I sense his disapproval in his silence. I know what he wants, and I have to force myself to give it to him—at least long enough to buy some time.
Slowly, swallowing back the hot rush of bile rising in my throat, I return to my submissive pose, head bent, hands on my thighs, balancing my weight on the balls of my feet and my knees. He offers his hand to me like one would for a dog to sniff, or a liege lord for a press of lips on his ring.
Juanita. Juanita. Juanita.
Gritting my teeth, I lean forward and touch my forehead to the back of his hand.
“No kiss?” he asks, lightly mocking.
I don’t answer, because the only words in my mouth are those of pure violence.
“All right,” he says after a time. “That will do for now. Look at me.”
I raise my head and meet his piercing blue stare. In spite of the intelligence there, it’s cold. Soulless. So unlike the generous dark warmth of Connor’s, those beautiful eyes of his that always looked at me with so much—
No.
I force the thought of Connor from my head, but Søren has already sniffed it out.
His look sharpens. Lightly caressing my cheek with his knuckles, he whispers, “You think you can hide from me? You think I don’t know how much you wish you could hate me…but don’t?”
I lower my eyes and bite my tongue. Silence is my friend now.
“Come,” he says, his voice warm. “I have something to show you.”
He turns and walks away. When I don’t move, his guards step in. One of them prods me with his rifle. I cut him a look so lethal, he blinks.
I rise unsteadily and follow Søren to the spiral staircase. The guards walk closely behind, our footsteps echoing off the metal. I take in everything around me, memorizing the space, looking for exits. When we reach the top of the staircase, I stop dead.
A few feet ahead of me, Søren says over his shoulder, “Like what I’ve done with the place?”
The platform we’re standing on juts out from the entrance of the mouth of another, smaller cave, with two tunnels at the rear that wind out of sight in different directions. The main space has been retrofitted with steel and glass to form a large, open work area, lit up in a wash of white light. There’s a bank of servers behind a wall of glass on one side. Video screens dominate the other wall. In the middle of the room is an enormous, horseshoe-shaped desk forested with buttons, a keyboard in the middle. Behind the desk sit two white captain’s chairs.
It has the look of the command room of a starship.
I feel a prod in the small of my back and stumble forward. The guards silently mount the stairs and move to flank me on either side. Søren saunters into the center of the cave and turns a slow half-circle, his arms held out.
“My humble abode. It took a great deal of time and money to complete, as I’m sure you can imagine.” He chuckles. “Installing all the equipment was the least of the challenges. You have no idea how difficult the tribal council can be to negotiate with.”
“Tribal council?” I repeat, distracted by the wall of video screens. Each one depicts a different view. Dams. Reservoirs. Power plants. Electrical stations. Airports. Docks. Government complexes. Military bases. Manufacturing facilities. Bus depots.
Panic begins to churn in my stomach.
“Yes. These caves are on native Athabascan lands. I had to pay them an ungodly sum to buy the land and their cooperation.”
My body turns as cold as my blood. “Alaska.”
“Exactly. We’re not in Kansas anymore, Toto. Although thanks to the nearby hot springs, it doesn’t feel like Alaska. I enjoy going barefoot because the rock is so warm underfoot. It’s pleasant, don’t you agree?”
I don’t answer. It’s not required, he’s just making small talk. Søren leisurely lowers himself to one of the captain’s chairs, presses a button on the desk, and all the screens go dark except one. On it is an aerial view of Outlier Studios.
I glance at him. Søren crosses his legs, lowers his lashes, and sends me the most angelic of smiles.
It all comes together with the speed of two fingers snapping.
I say, “Miranda.”
“Bingo.”
“So you knew all along. Even the press conference was fake?”
He lifts a shoulder, and I close my eyes. That fucking ice-queen bitch.
Søren asks, “Just out of curiosity, how did you guess?”
I open my eyes and stare at him, all that glittering perfection hiding such ugliness beneath. “She never asked how I knew you. When we were introduced and I said I’d known you before, I thought it was strange that she never asked when or how. Also, she quoted Machiavelli. The only other person I’ve ever known to quote him was you.”
Søren’s smile is cool and composed. “Well, no matter. That loop has been closed.”
He turns to the desk and punches a series of keys. The screens blink to life. News anchors giving reports, video from helicopters, headlines shouting “Breaking Story!”
Søren scans all the images, finds what he wants, and presses another button.
All the screens merge to show one enormous image of a fiery crash on a Los Angeles freeway. Three black SUVs are turned on their sides and engulfed in flames. Several more cars are scattered around the SUVs, spun around facing the wrong direction or flipped on their roofs. Traffic is stopped for miles on either side of the highway in both directions.
Søren presses another button and the somber voice of a reporter fills the room.
“Three vehicles carrying police officers and the CEO of Outlier Pictures, Miranda Lawson, have been involved in a severe crash on the I-10. As you can see, the vehicles are engulfed in flames. No one has gotten out of them. Emergency crews are on their way—if you would pull out, camera four, there you go—we can see a line of fire trucks and ambulances on the shoulder, inching their way through traffic.”
The picture turns to two reporters behind a desk in the news studio, a small inset of the live video stream in an upper corner of the screen. When they continue to discuss the accident, Søren mutes the audio.
Without a hint of regret, he says, “Unfortunately, Miranda outlived her usefulness.”
He killed Miranda. He used her to get to me, and then he killed her off like she was nothing more than an annoying insect.
Then I think, The woman in the Bank of America video. The woman who opened the account in my name… Oh my God, was that Miranda? How far back did their relationship go?
“Look at all the gears turning!” Søren says, amused. “What’s really going to bake your brain later on is how much I know about your new friend Connor Hughes.” His voice hardens. “And how he feels about you. Dear sister.”
The sound of Connor’s name on Søren’s lips jerks me out of my shock and sends a blast of pure rage throughout my body. “If you hurt him—”
“No more threats,” he interrupts. “Here’s the bottom line, Tabitha. I own you now. You’re mine. I’ve waited a long time to get this family back together, and nothing will separate us again. Including you. The two of us are going to start our new lives together here, and you’re going to forget about your old friends. If you try to escape, I’ll kill them all. If you try to hurt me, I’ll kill them all. Basically, if you do anything that displeases me, I’ll kill them all.”
He lets that sink in. Then, his tone dropping an octave, he says, “But if you’re good, I’ll give you the world. That’s all I’ve ever really wanted.”
The silence that follows is awful. I stew in it, my mind going the speed of light.
I say, “I have questions.”
Søren looks intrigued. “Go on.”
“Dismiss the guards first.”
When his look sours, I say, “I’ll never be comfortable while there are men with guns pointed at my back. You’ve told me the consequences if I misbehave, and I believe you. If you want us to be a family, you can start by treating me like family. Dismiss the guards.”
His expression is unreadable. For a m
oment, he stares at me, one finger tapping a staccato rhythm on the arm of his chair. Then he makes a dismissive motion with his hand, and his guards leave. I wait until the dull thudding of their boots has faded from the stairs to speak again.
“The place I woke up in.”
“Our room.”
I force myself not to react to the connotations of those two words and decide to go in a different direction.
“I know how much you like games and manipulation, so I know it amused you to watch me play into your hands. What I don’t understand is why now?”
He inclines his head, a kingly nod that indicates he approves of this question. “It took years to find this place. It took more years to prepare it. And during that time, I perfected our little project, the one we dreamed about in college. The thing all the experts said would never happen in our lifetime.”
A shiver of dread passes through me. Seeing my expression, he nods again. Then he glances at the wall of glass to my right with the rows of white server towers behind it.
Horror and fascination mix inside me to create an almost irresistible urge to run over to the servers and run my hands along their smooth flanks. I whisper, “A quantum computer?”
“One hundred million times faster than the average home PC, thirty-six hundred times faster than the fastest supercomputer in the world, built on a doped diamond crystal that’s easily scaled and functional at room temperature.”
There’s pride in his tone. Though it pains me to admit it, there should be.
A quantum computer is so complex, the algorithms so advanced, the machine can actually think for itself. And not only think.
It can learn.
“Yes,” says Søren, watching me reel in amazement. “It’s a revolutionary technology that will change the entire world as we know it. I calculate that just its uses in artificial intelligence, robotics, defense, and cryptography are worth well over a trillion dollars.”
My voice is faint when I say, “You could win the Nobel prize for this.”
“Prizes don’t interest me.”
I tear my gaze from the servers. Søren is looking at me in anticipation, knowing I’ll guess what does interest him. Knowing I’ll know.
The blood drains from my face so rapidly, I feel dizzy. “You’re going to tear the whole world apart. But first you’re going to make them pay you for it.”
“Not me. Us.”
“No,” I say, my voice turning hard. “I don’t want any part of this. Anarchy was never my thing. Hurting people was never my thing.”
He rises slowly, with complete grace. His eyes shine eerily in the light. “You wanted to set the world free once. Now we can. You and I, together. It’s what I’ve spent the last decade of my life working toward. It’s what we were born for, Tabitha. It’s our destiny.”
Fighting the onset of panic, I back up a step. Søren follows.
“You know me better than that.”
“I know that within the last few years you developed an encryption cipher that lets you break into any protected system you want. I’ve been watching you do it too, dabbling in power. Flirting with it. You wouldn’t do that if some part of you didn’t crave it. The only difference between us is your denial.”
“You forgot murder.”
Søren takes another step toward me. I take another step back.
“And yet if I put a loaded gun in your hand right now, you wouldn’t hesitate to pull the trigger, would you?”
“That’s different. That’s justice.”
“No, that’s revenge. And it would be wrong. You know it. Deep down, you know it. But you’re justifying your desire to spill my blood by calling it by a prettier name. You can put lipstick on a pig, Tabitha, but it’s still a pig. Murder is murder, no matter how well you try to dress it up.”
He takes another step forward. “So if you kill me, in effect you become me.”
There’s a gnawing in my stomach like I’ve swallowed rats. “Stop trying to mess with my head!”
“I’m not trying, I just am. Because you won’t accept the reality of who and what you really are. You put your entire life on pause because of your stubborn refusal to allow all that darkness inside you to come into the light. You knew what I was the second you met me. I never had you fooled like everyone else. And yet you allowed yourself to be drawn in.”
“I was seventeen! I had no one! You were my brother!”
He makes a soft tsk of disapproval. “I was your mirror. And still am. You should’ve seen the expression on your face when you looked at those servers. Shall I tell you what it looked like?” He prowls closer, growls, “Lust.”
“No.”
“Greed. Desire,” he adds, ignoring my interruption. “You want what I can give you. What no one else can give you but me. Our minds are the same. Our desires are the same. Our needs are exactly the same.”
He takes another step closer, and now he’s within reach. My fingers itch to poke out his eyeballs.
Juanita. Juanita. Juanita, I think, and then, my heart skipping a beat, But what if she’s already dead?
I have no control over what Søren does, or who he hurts, or how this will end. And in all honestly, I really don’t know that he’ll keep his promise not to hurt anyone if I go along with whatever he wants. After all, the man is a psychopath. They’re not exactly known to be reliable.
The only thing I have control over is myself.
So I inhale a slow, grounding breath. I look Søren in the eye and calmly say, “I disagree with everything you just said. But I do have another question.”
His brows lift.
“How are you going to call your guards if you can’t speak?”
His brows pull together into a frown, which deepens when he sees my grim smile.
In a whip-crack move, I cock my arm back and then punch him in the throat.
Thirty-Seven
Connor
We’re lying on our stomachs at the top of a rocky slope, a line of six silent men scanning the dark terrain below with night vision goggles.
The narrow valley resting between two low hills is much less rugged and densely forested than what we came through. It was a deliberate choice to hump it through the rough stuff, for purposes of both concealment and the probability that the more direct route in through the mouth of the valley would be heavily defended. So far we haven’t encountered anything unusual except shitty weather and the discovery that Reid’s flatulence could qualify as a lethal weapon.
I’ve been careful since then to stay upwind.
The rain that made our trek in so unpleasant has tapered off, leaving the sky above us crystal clear. Stars wink and glitter on the black canvas of the heavens. An ethereal, wavering green aurora of light on the horizon is the famous Northern Lights, which none of us take the time to appreciate.
“Two o’clock,” whispers Ryan, to my left, his breath a frost of white in the air. I swing around a few degrees and spot what he’s already looking at.
“Huey 212,” I murmur, eying the bird. “Mounted with twin M240s.”
Murphy, lying on my right, whispers, “We’ve definitely got the right spot.”
I agree. A black helicopter mounted with large machine guns hidden under a camouflage canopy is a dead giveaway for a bad-guy lair. Add to that a chain-link fence topped with razor wire enclosing the perimeter of what appears to be only a quiet alpine meadow, security cameras mounted on trees, and a hatch work of infrared sensor beams slicing through the dark. We’ve got our work cut out for us.
With a toggle on my rifle, I switch my night vision to thermal. “Hello there,” I say softly, spotting a warm body in the trees about two hundred meters out. A sentry.
“He’s got two buddies,” says Kasey at the same time I locate them, another fifty meters south. They’re all armed with rifles, spread out in a loose formation around a boulder, which I believe is an ingress point to the caves below. The guards don’t appear to be on high alert. One of them is taking a piss. Another is c
rouched under the low, spreading boughs of a tree, smoking a cigarette. This is good news. They’re not expecting company, which means we haven’t tripped any silent alarms on our way in.
We lie in silence for another twenty minutes, observing them.
It’s the Marine nicknamed Big Swingin’ Dick who finally speaks, for the first time since we set out. All he says is one word, spoken in a deep, rumbling voice like the low roll of thunder.
“Dibs.”
I whisper, “Happy hunting, soldier.”
The quiet spit of his suppressed weapon startles a nearby bird, sending it into shrieking flight. The guards have two bullets in each of their brains in the time it takes me to count to three. They go down, the bird flies away, and then the quiet of the forest is momentarily broken as six men rise to their feet and begin a crouched forward descent through the trees.
Thirty-Eight
Tabby
One of the main principles of Krav Maga is to strike aggressively at the weak spots of an opponent’s body in order to quickly neutralize a threat. And one of the most vulnerable spots on the human body is the throat. Even light pressure applied to the trachea causes severe pain. A more aggressive strike can crush the windpipe, resulting in death by suffocation as no air can be drawn upward from the lungs.
The blow I land on Søren’s trachea is extremely aggressive.
He stumbles back, clutching his throat, making a hideous gagging sound I find very satisfying.
But because he’s not technically neutralized, he’s still a threat. And so—because I’ve been well trained—I’m forced to go after another one of the body’s most vulnerable areas.
The feet.
Conveniently, his are bare.
I stride forward, grip him by the elbow, and, as hard as I can, drive my heel down onto the arch of his foot. I feel bone splintering, which is accompanied by the unmistakable sound of bone splintering.
Søren drops like a stone.
He curls into the fetal position on the floor, clawing at his throat and gasping for air, his eyes bulging, unable to scream because of the sad state of his trachea.
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