Chaos_The Dogs of War, a Lost and Found Series Spinoff

by J. M. Madden

  Grinning at her choice of words, Aiden ran a hand around her torso, cupping each breast in turn, then arrowing down to cup her pelvic area. “I hope you go commando again soon,” he murmured.

  “Maybe after the other commandos go home,” she murmured, and he could hear the humor in her voice.

  Yeah, he liked his warehouse, but the living area wasn’t set up for four. They might have to make modifications if the others planned on staying.

  Aiden finished scrubbing them up then helped her out of the shower. As he toweled her dry, he very carefully avoided the bruises on her right side. They ran almost the length of her thigh, with some abrasions thrown in. She gasped as he brushed too near with the terrycloth. “Sorry, Angel.”

  He couldn’t resist rubbing the fabric of the towel over the tips of her pretty breasts. In retaliation she reached out and cupped him in her hands. Aiden stilled.

  “We’re starting something we can’t finish right now, babe,” he whispered.

  “Mmm, hmm. And you started it.”

  Yeah, he supposed he had. With a gentle kiss to her lips, he pulled back. “To be continued…”

  Aiden patched up her injuries. The cut in her brow would probably be okay. He pulled the edges together with two butterfly bandages. And the split lip would just take time. He smeared it with Neosporin and told her to leave it alone. The other bruises on her body he couldn’t do much about.

  She turned the tables on him when he tried to tug her out of the bathroom. “Let me see your leg first.”

  Aiden hadn’t even thought about the leg. It had been excruciating two hours ago, but it had settled into a dull throb. Leaning against the counter he lifted the leg to her hands. The gunshot wound had sealed up. Because it was so deep it might leave scarred divots in his calf, but Aiden could tell that the muscles had pretty much healed.

  Angela ran her fingers over the wound, her touch tickling. “This is amazing.” Reaching out, she cupped his ass in one hand. “Sorry. Couldn’t help myself. You have a cute butt.”

  Aiden turned to her, cupping her bruised cheek in his hand, then she wrapped her fingers around his wrists. Aiden stilled, and watched as she lifted his hands in her own. They were bruised, he didn’t think from the Bitch’s air grip but from his own struggles. Angela looked at the bruises around his wrists. Then, very gently, she pressed kisses to each wrist. Aiden’s throat tightened with remembered terror, but he allowed her to hold him. He knew she wouldn’t hurt him but those two spots had somehow become the most vulnerable on his body.

  “I thought you were incredible,” she told him, her blue gaze connected to his in a way he’d never connected to anyone before. “I knew she had a grip on you, and you didn’t let it control your mind. You’re stronger than you used to be. And I want to tell you that I admire everything you’ve done to bring the company to justice.”

  It took him a minute to be able to answer her. Those words needed to be etched on his heart, because they were the most precious he’d ever been given. “Thank you, Angel.”

  Very, very carefully he pressed a kiss to the uninjured side of her mouth.

  Wrapping the towel around his hips Aiden went out to retrieve them both clothing, then returned to help her dress in the soft tee. She didn’t really need the help, but he found he had a difficult time not touching her. And when they left the bathroom and headed to the couch, it seemed natural as breathing to lay down on the cushions, then pull her down in front of him. Cradling her head on one arm, he wrapped his second arm around her waist and pulled her tight in against him. The two of them were asleep within just a few seconds.

  Angela woke rested but so damn sore. Shit, she hurt, all over her body. When the merc had snatched her from the top of the train car, he hadn’t been careful about getting her down. She was amazed, and thankful, that she hadn’t broken any bones on that fall. Everything had definitely been jarred, from her palms to her knees, and she was dying for ibuprofen.

  The windows to the outside were graying with light. It had to be between five and six. They’d slept a long while.

  Aiden breathed into her hair as he slept, his arm tight across her waist. She loved being this close to him. They’d needed the closeness after everything that had happened. But the physical closeness had also brought the mental closeness. Twice in the night he’d shifted with nightmares, and she’d been deep enough with him to feel the terror and panic. Her levelheadedness had served them both, though. Realizing it was flashback, she’d called him from the dream, lifting him to consciousness so that he could rebalance. Each time he pressed a kiss to the shell of her ear and sighed into her. “Thank you, Angel,” he whispered.

  Fontana had had a dream as well, making harsh sounds in the early hours before dawn. It made Angela’s heart ache as she listened to them. No one could ignore a person in pain like that, so she pushed on Aiden to reach out to him. When he did, Fontana quieted.

  Angela tried to sneak away from Aiden, but it didn’t work well. He tightened his arm on her and she had to lift it away. “Gonna check on Wulfe,” she whispered.

  Aiden let her go, but dropped his arm back to the couch. “Okay,” he murmured.

  She thought he was going to go back to sleep, but he pushed himself vertical, blinking blearily.

  Tugging her night shirt down Angela went to the bedroom door where she could see Wulfe. They’d left the bandages off because he’d been healing so well the night before. As she looked at his neck in the weak light, Angela blinked her eyes. She couldn’t even tell where he’d been cut. There might be the tiniest of faint lines, but that was all.

  It was incredible.

  The thought of what they could do with that kind of healing ability… but then, that was why the company was researching it. The person or corporation to sell this recipe could demand an astronomical price, which was why the company was after them.

  Behind her, Aiden dropped the blanket to the couch and moved to his computer console, moving like he’d never been beaten last night. She felt like ten miles of rough road, but she couldn’t even tell Aiden had had issues. He’d had the crap beaten out of him last night, and a gunshot wound to his leg, but she was sure it was all healed by now.

  They were, quite simply, super soldiers.

  Angela went to the bathroom to pee and wash her hands, then she dug a pair of jeans from the bag in the bedroom. Wulfe continued to sleep, and it was probably the best thing for him.

  Fontana’s dark green eyes were open, but he seemed bleary as he sat up on his blanket pallet on the far side of the room. Aiden, however, was gaining momentum with the morning. His eyes were flicking back and forth over monitors and she knew what he was looking for— any sign that the Collaborative was still in the area. His fingers flew over the keyboard, almost unnaturally fast.

  “What do you feel,” she asked.

  He shook his head, scraping a hand back through the long hair to get it off his face. “That’s the crazy part. I don’t feel anything. No dark presences anywhere. Before it used to be like a pending thunderstorm on the horizon.”

  “So, maybe the same way you could feel Wulfe and Fontana’s power, you could feel the Bitch’s power, even though it wasn’t directly connected to you.”

  He nodded. “Maybe.”

  “John and Shannon are okay?”

  He nodded again. “Nothing out of the ordinary there. No alarms at all. It’s strangely quiet.”

  She rubbed a hand over his shoulders. “Let’s take that stick drive to John and see what he can make of it.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Later that morning they headed out as a well-armed group. After sleeping off his injuries, Wulfe had woken clear eyed and energetic, and plowed through about ten pounds of food. Aiden hadn’t had a lot of groceries in his cupboards to begin with but now they were completely bare. Wulfe seemed to be completely recovered, though. In the light of day you could see a faint scar across his neck but it looked like it had been there years.

  Fontana seeme
d… guarded. Aiden didn’t know what his deal was, but he seemed off, somehow.

  What’s wrong?

  His buddy shook his head. Nothing. My shoulder hurts.

  Aiden let that roll. It did seem like his shoulder was taking a while to heal, but it had been a much deeper wound than Wulfe’s. Fontana prided himself on being fit and ready, so maybe he was aggravated he wasn’t in peak form.

  Grabbing a charged burner phone from the corner of his desk, he dialed Lost and Found from memory. A voice he didn’t recognize answered, so he asked for John. “Just a minute,” the woman said. There were a few clicks.

  “What?” John Palmer snapped.

  Aiden grinned. “Sorry, bro, if this is a bad time. Want me to call back?”

  “No, I don’t fucking want you to call back,” John Palmer growled. “I want you to call more often so that I don’t fucking worry about you. Where the fuck have you been?”

  Aiden laughed at the expletive laced response, hearing the worry in the words. “We had to take care of some business. I have that last item you ordered. Think we can meet up somewhere and try that new piece of equipment you fixed?”

  John understood what he was trying to get across exactly. “Meet me at this location in thirty minutes.”

  He sent a GPS pin through the wireless network.

  “Will do.”

  Palmer hung up without saying anything else, but Aiden didn’t feel put out. There had been… not quite affection, but definitely concern in the words. When he looked at Angela she was grinning at him.

  “I think I’m going to like him,” she said, nodding her head.

  They packed up into Angela’s car. Wulfe’s wreck would probably have to be misplaced or totaled. It was so far gone he doubted it would be able to be fixed.

  The address John sent them to was a warehouse on the north side of the city that had been modified into individual office spaces rented by the week, month or year for young entrepreneurs. John met them at the front door of the building and led them into a secluded space. The office was generic but had everything a young businessperson just starting out would need, desk, chairs, office supplies… everything but the paying customers. Once there he turned his chair and grinned at them. “I’m happy to see you all in one piece.”

  “Us too,” Aiden said, leaning in for a manly, backslapping hug.

  It was surreal seeing another person who looked so much like him. If he took a razor blade and a pair of scissors to himself they’d really look alike. John’s eyes had lingered on his face as well. It had to be just as strange for him. Aiden turned away.

  “Wulfe Terberger, this is my brother John Palmer.”

  The men shook hands. If Wulfe was surprised to see John in a wheelchair he didn’t let it show.

  “Where’s it at?”

  Angela handed over the stick drive.

  John pulled a laptop from the backpack hanging from the back of his chair. “This was brought to us to retrieve information from a memory stick in a divorce case. We did that and the Silverstone Collaborative was given ninety days to claim ownership of the device, which, obviously, it hasn’t. I charged it and have already uploaded the other three drives into a file.”

  He opened the laptop, typed a password and logged onto the device. Then he inserted the drive into the port on the side of the machine. Aiden moved close, leaning over John’s shoulder, his nerves thrumming with anticipation.

  The same Chinese characters scrolled across the screen and Aiden could have cursed. Had they seriously gone through all of that for it not to work?

  Then something seemed to kick in and the translation rolled down the page. Dr. Shu’s personal notes on how he produced the Ayahuasca serum for the Spartan Project. But there was more. As John scrolled down the page there was a master roster of all of the individuals involved in the project as well as the budget the Collaborative had given them to work with. And in a little section by itself, the name in bold, was Cameron Hall. Below the name was his contact information as well as a string of numbers. “Is that an account number?”

  John leaned forward, counting the digits. “Yes, definitely.”

  “Does that mean Senator Cameron Hall?”

  The group all looked at each other, knowing that they had found one of the roots of corruption. Cameron Hall had been a senator for almost twenty years and been on too many oversight committees to mention. Most recently, though, he’d been on the budget committee for the National Institutes of Health and had been one of the most vocal about cutting back on discretionary spending.

  John flicked his fingers and the screen started scrolling again.

  Then something caught Aiden’s eye. “Stop, there, John. What the hell is Project Marathon?”

  He scanned the information. “It was another project similar to Spartan,” Aiden told them, “but they were using a different plant derivative. Also Amazon based. Look at all the names…”

  The group grew quiet as they looked at all the listings. There were little flag icons at the end of the name, obviously indicating where the participant was from. There were a lot of American flags.

  “It’s another research camp,” John murmured.

  Aiden, Fontana and Wulfe crowded behind John to see what he was looking at. There was a map of South America, and an enlarged inset map of Guyana, on the northeast corner of the continent. There was a list of contacts in the area, as well as what looked to be bank accounts used for bribes.

  Fontana shook his head. “Why would he put all this information together?”

  “If he wanted it all in one place for easy reference,” Angela murmured, “there it is.”

  “This information is at least two years old, though,” Wulfe murmured. “Do you think the camp is still there?”

  “We have to go in and see,” Fontana told them flatly, looking at Aiden.

  Aiden shook his head. “There’s no way. What support would we have? Until we have more information and have exhausted everything on these disks, no one is going anywhere.”

  Fontana turned away, arms crossed over his broad chest. Aiden knew he was angry, but they needed to keep their heads about them.

  Aiden looked back at the screen, then down at John. “You’re sure the locator hasn’t been triggered on this?”

  John shook his head. “It’s on a closed device and the Wi-Fi has been disabled. It’s not broadcasting anything.”

  Aiden pulled up a chair and grabbed a notepad and pen. They sat there for several hours, looking over all of the information. He made note of what they needed researched, as well as a list of names and account numbers. Just in case something happened to these disks he wanted hard copies of everything. John also found a cable in the desk drawer that connected to the printer in the corner. Within just a few seconds pages and pages of information were being printed off.

  Angela looked over everything, but some of it was gibberish. The actual recipes for the formulas had more science in them than she could have ever imagined. Certainly more than she’d ever taken in school.

  The names and the countries the men were from though, that was pretty self-explanatory. There were so many names. How had they gotten approval from all of those governments to involve their military in the experiments? Were there men that had come before Aiden’s group? Or was his group the first?

  By the time they’d gone through all of the information, they were all both on-edge and exhausted. Just the thought of the treasure trove of information on the drives that they hadn’t gone through boggled the mind. Dr. Shu had obviously been a highly intelligent individual, though a little lax about his security. Yes, they’d needed all of the drives together to unlock them, but he’d made a serious mistake putting all of the information together on the drives the way he had. The man thought his security had been enough to protect it.

  Obviously not.

  That was a serious oversight on the Collaborative’s part.

  Angela rubbed her eyes and prodded at her sore eyebrow. Last time she�
�d gone to the bathroom it hadn’t seemed as swollen, but it had turned a pretty color purple. She’d put a bandage over it but people were still giving her strange looks. Her hip was killing her. She shifted uncomfortably, wishing she’d brought ibuprofen.

  Angela pulled out her phone and scrolled through the local news. So far there had been nothing about the incident at the train yard. How they were managing to keep it quiet, she had no idea, because every call went over the radio, and even the news crews had learned to listen to scanners for fresh material. If anyone had gotten wind of more than a dozen bodies found with automatic weapons, as well as the body of the Chief Operations Officer of a major corporation, the press would have been all over it.

  There hadn’t been a peep, though.

  In a way she was glad that the Collaborative was somehow managing to keep things quiet. It meant that they thought they still had a chance of flying under the radar. The higher-ups at the Collaborative were surely scrambling to figure out what had happened, and to try to lay the groundwork to keep it status quo as long as possible. If they were lucky, maybe the Bitch in Blue hadn’t been reporting as often as she should have been. She was responsible for the men being free, after all.

  Aiden looked excited and tired and overwhelmed. They needed to go get some food and evaluate what needed to be done. Might not be a bad idea to bring Duncan in on the talks as well. The man knew how to plan.

  By the time they left the office building, they were ready to relax a bit. Angela drove through a Zaxby’s chicken and got a bunch of everything to take back to Aiden’s bolthole. She still watched her rearview mirror, waiting for law enforcement to pounce on them. Shaking her head, she snorted at herself. She’d been a law enforcement officer for ten years, but in one week her motivations had completely changed.

  John had a guy that was a whiz with tracking bank transactions, so he was going to find out if the account numbers were valid and still being used. As long as everything stayed quiet they would have a meeting tomorrow to talk about their progress.