Shadows (Black Raven Book 1) (14 page)

“Until I talked to him,” Brandon continued, “I hadn’t realized how bad of a situation you’re in.”

“Don’t worry about it. My affairs are in order, and you and Zeus know what to do if-” he let the words trail as he glanced at Pete, whose eyes, for a second, had drifted from the road to him. Pete refocused quickly on the road. He didn’t have to look in the mirror to know that Skye was staring at him and listening to his every word. Ragno had listened as well, and her silence was deafening.

Beautiful. Fucking beautiful.

“Cavanaugh’s overreacting. He’s still the best choice for the moment. I can handle him.” He’d have to. He didn’t have any other doctors from whom he could secure immediate action in a private setting, and he knew Cavanaugh had the diagnostic tools and personnel that were necessary for a quick assessment. He not only practiced at Ochsner, the area’s largest hospital, he ran a boutique hospital that catered to wealthy, private clients, the only one of its kind in the deep South. “Would you get him set up for me now? I’ve got to get on the phone with a marshal. We’re dealing with a multiple-deaths-involved shoot out. Two were collateral damage, two were perps. I’ve got a Cleaner headed to the scene, but I need you or someone from your office there for damage control. Crisis management is big on this one. Avoid media contact. Steve Broussard would be good on this. He’s savvy, street smart, and knows his way around competing law enforcement jurisdictions.”

“Got it,” Brandon said. “I’ll assess, then decide. Where did this happen?”

“Covington. I don’t have agents in the New Orleans area now. So on a more basic level, I need you to have someone get a change of clothes for me and two women. We’ll only be with Cavanaugh as long as it takes him to get clearance to travel. Hopefully not more than a couple of hours. Ragno?”

“Yes.”

“Alert Raven One’s pilots that we’ll be departing from the New Orleans Lakefront airport. Destination unknown. For now.”

He glanced into the back seat, where Skye’s eyes, though trained on him, were unreadable. “Sizes?”

“Four for Spring. She’s allergic to synthetics. Only natural fibers, like wool and cotton. No rayon, or-”

“I know what synthetic means.”

“Six for me-” Skye said.

Her voice trailed when he gave her a slow, appraising glance and a headshake. “I’d have thought an eight.” Damn. The comment surprised him as much as it irritated her. He just couldn’t resist an easy opportunity to get to her.

Her cheeks turned pink. “Six.”

He shrugged. “If you insist. Shoe sizes?”

Skye glanced down to her feet. He’d watched her step through blood and guts. Her cream-suede boots didn’t wear that well, and he now realized that she hadn’t noticed. When she met his eyes again, all color had faded from her face.

Ragno said, “Jennifer Root called in and is insisting she needs to talk to you.”

“About what?”

“She wants to know whether you’ve found Skye and Spring.”

“Tell her no. I’ll get back to her later.”

“Will do,” Ragno paused, “and now Minero is on the line.”

“Give me a second,” he said. “Skye? Shoe sizes?”

Pained eyes held his. “Eight for me. Spring’s a seven and a half.” She smoothed her hair back, squared her shoulders. “Thank you.”

He gave her a nod, relayed the information to Brandon, and then broke the connection. To Ragno, he said, “I want me, Minero, and you on the call. No one else. Snap the connection if you have any doubt regarding contamination from his end.”

He waited, shut his eyes, and tried to tell himself that his headache wasn’t so bad. Yes. He needed surgery. He had no time for that now. When Minero picked up, Sebastian opened his eyes, made sure that Spring had her earphones on, then leaned into the seat and shut his eyes again as he gave Minero details of what had transpired at Creative Confections. He ended with, “Ragno, who is on the line with us, will send you the recording from the coffee house’s camera. I haven’t looked at it, so I don’t know what it captured. Now I’m getting medical assistance for Skye and Spring.”

Minero said, “Where?”

“That’s on a need-to-know basis.”

“You don’t have authority to act on your own.”

“I’m not telling you where I’m taking them, because it’s a safe place, but it isn’t a safe house with restricted access, and I’m not sure where the leak came from.”

“Whoa. What makes you think there’s a leak?”

“Someone knew where they were at the same time that Black Raven did. What do you think? We need to figure out who the hell did this, but we need to be smart about it.”

“Did the two coffee house workers who were killed have a relationship with Richard Barrows?”

Sebastian paused. “Ragno?”

“No. They were Covington locals,” Ragno answered. “Skye hired them when she arrived there a year ago.”

“As far as Black Raven knows,” Sebastian said, “as of this morning, the only people who knew that Chloe and Colbie Stewart are actually Skye and Spring Barrows were with Black Raven or the U.S. Marshals Service.” Sebastian drew a breath. “Barrows’ daughters had great cover. It’s entirely too coincidental to assume these thugs were able to find them on their own, or someone else broke their cover just as I did. So at this point, I can’t rule out the possibility that the marshals may have a leak, and you can’t either.”

“What the hell makes you think that it comes from my side?”

“I know my systems and I know my people, Minero,” Sebastian said. He did, but it didn’t mean that he wouldn’t explore whether he had a leak. Just in case. Minero didn’t need to know that. “There’s no leak on my side. I’m sure of it. One hundred percent sure. If you need details on how secure our system is, talk to Zeus, who’ll be helping your cyber-team. My cyber-team doesn’t need anyone’s help. Understand?”

“Well, given that news of the prison break is about to hit the airwaves at any minute,” Minero said, “and given what just happened with Barrows’ daughters in Covington, it would be best if they are in official custody. Black Raven doesn’t count in this scenario as official
custody.”

“Once we get an all-clear from the doctor,” Sebastian turned and looked at Skye as he spoke, “I’ll bring them to you. Come up with a safe house for them, unless you want me to.”

“No. I can handle that.

“Fine,” Sebastian shrugged, fighting back sudden unease as he tore his eyes away from Skye’s wide, alarmed eyes.

She’d heard his side of the conversation, and knew that she was going to be handed off to the marshals. Her fear was palpable.
Why? Why was the prospect of talking to the authorities so frightening for her?
What the hell was she hiding, and could it lead to her father?

“And I mean-an-honest-to-God safe house. We need to figure out who was behind the kidnap attempt and until we do, close your circle. Make sure people who you use for this are on clean lines and that they’re not talking-”

“Not my first rodeo, Connelly,” Minero interrupted. “I don’t need instructions from you. The U.S. Marshals Service has a bit more experience at this than Black Raven.”

Sebastian let the comment drop without response. He didn’t need to piss the guy off further, because Minero, technically, was in charge of this whole fucked-up situation. Domestic contracts came with a price, and that price was cooperating with the U.S. government and local authorities. It was a high price. That was why Black Raven, until recently, had focused on international operations in far-flung destinations. Keeping top personnel in place, though, meant they had to develop domestic work, because in every agent’s life, there were times that the agents wanted to work close to home. For the last two years, Black Raven had focused on developing domestic work, the kind that would keep some of his work force on U.S. soil, but the effort had come with speed bumps.

Sebastian and Brandon’s widely-publicized shoot-out in July, which involved the death of a Black Raven agent and an FBI agent on U.S. soil, had not helped the company’s reputation or its push for domestic-work, and the prison-break disaster, coming just eight months later, wasn’t going to help, either. It was also going to affect their international work, because it made Black Raven look incompetent. Good agents didn’t want to wear the badge of an incompetent company, and they’d jump ship in the time it took an elephant to blink.

Black Raven’s reputation was at stake, Black Raven depended upon its reputation, one hell of a lot of employees and their families depended on Black Raven, and even more clients depended upon the company. If he was honest with himself, it wasn’t just his employees or his clients that he was worried about. Hell.

Without Black Raven, he’d have nothing, and losing the company that he’d built out of thin air would make him exactly what his father had predicted for him. A loser. He’d never been one in his life, and he didn’t plan on getting acquainted with that status now. Once he found Barrows, dammit, this would all end. He glanced into the back seat, into slate-green eyes that mirrored his own desire to be out of this fucked-up mess. Once it was over, Skye and Spring could move on with their lives, and he could get on with his.

“Take off your mask,” Barrows said, between uncontrollable bouts of shivering.

The mask was a custom-fit, lightweight silicone face. It distorted his features into a large forehead, uneven cheekbones, and a comical grimace, though no one ever seemed to recognize the humor. It was a technological marvel, a modern-day mood ring that changed colors with his body heat. His captives never saw him without it, so Barrows’ request wasn’t going to be met. Trask didn’t answer his captives and he never responded to their demands. Not even to laugh at their ridiculous suggestions. He let them figure things out on their own. It gave him pleasure to watch them squirm as their new reality dawned. Rather than give Barrows an answer, he stood there, staring at the man.

Barrows was naked, clamped to a steel chair at his wrists, waist, and ankles, in a white-tiled room designed for easy cleaning of blood and guts. The chair and metal clamps that tied Barrows to the chair were designed to be temperature sensitive. As ice cold water rained on Barrows, the clamps and the chair exacerbated the chill. The room itself was a frigid forty degrees.

Tall, with a naturally lean build, Barrows was in good shape for a man in his fifties. His year in prison made him even leaner, and the soaking chill was sending full-body shudders through him. His lips were almost as blue as his eyes, which gave him a glance that was filled with defiance and loathing, despite the misery that was raining on his body. Between bouts of shivering, Barrows said, “I want to talk to the person who is in charge.”

Silence was his answer.

“Who the hell are you?”

He answered that question, from the man who was widely regarded as the world’s most brilliant mind, with silence. He never responded to their questions. With a wave of his hand, a signal to a handler who was watching through cameras, the rainfall of frigid water stopped. He approached Barrows and, with his bare index finger, he touched the man’s ice-cold shoulder. He traced a line to the man’s neck, and pressed the palm of both hands on Barrows’ head. Barrows had been inside his headquarters ever since the prison break, but this was his first meeting with him.

Barrows’ hair was wet. He bent closer to see into the man’s eyes, where angry defiance remained. Barrows’ brilliance came with a widely publicized price, and that price was paranoia. He’d have to work hard to come up with a scenario that Barrows hadn’t already imagined or anticipated. This man believed in UFO’s, after all. He folded his arms, stood a few feet away, gave the signal for the freezing rain, and as the water torture resumed, he waited for Barrows’ next question. It didn’t take long.

“How did you get my data?”

“So,” he paused, “the data that I have is your data, and it is part of the code for the LID?”

Barrows became even paler. He was only inches away from the man, and in the silence that followed the question that he would never answer, he could hear Barrows’ teeth chatter. “Who are you? How do you have this information?”

“You’re a smart man. You should understand that this is my world, with my rules. Rule number one is that only one of us gets to ask questions. Why doesn’t the data work?”

“You only have incomplete code,” Barrows said. “What you have is useless.”

He shook his head. “That’s why I have you. You will complete the code.”

“I can’t complete it, even if I wanted to. I don’t know it. I don’t have it memorized. The data sets are too long for anyone to memorize.”

“If you don’t have it memorized, where is it? Where is it stored?”

“The full data set was destroyed when my lab was destroyed,” Barrows said.

“You’re too smart for that. Where’s the backup?”

“There was no backup.”

He believed that about as much as he believed in relying on luck for anything that mattered, which was not at all. Luck only happened to people who had the wherewithal to make things happen. “I have your daughters.”

Barrows had a moment of wide-eyed fear, before snarling in defiance and narrowing his eyes. “You’re lying. You don’t even know where they are.”

“Chloe and Colbie Stewart. Creative Confections. Covington, Louisiana. You sent Chloe a text this morning.
Cataclysm. Now. Run.
Now that we know you sent a text from our system, we’re analyzing every keystroke you’ve made. If you have sent any other messages, I will know. I have your daughters. I have you. Are you willing to cooperate?”

“Bring them to me.”

He went to a wall and pressed a button. Hidden compartments opened, revealing gleaming stainless steel trays and tools of torture. His eyes rested on a tray containing custom-made steel rods, in lengths that varied from five inches to two inches, the diameter of each being slightly larger than a pinhead. The hammer that he was going to use could be purchased at any hardware store. The steel chair on which Barrows sat could be manipulated with a press of a button. He lifted Barrows’ leg. Bodies were such wonderful things to touch, to torture. Every man could be broken, and Barrows, though a genius, was nothing but a man. He signaled the rain to stop.

For a middle-aged man, Barrows had nice feet. Not too hairy. A few callouses. His toes were straight, the nails were trim. He took his time placing the tip of a four-inch-long steel rod underneath the nail of the man’s large left toe. He lifted the hammer and pounded the rod so that it speared into the soft flesh, under the toenail, through the cuticle, and into the toe. He got closer, watching the crimson blood seep around the metal, as he reached for another rod, it’s diameter about that of a pinhead, and relished every howl from Barrows that came with each pound of the hammer. Ten rods later, two for each toe, he asked, “What is the code?”

The man was breathing heavy. His blue eyes were wide with panic, yet there was more than a bit of belligerence. “Fuck you.”

He gave the wave that signaled for the water torture to begin. “This time, make it hot.”

A voice asked, “How hot?”

“Blistering.”

Before walking away, he lifted the hammer, and, because Barrows had work to do, he exercised slight restraint. He pounded the head down on Barrows’ left kneecap, drawing delicious strength from the feel of steel hitting flesh and shattering bone. “I’ll be back for that answer in one hour.”

***