by Fiona Quinn
“Yeah, here let me read this to you. ‘The symptoms include diarrhea, nausea, vomiting, severe abdominal pain.’ Yup, it says ‘severe pain with ambulation,’ and Indigo was almost shrieking as he moved around the penthouse.”
“Potassium.”
“That would be my strategy,” I said.
“I’ll text you when the job is done,” Spyder replied.
The line went dead.
America had betrayed a patriot. At first I had felt heartsick for Allan Leverone. I understood how his brain could snap, and why creating all of this pain and horror might feel reasonable and just to him. Because those are the feelings Indigo engendered in me. Not anger. Beyond anger. The kind of sensation that left me rabid.
I wanted nothing more than to be Ardestia – she who cannot be escaped; the daughter of Ares who went to war beside her father to bring retribution. I wanted revenge for what he had done as Indigo. Indigo had put so many people through so much. Put me through so much. My brain played around with these thoughts, because of course this was what Indigo had to have felt, too. I wanted him dead and gone. But when Spyder’s text came through: Task complete. I didn’t feel any kind of satisfaction or relief.
Indigo had left a mess behind. Especially in the form of Vine and her possible ability to influence people, even though she didn’t have her father’s decades of experience, and maybe was the lesser of the two evils.
I stared at the whiteboard and our scribblings, trying to figure out where she could be taking Striker. And why. The only way to help Striker right now was to find the pieces to understand the puzzle. The more we read, the more we realized the level of crazy we were dealing with. I thought Vine was just disturbed. If only that were the case. . .
Vine had seeded thoughts into Striker’s brain so she would be always on his mind. They weren’t very creative, I thought. Immature? Naïve? Vine seemed like a teenaged girl playing with wishcraft and her first crush. The seeds were simple phrases like: “I love Grace Hays and want her for my wife to love always.” “I only love Grace Hays and will only love Grace Hays in this lifetime.”
Jack started laying out information from his stack of papers. “According to these notes, Striker was too vibrationally dense for her. Her seeds couldn’t take root. Nothing watered and nourished them, so nothing sprouted. So she took the next step,” Jack told our team. There was funny pull to the muscles around his mouth that made him look like he needed to vomit. “She figured Striker needed to be in a life or death situation so the seeds would germinate. In her mind, if Striker truly thought he might die, and her loving eyes were the first that he saw — hers was the first concerned face he saw as he came to — then maybe those seeds would grow deep roots.
“Wow,” I said, shaking my head. I wondered if delusional thinking—well, just plain craziness—was a result of being poisoned by carbon monoxide as a child, the gases can have a permanent effect on the body and the brain. Maybe it stemmed from her father’s God complex? How much further would her mental health problems push her? It was hard to out think someone whose thoughts were so deranged.
“It gets even more bizarre from there,” Jack said. “Vine made a plan to put Striker on the cusp of life or death. She wanted to make sure Striker wouldn’t die – but he had to believe he would. And for this, she needed her dad’s help. They colluded.” Jack shook his head. “He told her it was a hell of a risk. But she was willing to take it.”
“Is this about his kidnapping?” Blaze asked.
“Not hardly, you’re not going to believe this shit. Indigo planned carefully—this could be a grand slam for him. A case that would abrade Iniquus’s reputation. A case that would take out what he called ‘their famed Strike Force’, destroying Iniquus morale and if all went well taking a key adversary off the board. Indigo decided to blow us and the D.O.A to bits at the Fuller Mine.”
“And the Sudanese?” Deep asked.
“They look like collateral damage, a means to an end,” Jack responded.
Blaze leaned his hips back into the table and crossed his arms over his chest. “How could they plan to blow everyone to bits and keep Striker from dying?”
“The plan was that Striker wouldn’t go down into the mine because he’d be shot. It had to be a very careful shot taken by the best possible Omega marksman. Not a kill shot, but a near-kill shot. Striker had to be unconscious so he wouldn’t call in support and wouldn’t follow them into the mine.”
“What now?” Deep’s jaw line jutted forward as he took this in.
“Indigo had put in a great deal of work to make it happen. He tasked finding the best possible case that he could influence, and found the Sudanese immigrants and the D.O.A. He contacted an Assembly member to arrange for the man who had commended Lynx for her work at the FBI last year as the one to sign the contract. That was a weird little twist. I wonder what was going on in Indigo’s mind…”
“How’d he know we’d be at the Fuller Mine? We didn’t even know we’d be over there.” Deep asked.
“I saw that one in one of the remote views,” Blaze said. “Indigo moved forward in time and read our plans off the whiteboard.”
“He made the plans with Omega based on the intel,” Jack continued, “and it was Omega who found traces of bad gas back around the switchback and suggested the D.O.A. take flashbangs with them.”
“Clever boys,” I said.
“Yeah those clever boys also sent out their snipers to shoot Striker. They just thought they’d have some fun hitting me, since I seemed to be heading their way. The shitheads.” Jack stopped reading to make note of the snipers’ call signs on the board. That didn’t bode well for them. Jack turned and asked, “You ready to hear something really fucked up?”
I looked around and everyone seemed just about as shocked and incredulous as I felt.
“While Striker and I were being shot, while our team was racing for breathable air, while all of those men and women from the Sudan and D.O.A. were sucking in their last breaths of gas, Vine had been at the spa, making sure she looked absolutely perfect for her Prince Charming.”
“What?” I stammered.
“Omega listened in on the emergency comms and knew exactly which O.R. prepped for Striker’s arrival. Vine was already in place at the hospital with her wedding rings on her finger, ready to play the wife. Ready for Striker to come to and tell her, “I love you. Marry me.”
Holy moly. “And instead he said, ‘Good night,’” I whispered. “What did she write down after that, Jack?”
Pages of her rage. Pages and pages of psychotic delusional thoughts.
“But look here,” Gater flipped some pages in the air. “Indigo promised to help Vine, and said the key was to make Striker’s mind malleable . He said that in some people, like Striker and Elliot, the only way to do it was to break down their mental strength with drugs.”
As Gater read that, the beast in me was too aggressive to hold back anymore. I saw the fury swirling amongst my team, but they contained it where I could not. Could not think. Could not process. My energy swelled and filled the room until my expanse burst right out the doors like Alice in Wonderland after she had a swig from the “drink me” bottle. Too big. Too big to contain.
With tiger-footed rage, I moved to the soundproofed cell. Shutting the door, I rebuked myself; this was the wrong time for emotions. I wanted to scream loud and long with fisted hands and taut body; I desperately wished I could scorch the walls with my wrath, expelling the flames from my lungs. But I had to contain the wildfire that swept through me. Your house is on fire. Your family will burn. My blood was on fire. My soul would burn. But there was no time for these emotions. To give in would be selfish and weak. I had to quell the blaze down to an ember, or I would not be able to work my way to Striker. Spyder’s training whispered in my ear. Until I could extinguish my fury, my mind would not be free to use its creativity and logic to find the best solution.
Peace, ironically enough, was my best weapon.
Forty-One
I sat on the floor and folded my legs into a lotus. Breathing in and out, I focused my force on the sound of om. I fought an inner battle to ground and release.
Finally, I emerged from my meditation centered and calm, and ready to think my way through the puzzle. I pulled the elastic from my hair and used my fingers to comb it back into a fresh ponytail. My phone buzzed.
“Hey, Spyder. Everything okay?”
“Have you seen the news?”
“Not in the last few minutes? Why? What?” Anxiety painted my words psychedelic colors.
“Omega’s rats are jumping ship. They’ve set their headquarters on fire.”
I scurried down the corridor and burst into our temporary office to find the men on their feet watching CNN, fingers laced and hands resting on their heads.
“Did you do that?” I whispered into the phone.
“Omega believes it can slow or thwart the inevitable by destroying evidence. But of course, the evidence has already been dispersed.”
“I. . . wow.”
“Exactly.” Spyder said, without a hint of stress in his voice. “There will be a lot of hot heads, needing to blow off steam. You are to stay on campus.”
“I don’t know that I can promise that. We’re still looking for Striker.”
After a long pause, Spyder said, “Understood. Be safe, Lexicon. Keep your head down.”
For another minute we watched as Omega Headquarters burned. The firefighters seemed to have their hoses trained on the buildings surrounding it instead of the Omega building, preventing the leaping flames from spreading.
I had an inkling that Omega’s burning had as much to do with Indigo’s being gone as the data dump. Without Indigo at the helm, things would quickly fall off-course. I wondered if Sylanos, Omega, and the Assembly knew he had died, or if the members were too focused on their individual survival to care. “That shouldn’t happen,” I said..
Blaze turned his head toward me. “We were talking about that. Omega must have shut off their water so the sprinkler system wasn’t functioning.”
“Holy smokes,” I said.
Blaze looked over and laughed. “That sums it up.”
“Don’t think they’re done, though. There will undoubtedly be some arrests, and whoever’s left will reform under a new name. This’ll shake things up a bit,” Jack said. He focused down on the list of sniper names. “Maybe make a few go underground.”
“And make us one hell of an enemy,” Gater added.
Spyder thought we could cauterize the heads as we lopped them off the Hydra, and the beast would be dead. Surely he knew better. When you cut off the head of a Hydra, two grow back. Had we just doubled our enemies?
“What have you got there, Deep?” I asked.
“Iniquus sponsored Super Bowl tickets greased the palm of the phone company guy who got us Vine’s direction. She seems to be heading due west, sticking to the highways. She’s on I-70.”
“How far?” Blaze asked.
“We need to turn them around,” Deep said.
“Lynx, you’ve got to figure out a way to get her headed back into town with a text message,” Jack said.
I read over Indigo’s texts, trying to get their rhythm so I could send her a message that didn’t raise her suspicion.
I started with, Okay?
Cat – Tired. Glad I brought a team to help me with the drive. Good call. Thank you.
Team? She had a team with her? Not just a single helper. Deep and Jack read over my shoulder, then Deep wrote the text on a paper for everyone to read.
Dad – Are you listening to the news?
Cat – Guys wanted rock station. Why? What’s happening?
Dad – Omega Headquarters is on fire. Had to evacuate.
Cat – OMG! Are you okay?
Dad – OK. Have the team turn around and head back to DC. I have information that will make you more effective. Are you getting anywhere with him?
Cat – He loves me. He is so in love with me, Dad. That bitch just did some energy voodoo to him. Cast a spell. Witches should burn at the stake.
Yes, that was her explanation and her justification in some of her rantings. Her dad had told her about my abilities with healing energy, and that I did Reiki. He assumed I did it on Striker regularly. Therefore, I was influencing him energetically to love me, and not her. Vine had said that two could play that game. She was “fighting fire with fire,” “fighting for her man.”
Dad – That may very well have happened. You’re going to like what I’ve discovered. I need you to head back. I’m so happy for you, Tabby Cat. Your well-deserved happily ever after is so close.
Cat – Tell me!
Dad – Turn around.
Cat – Stopping for gas next exit. U-turn. Back in a few hours. Thanks, Dad. I love you.
Dad – Love you, too. Text me as you’re coming in to town. I’ll tell you where to go.
Cat – Will do.
Forty-Two
I raised my eyebrows and curled my lips in.
“You think she bought it?” Deep asked.
“How could she contradict it? Indigo has been neutralized. She won’t get anyone if she tries any other means of communicating with him. If she tries to connect with Omega, it’s on fire. If she tries to connect with the Assembly or Sylanos’s people – well, they’re probably busy trying to use whatever escape hatch they’ve put in place for themselves. I’d say we’ve got a good shot. Deep, you need your contact to keep track of those pings and follow them in.”
“On it,” Deep said, and went to the hall to make his phone call.
Jack clapped hands on my shoulders. “You keeping it together?”
“Yeah, I’m good. I’m going to reach out to Mrs. Coleridge at the lodge. I imagine Major Trudy is there by now. I’m wondering if he did the remote viewing for me.”
“If he thinks there’s fifty-thousand riding on actionable intel, I bet it’s the first thing he did stepping off his plane,” Gater said. “Why don’t you call Titus?”
“Comms could be compromised. I don’t want to make any move that might give Omega fuel.” I moved to the front of the room. “I need to paint a picture for you guys.”
Deep walked back in and lifted his chin to let us know his guy was on the task.
“As you can see from reading the logs, time is of no consequence to a remote viewer in the ether. These are not my skillsets at all. I’m not sure I understand all of the ramifications. While we’re here in Iniquus, though, our plans are protected byTsukamoto’s art work, but we will have to leave this protection in order to get Striker. Once we are off the Iniquus compound, we’re vulnerable. If Vine does a remote viewing and sees what the outcome is of our rescue mission, she’ll plan for our actions and thwart our success. Just like they did at the Fuller Mine.” I waited while that sunk in. “While Vine is not tactically adept, she has an Omega team with her, and we don’t know their level of expertise. I have to assume that Indigo sent the best of the best to protect his daughter.”
I walked over to the flip pad and wrote, “UNKNOWNS:”
What is Vine’s success rate as a remote viewer and how does her delusions affect her?
How many operatives are with her? What are their skillsets?
Will they stick with her once they know Omega is falling?
Are they indeed heading home?
What seeds were planted in General Elliot’s mind? Is he a risk to anyone or anything?
What seeds are being planted in Striker’s mind? Is a he a risk to anyone or anything?
Wow—that one rocked my foundation, as if I were trying to stand through a magnitude-seven earthquake. My head was suddenly and fearfully in Suzanne Collins’ novel, Mockingjay. The Capitol had used tracker-jacker venom to create false memories and hallucinations in Peeta Mellark, and he tried to attack and kill the love of his life, Katniss. What if I were Striker’s Katniss? What the hell? What the holy hell?
“Blaze, can you work on that last q
uestion right now?” My voice wobbled, and the magic marker waved violently in my hand as I tried to point with it. “Can you look through the influencing logs from the time Striker’s house was attacked until the most recent, and make sure that the only influencing she did was as benign as ‘Striker loves Grace, and they will live happily ever after’?”
Deep nodded. “Yeah, I’ll do the same with Indigo’s.” His phone buzzed. “Pings are headed due east now.”
There was a “whoop!” to celebrate our minor victory.
The whole Peeta Mellark thought gave me an idea. I puzzled it through, and the nursery rhyme’s steady hum of Lady bug, Lady bug didn’t intensify. I explained my plan to Jack to get his take. Could go either way:
I texted - The witch burned at the stake. No longer a problem.
Cat – What? How? Did you do it?
Dad – She tried to break into my place. Caught in Omega fire. Rescued. Died of smoke inhalation at the hospital.
Dad – Just rewards.
Cat - So relieved.
Cat – We’re on our way back to DC. Is the fire under control?
Dad – Not yet.
Cat – Did she set fire?
Dad – Electrical system, they think.
Dad - Need you to turn off his drip. Meds need to get out of his system.
Cat - What? Why?
Dad - Need him clear for this to work. He should be ready by the time you arrive.
Dad – So happy for you.
Cat – OK. Done. Thank you, Dad.
I set the phone down on the table and laced my hands in my lap. I stared at the phone. My nerves rubbed raw against my skin. “Do you think she bought it, Jack?” I whispered.
“No idea. One way to tell is if there is another change in direction, or if she turns off her phone, so we can’t track her. Another way would be to try to get the information from the remote viewers.”
“Mrs. Coleridge said she’d call me as soon as they’re done with the task. Sixty-five percent chance of correctness if they pick up anything at all.”