Payback

by Vanessa Kier

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Excerpt from Aftermath

  Book List

  About the Author

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  Payback

  (SSU Series #3.5)

  by Vanessa Kier

  *****

  Payback Copyright © 2013 by Vanessa Kier

  Chapter One

  “I’m sorry, Faith.”

  Faith Andrews raised her shoulder in order to pin her cell phone closer to her ear and tightened her grip on her grocery bags. She’d broken another Bluetooth headset, dammit, and hadn’t gotten around to replacing it yet.

  “I haven’t found any reference to your brother Toby during my investigation,” Siobahn Murphy added.

  Faith grimaced as she climbed the front steps to her house. She’d really hoped her friend and former colleague would have good news for her. Siobahn’s skills as an investigative journalist were legendary. Her ability to ferret out information no one wanted to reveal was nothing short of spooky. So once Faith had seen the article Siobahn had written about missing military and law enforcement personnel, she’d contacted her friend and asked for help locating her brother. Toby, an officer with military intelligence, had been missing for a month. “Thanks, anyway, Siobahn.”

  “Are you going to tell me what’s really going on?”

  “I don’t know much more than we’ve already discussed.” Faith used her body to trap the grocery bags against the door as she fumbled for her house keys in her purse. “Toby was on a long-term, ultra secret assignment. Before he left, he promised to check in at least every two weeks via our secure email account.”

  The grocery bags slipped and threatened to break free of her one-handed grip. Where were her blasted keys? “But he missed his last two check-ins. I’ve called all his friends and coworkers that I had contact info for and no one has seen or heard from him. I’m worried.”

  Worried was putting it mildly. Despite his job often taking him away for long periods of time, Toby never failed to check in. He knew how paranoid Faith was about losing him—her best friend and last living family member.

  The grocery bags slipped another few inches toward the ground, forcing Faith to bend her knees and shove her hips closer to the door to prevent the bags from falling to the wet porch. She shoved her free hand deeper into her purse and her fingers touched cool metal. “Ah! Finally.”

  “Faith?” Siobahn’s voice held a hint of amused exasperation. Something Faith had heard all too often during the years they’d worked together. Siobahn expected to receive your full attention and didn’t appreciate knowing you were multi-tasking while talking to her.

  “Sorry. I’m trying to get the groceries inside and finally found my keys.”

  Siobahn sighed. “I don’t see how small town life can possibly suit you. Let someone else teach those snarky high schoolers and over privileged college students about journalism and come back to work for me.” Siobahn was a senior investigative reporter with one of the most prominent national newspapers. She headed a team of journalists known for their in-depth, hard-hitting reporting and Faith had once been proud to call herself a member of the team. But that life of constantly chasing down the truth to the exclusion of all else no longer appealed to her.

  “You know you’re missing the adrenaline rush of investigating a hot story,” Siobahn cajoled.

  “Actually, you’d be surprised at how much trouble a group of hormonal teenagers can cause. I get plenty of excitement.” Faith yanked the keys out of her purse, shoved the house key into the lock, and snatched her grocery bags with both hands as the door swung open.

  Unfortunately, her action caused her shoulder to lower. The phone dropped, landing on top of the stack of mail on the hardwood floor. Faith settled the grocery bags out of the way as she picked up her phone.

  “Faith? Are you okay?”

  “Ugh. Yes. Just dropped the phone. Listen, I—”

  “No Faith, you listen. You’re one of the best journalists I’ve ever trained. You’re wasting your talent with that high school newspaper and those Intro to Journalism classes you’re teaching at the college. You need to stop punishing yourself for what happened and get on with your life.”

  Faith sucked in a breath, the pain still sharp even after more than a year. Trust Siobahn to be the one person who confronted her head-on about her decision to quit journalism.

  “I really appreciate your support, Siobahn. You’re a good friend. But…” Faith closed the front door and dumped her keys back in her purse, then bent down to pick up her mail. A large manila envelope sticking out from the bottom of the stack caught her attention. Curious, she turned it over.

  The return address was for an unfamiliar lawyer’s office, but Faith’s address was written in Toby’s precise handwriting. She froze. The room spun and she closed her eyes until the dizziness passed.

  Toby, who’d been missing for a month, had sent her a package from New York City two days ago?

  “I’ve got to go, Siobahn. Thanks again for trying to find Toby,” she said woodenly. She eyed the envelope warily. What if something terrible had happened to her brother? What if this envelope contained Toby’s last will and testament?

  Ignoring Siobahn’s protest, Faith thumbed off the phone and tossed it onto the small table containing her landline phone. Then she walked to her office at the back of the house, set the envelope on her desk and just stood there with the letter opener in her hand. Unable to act. Unable to face the possibility that her brother might really be gone.

  Just open it. Since when have you become such a coward?

  She shook her head over the familiar argument. She’d become a coward the day eighteen months ago when her sister Lyndi had shot their parents to death, then turned the gun on herself.

  But if Faith’s years as an overseas investigative journalist had taught her anything, it was that delaying bad news didn’t lessen the impact.

  She took a deep breath and quickly slit open the end of the envelope. A stack of papers slid out, followed by two flash drives and a note written in Toby’s precise script on a piece of lined notebook paper.

  Faith,

  If you’re reading this note, then I’ve either been captured or killed and you need to go into hiding immediately. Grab everything essential, then follow our emergency plan.

  Love, Toby

  Faith stared in horror at the scrawled note. Toby had always joked that if the shit hit the fan and he ended up involved in an investigation that pitted him against his own superiors, he’d have to go on the run. The assumption had always been that anyone looking for Toby would immediately focus on Faith, so he’d made her practice evasive tactics as well. Their emergency plan involved a series of steps intended to help her disappear off the grid.

  The familiar rush of adrenaline kicked in. Within ten minutes, Faith had gathered everything she needed and had slipped out the back door.

  Two days later, Faith sipped her third cup of coffee and stared blearily at the Atlantic shoreline through the kitchen window of Toby’s safe house. After walking out of her neighborhood by cutting through backyards, she’d taken a circuitous route to collect some of the items Toby had hidden. She now had a nondescript dark gray sedan registered under a false name, Toby’s backup pistol, and this remote cabin on the coast to serve as her temporary home. The place was as off-the-grid as Toby
could make it. A generator provided electricity and a well supplied water. There was no Internet connection and the stove ran on propane.

  She’d removed her SIM card from her cell phone, then flushed the card down a public toilet and tossed the phone into a dumpster. Even though she had no sense of being followed, she’d still tossed and turned these past two nights, startling at every little creak and groan of the house.

  Behind her, spread out on the kitchen table, were Toby’s printed notes and Faith’s own handwritten comments. “Toby, you idiot,” she murmured. Not because she was mad at him for carrying on an investigation that had apparently resulted in his disappearance. But because he’d had the gall to tell Faith not to try and find him.

  Most likely I’m dead, Toby had written in his second note, which he’d clipped inside the cover of his printed report. I hope I’m dead and not captured. You’ll understand why after reading my report.

  Remember how I told you I was investigating something extremely sensitive? This is it. But I wasn’t assigned to this investigation. In fact, my superiors think I’m on extended leave. What I stumbled upon is so dangerous, I don’t know who to trust.

  Except for you.

  I want you to make this information public, Faith. I know you still have contacts at the top newspapers in the country. I know you’ll find a way to take this information and form it into an exposé. But only pass it on to a person you trust implicitly not to reveal my findings ahead of time to anyone in the government. If word gets back to the people involved, your life and the life of any journalist who helps you will be at risk.

  If there’s no one you trust with your life, then leave the story alone.

  Right. Like you’d ever do that.

  But please, don’t investigate my disappearance. I’m serious, Faith. Let me go.

  I love you and I know this will be the hardest thing in the world for you, but please don’t search for me. After the program has been exposed and taken apart, then maybe you’ll be able to discover what happened to me. But don’t try to find me before that. If I’m not dead, then they’ll have turned me into a creature that won’t recognize you and will kill on their order.

  There are dozens of men whose lives depend on you taking down the program. They’ll soon be beyond the point of saving if you don’t act swiftly to blow this whole thing open.

  Please. You have to save the victims. My death will be worth it if I know that no more men will suffer. The world needs to know that good, honorable men are being turned into conscienceless monsters by their own government. That the people whose job it is to protect these men instead look the other way and pretend nothing untoward has happened.

  I’m counting on you, little sister.

  Peace and love be with you.

  Toby.

  Faith had read Toby’s note again and again until she couldn’t make sense of the words through her tears. Even now, hours after she’d first read the note, indignation and fury warred with fear. How dare Toby ask her to make such a promise? How could he possibly think that she wouldn’t do everything in her power to find him if there was a chance he was still alive?

  Her throat tightened and she closed her eyes, pressing the rim of her coffee cup against her lips. In typical Toby fashion, he’d decided on the right thing to do and expected Faith to fall into line. She shook her head. His personality had always seemed better suited toward commanding men rather than spying on them. But her brother had claimed he loved the challenge of rooting out information and trying to make strategic sense out of it.

  She sighed and opened her eyes, watching dawn turn the horizon to pastel shades of pink and blue. Toby might have been one of the youngest military intelligence officers to gain his rank, and he might have a razor sharp mind when it came to analyzing data, but he was an idiot when it came to understanding the human heart.

  The proof lay in the fact that he’d told Faith not to search for him. Clearly Toby had learned nothing from her reaction to the deaths of their parents and Lyndi. For God’s sake, she’d quit her travel intensive job in order to make a home close to their grandmother, their only surviving relative. That should have given Toby a clue that Faith’s priorities now lay entirely with her family. Even when Gramma had died two months later, Faith hadn’t returned to being an overseas investigative journalist. Instead, she’d picked up and moved to Maryland so she could be closer to Toby.

  But apparently her brother still thought Faith was the same driven woman who’d chased stories across the world rather than stay home and deal with the hero worship from her difficult sister. Well, Toby would learn differently when she located him and pulled his ass out of whatever trouble he’d gotten himself into.

  First, though, she’d have to find out where he was.

  After taking a final swig of coffee, Faith set another pot to brew then settled at the kitchen table. Toby had apparently been investigating the same mysterious disappearances of military and law enforcement personnel as Siobahn. While Faith waited for the coffee to finish brewing, she started combing through first Siobahn’s article, then Toby’s report, and finally his files on the two flash drives, searching for clues that would lead her to her brother.

  What emerged was a chilling picture. A network that targeted men within the law enforcement and military communities, arranged for their kidnappings, then sent the men to a lab where they underwent treatment intended to turn them into superhuman soldiers. In the meantime, the victims were reported as dead.

  Faith shivered and rubbed her arms. Unfortunately, while Toby had uncovered the existence of the program, he did not know who was in charge on the scientific end. He also hadn’t learned what, exactly, was being done to the men. Only that several of the missing men had shown up hundreds of miles from where they’d last been spotted. They’d been bulked up on what appeared to be steroids, and had suffered from insane rage.

  Faith was beginning to understand why Toby would rather be dead than be captured. Still, she had to cling to the hope that he was alive and she could find him. But to do that, she needed help. She didn’t have the contacts within the military and law enforcement communities necessary to investigate the program. Because she was Toby’s sister, his friends and colleagues had already spoken to her about his disappearance. Yet even getting them to admit to her that they hadn’t seen Toby in a while had been as painful as pulling teeth. Faith didn’t think they’d be any more forthcoming if she started asking pointed questions.

  But Siobahn’s father and brothers were all either in the military or law enforcement. Much as she hated to involve her friend, Faith needed help.

  “Faith, my God, are you okay?” Siobahn demanded when Faith called her that evening from a disposable cell phone.

  “What?” Faith halted at the base of a sand dune and stared out over the water of Chesapeake Bay. This beach down from Baltimore offered the advantage of both privacy and the relative safety of a few dozen tourists who strolled at the edge of the water or huddled in groups to watch the sunset. Plus, it had multiple escape routes. “Yes. Of course. I’m fine. What’s wrong?”

  “What’s wrong is that someone has been poking around the newspaper, asking about you.”

  “About me?” Faith slapped down the hem of her yellow and orange flower print sundress, hoping she appeared to be just another tourist unwilling to unplug from her electronics.

  “Yes. When did we last see you? Talk to you? Were you working on any freelance projects for the paper, etc. Sheesh, girl, what kind of trouble are you in?”

  Faith squeezed her eyes shut. So. The hunt was on. She’d have to assume that meant Toby had given up information about his safe house. As soon as she finished her call with Siobahn, she’d have to find a new place to stay. Thank goodness she’d been paranoid enough this afternoon to pack up all of her things and put them in the car, just in case. “Who was asking? Anyone official?”

  “Yes. Well, sort of.” Siobahn gave a skeptical snort. “You’d think the Department of Defense
would realize that an experienced reporter can sense a lie. The story is that your brother went AWOL a few days ago and they want to talk to you as part of their investigation. But they’ve been unable to find you. However, I remembered that you said it had been almost a month since you heard from Toby, so I figured my visitor was up to no good. Therefore, I repeat, what trouble have you gotten yourself into?”

  “Not me,” Faith corrected. “Toby. Before he disappeared, he took official leave in order to continue his personal investigation into the missing military and law enforcement personnel.”

  “Well, crap.”

  “Yeah. Apparently an army friend of his went missing and was later reported dead. Some time later, Toby saw a glimpse of him on the news. When he started looking into it, Toby discovered evidence that made him think people he worked with might be involved. So he asked for time off and went into hiding.” Which scared Faith to death, because if Toby had been captured while in hiding, what chance did she, whose clandestine skills were meager compared to her brother’s, have of surviving? “Whoever is responsible for the disappearances likely kidnapped Toby, so you need to be careful, too.”

  “Which is why you left me a voicemail with the code that meant we had to use disposable phones for this conversation.”

  “Yes.” Faith took a deep breath. “But that’s not the main reason I called you. Siobahn, in your research into the missing service personnel did you ever come across reference to Kerberos?”

  “Kerberos?” Siobahn replied. “Yeah, that rings a bell. Hold on.”

  Faith scanned her surroundings for danger signs while she waited for Siobahn to pick up the phone again. She’d decided not to call Siobahn from Toby’s cabin, even though she was using a disposable cell phone. She didn’t know if technology existed that could somehow tap into their phone call and trace it back to a location, but figured it was best to err on the side of extreme caution.

  With Siobahn’s news, however, Faith feared for both her own safety and Siobahn’s. Although her friend’s article had been published a few weeks ago, she suspected that Toby’s disappearance indicated a decision to eliminate all possible sources of information on Kerberos. Which could lead them to decide to kill Siobahn, just in case she knew more than she’d printed.