Midnight Renegade (Men of Midnight Book 7)

by Lisa Marie Rice

  “Mmm,” Felicity said and Matt heard the soft patter of her fingers on the keyboard. It was amazing. Her fingers were always a blur. Apparently she’d written herself a little software patch that allowed her to type in what was essentially shorthand but came out in proper English. She typed as quickly as she thought and she was a fast thinker. “Wow. Looking at her cellphone records, she speaks to her father, Simon Thomas, a couple of times a week. For at least twenty minutes a time. Except for the past month. No phone calls this past month.”

  Matt knew husbands in the field who didn’t speak to their wives and kids that often. “That sounds pretty close. Seems weird the calls suddenly stopped.” He frowned. “Where does the dad live? What does he do?”

  “He lives in Los Angeles where he owns and runs a small but successful shipping company. Quest Line Shipping. It’s specialized in delicate or out-of-gauge cargo that requires special care — art works, endangered animals, sensitive electronics, delicate medical machinery, that kind of thing. Quest Line Shipping has an office here in Portland, for no reason I can discern other than the fact that Simon Thomas’s daughter lives here.”

  “So the dad hasn’t noticed his daughter is missing?”

  “Hmmm.” More light clacking. “The guy himself might be missing.”

  An electric jolt ran down Matt’s spine. He sat up, electrified. “What?”

  Felicity frowned on the screen. Metal walked up and put a hand on her shoulder. It looked like a catcher’s mitt and covered her shoulder from neck to arm. She looked up at him, flashed a smile, then looked back at her screen with a frown.

  “I don’t have any trace of him in public over the last ten days.”

  Matt thought about that. “Is he in the news often?”

  More clacking. “Not often, no. But enough. Let me try something.” She frowned even more fiercely and Metal lifted his eyes from her to frown fiercely in turn at Matt through the screen. It didn’t mean anything. If it were up to Metal, Felicity would spend her pregnancy sitting on ten cushions with her feet up. She was devoted to work, though, and everyone admired that about her. Metal admired that too, but she was having a difficult pregnancy and tended to barf a lot. She suffered from hyperemesis gravidarum, which Metal explained meant a pregnancy where you barfed a lot.

  Matt was sort of sorry she was working so hard for him, but sort of not. First of all, if the big boss himself — the Midnight Man — had made Dr. Honor Thomas a priority Felicity would knock herself out and there was no stopping her. And once she had her teeth in something she was hardwired to not let go.

  And Matt wanted answers, right now.

  “Okay.” Felicity straightened up in her chair. Her left hand disappeared and Matt was sure she had it curled around her belly. She was starting to show and she had a cute little baby bump. “I hacked into Quest Line Shipping’s offices. They have a decent security cameras system, pretty thorough coverage. I took Thomas’s photo from the company brochure and ran it through their surveillance system.”

  Matt blinked. “Well. That was smart.”

  Metal looked exasperated, rolled his eyes. Of course it was smart. This was Felicity.

  Felicity didn’t even notice the compliment. “So basically Simon Thomas hasn’t been seen since the 2nd of June.”

  “Several days before Honor — Dr. Thomas — last reported in to work.”

  Felicity nodded, not having noticed Matt’s use of her first name. But Metal noticed. He stared sharply at the screen and Matt felt, uncomfortably, like Metal was walking around inside his head. Metal looked a bit like a Neanderthal but he wasn’t, not by a long shot.

  Felicity talked without taking her eyes off her screen. “But — here’s the interesting thing. He’s been carrying out company business all this time.”

  “Any biometric data required?” Matt asked.

  “Yeah.” She smiled smugly. “Just like us.”

  ASI passes included fingerprints, retina scans and DNA. Though generally speaking, the passes themselves were enough, unless the company was in lockdown, DEFCON 1.

  “His cell?”

  “In the office. Hasn’t moved since the 2nd. Wherever he is, he doesn’t have his cell with him. Doesn’t mean he doesn’t have a cell, though. I hacked into his personal computer and he hasn’t sent any personal emails since the 2nd. And he hasn’t been in his home since the 2nd. Home camera footage only shows the gardener coming once and a housekeeper every other day. But not him. He’s not on a trip because the company system clocks him as using biometric data. He’s just disappeared off the face of the earth except for carrying out business dealings.”

  “So, in essence, we have two family members a thousand miles apart who just dropped off the face of the earth.”

  “Looks like it.”

  “But one of them was a prisoner, kept shackled and drugged.”

  Felicity lifted her head and looked straight at her monitor, staring straight at him. “Which means the dad could have been held a prisoner too, all this time.”

  Matt sighed. “Or on vacation in Maui with the girlfriend du jour, guiding the business via intranet.”

  “No, he logged into his business computers. Right there in Los Angeles. And anyway, he’s a widower. Been one since 2011, so he’d have every right to have that girlfriend du jour.”

  She shrugged, then turned pale as ash and bolted. Matt watched in the monitor as she crossed the great room, her ergonomic chair still spinning.

  “Barf time?” he asked Metal.

  “Barf time,” Metal answered glumly. “Gotta go, man.”

  “Will be in touch,” Matt said and closed the connection.

  He checked his wristwatch, which was a compass, a calculator, a stop watch and a tachymeter, had a garotte in the wristband and could blow up a door. It also told the time really well.

  Six pm. Time for dinner.

  She was half awake when he came back. Something had woken her up and in the silent room she couldn’t figure out what it was until the man walked through the door carrying a tray.

  Matt. Matt Walker. The man who’d saved her life.

  He hadn’t been holding her hand and her subconscious had missed that and had woken her up.

  “You need some food,” he said forcefully, as if she were going to object. Objecting was the furthest thing from her mind. She was ravenous.

  He set the tray on the bedside table and helped her sit up, placing the pillows at her back. Honor wanted to tell him she could sit up on her own but it turned out she couldn’t, not gracefully. She was pushing feebly with her hands, astonished at her weakness, when he gently caught her under the arms and lifted her until she was sitting against the pillows.

  “Thanks,” she gasped.

  He nodded and picked up the tray, pulling down two flaps at the sides making a bed table. A huge cotton napkin was snapped open and placed on her lap.

  He’d done this before, she suddenly remembered. She’d eaten quite a few meals here.

  “Everything smells amazing.” She eyed the tray and its contents. What smelled like mushroom soup, garlic bread, a small slice of lasagna and — oh God. Was that chocolate mousse?

  He smiled faintly. “It should. Everything we have here was cooked by Isabel Harris and frozen. Like I told you. But I’ll have you know I am a master nuker, which was my contribution.”

  Déjà vu. She’d been told this before. Memories were coming back. She paused, soup spoon in hand. “So just to be clear, everything I eat here is by Isabel Harris? And you’ve already told me this?”

  “Yep. And yep.” He dipped his head in a nod. “Nothing but the finest for you. By the way, I’ve been given direct orders to treat you like royalty.”

  Honor frowned. “By whom?”

  “By my boss’s wife, Suzanne Huntington.” He nudged the soup bowl closer to her. “Eat or she’ll have my hide. She’d be a scary lady if she weren’t so nice.”

  Honor put the spoon in her mouth and nearly sighed. It was divine. “That�
�s really nice but I don’t know a Suzanne Huntington.”

  “Maybe not by that name. Her maiden name was Suzanne Barron.”

  “I don’t know anyone by that name, either.” She frowned. “I don’t think I do, anyway.”

  “You treated her father, a retired professor of French who was up from Baja California to visit his daughter. Was rushed to the ER. Everyone thought he’d had a stroke but you diagnosed a heart attack and you were right.”

  Handsome elderly gentleman, very tanned. With diffuse severe pain. Two very beautiful women who were worried sick, mother and daughter.

  Matt nudged the garlic bread closer to her hand. “You saved his life. A doctor wanted to treat him for stroke.”

  She remembered perfectly now. “Strokes and heart attacks sometimes mimic each other. But the treatments are completely different. So the daughter is Suzanne … Huntington?”

  The younger woman had been charming, immensely grateful. Honor had come home the next day to a bouquet of flowers nearly as big as her refrigerator. Suzanne Huntington had invited her out to dinner but work had gotten in the way. They liked each other but they could never get together. When she could, Suzanne couldn’t and when Suzanne could, she couldn’t.

  “That’s right. Who is eternally grateful because you saved her father’s life. Her husband, my boss, is under strict orders to help you any way he can. Our company has vast resources. They’re at your disposal.” He bowed his head, like an old-fashioned knight. “As am I.”

  Wow. “Uh, thanks.” She looked him over carefully. He was so formidable, even sitting down. He had an aura of strength and determination built into every line of his body, every line on his face. Her memories were much clearer now. She remembered him battling a raging river, crossing over from one bank to another with her in tow. The river’s strength had been terrifying but his strength had been equal to it. She was alive thanks to him.

  He bent forward, elbows on knees and without even thinking about it, without realizing she wanted to do it before she’d done it, she held out her hand, palm up. He didn’t hesitate, folding his much bigger and stronger hand around hers.

  Something tense deep in her bones loosened its iron grip. Something bad had happened to her. The most terrifying thing was that she had no idea what. She’d been attacked, drugged up and she had no idea why. But just the fact that he was holding her hand, somehow transferring heat and strength to her, made things a little better. She could breathe.

  He leaned forward a little more and clasped his other hand over the back of her hand, encasing it in a warm strong grasp.

  “Can you tell me the last thing you remember?”

  Honor blinked. Huh. The last thing she remembered. There was a fuzzy buzzing aura where her memory should be. “The last thing I clearly remember is canceling my talk at an international symposium in Athens because Vesuvius blew up and there was a heavy stream of dense particulate ash over the Mediterranean. My flight was canceled.” She was watching his eyes and saw a reaction. “What?”

  “Vesuvius blew up two weeks ago. The eruption is over and flights have resumed their normal schedules.”

  Oh, man. A deep throb started up in her head. “It feels like just a few days ago. The day before you fished me out of the water. Quite literally.” Two weeks had been blasted right out of her head.

  “Yep,” he said, his voice deep and steady. “That was the 1st of June. It is now the 14th of June. So here’s the deal.” He leaned forward, so close she could feel his body heat. “A compound of ketamine and diazepam was found in your bloodstream when you arrived. The amount of ketamine found in your system was consistent with you being dosed continuously for six days. Metal says that there would be retrograde amnesia. Do you remember anything at all about being taken prisoner?”

  Honor delved deep inside, looking, looking. “No. I remember placing the call to the secretariat in Athens and they said the entire conference was canceled and that they would reschedule in the fall. And they asked me to be back on the program.”

  “Where were you when you placed that call?”

  “In my office. In the hospital,” she said promptly. Didn’t even need to think about it. She remembered the slight squeak of her office chair. For weeks now she’d been promising herself to bring some lubricating oil to her office. She remembered the sun streaming in through her window and looking out to see fluffy clouds on the horizon. “I ate a chicken wrap which wasn’t very good. Then —” she touched her forehead. What did she do then? It felt like she was worried about something … someone? She couldn’t remember her thoughts, she could barely remember the emotions. Her hand dropped. “Nope. Can’t remember. It’s like a black hole.”

  “It’ll come to you.” His hands tightened on hers.

  She sighed. “Maybe. For the moment, my brain feels like the Great Garbage Patch in the Pacific — just flotsam and jetsam.”

  “I’ve seen the Great Garbage Patch,” he said, muscles working in his jaws. “That’s not a nice image.”

  “But apt.” A huge jumble of images, most of which were frightening and jagged and no way of telling what was real and what was not. “Anything could have happened in those six days.” Her eyes met his. “Anything.”

  The muscles in his jaw clenched tightly. She was surprised he didn’t crack a tooth. “Metal looked you over. Your wrists were scraped raw from shackles, and you had bruises all over your body but from the looks of them, you got them in the river. They weren’t old bruises. Metal and I, we didn’t check for …” His throat clicked. He clearly couldn’t say the word.

  “Rape? You didn’t check for rape?”

  He nodded. “I’m sorry. We should have. It just felt like a violation of an unconscious woman. But that’s stupid. I should have. We should have —”

  “It’s okay.” She searched his dark eyes and found only sorrow and something else. Shame? She didn’t know him at all and yet she felt she somehow did. There was some bond she couldn’t articulate but it was definitely there. He had nothing to be ashamed of, though.

  God knew there was a lot of shame around rape, mostly felt by the victim. She’d seen a lot of young girls and some young boys come into the ER after a rape, shaking and terrified and ashamed. It never failed to break her heart.

  “I’ve treated a lot of drugged rape victims.” She met his eyes. “I’ve been there when they come around after being dosed with a date rape drug — roofies mainly. Whatever was used, there is a vestigial sense that they were violated. They don’t remember it, but they know. Every single time. I’ve seen it over and over again. But I don’t think that’s what happened to me. Did you see bruising around my upper thighs?”

  He swallowed. “No.”

  “On my hips?”

  “No.”

  She stretched her arms, legs, winced. “From what I can tell, my bruises are on my shoulders and lower legs. And the bruises are recent. I looked at myself in the mirror. The bruises are reddish because of capillaries broken under the skin. They will turn blue and then yellowish in the next few days. Bruising colors follow a set schedule. And everything is consistent with the bruises being from the river. Not a beating while I was a prisoner and not rape.”

  “You’re right.” He looked away then back at her. “I was so upset at the thought of you being beaten while shackled, not to mention being …” He swallowed. “Raped.”

  “That thought is pretty horrifying to me, too. But the thing is — it looks like I was kept immobile and drugged but essentially unharmed.”

  Matt nodded.

  “Which of course begs the question — why? Why abduct me, shackle me, drug me, for no reason?”

  He nodded. “There’s a reason. There has to be. Someone went to a lot of trouble and expense and some risk to abduct you.”

  “Yeah. Only to keep me essentially unharmed. I checked my tongue and eyes. I was kept hydrated.”

  “Were you … interrogated?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t remember anything.
I was canceling my trip to Athens and then I was driving down a country road, fell off a cliff and fell into the river. I don’t remember too much about that, either.”

  “You had my name and GPS coordinates written with a felt-tip pen on your upper left arm,” he reminded her, his voice even, eyes watching hers carefully.

  “I … yes.” She’d been so out of it that the significance of that had eluded her. Until now. Now it was like a giant red arrow had come down from the sky and pointed at Matt. Like some kind of supernatural phenomenon. And she had no idea why.

  “You were looking specifically for me and for this place when you ran off the road. Do you know why?”

  She looked at him with new eyes. Matt Walker. Probably in his mid-thirties. Lean but very muscular. Dark eyes, dark shaggy hair. Not handsome but compelling. Just him holding her hand reassured her at a bone-deep level.

  She’d never seen him before, and yet —

  “Do I know you?” The question was stupid, but maybe the drugs had knocked out more of her mind than she knew. Maybe she did know him. Why else would she have escaped and run straight to him?

  But if she did, wouldn’t he have said something?

  “No. Never met you before. Never seen you before.”

  Well, that was that.

  They stared at each other for a full minute.

  She cleared her throat, exhausted, baffled. “Why would I run to you?”

  “I don’t know.” His jaw muscles clenched. “But you did. You trusted me to keep you safe and I will.”

  Every line of his body showed determination and strength. She suddenly knew that he’d spoken those words as an oath. He’d do his very best to keep her safe. She remembered him battling the current to bring her to safety on the other side of the river. His very best was pretty good.

  Something deep inside of her relaxed, just a little. Something unfathomable had happened to her. She’d been abducted, kept a prisoner for almost a week. She didn’t have any faces, she had no information at all on who those people were or what they wanted. It was almost impossible to guard yourself when you didn’t know where the danger was coming from. When you couldn’t put a face to it.