by Lexi Blake
Tucker looked up and there was such determination in his eyes. “Back at you, brother. Now listen to River and maybe we can save this thing. Maybe we can save a lot.”
He turned to the door that separated him from Becca and wondered if there was anything left to save at all.
“All right,” Ezra said with a nod. “We’ll try this River’s way. She’s right. She’s the only one who knows how it feels to be Rebecca right now, but we have to be careful. If she won’t tell us where that box is, we could lose our shot at what’s in there. I can’t imagine Levi is giving up.”
Levi Green would never give up, and now he had to wonder why Levi had sent them here at all. Were they still falling into a trap?
And how much would it cost them?
He took a deep breath and walked through the door.
Chapter Seventeen
Becca watched as Owen walked in. Walked? The man didn’t walk. He strode. He prowled. He was a gorgeous predator, the perfect bait to a trap for a dumb woman like her. Had they staked her out? Done their homework and realized how lonely she was? Was that why they’d sent in the man meat?
“Let me help you up.” He stood over her, looking perfect in his jeans and T-shirt. It was what he’d worn earlier in the day, and somehow he wasn’t wrinkled or haggard. He hadn’t just been sick as a dog. “Do you want to use the bathroom?”
“I want to go home.” She turned her eyes away from him. How was she going to get out of here? She needed to get a look at the layout of the place. Maybe she should go to the bathroom. It would give her a chance to see where she was. She might be able to get a glimpse of the front door or out a window.
He sighed and got down to one knee in front of her. “I’m afraid your home is being searched right now by a police unit.”
“Why would they do that?”
“Because you’re at the heart of a conspiracy that’s been going on for several years.” He sounded so much warmer than he had before. “Because you worked for Hope McDonald and she did some terrible things. Did you know she was developing a drug that erased memories?”
“She wouldn’t do that. I don’t know what your game is, Owen, but I’m not going to play it.”
“It’s not a game.”
She looked up and a familiar man was standing in the doorway. Jax’s boss. Jax must be in on it, too. How many of them were there? And did they all have to be so gorgeous? “You’ll excuse me if I don’t believe you. I would like a lawyer or to be let go.”
She struggled to her feet because she wasn’t about to let Owen help her. At least she didn’t have anything left to throw up.
“I can’t do that,” the man who’d called himself Ezra Fain said. “I’m sorry about how we started. You have to understand that everyone on my team was deeply affected by Dr. McDonald’s work.”
Damn it, she wasn’t sure she could make it farther than the table. With shaking hands, she started to pull the chair out. Owen was right there, doing it for her. She didn’t look at him as she sat down. Fain slid a green can her way.
It sounded way better than the tea had. And if they’d poisoned it, well, it wasn’t like they hadn’t already drugged her.
She started to pull the tab.
“Let me help you,” Owen offered.
“If you touch this, I’ll throw it on you,” she promised.
He backed off but didn’t go far. “Becca, I started this off all wrong. I was angry you lied to me.”
She wasn’t buying his new warmth. “It’s Dr. Walsh, and do you understand the meaning of the word hypocrite? I would really like to understand how I lied to you.”
“This afternoon,” he replied. “You lied about Carter coming to see you while we were at Casa Loma.”
“How did…” The truth hit her like a hard slap to the face. If only that had been the actual place he’d slapped her. “You had someone watching me.”
“Yes,” he agreed. “We’ve had someone watching you for a while now, but there were several of us earlier today. I was able to listen in on the whole conversation.”
She let that sink in. The major question was why, and she could only come up with one reason.
“I want to know if he’s here.” She didn’t want to know anything about Steven Reasor, but it appeared she wouldn’t have a choice. What she didn’t understand was why he would want her here. She’d done what he’d asked her to do. She’d run and she hadn’t looked back. She’d left him alone with his precious mentor.
But now she had to wonder exactly what he’d done to her back then. Time dilation. McDonald had mentioned it while they’d had lunch one day shortly after she’d joined the team.
Think of the implications, Rebecca. If we could trick the brain, we could effectively become immortal. Forever young. Imagine all that time to do our work.
It was science fiction. It wasn’t real.
But it explained so much. What was the old saying? Something about eliminating the impossible and whatever was left had to be the truth. It was impossible. Except very little was impossible when it came to the brain.
“Are you talking about the man you knew as Steven Reasor?” Fain took a seat in front of her. “I have some questions about him. Was he on Dr. McDonald’s team at Kronberg Pharmaceutical?”
She forced herself to take a drink. She couldn’t panic the way she had this afternoon. If she’d been logical, she might have avoided this trap. “He was at Huisman this afternoon. Are you telling me he doesn’t work with you?”
Owen took the other seat, though he sat down with obvious reluctance. “No. A man named Tucker works with us. He might look like Reasor, but he’s not the same man.”
A laugh huffed from her throat. Even to her own ears it was tinged with the edge of hysteria. “Reasor has a twin? I think that’s my nightmare. Hell, maybe there could be three of that psychotic son of a bitch.”
Owen winced. “No one’s going to hurt you here.”
Anger threatened to overtake fear, and that felt good to her. “No one’s going to hurt me? What the hell do you think you did, Owen? You think I’m not hurt? You think I’m having a blast figuring out that the man I’ve been sleeping with is some kind of criminal? I assume you’re a criminal since you kidnapped me. What I don’t understand is what you want from me. Is it money, since apparently I’ve got an extra million lying around?”
“I believe someone set you up. I know you didn’t steal that money. A man named Levi Green is using that stolen money as leverage to get what we all want,” Owen explained. “Hope McDonald’s research.”
“Fuck you. I’m not giving you any research.” If that’s what this was about, they’d come to the wrong place. They could kill her, probably would, but she wasn’t giving in to them.
“Sweetheart, the police are after you for more than the money.” He opened that ever-handy file folder and slid a picture her way. It took her a moment to realize it was of her. She was standing in front of the portrait of the Duchess of Cornwall. The lady she’d talked to was standing there, too. “This woman is a Chinese spy. She’s also the mistress of the head of the Huisman Foundation. I assume she’s sleeping with him to get information.”
“There’s a lot of that going around these days.” But her brain was working. Something had been happening all around her and she hadn’t seen it until it had been shoved in her face. She still didn’t understand it. If the Chinese had targeted Jean Claude Huisman, there was only one thing they could be after—research. Or intelligence on the doctors who worked there. There was a reason they locked down the private labs. A lot of delicate research occurred there, things the doctors wouldn’t want out in the world because it could potentially be twisted.
“She slipped something into your bag,” Owen explained as though he hadn’t slid the knife in. “It was a thumb drive.”
“I don’t have a thumb drive in my bag.” She could remember how the other woman had bumped into her, had insisted on helping put everything back in her bag. It would have been e
asy to slip something small inside.
Had she been set up?
“I assure you that you do, and the police have likely already found it,” Fain said. “They’ll use it to prove that you’re working with the Chinese.”
“That’s insane.” She was cold. Why was it so cold?
Owen got up and walked out, the door slamming behind him.
“It’s not, though I’ll admit that I don’t understand the way Green’s mind works,” Fain admitted. “But I can explain part of this to you. Years ago, Dr. Hope McDonald started working on a project called Tabula Rasa.”
“I know that.” She wanted to get to the heart of the matter. “Though she never called the project that in public. She used much more technical terms. Her project was specifically about helping people with profound retrograde amnesia. I was brought in because my own work deals with the same parts of the brain. Those memories aren’t lost. They’re stored in the brain, but the connection has been cut for some reason. We were studying ways to reconnect, to rewire the brain so the patient has access to the memories again. It’s obviously more complex than that, but there it is in a nutshell.”
The door opened again and Owen return with a blanket in his hand. “You’re shaking. You can let me wrap this around you or let me hold you until you’re warm again. Tucker is firing up the furnace and River is making coffee.”
“Well, of course she’s here.” All her new friends were assholes, but she wasn’t so stubborn she didn’t take the blanket from his hands. She didn’t trust that he wouldn’t do exactly what he said he would, and she couldn’t stand the thought of being wrapped in his arms.
“I want to ask you flat out if you knew anything about McDonald kidnapping men, wiping their memories, and forcing them to work for her. I need to ask you about her, for the lack of a better word, super-soldier program. Her goal was to build small military units whose soldiers would only be loyal to their employers,” Fain said. “Although employers is the wrong word. Owners is a better word. Imagine it. Men who could keep their muscle memory so they would know how to fight, but they would have no ties, no memories of anything but their lives in the unit. And if they got troublesome, she could wipe their minds again and start over.”
“That’s ridiculous.” Except Fain didn’t look like he was joking.
“Do you remember a patient named Tomas?” Owen asked.
She nodded. “Of course. He had profound retrograde amnesia. He didn’t remember anything before his accident. Dr. McDonald took him on as a patient. I actually thought I could help him. I worked with him for a couple of weeks and we made progress. He remembered he’d been in the Navy and that he had a brother. I read the report on the accident that occurred. It was traumatic. He was shot in the line of duty and barely survived. He had a traumatic head injury as well. That was what caused the amnesia.”
“He has three brothers and his name is Theo Taggart. He wasn’t in the military at the time of his injury, though he was shot in the line of duty,” Fain explained. “He was on a mission to prove that Senator Hank McDonald was selling out US troop intelligence for cash. Hope McDonald saved his life but put him into her program. Theo proved to be her problem child. She brought you in not to heal him but to try to understand why he wasn’t responding to the drug the way the others did. The way Robert and Jax did.”
This was utterly ridiculous. “I don’t understand why you’re doing this.”
“The way Owen did,” Ezra said solemnly.
She felt her stomach drop. Owen? She looked to him, but he was staring at the table in front of him.
He never talked about his past. He’d avoided it studiously. He talked about work, but never his family beyond the fact that he had a mom and a sister and they’d died.
She forced herself to take a deep breath. She couldn’t be emotional about this. “What proof do you have?”
There was a knock and the door came open, and Erin walked in carrying a binder. The redhead glared her way. “I hope you’re happy. That was terrible. I hate sympathy vomiting. Honestly, I don’t like sympathy anything. Here’s the full report. Alex gave us the go to show her. It’s everything from Dubai to today.”
It was a big binder.
“Thank you,” Ezra Fain said before turning back to Becca. “As I told you before my name is Ezra Fain and I used to work for the Central Intelligence Agency. What you’re about to read is everything a group called McKay-Taggart and Knight has on the McDonalds, specifically Hope McDonald and Project Tabula Rasa.”
“All of which you could have made up.”
A blond man walked in, propping the door open. She’d only worked with him for a few brief weeks, but he was impossible to forget. Big and broad and gorgeous, Tomas looked to Ezra. “I think I have someone who can explain this better than that report. Reports are boring. Hello, Dr. Walsh. I hear we’ve met before. I’m sorry I don’t remember you at all. I’ve got a lot of my past back, but those months with McDonald are pretty muddy.”
“I hope they stay that way,” Erin muttered.
He was in on this, too? He hadn’t been faking. She’d worked with too many patients to not know when a patient was faking. Her head was spinning, and not from the drugs she’d been given. “I saw your records. You had a traumatic brain injury.”
“He didn’t even hit his head when he got shot,” Erin said. “I should know. I was there. I watched him die. No brain injuries. Just a big old hole in his heart.” Erin’s stare pinned her. “She fixed it and he’s alive today. It’s the only reason I don’t regret shooting her quickly.”
She looked to the redhead. “Dr. McDonald died in an accident.”
“I shot her. I killed her in a lab in France where she was holding Jax, Dante, Sasha, and Tucker. And Owen, though he’ll have to tell you that story,” Erin said.
“Did you ever run the brain scans on me yourself?” the man she’d known as Tomas asked. “Or did you simply accept what McDonald gave you?”
“She was your doctor.” This couldn’t be real. “Of course she ran your scans. Or had someone do them. Most doctors don’t run scans. We have techs who do that. We read them.”
“Would you like to run mine? I’m sure we can figure out a way to do it,” Theo offered. “You’ll find I’ve never had a traumatic brain injury, but I still have issues because the drugs she gave me caused disconnections in my limbic system. Or so I’ve been told by a friend of mine. Did you ever meet McDonald’s sister?”
“Faith? Yes, she’s a lovely woman.” She’d met the doctor while she’d worked with her sister that summer, and once since. It had been at a fundraiser. Faith was a general practitioner who ran a clinic in Africa and helped raise funds for health care in Third World countries. She was practically a saint. “Are you trying to tell me she’s evil, too?”
“Faith?” Theo moved out of the way as Jax walked in carrying a laptop. Theo shook his head. “Faith is one of the sweetest human beings I’ve ever met, and she’s one of the reasons I’m alive today. She believed us when we told her what her sister was doing. She helped us.”
Jax set the laptop down and fiddled with the keys. “You there, sis? I’m afraid I’m bouncing this off a couple of satellites. The connection isn’t the best.”
River was standing in the doorway, Buster at her side. She gave Becca a hesitant smile. “Jax is Faith’s half-brother. That makes him Hope’s half-brother, too, but we don’t talk about that much. It’s why Hope erased his memory. Turns out his dad didn’t want to claim him.”
“Love children don’t play well in elections,” Jax admitted and then a big smile came over his face. “There you are. Hey.”
A voice came over the computer. “Hi! It’s so good to see you and to know you’re not in police custody somewhere.”
“Not yet, sister, and if we can get some help, maybe never. You know what to do?” Jax asked.
“Tell the truth and shame the devil. Or rather shame my sister,” she replied as Jax turned the monitor to face Becca. “H
ello, Dr. Walsh. It’s good to see you again.”
That was really Faith. What was her part in this? “I can’t say I’m happy to see you’re involved in this.”
“I wasn’t happy to find out what my sister was doing. And I certainly hadn’t thought about the fact that she likely used your research to aid her own. It’s always good to know how something works if you want to break it down.” Faith leaned in. “I’m going to tell you the truth about my sister and what she did to these men and how she used you to do it. If you want to walk away at the end, if you don’t believe me, then I’m going to ask Ezra to drive you back to your place.”
“No,” Owen said, finally looking at her.
She ignored him. Faith looked so serious. “Tell me.”
Faith began her tale.
Thirty minutes later, she couldn’t breathe. She stared down at the reports in front of her. Sometime in the middle of Faith’s recitation of her sister’s crimes, Becca had reached out and grabbed the binder Tomas…Theo had brought in. It played like a handout accompanying the most horrifying lecture she’d ever attended.
Hope McDonald had used her. The other doctor had used her work to rip apart people’s memories. And then she’d had work all of her own, terrifying work.
“You’ve studied the time dilation drug?” It had been a part of McDonald’s therapy, tricking her “boys” into thinking they’d been with her far longer than they had. When she thought about it objectively, it was an interesting theory. Erase memories. Replace those memories with pain. Let the subject know that as long as they obeyed, there would be no pain. Let them think this is how it is and always was. Surround them by others so it feels normal. Isolate them. Become their only source of anything.