by Jade Powers
“No problem. That girl is hard core. She went back into the restaurant. She may come out again, but I called the taxi and he’s on his way,” The kid wore his hair just long enough to touch his collar.
“Thanks. I was afraid you were going to tell her I was here.”
“You paid me for, like, almost a day’s work. There is no way I’m going to give you up.”
“Still, it’s appreciated.”
The store bell rang indicating that someone had just walked in. Hannah backed into the shadows. The kid shrugged and went to the counter. Nell’s voice echoed in the store, “Gas on 6. I figured I’d fill up while I wait for my friend.”
“Dude, you’re going to have a long wait. As fast as she was running, she’s halfway to Canada by now. Why would she ditch you like that?” He spoke with genuine curiosity while he rang up candy, gum, gas, and chips.
“Schizophrenia. She hears voices and just takes off.”
“You don’t say? What do the voices say to her?”
Nell sounded annoyed, “How should I know? She’s psycho.”
Psycho? Hannah would have been offended, but the whole overheard conversation was giving her a new insight into Nell’s personality.
“You should try Roy’s bar and grill down the street. It’s pretty dark. If I were running from someone, I’d drop in there. They open for breakfast.” He rang up Nell’s purchases.
She said, “Thanks.”
“Good luck. Hope your friend gets the help she needs.”
Overhearing the conversation, Hannah appreciated the way he worded that. The bell rang again, indicating Nell’s departure. Hannah was used to waiting. She’d done plenty in the strange prison-camp where she’d been held. Still, the thought of Nell coming back a second time made her edgy.
When a few minutes had passed, she stepped out. Now the kid was looking at her like she was a monster.
“I’m not schizophrenic or psycho,” Hannah said. Of course, anyone could lie.
“Yeah, that’s cool.”
Hannah couldn’t say who was more relieved when the beige cab arrived. It didn’t even have one of those tops on the car, but the side of the car was a clear enough advertisement. Thanking the kid, she ran to the back door of the taxi and scrambled in. “Airport, please. As fast as you can.”
And suddenly she was driving to the airport with only the clothes on her back. Hannah didn’t even have identification. Just cash. A small nervous fear itched at her mind, wondering what would happen if her dad didn’t make it. What if his flight was delayed? What if the plane crashed? She couldn’t fly. She didn’t have her driver’s license.
Her thoughts circled and circled as they closed in on the airport.
“Departures or Arrivals?” the driver asked.
That was a loaded question. Hannah said, “Arrivals.”
She paid the taxi cab driver his fee and a tip and entered the airport, going straight to the board. Her dad wasn’t due to arrive for another three hours. Hannah bought a book, a cup of coffee, and found a quiet corner to wait.
DRAKE STAYED WITH THE clean-up. As much as he hated the idea of Hannah out on her own, he wasn’t about to abandon his people. Worse, General McFarland caught wind of the attack and was already landing at Fairchild and expecting to meet Drake. After a grueling day, the last thing Drake wanted was to put on a suit and tie and meet the general.
He stopped by AIT, walking once more through empty corridors. Sven stood at the doorway to the lab, scanning the room.
“What are you thinking?” Drake asked.
“McFarland will want to know where the sphere is.” Sven wore a suit and tie, but the tie was already pulled down as if Sven had been strangling on it.
“I’m prepared for that. He will of course ask where I’m keeping it.”
“What will you tell him?”
“That it is in New York under lock and key.” Drake wanted to loosen his tie and stand with Sven, but McFarland was waiting. Drake would meet him in a quiet room in the upstairs of an upscale restaurant where they would spend an hour lying to one another. “This isn’t the dream. Not what I had in mind when I took over AIT.”
“I know. What are you going to do?”
Drake shrugged. “I have over a hundred employees. I can’t just quit.”
“You can distance yourself. Pass it on. Hire a board of directors or a CEO. Hire a lawyer and sell the company. You have options,” This was Sven’s first hint of Drake’s unhappiness. This was the first chink in his friend’s armor.
Drake slapped Sven on the back and with eyes as sad as a beagle said, “I sure as hell hope I still do when all this is done. I’ll contact the lawyer today. I think you’re right about selling.”
As he walked across the parking lot, Drake slid his hand in his pocket. His fingers brushed against the metal of the sphere. His life would be snuffed out in an instant if McFarland thought for one instant that Drake would be stupid enough to carry the device around with him, which is exactly why he did. He couldn’t bear his employees to be the target of misfortune, and yet they were murdered without any thought to their value or families.
Drake wanted revenge. And he didn’t want anyone else to pay for his mistakes.
Tiny white lights sparkled from the staircase, reminding Drake of Coconut Grove, although this place was a poor shadow in comparison. Drake walked up that staircase the way a man would walk up the steps to a gallows. McFarland sat in the dark, the gleam of his smile hidden. It was just as well. Drake might punch his lights out if he had to watch the man gloat over the deaths of Drake’s employees.
It was a careful dance one played with the powerful, the dance of the snake charmer. Drake didn’t bother pasting on a smile. No one would believe him happy after the past week’s events.
He slid into the chair across from General McFarland.
“I took the liberty of ordering for you. Scotch on the rocks. We’ll talk a while and then order something to eat.” In the half-hidden shadows, McFarland’s emerald ring glowed. “I hear you’ve recovered the sphere? Sent it to New York or some such.”
Interesting. Until Drake had told Sven that bit an hour earlier, he hadn’t decided on the story he would tell McFarland. He’d known the lab was bugged, but he had no idea who had bugged the lab. Until this moment his suspicions were just that.
“On the contrary. We have yet to recover it. Tom’s son sent us on a wild goose chase, and then we got tangled up in an ugly mess in Miami. I have no idea where it ended up after that.” Drake cupped his hand around the scotch glass, leaving it on the table. He couldn’t trust the food or drink here. Not when McFarland was his enemy.
“A man could retire on technology like that,” McFarland leaned forward and the light bounced off the bones in his face and gleamed in his eyes at just the right angle to make him look like a skeletal death’s head.
“After the shit I’ve been through, I’m considering it. John, I started the business because I thought I could offer something. With my business acumen and military history, it should have been a win-win.” Drake knocked the cubes around in his glass. He didn’t have to fake the troubled frown. It gave him the willies sitting across from McFarland with the object of his obsession in his pocket. McFarland didn’t react a bit to his lie, but then McFarland was the master of schooled expressions.
“This whole thing has turned into a cluster. We have to distance ourselves from it. “Does anyone else know about the sphere? Why the hell haven’t you put your men on finding it? I hired you because you were the best, but what I’m seeing now is a mediocre company with a less than stellar performance.”
“We’ve been attacked at every turn. Military action on United States’ soil is illegal, and yet the group who hit Spokane had the capabilities of a military branch beyond the private security the tech corporations are using. My people have been threatened, blackmailed, spied on, and attacked. You need to dig in on your side and find out who to court martial.”
McFarland pa
used. It was a deep silence. He wouldn’t want to admit to military action inside the U.S. If old Mavis in the senate caught wind of it, McFarland would be sitting in a dozen hearings. Drake waited. Better to sit tight and let John answer the question than to weaken the statement with more words.
“They weren’t military. They must have been a privatized mercenary group.”
“Bull shit.” Drake might rely on McFarland for contracts, but he sure as hell wasn’t going to put up with the kind of attack that put his people in the morgue. If McFarland knew enough to answer that question at all, his people were responsible.
McFarland raised his hands in a gesture of verbal surrender. “I’ll get to the bottom of it.”
“We’ve delivered the technology as described in the contract.” Drake slid a letter of withdrawal on the table. “According to the contract either party may withdraw in good faith within thirty days after delivery of the technology. I am withdrawing.”
“Not good enough. You have a working prototype. We want it.” McFarland said.
“I don’t have a working prototype. I’m not sure where you got that intel, but they tech they stole was flawed.” A lie. The tech was fine. The flaw was in the use of such technology.
“You are bound by the contract to deliver all research related to Project Squid. Unless you give me the mind control prototype, you are in violation.”
“I can’t give you what I don’t have. You have my letter of withdrawal. Payment cleared this morning, so we’ll just call it even. I’ve fulfilled the contract to the finest print.”
Even in the dim lighting, Drake could see McFarland’s clenched teeth, his red face. “You do this and I’ll see you in court.”
Drake didn’t hold punches. “Do it. I’m holding the cards on this one.” He pulled away from the table without touching the glass of scotch, without ordering. It was just as well. “I’ve said all I need to say...for now.”
“You’re making a powerful enemy,” McFarland said.
“It didn’t have to be that way. If my people had gone untouched, I would have signed on for the second part of the contract and given you everything you wanted. Don’t strong-arm me again.”
Drake walked away, double-timing it down the stairs. He had hoped the meeting would alleviate his suspicions about John. Instead, he came out of the meeting certain but without proof that McFarland was behind the whole thing.
He called Johnson.
No word on Hannah.
Chapter 11
HANNAH SQUEALED WHEN she saw her dad and ran into his arms. It was the first time she’d felt safe since she had been with Drake. Not that she would think of that jerk, but she couldn’t help it. Tears streamed down her cheeks. She couldn’t believe she was finally going home.
“Hey, Honey. We’ve got a back-to-back flight in an hour. Ready to go home?” After a long hug, they disentangled.
“I lost my I.D. I can’t take the plane,” Hannah said. She hadn’t even thought of that until climbing into the taxi.
Unzipping his backpack, her dad pulled out her purse, the one she had left behind in her room at Miami. It had her license and credit cards. Hannah was so glad she didn’t walk around campus with it that day. Her dad said, “Got you covered.”
While her father led the way, Hannah thought how strange it was that she was finally going home after all the insanity. It felt unreal. Or maybe everything before it was unreal.
They sat in the chairs waiting for their flight in silence. Hannah didn’t know how to break into what had happened. Her father watched her, cleared his throat a few times, twiddled his thumbs.
“Dad?”
“Yeah.”
“I was kidnapped.”
“We don’t have to get into all that right now. As long as you’re okay,” her dad said. He was wearing a sweater with dress pants, his outfit of choice during press releases. He thought it made him look approachable. Maybe he was finally willing to make an effort. Except that he also had that stern look he would get when she would interrupt him while he was reading a court case.
Hannah couldn’t bear that stern look now, not when she needed him to listen.
“We need to talk. They could be after me again, and a lot has happened. I need you to listen to me.” Hannah pleaded.
“Sorry. Go on.”
Hannah fumbled at first. She hadn’t had her dad’s undivided attention in forever. She said, “Someone stuck something in my bag. It was some new technology, a mind control device. They experimented on me. It seemed like a long time, but I think it was just a few months.”
She didn’t know how to work in the cancer or the pregnancy. Her dad’s eyes glazed over when she used the words ‘mind-control’.
“Honey, I know about the diagnosis. Pancreatic Cancer. You didn’t have to run away.”
“Dad, I just told you. I didn’t run,” Hannah said. She wasn’t a liar...or a runner. But her dad was far too mainstream to believe anything out of the ordinary.
Flight 173. Any passengers with wheelchairs or strollers please start boarding.
That was their flight.
“We’ll talk more when you get home. No need to make a scene for the other passengers,” Her dad stood, and it was as if all of her joy withered away in an instant. He may or may not believe her. That remained to be seen. Either way, appearances among strangers meant more than the fact that she might be upset after having gone missing for several weeks.
Now she knew why she was so angry at Drake. When he disappeared for three days, that was classic ‘Dad’. Hannah refused to love someone who treated her like dirt...except for her dad. She was stuck with him.
They flew first class. Her dad pulled a pair of books out of his pack and then threw the pack into the overhead bin and took a seat. He handed her a technothriller, one of the few genres she didn’t read. She thanked him. She pretended to read most of the flight while she worried about the baby and how to tell her dad that extra bit of news. If he didn’t want to hear about her kidnapping, he certainly wouldn’t want to hear about the baby.
“Let’s wait here a few minutes,” her dad said after they walked off the plane. He led her to the circular baggage release.
The line wasn’t moving yet. There were a lot of people standing around waiting. Hannah said, “But you didn’t bring a suitcase.”
“We just need to time it right. The press knows I’m going to pick you up. It will be good for the law firm to get in the news again.”
Now the sweater and ‘aw shucks’ outfit made sense.
“Are you being serious?” Hannah exploded. “I’m your freaking daughter. Your daughter! I’ve been gone for two months and you use me for a publicity stunt? Forget this.” She stormed away from the baggage line which was just about to move and straight out the door without any thought to where she would go.
She was met with photographers and microphones. She hadn’t been fast enough. They asked all kinds of questions, where had she been, why had she run away, was the cancer in remission?
Hannah covered her face and turned away from the throng, running inside and making a beeline for the first set of bathrooms she saw. Her dad stopped her before she made it half-way there.
“What are you doing? We need to go out there.”
“They know I have cancer! I don’t even know how to deal with it and you tell the whole world.” Hannah said. In the meantime two cameras flashed.
“How am I news?” Hannah asked.
"Take my hand. Don’t talk. Let me answer the questions.”
Hannah’s dad towed her out in front of the press, talking about his brave daughter and her wish to fight her cancer alone until she had seen the plea from her parents.
Listening to her dad rattling off the story of her cancer like a promoter, Hannah remembered why she spent so many nights during the summer at her friend’s house. Photographed in clothes that weren’t hers by people she didn’t know, Hannah realized that for the past several months she really hadn’t belonged to
herself at all. Being dragged from kidnapper to kidnapper was terrible. Being sold out by her father was soul ripping, far worse than being implanted for a mind-control experiment.
As she got into the passenger side of the car her dad said, “We have an evening news special tomorrow night at nine and then CBS on Tuesday.”
“No.”
“You just got home. You’ll feel better once you get some food and sleep.”
“I’m not going on television. You didn’t even ask. Do you even care what happened to me? I was kidnapped and you tell everyone I was hiding out like some spoiled kid.”
“We had to explain it. You disappeared. We filed the police report, but people are going to want to know what happened.”
“Then tell them the truth.”
“You weren’t experimented on. That doesn’t happen. You probably had a nervous breakdown like your aunt. Do you want to spend the rest of your life in a hospital?”
“She was a drug addict. How is this even remotely similar?” Hannah didn’t yell even though her body shook with anger. She clutched her hands, holding them tightly in her lap. This wasn’t an argument she could win. Her dad had been browbeating her since she was ten, making her his own little traveling display case for whatever he needed at the time. She was done.
“She was a liar. Just like you.” He said that about his sister.
It was harsh. Cold. Cruel. He didn’t believe her. And suddenly, Hannah didn’t believe him. Maybe Aunt Mae had never taken drugs. Maybe it was just another of her father’s spins.
Hannah held her jaw tightly closed and stared out the window. No matter what her dad said, she ignored him. He appealed to her sense of morality, to her role as a daughter, he promised her five hundred dollars for her interview. Hannah didn’t say another word. She thought of everything she had been through, of all of the crap she had survived, and decided that she was going to run her own life from here on in. Her dad could support her decision or back off. She sure as heck didn’t mention the money in her socks.