by Nancy Madore
For some reason, Nadia thought of her grandmother. Helene had been caught up in the agendas of the people in her life, until she had lost every bit of freedom to act on her own. Nadia wouldn’t let that happen to her! And yet, it could easily have happened already. Supposing they hadn’t figured out Lilith’s plan in time—Nadia could have been killed in the earthquake that would have struck Alaska! Or if Lilith hadn’t gotten to Wessler in time—there was a very good chance that Nadia and the others would have been implicated in the plot to take out HAARP.
Nadia wiped away the tears that had fallen.
“No!” she said adamantly. “I will not be a pawn in anyone’s game!”
What do you want?
She thought about this for several long minutes.
I want to get away from here.
She looked out over the park again.
I want to laugh again.
She picked up her phone and dialed a number.
To hell with the consequences!
“Hey there!” said the surprised voice on the other end.
“Come away with me,” she said.
There was a pause. “Where?”
“Does it matter?”
There was another pause. “No.”
A thrill shot through her. “Really?”
“Sure. When do you want to leave?”
“I can be ready in a few hours,” she said breathlessly. She could hardly believe that she was actually going through with it.
“That gives you two hours to figure out where we’re going.”
Nadia laughed, feeling giddy and nervous, both at the same time. She thought about Lilith. “I’m thinking someplace warm,” she said.
“I guess its south then.”
“First I want to tell you something,” she said. “I don’t care what you do with the information. In fact…I don’t want to know.”
“What is it?”
“Lilith just left my office,” she said. She waited a moment, and when there was no reply she continued. “She has the ring. It’s…” Nadia couldn’t help it. She had to laugh. “It’s Poseidon. The Poseidon.” She paused again. The line sounded as if it had gone dead. “Hello?”
“I’m here.”
“She wants Asmodeous in exchange for Poseidon,” she continued. “She’s left instructions for reaching her.” Nadia waited for a response. “Are you getting this?”
“Yep.”
“Well?” She prodded.
“I thought you didn’t want to know!”
Nadia laughed. “I don’t…I guess.”
“Hey,” he said. “Maybe I don’t want any part of it either.”
Nadia considered this. “Are we doing the right thing?”
There was another long pause. “Yeah,” said the voice on the other end after a moment. “I think forgetting all this for a while is exactly the right thing.”
“I think so too,” Nadia agreed.
“I’ll see you in a few,” he said.
“Oh…and Clive?” she said.
“Yes?”
“Thanks.”
Masquerade is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2014 by Nancy Madore
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States
ISBN: 9781499298499 (paperback)
BN ID 2940149446322 (Nook)
ASIN: B00FZ4YHUK (Kindle)
Edited by Mark Hackenberg
For Mikey
Masquerade
Contents
Book 3: Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
“Oh for shame, how the mortals put the blame on us gods, for they say evils come from us; but it is they, rather, who by their own recklessness win sorrow beyond what is given.”
—Homer’s Odyssey
Prologue
Delta Junction, Alaska
Beth Timmons tipped the bottle and guzzled several more mouthfuls of the pungent fluid, heedless of the excess that dribbled down her lips and chin. It surprised her that, no matter how much she drank, she never grew to like the taste any better. She looked around in a moment of sudden clarity. She was sitting on her kitchen floor in the dark. She studied the bottle of vodka in her hand, wondering, vaguely, how it had gotten there.
Ah, well. She had made it through another day. That was what mattered.
Yeah, but you’re drinking again, she could almost hear him say.
I don’t have to listen to you anymore, Wayne, she countered. You’re dead.
She instantly regretted the thought. Tears filled her eyes and she squeezed them shut.
I didn’t mean it Wayne!
The room was too quiet. She wondered if he was out there somewhere, watching her. Where did people go when they died? She’d never bothered to form any convictions about it one way or the other, believing it too far off in the future to think about. All she knew for certain was that, if Wayne was watching her, he would definitely be disappointed.
She let the tears fall unchecked as she took another drink. She couldn’t get through this without a little help. She wasn’t even all that sure she wanted to get through it. What was she going to do without Wayne?
It didn’t seem real. That was the worst part. She couldn’t quite bring herself to believe it. How could Wayne have had a stroke? He wasn’t even forty and he was as healthy as an ox! And since when did a stroke do that to a person? She’d seen the effects of a stroke before—she was, after all, a nurse—and, though it wasn’t uncommon to find some disfigurement of the body, this went way beyond anything she’d ever seen before. Thank goodness she was in Minnesota with his aunt when it happened. Beth didn’t know what she would’ve done if she had been the one to find him. As it was, she would never forget the sight that greeted her at the morgue the following day. Wayne looked as if he’d been ripped apart from the inside. She didn’t believe that it was him, at first. Horrified, she’d demanded to know what they’d done to his body. But the mortician insisted that that was the condition it was in when they picked it up. They had pictures and everything.
It wasn’t just the way Wayne looked when they found him, either. Those men from T.D.M.R.—did they think she was stupid? The way they went through the house, searching through Wayne’s things and taking everything they wanted without so much as a warrant! Well, she’d fooled them. She took another swig of the vodka and smi
led, wondering what they would think when they finally hacked their way into her mother’s old IBM and only found her collection of family recipes. Good luck with those!
But a little part of her knew they’d be back.
Let them, she thought, raising the bottle to her lips yet again. No one knew about Wayne’s secret room in the cellar except her. And even she hadn’t been allowed in there. Even now—with Wayne gone—she still couldn’t bring herself to go in. If there was some dark secret he was keeping from her, she didn’t want to know what it was. Her curiosity hadn’t got the better of her while he was alive, so why should she open that can of worms now that he was dead?
And yet, whatever was in there might explain what happened to him. Disbelieving though she still was, there was no doubting that Wayne had met with some kind of foul play.
Foul play. Beth almost laughed at the term. Didn’t it mean murder? And if so, why not just call it that? But she knew why. ‘Murder’ was too brutal a word—and much too real. She wasn’t ready to use it on Wayne.
None of it seemed real. Not Wayne, not the goons from T.D.M.R.—not even the disaster in California. The strangest part was that it had all happened in that one day. She couldn’t help wondering if she’d gotten trapped in one of those nightmares where nothing made sense but everything was somehow connected. And yet, how could Wayne’s death be connected to those terrible earthquakes in California?
For the moment, a warm fuzziness was falling over Beth like a cozy blanket. She had made it through another day. That was all that mattered. Wasn’t that what they were always telling you at those Alcoholics Anonymous meetings?
Beth chuckled. Her method for getting through the day was probably not what Alcoholics Anonymous had in mind. Oh well. Being sober wasn’t everything it was cracked up to be. Any minute now, she would drift into blissful unconsciousness, and that left being sober in the dust.
Chapter 1
Jolly Beach, Antigua
Nadia took a deep breath and smiled. The smell of the ocean calmed her nerves, and the steady rumbling of the waves as they hit the shore soothed her troubled mind. If only she could stay on this little island forever. It occurred to her that this wasn’t all that impractical. Living in Antigua would be no more costly than living in Manhattan. She could move BEACON’s headquarters here—and save money on an expensive office by working from home.
She could start over. Meet new people. She thought about Yolanda, the waitress she’d met the night before. Her life seemed so simple. They had talked until the wee hours of the morning. Yolanda was saving her money for a new stove—one of those specialty ones with a grill in the middle, and two ovens instead of one. Cooking was her passion, and her ultimate goal was to someday become a chef in one of the finer restaurants on the island.
Most of the natives were like Yolanda. They were carefree and content with what life had to offer. Their lives, while less complicated, seemed more meaningful somehow. Isolated as they were, they were less affected by world events. It was easy to ignore what was happening in the rest of the world when you were surrounded by water, like an embryo floating tranquilly in its mother’s womb.
But did that necessarily mean they were safe?
Nadia steered her thoughts away from the direction they were taking. Ever since that terrifying incident the night she arrived in Antigua she’d been afraid of her thoughts. They were dangerous now, inundated with land mines no matter which direction they turned. There were so many land mines—explosive little reminders of things she didn’t want to remember. It seemed like they were everywhere. Families playing on the beach reminded her of her father, who wasn’t her father but something else—something ominous that she herself had helped to destroy. Lovers walking hand in hand reminded her of Will—though she wasn’t ready to consider why this bothered her so much. Even the relatively calming ocean brought reminders with each crashing wave that hit the shore, of the terrible events that had set off the San Andreas Fault and sent the west coast crumbling into the sea.
Of course, the west coast hadn’t actually gone into the sea. That was just the impression everyone got when it disappeared beneath the water. The beam had hit the fault dead on, triggering ‘the big one’ that seismologists were always warning about, and creating five more massive earthquakes along that same fault—as well as countless smaller ones throughout the world. The initial quake, which was later given a magnitude of ten-point-three, moved the earth for over an hour. It annihilated everything west of the fault, and the subsequent tsunamis—which continued for four long days—made it appear as if California had, indeed, been swallowed up in the Pacific Ocean. And to some degree it had. Everything of value was gone, including millions of innocent lives.
It could have been worse. If the San Andreas Fault had been any bigger, it would have been worse. But there was only so far the earth could move. As it was, no one ever thought that fault was capable of anything bigger than an eight-point-one. But they never anticipated it being struck by a tremendous beam of energy coming out of the atmosphere.
It was the biggest earthquake the world had ever seen—seven points bigger than the previous record of nine-point-six.
Conspiracy theorists were running amok. Religious leaders were predicting the end of the world. Everyone was seeking answers. But the people of this little island, who were used to the tempestuous character of Mother Nature, simply shook their heads as if to say; ‘Yes, it is the risk that we all take every day of our lives.’ Then they would shrug and smile. ‘Enjoy life while you still can,’ seemed to be their unshakable motto.
The hardest thing for Nadia was discovering that she hadn’t really been making things any better. In fact, her interference had made them a lot worse. Her opinion of BEACON, the highly regarded ‘first relief’ organization that she’d built from the ground up, had completely changed. What was once her pride and joy—the thing that gave her life meaning—now only brought forth feelings of failure and defeat.
Nadia’s gaze swept the beach. There was beauty and splendor everywhere she looked. She concentrated on this, shutting out all those other images. There was one thought in her mind, willing all the others away. She did not want to have another episode.
She wondered if she would be able to prevent it. She hadn’t been thinking about anything in particular when that first attack hit. It had come out of nowhere, and was more jarring than anything she had ever experienced before. Funny how something like that makes everything else seem irrelevant. Time stands still when you think you’re about to die. Nothing else matters.
Nadia shuddered at the memory. When it happened, it took her completely by surprise. She was in her hotel room getting ready for dinner, when all of a sudden her heart started racing. She stopped what she was doing and waited for the feeling to pass, reminding herself that she was much too young to have a heart attack.
But the racing continued, becoming painful, and suddenly her heart seemed too heavy for her chest. Something was wrong. Her arms and legs were growing numb. She tried to take a deep breath but couldn’t seem to get any air in. It was as if her lungs were swelling shut.
It occurred to her that she could be having an allergic reaction.
Or maybe she had been poisoned!
Nadia made a dash for the door but she fell down before she got there. She crawled the rest of the way, gasping for air as she clawed at the doorknob. Her chest felt like it was going to explode. At last the door opened and she crept out into the hall.
“Help me!” she tried to scream, but it came out sounding more like a squeak. Oh, God, she thought. I’m going to die in this hallway!
She heard the ‘ding’ of the elevator, but it seemed like an eternity before whoever came out of it spotted Nadia.
“Help!” a woman yelled. “Someone’s hurt!” Doors opened and shut as the guests came pouring out. Suddenly Clive was beside her.
“Nadia!” he cried. “What is it?”
He picked up her wrist and held it a moment. Then
he examined her face. She was soaking wet and gasping for air.
“Call nine-one-one,” said someone in the background.
“Poison,” Nadia choked out and several people gasped.
Clive’s eyes narrowed. “Does anyone have a paper bag?” he asked over his shoulder. People began scrambling around behind him, but a bag wasn’t produced quickly enough.
“Nadia, look at me!” he demanded so forcefully that she did. “I’m going to help you breathe, okay?” He didn’t wait for her to answer. “Now close your mouth and breathe in through your nose,” he ordered, “for one…two…three, and hold.” Nadia struggled to do as he instructed. “That’s good,” he continued. “Now let the air out through your mouth. Slowly. That’s it. Nice and slow. Now wait—look at me, Nadia—wait, wait. Okay, now breathe in through your nose again, for one…two…three.”
Nadia was trembling violently by this time, but she stared helplessly up into Clive’s face, focusing all of her attention on what he was telling her to do and trusting in his ability to keep her alive until the paramedics got there.
After the panic had run its course—and even later, when she was sitting in the hospital room listening to the doctor explain what had just happened to her—Nadia still couldn’t believe that she was going to be all right. That was a panic attack?
“But I could’ve died!” she exclaimed.
The doctor assured her that she would’ve passed out before she died, and then her breathing would’ve gone back to normal. She’d been hyperventilating. That was all.
Nadia was reminded of her assistant, Georgia, who sometimes threatened a panic attack when presented with unpleasant or especially problematic tasks. Nadia had often wondered if she wasn’t just using the panic attacks as an excuse, but now, having experienced one herself, she could understand how it might make a person less amenable. Just the thought of it happening again started her sweating.