Fear

by Jeff Abbott

  She picked up the phone. ‘Yes?’ She could not believe how calm her voice was.

  No answer. She could hear breathing on the opposite end of the line.

  ‘Yes, we’re fine,’ she said, not wanting to say, Yes? again, wondering, Why doesn’t Miles speak?

  ‘Is Groote there?’ a voice she didn’t recognize said. A man’s voice, with the barest hint of a Boston accent.

  ‘Yes,’ she said again.

  The line ended. ‘All right, Miles, good-bye.’ She hung up.

  ‘What did he say?’ Groote said.

  ‘Letting me know how the search is going.’

  ‘For Edward Wallace.’

  ‘Yes. But Wallace isn’t at home. Miles is going to wait for him, bring back food when he’s done.’ She sat down on the bed. Her skin prickled. What the hell was that call, who was that man? ‘We haven’t eaten for hours.’

  ‘Poor you.’ Groote scratched at the bandage covering his broken nose. ‘I saw you on Castaway. My wife loved that show. I know you can be a tricky bitch.’

  ‘I played fair and square.’ She couldn’t believe the sudden anger in her voice.

  ‘Whatever. Your face is known. You’re going to be a problem for me.’

  Terror filled her. Now that Groote believed Miles would soon return with the precious Frost, he would have no use for her or Nathan. He wasn’t going to let her out of this room. His gun wore a silencer and his hands were big enough to crush her throat. His eyes, smudged with exhaustion, over the grimy nose bandage, regarded her without mercy.

  She could not sit in this grubby room and wait to die, not again, waiting, choked with fear, for a man to walk through those doors and watch him be murdered. Not again.

  ‘Why are you doing this?’ Nathan asked Groote.

  ‘My boss wants his property back,’ Groote said. He prodded Celeste with the gun. ‘You. Tell me. Does it work?’

  ‘What?’ She looked up from her lap.

  ‘Frost. Does it work?’

  ‘Why would you care?’

  ‘Just curious.’ His voice was flat but she saw heat fire his eyes at her question.

  ‘You mean does Frost work, so is it worth it to kill us? Well, I’m too scared to tell you.’ She put a waver in her voice. ‘If the panic hits me, I start screaming.’

  ‘No screaming,’ Groote said in a harsh bark. ‘You scream, you die.’

  She shoved her palms against her mouth, pretending to stifle a shriek. Two deep breaths and she lowered her hands. ‘I need… my medicine. Please.’

  Groote said, ‘Forget it. Just shut up and sit there.’

  ‘Let her have her antidepressant, man,’ Nathan said.

  Groote gave him a kick to the chest that floored him. ‘I don’t want to hear your whining. I am incredibly tired of you people.’

  ‘My pill’s in my purse. In the next room.’ She slapped at her chest, as if she were beating back a howl climbing into her throat. ‘I have sedatives too. For Nathan.’

  In his frown gone straight, she saw Groote make the decision she calculated he might; he could force a pharmacy down their throats, keep them under control. Groote put the gun on Nathan, hauled him to his feet. ‘Come on, Tin Soldier. Try anything and you get a bad dent.’

  She walked to the next room, Groote and Nathan a step behind her. She walked to her purse.

  ‘Wrong,’ Groote said. ‘Pick it up by the bottom, Mrs. Brent, dump it on the floor. No surprises.’

  She did as he asked and her junk tumbled in a pile on the greasy gray carpet: lipstick, the extra rubber bands Miles had brought her, her money clip, a black notebook, an empty pill vial, wallet, her cell phone, switched off as Miles had ordered so the wireless company couldn’t get a reading on her location. She crouched among the junk.

  ‘Hands away from the cell phone. Kick it to me,’ Groote ordered.

  She obeyed. He crushed the phone under his heel, breaking the keys and the screen.

  She cranked open the pill vial. Empty.

  ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘I’m – I’m out.’ But she fidgeted, put her knee over the money clip.

  ‘Stupid,’ Groote said. She stayed kneeling.

  ‘Get up, Tin Soldier, on the bed, I’m tying you two up.’

  She got up, closing her fist around the clip. She worked the money loose, let the clip drop to the floor. Between the soft, worn bills the sharp bite of her razor nipped at her finger. She folded it in her hand.

  Groote didn’t see. He shoved her on the bed across from Nathan. ‘If one of you moves, you die,’ Groote said.

  Tie me first, she thought, please. Because Nathan could help her fight him when Groote drew close to her.

  But he tied Nathan first, pulling the phone cord loose from the wall, securing Nathan’s hands and feet together, ripping a pillowcase, jamming a near-choking length into Nathan’s mouth.

  She told herself: Don’t flinch.

  There wasn’t another phone cord in the room, so he snapped loose the curtain cord and came toward her.

  She knelt on the bed and stuck her hands out in front of her, as though prepping to be handcuffed, and before he could reach her she said, ‘I have most of the five million that I won. It’s yours. Just let us go.’

  And because he thought she was about to beg, not fight, he paused. ‘I don’t give a shit about your money.’

  ‘I can’t be tied up. Because of what happened to me… when my husband died.’ Not a problem to put fear into her voice. But she was more afraid of what would happen if she didn’t stop him. ‘Don’t tie me. I know where Frost is. Right now.’

  ‘Where?’

  She raised her chin. ‘I don’t want Nathan to hear.’

  She figured Groote would steer her into the next room but he was too eager, he leaned closer to her and she might not get close again so she slapped at him. Except the razor was tight and true between her fingers and the blade scored a garish red thread across his face, along his cheek, close to the eye.

  He stumbled back in shock and she swung at him again, but he clubbed her arm aside with a low animal grunt that rose into a scream. She darted the razor toward his throat. Groote belted a fist into her temple and she tumbled off the bed. He levered his foot hard on her wrist, forced her fingers open, and the razor slipped free of them.

  ‘Date with pain.’ His voice sounded broken. ‘That’s right, you cut me, bitch, it better not scar, it better not scare Amanda…’ His voice stopped and she fought him, biting, kicking, his hands clamping over her mouth, and he carried her, headfirst, into the bathroom. He held her upside down; her feet brushed the plaster ceiling.

  ‘Where is Frost? Where is it?’

  ‘I don’t know-’ she started to say, and then she saw the open toilet rushing toward her face. She managed a startled gulp of air before he drove her face into the shallow water.

  Celeste struggled but he pinioned her legs with his own, her hands with one of his massive arms, and held her head at a precise angle and her face rammed against the porcelain. He’s done this before, she realized in shock.

  ‘You know! Tell me! Where is it?’ he yelled.

  All she could do was keep kicking, make him fight to drown her.

  The air exploded from her lungs as though seeking release and she choked, breathed the water, and then he let her go. She fell to the cold tile, spluttering, coughing, tasting her own blood from her lips.

  ‘Mrs. Brent? Are you well?’

  The voice from the phone. Above her stood a fiftyish man, hair dark as coal, skin pale, with the biggest gun she’d ever seen pressed against Groote’s head.

  FORTY-THREE

  ‘Why are we both dead men?’ Miles asked.

  ‘We know too much. Or rather, people think we know too much.’ Edward Wallace stepped aside and Miles walked into the house. He could see a back wall, dotted with photos. Of Allison. Wearing glasses, hair lighter in color, cut longer.

  ‘About Frost.’

  ‘Do you have it?’ Cautious hope lit Wallace’s ey
es.

  ‘No. You do.’

  Hope changed to surprise. ‘What?’

  ‘Allison hid the files on a server here. The day she died.’

  ‘Oh, Jesus. That explains it.’ Wallace sank against the wall.

  ‘Not to me, Doctor Wallace.’

  ‘I don’t have Frost.’

  ‘But you could access this system where she put the files-’

  ‘No. Listen, you have to go. Now. You can’t be here when Dodd gets here.’

  ‘Who’s Dodd?’ Miles remembered having heard the name when Sorenson spoke on the phone in Allison’s office: Dodd doesn’t know. And asking Allison who Dodd was as she hung up on him before she died. Dodd. The missing piece of the puzzle.

  ‘You can’t be here and you can’t know who he is. Please. Just go.’

  ‘No. Show me this system where she uploaded the files.’

  ‘I don’t have the Frost files.’

  ‘You erased them.’

  ‘No. I don’t know what happened,’ Wallace said. He set the gun down on the table, ran a hand through his hair, which stuck in clumps as though he’d run his hands through it in unending worry for the whole day.

  ‘Your wife asked me for help, Doctor. I didn’t help her in time and she’s dead, and the only way to help her now is to make sure whoever killed her doesn’t get away with it.’

  Wallace’s half cough, half laugh was a strange sound in the quiet of the bungalow. ‘You. Stop them. I don’t know which side killed her, but you won’t stop them. Listen. Dodd could arrive at any time. We need to go.’

  If you’re so afraid of this Dodd, why haven’t you already left? Miles wondered.

  ‘Dodd wants Frost. Why? Who is he?’

  ‘If I tell you – will you help me hide? Before they kill me the way they killed Renee.’

  This didn’t add up, but the fear on the man’s face seemed real and defined. ‘These people killed your wife. Why don’t you just go to the cops?’

  ‘I – can’t go to the police.’

  ‘Explain.’

  Wallace took a fortifying deep breath. ‘Dodd was in charge of the original Frost project.’

  ‘Hurley and Quantrill didn’t create Frost?’

  ‘No. They built on our findings. I was on the original Frost research team,’ Wallace said. ‘So was Renee.’

  ‘Why was she living as Allison Vance?’

  ‘She had no choice – being Allison was her cover story. Dodd forced her. He’s with the government.’

  ‘What agency?’

  ‘Dodd’s group is code-named Shaman. But you won’t see them listed on a congressional budget. They operate out of back rooms, with money cleaned through legit projects. He’s in charge of clandestine scientific research for the Defense Department.’

  It clicked. Frost would be an immediate benefit to soldiers mentally devastated by the horrors of war. ‘So she was supposed to steal it for Dodd.’

  ‘Returning his stolen property.’

  ‘Why didn’t she just send it to Dodd?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Why did she send Frost to your server?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’d had no contact with her since she went to Santa Fe. Dodd forbade it.’ Wallace closed his eyes. ‘The – the people on Dodd’s team three years ago, we developed the initial version of Frost. I’m a neurobiologist – I worked on the beta blockers to prevent traumatic memories from consolidating. Allison was one of the psychiatrists. But our prototype drug didn’t work unless administered within two hours immediately following the trauma. One soldier in the test group, he went psychotic. When his long-term trauma didn’t go away… he killed the other patients in the testing. All of them.’ Wallace’s voice broke. ‘We brought those people there to help them, to cure them, and they all were murdered, one by one, in their sleep. Dodd ended the project and killed the research. Renee blamed herself.’

  ‘She knew about Frost. She knew what it was, from the beginning,’ Miles said.

  ‘After Dodd shut down the project, his team drifted into other work. Renee and I moved up to Fresno to open a PTSD clinic while I taught college and continued research. We kept a low profile, and then Dodd showed up at our house a few months ago. Quantrill had got hold of the original research – another researcher stole the original work and sold it to him – and managed to take Frost to the next level. Dodd found out – probably from the researcher who sold the data to Quantrill. Dodd can be… convincing. As in his way or it’s your funeral. That researcher died in a car accident. I don’t believe much in coincidence.’

  Miles remembered the news account. ‘You had a hiking accident a few weeks back.’

  ‘Dodd forced us to quit our jobs and we moved up here for a lower profile. Renee went to Santa Fe to do Dodd’s spying for him… She called me late one night on the phone from her office. She missed me. Dodd must have been monitoring her office line; he sent a message as to what happens when his rules are broken. He came, asked me to go on a hike with him so we could talk, gave me a shove off a ten-foot bluff. Just enough to hurt, to rough me up. A warning.’

  ‘Nice.’

  Wallace said, ‘Renee blamed herself for the Frost patients’ dying before; she never got over it. Dodd covered up the deaths, made the families believe the patients had died in a fire in the ward at a medical hospital in San Diego where we did the work.’

  ‘So Dodd wanted a new and improved Frost back. He made Allison his spy.’ She’d been a spy of sorts – just like him. Miles’s chest tensed; he remembered her words the last morning he saw her: I think I understand you better than you know.

  Wallace nodded. ‘Memory research… it’s a small world. Quantrill couldn’t know that she’d worked on the original team. She had to see if his version of Frost had promise, steal it if it did, and then she could be Renee again.’

  ‘Why didn’t Dodd just go to the authorities and let them handle it? Quantrill broke the law, buying government secrets…’

  ‘Dodd didn’t want the original project exposed; the Pentagon was doing secret drug testing on veterans. I don’t think Dodd has a shadow; the man doesn’t see the light of day often.’

  ‘Connect the other players for me. Sorenson. Who’s he?’

  Wallace sat down in the chair, mopped sweat from his forehead. ‘He’s a mean bastard. He worked security on Dodd’s projects. He was supposed to go to Santa Fe and protect Renee, help her if she needed to bypass security systems to steal the Frost research.’

  ‘Sorenson killed her.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He planted the bomb that killed her.’ He told Wallace about seeing Sorenson enter and leave Allison’s office without his case, return and speak on the phone about Dodd.

  Wallace paled, covered his eyes with his hand.

  ‘Would Sorenson have access to explosives?’

  ‘He used to be in covert operations for the Pentagon. He’s Dodd’s security guy. Dodd called me early this morning, in a panic, because he knew she’d sent the files to the server. I don’t know how he knew

  …’

  ‘Early this morning?’ Miles said. Oh, Jesus. His mouth went dry. Nathan, putting the pay-phone receiver down, a sheepish look on his face, a lie on his lips about a weekly duty to call his mother. A call he could not risk in the same room, even with Miles asleep. Dodd was connected to Allison; Allison tried to help Nathan escape. So maybe… ‘I think I know who called him. Dodd ever mention a guy named Nathan Ruiz?’

  ‘No.’

  It didn’t mean Nathan didn’t know Dodd. ‘So Dodd wanted the files she sent.’

  ‘But they’re not there. I use the server to run a small Web hosting business, and to hold my research database, run power-hungry apps I use in my work – I never saw any files, never knew they were there. You have to believe me.’

  ‘Dodd doesn’t.’

  ‘I gave him the access codes, he checked it himself. Someone accessed the server this morning using the admin password Renee and I used and
ran a wiping program to destroy all the data on the drive… everything’s gone, totally overwritten. Nothing’s recoverable, and I’ve already tried. The only other person with the administrative password who could have done that was Renee. Unless she gave the password to someone.’

  Miles thought it through. ‘Sorenson. Allison wasn’t hiding the files from him – she was stashing them to deliver to Dodd. So the files would still be available to him or Sorenson if Quantrill’s people caught or killed her. But she must have told Sorenson the code, or he found the password – people are always writing that stuff down – and he took the Frost research off the server, then wiped the server to destroy the files once he’d retrieved them.’

  ‘Dodd doesn’t believe me, he thinks I have Frost. He’s coming. That’s why I need to hide.’ A tremble colored Wallace’s voice.

  The picture wasn’t fully clear and Miles shook his head. ‘Go back to Sorenson. Where’s he?’

  ‘Dodd said Sorenson went missing two days ago; Dodd thinks another man, a guy named Dennis Groote who works for Quantrill, caught up with him. Probably killed him.’

  Probably after our escape from the hospital, Miles thought. ‘This Nathan Ruiz I mentioned. He was a patient of Allison’s. Sorenson went to a lot of trouble to try and kill him at Sangre de Cristo, but I don’t know why.’

  ‘I never heard of him.’

  ‘But you’ve heard of me. She asked me to help her before she died. If Sorenson was supposed to protect her, she sure didn’t need me. So… she must have suspected he was betraying her. He took Frost.’ But then why give him the key to the hidey-hole for the files? It made no sense, unless she’d given the password before she suspected him.

  ‘This is all Dodd’s fault,’ Wallace said. ‘If he’d left well enough alone…’

  ‘One more question. WITSEC vetted Allison, it did a background check on her.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So Allison Vance isn’t a real person; she couldn’t have passed the check under false name.’

  ‘Well, clearly, she did. Dodd would have handled ensuring her background was impeccable.’