“Hi,” I said, holding out my hand. “I'm Olivia. I just joined the team.”
The man took it and gave it a shake, looking into my eyes a little longer than was necessary. I had no idea how long it had been since he touched a woman, but given how tightly he was gripping my hand – and the fact that he didn't seem able to let it go – I figured it had been a while.
“Keith,” he said. “Keith Stearn.”
“Nice to meet you, Keith,” I said and pointed at the hand he was holding with my other hand. “I'm gonna need that back though.”
Color flared in his cheeks and he quickly let go of my hand, quickly picking up his coffee cup as if giving himself something to do with his hands. He lowered his eyes and muttered an apology. I glanced at my watch and felt the seconds slipping by – I didn't have much time for subtlety.
“So, what do you, Keith?” I asked. “You part of the strike teams too?”
He laughed and then looked at me. “Seriously?”
I shrugged and gave him a flirty smile. “What? You look like a man who can take care of himself.”
“Well, I do work out with some of the martial arts instructors, so maybe in time, I'll join the strike teams,” he said, a note of pride in his voice. “But my official job is with the tech team. I help maintain all of the terminals and servers that run everything in this place.”
Bingo. I knew he was with tech – I could see that just by looking at him. But the fact that he was one of the crew who maintained the server farm was even better. A lucky break for me.
“I'm terrible with computers,” I laughed. “It's all I can do to turn mine on.”
Apparently feeling a little emboldened, Keith looked at me, an all-too familiar gleam in his eye. It was a gleam I'd seen in the eye of too many men in too many bars in too many places.
“Oh, I bet you don't have much of a problem turning things on. Like, at all.”
Ordinarily, a crack like that would have earned him a punch in the mouth. But given that I was pressed for time and I needed him on my side – at least temporarily – I just flashed him my best smile and giggled. And then felt like punching myself in the mouth.
“I bet you don't have much of a problem with that either,” I said, giving him a small smile.
Color flared in his cheeks again and he cleared his throat. “I do okay.”
“I bet,” I said. “Listen, maybe we should get together for a drink sometime?”
He nodded quickly – far too quickly and eagerly. “Yeah, I – we – should,” he said, trying to maintain his composure and failing badly. “We should do that. Yeah.”
“Great,” I said. “It's a date. Anyway, I need to get to my station. But like I said, I'm new here – I'm not sure which floor I'm supposed to be on.”
“Well, what are you doing?”
“Security in the labs,” I said. “And sweeping the sub-floors.”
“Well, the holding cells are on the fourth floor, labs on the third, server farm on the second, and administrative offices on the first,” he stammered, obviously eager to please me.
“Great,” I said. “Thank you.”
We stood up at the same time, and as we left the lounge area, I bumped into him, nearly falling over. Keith caught me and held me up, giving me a wide smile.
“Careful now,” he said.
“Thanks for the catch,” I said and gave him a flirtatious little wink. “My hero.”
He beamed so brightly, I though he might explode right then and there. I walked away, leaving him to revel in his heroics, and made my way over to the elevators to the sub-floors. Slipping the badge, I'd swiped from him when I “tripped,” out of my sleeve, I swiped it across the keypad. I hadn't been issued my own badge yet and didn't have access to the sub-floors. Which made swiping Keith's a necessity. I knew I wouldn't have long before the ruse was discovered and they came looking for me, so I needed to act quickly.
Glancing at my watch again, I saw that I was down to about fifteen minutes before the bus rolled in. The security measures needed to be down when Luca and his team arrived, making the need to act swiftly all the more pressing. With so much on the line – including my sister's freedom – the pressure was almost suffocating and I felt on the verge of a panic attack.
As the doors to the elevator closed, I let out a long breath. “Get it together, Marine,” I told myself. “Keep your shit together.”
I pressed the button for the second floor and let the elevator take me down as I tried to keep my composure. My sister was just a couple of floors down. We were so close. I was so close to getting her back. I just needed to do my part to make sure it happened.
A moment later, the doors chimed and opened to a plain white room. Every surface gleamed beneath the bright white fluorescent lights and it radiated sterility. Stepping out, I made my way to the door at the far end of the room. Swiping Keith's key across the pad, the door buzzed and slid aside, revealing a dimly lit, chilled room beyond.
I stepped into the room and felt like I'd stepped into the guts of a spacecraft. Tall towers were in neat, orderly, precise rows. Dozens of them. They all had rows of flashing lights and equipment housed within the towers. I couldn't even begin to guess what everything was or what it did.
But I didn't need to know. That wasn't my mission. My only objective was to get the thumb drive Asher had given me into one of the servers. His guys would do the rest.
I walked down the rows of towers, looking for the one that would be the least likely to be noticed. I found it somewhere near the middle back of the room. It was out of the way and if John somehow figured out what I was doing and swept the server farm, it would take some time for them to find it. And hopefully by then, it would already be too late.
Slipping the drive out of my pocket, looked at it for a moment, and gave it a quick kiss for luck.
“It's all up to you now, guys,” I said. “Make it count.”
I plugged the drive into a USB port and headed for the door. I was scheduled to do some Krav Maga training and needed to get up to the instruction area before I was missed. I pressed the button to open the door to the white room where the elevator was located and felt my heart drop straight into my shoes.
Just beyond the door stood John and two of his guards. All of their faces were as expressionless as stone and the guards had their automatic rifles trained on me.
“Olivia,” John said. “What are you doing down here?”
I cleared my throat and tried to control my nervousness. “I've got Krav Maga training today,” I said. “And I was looking for the locker room.”
“Oh, training?” John said, raising his eyebrows.
I nodded. “Yes, sir.”
“Well, where's your gym bag?” he asked.
I wanted to kick myself for being so careless. For not having a cover story worked out ahead of time. It was sloppy and stupid – and was very likely going to be the death of me. I said a silent prayer that Luca and his team got there – and soon.
“For that matter,” John went on, “why are you using a stolen key card to access the server farm?”
Another question I didn't have an answer for. “Look, sir, I –”
“Enough with the bullshit. Escort Ms. Bowden to my office,” John said. “And have the techs sweep the server farm. We need to know what she was doing in there.”
“Right away, sir,” one of the guards said.
They stepped forward and I put my hands up, allowing them to shepherd me to the elevators. As I passed John, he looked at me and though I expected to see anger or rage, what I saw in his face struck me as entirely odd. For in his face, I saw what looked like disappointment.
The doors slid shut and the guards sat me down in John's office, standing post just outside the door.
Chapter Twenty-One
“Let's skip all of the bullshit, Olivia,” John said. “I don't have time for it, and frankly, lying is beneath you. Give it to me straight and maybe I won't have you executed. Maybe.”
<
br /> “Well, that's reassuring,” I said.
“It's the best you're going to get,” he said. “And under the circumstances, you should be grateful.”
I leaned back in my seat and stared at him. John sat across from me, behind a large, desk that held a computer terminal and several piles of neatly stacked, orderly paperwork. Everything had a place and everything was in its place. John obviously craved order – and judging by how precise and neat everything in his office was, down to the pictures on the walls, he was borderline OCD about it.
As I looked around the room, my eyes fell on a picture that piqued my interest. It was of a younger John standing next to a woman about my age. She had auburn colored hair and milky white skin – and she wore the uniform of a Marine. If I had to guess, it was his daughter – and honestly, we very likely could have passed for sisters. It was an interesting piece of information I stored away – maybe something I could use for leverage.
“If you're not going to execute me,” I said, “what would you do with me?”
He shrugged. “It all depends on you, Olivia,” he said. “You're obviously conspiring with the enemy. Play your cards right and you won't have to live your life down at Gitmo. Maybe you can do it in a prison somewhere here in the States.”
“Wow,” I said. “Life in prison.”
“That's what happens when you ally yourself with terrorists.”
“Terrorists?” I asked. “What terrorists?”
He smirked. “Lying doesn't become you, Marine,” he said. “I should have seen it straight away. But you – distracted me. I was temporarily blinded.”
“Should have seen what?”
He steepled his fingers in front of him and looked at me. “You know, they say we all have a doppelganger in this world,” he said. “Somebody who looks just like us. And it took me a minute to see it, but you bear a very, very striking resemblance to the red-haired girl in the cage downstairs.”
Anger and fear flooded my body when he mentioned Emily. He'd seen the resemblance. Maybe he'd even seen how I reacted to her when I was down in the cells with him. Had my reaction piqued his curiosity? Had he done something to her because of it?
“I swear to God, if you hurt a hair on her head, I –”
“Empty threats are even less becoming than lies,” he said, waving me off. “When I figured out we had your sister downstairs – and that she was one of these goddamn animals we're fighting – I knew you were compromised. Not what you said you were. It didn't take me long to figure out your true mission here in this facility. So, I had her killed.”
A rage, dark and abiding, flooded my body. With a cry born of that rage, I jumped out of my seat, and lunged at him. John was ready for it and punched me square in the face, knocking me backward. He came around the desk, a pistol at his side. He loomed over me, aiming his sidearm at my face. My mouth was filled with the taste of my blood and I felt it flowing from my nose – which was more than likely broken.
As he loomed over me, one of his guards opened the door and looked in. “Everything okay, sir?”
“I'm handling it,” he growled. “Stand your post.”
The door closed and John looked at me with a maniacal light in his eyes. I stared into his face and saw a pain so deep that I realized exactly what it meant. Knew exactly why he was on this crusade to wipe shifters off the face of the Earth – and what his daughter had to do with it.
“Shifters killed your daughter,” I said, pointing to the picture on the wall. “That's why you hate them so much, right? That's why you're so intent on killing them?”
“Worse,” he said. “They turned her into one of them. They made me kill my own little girl.”
I felt my stomach drop and the wave of horror that washed over me was beyond imagining. That was the last thing I'd expected to hear.
“Y – you killed your own daughter?” I asked, my voice barely more than a whisper.
“What was the alternative? Let her live her life as one of those – animals?”
“Sir, they're not what you think,” I said. “They're not the monsters you imagine them –”
His arm lashed out and he pistol-whipped me, rocking my head to the side. I felt the blood flowing from a fresh cut he'd opened on my cheek and I was literally seeing stars.
“They are,” he seethed. “They're monsters. They stole my little girl from me. And they deserve to be eradicated.”
There was no convincing him of anything other than what his own pain was telling him. He believed the shifters had stolen his little girl from him. And rather let her live out her life, he'd killed her – and then embarked on this fanatical crusade to rid the world of their kind.
He was a zealot. Beyond a true believer. And there was going to be no getting through to him. The only way a man like John could be dealt with was by putting a bullet in him. Because if you didn't put him down, he was going to keep coming at you and coming at you until one of you was finally dead. John was the kind of man who most definitely would strap on an explosive vest and run into a place filled with shifters.
The door opened again and the guard looked nearly frantic. “Sir, there's a problem,” he said. “Please stay in your office and I'm going to have a full protective detail brought down.”
John nodded and then looked at me, absolute fury in his face. “What in the hell have you done?”
I gave him an evil smirk. “You're about to find out.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
Luca
“I promise you, that if you give us up or tip your guards off in any way that we're here,” I said softly. “I'm going to let Mariana cut your balls off – and then I'm going to kill everybody in your life that you love. You'll live, but anybody you've even spoken to is going to die. Horribly and painfully. Do you understand me?”
Sweat rolled the man's face and he wouldn't meet my eyes. “Understood,” was all he muttered.
“Do you believe that I'll do what I say I'll do?”
He nodded quickly, staring straight at the road ahead.
“Good. That's good,” I said. “Because I am a man of my word.”
I sat down in a seat next to Mariana that was near the driver's seat, keeping a close eye on him. She looked at me and smirked, suppressing a laugh. She knew I'd never follow through on my threat. But the driver didn't and he was the only one I needed to convince.
“We're approaching the gates,” the driver announced.
“Remember what I told you,” I said menacingly.
The bus came to a stop and the driver opened the door for the guard. The guard, obviously bored with what was a mundane and tedious job, gave all of us a cursory glance – not really bothering to check us out.
“Mornin' Darren,” he said to the driver. “Pick up any terrorists on your way in this morning?”
“Yeah, mornin',” he replied with a nervous chuckle. “Nope, not today.”
We waited as the guards outside finished searching the undercarriage with mirrors mounted on long poles. A few moments later, there were two loud bangs on the outside of the bus. The guard gave the driver a nod and stepped back out of the bus.
The driver let out a sigh of relief and got the bus moving again. He drove up a long driveway that led to the rear of the building and I watched as a large door opened. Standing up, I turned and looked at our assembled team, feeling my adrenaline begin to surge.
“Okay everybody, this is it,” I called. “This is where things get hairy. Do what you can to preserve human life. But do not sacrifice your own. There are going to be casualties in this fight, but let's do our best to minimize them if at all possible. Our main objective is to get the prisoners out and then demo this whole facility.”
The driver pulled the bus to a stop and turned the engine off. He looked at me with fear in his eyes. Mariana stepped forward and stuck a needle filled with a powerful sedative in his neck. The man was going to sleep for a while.
“You all have your assignments,” I said. “It's time to roll
.”
Mariana stepped aside and let the team go pouring out of the bus. The minute they hit the ground, they all shifted into their bear forms and charged deeper into the building. Their job was to create the diversion we needed. Asher, Mariana, and I were heading for the sub-floors to release the prisoners. And I had to hope that Olivia had gotten the drive in place and our tech team had been able to take control of the facility.
And of course, I had to hope against all hope that Olivia was okay.
Chaos erupted as the sounds of screaming, gunfire, and the roar of the bears filled the cavernous building. The sound of a siren blaring added to the cacophony, making it sound like all hell had literally broken loose.
“They're playing our song, boys,” Mariana said and stepped off the bus.
We followed her out and found our way to the elevators Olivia had told us about. But she wasn't there waiting for us as we'd agreed upon.
“Something's wrong,” I said. “Olivia's not here.”
I scanned the scene of chaos and carnage in the building. It didn't look like our team was going to be able to preserve much human life. The fighting looked fierce and I saw bodies – human and shifter alike – dropping, covered in blood.
Asher spoke into the Bluetooth comm device he was wearing. “Control, strike team leader. We are in the building,” he said. “Do you have the power?”
“Affirmative, strike team leader,” came the reply. “We own the place.”
“Power the elevator,” Asher said. “We're going down.”
We stepped into the elevator and the doors slid shut behind us.
“Control,” Asher said. “Do you have a location on Olivia?”
Before we'd let her go into the building on her own, Asher had insisted on Olivia allowing us to put a subdermal tracking beacon on her, which would help us find her if things went sideways – and it appeared that things were definitely going sideways, making me grateful for his foresight.
“Administrative level, lead,” came the reply. “First sub-floor.”
“Find her,” Asher said. “Mariana and I will head to the cells and get everybody out.”
Saved by a Bear (Legends of Black Salmon Falls Book 2) Page 12