“Why didn’t you tell me this last night?” Alec asked.
“I wanted to be certain before I said anything. So I made some follow-up calls, but my contacts didn’t get back to me until this morning—and you were nowhere to be found. I was about to tell Hatcher what I’d learned, but then I received the Fairbanks ultimatum. Which brings us here.”
From Upton’s demeanor, it was clear Brad had his full attention. “Who’s Godfrey?” the FBI agent asked.
“He’s an operative who, according to Nicole Markwell, accepted a position with Apex and quit on Thursday,” Alec said.
“But Godfrey isn’t with Apex,” Upton clarified.
“No. He’s missing,” Fraser said.
It was time to tell Upton everything. “He’s not missing. I know exactly where he is.”
“Good. Because he’s crooked as shit, and we need to keep an eye on him,” Brad said.
“You suspected Godfrey?” Alec asked.
“There’s been something off about Johnston ever since Godfrey took him under his wing. Chase was a good kid. Then he started staring at Isabel. Just being strange. I told him to knock it off, and he denied it. But the strange part was, he really didn’t seem to know he was doing it. I kept telling Isabel it was just a crush, but now…I don’t think so. I think Godfrey was fucking with his brain, using infrasound or some other shit that had been in development under Robert Beck.
“Back when Beck owned the place, Godfrey and Westover were tight and teamed up to run lots of the smaller trainings. Knowing Chase’s brain may have been fucked with reminded me that Westover once worked for Defense Intelligence. He used to hint at the shit he’d done for DIA. I figured he was full of crap, but now I have to wonder if he really was versed in enhanced interrogation, and if he and Godfrey were working together, screwing with Chase’s head.”
At the first mention of Westover, Alec felt all the blood in his brain flow straight to his gut.
Isabel.
Alec stood without a word and turned for the door. Upton grabbed his arm, stopping him. “We need more information first.”
“She’s in danger.”
“He’d be a fool to try something now. He’d reveal himself.”
“What’s going on?” Brad asked.
“Isabel is in the Tamarack lockup while we look into my suspicions of Nicole.”
“Nic too?” Jenna said.
Alec nodded. He forced himself to stay and ask the questions, knowing Upton wouldn’t release Isabel based on vague speculation alone. “You ever see anything suspicious between Nic and Godfrey?”
Brad shrugged. “He always got the odd assignments—the small trainings, one instructor, of two or three soldier/trainees. Short and intense. Much like Vin Dawson’s last training. Those are the fun ones—out in the woods with a small team.” He shrugged. “I figured she was playing favorites and it pissed me off. Truth is, I don’t like Godfrey because he’s reckless, and I swear he likes playing the hostage taker in the scenarios a little too much. We always play it real, per your rules, Rav, but he brought a special level of sicko to the job.”
He frowned. “A month ago, we did a dry run in the new shoot house, to block out a new scenario. Chase played hostage and was tied to a chair. I caught Godfrey holding his gun inches from Chase’s forehead and dry firing.”
“That’s a firable offense,” Alec said. “Why the fuck are you just telling me this now?”
“I reported it to Nicole. Godfrey was put on a two-week suspension, and she said you’d approved the suspension over the firing because we’re short on operatives.”
“Nic lied. I’d have fired Godfrey on the spot, I don’t give a crap how short-staffed we are.” How badly had Alec fucked up in leaving Nicole in charge at the compound?
“Anything else?” Agent Upton asked Brad.
Brad paused for a moment, then said, “Search the wine cellar. Nic goes in there a lot, but she’s not really a wine drinker, and it would be just like Beck to have a secret room tucked behind his precious wine cellar.”
Alec turned to Upton. His body was tight with the need to go after Isabel. “Is that enough?”
Upton gave a sharp nod.
“Go to the compound and detain Nicole for questioning,” Alec said. “I’ll get Isabel.”
“Westover won’t release her to you. We’ll get Isabel, then leave her here with Fraser.” Upton nodded to the former operative. “Do you trust him to protect her?”
Alec met Brad’s gaze, then nodded to Upton.
“Good. Then we’ll find Nicole Markwell.”
“Where’s Godfrey?” Brad asked. “Question him. He’ll crack long before Nic does.”
Alec was about to say Godfrey wouldn’t be answering questions anytime soon, when the front door to the Roadhouse opened, admitting a strong gust of wind and the woman who worked for Westover at the Tamarack Post. She had a pinched, anxious look on her face as she met Alec’s gaze. “Oh, thank goodness you’re still here! He’s taken her. She’s gone.”
Fear unlike anything Alec had ever experienced gripped him by the balls.
“What happened?” Upton asked.
“That ass Westover sent me to lunch—insisted I go, which was unusual for him—but I needed to let the dogs out and was relieved we were going to skip our daily argument, so I went. While I was gone, he took Isabel. She’s not in the jail.”
31
Alec’s wasn’t quite sure he was breathing, yet he must be, because he managed to speak. “Where did he take her?”
“I have no idea! His patrol car is gone. I radioed him, but he didn’t respond.”
“Can you track his vehicle with GPS?”
She frowned. “The tracking device was damaged a few weeks ago. It hasn’t been fixed.”
Alec’s heart pounded. This was all his fault. He’d suggested they leave Isabel in the jail. He stupidly hadn’t suspected Westover. But why did the man expose himself now by going all in? What was his goal? And how did he expect to escape with his life?
Because sure as hell, if the officer hurt Isabel, Alec was going to break his neck—as easily as he’d killed Godfrey.
Isabel jolted awake, unsure what had pulled her from sleep. Then she heard it again. The song. Someone was calling her. Not just someone. Alec. That was his ringtone.
Wait. What was her cell phone doing here?
And where, exactly, was here?
She sat up—or rather tried to—and discovered she couldn’t move. She was strapped to a bed in a cold, dark room. The only sound was the ringing of the cell phone. The repeated phrases of Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Call Me Maybe.” The light pop song had been her secret admission she was interested in him when she’d downloaded it, but in this stark, desolate room, it offered only discord and turmoil.
Slowly, the last hours came back to her. The Sun article. Finding the cave and Godfrey’s remains. Upton’s accusations. She’d been locked up. Again. And Westover had cuffed her and they’d driven off. Then…nothing.
She probed the blank spaces in her memory. She’d never really liked Paul Westover, but that didn’t mean anything. After all, she’d liked Nicole.
The officer must be involved. He hadn’t worked on the compound when Vin was there, but that didn’t mean he didn’t work with Godfrey and Nicole and infrasound.
She must have been zapped while she was still in the cruiser. She could have passed out with the pain, giving him the chance to bring her here. Wherever here was.
Four concrete walls and a ceiling. They weren’t in the cave.
She shouldn’t be surprised that they had other locations for their experiments. The cave was probably only for certain special cases. Over the months she’d searched for it, she’d done a lot of research, and understood that caves were ideal for torture and brainwashing because they were disorienting. Sound reverberated in odd ways. Were infrasound waves especially intense inside the cave?
The cave itself, she’d discovered, had felt like an underground cave
rn. Like being buried alive.
It must have been a nightmare for Vin. And for Alec.
This concrete bunker wasn’t much better, but at least there weren’t bats clinging to the ceiling. Even so, she had a feeling Alec’s and Vin’s nightmares were about to become hers.
Footsteps tapped out a rhythm on the floor, the sound echoing as if a person approached from a long corridor. This had to be one of the shoot houses. Or maybe she was inside one of the fake structures meant to emulate a crumbling city street.
That would mean there were cameras here with a direct feed to the compound. Alec could find her if he went to God’s Eye and checked the feed for every structure. She had no idea how many structures, how many rooms, how many cameras there were, or if he’d even think to look. But she had to believe he’d find her. She needed a reason to hope.
A person wearing a ski mask with dark, reflective glasses and a regulator of some sort over the mouth and nose paused above her. From the build, she figured the man must be Westover. Did he really think he could hide his identity now? But then, he probably wore the mask for the same reason they’d tortured in a cave, because it was disorienting.
She had to admit, she didn’t like her reflection in the glasses.
The man spoke, and his voice was mechanical. Not computerized, the mouthpiece must be a filter that altered the frequency and modulation of his speech. “You’re lucky, Isabel, you’ll have no memory of this.”
She shivered at that. They planned to torture her but considered blanking her memory of the pain a kindness.
“Why are you disguising your voice and face, Westover?”
A sharp crackling noise emitted from the mask. It took her a moment to realize it was altered laughter. He was amused. “Infrasound can interrupt your ability to understand speech, and it’s vital you understand so we get the response we need. This filter emits my speech at a frequency you can comprehend while being subjected to the waves. It took us months to figure out the right frequency. Your brother was our first successful filter test. He was able to answer all of my questions.”
Her belly turned as she imagined Vin in this position, their test subject as they honed their instruments of torture. “What do you want from me?”
“We want nothing from you.”
“Then why are you doing this?”
“Because we want something from Ravissant. You interrupted his interrogation before we got what we needed. It’s your fault he killed Godfrey.”
He knew she knew about Godfrey?
The mask emitted a low, rumbling sound. A heavy sigh? “We’ve had this conversation, already, Isabel. I’m tired of it.”
“Already?”
“Oh yes. You’ve already been questioned. You told me everything. You know about Godfrey. You know about Nicole. The only thing you don’t know is why. That’s the word you repeated as you screamed and cried. So much like your brother.”
She felt all the blood in her body pull back from her bound extremities. She’d already been tortured? She’d told them everything she knew? “How long have I been here?”
Another set of footsteps entered the room. A lighter step—a smaller person. A second mask and goggles filled her vision. Shorter. A woman’s build.
Nicole.
“Five hours,” she said, her voice also distorted by the mask. “You were such a good sport, Isabel, this time I’m going to answer all your questions. Such a pity you won’t remember later.”
“You can suppress memories, but you can’t erase them. I will remember.”
A cold, gloved hand caressed her cheek. She flinched away from the cruel touch. “Oh, sweetie. You said that before too. But you don’t remember. And you won’t this time either. The only reason it didn’t work with Rav was because you interrupted. Once the trance was broken, Westover had to knock him out. After that, there was no going back. He couldn’t reset and start over. Your interference meant there was a chance Rav would remember. Too many untested variables we couldn’t control. It’s why we couldn’t abduct him a second time and try again.” She tugged on one of Isabel’s curls. “Good thing the man has a thing for redheads, or we’d be up shit creek. I didn’t know what we were going to do until we were at the shoot house and he freaked about you playing hostage. We can’t torture him to get him to tell us what we need, but he’ll cave when he watches the video.”
“Video?”
“The one we’re going to send him. Want to see it?” She picked up a remote from the wheeled cart next to her and hit a button, turning on the monitor mounted to the cart.
The video was black-and-white and blurred, but slowly, the image solidified into crystal-clear high definition. Isabel watched in horror as she thrashed, gasped, and screamed as if she were being sliced open, one slow inch at a time.
There was something horrific about seeing herself whimpering and begging for the pain to stop. She could easily see Vin in her place. Or Alec.
“Stop it!” she shouted when she couldn’t take it any longer. She wanted to wipe away the tears that streamed down her face, but her hands were strapped down at her hips. All she could do was turn her head into the cot, but it was covered in cold, crinkly, nonabsorbent plastic.
She didn’t want to think about why they used a plastic-wrapped cot, yet her brain still registered that bodily fluids were easily washed from plastic.
“Why are you doing this, Nicole? I thought we were friends.”
The cold, gloved hand returned to her cheek. “We are friends, sweetie. I hate doing this to you. But at least you won’t remember it. That’s my gift to you.” Her hand slid from Isabel’s cheek and wrapped around her neck. She didn’t squeeze, she just rested her hand in a relaxed threat. “As for why, it’s simple, really. I want Alec’s money. All of it. We tried subtle—going after account logins and passwords, access codes, security questions—everything we’d need to clean him out.
“We were going to transfer his funds to foreign numbered accounts, coordinating the transactions so it would happen right as his assets were being transferred into a blind trust—which he was setting up in the event he wins the election. Because he wouldn’t remember giving us the information, he’d have had no idea his assets were vulnerable. It would’ve been the perfect heist.”
Nicole pulled off her mask and glanced at Westover. “I hate this damn thing. It’s hot and uncomfortable. I don’t know how you and Godfrey could handle wearing it for hours on end. There is no point in wearing it when the subject isn’t being subjected to infrasound.”
“We need to start another round within four minutes, or she might remember this conversation,” Westover said.
“I’ll put it on again then.” She turned to Isabel and smiled, the same grin she’d flash when they laughed over a beer. “As I was saying… You’re the perfect hostage. I don’t think you understand exactly how rich Rav is. He has a lot of financial assets that would’ve been rolled up in that trust, and we would’ve taken every dime. We’d bide our time, and six months, a year from now, quietly disappear and enjoy his money.”
“So you’re just a fucking thief?” Isabel’s question came out as a snarl.
“Thieves now, but originally we were entrepreneurs. We planned to sell infrasound. I had Russian—and Ukrainian, I believe in taking money from both sides—clients lined up. But then you kept making a stink about Vin and his dreams of the lynx cave, and they balked. It’s no good if the victim remembers. But we kept perfecting the techniques. By mixing infrasound with some drugs Westover managed to procure, we were getting pretty good with brainwashing and suggestion. Chase has been stalking you for weeks, not because he wanted to, but because he had to. And he had no idea why. But he resisted kidnapping you in the basement, so Westover upped the infrasound frequency. You saw what happened.” She tossed a glare at her partner. “It was our one chance to grab you while remaining anonymous.”
Finally, Nicole turned off the video, and Isabel’s screams no longer provided a horrific soundtrack to the
conversation. “When my spy in the DC office told me Hatcher had been hired for the CEO position, Godfrey suggested we kidnap Rav and take his money. It seemed like a fitting punishment. That job should have been mine.”
“You didn’t get the CEO position because you were losing operatives to Apex, and I got the compound shut down because you murdered my brother!”
“Chicken, egg. Whatever. I was content as an operative in Hawaii, but Rav sent me to Siberia. I knew he’d never promote me out of this wasteland, so I seized other opportunities.” She had the gall to shrug.
“He sent you here as a promotion! Alaska is the heart of the entire training operation.”
“I don’t want to train soldiers. I left the Army because they wouldn’t let me be a soldier. There’s little room to advance if you can’t play with the big boys. Robert Beck may have been an ass, but at least he let me be an operative. Rav yanked me out of operations and called it a promotion.” Nicole reached for the mask. Once it was again over her head, she picked up another item from the cart. It looked like a parabolic microphone. She turned the curved dish toward Isabel. “And I didn’t murder your brother. We just tested things on him. In the end, he died all by himself.”
Before Isabel could react, she pressed a button on the object in her hand, and Isabel’s head began to throb. Her vision blurred. She wanted to puke.
She was going to die.
32
Alec was about to lose his mind. Isabel had been missing for six hours. The compound was now emptied of everyone except Alec, Keith, Ethan, Josh, Sean, Lee, Brad, and Agent Matt Upton, who was now on a first-name basis with the team after he’d been the one to find the panel that opened in the wine cellar, revealing a stark laboratory.
In the lab—which was adjacent to the firing range and, like the range, not under the compound building, but next to it—they found a computer terminal with access to the elevator controls and every security camera that hadn’t been replaced by Alec when he took over the company. They also found Isabel’s laptop, cell phone, and the notebook she’d used to document her search for the cave. Westover must have seen the notebook when he arrested her Friday morning and taken it when he grabbed her laptop later that night.
Vote Then Read: Volume II Page 264