
“Yeah, I remember, and I won’t forget it again when dealing with you.” He smiled. “See anything?”
“Not yet.” They rode from the hangers in all four directions, and then repeated the process a second time. And then a third, but still she saw nothing that she could pinpoint. “You look so tired,” Mark said.
“It’s been a long—” she went blank “—however long it’s been. I’ve lost track.”
“Too long,” Mark said, glancing out over the debris. “Don’t worry. I’ll be your calendar.”
“You’re so good to me.” The charred smells of burnt plastic and wood hung heavy in the air.
“That’s the plan. Integrate and make myself indispensable.” He sent her a speculative look. “Unless you have any objections?”
She worked at not melting into a humiliating puddle at his feet. He already had become indispensable to her. “Not if you meet one condition.”
“What’s that?” He didn’t look worried, only curious.
She loved him for that. “Remember those little computer games you invented that all the college kids play? The ones that made you rich enough to own a view of the water that a house and deck came with, a boat and a Hummer?”
“Dirty Side Down,” he said. “Yes.”
“That is where all your money comes from—the games—right?”
“Yes. From them, my captain’s salary and investments.” He looked a little embarrassed. “But what does that have to do with your condition? Do you need money, Amanda?”
“No, I don’t need any money.” So different from her father. So giving and caring. Men really could be good to women. Some men, anyway. Mark’s kind of man. “I want to win.”
“The game?” he asked, his jaw dropping loose. “You play?”
She nodded. “Often—with Kate. We both have come close, but neither of us has ever won the darn thing.” She shrugged. “I want to win.”
He let out a little laugh. “You got it.”
“There’s one more condition.”
“Greedy little thing, aren’t you?” He kissed her wrist to take the sting out of his comment.
“Yeah.”
“Well, what is it?”
“We-sit on your deck and fish until sundown together as often as our crazy schedules allow us to. In the last year, it’s the only place on the planet where I’ve felt mellow and at peace.”
“It’s the view.”
It was the company and the view, but she wouldn’t mention it. “Right.”
“That works for me.” He spared her a glance. “Now it’s my turn.”
His conditions. A little bubble of fear burst in her stomach. “Go ahead.”
“Hand me another bottle of water.”
She passed the water to him. “Is that it?”
“That’s it.”
“You’re so easy, Mark.” She smiled and let her head droop onto his shoulder—and noticed an odd little building. Its shape reminded her of the buildings leading into the bunkers in Afghanistan. “Stop.” She bolted straight up in her seat. “Mark, stop.”
He hit the brakes. “What?”
“There.” She pointed to the wooden shack. “We need to look there.”
He stopped alongside the shack and they opened the door. “It’s a toolshed.”
All the paraphernalia needed for maintaining the golf course. But something was off. Seriously off. The warning prickled at her at the instinctive level. “If it’s just a toolshed, why is it still standing when everything around it is rubble?”
“Good question.” Mark pulled out his gun and a flashlight.
Amanda did as well, and they began examining the walls, ceiling and floor.
“It’s too shallow,” Mark said. “The outer shell is at least six feet deeper.”
“False wall?” Amanda moved to the rear of the building.
Finally they found it—a panel hidden behind a rake hanging on the wall. Mark pushed it and Amanda took a defensive stance, aiming her weapon straight ahead.
A wood-faced, thick metal door swung open.
“Radio Mac,” Amanda whispered.
Mark did. “Mac, we found it.”
“Where?”
“Hangar Row. A wooden toolshed.” He gave further, more explicit directions.
“Wait for backup before going down,” Mac said. “We’re on the way.”
Mark looked over at Amanda, who gave him a negative shake of her head. “Mac, say again. You’re breaking up.”
“Don’t pull that crap on me, Cross,” Mac shouted, obviously onto Mark and Amanda’s plans. “I said wait for backup.”
Mark turned the radio off, hefted his .45 Colt and followed Amanda into the tunnel.
Chapter Nineteen
They moved carefully along the tunnel’s single corridor, weapons drawn, senses wide open, instincts on high alert.
Amanda swept and scanned. White walls, ceiling and floor. Empty. Unadorned. No photographs of the alias Thomas Kunz hung here as they had every six feet in the aboveground buildings. And no security-monitor cameras or obvious sensors were mounted near the ceiling or ankle-high on the walls. The floor felt a little spongy; it could be pressure-sensor embedded. But if it was, they’d just have to deal with it because the corridor was too wide for her or even Mark to walk the walls and stay off the floor.
About twenty meters in, they came to a double fork. The air smelled stale and recycled and tinged with the burnt scents so prevalent aboveground, but no guards appeared. Not one. Amanda had an odd feeling that wasn’t because she and Mark had entered undetected. Unsure what to make of it, she maintained stern discipline and moved with even more caution. Recalling her blindfolded walk into Kunz’s office, she whispered to Mark, “It was a hundred twenty-seven steps from smelling fresh air to his office with a right turn along the way. We’ve gone sixty-three.”
He acknowledged hearing her with a hand signal, and motioned to the right-most tunnel. The lighting in it was dim, but too bright for night vision gear to be effective. Kunz had played that one perfectly.
Only Amanda’s and Mark’s shadows rippled on the ceiling, floor and walls; this corridor was also empty. They passed three openings to rooms that stood empty—training rooms, judging by the overhead projectors, film screens
and audio equipment—and stopped when the corridor came to a dead end. Mark examined the back wall. Amanda took the left then the right. No panels, no triggers for secret openings. The corridor had truly come to a dead end.
“Nothing else here,” Mark confirmed her assessment and turned around.
They backtracked to the fork and took the next tunnel, moving systematically. Again, they encountered no one. The place looked and felt empty. Spotting a large opening at the end of the tunnel, they approached with elevated caution. It was an operations center. Monitors lined two walls and backlit maps covered the others. Desks littered with computers and phones, three fax machines, a mega duty copier, and in a little anteroom, vaults. A second alcove room had a table and chairs, coffeepot, sink and refrigerator. The cabinets were stocked with food and the fridge was full of cold drinks. The computers were on, everything was working, but there were no people manning the desks or computers. It was as if they’d been working one second and had just gotten up and left the next—which well might be exactly what had happened.
And which raised a vitally important question: Where did they go?
“Hopefully, we’ll find out who’s been doubled.” Mark looked pointedly at the computers and then at the vaults.
It looked promising, she had to admit, but they couldn’t afford to forget whom they were dealing with here. “I wouldn’t bank on it.” Amanda took a closer look at the computers. “No hard drives.” She didn’t check—leave it to the experts. “I’ll bet they’ve wiped the RAM, too, and there’s nothing recoverable on any of them.”
“Maybe investigators will have better luck with the vault.”
“You think?” Amanda looked over at Mark.
He frowned. “No. Not really.”
“Your judgment might be okay after all, Cross.”
“I have excellent taste in women. That should count for something.”
“Oh, it does.” She backed out of the room and into the tunneled corridor. “Kunz wouldn’t lead us to what we want. It’s not his style. He loves the game. Playing with our heads.”
“I wish I could disagree.” Mark followed her down the tunnel. “But the truth is, anything we find here will be only what he wants us to find.”
Back at the fork, they took the next corridor. “Has to be it,” Mark said, looking down the corridor. “Otherwise you would have made a left turn.”
Amanda’s stomach fluttered and she double-checked her weapon. For a second, she thought she might be overreacting, but then she saw Mark do the same thing, and his shoulders tensed in a way they hadn’t moments ago. She felt more confident in her gut-level reaction.
She led the way down the corridor. This one was even more dimly lit than the others. So far, she saw nothing, but her instincts shouted that, unlike the others, this corridor wasn’t empty. She moved cautiously, slowly, hyper-alert to any sounds, smells or sensory perceptions.
They passed an empty room—stark and barren, not so much as a scrap of paper littered the floor. “He kept the records here,” she said, knowing it as well as she knew she needed to draw her next breath to live.
“Looks that way.” Mark backed up. “He had to have pulled them out before you escaped from here.”
“Yeah. Probably on the same flight as the detainees, though I’ll bet my hat those records are not and never were at the Middle Eastern compound.”
“He’s got a place no one—not even Reese—knows about, Amanda. His retreat. That’s where the records are.”
“Do you know this for a fact?”
“No, but it’s what you or I would do in his position. We’d have a sanctuary, and we’d go to it.”
She thought about it and agreed. “It’s frustrating. I have no idea where Kunz’s sanctuary would be.”
“Neither do I. But something, somewhere will lead us to it.”
“In this lifetime?” The world was a big place for one man to hide. Especially when so few people recognized that man as himself.
Mark thought about it, and didn’t answer. He had his doubts about routing out Kunz, too.
Amanda moved on down the corridor. Two more empty rooms, and then a chill crept up her backbone. The next doorway would be at a hundred twenty-seven steps. Her mouth suddenly went dust dry. She licked her lips, paused just before the slightly ajar door, looked inside and saw the edge of a desk.
Kunz’s office.
She stopped, lifted a finger to signal Mark that this was it, and motioned to him with the barrel of her gun.
He nodded and moved in front of her.
A man’s voice sounded from within. “Come in, Captain West. I’ve been expecting you.”
Kunz. She nodded to verify it to Mark.
“No need for concern. I’m not going to resist.” His elevated voice ended in a wistful sigh. “There’s little sense in it now.” Amanda touched Mark’s arm, signaling him to step aside. He frowned, clearly opposed to doing it, but she insisted with a stronger nudge.
She crouched low, rolled into the room and landed on her feet behind the leather chair she once had sat in. “Hands up, Thomas.”
He raised them. In one, he held a glass filled with ice, and if the smell proved right, bourbon. “I said I have no intention of resisting, Captain.”
“This seems a bit too easy. Us just walking in and finding you unprotected.”
“Ah, isn’t that what you’re always looking for, Amanda? A break? Again, I’m not resisting. You’ve won.” His placating smile didn’t reach his eyes. “You can lower your weapon now.”
“Lower my weapon? I’m going to kill you, you twisted monster.” She took a two-handed stance and aimed at his forehead, right between his eyes. “You’ve done too much harm to too many for me to ever let you walk out of here alive.” He sipped from his drink, again raised his hand. “I permitted Paul to rape the good doctor in front of her husband. That’s your primary challenge with me.”
Amanda shook with fury. “It ranks right up there on the list with stealing other people’s lives.”
“Don’t shoot, Amanda,” Mark said from behind her. “He’s more valuable to us alive than dead.”
Surprise widened Kunz’s eyes and the ice tapped his glass; his hand shook. He hadn’t expected her to have to fight for discipline. She reveled in knowing he had underestimated her and he was afraid. And yet her training began intruding; the discipline he expected was, and should be, second nature.
“He deserves to die, Mark,” she insisted, eager to shoot him and watch him the way he’d watched so many others. She’d be merciful. She wouldn’t torture. She wouldn’t remove skin or bones or sew mouths shut or blind people just to watch them writhe in pain and suffer and then kill them. She wasn’t sadistic, but she’d gladly provide humanity a service by just shooting his sorry hide and having justice done.
“Yes, he deserves to die,” Mark agreed, his voice calm and reasonable. “But not before we use him to save the others.” Her hands shook violently, her finger twitching on the trigger. She battled the demon inside her that wanted to throw logic out the window, the outraged woman who had been hurt and used and abused by this man after swearing to never be hurt or used or abused by any man again. “We’ll find what we need without him.”
Mark stepped to her side, touched her arm and gently lowered the barrel of the gun. “No, we won’t. And even if we could, we can’t do this.”
“I think I could.”
“Please, don’t. Not this way. This is his way, not yours or mine. If he dies now, it’s over for him while we chase shadows, looking for his demented doubles and the detainees he’s put on ice. If he lives, he’ll be a prisoner for life—just like he made others prisoners.”
“You don’t understand,” she said from between clenched teeth. “You don’t know everything he’s done.”
“Tell me.”
Amanda glared at him. “He didn’t just let Reese rape Joan in front of Simon. He made Jeremy watch.” Anguish flooded her voice.
“Then you owe i
t to Joan to give her the chance to regain her dignity. Joan should have dibs,” Mark spoke softly. “She knows how to make Kunz talk. She knows how to make anyone talk. Let her make him talk and tell us how to find the others. Give Joan control over his destiny.”
That “control” resonated with Amanda, but still she fought the battle of wills between right and wrong and justice and vengeance and good and evil. It was an intense battle that carried her back to her youth, to her father and that stupid box, and scarred from the effort, she fought to remember not the child she had been, but the woman she had become.
Strength took root in her, temperance and the lessons she’d learned in life added to it, and she grew stronger and stronger, overtaking the red haze that had nearly made her like Kunz and her father.
Battle-worn and scarred, the woman she had forged by will and choice emerged, and she claimed her victory. “You’ll never set foot outside prison again, Thomas. I swear it.”
He gave her a look of mild interest, as if it were all that the situation warranted or all that he could be bothered to invest. “Never is a very long time. Soon, other matters will occupy your time, Captain.”
Before she could respond, Mark interceded. “If anyone ever opens that cell door, Amanda, we’ll kill him. I swear it. I swear it to him, and to you.”
His promise had the desired effect. She dipped the barrel of her gun to the floor. “I’m going to hold you to that promise.”
“You won’t have to work at it,” Mark assured her.
Kunz feigned a yawn.
Tempted to shoot him just for that, Amanda tensed. Footsteps sounded in the corridor.
“Ah, it appears the cavalry has arrived.” Kunz smiled. “The choice of whether I live or die is apparently no longer yours to make, Captain West.”
“Don’t count on it,” Mac spoke up from the doorway. “Captain West, if you want to kill him, now’s the time. Otherwise, we’re coming in.”
Fear flashed through Kunz’s eyes. Fear that gave Amanda an enormous sense of satisfaction, which, she was sure, had been Mac’s intention. She waited a long moment, as if wrestling with whether or not to put a bullet in him, her gaze locked with his. The fear in him deepened, solidified, and he dropped the glass he’d held midair.