Cuff Lynx (33 page)

“It means nothing. Absolutely nothing. Influencing won’t work on Striker. Whatever it is Vine wants, it can’t work. He’s too solid, like the general,” I insisted.

“But the general isn’t fully revived – brainwashing, Stockholm syndrome, it happens to the best of the best,” Blaze said. “We don’t know what’s been planted in his brain while he was out, and what he’ll do when he’s revived. He could be like some kind of sleeper assassin. If we don’t know what Vine’s planting in Striker’s head, we don’t know what the result could be.”

Was it possible that there more to this than Vine manipulating Striker into a marriage?

“Whatever it is, I bet she’s been trying for a while,” Jack said.

I looked over at him, my nostrils flaring with anger.

“He’s had a headache for weeks now.” Jack blinked and stared over my shoulder at the blank wall, thinking. “He started getting them after Omega attacked his house.” He focused solidly on me. “Think about it. If Indigo is Vine’s father and Vine wanted you taken out of the picture – look at the board and the things Indigo did. He worked on Frith, planted seeds of hatred and vengeance mentally, and physically he put Frith on your trail. Again and again, he gave Frith the information. I’d say he was reveling in the angst he was causing. Otherwise he’d just have sent someone from Sylanos’s cartel or from Omega to make a quick hit.”

“Those were my thoughts as well. Also, he’s angry that Spyder didn’t stand up for the Galaxy Project in front of the Senate, I would guess that by making bad things happen to me that Indigo felt he was punishing Spyder.” I said.

“If we follow that line of thought, I bet good money Frith didn’t find you at Striker’s bay house the way he said he did with computer searches,” Jack said. “I’ll bet Indigo gave Frith the address and told Omega to go after you.”

“But Indigo would have wanted me dead as a result, and the Omega operator said I was precious cargo and not to be hurt.” I sat there, wide-eyed. Layers upon layers. Like an army private, Wilson took orders from his superior Frith, and Frith took orders from Indigo. Next I could find out it’s the President of the United States, the Pope, and maybe even God Almighty Himself that wanted me to suffer and freaking die.

“Frith thought that he was playing his own game. He’s the one who ordered Omega in to capture you for profit’s sake. But I saw that operative’s face right before Bella bit him. His job was to take the kill shot, he was Indigo’s man, I’d swear it. I’ve been in too many gun fights not to recognize that conviction,” Deep said.

“So you think that when Omega failed to kill me, Indigo started trying to influence Striker to gain allegiance for both his daughter and for his own ends?”

Blaze leaned forward. “Vine wanted Striker to love her. But think what an asset Striker would be to the Hydra. What if they were weakening Iniquus for a takeover? Then we’d be another strong arm for them, just like Omega.”

“We need to figure out what the hell they’ve done to the general’s and Striker’s brains,” Jack said.

Forty

“S
pyder,” I said into the secured line. “Indigo is at St. Bernard’s hospital in ICU under the name Allan Hays. Things aren’t looking good for him.”

“Tell me more.”

“Seems he has a case of diverticulitis with a perforated abscess. He was brought in by ambulance in septic shock. I’ve done some quick research if you need it.”

“Yes, please. Making his death look natural is in everyone’s best interest.” Spyder’s voice was soft, warm, and matter of fact. We were plotting a man’s death, but it sounded like any other conversation we might have. As easy as, “will you be joining me for tea and meditation?”

“Okay.” I began. “The infection had gotten into his bloodstream and made his blood pressure drop. He was delirious, and they put him on a ventilator right away, so he can’t talk and his hands should be tied down to keep him from yanking the tube from his throat. That will make anything you do easier.”

“Agreed, go on.”

“All of his organs are shutting down. That means his kidneys are failing, too. I believe now is the time to act if you want to make sure he won’t survive this.”

“A concern would be that anything I do needs to look natural and be quick acting. I’m sure that his machines will send an alarm to the nurses station, and I need to have exited the floor by the time that happens.”

“Well, septic shock has an extremely high mortality rate so that’s on your side. The medical staff will assume that he might die. From what I can tell from this research site, the heart problems comes about because of something called ‘output failure’. The heart can’t keep up with the amount of blood that needs to be circulated to get enough oxygen and glucose into the system.”

“So his systems is shutting down at a cellular level. Still, I need to make sure that the threat is terminated. Immediately.”

“Okay. Um.” I flipped through the pages that Deep had provided me. “So I’m looking over Indigo’s bloodwork. It looks like you could do one of two things. He’s already hypoglycemic so you could shoot some insulin into his IV line. No, wait. Now that I hear myself say that aloud, I realize that’s a bad idea. When I’m admitted to the hospital, they’ve been pretty attentive to my glucose levels, and the nurses can counter excess insulin pretty quickly with dextrose. And with the sepsis, the nurses will be vigilant about those levels. Scratch that.

“The other thing I thought of was potassium. When Mom was in hospice, and she was experiencing kidney failure, the doctors could tell by, among other things, the high potassium levels in her blood. So yeah, a gigantic bolus of potassium would do the trick. There’s not much anyone could do about it, and an external source of potassium would be pretty untraceable if he were autopsied. In other words, high levels of potassium would be expected and not suspect.”

“The diverticulitis is why he was in gastric pain the night you went in to photograph the logs?” Spyder asked.

“Yeah, here let me read this to you. ‘The symptoms include diarrhea, nausea, vomiting, severe abdominal pain.’ Yup, it says ‘severe pain with ambulation,’ and Indigo was almost shrieking as he moved around the penthouse.”

“Potassium.”

“That would be my strategy,” I said.

“I’ll text you when the job is done,” Spyder replied.

The line went dead.

America had betrayed a patriot. At first I had felt heartsick for Allan Leverone. I understood how his brain could snap, and why creating all of this pain and horror might feel reasonable and just to him. Because those are the feelings Indigo engendered in me. Not anger. Beyond anger. The kind of sensation that left me rabid.

I wanted nothing more than to be Ardestia – she who cannot be escaped; the daughter of Ares who went to war beside her father to bring retribution. I wanted revenge for what he had done as Indigo. Indigo had put so many people through so much. Put me through so much. My brain played around with these thoughts, because of course this was what Indigo had to have felt, too. I wanted him dead and gone. But when Spyder’s text came through:
Task complete.
I didn’t feel any kind of satisfaction or relief.

Indigo had left a mess behind. Especially in the form of Vine and her possible ability to influence people, even though she didn’t have her father’s decades of experience, and maybe was the lesser of the two evils.

I stared at the whiteboard and our scribblings, trying to figure out where she could be taking Striker. And why. The only way to help Striker right now was to find the pieces to understand the puzzle. The more we read, the more we realized the level of crazy we were dealing with. I thought Vine was just disturbed. If only that were the case. . .

Vine had seeded thoughts into Striker’s brain so she would be always on his mind. They weren’t very creative, I thought. Immature? Naïve?  Vine seemed like a teenaged girl playing with wishcraft and her first crush. The seeds were simple phrases like: “I love Grace Hays and want her for my wife to love always.” “I only love Grace Hays and
will
only love Grace Hays in this lifetime.”

Jack started laying out information from his stack of papers. “According to these notes, Striker was too vibrationally dense for her. Her seeds couldn’t take root. Nothing watered and nourished them, so nothing sprouted. So she took the next step,” Jack told our team. There was funny pull to the muscles around his mouth that made him look like he needed to vomit. “She figured Striker needed to be in a life or death situation so the seeds would germinate. In her mind, if Striker truly thought he might die, and her loving eyes were the first that he saw — hers was the first concerned face he saw as he came to — then maybe those seeds would grow deep roots.

“Wow,” I said, shaking my head. I wondered if delusional thinking—well, just plain craziness—was a result of being poisoned by carbon monoxide as a child, the gases can have a permanent effect on the body and the brain. Maybe it stemmed from her father’s God complex? How much further would her mental health problems push her? It was hard to out think someone whose thoughts were so deranged.

“It gets even more bizarre from there,” Jack said. “Vine made a plan to put Striker on the cusp of life or death. She wanted to make sure Striker wouldn’t die – but he had to believe he would. And for this, she needed her dad’s help. They colluded.” Jack shook his head. “He told her it was a hell of a risk. But she was willing to take it.”

“Is this about his kidnapping?” Blaze asked.

“Not hardly, you’re not going to believe this shit. Indigo planned carefully—this could be a grand slam for him. A case that would abrade Iniquus’s reputation. A case that would take out what he called ‘their famed Strike Force’, destroying Iniquus morale and if all went well taking a key adversary off the board. Indigo decided to blow us and the D.O.A to bits at the Fuller Mine.”

“And the Sudanese?” Deep asked.

“They look like collateral damage, a means to an end,” Jack responded.

Blaze leaned his hips back into the table and crossed his arms over his chest. “How could they plan to blow everyone to bits and keep Striker from dying?”

“The plan was that Striker wouldn’t go down into the mine because he’d be shot. It had to be a very careful shot taken by the best possible Omega marksman. Not a kill shot, but a near-kill shot. Striker had to be unconscious so he wouldn’t call in support and wouldn’t follow them into the mine.”

“What now?” Deep’s jaw line jutted forward as he took this in.

“Indigo had put in a great deal of work to make it happen. He tasked finding the best possible case that he could influence, and found the Sudanese immigrants and the D.O.A.  He contacted an Assembly member to arrange for the man who had commended Lynx for her work at the FBI last year as the one to sign the contract. That was a weird little twist. I wonder what was going on in Indigo’s mind…”

“How’d he know we’d be at the Fuller Mine? We didn’t even know we’d be over there.” Deep asked.

“I saw that one in one of the remote views,” Blaze said. “Indigo moved forward in time and read our plans off the whiteboard.”

“He made the plans with Omega based on the intel,” Jack continued, “and it was Omega who found traces of bad gas back around the switchback and suggested the D.O.A. take flashbangs with them.”

“Clever boys,” I said.

“Yeah those clever boys also sent out their snipers to shoot Striker. They just thought they’d have some fun hitting me, since I  seemed to be heading their way. The shitheads.” Jack stopped reading to make note of the snipers’ call signs on the board. That didn’t bode well for them. Jack turned and asked, “You ready to hear something really fucked up?”

I looked around and everyone seemed just about as shocked and incredulous as I felt.

“While Striker and I were being shot, while our team was racing for breathable air, while all of those men and women from the Sudan and D.O.A. were sucking in their last breaths of gas, Vine had been at the spa, making sure she looked absolutely perfect for her Prince Charming.”

“What?” I stammered.

“Omega listened in on the emergency comms and knew exactly which O.R. prepped for Striker’s arrival. Vine was already in place at the hospital with her wedding rings on her finger, ready to play the wife. Ready for Striker to come to and tell her, “I love you. Marry me.”

Holy moly. “And instead he said, ‘Good night,’” I whispered. “What did she write down after that, Jack?”

Pages of her rage. Pages and pages of psychotic delusional thoughts.

“But look here,” Gater flipped some pages in the air. “Indigo promised to help Vine, and said the key was to make Striker’s mind malleable . He said that in some people, like Striker and Elliot, the only way to do it was to break down their mental strength with drugs.”

As Gater read that, the beast in me was too aggressive to hold back anymore. I saw the fury swirling amongst my team, but they contained it where I could not. Could not think. Could not process. My energy swelled and filled the room until my expanse burst right out the doors like Alice in Wonderland after she had a swig from the “drink me” bottle. Too big. Too big to contain.

With tiger-footed rage, I moved to the soundproofed cell. Shutting the door, I rebuked myself; this was the wrong time for emotions. I wanted to scream loud and long with fisted hands and taut body; I desperately wished I could scorch the walls with my wrath, expelling the flames from my lungs. But I had to contain the wildfire that swept through me.
Your house is on fire
.
Your family will burn.
My blood was on fire. My soul would burn. But there was no time for these emotions. To give in would be selfish and weak. I had to quell the blaze down to an ember, or I would not be able to work my way to Striker. Spyder’s training whispered in my ear. Until I could extinguish my fury, my mind would not be free to use its creativity and logic to find the best solution.

Peace, ironically enough, was my best weapon.