by Justine Davis, Amy J. Fetzer, Katherine Garbera, Meredith Fletcher, Catherine Mann
Josie gulped back her fury at this man’s gall, his total lack of concern for the people who followed him. She would gladly show him battle soon enough when she kicked his ass.
Her sister stepped forward, obstructing Josie’s path, forcing her to wait. “Why would you do this?”
Frustration itched. Was Diana working an angle? Pulling some intelligence officer mind game? Distracting him to get closer or stall for help?
“Sir,” Quincy snapped.
“What?”
“You will call me sir, Lieutenant Lockworth. Is that understood?”
Diana nodded. “Yes, sir.”
“Why did I do this? For recognition of course. This should have been my project, my success all those years ago.”
Josie blinked, waiting for the other shoe to fall, but…nothing. That was it? Why would anyone risk everything to log credit for what in the big scheme of things was one small project? There had to be something else, or this guy was seriously more bent than she could imagine.
Josie inched her hand lower, her calf back farther, survival knife only millimeters away from her fingers. “Okay then,” she said in her best rational-Josephine voice. “Let’s be reasonable. There has to be some kind of deal we can make.”
“Deal?” Quincy whipped to face her, anger mottling his distinguished face into purple mania. “You had your chance to deal, Zoe.”
Zoe?
Diana gasped. Josie faltered.
Her flesh crawled at the horrible realization. “My mother. You wanted my mother.”
“Of course I want your mother,” he explained as if to a moron. “Your father was never worthy of Zoe, just look at how he never made general. Hoyt Lockworth lost his drive to move up the chain after your mother’s tragic breakdown and swapped career paths. That proves he was weak. Your mother deserves a leader like me.”
What a different image of her father this man relayed, showing Hoyt Lockworth as overwhelmed and grief stricken rather than too distant to be bothered with a troublesome wife and kids. Had her perceptions of her dad been skewed by childhood misperceptions?
As much as she wanted to process all Quincy was throwing her way, she needed to focus on reaching for her knife and straining her ears to listen for reinforcements. Later she would work through the implications of the general—Birddog—confusing her with her mother. It only provided further proof the man was deranged—and therefore all the more dangerous.
One fingertip grazed the top of her survival knife. When the opportunity arose, she could sweep her hand in to snag and throw in a flash. Meanwhile, she would let the general ramble and wait.
“You should have worked with me, been with me, Zoe. Instead you stayed with that loser, a man who never even made general because he was too busy trying to play nursemaid to those brats of yours. Now I’m taking charge.”
He steadied his gun level with Josie’s chest.
She stopped moving. Immobilized muscles bunched. He couldn’t actually plan to shoot? She trained her eyes on his trigger finger, ready to strike at the least twitch.
His arm moved away from her. She sighed—then realized he wasn’t lowering his weapon.
He was shifting aim. Targeting Diana, his eyes narrowed. His finger twitched.
“No!” Josie launched toward her baby sister.
A second too late.
Quincy shot. The silencer hissed.
Blood blooming on her black shirt in a fatal mockery of so many stains before, Diana crumpled to the ground.
Chapter 20
“No!” Josie screamed.
Rage spun her around to Quincy. Her hand moved by instinct, securing the knife in her grip as she leaped.
She took Quincy down onto the carpeted floor with the force of her charge and fury. He crashed onto his back, eyes stunned wide. He thrashed with bulk and frenzy, a punch knocking her sideways. She gripped, her fingers twisting in his flight suit. His leather name tag dug into her hand, Velcro loosening, the tag ripping free.
She flung it aside, regained balance. Her nails clawed at his face as she anchored his head, her knee jammed against his chest. Josie pressed the knife edge to his throat.
All movement ceased.
Emotions howled inside her, dark and ugly, the need for revenge. This man had killed Craig, her sister and done God only knows what to their mother. Even in her rage, Josie couldn’t miss how cleanly the problems in her test program mirrored her mother’s.
Josie had feared repeated mistakes. Quaked at coincidence. Now she seethed at the traitorous deceit.
Quincy stared up at her with fanatical intensity in his hollow blue eyes. “Your sister isn’t dead, but if you kill me, she will die.”
She couldn’t believe anything he said. He’d gone off the deep end. But what if…
Josie eased back on the blade while holding it in place. “Talk. And make it fast, because I can justify a self-defense kill so easily.”
Too easily.
“I only shot to wound. But the bullet I used is hollow,” he explained with a strange calm, “filled with an amnesia drug. I only planned for her to forget what happened. However, the longer she goes without the antidote, the more of her memory she’ll lose.”
He was smart. His whole story could be a lie. But she couldn’t afford to gamble with Diana’s life, and as reason trickled in, she couldn’t justify murdering him in cold blood.
Diana moaned behind her. Relief stunned Josie with images of her sister, all of seven years old again, racing across the countryside on her horse with her pigtails sailing.
And in that scant moment where she’d let emotions creep in, Quincy flipped her.
His gun pressed to the center of her forehead. “Drop the knife.”
The first beads of real panic trickled over her like Chinese water torture. Her fingers relaxed, releasing the knife with a thud.
Quincy scooped it up and tucked it in his boot, keeping his gun trained on her. “Good. Now listen. You are going to die, but if you do this right, your sister can live. I was being straight about the amnesia drug, if not the need for an antidote. When she comes to, she won’t remember a thing about the past forty-eight hours. Everyone will assume you shot her before you killed yourself—another Lockworth lady going crazy. But at least your sister will be alive to console your parents.”
Like hell. She wouldn’t let him win that way. Not when he’d hurt so many people. Diego would be back. She needed to do her best to make sure he didn’t walk into an ambush—and to leave him a clue. Hysterical laughter threatened. Too bad she couldn’t leave him another note.
She couldn’t even allow herself to consider him being hurt—or worse. That would bring debilitating fears, emotions she couldn’t risk.
Josie scanned the room, searching.
The general’s name tag lay just a few inches away, where she’d tossed it during their scuffle. If she could just plant it somewhere on Diana so it would be clear the man hadn’t simply dropped it some other time. It wasn’t much, but Diego already knew they were looking into Quincy.
Meanwhile, knowledge was power, because she would live, damn it, and anything she learned would help bring this bastard down in court. She inched up to sit, ever aware of that gun and its amnesia bullets trained her way. Losing her mind, living out the horror of what her mother had experienced, threatened her more than death.
“How do you intend to kill me?” She inched her hand closer to the name tag while locking eyes with Quincy so he wouldn’t look away.
“We’ll get to that soon enough. Now stand up.” He waved the gun. “Move it, Captain!”
“Please, just let me check on my sister.” She leaned forward, faking a need to balance with her hand so it landed on top of his name tag. “I’m not going without reassurance she’s alive.”
Quincy rolled his eyes. “Women and their damned emotionalism. Fine. Say your goodbyes.”
Her fist closed around the incriminating square of fabric and Velcro. Yes. At least one victory in this hel
lish situation.
Josie leaned over her sister, pressing a kiss to her forehead. “Hang in there, Diehard.”
With her body shielding her from Quincy’s line of sight, Josie folded her sister’s limp fingers around the name tag. Please, be enough. If the worst happened, at least Diana would know her own sister hadn’t done this to her.
Josie rose slowly. “Where are we going?”
He swept his uniform once, twice, again even though he’d long since swiped away any dust from his fall to the floor. “There’s still one test Predator left. You were so grief stricken over the failure of your project, you went off the deep end. The mission data disk I’ve prepared will disable your override controls and fly you into a mountain—if fighter planes don’t shoot you down first.”
“Fighters?” She searched the room for a weapon, a room that was deliberately left bare for security reasons. Nothing but computers and files surrounded her.
“Captain, I’ll have to share my concern that you’ve gone crazy like your mother and may plan to crash the craft into downtown L.A.” He gripped her arm, gun kissing her temple. “Now walk.”
As much as she hated leaving her injured sister, she wanted this nutcase and his gun away from Diana. Hopefully Diego would be back with their food and would question why security out front was lax. Even if he couldn’t stop Quincy, Diego would discover Diana and the name tag. Soon, please.
She needed to keep Quincy talking, voices being the only advance warning she could offer Diego if he was already on his way. She would walk a fine line between keeping Quincy chatty and irritating him. Her gut told her, though, that he was married to his specific plan for killing her. He wouldn’t want to deviate.
The elevator opened. Empty. Disappointment squeezed.
Quincy shoved her inside. “I told you no one’s around to help.”
He took his place beside her, only a few inches taller and leanly muscular, but with a crazed strength she wasn’t sure she could combat.
Talk. Get in his whacked-out head and gain as much arming knowledge as possible. “Damn it, you killed Craig Wagner by introducing that virus in the mission data disk.”
“No. I only placed it in the remote booth’s disk. I was careful when Bridges flipped the schedule. If your program had worked as it should, Wagner would have flown out of the problem with his override controls. You would have looked like a fool when your remote control flying failed. But Wagner would have safely landed. His death is a tragic loss to the air force that I never meant to happen.”
The overconfident idiot. He hadn’t realized she used the same disk for both the remote booth and the craft. His “brilliant” virus had killed an innocent man. The senselessness of it all threatened to weaken her. She refused to bend.
A hunch prodded her to push. “Do you really expect me to believe that when you started killing long ago?”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about, Captain.” The elevator door opened again and he jerked her into the hall.
“The hell I don’t. What about the pilot who died during my mother’s test program?”
“Your mother’s test failed. Those things happen. That a pilot died in the accident was yet another tragic loss to the air force.” He swung open the back exit and escorted her through to a dark and empty parking lot. He truly had sent all help away. His car waited, parked inches away.
If she got inside, her odds of living decreased significantly.
She stood her ground with nothing but stars and wind for backup. “Bullshit, sir. It was no accident. I think you made the crash back then happen in just the same way you killed Craig.”
“You know as well as I do the technology is different now than it was back during your mother’s testing days. It couldn’t have happened in the same way.”
“So you didn’t mean to murder the pilot working my mother’s test, either?” Anger clawed higher, begging for release. It was really getting tougher not to risk entering that pissing-him-off territory. “You really are an incompetent fool.”
Quincy yanked her closer, his sweaty upper lip close enough for her to see and smell fear seeping from him.
He jammed the pistol into her gut. “Oh, I most certainly did mean to kill him. I reprogrammed the hard drives, just a subtle change in the controls. In the end, the pilot thought he was turning twenty degrees. In reality, the plane turned twenty-five. The evidence exploded with that self-righteous bastard.”
A couple of degrees on the right mission could fly a craft into a mountain or straight into the ground. Her mind’s eye replayed in horror the test prototype exploding on the runway. That poor pilot. Accidental death was bad enough. “Why?”
“He was going to tell her how I felt.”
“What?”
She’d wanted answers for her mother, but this went beyond anything she could have expected. Her brain struggled to review what she knew about the crash that had ended her mother’s career. Not the test data that Josie had memorized in flight school, but the personalities. Damn it all, she’d been so focused on the dry data, she’d missed the explosive dynamics of the people involved.
“If he told Zoe I loved her, that would ruin everything. I needed to win her over slowly. She was married so I couldn’t make an overt move. That would be dishonorable and against regulations. I became her co-worker on the project, her friend, as well, so I would be in place to pick up the pieces when her marriage dissolved. I’m certain it will one day. Then she’ll come to me and I’ll divorce my wife for her.” His eyes glowed with a maniacal passion. “You look just like her, you know. I still have a picture of her from our days here together in California.”
Bile burned her throat. His hand gentled on her arm and stroked absently, gun still bruisingly deep in her tender flesh. One inhale could kill her. “When I go to console Zoe over the loss of her child, finally she’ll see that I’m right for her. I’ll make sure her daughter’s project—hers, as well—succeeds. Because of my modifications, of course. We’ll hold a special ceremony in your honor.”
He released her arm and fished out his key ring. He activated the trunk release. “Get in.”
Into the trunk? Survival instincts recoiled.
Josie considered forgetting about odds and the gun in her gut and just fighting it out here even though he was strong, trained and well armed. But if she lost, her sister would be helpless to whatever Quincy went back to do. She couldn’t risk the confrontation.
Staying cool and giving Diego time to return offered the most hope for Diana.
Folded inside the general’s trunk, Josie choked back claustrophobic fear. This wasn’t any tighter than a cockpit, no darker than a night flight.
Of course, in a plane she had a stick and throttle to control her future. Here she had dark and stuffy air with exhaust fumes gagging her. Worse yet, he’d tied her hands.
Industrial carpet abraded her cheek, her head crammed into a nook behind the fender. She’d tried shouting for help. He’d turned a sharp corner in retaliation and slammed her head against the side, nearly knocking her out. If she passed out, he could kill her before she woke.
Josie struggled to loosen the bonds on her wrist. Inching and twisting, she searched in the dark for something to chafe the rope against. Still nothing. Any hopes faded of pretending to still be bound and then overpowering him.
The car jerked to a stop, jolting her. She cracked her head against the metal interior again. Pain exploded through her brain. Sparks lit behind her eyes.
Footsteps sounded. The trunk popped. Overhead lights blinded her long enough for him to reach in and yank her up by the arm. Her numb legs collapsed under her. She hated the helplessness most of all.
Blinking, she cleared her brain and eyesight. They were outside her testing hangar, still at Palmdale, thank God. He really did plan to strap her to her remaining test Predator.
It was dark, late and abandoned. Even if someone saw him, no one would be in the least suspicious until she took off—and then it was v
ery likely she would be shot down by her own air force.
Punching the access code into the door, he escorted her inside the hangar. Their footsteps echoed in the cavernous metal structure. A dim halo of light silhouetted her gray-and-white sleeping craft.
She pressed a hand to the cool side, eyes gliding along the expanse of wings. She’d been so proud of the crafts and the chance to clear her mother’s name. It couldn’t end like this.
Quincy opened the access panel and slid his data disk into the slot behind the pilot’s seat. “This will fly the craft with my plan, while locking out your override controls.”
She would be helpless to stop the crash, with no parachute as backup. Real fear kicked in with the childhood memory too close to the surface, of watching the crash in her mother’s project. The smell of burning flesh roiled through her again. The sirens from just last week at Craig’s accident—no, his murder—shrieked in her mind.
Josie balked.
Quincy leveled his gun at her. “Climb on, or I’ll shoot you now and your sister will die. The sooner you take off, the sooner I can drive back to the intelligence building, discover her and call for help. Once I do, then I can report how you went crazy, confessed that you’d hurt your sister and then stole the plane at gunpoint before I could stop you.” His fingers caressed the claw marks she’d left on his cheek, his eyes glassy with a crazed fanaticism. “That will explain these.”
She was afraid Diana might die anyway without help soon. But what did Josie have to fight back with? She didn’t even have her keys to stab at him if she could get free. She only had her wallet, a tube of orange-tryst lip gloss and her day-planner calendar.
Her day planner. With a flight data disk inside. Hope flickered.
Could she actually free her hands and slide in the new disk while in flight?
Hiss. A bullet spit from Quincy’s gun. Cement spewed beside her foot. Shards stung her leg.
“No more waiting, Captain. Board your craft.”