Shadows Strike(34)

“I know. Honestly, I don’t see that I have much choice. If this Gershom asshole wants me for my connections, then I should keep working as usual to give you guys time to find him. If you’re all wrong and nothing else happens . . .” She shrugged. “I’ll have to go back to my regular life, or at least the day job part of it, eventually anyway.”

“It’s settled, then,” Seth pronounced. “Thank you, Heather, for working with us. Zach will protect you as promised.”

“I still don’t think he’ll be able to accompany me inside the building,” she warned.

“He won’t have to,” Seth said. “He’ll be able to hear everything that happens from outside. And if something goes wrong, their security—no matter how tight—won’t be able to keep him from reaching you.”

“Oh. Okay.” That was a little scary. One man being able to defeat a building full of soldiers armed with automatic and other deadly weapons?

Seth hadn’t been exaggerating when he had said he, Zach, and the Others wielded enough power to alter the world.

Hell, if they chose to do so, they could conquer it.





Chapter Eleven

As Heather followed her escort into the parking garage’s elevator, she wondered if Zach was somewhere overhead, circling the building in whatever bird form he had chosen.

The soldiers who had picked her up in the car remained silent as the elevator carried them upward. When the doors slid open once more, a man in a business suit waited for them.

“Heather Lane?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Follow me, please.”

Onward they strode, the suit in front, the soldiers in back, down a series of nondescript hallways. A white ceiling. White walls. A white floor marred by occasional dents and dings and smudges.

Boots clomped behind her in a rhythm that made her wonder if soldiers always inadvertently synced up their steps when they walked side by side.

Heather’s sneakers, on the other hand, made no sound. When Zach had teleported her home, she had taken a quick shower and changed into jeans, a T-shirt, and a blazer. She would have been happy to leave off the blazer, but had encountered enough good old boys among the higher-ups in the military and law enforcement agencies to know that they tended to be less assholish toward her when she added that little bit of professional accoutrement.

At last, the suit stopped before the first of two doors in a short corridor. Both doors bore keycode entries. Armed soldiers manned each.

The man typed in several numbers, angling his body to hide his hand as if he thought Heather might try to see the code and what . . . spring the prisoner?

News flash, she thought, I don’t need to watch you type it in. I can pluck every keycode and password you know from your thoughts.

When a click sounded, he pushed the door open and held it for her.

Heather’s father and another man in a suit waited within. Beside them, a soldier sat at a table loaded down with electronic equipment used to record audio and video and to monitor the vitals of the suspect being questioned.

Heather stepped inside.

Her father nodded to the suit, who stepped back into the hallway and closed the door.

General Lane opened his arms and drew her into a hug. “Hi, baby. Thanks for coming in on such short notice.”

“Sure.” She gave him a squeeze and stepped back. “Mac,” she greeted the man who stood beside him.

Mac nodded. “Good to see you again, Heather.”

Mac was a bit of a mystery. She could never decide who he was or what role he played in the greater scheme of things. Was he military? Ex-military? General counsel? Military Intelligence? From another branch of the government? FBI or CIA? Maybe NSA?

She had tried to peek into his thoughts once and caught him picturing her naked. He was more than a little attracted to her and always seemed to focus on that when in her presence, so she had given up and stopped looking for anything else.

He seemed like a straight-up guy, though. She liked him far more than she did some of the other men who had been present while she worked. Most viewed her abilities with skepticism and a run-along-and-play-little-girl-while-the-men -take-care-of-business attitude. They wouldn’t have even let her in the building if her father hadn’t been the one to summon her.

Neither General Lane nor Mac bothered to introduce her to the soldier who sat at the table, deciphering the data the equipment sent.

“So,” she said, “how can I help you?”

Mac spoke before her father could. “I’ve been told to remind you that everything you see and hear today is classified.”

“Of course.”

General Lane nodded to the large window that she knew was instead a two-way mirror. “We have a situation.”

Beyond the glass lay yet another stark white room. Small. Boasting only a table and two chairs: one on the opposite side of the table, facing the mirror, and one with its back to the mirror.

A soldier sat in the chair facing them. Perhaps in his midtwenties, the guy looked strung out, with hollow cheeks, and dark circles beneath his eyes. One of his knees bobbed up and down under the table in a rapid rhythm. And he couldn’t seem to sit still. Leaning forward one moment. Leaning back the next. Then leaning forward again. Shifting as though the monitors attached to his chest chafed. Dragging a hand over his closely cropped hair. Then drumming an anxious beat on the table with his fingers.

If she had seen him on the street, Heather would’ve thought the man a drug addict in need of a fix. “What can you tell me?” she asked.

Her father moved to stand beside her, his arm brushing her shoulder. “A small military base was attacked and destroyed two weeks ago. One of ours.”

Shock rippled through her, accompanied by a twinge of unease. “What?” She had seen nothing about it on the news.

“It was a classified installation,” he said.

Which explained the no-news thing. “Here in the States?”

“No. But the location is need-to-know only.”

“Okay.”

“Every soldier who manned the base was killed.” Her father pointed to the strung-out man in the next room. “Every soldier except for him. He’s the sole survivor.”

“Who did it?” Heather asked, stunned.

“That’s what we’re trying to find out. The surveillance equipment on site was either destroyed or tampered with, because the images of the onslaught are all too blurry or distorted for us to identify the attackers.”

“No one has claimed responsibility?” It had to have been terrorists, right? Terrorists were always eager to claim or tag their work online.

“No one,” Mac answered. “No tapes have been released. We’ve heard no chatter relating to it, or anything close to it, at all.”

Heather nodded to the suspect. “How did he survive when on one else did?”

“That’s what we want to know. That and whether or not he might have been involved in planning the attack. It seems unlikely that he would’ve been the only survivor if he wasn’t.”

“Was he injured? Or did he walk away unharmed?” If he walked away unharmed, she could see why they were suspicious.

“He suffered some deep cuts on his arms and torso,” her father said, “and almost bled out before we found him.”

Any bandages the soldier sported lay hidden beneath his uniform. “Has he given you anything at all?”

Her father and Mac shared a glance.

“Only babbling nonsense,” Mac murmured.

Her father sighed. “According to the psych eval that was ordered after listening to his account, whatever happened during the attack caused him to have a mental breakdown.”

“But there are those who disagree and think he’s bullshitting us,” Mac inserted. “Faking it to cover his own ass.”

She arched her brows. “You think he’s bullshitting?”

“Yes.”

She studied her father. “And you?”

“I want you to tell us if he’s bullshitting. A lot is at stake either way.”

She examined the soldier once more and noticed a gold chain around his neck. “He’s religious?” she asked, her eyes on the cross that peeked from beneath his rumpled shirt collar.

“Not until now.”

Mac snorted. “Apparently his mental breakdown made him find God.”

“Will you be interrogating him while I observe?” she asked Mac.

General Lane shook his head. “I want you to sit down and talk with him, see if you can get him to tell you what happened. He stopped cooperating with us when we refused to believe him.”

“You want me to talk to him? Alone?” Usually she just observed, sometimes in the room with them, sometimes from behind the mirror. “Is it safe?” The last thing she needed was for the soldier to attack her and have Zach come charging through the facility to rescue her.

“I wouldn’t ask you to do it if it weren’t,” her father assured her.

“Okay then.” Heather stepped out into the hallway.

The dour suit waited for her in front of the next door. As soon as he saw her, he turned his back, typed in a code, and opened it for her.

Heather stepped past him into the interrogation room.

The soldier looked up. One hand went to the cross on his chain.

The door closed behind her.

“Hi,” Heather greeted him and, bolstering her nerves, offered her hand. “I’m Heather.”