Deadly News: A Thriller (18 page)

There were no monsters. People were the monsters. She was the monster.

And just like that, Ecks’s situation, her not knowing if he was alive or dead, hit her once more, while she was already down.

Maybe that’s why they had left her though, to rescue Ecks.

This gave her enough hope that she got up and left the room, was not assaulted by any monsters, found her way out of the hallway maze and down the stairs, and eventually back to what she now thought of as the breakroom.

She focused on the screen, trying to make out anything in the dim light the camera through which the scene was filmed picked up. She tilted her head to make the image appear right-side-up. It was just a building, part of a roof.

She frowned. There was something about that that was off, she could feel it.

No matter how hard she tried though, she couldn’t figure out what. Her jaw flexed as she struggled to force the feeling into something concrete. It was making her want to scream.

Suddenly she kicked one of the chairs, and it crashed into the table, causing soda to spill. Good, she thought, and kicked it again. One section of the table collapsed. Empty pizza boxes and candy bar wrappers fell and fluttered to the industrial carpet flooring the room.

She picked up the flimsy table and flipped it. She’d had it in her mind to toss it across the room, into the screen—how she would have loved to see it crack, sparks fly, maybe even start a fire—but it slipped on the carpet and now instead lay a table-width away.

She stared at the screen, the sideways building.

Nothing.

She grabbed the chair she’d kicked, righted it, and sat down. Ran through scenarios in her head. Determined what to do next.

Quite a lot of time passed, and Abby, lost in her thoughts, was found again by a loud rattling sound. She hadn’t fallen asleep, but more like into a trace where she was content to stare at the carpet as patterns emerged, reformed, disappeared.

She quickly exited the room and made her way to the main floor. She stayed hidden as she watched several vehicles enter the warehouse though the large rollup doors. Through them she saw the wall of another building, blacktop.

The headlights of the vehicles lit the blacktop, like a dropped flashlight, and it came to her. The camera was different, it had been moved.

As the vehicles came to a stop and people exited, she tried to see if she recognized any of them, but it wasn’t until she saw Emily that she called out, “You mother fucking fuckers! What the fuck?”

Everyone stopped—including Abby, who had been storming toward them, since there were now several guns pointed at her.

“Hey,” she said.

“Calm down!” Emily said to the other agents, holstering her own weapon. “Sorry. You weren’t supposed to wake up.”

“What?”

Several of the agents seemed to glare at Emily.

“Uh, I mean, you seemed so tired. Like you’d be out for days.” She approached Abby.

“So you just left me?”

Emily reached her. “Sorry. But I do have good news.”

“Ecks?”

Emily nodded.

“Where is he?” She peered around Emily, once more searching the agents for someone she’d missed. She’d seen the invisible gorilla video, and been fooled by it, and so she still had hope that she would see Ecks now that she was looking for him.

Emily shattered her hope: “Not here. But he’s fine. He has a job to do.”

“What! Fuck you and your job.”

“Hey, it’s not me. If we could have gotten him we would have.” She looked back at the other agents, who were paying the two of them little attention now as they unloaded, and removed layers of clothing, vests. “Things didn’t go as planned. Grayson was shot.” She laughed, but it had more in common with a choke. “By one of us.”

“I’m sorry.”

“He’s alive. For now. He’s tough, I’m sure he’ll make it.”

Abby didn’t want to change the subject, like she didn’t care someone she didn’t know was shot, but the truth was she didn’t, and she couldn’t help it. “Um, so…”

“Yes, your boyfriend.”

“He—”

Emily put up her hand. “Please, I’ve seen the footage.” She went on before Abby could really process this, “He’s okay, but he has to do something. We have eyes on him now, but if we try to pick him up, something bad will happen.”

“Um, bad?”

“That’s what the voice said. On the Blu-Ray.” She shook her head. “It’s like he was taunting us. The thing played when we walked in—that’s when Grayson got shot, we still don’t know exactly how. The video was playing on this huge screen, you could see everything. I could literally read the care tag on the guy’s Under Armor balaclava.”

“And he said Ecks had to do something?”

She nodded. “They showed your friend getting injected with something. It was weird, it looked green screened. The guy in the mask was talking, and behind him was your friend, but the proportions were wrong. As they inject him, the guy says it’s some kind of disease, and that if he doesn’t get the antidote within a few days, he’ll die.”

“Couldn’t you just pick him up and figure out what it is?”

“Of course. The guy even said as much. But he said that if we did, bad things would happen to other people.” She got a distant look, no longer focusing on Abby. “The names, man. I mean, I don’t know how he knew them.” She gestured around. “We’re not spies or anything, but still, he knew our names, the names of our families. That’s not exactly public knowledge.”

Abby was silent. What could she say to that? “What is this thing they want him to do?”

“We don’t know. Trying to figure it out. They said he would be on a particular street at particular time.” She looked at her watch. It was a man’s, and though her arms were long, it still looked comically large on her wrist. “That was about twenty minutes ago. Sure enough he was there, coming up from the subway. We’re trying to find out where he came from, if he took a train or was dropped there.” A shrug. “Could lead us to them. We obviously can’t just ask him though.”

“So now what?”

“Now?” Emily looked around. Most of the vehicles were unloaded, and agents were exiting this main room. “We wait.”

“That’s it. We just wait?”

Emily glared at her. “What would you have us do? I’m open to suggestions.”

“What about my apartment, Ecks’s?”

“The locals gave us what they have, it’s probably at Quantico by now. Maybe they find something, maybe they don’t.”

“When?”

“A day or two.”

“So until then, we just wait?”

“Unless they call you again.”

Abby shook her head. “I don’t have my phone.”

“They’ll patch it through to here if they call your number.” She put an arm around Abby’s shoulder, and began walking toward the glass office, which was now lit up. “Come on, you can sit in on this one.”

“Thanks,” Abby said flatly.

Abby had a difficult time following the meeting. Despite the coffee that had been set in front of her and which she’d gratefully drank, she was still tired.

The debriefing continued for an hour, but Abby didn’t get much from it. The operation to get Ecks, which, from the way it was talked about, wasn’t really for Ecks, but more of an excuse to infiltrate the building, had failed. They talked and argued about what went wrong, what could have been different, whose fault it was (no one in the room, that everyone could agree on), but Abby thought it was mostly the fact that the place had been empty.

Someone, whoever had been in there, had gotten out unnoticed. The cameras had been knocked out with rocks, “Slingshots is my guess,” one agent put in, but other than that, there had been no obvious attacks, or any indications that the spied upon knew they were being watched.

The meeting wrapped up, or, more accurately, dwindled out, and a few agents left entirely.

Abby watched them go with a frown on her face.

“What?” Emily said, taking a seat next to her. She had been up front, verbally joisting with an elderly agent for most of the meeting.

Abby saw now the woman had a sheen of sweat on her forehead. She nodded toward the exiting agents. “Where they going?

“Skeleton crew. So to speak. Now we wait.” She sighed. “You should get some sleep.”

“Are you kidding? All I’ve been doing is sleeping.”

The agent she’d talked to earlier—Scott? Abby thought, Agent Scotts?—fell into a chair across from Emily and Abby. “No one ever died from too much of that. I could use some myself.” His earlier jovialness seemed diminished.

“You said you were watching Ecks. Can I see him?”

The man laughed.

Abby glared at him.

“We’re not filming him, we have people following.”

“Oh.” She hit the table.

“Whoa,” the man said.

“This is bullshit. I’m just sitting here, I should be doing something.”

“There’s nothing you can do. Not right now.”

They sat in silence until eventually the man got up. “I’m gonna checkout.”

“You’ll be missed,” Emily said.

“There’s room for you, if you need some, you know, relaxation.”

“Thanks, but I’ve got this,” she held up her hand.

The man laughed and exited the room.

“Can I get a computer or something?”

“Why?”

“So I can write.”

“Ah, shit, you’re a reporter. I forgot.”

“That doesn’t sound like a yes.”

Emily sighed and got up. “Come on, you can use mine.”

Abby sat in her cell—sorry, her room—and typed up as much as she could remember. She already had a lot of it saved to her work’s Dropbox, when she’d written in the hotel room with Fe, but that was before the really interesting stuff happened, before she ended up on YouTube, before the explosion. Pretty much, she could just think of it as
before
, as backstory to the real thing. The current laptop she was using was connected to the internet in some weird way, something about a proxy, and a device with a large antenna was plugged into one of the USB ports. It made typing unwieldy, getting in the way of her left hand as it moved across the keyboard. The internet was also slow. Just googling something took ten to twenty seconds for the page to load, and when it finally did, it looked weird, like it was glitched. And there were no images.

She managed to secure a USB drive, which is where what she was currently writing was being saved to. She tried to remember everything that had happened so far, and just wrote.

When she’d exhausted all the details she could recall, she scrolled back through her words. Reading it over, she thought it could be a pretty good story, if Becky let her run with it.

She set the laptop aside and lay back. She would not be sleeping anytime soon.

Though she didn’t fall asleep, she was still startled when Emily burst into the room, followed by four other agents.

Abby began to say something, but Emily was holding up a phone. She was gesturing frantically for Abby to take it.

It rang.

Abby did, then answered before it could ring again.

“Well, that took a while. I wonder why?” a voice said. It was a women.

“Who’s this?”

“Who’s this?”

“You called me.”

“Next you are going to say you asked first. Abby, I assume.”

“Yes.”

“Good. Take off your clothes.”

“What?” A surge of wakefulness jolted through Abby. She looked around the room. There was absolutely no way they could see her here. Was this a joke? Fucking not funny.

“We need you to do something for us, and we have to make sure you’re not bugged.”

Did they know where she was? “I don’t understand.”

“Of course you don’t. If you aren’t covered, it will be hard to cover a wire.”

“A wire.”

“I don’t have time for your games.” A pause. “We know you’re with the FBI. They will take you to a location we designate, and drop you off. If they try to interfere, well, another building will need repairs.”

Abby tried to think of something to say, but couldn’t.

“Put Mills on.”

“I—”

“Now. If you ever want to see Ecks again. While he is alive, that is.”

“Mills?” Abby asked, both into the phone and to the room.

An agent briefly raised his hand. Emily was shaking her head.

“Give the phone to him.”

Abby numbly handed the phone over.

“Hello.

“What?” the agent said after listening for a moment. He was staring at Abby. “That is not something—” His expression changed, fear, anger, both.

“Yes, but she’s not—

“I understand.” He handed the phone back to Abby.

“Now what?”

“Don’t be so childish. You are about to be arrested, charged under Title 18, Section 2331.” There was a pause. “No, I didn’t expect you’d know that offhand, you cover computer stories. Terrorism, Ms Melcer. I hope you weren’t too attached to your constitutional rights.”

“What!”

“Go along with it, and everything will be fine. This is the last thing we will require from you.”

“And I should believe you?”

“It doesn’t matter. Agent Mills will instruct you further. You can choose to listen to him or not. What happens to Ecks is now up to you.” She disconnected before Abby could respond.

Abby took the phone away from her ear, held it out toward Emily.

“What the fuck?” Emily said, taking the phone and looking at Mills.

“We have to arrest her.”

“No shit,” Emily said. “But what did she say?”

The agent shook his head, pointed at Abby. “Her.”

“Oh fuck you.”

The agent stared at Emily, said only one word: “Hughes.”

Emily frowned, looked at Abby, back to Mills. “I’m not seeing the connection.”

Mills glanced at Abby. To Emily, “I think we should discuss this in private.”

“Do let me fucking stop you,” Abby said. “It’s just my life.”

They left Abby in the room with two other agents while Emily, Mills, and an agent Abby didn’t know left the room and shut the door behind them.

Several minutes passed before the three of them came back in, Emily pausing in the opened door.

“Ms Melcer— Abby, this is your choice, we won’t force you to do anything. Technically we can’t—”

“Vasquez!” one of the other agents shouted. It wasn’t Mills, but the other one that had left with them. He was older, and the streak of gray in his hair reminded Abby of a male gorilla, a silverback.