Aftermath Read online

  “Remember how you asked me about those freaky soldiers a while back?” he asked.

  Siobahn felt her eyebrows scrunch in surprise and knew she was adding to the lines that were starting to form on her forehead. Ah, well. “Yes. You clammed up tight just when I desperately needed all the information you could give me.” Now she suspected why Brian had gone silent about the strange soldiers he’d seen. He’d been afraid of retaliation from the top. He’d probably been afraid of suffering the same fate as Toby and all the other missing military men who’d been conscripted into Kerberos.

  “Yeah, well,” Brian said. “The silent treatment was as much for your own good as mine. You don’t have any idea what the stakes were.”

  Oh, you’d be surprised. Given the amount of time she’d spent lately using disposable prepaid cell phones and skulking down deserted streets, she figured she was well on her way to earning an espionage merit badge. Yet until she determined who in the government had been involved in the cover-up, she couldn’t afford to trust anyone. Not even the FBI. And wouldn’t that just delight her brother Ian who worked for Homeland Security and was constantly engaged in a not-always-friendly rivalry with the FBI. Of course, since her family had no clue what she’d been working on, she couldn’t very well tell Ian of her current predicament.

  “So what’s changed?” Siobahn asked. She rubbed her arms against a sudden chill and realized that the phone had gone silent. “Brian? You still with me?”

  “Yeah. Sorry. Had to move to a more secure location. Listen, the reason I wouldn’t talk to you was that we were under lockdown. On standby as backup for an ultra top secret mission in case something went bad. We were prohibited from talking to anyone on the outside.”

  “Is that usual?”

  “For the entire base to be on alert like that? No. It’s the type of situation you’d expect if an attack was pending. But none of us were aware of any situation that threatened to escalate into immediate aggression.”

  “Okay. So what’s that got to do with why you’re calling me now?”

  “After the lockdown was over, I was having drinks with a buddy who works at one of the airbases. He said that during the lockdown a plane took off carrying a bunch of what looked like private soldiers. Some of them acted strange, similar to the behavior of the freaks we’d seen out at Ft. Bragg. Even weirder, there appeared to be several people in white lab coats who joined the group just before takeoff.”

  Kerberos’s enhanced men. Had to be. “Exactly when was this? What was the plane’s destination?”

  “Uh, about four and a half weeks ago. My friend said that no one knows where the plane was headed.” That was about the same time that Toby had been rescued and MacAdam had resigned.

  “Why are you telling me this, Brian? If you’re looking for the truth, you’re in a better position to find it than me. You’ve got more access to the crew that flew the plane back than I do.” Her investigative radar definitely felt something suspicious was going on. If Brian could give her details, then maybe she’d be able to tie the secret mission to MacAdam’s resignation and death. But it didn’t sound like her friend had much to tell her.

  At this point, Siobahn figured her best bet for getting the information she needed was to see if one of her contacts could put her in touch with the team responsible for the security of MacAdam after his resignation.

  “That’s the problem, Siobahn,” Brian said. “All records that the plane ever landed on base have been destroyed.”

  Figured. Siobahn sighed. “A cover-up is nothing new, Brian. You know I need more detail before I can investigate. Besides, I’ve been promised that the people responsible for creating the freaks have been stopped and will face justice.” Not that she considered it justice that MacAdam had died before the public learned the truth about his sudden resignation. It stank of someone trying to cover their tracks.

  Someone who might recently have turned his or her attention to Siobahn. Once again, from the moment she’d left the house this morning, she’d had the sense that someone was watching and following her. Sick of feeling afraid, she’d immediately called Ajax and demanded point blank if the FBI had agents tailing her.

  “No.” He’d actually sounded affronted. “Our orders were only to confiscate your files and question you.”

  Ajax might be a jerk, but he wasn’t a liar. Which meant someone else was watching her.

  Yet despite using all the tricks she’d learned from her overprotective, security paranoid brothers, she hadn’t been able to spot her tail.

  It freaked her out.

  Because someone ballsy enough to take out a former president wouldn’t hesitate at eliminating one pesky reporter.

  “Well, that’s just the thing, Siobahn,” Brian continued. “A few days ago, my team was out in the middle of the country in a remote forest doing some special maneuvers. The wind had changed on us last minute, so we were dropped several miles deeper into the forest than intended. That’s where we ran into another one of those freaky teams.”

  “Wait. What? I—” She thought back. Faith had said that the people involved had been stopped, but nothing about whether all of the victims had been rounded up. Siobahn swore under her breath. “Tell me everything, Brian.”

  “There’s not much to tell. At first, we only knew these weren’t regular soldiers because of the unique black uniforms they wore. Colored stripes decorated their left shoulders in a ranking system I’ve never seen before. All of the men were huge. Like they’d been taking massive doses of steroids. We took up observation positions in the woods and they never noticed us. A few of us snapped photos. I’ll send them to you.”

  Siobahn did a fist pump, glad that her door was closed so her colleagues couldn’t see her elation.

  “Then, as the men moved out of sight,” Brian continued, “we noticed that some of them were weaving slightly on their feet and tripping frequently.”

  “Were they drunk? Wounded?”

  “If it was one or two guys, I’d go with drunk. But out of two dozen men, I’d say at least eight had some difficulty moving. And if they were injured, their teammates should have been watching in order to step in and offer assistance if needed. Instead, none of the others paid the struggling men any attention. In fact, the team lacked the overall sense of cohesion and interpersonal awareness you’d normally see in a group that has trained together extensively.”

  “Is that it?”

  “No. Some of us decided it would be a good test of our skills to follow them. Siobahn, they returned to a small compound built against the base of a hill. It almost blended in with the rocks and the trees. We might have missed it if we hadn’t been paying attention. The place was surrounded by fencing tipped with razor wire and guarded by more men in black uniforms. I recognized one of the guards at the gate. He’d been recently deployed to Iraq but was reported killed by a roadside bomb his first week there.”

  Siobahn’s blood hummed. “Did you report what you’d found?”

  “Not yet. The guys want to think some more about the possible repercussions. They’re afraid of what might happen to our team if it turns out people higher up in our command structure knew about the compound.”

  Siobahn bit her lip. “Brian, is there any suspicion that the ones responsible for covering up the existence of the freaky soldiers might be outside of the military? In one of the other branches of government?”

  “That’s not something I can speculate on.” Brian’s crisp reply sounded too rehearsed. He was hiding something. But she knew better than to push him when he started sounding all official.

  “All right,” she said. “I’ll send you an encryption program from my secure email box. Send me everything you’ve got. And for God’s sake, Brian, be careful. I don’t want to hear that you’ve suddenly turned up dead.”

  “You got it.”

  As Siobahn got ready to hang up, Ryker’s face popped into her mind. “Totally off topic, but I ran into a guy named Ryker yesterday. What do you know a
bout him?”

  “Ryker? You mean your dad and brothers haven’t mentioned him? Really? He’s something of a legend. Belonged to an ultra-hush-hush spec ops group during the Vietnam War. Stayed in spec ops after the war until he had a falling out with the powers that be. Left to start his own privately run special operations group, The Surgical Strike Unit, SSU for short. He’s the commander everyone wanted to serve under. Tough but fair. Still has a reputation of being fiercely protective of the men and women who serve with him. A friend of mine joined the SSU and has been after me to follow him. But they’re headquartered in Oregon and my kids are in good schools here in Maryland, so I’m not ready to make a move just yet.”

  Siobahn’s heart sank. Oregon. Figured a man as mysterious as Ryker would live out in the middle of nowhere. Well, no point in having regrets. They had a dinner date in two days and she’d enjoy his company for as long as he was in town.

  “Thanks, Brian. I look forward to getting your photos. And once things have calmed down, I’ll take you to lunch.”

  “Offer instead to babysit the kids so Samantha and I can have a date night, and I’ll be in your debt forever.”

  Siobahn laughed. “Done.”

  “Faith, before you remind me of my promise to let this investigation lapse, I’ve got to tell you that something new has come up. Something that whoever helped you find Toby is going to want to hear.” Siobahn suspected that Faith was reporting back to Ryker and the SSU, but figured it was Faith’s responsibility to share that information with her first.

  “Siobahn—”

  Hearing the warning in her friend’s voice, Siobahn rushed on. “There’s a hidden compound in the woods in South Dakota with at least one team of those freaky soldiers that I think might belong to Kerberos.”

  Faith sucked in a breath loud enough for Siobahn to hear over the secure line. “You’re right. That does change things. We thought…” Siobahn could picture Faith shaking her head, setting her unruly hair falling out of whatever attempt she’d made to contain it. “I’m going to have to make some calls. See who best to put in touch with you.”

  Yes.

  “Tell me everything you know,” Faith demanded.

  Siobahn smiled. “Isn’t that usually my line?”

  Faith chuckled. “Yeah. Sorry.”

  “Don’t be. And don’t forget that there’s still a job waiting for you if you want to come back.” Faith had quit journalism after her sister shot their parents to death then turned the gun on herself. The need to focus on her remaining family had been the main reason Faith gave up her job, but Siobahn often wondered if the harsh treatment Faith and her family suffered at the hands of her fellow journalists had soured her on the profession as a whole. “I promise this is the last time I’ll mention coming back to work for me.”

  “I appreciate your confidence in me, Siobahn, I really do. And you know I love you like a sister. But I don’t think full-time journalism is in my future. I’m not sure what I’m going to do, but it partly depends on where Toby ends up. Now, give me everything you’ve got and I’ll pass it on.”

  Ryker sank back in his office chair. “Run that by me again.” The call from Faith Andrews had caught him just as he was getting ready to head home for the night.

  “According to Siobahn’s contact,” Faith recapped, “there’s a small compound of what appear to be Kaufmann’s men in the wilds of South Dakota.”

  Ryker let out a sigh. Beyond his window, the night sky glowed from the lights over the city and an occasional spotlight roamed across the sky. Half the time the SSU was like that spotlight, a thin beam of light in an increasingly dark world. Taking care of one crisis only to face another, more deadly situation the next day.

  Rafe and his team had located several batches of enhanced men who had been sent out on missions by Jamieson and never checked back in, or whose missions hadn’t been completed when Kerberos was dismantled. Yet there’d been nothing in the notes confiscated from Kerberos headquarters to suggest an offshoot to Kaufmann’s lab.

  On the other hand, everyone agreed that both Jamieson and Kaufmann had been paranoid men. Dr. Nevsky, Kaufmann’s predecessor, had stored his backup notes on a microchip implanted in the abdomen of his daughter, Susana Dias. After Nevsky had triggered the self-destruct sequence that had burned down his lab and destroyed all of his research, there’d been an international manhunt for the microchip. Ryker suspected that Kaufmann and Jamieson would have chosen a backup location much more accessible.

  Maybe they hadn’t kept their backup at a secure storage site, but at another compound that mirrored Kaufmann’s experiments. What better way to guarantee the program would continue than to already have a second lab running?

  Not wanting to jump to conclusions, Ryker admitted that Siobahn’s contact might have stumbled across a simple training camp for Kaufmann’s men, a camp that had lost communication with its command center and therefore continued on as usual, waiting for new orders.

  Ryker tilted his head toward the ceiling. He was going to have to send a team to investigate. With Rafe’s imprisonment still weighing on him, he would make certain all members of the team were volunteers who fully understood what types of horrors they might witness.

  “Thank you for passing this on, Faith.”

  “You’re welcome, sir. I…ah…haven’t told Siobahn about the SSU.”

  “That’s good. I’ve recently run into Ms. Murphy and if I feel she needs to know of our connection, I’ll tell her myself.” He didn’t like the idea of keeping Siobahn in the dark, but he wanted to keep her safe.

  “In the meantime,” he continued, “please warn Ms. Murphy again that it’s too dangerous for her to continue to pursue this.”

  “I will, but I can tell you right now, it won’t do any good. I already warned her off once. With this new information, her instincts are back on full alert. When Siobahn gets her teeth into a story, she doesn’t let go.”

  “I figured as much. However, the people involved in protecting Kerberos’s secrets have already killed. I don’t want Ms. Murphy to become their next victim.” Ryker didn’t voice his deepest fear, that if someone was trying to continue Kaufmann’s program, he or she might not choose to focus their research solely on men, the way Kaufmann had. Ryker would do everything in his power to stop Siobahn from becoming a victim of such experiments.

  “Rafe tells me you’ve placed a guard on Siobahn,” Faith said. “Thank you. She might not consider it necessary, but I’ll rest easier knowing that she’s protected from the men who hurt Toby.”

  “You’re welcome.” After what Faith had just told him, Ryker suspected the stakes were higher than he’d believed. It was time to talk to Siobahn about entering protective custody.

  He knew he was in trouble when the thought of seeing her again, even to give her unpleasant news, filled him with anticipation.

  The reporter sure did keep odd hours. And move around a lot. The assassin had found it challenging to keep the woman in his sights today, even with her red hair. She walked fast and skillfully slipped between her fellow pedestrians, often leaving little room for him to follow without bumping into people.

  For longer distances, she took the Metro. Which presented another set of challenges as he tried not to lose sight of her on the crowded platforms, then worked to stay unnoticed while standing a few feet away from her in the train car.

  By itself, this job wasn’t too difficult, and with Kerberos dismantled he was simply glad to have an assignment. All he had to do was follow Siobahn Murphy and then find a way to kidnap her. However, the other man who’d been tailing her was going to be a problem. He acted more like a bodyguard than a tail, but if so, Ms. Murphy didn’t seem to know she was being guarded. Still, he couldn’t risk taking the other man out until he understood who’d sent the guard to watch the woman. Eliminating a law enforcement officer or other security professional would bring nothing but trouble.

  In the meantime, he had to take extra precautions to avoid being spotted
.

  The assassin’s orders were to stay undetected and he had no choice but to obey. A small voice in the back of his head tried to warn him that his unswerving need to obey no matter what the threat to himself was wrong, but he didn’t listen. He liked the security of being told what to do. He didn’t want the responsibility of deciding what was right and what was wrong. Jamieson and Kaufmann had been strong leaders to follow and he’d been happy to carry out their commands. Whether this new boss would also provide him such security, he didn’t know. All he knew was that his panic over learning that both Jamieson and Kaufmann were dead had been eased when the new man gave him these orders.

  He didn’t care if his target was a male or a female. As long as he was told that national security depended on his actions, he would obey.

  His phone vibrated in his pocket.

  Change of plans, the text message read. Kill her. Make it look like an accident. Or suicide.

  A heady burst of adrenaline flooded his system. Kidnapping a target was interesting work, but stalking with the intent to kill truly made his heart pound with anticipation. This was what he’d been bred for.

  “Rafe,” Ryker said when he called the younger man to pass on the information Siobahn had discovered. “I’m not asking for you and your men to go in. Let another team handle it.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “This isn’t a matter of you facing down a few of Kaufmann’s enhanced soldiers, then bringing them to Gabby for treatment. This—”

  “Stop babying me, sir.”

  Ryker winced at the anger in Rafe’s voice. “Rafe—”

  “I understand that you’re trying to protect me, sir, and I appreciate your concern. Trust me, I can handle the situation.” Rafe gave a slightly bitter laugh, something he wouldn’t have done pre-Kaufmann. “The shrinks will tell you I need to face what’s inside that compound if I’m going to put what happened to me in the past.”

  That didn’t make Ryker’s decision any less difficult. It wasn’t just Rafe’s state of mind he worried about. Rafe might be the only member from the original SSU team who had survived being captured by Kaufmann, but his second team had witnessed the horrors of the lab during their assault on the compound.