Taken By Terror by Lolita Lopez

Chapter Thirteen

Keen winced at the blaring klaxon assaulting his eardrums. He hated these damn drills that Orion insisted on running. As he scanned the monitors in the locked Shadow Force surveillance room, he watched the orderly movement of soldiers, airmen, mates and even a few children to their escape pods. His gaze lingered on an airman carrying a toddler and guiding his mate through the throng of bodies. The airman had his lower hand on his mate’s back in a protective gesture, and he nuzzled his toddler—a girl—in a reassuring, fatherly way.

Keen ignored the pang of envy at the sight of the happy family. It had been a long time since his mate and child had been killed, and the pain had faded some. It never really went away, but he had learned to manage it. He had grieved—and now he was ready to try again. He would be running in the next Grab and planned to take a mate and start a new family. He had given his blood and sweat to the cause, and now it was his turn to enjoy some well-deserved peace and quiet.

First, though, he had to get to the bottom of this whole mess with Devious getting burned as a double agent. He didn’t believe the deaf woman was guilty of anything except bad luck. Keen had interrogated hundreds of suspects and prisoners. He could spot a liar from fifty paces. That girl hadn’t been lying about anything. She hadn’t betrayed Devious, and if she had killed any of their men in a firefight, it had been in self-defense when she was too young to know better or be held responsible.

The secured door behind him beeped, and Savage stepped into the room. His face was a mottled mess of bruises and swelling. Keen felt a glimmer of guilt for his part in the fight.

“Next time we decide to run a game on Terror, you’re the one who gets to piss him off,” Savage grumbled as he dragged a chair out from the desk and dropped into it. The chair squealed at the sudden weight, and he grunted in discomfort. Holding up his bandaged and splinted hand, he snarled, “He almost bit my fucking finger off!”

“Sorry,” Keen apologized. “I did warn you that he would try to bite.”

Savage rubbed at his fat lip. “I didn’t see you jumping in to stop it.”

“Because I didn’t want to get bit,” he answered honestly.

“Asshole,” Savage growled. With a heavy sigh, he asked, “Is this going to work? Or did we just force our best operative on the run for no reason?”

“It’s going to work.” Keen felt there was at least a seventy-percent chance it would. If it didn’t, well, they would cross that bridge when they got to it. “Everything work out with Noble and Orion?”

“Seems so,” Savage said, leaning forward to adjust the view on a camera mounted in the bridge. “Noble kept me busy in the med bay. I assume Orion confined Terror to his quarters?”

“After they took a detour to Orion’s office.” Keen motioned to an intel sheet on the desk. “While you were in the med bay, there was another spike of energy in Orion’s office.”

“Another one?” Savage frowned and picked up the sheet. “Similar signature to the one we picked up before the virus that compromised our comms while Terror’s team was on the planet.” He ran his finger down the data. “It’s got to be some kind of bug that we’ve missed.”

“We’ve run all the scans multiple times. There’s nothing there.”

“Maybe it’s not something we can scan for,” Savage reasoned. “Something older? Something analog?”

“Shit. Probably,” Keen agreed, pissed off at himself for not thinking of that earlier. “But that makes me more inclined to believe your multiple agent hypothesis.”

Savage seemed relieved to hear Keen admit he had been wrong to dismiss the admittedly outlandish idea. “I still think it ties back to Flint. There’s something rotten there. The director would not remove his former boss from top secret communiques if there wasn’t something very wrong.”

“Then why aren’t they telling us?”

“Maybe the director doesn’t know who he can trust.”

Keen made a sound of agreement. “Stars help us if that’s true.”

“You know, I think she realized that wasn’t Devious’ body in the images you showed her.” Savage eyed him over the intel sheet. “I saw that double glance she did.”

“So did I.” The corpse that had been recovered from the mine fit Devious’ description in every way but one. Even with all the bloating and distension of the body, the crescent shaped burn on his upper right arm should have been visible. Devious had earned that brand during a hazing incident at the Academy. It was in his files and listed as one of his identifying marks.

“Of course, she didn’t ask how we got a familial DNA match from a body that wasn’t Devious.”

“No, she didn’t,” Keen said, feeling some shame at the way he had treated Maisie. “She was half-asleep. I’m sure she’ll piece it together later.”

“I wonder if Flint has realized that we’ve been pulling his family’s DNA profiles.”

“Probably.” Keen watched the ongoing drill. “We should think about being more cautious with our reports. Keep everything to paper for a while, you know?”

Savage hummed in agreement. “Devious obviously wanted us to go down this path. He wanted us to dig into the DNA swabs from the interrogation cell we found. He made sure he left enough of his DNA to make us curious. He had to know we would uncover Maisie’s connection to him and to Flint.”

“Let’s just hope it doesn’t end up killing us all,” Keen grumbled.

It was the DNA results from the forensic team that had thrown the whole situation into question. The body on the ground didn’t match Devious’ DNA profile from the Central Repository for Biological Data. The DNA recovered from the body belonged to a man who did have a profile in the prisoner database. His name was Helm, and he had been working as a cutout for the Shadow Force for years. How Helm got beaten and left for dead in Devious’ place was anyone’s guess. Keen suspected Helm had tried to rescue Devious and Devious had killed him instead to facilitate his escape.

There had been so much blood DNA in that interrogation cell. The forensic team had collected dozens of samples to run against the CRBD files. Once Maisie’s profile had been created, it was only a few steps for the computer program to match her to Devious, Crow, Flint and a daughter who had supposedly died at six-years-old with her mother in a Splinter attack.

“We should have told her what we found out about her mother,” Savage said, his voice filled with regret. “About the school where he sent her.”

Keen shot him a strange look. “What good would that do?”

“She deserves to know why her mother chose the Splinter side. Why her mother left her there with Devious,” he reasoned.

“You think that’s going to give her comfort?”

“No, but it would have given her some answers she doesn’t have.” Savage growled in irritation.

“We can’t give her answers we don’t have. Neither you nor I know what happened all those years ago with her mother. We don’t even know if Flint is on our side or the Splinter’s side.”

“If Flint is corrupt, he could have dozens of double agents following him,” Savage insisted hotly. “For all we know, the entire power structure of our Alliance could be crawling with secret Splinters.” He made a disgusted sound. “I can’t even handle thinking about how many of our colleagues have been working against us all this time.”

“It would explain why we’ve always been one step behind some of the bigger cells and the seedier operations the Splinters run.”

“Like the kids?”

Keen nodded. “Exactly like the kids.”

It sickened Keen. Early on in his career, he had investigated a child sex trafficking ring operating between various land and sky bases in the Atwater sector. The children had come from orphanages, some homes for abandoned Defects but most from homes that cared for war orphans like the one where Torment had been found. The horrific circumstances of those trafficked children would haunt him for the rest of his life.

Flint’s polished war hero image was forever tarnished as far as Keen was concerned. The selfishness he had displayed in throwing away his only child could never be forgiven.

“What if we made the wrong decision?” Savage asked, uncertainty coloring his voice. “Maybe we should have kept her here. Kept Terror here,” he added. “Or moved them to one of our safe houses.”

“She’s on the Tier One List. Even if we tried to keep her in custody, we would have been overruled within days. They would have sent a team to take her, and Orion isn’t going to risk the entire ship for one woman, no matter how soft he is when it comes to them.” He shook his head. “No, working Terror into a froth and convincing him to take her was the best choice out a bunch of really bad options.”

“Using her as bait to lure out Devious is dangerous,” Savage warned. “If things go badly and she dies, Terror will probably kill us.”

“Oh, there’s no probably to that.” Keen shook his head. “He’ll definitely make us pay, and he’ll make sure it’s painful and prolonged.”

Having read the transcripts and watched the footage of Terror’s debriefings after his rescue, Keen had known without a single doubt that Terror cared for Maisie. Maybe it was only brotherly affection or a debt of honor. Maybe it was something stronger—something like the love Vicious had for Hallie or Raze had for Ella. Whatever it was, it was powerful enough to motivate him to take huge risks.

So, Keen had exploited that. He had exploited Terror’s love for that woman, the intense dislike and distrust between Savage and Terror, and Orion’s disgust with the Shadow Force treatment toward female assets to get what he wanted. His gaze moved to the cargo deck where a pallet of biohazard bins from the medical bay were being loaded onto the trash transport ship. The load master in charge of the deck had allowed the civilian ships to continue their business while the crew and families aboard the Valiant practiced an orderly escape.

Keen couldn’t prove it, but he suspected Maisie was being smuggled onto the trash ship. If not the trash ship, one of the two cargo ships on either side of it waiting for departure clearance. Keen suspected the trash ship because someone in traffic control had pushed the departure time back twelve minutes. Maisie was under guard in the med bay, but the guards watching her were loyal to Orion. It would be easy enough for him to arrange to have her smuggled out of there in a large box filled with medical waste.

“Found him,” Savage said, gesturing to a monitor at the top left of the wall. “Looks like he’s in the air ducts.”

Keen watched Terror sliding through the air ducts on the deck above the cargo section. “We should delete that. All of it,” he clarified. “Roll back to his quarters and delete it all.”

“I suppose is this part of Operation Cover Our Asses,” Savage muttered while deleting the footage.

“The next part of OCOA is you following the fake trail that Terror will undoubtedly leave behind.”

Savage frowned. “Why do I have to look like the dumbass in this op? Why don’t you chase him?”

“I have business to handle here,” he replied cryptically. “All that matters now is that Terror and Maisie get off the Valiant and find Devious.”

“If they fail?”

Keen sighed. “Well, at the very least, Maisie will end up somewhere safer than here.”

“Or dead,” Savage corrected. “In which case...” He drew his finger across his throat to describe what Terror would do to them.

Keen’s thoughts turned morbid as his gaze drifted to one of the cameras trained on a pod filled with families. If their theory about a far-reaching conspiracy was correct, Terror slitting their throats might be the best outcome. He didn’t think he could survive another failure that cost mates and children their lives.

“You okay?” Savage asked, concerned.

“Yeah.” Keen cleared his throat and shook off the macabre thoughts darkening his mind. He gestured to the surveillance screens. “You got this?”

“Yes.” He frowned. “Where are you going?”

“To rattle Orion’s cage a bit.” Keen pocketed his handheld tablet. “Best if we keep him on edge so he doesn’t get suspicious of what we’re actually up to,” he decided.

“Why do you always get to do the fun shit?” Savage asked grumpily.

“Because you wanted to be in charge,” Keen reminded him. “I told you not to take this assignment. Didn’t I warn you that it would be nothing but office work and logistics?”

Savage huffed and waved his hand. “Just go before I decide to assign you overtime in the brig.”

Keen laughed and grabbed his weapon belt from the chair. He hated the way it rubbed on his back and thigh when he sat. As he fixed the belt in place around his waist, he schooled his amused features and returned to his usual grim, hard stare. He opened the door—and ran straight into Pierce.

“Whoa!”

“My fault,” Pierce said, taking a step back. “I didn’t realize anyone was in the surveillance room. I thought there was something wrong with my access code.”

“Savage is in there. He’s busy.” Keen turned and used the master code to make sure only Savage could open the door from the inside.

“You need any help?” Pierce asked.

“No. I’m good.”

“Right. Okay.” Pierce backed away. “I’ll be at my desk reading intel reports if you need me.”

“Sure.” Not for the first time, Keen had a squirrely feeling about Pierce. He always happened to be in just the right place at just the right time. It seemed like an impossible list of coincidences.

Is it him? Is Pierce the mole? Or one of them?

Knowing how close Pierce was to Torment, Keen faced the very real possibility that he and Savage were surrounded by Splinter plants. Paranoia crept in as Keen wondered how many other men he interacted with every single day were spies.

Terror, you better figure this shit out and fast. We’re all counting on you.