“But I wasn’t fucked over by the law. I was in a clusterfuck of a situation and the military did what they thought they had to in order to protect the woman that was already victimized.”
“Are you really that fucking blind? The military didn’t do anything to protect your rights. They used you as a fucking scapegoat.”
“And you really think that I’m going to somehow redeem myself by trying to help you take down some senator? I need a Presidential pardon to get my name cleared. I have a dishonorable discharge. The chances of this working out in my favor are slim to none.”
“Then what the fuck are you doing here?” he snapped.
That was a good question. I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing here. What he was suggesting for me was highly unlikely to ever happen, and even if he were to get someone to look at my case, what were the chances that Kiera would suddenly decide that I hadn’t been the one to rape her? And if the phone records didn’t show me making those calls, they wouldn’t magically appear now.
“You know, I came to you because I thought you had more grit than this. You’re just rolling over and letting them shit all over you. And for what? Do you really think you deserve this shit? I’ve seen the files. It’s all bullshit!”
“Yeah? And how are you going to prove it? No one else believed me when the evidence was laying right the fuck in front of them. It was her word versus mine and I lost out.”
“So you keep fighting! You don’t lay down and take it when you’re accused of shit like that.”
“I have no way to fight back,” I argued. “This isn’t a civilian court. This is the fucking military. They could have thrown my ass in prison if they wanted. I got fucking lucky last time that they didn’t decide to send me away. And now you think that I should fight harder? For what? For the chance to go to prison?”
“Better to fight for the freedom that you served to defend, than to accept what was unjustly handed down to you. I’ll never bullshit you. This is an uphill battle, but I’m willing to fight it with you. But you have to believe that you can win and you have to be willing to fight for what you know you deserve.”
“My phone records are gone. That was the one thing that would have cleared my name.”
“That and the testimony from the victim,” he added.
“Well, I’m not seeing her suddenly changing her story and getting a perjury conviction for her trouble.”
“Then you’re in luck, because there are two things that I do really well. First, I’m very good at getting information, and second, I happen to be very good at convincing people to change their minds.”
I shook my head slowly. He just didn’t get it. “I can’t intimidate a victim so that I can get my sentence overturned. If I were to do that, I’m no better than the man that raped her.”
His lip twitched and he huffed out a laugh. Frankly, I didn’t see what was so funny. I watched as he paced the room. When he turned to me, he was pissed. “You believe her.”
“What?”
“You believe her. You think that- Parker, this was a setup. She didn’t ID you because she thought you raped her. She did it because she was forced to. I thought you fucking knew that!”
“No, I saw her face on that stand. When she identified me as her rapist, she believed it one hundred percent.”
“Didn’t you ever wonder how your friend, the woman that you were closest to in your unit, could think you would rape her? Don’t you think she would have known that’s something you would never do?”
“Of course I wondered that. That was running through my head constantly, but the fact is, she was raped and she wasn’t in her right mind. She could have seen a fucking lion on top of her for all I know.”
“She was fucking Colonel Barrow!” he shouted.
I stepped back like I had been hit. What he was saying couldn’t be true. I would have known if she was sleeping with our commanding officer. She would have told me.
“No, she would have told me-”
“She couldn’t have fucking told you. Do you realize how much shit he would have been in for having a sexual relationship with an enlisted Marine? He would have been court-martialed. Open your fucking eyes. You were accused to take the heat off him!”
I couldn’t believe it. All this time, I thought for sure that she really believed that I raped her. “But she was raped.”
“By him!”
“Are you sure?”
“Like I told you, I’m very good at getting information.”
“You saw her,” I said quietly.
“I paid her a visit, because nothing was adding up, and if you had been in the right frame of mind, you would have fucking seen that. Didn’t you wonder how your phone calls that would have proved your innocence suddenly disappeared? Or how your entire unit believed that you could rape a woman that you had served with for two years? You’re goddamn right that I saw her. I made her tell me exactly what the fuck happened, and then I took her and hid her under lock and key until she fucking tells the truth.”
“You can’t just fucking kidnap people,” I yelled. God, this was all spiraling out of control. If I was linked in any way to Kiera’s disappearance, I was fucked. I couldn’t afford any of this.
“That’s your first reaction? I just told you that I made her tell me every last fucking thing that happened and you’re concerned that I took her?”
“Fuck,” I swore, sitting down. I felt like I was going to have a fucking heart attack from information overload. I had wondered about that shit for the past three years, but now that he was about to tell me, I just wasn’t sure that I could handle it.
“They were caught fucking,” he said after a minute. “Someone in your unit caught them fucking and he was going to tell. But it turns out that Barrow had something on your unit that could destroy everyone.”
My head snapped up. What the fuck was he talking about? If there was something going on in my unit, I would have known about it. But I had a sinking feeling that there was a lot that I didn’t know about.
He laughed humorlessly. “Think back. Your MIT team was on a mission a few years back, a mission that made Barrow’s career.”
“The terrorist that he took out,” I confirmed.
“He also happened to save a woman from being raped that day. Do you remember that?”
“Yeah, I was working intelligence on that mission. After the team caught the terrorist, I was sent to another forward operating base to talk with my intelligence officer.”
“And meanwhile, Barrow was looking after the woman, talking with her family and trying to calm them all down. The rest of the MIT team was handling the terrorist. They were tasked with preparing him for transfer, but he never made it. He was beaten to death by your unit-”
“Wait, what are you talking about? The terrorist was killed because he got ahold of a weapon and started a firefight.”
“That’s what they wanted everyone to think,” Knight said. “They took turns beating the shit out of him. Can’t say that I really blame them. That piece of shit was going to rape a woman and he was planning to blow up a school. Your team made a decision in the heat of the moment, and then they covered it up.”
“The whole team? You’re telling me the whole fucking MIT team made the decision to cover up murder and Barrow went along with it?”
“Information is power, and he used it against your team when he was caught fucking Kiera.”
My head was reeling. This was all too much. The conspiracy of the whole thing was too fucking unbelievable. I couldn’t believe that my unit would hang me out to dry like that.
“So, you’re telling me that my MIT team beat and killed a terrorist, and then covered it up along with Colonel Barrow.”
“He was Lieutenant Colonel at the time. He got a really nice promotion because of his heroic acts that day. His team killed a terrorist that started a firefight and he saved a woman from being publicly raped. He got his pin and promised all sorts of accolades to everyone on that MIT
team.”
“Not me. I knew nothing about it.”
“Which is why it was so easy to use against everyone else so he could throw you under the bus.”
“But Kiera…why would she go along with that?”
“He threatened her. Do you understand what the fuck was happening? She was fucking her superior officer, a man that she thought she could trust, and the moment they got caught, he turned on her to save his own skin. Then he went to the MIT team and fed them that bullshit about how he helped them cover up what they had done, and they needed to stick together. It was fucking blackmail, and they all knew it, but unfortunately for you, saving their own skin was more important than saving your ass. And to top it off, Kiera was one of those people on your MIT team. She participated along with everyone else, and he fucking used that to silence her. You were a scapegoat and you didn’t even have a fucking clue.”
My first instincts were to sit down and process all the shit that I had just been told. I just couldn’t believe it. It was like something out of a bad movie. Shit like this didn’t really happen. But then the anger set in and the rage that was building needed a release. I had been through the shock of it all for the past three years. Now I wanted revenge.
“Where is she?” I said in a voice that was way too fucking calm even to my ears.
“She’s safe, but she’s hidden.”
“I need to see her.”
“No.”
I rushed him, shoving him up against the wall and holding my arm against his throat.
The fucker just smirked at me. “Do you really think you can get me to say shit to you?”
My chest was heaving and my eye was twitching in anger, but my mind was solid and I knew that there was no way I was getting anything from him. I stepped back, releasing him with a jerk.
“You can’t go see her. If you do, you’ll end up killing her. She stays where she is until we’re ready to move forward with getting your name cleared.”
“And when the fuck will that be?” I snapped.
“That’s what I’m working on. I have a feeling that whatever is going on with this senator, it’s big.” He walked around the table and grabbed a file, sliding it across the table to me. “That’s information that I got from Senator Blakely’s safe the night I killed him. You would be right in your assessment of me. The senator was part of the group of people that was profiting from soldier’s deaths. I left him alone once I got my life back. I made a promise to Kate and I fully intended on keeping it, but when Reid showed up on our doorstep and I heard what the senator did to him, I couldn’t let it go. Yes, I fucking killed him and then I set it up to look like someone was after him for information. I pulled that out of his safe, and the information in there is all highly sensitive. The senator didn’t waste his time with trivial shit. Anything he collected was stuff that could cripple governments. Some of it has already been dealt with, but this is something that I haven’t figured out yet. My hope is that whatever we find, you help me stop whatever is going to happen and then you help me bring the fuckers down.”
“And then what?”
“And then we use your heroic actions to move your case to the President’s desk.”
“That’s a lot of wishful thinking.”
“True, but if it works, you’re looking at getting your life back.”
I took it all in. If it worked, it would be a fucking miracle. If it didn’t, I could end up in prison. But he was right, it was better to fight for something than nothing.
“I still don’t understand one thing. Why are you helping me?”
“Because I saw something in you that first time I met you.” He shook his head, his chest heaving as he sighed heavily. “I guess you reminded me of myself. You were out there doing what you had to to survive. And when Cap brought you back here and had me work with you, I saw the fighter that was on the offensive, ready to take me down if it meant that you could survive. You and I are a lot alike-”
“We’re nothing alike,” I corrected.
He smirked at that. “If you had been there with your MIT team, you never would have gone along with the choices they made, because whether or not that terrorist got what he deserved, you have a compass that guides you on right and wrong, and what your team did was fucking wrong. Guys like you and me joined the military for a cause greater than ourselves. There was a line that we said we weren’t going to cross, and I think both of us believed that at one point.”
“And then you went and became an assassin.”
“Well,” he shrugged, “I never said I was perfect. My ideals changed when I saw my friends getting murdered.”
“And you think I fall in line with you now?”
“I think that what happened to you changed you, and now you just want some fucking justice, and you want your life back. Like it or not, I was after the same fucking thing.”
Chapter Twenty-One
Blake
“Who are we waiting on?” I asked as I sat around the conference room table with Knight, Hunter, Cap, and Parker. We were all here, yet nothing was happening.
“Sorry!” the woman from the other day rushed in. She looked super energetic for so early in the morning. “I was up all night going over stuff and it was a lot of boring crap, followed by some really weird crap, followed up with a shit ton of just crap, but then I came across some really interesting crap, but before I could sort through all the crap, I had to get like ten cups of coffee so that I could focus.”
She took a deep breath and sighed, smiling at all of us.
“But, you did bring the crap, right?” Knight asked.
“Of course. When have I ever let you down? Wait, don’t answer that,” she said quickly, walking over to a computer where she quickly started typing. A screen on the wall lit up and suddenly I was looking at everything she was doing on her computer.
“Becky,” Cap said, getting no response from the woman. “Becky,” he tried again.
“One second,” she said, holding up her finger as she continued typing with her other. “Okay, now, first of all, there is a shit ton of stuff going on at that facility, most of which I’m not sure is even legal. However, it is a research lab, so I’m not really sure on all the legalities involved. Anyway, I searched through all the files they had on their systems, and you should really be paying me a lot more for the work I just did for you.”
“We’re not paying you anything,” Cap said, almost in confusion. “You stopped working for us.”
“Well, I suggest you rectify that then.”
“What did you find?” Knight asked irritatedly.
“Geez, give a girl a break. I just spent days on end sifting through all this medical jargon. The least you could do is get me another coffee.”
“You don’t need another coffee,” Cap said, pointing to her slightly shaking hands.
“Says you, but my mind is only going at half speed right now, while my body is running a marathon. I need some balance.”
“Can we get back to what you found?” Hunter asked. “Lucy promised to have breakfast for me when I got home.”
Knight snorted out a laugh. “When was the last time that Lucy ever made breakfast for you?”
“It’s happened,” Hunter said defensively.
“Guys!” Parker shouted. “Can we please get back to what Becky found?”
“Thank you,” Becky said with a smile. “Alright, so, I’m not going to bore you with what I didn’t find, but I will tell you what’s missing. First of all, they’re a research facility and one of the things they research are viruses, diseases, infections…Basically anything that could be transmitted, they study it. They have lists of all diseases that coincide with what the CDC has on record, and they have lists of vaccines, safety protocols, etc that they are working on in conjunction with the CDC and the WHO. However, in their list of all of these things, I saw one file that didn’t match any records anywhere. I searched through histories of diseases and scoured the internet of any mention of whatever
this is, but I’ve found nothing.”
“What is it?” I asked, confused by what she was saying.
“That’s just it. I have no idea. It’s listed as SNC-8374. Now, when they name a virus or disease, it’s usually in relation to a time, a place, or the name of the infection. This doesn’t seem to be anything but random numbers and letters, so I can’t reference anything that’s going on anywhere. I’ve searched every letter and number combination that uses those, but nothing pops up. It’s as if someone just stuck this random thing in with the CDC file.”
“Okay, so what does this mean?” Knight asked.
“If they have a file on it, then it means that they’re either testing it, creating it, or trying to find a cure for it. Unfortunately, it’s all medical lingo and I don’t understand it.”
“Pull it up,” Hunter said, leaning forward in his chair as he stared at the screen. Becky pulled up the file, but I didn’t understand what any of it said. “It looks like they’re testing it. See right here,” he said, standing and walking over to the screen. “These are trials that they’re doing. It looks like testing is being done, but it doesn’t say what they’re testing it on.”
Parker: A Reed Security Romance Page 17