Not as much as Mark did, though.
On to the next move. Mark opened the back of the large truck that he’d driven into the complex, and leaped inside. A teenaged boy lay in the cargo space.
“Joseph. You’re still breathing.” Mark grabbed him by the collar, and hauled out General Kitteridge’s grandson. He’d regained consciousness, and his eyes rolled in terror. He was hog-tied with dirty white ropes that showed blood where they’d rubbed his skin raw. Duct tape over his mouth, though. Easier than a gag. Harder to chew, what with the adhesive.
The boy was six feet and weighed a hundred and eighty pounds, but Mark hefted him as if he weighed nothing. Joseph twisted and fought as if dangling from a gallows, groaning as the shirt collar choked him.
“Joey!” Kitteridge’s sig turned inside out. Watery green alternated with pulsing yellow. Soul-chilling fear. Yes.
“I don’t need to describe what I could do to your grandson,” Mark said. “Your imagination might be even more creative than mine.”
“Don’t hurt Joey!” Kitteridge stared at Mark’s unflagging one-armed grip. “Who in the hell are you? Are you modified?”
“Me? I’m just a piece of garbage you threw away years ago. It’s payback time.”
“You’re an older gen—? What year? I thought I was familiar with all of the . . . oh. Oh, God. You helped torch Midlands.”
“Bingo. You’re the second one on my list. You should be honored.”
“Second?” Kitteridge’s eyes kept darting toward his grandson. “Lydia was the first? Please understand, we had no idea what the researchers were doing. We were horrified when we learned about you kids but there was—it was a breakdown in command—”
“Of course. These things happen.” Mark’s soothing tone made Joseph groan again.
“We were never able to find you kids after that! We never intended anything like that to—”
Mark gave the man a vicious crack across the mouth. “Shut up, General. The bill’s due. You Obsidian pricks are going to pay.”
Blood dribbled from Kitteridge’s mouth. “I will. Go ahead and hurt me. Not—not—my grandson.”
“Shhhh.” Mark placed his free hand over Joseph Kitteridge’s skull, winding his fingers into the boy’s hair. “How about if I collapse his skull and we watch his brain squeeze out? On second thought, that’s too quick. I want him conscious when I do this.” He reached down and grabbed Joseph’s balls.
Joseph screamed behind his duct tape and jackknifed frantically.
“Stop!” Kitteridge begged. “Stop! I’ll open the vault! Just put him down!”
“That’s the spirit.” Mark let go and Joseph thudded heavily down to the concrete floor with an agonized grunt.
Bonus. The kid was crying real tears. Mark almost wished he hadn’t let go so soon. He sighed and turned to the general. “Do it.”
The older man’s eyes darted to his grandson. “I will, but . . . but you can’t use it. No one could, not even me.”
“Explain, fuckhead. Or your grandson gets something worse.”
Kitteridge talked fast, spewing out the words. “The weapons are keyed to the mods of the ultimate generation of enhanced slave soldiers, and they respond only to their specific mental commands.”
“Really. Well, I may be just a rough draft,” Mark said casually, “but I’m still curious to see the final product. Don’t make me wait. Joseph has a low pain threshold. Trust me on that.”
“I have to concentrate,” Kitteridge pleaded. “It’s not easy to use, and it’s impossible when I’m agitated! The system recognizes brainwaves generated while visualizing images, and if I can’t—”
“I understand the basic principles,” Mark interrupted. “I’m a GodsEye client myself, General, and I manage the brain/software interface just fine. Would it speed things up if I cut off a piece of Joseph’s body?”
“No! Just let me concentrate, please! Just give me a moment!”
Mark tapped his foot as he watched sweat roll down the General’s face. Payback was never as satisfying in real life as in fantasy. He’d cornered his first Obsidian target last year. Lydia Bachmann, CEO of a weapons manufacturing firm. He’d tried to compel Lydia to open a GodsEye safe for him, unaware of the safe’s unique biometric design. But the drug he’d used to lower her resistance to interrogation hadn’t worked right. She couldn’t summon up images strong enough to be read by the sensors.
The safe had stayed closed, to his intense frustration. For months, he’d been hauling the fucking thing around everywhere he went.
Lydia had regretted her sins, but it hadn’t been as much fun as he’d hoped. Plus, she’d lost consciousness far too quickly. Silence was not what he wanted out of the encounter. Screaming provided measurable feedback during the infliction of pain. She’d disappointed him.
He was learning how to make agony last, build it into a crescendo as he killed these power-bloated bastards one by one. And then, ahhh. Taking their masterpiece from them, and bludgeoning the living shit out of everyone with it . . . that promised to be a fucking blast.
No drugs for Kitteridge. He’d learned his lesson. The general’s mind needed to be crystal sharp. The kidnapped grandson was a more efficient stimulant.
Kitteridge squeezed his eyes shut, veins pulsing in his temples. Minutes crawled by. Mark drummed his fingers, monitoring the general’s sig for any sign that the man was stalling. All he saw was desperate effort.
Finally, the light panel on the vault door flashed green. The seal popped open.
Kitteridge sagged in his bonds, dangling his head between hunched shoulders.
In between the older man’s ragged, sobbing breaths, Mark heard nothing with his augmented hearing. Nothing moved in the desert for miles around other than small animals. He’d taken out the facility’s security personnel when he arrived. The place was strewn with their soon-to-be-desiccated bodies. How fortunate that they wouldn’t smell, considering that there were ten of them.
Now, it was just him, the two Kitteridges, and the quiet desert evening.
A quickie scan showed that neither Kitteridge was likely to inconvenience him at this point, so he took a leisurely inventory of the vault’s contents. Cutting edge weapons designed to be wirelessly synchronized with the newest gen of modified humans, who were basically a slave army awaiting the call to action, if and when it came.
Soon.
Mark was going to take their army and have bloody, noisy fun with it.
It took the better part of an hour to hump all that equipment into his vehicle. With his enhanced musculature, boxes that would take two normal men to lift were feather light for him. But he still hated wasting his time and energy loading fucking crates like a dock worker.
He was better than that. He was one of the original prototypes, goddamnit. Hundreds of millions of dollars worth of research and development had been plowed into producing supersoldiers. There’d been years of rough drafts, failed attempts, trial and error.
Now their worst error, their roughest rough draft, their biggest failure had come back to devour them, suck their living brains and tear at their warm flesh.
He couldn’t wait.
He found the flash drive inside the vault that Lydia had described, and plugged it into his laptop. The control freq wands that generated the signal codes were there, too. He entered the general’s hacked passwords. Found a folder entitled Control Codes.
But there were only six files in it. There should be files for twelve hundred slave soldiers in there. He already had the names and location of the six prototypes. He’d extracted them from Lydia under extended torture after she failed to open her safe. He knew who and where they were, but hadn’t been able to activate them without the freq wand.
Now he owned them. But he wanted the other one thousand nine hundred and ninety-four.
Mark walked out, and nudged the general with his toe. “Where are the activation codes for the rest of the soldiers?” he asked.
The older man’s d
rooping head came up. “Uh—in Lydia’s safe,” he said dully. “The rest of us only held codes for the six prototypes. Lydia kept the rest. That was our security strategy. We agreed on scattering all the various pieces of the puzzle so that no single one of us could ever—”
“Like I give a fuck.” Mark vaulted back up into the cargo bed of his truck, and hoisted the colossal safe he’d taken from Lydia Bachmann. He put it down in front of the general. “Recognize this? Open it for me. Or you get to watch your grandson die real slow.”
Kitteridge’s horror and despair were clear in his sig. The man was beaten.
“I can’t.” His voice shook. “I never knew Lydia’s image sequence. Kill me if you want, but please let Joey go. He never hurt you.”
“If you can’t open it, who can?” Mark demanded.
“Lydia’s GodsEye coach could,” the general said eagerly. “Caroline Bishop. When you can work the interface, you’re supposed to re-key with a new sequence of images. But Lydia was so bad with the interface, she tripped security and burned a safe! I doubt she re-keyed the training sequence, just for fear of never getting back in.”
“Did you know Caroline Bishop personally, General?”
“Ah . . . ah, no, not personally. Dex Boyd, the GodsEye biometrics designer, sent her to us because she was the best coach—”
“Tell me about her,” Mark directed. “What else do you know?”
“Well, ah, only that she’s an artist. She gave me an invitation once to a gallery opening. Masks, I think. Dragons, griffins. Not my thing. I didn’t go.” Kitteridge turned to look at his grandson, who was groaning. “Joey? Are you OK?”
Mark’s AVP rage blazed up, hot and maddening. Caroline Bishop, the GodsEye coach who had taught Lydia to use her fucking safe. The only other person on earth who could open it.
He’d been hunting her ever since he’d first heard her name. Now that he thought about it, Caroline Bishop’s name had been the last coherent words that Lydia had ever spoken.
So he hired GodsEye himself. Requested Caroline Bishop as his coach. His intention had been to force her to open Lydia’s safe and then dispose of her.
Then he saw her with his own eyes, at their first training session.
Her sig made his mouth water. And he, with his visual mods, was the only man on earth who could truly appreciate it. She was meant for him.
He’d changed his original plan. Organized a scenario that would explain away Bishop’s disappearance. Framing people was an art form, and he excelled at it.
He’d done all four of the training sessions. He’d asked her out, called her, emailed her, texted her. Dreamed of wallowing in that luxurious haze of shifting colors as he fucked her. Drinking them up.
And after a few drinks and a few coffee dates, the dumb bitch had run away. It must have been seeing that fucking sapphire brooch along with all the other jewel-encrusted crap he’d intended to shove into his new GodsEye safe and forget about. The damn thing had gotten too much press. She’d recognized the piece, and panicked.
She had dared to judge him. She had no fucking idea.
“Joey is innocent. Let him live.” Kitteridge was pleading again.
The man’s quivering voice spiked Mark’s rage. He had to release it or he’d explode.
Over the years, he’d developed tricks that were unique to him, as far as he knew. Siphoning was his favorite. It left no trace. Just a dead body with no outward signs of violence. And it was intensely pleasurable to him. He hadn’t had a really good one since Dex Boyd. It had been a long time since then.
The teenager was obviously preferable to his grandfather. Mark kneeled and pressed his mouth to the younger man’s throat, pinning him to the ground. Joseph arched, bucking under Mark’s weight.
He’d synced to Joseph’s vital energy and started to suck the boy’s light greedily into his own body. Joseph writhed but there was no escape. Mark didn’t break the skin or rupture a single capillary, but on some level the boy knew he was doomed.
Mark faintly heard the general trying to bargain, offering himself, then at the end, hoarsely screaming. He paid no attention. Once Mark started siphoning he never stopped until he was done.
When he lifted his head, Joseph’s light was out. Mark had taken it all.
A glance at the general showed him slumped forward, still tied to the stool, no longer breathing. The shock and horror of what he’d witnessed had stopped his heart.
A good night’s work. He’d taken out an Obsidian insider, gotten into one of the main vaults for the weapons stash, and replenished his energy. No need to remove the corpses.
Mark hoisted Lydia’s safe into the truck and drove into the darkness, dreaming of the rush he’d get when he siphoned Caroline.
Chapter 6
Noah Gallagher flicked the lever on the door lock of his conference room. Finally, alone with him. The look in his eyes made her quiver with excitement.
He approached her, stripping off his jacket and tossing it away. Trapping her between his big body and the conference room table.
The cool edge of that hard slab of polished wood pressed her back.
She gasped as he hoisted her up and perched her ass on the table. He gathered up armfuls of her purple and lavender veils, pushing the sheer stuff up to her waist.
Cool air hit her bare thighs. She realized suddenly that she was naked. His eyes flicked up to meet hers. His knowing grin said that he saw all her secret desires. He knew them like he knew his own, and he meant to satisfy every one. He was inside her mind somehow, making her hot, making her mad, making her melt.
He pressed her legs wide, staring down with hungry fascination, and jerked open his belt—
The ringtone buzzing in her coat pocket snapped Caro out of it. The lurch and sway of the nearly empty bus, the blur of traffic lights and neon signs outside the rain-streaked window replaced the intensely vivid fantasy that had filled her mind.
She pulled the phone out, still addled by her fantasy. Her boss at Bounce. At this hour? She tapped the screen. “Hi, Gareth. What’s up?”
“Quick question,” Gareth said. “I got a call from that guy you danced for this afternoon at Angel Enterprises. Remember him?”
“Of course.” Caro’s legs went liquid. “What did he want?”
“You! He’s fixated on you. And I’ll tell you quite honestly, it creeps me out. I hate guys who think anyone they get a yen for is automatically for sale.”
Electricity raced, crackling along her nerves. “He said that?”
“Not in so many words. But I just want you to know I made it very, very clear that you’re not an escort, and I’m not a pimp.”
His indignation was almost funny. “OK.”
“But then he kept doubling the fee! He said all he wants is a dance, but in private this time. He got up to twenty-eight hundred before I hung up on him!”
Caro was startled. From what little she knew of the world’s oldest profession, that was actually much less than what a high-dollar hooker charged, but to her it was an unspeakable sum of money.
“You hung up on him?” she said blankly.
“Absolutely,” Gareth said. “The whole thing was very sleazy.”
“Ah . . . wow. Do you think he actually expected me to have sex with him?”
“He’d be an idiot, if so, but there’s no shortage of idiots out there. What on earth did you do to this guy?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Apparently it was a revenge gig. His sister booked me to punish him for being a humorless prick. His fiancée glowered the whole time.”
“Ah. I see. Well, I just wanted to make sure you weren’t . . . you know.”
She paused, puzzled. “Um, no, Gareth, actually, I don’t. That I wasn’t what?”
“Oh, sending mixed messages. Getting too flirty with clients. Something like that would be incredibly bad for business.”
Outrage prickled up her spine like an electric charge. “I didn’t! I can’t believe you said that!”
“Don’t get offended,” Gareth said. “I had to ask. It’s my business at stake.”
“I behaved with the utmost professionalism! As I always do!”
“Well, good. I’ll see you tomorrow morning in the costume shop, then.”
Not likely, at this point. Caro ended the call, bristling with indignation.
Gareth knew only a carefully edited version of her life story. Just enough to justify her low profile and why she needed to be paid under the table. As far as Gareth knew, she had a jealous, violent ex-boyfriend on the East Coast, and an ineffective restraining order.
She’d left out the more colorful details, like being framed for grand larceny and first-degree murder and being on the run from a terrifying killer. Gareth had been patient with her limitations. He was a decent guy, and not naïve, but the whole truth would scare the shit out of him. Like he’d just said, bad for business. It would be good-bye and good luck if he found out how serious her problems actually were. She was sick of disappearing. It was exhausting. And expensive.
But given the pony-tailed guy following her, she’d have to do it soon.
It occurred to her, all at once, that twenty-eight hundred dollars would go a long way toward refilling her sadly depleted emergency flight fund.
A fizzy, whole-body thrill startled her. Oh, God. No. A private dance would be so dangerous.
Then again. She’d stabbed a guy in the throat. She’d witnessed a murder and barely escaped herself. She’d lived on the lam for eight months. Noah Gallagher was just a pampered bad boy who wanted to indulge himself. She could take him on with her hands tied. She could eat that guy for breakfast.
After all. Every move she made put her in danger. Just belly dancing at all was dumber than shit, even covered with makeup and draped with concealing veils and all those chains. But she had to eat. Pay rent. Buy bus passes.
So since every move she made could be defined as a mistake, then why not just make more interesting mistakes?
A few passengers had gotten on, staying in the front of the bus where they couldn’t hear her. She pulled out the business card that Hannah Gallagher had given her, and stared at it for only a minute before she tapped out the number.
Right Through Me (The Obsidian Files #1) Page 6