Burning Bridges (Shattered Highways Book 2)

by Tara N Hathcock

  “I found them,” she said simply.

  “Found who?” Logan asked, eyes never leaving the game.

  “The company,” Quincy said. “The other patients. I know where they are.”

  They were perfectly still, perfectly silent, for several seconds. Dave’s look of polite interest froze, sealing his face in a caricature of a still life portrait. Logan’s shoulders tensed, not having expected the blunt announcement.

  But the shock wore off quickly. Without looking away, Dave leaned over and shut off the television. Logan spun sideways on the couch to face her.

  “You found the company?” he asked. She could hear the confusion in his voice. “I didn’t even know you’d been looking.”

  “It started after that last conversation in the bunker,” she said. “You said we didn’t have any intel. No place to start looking. It got me thinking.”

  “And your thinking led to the company?” he asked, the doubt showing through in his voice. “In less than a week?”

  “It actually wasn’t that hard,” she said. “The only reason the police weren’t able to put it together and find each of the patients was because they didn’t know the cases were connected. We do. So I compared the data from all of the cases that we know of and narrowed it down to a general location.”

  “I think you’d better start from the beginning,” Dave suggested calmly.

  Quincy sank down onto the small coffee table in front of the couch they were sitting on and pulled her legs up under her, gathering her thoughts.

  “There had to be a pattern between all of the known RNB disappearances,” she began. “A powerful, multi-billion dollar company isn’t going to use multiple contractors to do their dirty work. They’re going to use one contractor that they trust. And any contractor worth his salt is going to use a standard mode of operation. So I started with what I knew.”

  “The Colonel.”

  The question came out more as a statement, Logan’s voice flat and monotonous. He was even less keen to talk about the man who had almost ended their escape as she was.

  “The Colonel.” Quincy closed her eyes, thinking back. “The first two times I escaped, when I was Kara Scott and Grace Elliot, the only person I saw was the Colonel. Being the paranoid, hyper-alert mess that I was, I would have noticed anyone else. They would have triggered some sort of internal alarm. But there was no one else.”

  “What does that tell you?” Dave asked. Logan kept quiet.

  “That target acquisition is usually done as a one-man operation. The Colonel only embedded Brandon when he realized he wouldn’t be able to get close to me any other way. Brandon was an aberration.”

  “Truer words were never spoken,” Logan quipped, a small, halfhearted effort to lighten the mood. Quincy smiled back.

  “In more ways than one,” she agreed. “The second piece of data I used to find the others was the vehicle. The Colonel picked me up in a rental. Seems sloppy at first, I know,” she said. “It would be almost impossible to eliminate all trace evidence from a rental car.”

  “Trace evidence?” Logan asked. “Have you been binge-watching procedurals again?” He shook his head in pity. “Remember, we talked about this - binge-watching procedurals makes you weird and even more paranoid than usual.”

  Quincy rolled her eyes. “I have not been binge-watching procedurals.” She hesitated. “Much. I read a book.”

  “Oh yeah, much better.” He rolled his eyes as though she wearied him to his very soul.

  “I read it back before we even met,” she shot back. “And that’s not the point. The point is, cleaning every hair fiber and every fingerprint out of a rental car is nearly impossible.”

  “So why use a rental?” Dave asked.

  Quincy smirked. “Because no one is looking.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Think about it. There are millions of cars on the road at any given moment. Depending on the size of the city and the surrounding highway infrastructure, there could be hundreds or thousands of rentals moving through an area, all obtained from different locations and heading in different directions. Without an established pattern, the police wouldn’t know to look.”

  “But we do?” Dave asked.

  “We do.”

  “So,” Logan piped in, “because the Colonel picked you up in a rental, you’re assuming he did the same with the others.”

  “Yes,” Quincy said. “The Colonel is successful because he has a process. One he rarely diverges from. He’s not going to drive a company car. A warrant against a fleet of company cars would be much easier to obtain than a warrant against a specific rental car company, whose cars are constantly changing hands.”

  “Okay, I’ll buy that,” Logan said. “But how did knowing this help pinpoint the company’s location?”

  “Because I tracked every rental car in a 10-mile radius from the time and date of each disappearance.”

  The boys took longer to digest that tidbit than Quincy would have expected, exchanging a glance that confused her.

  “And how,” Dave finally asked, “were you able to do that?”

  Oh. Right. She forgot to mention that part.

  “I pulled the traffic footage,” she said. “It…wasn’t that hard.”

  “And how exactly did you get that footage?” Logan asked.

  Hmm. How to phrase it? “I may have become a computer hacker last week,” she said mildly. “Turns out, it’s not that hard.”

  Chapter 33

  Dr. Cans

  The patients were vocal today, just not about the things Dr. Cans needed them to talk about.

  “Of course she knows they’re coming for her,” Andre stated vehemently. “She’s on the lookout. That’s how she keeps slipping past them.”

  “I don’t know,” Miguel argued hesitantly. “None of us knew.”

  She really shouldn’t allow the legend of Jane Doe to grow, but Miguel wasn’t one who usually engaged with the other patients, let alone contradicted them. Dr. Cans decided to allow the tangent. She wanted to see how it played out.

  “Yeah, well, none of us made it past the first attempt,” Amy shot back, “so she must know something we didn’t.”

  Amy and Andre had a tendency to side with each other. Whether it was their similar dispositions or just their desire to hurt someone they saw as a turncoat, Dr. Cans didn’t know. But she had noticed, in recent days, a slack in their attacks. They were half-hearted now, as though being waged out of habit rather than real anger.

  “I’m not saying she doesn’t have some idea that she’s being followed,” Miguel reasoned. “I’m just saying, maybe she got lucky that first time.”

  “You’re most likely all right, to an extent,” Claire broke in, right on schedule. Always the peacemaker. “She got lucky the first time, whereas none of the rest of us did.” Claire uncrossed and re-crossed her legs, never once dropping out of the perfect posture she clung to. “And once lucky, twice shy. Now she knows what to look for.”

  “If she even exists,” Dr. Cans threw in, deadpan. How did the patients even know about her? It’s not like the company was prone to advertising its failures.

  “Oh, she’s real.” Andre sat back, folding his arms across his chest, smug. “People talk.”

  He had a point. Dr. Cans had never been around a group of people that didn’t share gossip. She had no doubt the stories had circulated from the source, reaching as far down as the lab technicians and security guards who the patients were constantly exposed to.

  “Point taken,” Dr. Cans agreed calmly. “But knowing what you know of the Rhinehardt Collaborative’s …” she searched for a diplomatic word, “acquisition tactics, how would this Jane Doe be able to escape multiple times, even if she did know to be watchful?”

  It was a valid question. Rhinehardt employed very talented, very experienced retrieval specialists. Knowing they were coming didn’t mean someone could escape.

  “Could you have escaped, Amy,” she asked pointedly, “
knowing they were coming? Or you, Claire?” Dr. Cans rested her chin in her hand. “Would you have been able to evade capture if you’d known what to watch for?”

  The group was silent, each remembering the circumstances that had brought them here. Dr. Cans knew the conclusion they would each be forced to draw. No, they would not have been able to escape. The retrievals had each been brutal in their efficiency. Andre, drugged at the local pub on his way home from work. Amy, removed silently from her son’s soccer game.

  Claire and Miguel’s retrieval had been just as neat: Claire, crawling into a rideshare vehicle she thought she’d ordered and Miguel, his truck abandoned along a lonely stretch of blacktop.

  No, even if they had gotten lucky and escaped that first time, Rhinehardt and the people they employ were too good, too coldblooded, to escape again.

  “So how is she doing it?” Dr. Cans asked, segueing the conversation back towards their original topic. “If she’s real and the rumors are true, how is she doing it?”

  Miguel was the one to speak. “It’s her RNB. Or the symptoms that come from her version of RNB.”

  “That’s a reasonable conclusion,” she said. “Since no one has caught her, no one knows exactly how she’s doing it. But how else would she be so difficult to pin down if not for some sort of enhanced sense?”

  “You want us to buy into the fact that we each have an enhanced sense, as you put it,” Claire said, “instead of accepting it in Miguel only.”

  “I do,” Dr. Cans replied. “I know you each see it. You can’t possibly deny it to yourselves, not after seeing and hearing Miguel’s story. If it’s true for him, it’s true for you.”

  Claire licked her lips nervously. It was a habit Dr. Cans had noticed, probably from her opera days when constant singing took its toll on her mouth and throat.

  “You’re an intelligent woman, Claire,” she went on. She had her attention; she might as well use it. “You can see the similarities. The accidents, the recoveries - they are the same. The side effects - headaches, sleeplessness, irritability, and depression. Statistically speaking, if one of you has it, you all do. You know it. Why can’t you acknowledge it?”

  “Can’t or won’t?” That look was back in Claire’s eyes. The one that said she might agree, but she certainly wasn’t going to play the game.

  Dr. Cans smiled. “You’re right, they are two different things. Miguel has accepted it. Why won’t you?”

  They all turned to Miguel, who seemed to wish he could disappear. His shoulders hunched and he pulled his head down into his chest.

  “Yes,” Claire agreed speculatively, “Miguel has the answers he was looking for. And by learning about these…enhancements, if you will, his life is improving. If Amy and Andre want to do the same, I would support them fully,” she allowed. “Just because I choose not to participate doesn’t mean they shouldn’t.”

  Claire was looking at Dr. Cans as she said this, but she was speaking to the other patients. She gave a surreptitious glance at the others. Andre’s posture hadn’t changed, but he was chewing on his lower lip and his eyes were unfocused, considering something far away. Amy looked torn, and Dr. Cans knew why.

  Miguel wasn’t simply cooperating to learn to control his ability for the company’s sake. They thought she didn’t know. That she had made a mistake when she’d given him the book explaining the physics of particulate energy. She hadn’t.

  She’d told Mr. Smith and Mr. Anderson that she didn’t need the cooperation of the patients, and she didn’t. Miguel was learning to understand and control his ability so he could use it to leave this place. She didn’t care why he was doing it. All that mattered was that he was.

  The others had likely encouraged him in this pursuit while hesitantly wondering if the same could be true for them. Dr. Cans had some theories about what each of their abilities were, but she needed them to work with her if she was going to be able to give them working diagnoses. From the looks Amy and Andre were exchanging, she thought it was likely their next individual sessions would be a little more encouraging.

  Amy’s irritability came from desperation, Andre’s from pain. She thought she could help them, they just needed to give her the chance. If that meant they thought they might be able to escape using what she taught them, that was fine with Dr. Cans. Just so long as they were learning.

  Chapter 34

  Logan

  “You may have become a computer hacker?” Logan asked, annoyed. “You mean, you may have purposely used your condition to absorb the information necessary to learn how to illegally break into police and governmental records in less than a week?”

  Quincy smiled. “Yes,” she said. “That’s exactly what I mean.”

  “You don’t even know how it works!” Logan exploded, jumping to his feet to pace the small space between the couch and the card table they usually ate dinner at. “And you’ve been refusing to even attempt to learn ever since you got here.”

  Okay, so maybe she had recently agreed to let Dave examine her. And maybe Dave had started to form some conclusions, but this was reckless. They needed to understand more about her condition before she started consciously seeking it out. What if there were side effects? What if she started forgetting-

  “Well, now I’m on board. Happy?” she snapped back.

  “Nope, not happy at all. You don’t even know how it works,” Logan repeated. He knew she was impulsive. He knew she was stubborn. But this? Digging into the company without telling them? It wasn’t only reckless, it was dangerous, too. What if the company had their own computer hackers watching for that kind of breach? It could be traced back to Boulder.

  “I said I’m a computer hacker now,” she said in exasperation. “Don’t you think I know how to avoid leaving a trail?”

  He must have said that last part out loud.

  “It’s not just that,” he argued. “It’s not just dangerous for all of us. It’s dangerous for you.”

  “Why?” Quincy asked. “It seems pretty simple to me. I read or hear something and then I’m good to go. Doesn’t seem that hard.”

  “Logan’s right,” Dave said quietly. Logan had almost forgotten he was there. “We may know that you can absorb and use information on a massive scale, but we don’t know what the side effects of that information download is.”

  “What kinds of side -,” she started to ask.

  “Memory loss.”

  Quincy and Logan both paused. Quincy looked down, Logan looked at her.

  “I thought we decided the memory loss is a result of her brain injury,” Logan said. “It is, isn’t it?”

  “Maybe,” Dave said. “Or maybe it’s a result of taking in more data than her brain can hold.”

  “You think it’s a protection mechanism?” Quincy asked. “Part of the RNB?”

  “Maybe it’s all of the above. I really don’t know,” he said mildly. “That’s something I’d like to look into in the near future. But there are also the headaches. You’ve had at least one migraine in the last week. Two,” he said, looking at Quincy knowingly, “if the restlessness from three nights ago was any indication.”

  Quincy grimaced. “You heard that, huh?”

  “I suspected.”

  “So what?” she asked, suddenly angry. “You wanted me to come here, and Logan convinced me to do it by promising I could help find the others,” she said, pointing accusingly at him. “But now you don’t want me to do whatever I can to help?”

  Logan rolled his eyes. “That’s not-,”

  “That’s not it at all,” Dave cut in smoothly. “We want you to be part of this team. We want you to understand your condition and be able to use it accordingly. But we also want you to be safe and healthy, and we won’t know how to do that until we understand what you’re dealing with.”

  Basically what Logan was going to say, just more…diplomatic.

  “I guess that’s fair,” Quincy grudgingly admitted. “I know you’re just trying to help.”

  “We are,
” Dave said, looking pointedly at Logan.

  “Yeah, whatever,” he said, then sighed and rubbed his hands roughly over his face.

  “Fine,” he finally said, stomping back over to the couch and dropping into it. “What else have you got?”

  Quincy smiled. “Everything.”

  Chapter 35

  “Hope deferred makes the heart sick,” A Proverb

  Hope is an ugly thing. It leads you on, gives you strength.

  Only to crush you in the end.

  ***

  Dr. Cans

  Andre shifted uncomfortably in his seat in front of her. His eyes darted around the room, never quite meeting hers. That he was physically uncomfortable with her was obvious. Why he was uncomfortable was not.

  “Andre,” she began, “you’ve been here before and never seemed uncomfortable or awkward. Angry and anxious, yes. But not uncomfortable.”

  He had the good grace to finally meet her eyes.

  “It’s different this time,” he finally said. “It’s…I need to know the truth.”

  “Alright.” Dr. Cans tapped her pen against her chin. “The truth about what?”

  “About all of this.” He gestured towards his head, then down towards his body. “I need to know how to make the pain stop.”

  He seemed smaller today, somehow. As though this were his rock bottom. She tilted her head. “The headaches, you mean?”

  “No, not the headaches.” Andre pushed out of his chair and began to pace, seeing nothing. Where her bookshelves had been objects of interest for the women, Andre didn’t even seem to see them. They were only obstacles that, once reached, turned him back the other direction.

  “I get headaches, sure,” he finally said. “They can be pretty bad sometimes. I’m talking about the pain I feel everywhere else.”

  “Can you tell me about the pain?” Dr. Cans asked curiously. None of the others had complained of body pain and there was nothing in the patient records.