Cease and Desist (The IMA Book 4)

by Campbell, Nenia

  I closed my eyes. When I opened them again, the blindfold was gone. Fucking vanished. I sat up sharply, studying the room. There were no traces left to signify that anyone had ever been in here but me, but I knew better. Someone had been in here as I'd slept. They had managed to remove my blindfold without waking me.

  That was not good.

  Although perhaps I should be honored that they were going through the old song and dance of these petty intimidation tactics for my benefit.

  The door opened with a rush of air. A guard. He wasn't in uniform, but his posture and bearing screamed “hired professional.” His face was unlined but grim. A few more years of that, and he'd look twice his actual age. I'd seen it happen before. It was starting to happen to me.

  He walked into the room and the tension spiked. I sat up slowly, not making any sudden movements. “You don't look anything like the ad.”

  A muscle in his neck tightened. He didn't say a word. Didn't need to. The way he was coming at me, it was clear what his intentions were. The moment I recognized that air of repressed violence, I'd known that he was here to fuck me up.

  I sprang to my feet, fighting the dizziness that threatened to overtake me as my blood pressure dropped abruptly. I was not in prime condition. Far from it. I was dehydrated and hungry, and there were enough drugs swimming around in my system that I'd be guaranteed to fail just about any mandatory piss-in-the-cup test. But I had pushed my body to the very limits of endurance; like a battery, a human body cannot realize its full potential unless it has been fully drained and then allowed to recharge. What doesn't kill you makes you stronger and all that bullshit.

  “You wanna dance? Let's fucking dance.”

  I kicked him in the hollow space between stomach and ribs. Heard the air leave his lungs — yes — and kicked again, intending to knock him on his back. That, paired with the kick, would leave him winded and at my mercy. But this man had my training and my speed. He caught me by the leg and yanked my feet out from under me. Fuck.

  I hit the floor, rolling, and felt the air around me displace briefly as he aimed a parrying blow at the area of floor where I'd been lying prostrate scant moments before.

  I had to get back to my feet, but my hands were still cuffed behind my back. These fucking restraints would be the death of me. I bent to a half-sitting position like I was doing a crunch, and kicked at the floor. When my back hit wall, I levered myself against it so I was standing again.

  “Bravo, Mr. Boutilier.” He slow-clapped.

  The guard had his fists and his legs at his disposal, and unlike me, he was wearing boots. Was Callaghan aware of this man's methods? He didn't give two shits if an interrogation tactic was unorthodox, but it really wasn't like the bastard to let others share in on the fun.

  “Your boss know you're playing in his sand box while he's away?”

  “I have my orders.”

  “Funny thing about orders. They can change.”

  Something flitted across his face. A shadow of doubt, acknowledgment, something. Whatever it was, it disappeared before I could get a proper reading on it.

  “Your girlfriend is just as stubborn.”

  He was trying to distract me. I knew it. I knew it, and I still fell for it like a rookie.

  He drove his fist into my face. Something crunched, and I smelled blood. Several more attacks followed, with swift precision, all of them hitting their mark. Oh, Christ.

  “I thought you were going to interrogate me.”

  “No,” the guard said. “That privilege goes to him.”

  He didn't specify, and I didn't ask; we both knew who he was referring to.

  This is bad.

  Christina

  A woman entered the room. Older, in her late thirties, with frosted blonde hair. My heart lifted slightly — until I caught a glimpse of her face. The moment I saw the steel in her expression and the ice in her eyes I knew that there would be no sympathy from that quarter.

  I'd been here for about two days without food, and with almost no water. My hair was starting to get greasy; in one more day, it would be. Beneath the faint traces of deodorant was the faint but unmistakable odor of unwashed skin already in the process of graduating to a full-on reek. The woman looked at me with undisguised disgust, and perhaps this was calculated, too. As women we put so much stock into the way we look; it says so much — too much — about our culture that a go-to insult for cutting a female down to size is “ugly.”

  She paced around the room, her high heels sinking in to the padded floors. I got the impression that she was waiting for me to speak. Well, she could wait until hell froze over. My throat was aching, dry, and raw, and sore. All I could think about was water in tall frosted glasses…. A whimper started, and I choked it off mid-sound. Crying wouldn't help me now. I doubted whether anything would.

  The woman waited for a good five minutes, watching me watch her, her impatience betrayed by each toss of her hair, each start and stop as she moved around my cell with a lithe grace that I'd never possessed. She stopped in front of me, and said, “So you're Christina Parker.”

  “You didn't check before you brought me in?” Speaking hurt, as if each word was a shard of broken glass scraping along the inside of my throat. I almost preferred the stare-down.

  Her mouth tightened and her eyes narrowed.

  Don't antagonize the interrogator, Christina.

  I couldn't help it, though. Sarcasm had always been my way of whistling in the dark, even when it turned out to be the shovel that dug me deeper into the hole I was in. Was I digging my own grave?

  “You know,” she said, “human beings can only live a few days without water. You're on your second, isn't that right?” She pursed her lips. “I suggest you cooperate. For your sake.”

  I drew in a deep breath, and almost choked on it. “Okay.”

  The woman lifted her eyebrows. I could tell she was thinking this was too easy. Rather than according a sense of disbelief, her expression signified something else, perhaps disappointment.

  I compressed my lips as another painful swallow had me wincing. Did she hope I'd remain stubborn so she could torture me? If so, she and Adrian deserved one another.

  “Your name is Christina Parker?”

  God, my throat hurt. “Yes.”

  “And you are the head of AMI?”

  “One of them, yes.” That was no secret. They weren't stupid. I wouldn't be here if they were.

  “You admit to defecting from the Bureau du Nuit, then.”

  “I didn't defect from the BN,” I said. “I defected from Adrian Callaghan. I might have stayed loyal to their cause if they hadn't prostituted their organization to a psychopath. As far as potential downsides go, that's a huge fucking drawback.”

  A muscle in her face jumped at the word 'prostituted.' I wondered why. Because of the slur against her boss? Or because prostitution was a filthy industry she knew her boss had a hand in and maybe didn't approve of? I didn't have the wherewithal to figure it out. Dehydration was taking its toll; I could barely concentrate. I would have to be very, very careful not to reveal anything dangerous.

  “Mr. Callaghan would disagree with you,” she said tightly.

  “No, he wouldn't. He'd laugh, and say that possessing a conscience is an impediment to success. He kidnapped their leader's daughter and then threatened her in order to force the merger — or did you not know that?” Her face had, for a moment, betrayed her. She hadn't.

  “Do you have kids?” I asked. “Is that how he got you?”

  “You should take a moment to consider your situation.”

  I bit back another sarcastic retort. “I could say the same thing.”

  The mask had slipped back in place. Any leeway I thought I'd had vanished like so much smoke. “Did you try to hack into our databases?”

  “I didn't try.” I succeeded.

  “Don't lie, Miss Parker.”

  “I'm not lying.”

  I had succeeded where my father had failed, becaus
e he had taken the overhanded approach. In all his brashness, and eagerness to prove himself, he had announced himself like a braggart. I, however, had stolen in through the backdoor, through their accounting files, chasing ill-guarded streams of code until, like Houdini, I had made my surprise entrance.

  “We have records of an unlicensed connection from a San Francisco IP address.”

  This was a blatant lie. I'd rerouted my connection so it would look like I was from Serbia. Smirking, I said, “Are you sure it wasn't Kragujevac?”

  Her face changed, briefly. The microexpression was so sudden, I'd barely registered the twitch of her facial muscles as they betrayed whatever emotion she was experiencing. But I thought I might know what it was. I thought it might be fear.

  “Do you think you're clever?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I do.”

  Cleverness had been my only weapon when I had been taken hostage by the IMA, and like a blade, I had honed my skills, sharpening them. I had changed a lot in three years — I was no longer the scared little girl who had cowered in her cell, subdued by the first threat of violence.

  Whatever Adrian had told her about me, I wasn't what she was expecting. I wasn't sure whether that was a good thing or a bad thing.

  As though reading my mind, she said, “Perhaps I should send for Mr. Callaghan. Perhaps then you would be more forthcoming.”

  Definitely a bad thing.

  “Forthcoming, yes,” I said, trying — rather unsuccessfully — to hide my fear. “Truthful, no. Torture is the least effective way of extracting information, or haven't you heard that statistic?”

  “Maybe we just want to see you suffer,” she said, in the same hard voice as before. “You have done untold damage to this organization, Miss Parker. You owe us a blood debt.”

  I was shaken. Blood debt. What a terribly apt turn of phrase. “Are you a sadist, too?”

  That gave her pause.

  “All right,” she said. “So you managed to create a dummy IP address in Serbia. You still stole confidential information from our organization. Is that the gist of it, or am I forgetting something?”

  I said nothing.

  “We know you and Mr. Boutilier didn't work alone. One of our agents disappeared shortly before your AMI reared its head. And Mr. Callaghan suddenly found himself unable to locate one of his own personal contacts around the same time.”

  “But you have no proof.”

  “We're about to.”

  She must have signaled someone, somewhere, because the door opened — and I tensed, God help me, because I thought she had followed up on her threat to summon Adrian. She hadn't, although I could tell from her smirk that she knew exactly why I had flinched, and she was relishing how the tables had turned on me so swiftly. No, the man she had called was another IMA guard, indistinguishable from the rest, except that he had a long black case.

  I knew what cases like that were for. They contained needles. “What are you doing?” My voice sounded a little high. “What is that?” I was deathly allergic to opiates. Were they going to kill me now by inducing anaphylactic shock?

  “A mix of potent barbiturates,” she said. “In layman's terms, a truth serum.”

  Not opiates, then, but just as bad. They weren't going to kill me; they were going to make me talk. I jerked my arm away, aimed a kick at the guard's groin. He jerked his hips aside and knocked me to the floor with a blow to my head that made my ears ring.

  Over the tintinnabulation, and the imminent dizziness that followed, I felt the pain of the needle entering my neck. Not my arm, my neck. She wanted this to hurt. Jesus. She was a sadist.

  “You haven't had anything to eat or drink in days. It should be metabolized fairly quickly.”

  “Go to hell,” I told her.

  “We're already here,” she said. “At least, you won't know the difference.”

  The guard didn't leave. Looked like more than one person was going to be present for my humiliation. I blinked, and my eyelids seemed to weigh five pounds.

  My interrogator had been right. The drug was quickly taking effect on my vulnerable metabolism. Far too quickly. What is this? What acts so fast?

  The only warning was a sudden mental fog, as dense and thick as the cloud fortress that often ensconced San Francisco on cold and humid days. My thoughts crawled along as slowly as honey being drizzled from a cold spoon, fuzzy and indistinct. Reality blurred, its edges fuzzing, becoming less delineated, less clear, less obvious — and I was terrified, and yet, numb.

  Fear and numbness are not mutually exclusive. You might think that the one would cancel out the other, but instead the numbness creates a void that gives the fear a place to expand in place of all the other absent emotions. Rationalism and intellect had no place here, only terror —

  Terror, and that horrible, widening expanse of emptiness.

  (I feel nothing now.)

  Chapter Twenty

  Answers

  Subject Interrogation #002986

  Subject name: Christina Maria Parker

  Interrogator: Ellen Sterling

  [Subject dosed with 10mg/kg of soporaxine.]

  [ES] For our records, can you confirm that you

  are Christina Parker?

  [CP] Yes.

  [ES] And that you are a computer hacker?

  [CP] I'm more of a cracker. Hacking just refers

  to someone who is good at code. Cracking is the

  act of dismantling or breaking code, usually for

  criminal purposes.

  [ES] By your own admission, are you calling

  yourself a criminal?

  [CP] I said usually. There are always exceptions.

  [ES] How did you get into our mainframe?

  [CP] Easy. [Redacted — Grade 1 Clearance]

  [ES] And did you steal data from the IMA?

  [CP] It wasn't stealing. The information I took

  was purchased with human lives.

  [ES] And that's your idea of justice?

  Vigilantism?

  [CP] What else is there?

  One minute pause.

  [ES] But you weren't working alone. Michael

  Boutilier was working with you. Let the records

  show that this is the same Michael Boutilier

  who was taken into captivity alongside subject.

  ES approaches subject.

  [ES] Who else was working with you?

  [CP] No —

  ES slaps subject.

  [ES[ Who else was working with you?

  [CP] Three others. I can't…I can't say…

  [ES] Inject her again. Now.

  Subject is injected with a second dose of soporaxine.

  [ES] Christina, we're waiting.

  [CP] Cliff Cordova and Suraya…Suraya I can't

  remember her last name. And Angelica — I

  don't know her last name either.

  [ES] Cliff Cordova was under contract with the

  IMA, wasn't he?

  [CP] He brought me in to Adrian back when he

  was under the IMA's employ, yes. He used to be

  partners with the Sniper.

  [ES] And Suraya also worked for the IMA.

  [CP] Is that why you did what you did to her?

  [ES] I don't understand.

  [CP] Ask your boss.

  [ES] The one you planned on killing.

  [CP] I didn't tell you about that.

  [ES] You just did.

  [CP] You've been talking to the Albanians.

  [ES] What Albanians?

  [CP] [Redacted — Grade 1 Clearance]

  [ES] How did you hear about that?

  [CP] You underestimate my capabilities.

  [ES] You found that out through cracking?

  [CP] Maybe. Or maybe you're not as good at

  covering your tracks as you think you are.

  [ES] Do you have proof of any of this?

  [CP] Are you afraid? You should be. I'm not a

  scared little girl anymor
e.

  [ES] You should be more forthcoming,

  Christina. You hold your life in your hands.

  [CP] Don't pretend for a second that you ever

  had any intention of letting me live.

  [ES] Adrian Callaghan offered you amnesty.

  [CP] He wanted to own me.

  [ES] Explain.

  [CP] He didn't just want a computer hacker. I

  mean, cracker. He wanted a whore. That

  amnesty was contingent upon letting him hurt

  me as much as he wanted, and there was no

  guarantee that he wouldn't decide to renege

  like he did with Michael. When Adrian

  Callaghan gets tired of someone, they tend to

  disappear in unpleasant circumstances….

  [ES] What bargain did he cut with Michael?

  [CP] At one point, Adrian told Michael that my

  continued safety depended on his reenlisting with

  the IMA. [Redacted — Grade 1 Clearance]

  [ES] This caused you to conspire against him?

  [CP] He's a monster. Do you really not see it?

  [ES] Answer the question.

  [CP] Yes. We decided to end him, for good.

  [ES] You also shot him in the leg.

  [CP] I wish I'd killed him.

  [ES] Do you fear him?

  [CP] Of course I fear him. I still have

  nightmares about him. He's completely insane.

  [ES] What about Michael? Does he fear him?

  [CP] Oh God…I…yes, I think so. More than

  anything. He'll do anything to — to —

  Subject starts retching.

  [ES] Christina?

  [CP] I don't feel good.

  [ES] What were you saying about Adrian?

  [CP] I don't remember.

  [ES] Reading from last line. You said he'd do

  anything to — ?

  [CP] He'll do anything to cause pain. He once

  told me that there were different kinds of

  suffering, and he knew them all. He enjoyed

  matching people to their worst fears.

  [ES] What's your worst fear, Christina?

  [CP] Adrian Callaghan.

  Michael

  I had been in a lot of fights, but few had been as one-sided as this: the white padded room looked like a crime scene, with enough blood spatter to make a forensic investigator cream his pants. The coppery tang of it hit my nostrils. It was all mostly mine.