“No.” The idea was too horrifying. Bianca couldn’t wrap her mind around it.
“Yes. You should be proud. You’re a living example of exactly what our scientists set out to do. They succeeded.”
Whoopee. They succeeded—and she was what, Frankenstein? Or rather, the monster. She shuddered. Openly. Ordinarily she never showed weakness, but she was so overwhelmed she seemed to have lost all her self-protective instincts.
“Am I human?” She looked at him numbly.
“You’re entirely human.”
“What happened to the women? The other…gestational mothers?”
“When the project was terminated, they had to be terminated, too. It was unfortunate, but there was such an outcry at the time about human embryo experimentation that taking the chance that one of them would break their nondisclosure agreement and leak what they’d been involved with seemed entirely too risky.”
“Is that why you’re hunting my—” Oh, God, he wasn’t her father. She felt like she was teetering on the brink of this huge chasm that had just opened up beneath her feet. “Thayer? Because he knows too much about your Nomad Project?”
“That’s why I’m hunting him, yes. Others want him for other reasons. I thought he’d show up here to retrieve his daughter. He hasn’t yet.”
It took Bianca a moment to realize he was talking about Marin, not her.
“Maybe that’s because he’s dead.”
“I don’t think so. Maybe he’s smart enough to know his family’s dead no matter what he does.” His expression changed. Bianca could almost see the calculations going on behind his eyes. She was engaging in calculations of her own. He’d said Marin and Margery were dead no matter what Thayer did. There was no longer any question: she was going to have to get them out. “I brought you here with the intention of forcing you to tell me where Thayer is and then killing you. Cleaning up an old mess, in a way. You’re living proof of an experiment that the powers that be want to forget ever happened. But now—I think we might be able to use you. Study you. Let you serve as a template for another, future Nomad Project. Maybe even put you in the field, once we’ve learned all we can from you.” He looked at her thoughtfully, as if she were a bug he’d been about to crush underfoot but was starting to find interesting. “It seems a shame to destroy what we spent so much time and effort to create. The truth about what you are could never be allowed to be known beyond our small circle, of course, at least not for many years, but if you work with us—”
He was interrupted by a crackle of static from the intercom.
“Sir? Mr. Groton has arrived.”
“Kemp? Where are you?” A man’s voice replaced the woman’s. Even over the intercom it sounded autocratic, like he was accustomed to being in charge.
Kemp stared at the intercom as if undecided for a moment, and Bianca got the impression that he was thinking hard. Then he leaned forward and pushed the button.
“I’m on the second floor. Room 203. Come on up. I have somebody with me you might find interesting.”
“Not Thayer.”
“No.” He glanced at Bianca. “Do you still go by Beth?”
Beth? She’d only gone by Beth when she was a little girl living in Wisconsin with her mother. The memory was still hazy. How had he—
She nodded. Her gaze fixed on his face.
He said into the intercom, “Her name’s Beth.”
“How have you not taken care of that yet?” The voice was impatient, irritable. “Letting her live once was a mistake. Doing it twice is a decision.”
Kemp’s face tightened. She almost got the impression that he was afraid.
“Come up and see for yourself,” he said and stepped away from the intercom.
Bianca shivered a little as cold chills raced over her skin. He’d called her Beth. His friend, boss, whatever, had said, Letting her live once was a mistake. From the moment he’d come near her, she’d reacted to his presence like a sparrow to a hawk.
She stared at him, and the world seemed to tilt on its axis.
“I remember you now,” Bianca said, wanting proof for her theory. “You walked through my house calling my name, all those years ago in Wisconsin.”
“You were a smart one. You hid. Where were you, by the way?”
“Does it matter?” The sturdy metal cabinet she’d been hiding in had protected her from the blast, which had sent it hurtling through the air and away from the subsequent raging fire. She remembered the shock and terror she’d felt as the world had exploded around her, remembered instinctively curling into as tight a ball as possible as she was launched skyward. She remembered crying out for her mother—
Keep emotion out of it: that was another of the rules.
To hell with that. She made no attempt to stem the hatred that swamped her as she looked at him.
“No, I don’t suppose it does.” He was beside the lamp, bending over as he reached for the toggle on the cord. “It’s too dark in here. Why don’t we turn on this light so that Groton can get a real look at you?”
The lamp came on. With one hand on the tripod, he turned toward her, adjusting its position so that the light fell directly on the bed.
Bianca waited and breathed.
Boom.
She was on him in an instant, plunging the hard plastic pen deep into his carotid artery.
CHAPTER 25
Kemp didn’t scream. He squeaked, started to clap a hand to his neck, started to totter sideways, then grabbed on to the bed and leaned against it and went completely still.
Smart man.
“You move, you’re dead,” Bianca warned him, holding the pen steady in his neck. She stood behind him, her body close against his as she steadied him until he got used to the idea that one wrong move meant he would die. She wanted to make sure he understood his situation. He was breathing so heavily that his whole body heaved with the force of it. With her other hand she yanked his pistol from its holster, thrust it into the front waistband of her pants. “I’ve punctured the outside wall of your carotid artery with an ink pen. I can feel the back of it against the tip of the pen. If I puncture that back wall, you’re dead. If I pull the pen out of the hole in your neck, you’re dead. You’ll bleed out in about two minutes either way, nothing anyone can do. Oh, and I took the insides out, so the pen’s hollow. I have my thumb over the end of it, or your blood would already be shooting out like a fountain. Thing is, my thumb’s prone to getting cramps.”
“You’ll be sorry.” His voice was punctuated with those heavy breaths.
Being a supersoldier means never having to say you’re sorry. Okay, she was officially shell-shocked. Her mind was going places it had never gone before.
“I don’t think so.”
“I was going to let you live.”
“You killed my mother. Be glad I’m letting you live. For now.” Bianca plucked his key from his pocket, then twined the hand that wasn’t holding the pen through the back of his belt. “We’re going to walk out of here together, you and I. You’re going to take me to Marin and Margery Humphries, and then you’re going to get us some transportation out of here. And you’re going to tell anybody we come across to stay the hell back, because if I get shot, if I get grabbed, if I stumble, if I so much as twitch wrong, you’re dead.” She paused to let that sink in. “Understand?”
“There’s no transportation. Helicopter…dropped us off. Won’t be back until I call.”
“Move. Toward the door. Very carefully.” She steered him around with her hand in his belt. They started walking. “So call.”
“Phone’s…on the first floor. No cell signal this high up.”
Bianca thought about going to wherever the phone was, thought about waiting for him to call and a helicopter to show. No telling how many armed individuals between here and
there. Plenty of opportunity for somebody to get stupid, or for something to go wrong. Plenty of opportunity for wherever they were holed up waiting for the chopper to get surrounded and cut off. Plenty of opportunity for the word to get out, and the chopper to end up as a no-show. Or if the thing did show, for it to get shot down.
By herself, she might have made another choice. But she couldn’t chance taking a kid out in the snow and cold and trying to get off the mountain. If a chopper was the only transportation there was, she was going to have to wait for the chopper. Probably she would need more hostages to hold off any sabotage attempts, and to travel in the helicopter with them, in case something should go wrong with Kemp.
Like a stumble. Or a sneeze.
Because of her bare feet, she had to be careful not to step on any of the glass pebbles scattered across the floor as a result of the exploding light. She needed shoes; a glance at Kemp’s confirmed that they were way too big. In them she would be clumsy, prone to tripping over her own feet. At some point that might be the best she could do, but not yet.
They reached the door without incident. She unlocked it, opened it, and together they stepped out into the hall. No one in sight.
Her heart should have been beating a mile a minute. Her pulse should have been racing.
They weren’t.
She’d gone into warrior mode, stone-cold.
“We’re walking sideways,” she told him. That was so she could keep both ends of the hall in sight while keeping her grip on the pen. The hall was maybe sixty feet long, poured concrete like the room they’d just left, three metal doors to the left, two to the right on the side they’d just emerged from, the same number—six—on the side opposite. Down staircases at both ends of the hall. No windows. Light from overhead fluorescents.
Kemp was sweating now. She could see the droplets beading on the sides of his face, feel the heat coming through his clothes. She could feel the stickiness of his blood seeping out around the pen against the heel of her hand. She could smell it—raw meat.
The sound the blown light had made—had it been heard beyond the room? If so, they wouldn’t be alone for long. Plus there was Kemp’s intercom exchange with Groton, who should be on his way to join them.
“Careful,” she cautioned Kemp, who seemed to be sagging at the knees. Blood loss was not a problem; she had the hole in his neck plugged up. Shock was. “You know where Marin and Margery Humphries are. Take me to them. And you don’t want to mess with me, because it would be easy for me to decide I could make it out better on my own.”
“They’re in there.” He stopped outside a door, leaned a hand against the wall. He was trembling now. Bianca wasn’t sure how much longer he was going to be able to keep moving. But she’d told the truth. If she took the pen out of his neck, or let go of it, he was dead.
“Are they alone?” she asked.
“Don’t know.”
“Same key unlock all the doors?”
“Yes.”
She handed him the key. “Unlock the door. Open it. Say, ‘It’s Kemp,’ as we step inside.”
That way, if anyone besides Marin and Margery was in the room, at least she’d have a moment to do something about it—like shoot them. The reason she was having Kemp do the unlocking and the pushing-the-door-open thing was because she now had his Beretta in her free hand.
“Be careful,” she warned him. “You don’t want me to lose my grip.”
He unlocked the door, pushed it open, said, “It’s Kemp.”
The overhead lights were off. With only the gray light of the two small windows for illumination, the room appeared cold and gray. Marin and Margery, looking terrified, sat on the edge of a cot against the left wall. They huddled together with their arms around each other. The mother bent protectively over the daughter as, moving in tandem, Kemp and Bianca stepped inside. The door started to swing shut behind them. Marin whimpered; the fierce “Shh” that followed presumably came from Margery.
There was a flurry of movement in the corner behind the door.
“Freeze.” Bianca snapped the pistol toward the corner, cross-body, ready to fire at the shadowy figure that, fortunately for whoever it was, froze. Her movements were restricted because of her need to keep a grip on the pen, but not so restricted she couldn’t have gotten off a shot. Or three.
“Ah,” Kemp moaned, clutching at his neck, at the same time as Marin whimpered, “Mummy, I’m scared,” and her mother said, “Hush.”
“Bianca.”
The most welcome voice in the world, chock-full of pleased surprise. Bianca looked at the man who stepped out of the dark corner into the meager natural light and felt as if a great weight had been lifted off her chest.
Her father was alive.
She discovered that she wasn’t even all that surprised. He always had been one to land on his feet.
Richard St. Ives—no, Mason Thayer—had movie-star good looks, if the movie star was in his midsixties with a few wrinkles and thick silver hair. He had blue eyes, high cheekbones, a long, straight nose, well-cut lips, a square chin. He was six foot one, with a slim, elegant build. Bianca had always thought she looked like him.
Nope.
She almost said, Dad, before she remembered that he wasn’t.
The sudden hollowness in the pit of her stomach was a stark reminder of how much everything had changed.
“Mason Thayer, right?” was how she greeted him instead, because showing emotion had never been what they did. She thrust the Beretta back into the waistband of her slacks. “And here was I thinking you were dead.”
He was wearing a ski parka, boots, gloves, and he smelled of fresh air and the outdoors. The weapon he’d slung over his shoulder upon recognizing her was a submachine gun. A machine pistol hung over his other shoulder. From the looks of him—his shoulders were wet with what was presumably melted snow—he had arrived scant moments before she and Kemp had stepped through the door.
She couldn’t help it. Despite everything, she was really glad to see him.
“Long story,” he responded, as if the ordeal he’d put her through was no big deal. “Short version is, the only way you ever get away from them is to die.”
“You could have filled me in on the whole test-tube thing,” she said.
He looked at her, and she could see the truth of what she’d been told in his face. She hadn’t even realized that she’d been cherishing a tiny little sliver of hope that the story was a lie until it died.
“Strictly need-to-know. And you didn’t.” At his brusque reply Bianca felt a stab of hurt, a flicker of anger, and pushed both aside in favor of focusing on the urgency of the here and now. His gaze shifted to Kemp, who was partially turned away from him. “What’s this, the catch of the day?”
“Daddy.” Marin drew his attention by breaking away from her mother to run to him, throwing her arms around him, hugging his legs. Bianca looked down at her little sister—no, not little sister—this child she’d thought was a sister, and felt another twinge, this time of emptiness. “I want to go home.”
Watching her not-father hug her not-sister and say something comforting to her, it hit Bianca, forcefully, that she was once again on the outside looking in. She had no one and nothing of her own.
Pity party at seven. Emergency confab for now.
“You have transportation?” she asked Mason (calling her erstwhile father by that name was going to take some getting used to, but apparently that was his name and she couldn’t call him Dad anymore).
“Chopper. ETA fifteen minutes. East slope.”
That was the best news Bianca had heard in a while.
“I need shoes,” Bianca told him. “And a coat.”
He glanced at her bare feet. “There were piles of boots by the door I came in through. You can grab some on the way out. A bunch of co
ats hanging there, too.”
Marin looked around at her. The little girl’s round-cheeked face was pale and streaked with dried tears. Her hair had been finger-combed and plaited into a single braid that hung down her back, presumably by Margery.
“What happened to your shoes?” Marin asked.
Bianca met wide blue eyes. “I lost them.”
“I’d get in trouble if I lost my shoes.”
“Stay with Mummy.” Mason gave the kid a gentle shove in her mother’s direction. To Margery, he said, “Bundle her up. We’ve got to go.”
“Edward, who is this?” Even as Marin ran into her arms, Margery was looking at Bianca. Her expression was wary. Well, fair enough, Bianca thought. It probably wasn’t every day that her husband teamed up with a young blonde who was armed with a pistol and was leading a bleeding man around by a skewer in his neck.
Plus Margery was probably traumatized from the kidnapping.
Mason said, “Margery, Marin, this is Bianca. She’s…a friend.”
Okay, that hurt, too.
“I need to sit down.” Kemp tottered a little. His voice was weak, strained. Bianca could feel the rapid pulsing of his neck beneath her hand. More blood leaked out around the pen.
Bianca said, “You can’t. We’re heading out.”
“I have to.” His knees sagged. He sank to the floor, first kneeling, then sinking back on his haunches with his hands braced on his thighs. Hanging on to the pen, cursing silently—she didn’t want to curse in front of Marin—Bianca shifted positions along with him. She’d meant the thumb-cramp thing as a taunt, but turned out it was a real problem and her position was starting to get untenable.
“John Kemp.” Mason drew the name out. He walked around in front of the man as he seemed to recognize Bianca’s prisoner for the first time. Across the room, Margery zipped Marin into a coat. The sound caused Bianca to glance their way. Marin’s back was to their gruesome little tableau with Kemp. Bianca thought Margery had turned her daughter away from it deliberately. “Long time no see.”
Kick A** Heroines Box Set: The UltimatumFatal AffairAfter the DarkBulletproof SEAL (The Guardian) Page 29