Code Name: Aries by Janie Crouch

37

Ian

I watched the footage of Wavy leaving the building for the hundredth time, leaning forward in my chair to relieve the ache from the burns on my back. Nothing was any different than it had been any of the other times I’d watched it.

She was calm, looked straight ahead, relaxed and unhurried. She wasn’t antsy, wasn’t looking over her shoulder, wasn’t nervous.

She was calm.

Just like she’d been before I’d left to go to Kings Fork Island.

Rayne was sitting next to me, also watching the footage.

I rubbed the back of my neck. “I don’t understand what’s going on here, Rayne. Look at her. Nobody’s coercing her. She’s not in a hurry. She’s unnaturally calm.”

Rayne had arrived a couple hours ago and had been briefed on what had happened. I’d also been caught up on the details of the current shitstorm that was my life. Garrett and Nate had both been confirmed dead. They hadn’t made it out of the church before the explosion. Landon was out of surgery, the bullet having missed all major organs and arteries, thank God. He was still sedated, but they thought he would pull through without a problem.

“We must have been wrong,” I told Rayne. “Mosaic’s protocol must have worked on Wavy after all. She was some sort of sleeper agent. Whatever genetic changes they made in her worked and what we thought we knew was wrong.”

Rayne leaned back in her chair. “I don’t think that’s the case. Honestly, I don’t think that Erick Huen would have waited this long to trigger her if he could’ve used her as a tool to hurt you from the beginning. I think they wanted to make her an assassin, but they couldn’t.”

I shook my head. “She shot Landon. She was the only person in that room. It had to have been her.”

“I don’t disagree that they did something to her, but if she was an assassin, you’d be dead now. We don’t have all the facts.”

No, we didn’t have all the facts. But we had enough to know that Wavy wasn’t herself.

There was a short knock at the door before it opened. “Hey, boss.”

I closed my eyes for a second, relief surging through me. With Landon out of commission, there was nobody else I’d rather have in this office. “Sarge. I’m damned glad to see you.”

“I heard what happened,” he said. “I’m here to help.”

“And Bronwyn?” I asked.

“I have her hidden away. More like locked away. It’s . . . complicated. I’m going to have to get back to her as soon as I can, but I wanted to help.”

I nodded. “Thank you.”

“Get me up to speed.”

I wasn’t sure I knew where to start. “Wavy fed us fake intel and then shot Landon and left the building of her own accord.”

Saying the words out loud made it even harder to wrap my head around them.

“I know it looks bad now, boss, but you have to focus on the most important things.”

“I’m not sure I know what those are anymore.”

“Finding her and getting her back are the most important things. You deal with all the rest afterward, but first things first.”

Sarge was speaking from experience. And he was right. Rayne was nodding too.

I took a breath, blowing it out slowly. “We have to assume that Mosaic picked her back up.” I had to force the words out, barely able to stand the thought of her being back in their clutches after what she’d gone through the last time.

“I concur,” Sarge said, “but this is personal for Erick, so you know you’ll be hearing from him again soon.”

My jaw clenched, and I bit back a curse. I didn’t want to wait while Erick held all the cards and then watch as the hand played out.

My phone rang, and for a second, I wondered if it was Erick, but it was the hospital. That could be worse. I connected the call.

“Ian DeRose,” I barked.

“Mr. DeRose, this is Dr. Faxon at the hospital. Landon Black is awake and insisting on talking to you. I told him whatever it was needed to wait, but he refuses. He is causing problems for the hospital staff and endangering his health in the process, so I was wondering if you could please come here immediately.”

“I’m on my way,” I said, standing.

Sarge stood up too. “I’m coming with you. You need two sets of ears and eyes on everything right now. Nothing is what it seems.”

That was the damn truth.

“I’m going to stay here,” Rayne said. “I need to reexamine the footage of my sessions with Wavy over the past week. There were two distinct types of sessions. I have a potential theory. I’ll let you know if that still holds true after I watch the footage.”

Sarge and I were silent on the drive to the hospital. I wanted to ask how Bronwyn was doing, but I didn’t have the emotional bandwidth for that. He seemed to understand.

When we got there, Landon looked like hell. He’d obviously refused any pain medication and was suffering for it. When he saw us, he tried to sit up.

I put a hand on his shoulder. “We’re here. Just relax as much as you can.”

“Wavy,” he croaked out. “Wavy.”

“She shot you. We figured it out.”

“I don’t think she meant to.”

“Like, it was an accident?”

He shook his head, then grimaced in pain. “No. She only picked up the gun when I tried to stop her from leaving. She had to get out of the penthouse. I don’t know how to explain it. She was compelled to leave.”

“But she wasn’t trying to kill you?” I asked.

“No, not until I stood in front of the elevator door.”

I looked over at Sarge. That was something at least. She hadn’t tried to murder him in cold blood. “So she only shot you when she tried to leave and you wouldn’t let her?”

“Yes,” Landon whispered, “and, boss, she had a headshot. She had a gun pointed straight at my head, but she fought it. Her nose was bleeding, she was sweating, but she lowered the gun to my chest and then took the shot when I wouldn’t move.”

I tried to wrap my mind around what he was saying. “So, she was fighting it? Whatever it was she was . . . compelled to do, she was fighting it?”

“Yes,” Landon whispered, getting weaker. “I think if I had gotten out of her way, she wouldn’t have shot me at all. But as it was, she took the chest shot rather than the kill shot.”

His breathing was getting more labored. Nurses gathered at the door, shooting us worried looks. I leaned down and kissed my friend on the forehead. “You’ve done enough, Landon. Now you rest, okay? We’re going to get her back, and we’re going to get to the bottom of this. You’ve helped so much.”

His eyes closed. Sarge and I left.

“You look like you’ve discovered something,” Sarge said as we walked back down the hall.

“I have. We’ve been encouraging Wavy to focus on the wrong things.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m pretty sure Dr. Rayne has gotten to the same conclusion. Wavy’s had two types of memories over the past couple weeks. Ones that caused nosebleeds, headaches, vomiting, and ones that were easy.”

“Let me guess,” Sarge said. “The church on the island that blew up, those were part of the easy memories?”

“Yep. The easy stuff is what Mosaic planted. So we need to look at the things that cause her pain. Those are the things her brain is trying to remember. Her real memories.”

* * *

I’d been right.

Dr. Rayne had come to the same conclusion we had. Now we were all poring over any conversation or action over the past two weeks that had caused Wavy pain.

“Janice,” Rayne said. “Every time Wavy talked about Janice, she was upset, but no nosebleeds or flinching. I think Janice was somebody they planted in her mind to make her want to get back somewhere. I think that may be the only reason she was trying to leave the building. We can ask Landon when he wakes up, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Janice’s name was mentioned.”

We’d all spent the past six hours searching through the footage of Dr. Rayne’s sessions with Wavy. Filtering them with the information we now had, it was easy to see the pattern.

They’d done something to her that made bringing forward any real memories from her subconscious very painful. But the memories they’d planted came forward without any problems at all.

“The fact that she fought to access the real memories is a testament to her mental strength,” Rayne continued. “Most people wouldn’t have had the strength to fight the pain. Mosaic probably wasn’t counting on that.”

“I’m not surprised. Wavy has always been strong.” She wouldn’t have survived the first time if she hadn’t been.

We needed to figure out how to find her.

Sarge leaned in toward the monitor. “The video from Erick was used as the trigger. Watch Wavy as soon as he says ‘mano y mano.’ That was the phrase. I’m sure of it.”

Wavy had been ramrod-straight as she’d watched the first couple of minutes of Erick’s video, obviously disturbed by seeing and hearing him. Then, sure enough, as soon as he said mano y mano, everything about her changed. The tension and worry faded from her features.

And she began drawing the church Erick had used as a trap.

“She stayed that same eerie calm the entire night. I thought she was hiding her fear for my sake.”

Sarge turned to me. “I looked through the research found on the drive again about the gene-editing protocol not working on everyone. I’m pretty sure that’s what happened with both Bronwyn and Wavy.”

Rayne nodded. “Mosaic knew it wasn’t going to work the way they wanted—getting her to kill you—so they did what they could with her, which was to lead you somewhere they wanted you to be. She wouldn’t hurt you, but that didn’t mean that she couldn’t be used to lie to you. You had no reason not to trust her, and they knew it.”

I rubbed the back of my neck. “But this doesn’t help us find her.”

Rayne sat back in her seat. “I’ve been looking at the footage of our sessions, concentrating on the things that were hard for her to talk about. Nothing about islands or churches or anything like that. I’m convinced any helpful info we’ll find is in the conversations that were hardest for her. The headaches, the nosebleeds. The worse it was, the harder her mind was working to get the truth out.”

That was a good place to start. “The worst nosebleed and pain I saw her have wasn’t in conversation. It was . . .” I trailed off.

“What?” Rayne asked.

“Her paintings. The ones she did the other night, before we made her stop anything that was hurting her. I remember it was so bad, blood was pouring from both nostrils. I’d never seen anything like that.”

I got up and went into my office next door to the conference room. Rayne and Sarge followed. I still had the paintings from the show because I wasn’t sure exactly where I wanted to put them yet.

Sarge whistled through his teeth. “Those things are absolutely breathtaking, but in the same way, hard to look at.”

“I know. They’ve called to me the whole time.”

I set them all out side by side.

“There’s a pattern in them.” Rayne pointed to the ones that were primarily made of blues and greens. “See right there.”

“It’s also in the red one, the one with the gray too,” Sarge said, running his finger along the same pattern, this one farther up in the corner.

Oh God. Oh, holy hell. It felt like I’d taken a hit to the solar plexus.

I took each of the paintings and flipped them so they were upside down from how they’d been facing.

“I know where this is. It’s a compound in the Sierra Nevada.”

“Are you sure?” Dr. Rayne asked.

“Very sure. The shapes of these two buildings together is unique—the dome and then the A-frame. I know it. It’s where I killed my brother.”

Both Sarge and Rayne let out curses.

“It would make sense that Erick would take her there. This has always been about me killing Grant. He wants revenge.”

Rayne nodded. “I agree. Everything that Erick has done orbits around that event. I’m sure he would like the chance to bring his fight with you back around to where it began.”

I walked over to a map hanging in my office. “The compound is hard to get to. Grant loved it because he was a paranoid bastard. Lots of exits and panic rooms, including some underground tunnels.”

“Good thing is, you’re familiar with it,” Sarge said.

“Yep, and we’re going to use that against Erick. Sarge, I need you to lead a team, a big one. As many as we can get.”

He side-eyed me. “Are you sure that’s the way you want to go? If we go in there guns blazing, Erick will disappear with Wavy or maybe kill her outright.”

“He won’t kill her until he knows what’s going on. I need you guys to distract him and the majority of his men long enough for me to sneak in a back route and get Wavy out.”

That was the good thing about having spent so much time there. I didn’t want to go back to where I had died, but at least I was already familiar with the compound itself. Once again, we didn’t have a lot of time to figure out our best tactical approach. Time was of the essence.

Sarge nodded. He could see why I wanted to go this route. “It’s still risky. Erick’s not going to send every single man he has after us. If you get caught, it won’t be pretty.”

I nodded. “I’ll wear a tracker just in case, but I’m not going to get caught. The only thing I’m going to do is get Wavy back.”