Havoc by Shannon McKenna
25
The cavern looked different, with the plywood doors at the main entrance dragged open and daylight pouring in. Where the natural morning light failed, floodlights had been set up. The place blazed with light. Everything in sharp relief, like a moonscape picture.
They had brought vehicles inside. A great big tractor backhoe, driven deep into the library chamber, not far from where the floor had crumbled in to the lower level.
And in the flattest, most open place, a truck was parked, pulling a large trailer. One side of the trailer had doors that slid open, and right past it, a heavy plastic barrier. It looked like a mobile clean room.
So cold. She shivered. The shoes were torture. Her ankles had turned after just a few steps in the treacherous rubble, and the men pulling her had just dragged her along by the armpits, her feet bumping and dragging.
She was tossed down onto the rocks and bricks, with a force that took her breath. She forced herself not to cry out, but no one paid attention except for the tall, skinny one pointing a gun at her head. A dark, younger guy, with a foxy face.
She tried to discreetly pry her shoes off, not that being barefoot was much better.
Kimball crouched down next to her, and held up her tracking device. “Time for you to do your part, Cait,” he said. “Last week, we saw you head into this cave, following a signal from this tracker. I want you to do that again, right now.”
“You have the tracker,” she said. “Nothing’s stopping you from using it.”
Kimball gave her a thin smile. “Set the frequency.” His voice was horribly gentle. “You deliberately wiped the device’s memory record. Do not play dumb.”
Cait shook uncontrollably. “I never found anything with it,” she quavered. “I found that thing in my dad’s safety deposit box, along with coordinates that led me up here, and thought it was worth a try. But I came up blank. The whole thing was useless.”
“You’re lying. I watched you. You were following a live signal.”
“But I told you, I didn’t find any—”
“Shut up!” Kimball yelled, spittle flying from his lips. “Darius, get over here!”
Another young, foxy-faced guy approached, identical to the one holding a gun on her, dressed identically in forest camo. Their eyes gleamed. They were enjoying themselves. Double vision from hell.
“Darius here is a specialist,” Kimball said. “He’s even more talented than I am. I’ve done my share of wet work in the past, but at this point, I prefer to sit back and watch. Program the tracking device now, with your body intact, or program it for me after, with only one eye, or one hand, or half a foot. Do you have an ax, Darius?”
“More like a meat cleaver,” Darius replied. “But it would take her hand off in one clean blow, easy. For her foot, I’d probably have to do some hacking.”
“Hmm. So messy.” Kimball’s voice sounded like a silky purr of pleasure. “The choice is yours. I’m thinking the hand, for now, since we’re pressed for time. Put a tourniquet on her first. I don’t want her bleeding out before we get what we need.”
Darius pulled a rubber tie from his pocket. “Born ready, boss.”
“Darius and Julian were the outside-the-box quick thinkers who figured out how to design a convincing Federica Atelier catalog page for the phish,” Kimball confided. “At last, some hired help with brains and initiative. Such a relief.”
“The trace,” she said. “It was in the lingerie.”
Kimball’s finger slid down her chest to her breast. “Yes. It’s so small, it disappears right into the lace. Show her, Julian.”
She shrank back as Julian pulled out a wicked-looking black-bladed knife. He wrenched down her dress, snagged the lacy bra cup with the tip of his knife, and then pried out a tiny object like a flat grain of rice. A miniscule antenna dangled from it.
“Our first thought was to put them in the gusset of your panties, right over your clit.” Kimball’s voice was low and insinuating. “It would have been perfect. Upon further reflection I decided that panties probably wouldn’t stay on a dirty slut like you for very long. Not with the Trask pig pounding you day and night. The bra was the better bet.”
She tried pull the dress back up, but Kimball slapped her hand down. “No, no. Leave it. I prefer it like that. Darius, show her your cleaver.”
Darius opened up a soft-sided case, and took out a horrible looking blade. Its edge shimmered brightly. Recently sharpened.
“Well, Cait? Are you braced for this?” Kimball’s voice was grotesquely cheerful. “Put on the tourniquet. Is there a flat surface somewhere, for a nice clean blow?”
“Stop,” she said dully. “Just stop all of this. I’ll enter the frequency.”
“Ahhh. So she can be reasonable. Was that so hard? Julian, put the gun in her ear while she’s handling that tracker. If you do anything you shouldn’t, you will pay.”
Julian did so. It was a cold, painful, and distracting sensation, and Cait entered the frequency wrong several times in a row, her hand shook so badly.
Finally, she got it in, and then all she could do was hope that all of the slabs of fallen concrete would stop or slow Kimball’s crew, as they had the Trasks.
No such luck. They had a tractor backhoe, and Kimball’s crew made brisk progress. Julian held the gun on her with that hideous, unblinking smirk on his face. She tried to ignore him and watch what was happening, but the action was deep in the cavern, the part that used to be the library. She heard them shouting instructions to each other over the roar and grind of the backhoe.
How could everything have all gone to shit so incredibly fast? One minute, she’d been tearful with joy. Her heart on fire with love, a shining sense of belonging.
An hour later, she was all alone, in the depths of hell.
Mace was going to feel terrible when whatever was left of her was found. He’d know then that he’d made the wrong call, but that prospect gave her no comfort at all.
It would be too late for her, for him. Too late for the whole fucking world.
* * *
Mace madeit up the canyon in record time. He wrestled the Wrangler farther up the rough riverbed than he’d ever dared to before, and he left it there, in full view. He doubted that Kimball was wasting any of his energy looking at drone footage now.
He was in end game mode, and so was Mace.
Good thing he’d adopted Nate’s habit of keeping a change of clothes in his vehicle, though he’d only taken the time to change the slick dress shoes for hiking boots, and cover his hair with the cap. He was still in the Armani suit, the gray dress shirt, even the silk tie. He used riverbank mud to darken his face. He had his gun, and Fi’s gun, and he had a pair of infrared goggles in the box of miscellany in the back of his Wrangler.
He’d sprinted up the mountain. The waterfall drenched his shoulders, but he didn’t feel the cold. He was on fire. Burning for retribution. Water hissed off him like steam.
He ran up the tunnel at full speed, slithered through the wormholes like a human drill. He took the goggles off before he emerged into the ruined library. It was bizarrely bright in there. Floodlights lit the front part of the cave, and there was daylight from the opened-up entrance. He saw a truck parked in the flat open space near the entrance, and he heard voices, and the roar of heavy machinery.
He wasn’t sure what that meant for Cait, and he didn’t dare speculate. One thing at a time. He kept low, crawling to the best vantage point he could find. Best he could tell, there were seven men, not counting Kimball. He saw a splotch of red near the truck. Had to be Cait, but he couldn’t even let himself think about her yet. His best chance to help her was to thin out Kimball’s men as much as he possibly could before they noticed him.
The hum of a tractor filled his ears as he crept closer, keeping low to the ground, darting from shadow to shadow.
Mace lunged back behind the wall just in time to avoid being seen by the first guy he saw. Then he heard the clink of a belt being undone, a grunt, a sigh, and a long, pattering sound. Dude was taking a piss. Asshole should cut down on the coffee.
Mace drifted up behind him and whipped his silk tie around the guy’s neck before he finished. The guy wiggled, choked, and moaned, clutching at the tie constricting his throat. Mace lifted up off his feet, letting him flop and writhe.
He went limp. Mace lowered the guy silently to the ground. Zip ties poked conveniently out of the guy’s kit bag. Mace fastened the man’s arms behind his back, and used another zip tie to fasten him to a metal pipe that was still bolted to a heavy slab of concrete. He bashed him on the head with a piece of rebar, to make sure he stayed quiet.
One down. An unknown number of adversaries to go.