Cease and Desist (The IMA Book 4)

by Campbell, Nenia

  “No more screaming.”

  Had I been screaming?

  I stared at him blankly. He returned it levelly, then looked away with a sound of disgust.

  My throat ached. Oh God, I was screaming.

  I craned my neck to look over my shoulder at the motionless heap that was Michael. He hardly seemed to be breathing. I wanted to ask if he was all right, but even I knew I wouldn't get an answer.

  The man reached into the door's side pocket and gave me another one of those drug-laden cocktails, forcing it to my lips like before. It tasted syrupy, with vague notes of fruit.

  I swallowed, gagging, and glared at him.

  He pretended not to notice.

  If the nightmares returned, I didn't remember them. A small blessing. Where I was going, there would be plenty of opportunities to make new ones.

  This time when the car stopped, the man got us all out of the car. We were in the middle of an office park that looked to be deserted. There was only one other car here besides ours, and the windows were tinted. Backups, I thought. Reinforcements.

  The man spoke into a phone, and a man and a woman both dressed like businessmen appeared out of nowhere. They were both wearing earpieces, and they both looked tense.

  “Where is he?” the man asked.

  They're afraid of Michael. That was reassuring. If they feared us, that meant we still had some sway. Fear was currency in this world: more powerful and more universal than money.

  My captor jerked his head back towards the sedan. “He's still in the car.”

  Both of them relaxed. Cowards.

  They grabbed Michael under the arms and got him to a standing position. He was still unconscious and slumped in their arms as they half-carried, half-dragged him towards one of the buildings.

  The man opened my car door, leaning in to unbuckle my seat belt. He seemed to enjoy invading my personal space. Intimidating me. This time I didn't lean away. I met his eyes coldly. “What?”

  “Are you willing to walk?”

  “Yes.”

  “Don't run.”

  My handcuffs jangled as I swung out my arms to steady myself instinctively while getting out of the car. Handcuffs. It had been years since I'd worn any, and the cold, restrictive metal bracelets were bringing back memories of the time I had spent alone and afraid in the IMA's base waiting for my fate to be decided by men who made it painfully clear that they considered my life worthless.

  All that had changed.

  I dug my nails into my palms and stared resolutely ahead as the building got closer.

  I won't run.

  The man beside me reached into the pocket of his coat and pulled out a ring of keys. He sorted through them until he found the one he wanted — a brass, utilitarian looking key — and unlocked the door with a noise that echoed down the hall.

  We were quickly ushered inside. I bit the inside of my cheek. While I'd been held captive by the IMA, Adrian had shown me a video of Michael torturing one of his enemies to a slow death in the middle of an abandoned warehouse just like this.

  Was that to be our fate now? I didn't ask. If I showed any fear, that would only give these people more to work with. It might give them ideas. They were trying their best to break me; they didn't require my help to do it. But I was terrified.

  We got to an elevator, Michael and his two captors in front. He was starting to stir now, but his face was slack and disconcertingly gray. His hands were still locked behind him in that uncomfortable position. I imagined his shoulders must be killing him and he was doing everything he could to avoid showing that strain.

  Once, he had told me that he didn't need his hands to kill someone. Remembering that threat of his now, it made sense that these people would take precautions. I just wished that they hadn't come so prepared. I wanted them to make a mistake. I wanted them to fuck up.

  There was no sound in the elevator, save for our commingled breathing and the hum of the mechanisms pulling us skyward. We were going so high, all the way to the top floor. Maybe their plan was to push us off the building, make it look like a double-suicide — but they'd need to remove the handcuffs, first. Plus, that man had told me that Adrian wanted us both brought in, though he hadn't said alive. Maybe they're going to shoot us.

  The elevator opened up at the roof, increasing my fears. The floor was concrete, covered with dead leaves and bird droppings. There was nothing around for miles; we were completely isolated and alone.

  They could do anything.

  The man said something but I didn't hear what it was. All sounds were being subsumed by a deafening staccato roar. A black helicopter was roosting on its landing pad like some fearsome bird of prey, the pilot waiting in the front seat with a helmet that obscured his eyes. We were now outnumbered four to two.

  I'd never been a gambler, but even I knew those odds weren't good.

  One of my captors nudged me in the spine with the barrel of his gun. “Get in.”

  I dug my heels into the concrete, hesitating. If I got inside that thing, I'd be heading en route for my own death. If I didn't, they'd shoot me like a dog.

  I wanted to run. More than anything else, I wanted to run, far and fast, without looking back. But I was not a coward, and I would not leave Michael. If either of us had a chance, it would be together, not alone.

  One mistake, I thought. That's all we need. Just one.

  “Christina.” Michael, conscious now, raised his voice to be heard over the roar. “Don't be an idiot.”

  The man behind me adjusted his grip on his gun, and though it was too loud to hear, I knew he had just removed the safety. There would be no second warnings.

  “Okay,” I said shakily. I swung myself in unsteadily and the man got in beside me. Michael was placed across from me, with the woman and the other man sitting on either side of him like bookends. As if it had received some signal, the helicopter took off with a lurch that made me dig my nails into my palms.

  The IMA used to have two internment bases. Target Island was one, an island off the coast of Mexico. Michael had told me that there was a second in Russia.

  Was that were they were taking us, Russia? Could we get there by helicopter alone?

  If they were taking us to an internment base, there was no question what would happen to us. We would be executed like war criminals. If anyone questioned our disappearance, they would also vanish. All traces would be wiped clean. Nobody would find our bodies. Nobody would find anything.

  Michael was sitting straight up as though he were attending a briefing and not pending his own execution. His face was without an ounce of softness: even when his eyes met mine, there was no yielding, no reassurance, nothing.

  A chill rippled through me.

  I'd seen that look before. Fear — it was fear.

  Michael was afraid.

  If he was afraid, I didn't have a hope.

  Michael

  We'd been blindsided, both of us.

  Conscious of the agents on either side of me, I said nothing. Better if they thought I was still under the influence of that morphine. Which I was, to an extent. I was lucid, but my head felt as though it had been packed with the itchy cotton from a dentist's office, and all my thoughts had slowed.

  In the silence, I turned inward, and reflected on what I could have done differently. Retraced every single goddamn step we had taken to bring us to this point. An inadvisable exercise by any standard: it was a waste of brain power, there were better uses for my cognitive abilities.

  But there was one thought I kept circling back to — Christina. In the mall, afraid and alone, put in a situation that I had sworn to keep her out of.

  I shouldn't have been so hard on her.

  I shouldn't have left her alone.

  That last one, it killed me. That man never would have approached her if she wasn't alone.

  I sighed impatiently, and the woman turned to give me a sharp look.

  Even if we had been together, even if we'd been glued at the hip,
it would have only postponed the inevitable. The men at the IMA were paid to be tenacious, to lock their jaws into a case and, like a pit bull, not let go.

  I would know. I'd been one of them.

  Sudden movement had me turning my head. The man beside me was reaching into his pocket. More drugs? A weapon? I tensed, but he wasn't pulling a knife; he was removing a long swatch of black fabric from his suit jacket.

  A blindfold.

  Of course. He didn't want us to see where they were taking us. Which was interesting, because I was an ex-agent; I knew where most of their old bases were because of my rank. The need for this secrecy could only mean one thing: they had been building more facilities since I'd left the IMA.

  The man rose from his seat and looped the fabric around Christina's eyes. She jerked, but didn't struggle. I soon saw why. There was a bruise on her face that hadn't definitely hadn't been there before. They had decided to wait until I was unconscious before laying into her.

  How pathetic.

  As he tied off the fabric, he looked at me and made a lewd gesture she couldn't see. I tightened my mouth and stayed silent. The woman rolled her eyes and said, “Oh, grow up, Earl.”

  “Did you hit her, Earl?” I asked him.

  “It was Luis,” Earl said, nodding at the first man, who gave him a sharp glare.

  “I'll remember that.”

  “What you remember won't matter soon.” Luis turned his dark eyes on me. “Do him, too. If he says another word, give him another dose.”

  Fuck you, too, Luis.

  Fabric looped around my own head, knotted tightly enough to cause discomfort. The blindfolds were a nice touch. They weren't just disorienting, they were a display of power. Blindfolds rendered the wearer blind, helpless, and utterly dependent. Combined with the handcuffs, they ensured that my training would be of as little use to me as possible.

  There was nothing to do but sit back and wait.

  Christina

  The blindfold heightened my other senses. I could feel when we began our descent. Whatever was going to happen would happen soon.

  One advantage of the helicopter's violent motions was that it helped mask my fear from my captors. My hands were shaking.

  I might very well die today.

  Death — I had been looking it the face every day since my kidnapping. Since the day I'd realized that it was fully possible to die young. Since the day I'd realized that not only could I die young, I could die young in a number of unpleasant ways.

  A quick death was a luxury far too many people took for granted.

  I had expected that they would remove the blindfold once we landed, but my captors didn't bother. I stumbled and felt an unyielding hand clamp around my forearm to keep me from falling.

  “Walk,” said a male voice. I think it was Luis. I'd managed to make that out from Michael's conversation with Earl on the helicopter; he had a slight accent I hadn't picked up on before in my panic. I thought he might have been from Argentina.

  I was trying to walk, but the ground felt shaky beneath my feet, as though someone were gripping it in their hand, seconds from pulling it out from under me. I wasn't sure if that was a lingering aftereffect of being on the helicopter or a byproduct of my own sheer terror.

  “I said to walk.”

  Luis was not a patient man.

  I was filled with the urge to cry. “I'm trying.”

  “Try harder. Pretend your life depends on it.”

  There was a flight of stairs. Blindfolded, stairs are terrifying because only a single step divides you from a tumble into darkness. Hinges shrieked and a blast of cold air hit me like a slap, tinged with the scent of mulch and leaves. We were outside, and I suspected that the lack of warmth on my skin meant that it was nighttime. Hours had passed.

  I tried to count the footsteps, to see if Michael and the two other agents were still with us, but I couldn't quite sort them all out. My head was still sore, and I was foggy from the anesthetic.

  There's at least three. I wanted to call out to Michael, to see if he'd answer, but I was afraid that doing so would get him in trouble. I'd heard Earl's threat to inject him again if he spoke.

  Soil eventually ceded to hard tile. The soles of my shoes squeaked on the polished surface. It was still cold in here, but the air was stale as if it had been pumped through an air conditioner with old, musty filters. I could smell disinfectant coupled with an odd chemical smell that was pungent and unpleasant. A cleaner of some sort? Fuel?

  To hell with it. “Michael?”

  The sound of a keypad pricked my ears. We were entering a room that was kept locked by code. I was not anticipating the step, or the push that accompanied it, sending me sprawling into an ungainly heap into a padded floor. Padding.

  Oh, God, one of those rooms.

  All the old terror before was swirling around me, like clouds swirling around the epicenter of a building storm.

  The blindfold was ripped off, and light speared into my eyes. I rolled over, kicking with my feet to propel myself against a wall with which to right myself as my eyes brimmed with tears from the abrupt brightness of the fluorescent lights. The guards seemed to take it as an attack, or maybe they were just feeling vindictive: I received a kick to the gut for my trouble, hard enough to wind, and send me curling in upon myself like a woodlouse.

  By the time my eyes had adjusted, my captor, or captors, had left the room. It was a holding cell, almost identical to the one that I had been in before. And just like before, I was alone.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Numb

  Christina

  Food was not forthcoming, and neither was water. As far as messages went, that had all the subtlety of a ten-foot sign painted in blood. You are unnecessary. Keeping you alive is not cost-effective.

  When I had been here before, the IMA had still needed me. I was their bargaining chip, and their connection to Michael, who had gone MIA.

  Michael had told me at the time that I'd been lucky, that if I hadn't been a crucial component of their plans they wouldn't have bothered treating me with kid gloves. I hadn't believed him at the time; my treatment had seemed brutal to me. In my shortsightedness, I had trouble seeing how my situation could have been worse than it was.

  But now — I was starting to understand. The IMA had no need to treat me nicely, not when they were going to kill me anyway. Before they had fed me, provided me with water, and, until Adrian had been given control over my case, I'd remained mostly unharmed. I hadn't been tortured.

  Things were different now.

  Now they had every reason to want me dead. I was caught in the maelstrom. I would be battered and bandied about, lucky if I came out at all recognizable in the end. Lucky if I came out at all.

  I thought again of Suraya and shuddered.

  Dios no lo quiera.

  Time passed incredibly slowly in the cell. I fell into a listless sleep that I imagined lasted for at least half a day.

  Whenever I sleep for more than nine hours, my head becomes stuffy and my eyes swell, and I feel as though I've taken a double-dose of antihistamines. I call it “sleep hangover.” I felt that way now, along with an acute sense of hunger that asserted its presence with a bloated sensation in my belly that throbbed in time to the aching in my temples and behind my eyes. Part of that was dehydration, I think. I hadn't eaten or drunk anything since the mall.

  I lay crumpled in a heap, trying to conserve my energy. My lips were cracked. Bits of skin peeled away as I opened my mouth to yawn. When I had gotten up to use the bathroom earlier my urine had been a dark, brownish yellow.

  Humans can only survive a couple days without water; and they're quick to feel the effects when deprived. Such an easy, cost-effective way to torture someone. I didn't want to die that way.

  I didn't want to die, period.

  Coward, whispered the ghosts from my dreams.

  Was it cowardly, to not want to die?

  If so, then yes, I was a coward.

  I wanted
very badly to survive.

  I curled up into an exhausted, unhappy ball, bracing myself in one of the padded corners against the unrelenting air conditioning. I dozed, and my nightmares wove entire tapestries of horror inside my head: each one of them was a grim reflection of the reality I now found myself in.

  Please. Someone help me.

  I stumbled to my feet when I heard the door open. It was a guard, nobody I recognized. He had a glass of water with him.

  I lurched towards him, in spite of my weakness, trying not to look too eager. As soon as I got close, he upended the glass slowly, letting the precious liquid spill out as he maintained eye contact.

  “What are you doing?” I rasped, near tears.

  “Better drink fast, before it soaks into the padding.”

  My mouth fell open. “But why…?”

  The guard shook out the last few remaining droplets. “Tick tock …”

  I decided I didn't care. I fell to my knees and lapped up the pathetic pools of water as if I were an animal. The guard made cruel comments I scarcely heard: my head was throbbing, dizzy from standing up and then kneeling down so quickly.

  Sometimes pride and survival are mutually exclusive things. I was glad when the guard left, although the sting from his comments still lingered like poison beneath the skin. I didn't cry at least, but that wasn't saying much.

  My eyes were far too dry for tears.

  Michael

  Sleeping meant leaving myself open to attacks I couldn't defend myself against, but if I was going to pull through this, I would require rest. Rest that didn't come from the business end of a needle.

  Thinking of the needle and Luis filled me with a dull anger. I shoved that aside for now. Anger wasn't useful at the moment. I needed my head to stay clear in order to focus on the festering cluster-fuck of a situation I'd gotten myself into.

  That I'd gotten her into.

  Don't think about that. Relax.

  I'd always been a light sleeper. Part of this was innate, but I had taken the trouble to cultivate it for my own purposes. I had pissed a great many people off by the nature of my trade. It paid to be alert. I breathed out slowly, relaxing my muscles one by one as I stared at the faded light emanating through the fuzzy blackness of the blindfold.