Fight or Flight (23 page)

“I wanted to warn them he might try to break in. Jeanne was concerned about what my father would do if he knew I’d gone to them, so they hired me. Kept me close.”

“Until they found us again.”

“Yeah.”

“So when were you last in contact with your father?”

“Ten years ago. The day I left the facility.” He watched her with anxious eyes. She wanted to tell him she believed him, but…

“They knew you’d be at Harrison’s, Tyler. They didn’t go after you. The guy who talked to you acted like your father had expectations of you.”

“I know. It threw me.”

“Oohhhh, Tyler.” She propped her forehead on her palms. “I don’t know what to do.”

“The Harrisons sent their jet back here. We take the Corvette to the airport, fly to Sacramento, and get to the facility. I think my father’s people will let us in. We get Kelsey and get out.”

She laughed mirthlessly. “That is such a stupid plan.”

“I know. Do you have a better idea?”

Of course she didn’t. Regan stood and carried her dishes to the sink, thinking while she washed, rinsed, and dried them, then put them away. When she was done she leaned against the sink and folded her arms.

“Why didn’t you tell us about the trap door? If they hadn’t found it…”

Tyler’s face darkened. “I know. I didn’t show them the room because of the weapons in there.”

“Kelsey can handle a gun.”

“But Van and Tom aren’t trained. And if they tried to get in there and the enemy did, instead.” He held out his hands, palms up. “They’d be trapped and have a lot more weaponry to be used against them.”

He could have cleared out the guns, or taken some time to get Van and Tom familiar with them. She supposed his way had been easier, and if he really thought they wouldn’t need it, there was no point.

“Everything about you has two possible explanations,” she said.

“Like what?”

She didn’t believe it, but out of habit, or maybe punishment for lying to her, she heard herself say, “Like, you could be taking me to your father not to help me, but to help him.”

For a moment, Tyler looked completely defeated. Then he stood with his shoulders squared, his spine straightened, and his face cleared.

“I’m tired of struggling over this, Regan. I can’t say anything to convince you I’m on your side. I love Kelsey and don’t want anything to happen to her. It’s up to you now.”

He set his plate in the sink and left the room.

***

Screaming at the top of her lungs felt so good, Kelsey did it twice.

Which made her desperately need a drink to soothe her now-raw throat, but for thirty seconds it kept her from going insane.

First, she’d explored the room some more, looking for things she could use as weapons or part of an escape plan. Some of the toys in the closet had yielded possibilities. Barbie doll legs would hurt if she jabbed someone, so she ripped them off and kept them handy. She considered making a garrote of tied-together doll clothes, but she didn’t have it in her to throttle someone and decided not to bother. Most of the rest of the stuff was too flimsy or light to be any good, but she’d collected the marbles out of a game and the thin plastic sticks out of another, thinking she could make use of them somehow. She gathered her finds into a T-shirt she’d found in the dresser drawer and hid them at the bottom.

The books were mostly very thin paperbacks and no good as weapons, but they helped stave off boredom for a couple of hours. It was almost cool, reading old favorites and discovering ones she’d never seen before. But kids’ stories could only hold her attention for so long.

The Bulldozer delivered a change of sheets and a pillow. She made up her bed, then took a nap, counted everything countable in the room and slept again. They’d fed her twice, but she had no idea how much time had actually passed or what day it was. Eventually, she was so frustrated she wanted to scream, and when she couldn’t think of any reason not to, she did.

Interestingly, no one came running. She wondered if Archie was stupid enough not to be monitoring her room. When Bulldozer brought her a sandwich and bowl of soup for her third meal, he didn’t bother looking around or removing her toys from the dresser or anything else indicating a hidden camera. And he didn’t mention the screams.

When he brought her the fourth meal, she’d been exercising to keep up her strength and work off a little of the excess energy she was building up.

“Good,” he said, when he noticed her sweat. It was the first thing he’d said to her. “Exercise will keep you healthy.”

“I thought my supergenetics did that.” She wandered over to the dresser where he placed the tray and made a face at the sandwich sitting there. “Don’t you guys have any imagination? How about a nice lobster or something?”

Bulldozer didn’t answer. He removed a plastic packet from her tray and ripped it open, setting a syringe, vial, rubber strip, cotton ball, and antiseptic wipe on a towel next to the tray.

“What’s going on?”

“I’m going to draw the first sample.” He lifted her right arm and looked at the inside of her elbow, then compared it to her left.

“Sample of what, blood?”

Again he didn’t answer, but he wrapped the rubber tourniquet around her upper left arm and tapped the vein with his meaty finger.

“Okay, I take that as a yes.” She watched him insert the needle and push the vial onto it. Dark blood poured into the vial and he snapped the tourniquet off. Then he placed the cotton ball over the puncture, pressed down, and slid the needle out.

“Keep pressure on.”

Kelsey bent her arm to hold the cotton in place. Bulldozer gathered up his things and started to leave.

“That’s it?”

For some reason, he stopped and nodded at her.

“That’s why you’re keeping me here? For how long?”

The answer was in his eyes. For as long as it took. She had no doubt when they got what they were looking for, they would no longer need her.

“So I have to stay shut up in this five-year-old’s room for God knows how long, waiting to die?”

The door closed, the deadbolt punctuating his silence.

“This is lovely, Tyler, but not what I was expecting,” Regan said dryly. They strolled through a city park, clasped hands swinging between them, Tyler actually ambling and Regan doing her best to look relaxed and happy like most of the other people enjoying the warm fall weather, instead of burning with rage and vengeance and desperation to get to her daughter and make sure she was alive. Whole. Surrounding them were park benches lining meandering jogging-biking-skating paths, open grass, and people playing Frisbee or cuddling on blankets.

Nowhere could Regan see a possible entrance to an underground facility.

Tyler wouldn’t be hurried. Every time Regan unconsciously picked up her pace, he tugged her back to slow her down. Once the tug was too obvious, and he covered by catching her mouth in a kiss. She started to shove him away, remembered where they were, and left her hand on his shoulder, her heart aching under the need to push him to
hurry, goddamn it.

Tyler hovered over her mouth. “We’re not getting past this, are we?”

Regan raised her eyes to his and the “no” froze on her tongue. Then she sighed and backed away. “There’s a lot to finish before we can even talk about it.”

“Fair enough.”

They walked on. Ten minutes later they reached the other side of the park, and Regan was getting angry. How much time had they wasted? Was this much caution really necessary? “Why didn’t we just park over here?”

“I wanted to scout the lookouts.”

She hadn’t seen anyone who looked out of place. “How many?”

“Two. One back in the parking area where we started—he didn’t see us. One playing fetch with a dog and a tennis ball. He’s still behind us. I don’t know if he knows who we are or not.”

“When will we get to the entrance?”

“We’re here.”

They’d just about left the park and were approaching an overpass. The street to their left teemed with cars speeding awfully close to the narrow sidewalk that continued under the bridge. There was a door in the side of the overpass, presumably for maintenance. Regan glanced around, but there was nothing else—no sewer cover, no building or crypt or monument, not even businesses across the street—that could have been what they were looking for.

Tyler moved at a constant pace into the shadow of the road above and pulled open the door. Regan moved inside and he followed, letting it close behind them.

“Light,” Tyler said, and a weak florescent bulb flickered on overhead.

“Your father’s an
Alias
fan, huh?”

“He was here long before that show was on TV.”

The room they were in was tiny and bare, painted white so long ago dingy gray chips now littered the floor and water stains striped the walls. Regan couldn’t see any wheels or keypads or seams of doorways.

“No lock outside.”

“No, too suspicious.” He was just standing there.

“What do we do now?”

“We go in.” But he looked at her as if trying to decide something.

“How?”

“You’ll see.”

Exasperated, Regan threw up her hands. “How do you know you’ll even be able to get in?”

“He gave me a special code. Even though I left, I don’t think he’d have changed it. He has a serious sentimental streak, and I think he always hoped the prodigal son would return.” He said it all absently, as if he’d expected her to ask and had prepared his answer, but didn’t have his mind on it.

“Tyler, what is going on?”

He seemed to come to a decision. “Look, Regan, I don’t like ‘if we don’t survive’ speeches.”

“I wasn’t going to make one.”

His lips quirked upward for half a second. “I didn’t expect you to. And I plan for us to come out unscathed.”

A tongue of fear stretched inside her, but she smothered it quickly, not willing to be distracted. This was going to be difficult enough without latent insecurities rearing up.

“I plan for the same thing,” she said.

“But I have to say it anyway.”

She knew what was coming and didn’t want to hear it. “You’ve already said it.”

“No. Not like this.” He stilled, his eyes locked on hers. “Over the last two years—”

A new fear flared. “I
know
, Tyler. You’ve watched us, good mother, struggle in the face of unknown danger, blah-dee-blah-blah. You fell in love with me, went against employer orders—”

“Will you shut up and listen!”

Her mouth snapped closed.

“Thank you. Over the last two years I’ve watched you live the loneliest life I could ever imagine.”

Okay. Unexpected. She could have told him she wasn’t lonely because she had Kelsey.

“No matter what happens in there,” he continued, “your life is about to become even lonelier.”

What the hell?

“Kelsey will go back to school, and the center of your life will go away. You’ll have to learn a whole new way of living. Of loving.”

Now she understood where he was going, and apprehension flared higher. “I don’t know if I can make you a part of that, Tyler.”

“I know.” He took a step toward her. “Like I said, I can’t say anything to make you believe. Make you trust me. Maybe the only way I could is to die for you.”

She swallowed, hard. “I don’t—”

“I’m not going to die for you, Regan.”

She stopped talking, her mouth open. “You’re—not?”
What a stupid thing to say. You don’t
want
him to die!

“No. I’m going to live for you.” He caught her around the waist and pulled her against him, reached overhead to grab a pipe running the width of the ceiling, and yanked down.

The entire floor started to sink.

Kelsey stared at the door in front of her, open a crack, then at the plastic pick-up sticks in her hands.

“Well, that was easy.” Too easy, of course. She should never have been able to pick a dead bolt with a couple of plastic sticks. She remembered a TV show she saw once, where a guy was kidnapped and put in a cage. The cage opened suddenly and he ran, with the other caged guy telling him it was a trap. He was right, of course. The smart guy, who stayed put, lived. The dumb guy, who “escaped,” was hunted and killed.

She imagined Archie stalking her with a shotgun in the brilliantly lit corridor outside and laughed softly. That wasn’t going to happen, she was sure. But she was wary, too. She’d expected him to secure the room better.

The sticks went back into her left rear pocket with the others. The marbles filled both her front pockets, and the Barbie legs stuck out her right rear pocket, toes down, for easy access. She stood against the wall, listening. No footsteps. No voices. No hum of machinery or any other sound.

It was going to be so easy to get caught.

“Oh, well, nothin’ to do but to do it!” she murmured in Van’s voice, and slipped out into the empty hall.

Her door was near the end of the corridor, so she could only go in one direction. There were about a hundred feet of blank space before a side hall branched off to the left, and no doors in between. Taking careful steps, she went a few feet, checking how loud her shoes were. Luckily, they didn’t squeak on the linoleum floor, and she risked going faster.

In the absence of floor plans, she hurried up and down countless passageways, all seeming to intersect and circle back on themselves. They were all identically white and brightly lit, and most contained only one door, unmarked, no windows. There didn’t seem to be anyone around, either, which she found as weird as the hallways.

I bet he meant me to get out and see this
, she thought. Wear her down, convince her not to try to escape for real. Well, he had seriously underestimated her.

She started trying doors, unsurprised to find them locked. Her sticks wouldn’t open them, either, also not a surprise. But she wasn’t giving up. Only a few minutes after she started, she found herself back at the open end of the hallway to her room. There was only one direction she hadn’t explored: up. Her room’s ceiling was solid plaster like the walls, but out here it was acoustical tiles. She jumped up and tipped the one above her enough to glimpse inside. As she’d expected, the lights set into the ceiling illuminated the crawl space above, too. She knew if she spread her weight she could move around up there, but getting up was another story. The metal braces wouldn’t hold her.

She quickly did the jumping/tipping thing in all four directions before she found what she was looking for—a wood support beam next to the edge of the metal brace. She jumped harder, moving the tile away from the beam, then again, this time catching hold of the wood.

“Dammit.” She hadn’t thought it through. The angle was too tight for her to pull herself up. She dropped, toed off her sneakers, and tied the laces together so she could drape them around her neck. Then she peeled off her socks and stuffed them into the shoes.

Better. She turned so she faced the opening, and this time jumped with her hands facing backwards. This was harder, so it took her three tries before she was high enough and timed it well enough to grab the beam again. With her hands twisted, her grip was weaker. She swung her legs quickly up in front of her, using her toes only on the edge of the brace. It gave slightly under her weight, but she didn’t hang long. Her body arched until she’d cleared the edges of the opening, and she rolled to her right, landing on her stomach on the inside of the ceiling.

“Yes!” She pumped her fist. A man’s voice suddenly echoed down the hall, and she hurried to replace the open tile. It dropped neatly into its spot as someone walked below her. She heard only one set of footsteps, so who was he talking to?

It took her a moment to realize the man was Bulldozer, and he was singing.

She held her breath, but he crossed below her and went left, not right and the direction of her room. She heard a door open and close, then silence again.

Moving slowly, like a spider, and trying to keep near the rafters where the anchors were strongest, she headed in his direction.

When she heard Bulldozer humming below her again, she silently lifted a tile out just enough to peer into the room below. Her gasp was loud in her ears, but neither Bulldozer nor the other man in the room seemed to hear.

It looked like an examination room in a doctor’s office. Bulldozer leaned over a counter, playing with some kind of medical-looking tool, and on the exam table in the center of the room…

Lay Tom.

“That’s not special,” Regan told Tyler as they descended into darkness. “Anyone could pull that pipe.”
Focus on the silly details, not the churning nausea building with every inch we drop.

“True.” He held on to her even though he didn’t have to. The floor was very stable in its movement, very smooth. She didn’t pull away. Heat seemed to be the antidote to churning nausea. At least for a few seconds.

“The next step is the special one,” he said. The floor glided to a stop with a gap of about four feet between it and the bottom of the wall above. Tyler ducked through, stepping down onto another white-painted concrete floor. Regan followed, and as soon as her weight was off the platform, it rose again, taking her veneer of calm with it. What if they had to get back out that way, fast?

Focus on the…
This was more what Regan had expected. Smaller than the one above, this room had six visible cameras, an intercom set into one wall, and a panel beneath a computer monitor. Her muscles tensed against the feeling of being watched, braced for a loudspeaker to shout at them or something, but nothing happened.

“How does your father fund all this?” she asked, not caring but still trying to distract herself. Her free hand clenched. She unclenched it, but it curled right back up of its own accord.

“I have no idea.” He dropped her hand and turned his back to stand at the computer. Regan immediately put her hand on his shoulder—he wasn’t going to shut her out now!—but he was immovable. She moved up to stand next to him and watched him rapidly type a series of letters and numbers, sending him from one screen to another.

“Don’t start lying to me again, Tyler,” she warned, the edge in her voice betraying her nerves.

“I’m not.”

The lights dimmed. He kept typing. A motor started up with a whining, spinning sound, somewhere behind the wall they faced. Her nerves revved with it until she thought she’d lift off the ground on her own.

“You are.”

His lips pressed together. Eyes still fixed on the screen he said, “I think he was still working on some government projects.”

Holy crap. No wonder he hadn’t wanted to tell her where his father got the money. “The government has sanctioned all this?”

“I don’t know.”

“They knew all along what he was doing?” Her voice went shrill. “What he planned for my daughter?”

“I doubt it.” This time his voice was less tight. His body relaxed an inch, projecting relief that dampened Regan’s own tension. The computer screen flashed three times, then a big black box came up saying, “Welcome Home, Son.” He grimaced, his eyes flicking sideways at her, then back to the screen. “Told you I’d still be able to get in.”

“Good for you.” For the moment, she was focused on her anger. “The Harrisons told the Air Force what they thought Archie’s plans were. Did they just overlook it?” She didn’t need Tyler to answer. Of course they did. There was no reason for them not to, especially if they thought they could control Archie and get what they wanted from the immunity program. The entire fricking government was against her.

“We are so screwed.” She spun and gripped the rail surrounding the hydraulic shaft for the platform they’d just descended on. Implications cascaded over her, pummeling her hope that soon this would all be over. “Even if we get her out of there, they’ll just keep coming after us.”

“No.” Tyler’s hands closed over her shoulders. “There’s no ‘if.’ We
will
get her out. And then we’ll call the police and he’ll go to jail for kidnapping and you can both start living a normal life.”

Her shoulders dropped under his grip. Her hands released the rail. “I don’t know what a normal life is.”

“You’ll create one.”

The computer behind them beeped and a rumble came from their right. She turned. The wall was opening, a thick, steel, reinforced vault-type wall. She waited, expecting more black-clad action figures to come jogging through, ready to spray them with machine-gun fire. But nothing happened.