by Vanessa Kier
“Not done yet,” he told her. He gathered her in his arms, then sat back on his heels without losing intimate contact. With Rafe’s hands guiding her, his mouth at her breasts, and his dark chocolate eyes filled with love, Gabby soon found herself riding another orgasm. Only this time, Rafe was with her.
As they collapsed together on the bed, Rafe tucked her against him. And for the first time since he’d been captured, Gabby sank into a deep, restful sleep.
Chapter 21
“Dr. Steuart informs me that your intelligence test came back normal, Rafe. Congratulations.”
Rafe nodded at the image of Ryker on the videoconference screen in the underground conference room.
“Gabby and the others agree that except for your inability to remember where Kaufmann’s lab is you’re fit for duty again. Therefore, I’m having you transferred to the training compound in Oregon. Let’s get you back to full fitness so when you do remember the location of the lab you’ll be ready to go.”
Satisfaction and pride filled Rafe. He couldn’t wait to tell Gabby he was back in business. Yet he hated knowing that Kaufmann still had a hold on him. In the last couple of weeks he’d stopped experiencing the blinding headaches that had hit whenever he tried to remember the lab’s location. But a thick fog still separated him and the memories, making it impossible to see clearly.
“Thank you, sir,” Rafe said. “What about—”
The floor heaved, pitching the conference table sideways. Rafe heard the muffled boom of an explosion in the upper section of the house. Another explosion shook the videoconferencing screen off its anchor. Rafe dropped and rolled out of the way as it crashed to the floor and shattered.
Gabby! Rafe had left her upstairs in her apartment this morning after having convinced her to sleep in for once. If anything happened to her…
Staying close to the floor, Rafe scrambled for the door. Wait. Ryker would need an update and the director could tell him what contingency plans were in place. Rafe dashed over to the phone, but the line was dead.
Wishing he had a gun, Rafe cautiously opened the door into the hallway. According to an earlier conversation he’d had with Ryker, very few of the SSU staff in Oregon or D.C. knew this lab even existed. So who had leaked the lab’s location?
He shook his head and assessed the situation. The corridor appeared structurally sound. A few ceiling tiles had cracks in them, and plaster dust covered some of the carpeting, but Rafe didn’t get the sense the building was about to collapse on him. Still, being three levels underground with explosions above him and not knowing what type of reinforcements the SSU had added to the old building made him edgy.
Halfway to the stairs, another explosion nearly knocked Rafe to the floor. He braced himself against the wall until the shaking stopped. Praying that Gabby was okay, he raced toward the end of the hallway. Just as he reached the stairwell door, a security detail of four men stepped into view.
“Where did they hit?” he demanded, coming to a stop. “What are we up against?”
If the men were surprised to be faced with Rafe, they didn’t show it. “Mortar fire hits on both wings, sir,” the closest man replied. Rafe felt the warm glow of pride at the man’s respect. God, he’d missed this.
“There’s a helicopter on the front lawn,” the man continued. “Two platoons of men are fighting our exterior security team. The attackers are wearing black uniforms with colored stripes at the left shoulder under a gold insignia ”
Everything inside Rafe went cold. Black uniforms. Gold insignia which he’d bet showed a three-headed dog. Colored stripes to indicate what level of stability the subject had reached. Christ. They were under attack by Kaufmann’s men. “Tell—” He choked and had to clear his throat. “Tell whoever’s in charge of security that the men you described are from Kaufmann’s lab. Red stripes mean the men are at the peak of their physical strength and completely under Kaufmann’s mind control. Orange stripes mean a bit less physical strength and speed and less reliable mind control.” Yellow, green and blue subjects were too unstable to be sent on missions.
The man paled, but relayed Rafe’s message via his radio. When he signed off, he explained, “We’re to continue our original mission—checking this level for personnel and evacuating everyone down to the medical facility on Sub-basement 5.”
Rafe nodded absently, trying to rein in his terror as he pictured himself being dragged back to Kaufmann’s lab. Hell, no. He’d die before he let that monster touch him again.
“Dr. Steuart was in Testing Room 1 half an hour ago,” he told them. “I don’t know if she’s still there, or if any of the other rooms are occupied.”
Two of the men ran toward the testing room, while another started opening doors to check for injured staff.
One man hung back long enough to ask, “Do you need assistance, sir?”
Rafe shook his head. “Thanks, but I’m good.” Leaving them to their work, he ran up the stairs. Gabby’s room was on the second floor of the staff wing, but he had three flights to go just to reach ground level. He pulled on the railing, giving himself extra speed as he took the stairs two at a time.
Automatic weapon fire sounded from the floor above him. Cursing, Rafe pushed himself to move faster. Whoever was up there, whether SSU security or attackers, gunfire meant only one thing. More danger for Gabby.
Dios, please let him reach her in time. He’d kill anyone who tried to return Gabby to Kaufmann.
At the top of the stairs he lowered himself to the floor and eased open the door so he wouldn’t present a large target. The hallway was empty, but he heard booted footsteps heading his way from the front of the building. Staying low, he slipped out of the stairwell.
“There he is!”
The shout came from his right. Rafe rolled left, then sprang to his feet and bolted toward the nearby intersection of two hallways. As he made the turn, a dart embedded itself in the frame of a painting inches from his head. The familiar twang of the tip sent shivers down Rafe’s spine. Kaufmann had used tranq darts on him too many times not to recognize the dart.
He was not a fucking animal to be tranq’d and tagged. The uncontrollable fury that he’d worked so hard to bank rose up. His whole body shuddered with the effort to tamp down his rage. He stumbled. But his fear for Gabby beat against his skull, urging him forward. Telling him that fighting the men behind him wasn’t worth his time. His priority was to save Gabby.
Even though he’d retained some of his enhanced strength and speed, the men chasing Rafe quickly gained ground. A quick glance behind him showed they had red stripes on their uniforms. Figured.
But he had one advantage they wouldn’t expect. Thanks to the drugs Gabby had given him, he was able to anticipate where they’d shoot their darts next. He successfully zigged and zagged, narrowly avoiding being hit, until he reached the next staircase.
He grabbed the banister and vaulted over it. Two steps up and he was temporarily hidden by the wall. He used his advantage to fly up the stairs as fast as his legs could carry him, knowing he wouldn’t have the advantage for long.
But all he needed was to get to the top of the stairs. He jumped up the last four stairs and landed in the common area. On most days, at least one staff member could be found lounging in one of the comfortable, overstuffed chairs or cozy sofas flanked by a set of coffee tables. Today the space was empty.
Rafe grabbed the nearest chair and hurled it down the stairs, knocking his pursuers on their asses. It wouldn’t slow them down for long, but he’d use every second to his advantage. He shoved a sofa across the opening to the stairs, then took a quick look around. Smoke drifted down the corridor to his left, from the direction of Gabby’s room.
No!
Rafe burst into a run.
“Get your hands off me!” Gabby’s enraged shout came from the end of the hallway where the smoke was thickest. Rafe increased his speed.
Through the smoke he saw two men drag Gabby out of her room. She had on a t-shirt and sho
rts and her hair was unbound. She dug in her heels and pulled back, trying to slow the men down. One of them lashed out with his fist and clipped her on the jaw. She collapsed into his arms.
Rafe bellowed in fury and charged. The man who’d hit Gabby threw her over his shoulder and ran towards the far stairs. The other man turned and charged toward Rafe with lowered head. His oversized muscles and the blank look in his eyes were clear markers that he was one of Kaufmann’s men.
Rafe sized him up, saw his opening, and ducked to the side just as the man reached him. Rafe swung around, plucked the man’s pistol off his hip, and in one smooth move slammed it into the back of the man’s neck.
The man went to his knees, but he wasn’t unconscious. Rafe didn’t care. He pounded down the corridor where Gabby and her kidnapper had disappeared. The stairwell door banged shut when Rafe was halfway there. Even as he leapt down the stairs, he knew he was too late.
He reached the lawn in time to see Kaufmann’s man toss Gabby into a waiting helicopter. Rafe ran toward it, but he was too far away to even fire a single shot before the helicopter took off and banked sharply in the opposite direction.
“No-oo! Gabby!” Rafe dropped to his knees, howling his rage and grief to the sky.
Kerberos Headquarters
Outskirts of Washington, D.C.
“What’s this?” Mark asked as he followed Jamieson into a military-style control room.
“The heart of Kerberos,” Jamieson said with enough pride to cause Mark to do a double take.
Mark surveyed the room, hoping Jamieson would take his interest as being awe or at least respect for what he saw, instead of a way to burn the details into his memory to be reported to Ryker later. Men sat at workstations set into a long, u-shaped desk that reminded Mark of the bridge of the Starship Enterprise. Some of the men typed feverishly at keyboards. Others barked into headsets.
Screens lined three of the walls. One showed a global map illuminated by pinpoints of light in a variety of colors. Another showed a satellite photo of a village surrounded by lush jungle, viewed from above. That photo morphed into a night shot of a team of men climbing over rocks on a rugged hillside. One of the men toward the rear of the group paused. He slammed his forehead once, then twice, into the rock in front of him. The man behind him reached into a pocket, withdrew a syringe and jabbed it into the man’s neck. Before Mark could figure out what was going on, the image changed to an open, empty sea under a storm. The final screen was split between security shots of the interior and exterior of this building.
“Jonas,” Jamieson said. “Bring up the training exercise please.”
The image on the middle screen changed to show a group of men in fatigues working through what appeared at first glance to be an ordinary obstacle course. Then Mark noticed that the walls were extremely high. The distances the men had to jump or swing seemed excessive. The speed at which the men completed each obstacle made them appear to be moving at double time.
These must be Kaufmann’s men.
“Kerberos has recruited men from every branch of the military, law enforcement and intelligence community to form the most elite assassination squad in the world.” Jamieson glanced at Mark, no doubt wanting to see how he reacted to the news that the assassins that had almost caught him in Brazil had come from Kaufmann.
Mark wasn’t an amateur, though, and his face remained devoid of emotion.
“But that isn’t enough,” Jamieson continued. “Why settle for ordinary men? There are jobs the President needs done that a normal man just can’t handle.”
Jamieson waved at the monitor. “This is the latest batch of recruits from Dr. Kaufmann’s program. Men with physical abilities that put them worlds above the elite of any special operations group in the world. Men who obey our every command without fail, no matter the physical toll. Men who are already presumed dead, so if they die on a mission, there’s no one to mourn them and raise questions.”
Mark checked the image for signs of Faith’s brother Toby, but the camera angle wasn’t close enough to allow facial identification. All the men had similarly bulked-up bodies that spoke of heavy steroids use, so he couldn’t even use body type to guess at Toby’s presence. “How far into the program are these men?” Mark asked. He made sure his tone was stiff with distaste, but with an underlying curiosity, as if he was fascinated despite himself.
“Excellent question. I see that despite your personal objections, you’ve been paying attention to the reports I sent you. These men are in the first week of Level 1. They are part of a recently developed accelerated program, so they’ve been with Kaufmann for about six weeks.”
That was the right time frame for Toby. Mark tried harder to determine any distinguishing characteristics of the men, but they were running a complicated pattern across a field, so Mark gave up trying to make an identification. He’d just have to go about this another way.
“Why are you showing me this?” Mark asked.
“Because these men are training for a very critical upcoming mission dear to the President’s heart. I need you to understand what’s at stake, so that you can run interference with the SSU.”
Mark hoped the chill that came over his body at those words didn’t show in his body language. He hadn’t wanted to believe that the President would go behind the backs of all the legitimate organizations tasked with protecting the nation to create his own squad of soldiers. But it fit with what Mark had learned.
According to Ryker, the SSU had been asked to investigate disappearances of military and law enforcement personnel. Every time the agencies involved had started an investigation, they’d hit stone walls. No one had wanted to believe the interference originated at the White House, but Ryker had expressed doubts that anyone else could have so effectively stalled the investigations.
Mark acknowledged the irony that he now trusted Ryker more than Jamieson, when once he’d considered the SSU to be beneath his contempt. Strange what a reawakened conscience could do to a man.
At a softly spoken command from Jamieson, the middle screen returned to the satellite shot of the village in the jungle. “This is an island in the South Pacific,” Jamieson said. “A place hated by our President.”
“Why?” Mark asked with feigned confusion, even as it felt like a giant fist had a vise grip on his heart. He’d heard rumors, but the shreds of his idealism that had survived the death of his father had refused to believe them.
“This village,” Jamieson said, gesturing to the screen, “Is the birthplace of three of the men who carried out the attack in Jakarta that killed then Ambassador MacAdam’s son. It’s been five years since the boy died. President MacAdam has decided it’s finally time to exact retribution. His weapon will be Kerberos’s soldiers.”
The rumors had been right. For a moment Mark was five again, watching the man he admired most, his father, die in his arms. He’d felt the same bone deep cold then as now. Only this time the cause was betrayal. He hadn’t wanted to believe the President capable of targeting innocent civilians as part of a scheme for personal payback. Mark managed to keep his breathing even and his face expressionless as he studied the image of the village, trying to commit to memory details that would help the SSU figure out which of the thousands of islands was the target. He’d never heard a specific name tied to the terrorists’ home.
The image showed a typical, sleepy village. Brightly colored laundry hung around what seemed to be a communal well. Pens held farmyard animals. Children played in dusty streets. “I don’t understand,” Mark said.
As Jamieson went on to outline the basic plan, Mark realized that Toby had been way ahead of him in discovering Jamieson’s purpose. But who’d been feeding Toby information? And was that person still around for Mark to use? He needed the name of that island. Even without the name, he had to get this information to Ryker and hope the SSU could stop the plot that would leave an island of innocent people dead.
Kaufmann’s Lab
Blue Ridge Mountains<
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“We have the woman, sir. She is in transit to the facility.”
Kaufmann smiled and shifted the cell phone to his other ear. “Excellent. Update me when you are half an hour away and I will have a team escort you in.”
He disconnected the call and replaced the phone in its belt clip. This was how Jamieson must feel when his teams successfully completed a mission. Elation. A feeling of such power, he felt capable of taking on the most challenging opponents and winning.
No wonder men became addicted to power. Because of him, Dr. Montague’s life was at risk. He could just as easily tell his men to kill her as to transport her.
That wouldn’t serve his purpose, of course, but his blood hummed at the possibility of causing her death. This was the first time he’d deliberately set out to harm another human being for no other reason than she stood in his way. All of his subjects’ deaths and tortures contributed to science. This, though, was personal. He knew Dr. Montague had sicced the SSU on him. He wanted her to suffer.
But his revenge had to wait. First he needed her help boosting his formula.
Kaufmann scowled. He didn’t like being beholden to the woman he hated. But all his attempts to stabilize his subjects at Level 1 had failed. Montague had worked with Rafe Andros. If anyone could come up with the breakthrough he needed, she could.
After…well, then retribution would be served.
Three Hours Later
SSU Laboratories
Georgia
“Rafe, what’s going on?” Ryker demanded.
Rafe spared a second to check over his shoulder, long enough to notice that Ryker had brought Kai and two security guards with him, then returned his attention to the lab assistant.
“Get it now,” Rafe ordered.
The young man shot a frightened look in Ryker’s direction.
“What’s the problem, son?” Ryker asked.
“He…uh…he wants…” the young man stammered.
“I want more of the drugs Gabby gave me before she was kidnapped,” Rafe bit out. Dios, it hurt just knowing she was gone. He couldn’t even think about what she might be going through or he’d turn back into a raging beast.