by Lexi Blake
He could breathe here. For the first time in his life he felt like he could take a full breath, as though his lungs had been bound and someone had clipped the rope.
“You going to join us, Princess Jax?”
Not that everything was perfect.
“I’m not sure I have anything to add. You have the sarcasm thing down.” He kept his eyes on the scene in front of him. He wanted to go out and explore. They’d gotten in the night before, but it had been incredibly dark. He hadn’t seen a thing except the stars shining overhead. He’d stared at those for the longest time, too. He’d stood on the big front porch of the house they were staying at, his head dropped back and eyes focused on the way those diamonds sparkled in the deep midnight.
Big Tag had been the one to poke him then, too.
With a sigh, Jax turned and walked back across the great room to join his brothers at the massive dining room table. It was obviously meant for dinner parties and entertaining, but they’d taken it over and turned the whole place into one big conference room.
Story of his life. No matter where he went, the place became somewhere to work, the beauty of whatever space he was in overtaken by charts and laptops and maps to all manner of horrors. In the year and a half since he’d been freed from Mother’s tender care, he’d buried himself in work as an investigator for McKay-Taggart and Knight in London, rarely leaving the building known as The Garden. He’d become excellent at hunting down information on the dark alleys of the Internet.
He was rarely allowed outside. Sometimes he felt like he’d exchanged one cage for another.
Still, he forced himself to sit down in his chair across from his current jailor, Ian Taggart. And yes, he knew that wasn’t fair. Big Tag had kept him inside because there were several BOLOs and warrants on him. While he’d been Mother’s drone, he’d committed any number of crimes for which actual jail would be called for. But small-town Colorado should be different than London. Surely no one should be looking for him here.
Big Tag held up a file folder. “Nothing to add? I thought you were the subject matter expert on this op. Was I wrong?”
“Jax is the one who found the site in the first place,” Robert replied. Robert was the one who tried to smooth everything over. In their odd family, Robert would be the eldest brother, the one who kept them together, who took responsibility.
“So he is reason we’re here in this shit hole.” And Sasha would be the brother everyone wished had been born to another mother. His accent was Russian, thick and heavy. He looked around, his dark eyes taking in the scene.
“It’s not a shit hole. I think it’s pretty here.” Tucker was his favorite brother, his closest friend in the group. But then he and Tucker had been close inside the compound. He and Tucker and George had been a unit. Tucker had been the one to sneak into Jax’s cell after particularly brutal beatings. He was an excellent thief and he would show up with things he’d stolen from medical to ease Jax’s suffering. Many a night he’d spent under Tucker’s care. “It’s different from London. I like the trees. I got up early this morning and sat on the porch and there’s a couple of chipmunks running around. It was cool at first. I thought they were playing. Then I realized it was chipmunk porn and that dude was not a gentle lover. Like I know it sucks to be a human female sometimes, but think about the chipmunks.”
He was also the weirdest of the group.
“Oh, you must be talking about Felix and Finola.” The newest guy on the team leaned forward. He’d briefly met the man they called Henry Flanders the night before when he’d let the group into the massive mansion-like cabin after more than twenty-four hours of flights, including a side trip to Dallas to pick up the big boss. Henry Flanders was a blandly handsome man who looked to be in his early- to mid-forties. “That’s what my wife named them. And we don’t know that there’s no consent. That’s extremely judgmental of you, Tucker.”
He’d heard that Henry Flanders once had a different name. Now he was a mild-mannered husband who ran several earth-friendly businesses and loved his pretty, pregnant wife. But once he’d been a man named John Bishop and he’d been a deadly CIA operative. He’d trained Ian Taggart and Ten Smith.
Now he wore Birkenstocks and apparently didn’t mind a little rough sex.
Tucker was shaking his head. “Nope. I bore witness to that scene. No one would consent to that. No one. I’ve never thought of it before, but I think lube might be the best creation ever. Certainly the kindest.”
Big Tag sighed and took a sip of his coffee. “Knight warned me it would be this way. Could we please move on from kinky chipmunks? All you bastards were either too sleepy or too drunk to have this meeting last night. I need a briefing on why I’m here in Colorado when I could be home being used as a stud for my wife’s plans to have so many children they form their own army and take over the world. Don’t think I’m joking. My daughters have plans. They use those little pony things to lay out the battle maps.”
Dante sat back in his chair, his eyes sunken. Of course he’d been one of the drunk ones on the plane the night before. They’d come in on a private jet in a mysterious circuitous route designed to throw off whatever agency was looking for them, the airplane version of losing a tail. The private jet had been loaned to them by the royals of Loa Mali and had come with a fully stocked bar that Dante had done his damnedest to drain. “We’re here because Jax enjoys the—what do you call it? Goose chasings. He chases the gooses and we sit and do nothing.”
Ezra thought Dante was possibly Romanian. From his accent, Jax believed it.
“It’s not a wild-goose chase,” a man with a thick Scottish accent said as he walked in from the kitchen. Owen was relatively new to the “family.” He’d been born the day of the raid that freed the rest of them. Mother had used him to bring Theo and Erin Taggart to her. She’d kidnapped Owen’s mother and sister, using them as leverage to force the man to do her will. Of course, she’d killed them anyway and punished Owen for not bringing baby TJ Taggart along for the ride. Owen was the only one of the group who knew who he was, where he’d come from. But that knowledge wasn’t personal. Owen had to read about his history in a report.
Sometimes Jax wondered what his own report would look like. Not that there was more than a blank page on him. He wondered what his real name was, where he’d come from, why he was good with a computer. Other times he realized he never wanted that report. Ever. He couldn’t have a great past if he was so easily erased. And yet, he was in charge of looking for something he might not want to find. “The place is real. I’ve got too much evidence for it to be anything but real.”
Sasha shook his head. “I think people who believe in the Sasquatch think same thing.”
“Yeah, well there’s not aerial footage of Bigfoot,” he replied.
“You have satellite footage? Then why can’t we simply go to the spot?” Tucker asked. “Why the whole hiding out here thing? Not that this place isn’t cool. But why not charge in and get the files and run like hell?”
It was more complicated than that. “I’ve seen footage, but the actual longitude and latitude was redacted and I can’t find anyone who knows the exact location. Apparently if you worked at this base, you were brought in with the tech equivalent of a blindfold. And the majority of the place is underground. The footage is from years ago. I suspect the place is overgrown with vegetation now.”
“Why doesn’t someone explain what this place is exactly?” Big Tag asked. “And how it’s connected to McDonald.”
He didn’t flinch at the sound of her name, but his stomach did churn a bit. Hope McDonald. Somehow that was worse than Mother. Mother was a monster. Hope McDonald sounded normal. It reminded him that she’d had parents and a family and still turned out to be evil as fuck. “It was originally an underground base built during the height of the Cold War. It was meant to be used to protect military big wigs and their families. Over the years it morphed into a scientific base where certain experiments could go on in secrecy.”
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br /> Big Tag frowned and opened the file. “So the Agency took it over.”
It wasn’t a question. The boss knew where to put the blame. “The CIA took over in the early nineties. From the information I’ve discovered, it was code-named The Ranch.”
Henry Flanders’s jaw tightened. “I’ve heard the name before.”
Big Tag glanced over at the other former CIA operative in the room. “What do you know about this, John? I’m sorry. Henry. Too many names. I’m glad I never stayed long enough in the Agency to acquire all the names long-term operatives do.”
A faint smile crossed Henry’s face. “Well, the one time I asked you to go undercover you called yourself Frodo Baggins. Seriously. He had a passport and everything. I have no idea how that got by support.”
Tag grinned. “Don’t tell Charlie because she thinks I was a virgin until I met her, but I was banging the chick in charge of support. It was her idea. She was a geek girl, probably with a lot in common with Finola. And I thought it was quite apropos. You were asking me to escort a shipment of arms into a jihadist camp so we could find information. Believe me. I felt like the dude with the ring.”
Jax didn’t want to sit and listen to old war stories. He was anxious to get out, to see something that wasn’t a club in London or a bank he was supposed to rob. For the first time it felt like the world was right there and he was stuck in here. On the outside looking in. Except he wanted to be outside…
“The Ranch was a black ops site. It was highly classified. I only heard rumors but I suspect it was a medical research facility,” Henry explained. “What you have to understand about the Agency is that there are different branches and those branches have many teams and those teams divide into units. It’s a big bureaucracy and sometimes one hand has no idea what the other is up to.”
“Is that how Ezra ended up getting fired?” Owen asked.
Ezra Fain was their new “dad.” If Taggart was the boss, then Fain was the man who watched over them on a day-to-day basis now that they’d left the safety of The Garden. Fain had gone into town earlier to meet with some of the authority figures of Bliss, Colorado. It was all to make sure they could operate in peace. A small town was a good place to hide, but the locals would definitely notice all the new faces. Fain had to make sure their cover would be secure.
“Fain left the Agency because his side of the investigation lost with brass,” Taggart explained. “You know every intelligence group in the world would love to get their hands on any one of you. Well, at least on a few of you. Owen is protected by his citizenship. My brother has a verifiable past and connections. But the rest of you have no ties. I can say I think Robert and Tucker and Jax are Americans all I like, but I can’t prove it. Sasha, we’re almost certain you’re Russian, but there are no records. I’m pretty sure Dante was spit from the bowels of hell, hence his name.”
Sasha nodded readily. “Yes, this I could believe. What you are saying is Ezra wanted to deal with us one way. Levi Green wants to bring us all in and crack us open until he find out how the drug worked in our brain. The Agency prefer Green’s method and that’s why Ezra was told to get with program or leave.”
Sasha was a bastard, but he wasn’t stupid. He’d made the point nicely. “That means we can trust Ezra. He gave up his career to help us. But it also means the Agency probably won’t stop.”
Dante frowned. “Or this Ezra is setting us all up and we will get into this laboratory and find ourselves being studied.”
Jax felt weary. They’d been arguing about Ezra Fain’s motives from the moment the man had come on the scene.
Owen stared at the man. “He’s not like that. He’s a good man. Everyone is working hard to help us. We can’t treat them like dirt.”
Dante shrugged and stood up, pushing back from the table. It was obvious which side of the argument he was on. “So you say. As for people helping, I don’t know about this, either. All I can tell is no one knows who we are and it’s been a year and a half. I think they care not much. They’re getting free work from us.”
“I’m not getting much out of you, buddy,” Taggart said. “Jax, Robert, and Owen earn their keep. Tucker is at least somewhat amusing. Sasha is fairly good at communications, even though I can’t understand a word he says most of the time. You spend almost all your time drinking and complaining about what’s not happening. If you don’t like it, the door is that way.”
Dante stared at the big boss. “Well, you’ve taken me to a place where if I leave I will likely be eaten by bear. I think I’ll stay. When you need me to kill someone, wake me up.”
He stalked away. Dante was so dark. Besides Sasha, he’d spent the most time with Moth…McDonald. Sasha had been her favored son and Dante, well, he’d tried to help Dante, too, but it was like the man welcomed the pain.
Taggart leaned back, obviously tired from the long night’s travel and next to no sleep. “Could someone explain what McDonald’s connection to The Ranch is?”
He glanced to the stairs where Dante had disappeared. Dante was sharing a room with Sasha there. Despite how large the house was, they were bunking together. Still, Sasha didn’t seem to care that his partner had left. Jax took a deep breath. Tucker was his partner. He couldn’t run after every one of his brothers who had problems. He would never stop running. He focused on the issue at hand. “From the information I’ve put together, The Ranch was abandoned. It sat dormant for years and then it was reopened, but this time the Agency accepted cash for rental space, so to speak. Cash and a glimpse into some of the things certain pharmaceutical companies were interested in developing that might not get by the FDA.”
“Why would they research stuff they can’t sell?” Owen asked.
“The dark stuff can lead to stuff they can sell,” Henry explained. “The FDA has all sorts of rules. The Ranch offered them a place to experiment outside the normal spaces and with almost no oversight. I assure you plenty of the drugs we use today weren’t developed with kindness in mind. And they can make a ton of money on the Dark Web selling torture drugs to governments and jihadists and drug cartels. There’s a whole world under the shiny one we see.”
He knew that better than most. “The intel I found has a pharmaceutical company called Kronberg doing research at The Ranch. Hope worked there at the time and I’ve found records of her flying into Colorado Springs. The flight in and the flight out were months apart. She was here but there are no hotel reservations, no cars booked. I clock her time here during a four-year period at one thousand forty-two days. She was here and she was working on her time dilation drug. I believe her early notes are still in that base.”
“Why wouldn’t she have taken them with her?” Tucker leaned in.
Henry took that one. “Because if her company was paying for her to have that space, one of the ways they would pay would be in information. The Agency would have kept documentation on all the experiments that went on there.”
“She developed the drug right here,” Taggart mused. “Her father was a senator before he became a corpse. I’m sure he was the one who put her in touch with the Agency. No wonder they’re fighting. They helped to develop the drug. And the timing of her leaving would fit. She left Kronberg when she kidnapped my brother.”
“There’s more to it. Something happened right before McDonald left for Argentina.” He’d spent the better part of the last eighteen months putting this timeline together. “The rumor floating around is that there was a biological incident at The Ranch. They shut it down overnight three years ago and no one has been back since. That’s why we need the bio suits, although I doubt there’s a real biohazard. I believe that’s a smoke screen to keep people out.”
“Then what’s the real reason they shut it down?” Robert asked.
He’d thought about this long and hard and come up with only one reason that made sense. “At roughly the same time there was a shift in power in the presidency. Zack Hayes was elected and he cleaned house. The Agency got a new head. A whole lot of fil
es were deleted during the regime change, and one of them was all information involving The Ranch. But before that delete command was pushed through, I found evidence that The Ranch itself was closed up and locked down to wait for a more amenable administration. This all went down a few weeks before McDonald shows up in Grand Cayman and steals Theo Taggart and places him in her stable of experiments.”
“That’s awfully coincidental.” Taggart was staring down at the file in front of him like he could change the words on the page.
“Yes, but we’re talking about the intelligence world. It’s not surprising.” He’d learned a lot about this world. “The Agency is good with coincidence.”
“What does that mean?” Robert asked.
Robert took point on logistics. He was incredibly good at making sure things flowed smoothly. Sometimes it was hard to believe that once he’d fought on a Dallas street to try to bring Robert back to Mother. He could close his eyes and feel how hard his brother had fought. They’d been standing in the middle of a park with food trucks around them and Robert had battled them all to retain his memory, as sad and pitiful as it was. Jax had been the bad guy that day. He’d been the one on the wrong side, and he’d paid for it in blood and humiliation. He’d watched two of his brothers jump into traffic.
He’d been punished for not doing the same.
“It means that they shut down the project,” Taggart replied. “It means that they thought they couldn’t do anything with the data at the time. Hayes wasn’t supposed to win the election. He was behind in the polls right up until his wife was killed. He was swept into office with a sympathy vote. The Agency hadn’t counted on that. I still have thoughts on the assassination of Joy Hayes, but this isn’t the time or place to go into that. What affects us is that the Agency thought they would get one president and they got another. The head of The Ranch project might shut it down until such time as they get an administration they believe they could work with.”