If she did this, she might never get what she wanted, might never get the treatments he’d promised her.
But right now she wanted to punish Derek, the man who’d called her his courtesan and then treated her like his whore — punish him by not letting him find out what he’d been trying so hard all day to discover.
He’d taken advantage of her, and he admitted it right to her face and showed no remorse.
No. Of course not. She’d never seen him show remorse over anything.
Well, that was about to change.
She placed the blade carefully against the man’s right wrist.
Steadied it.
Pressed down.
Drew it back sharply.
And cut through the black thread that was binding his wrists together.
All we find down the first hallway is a series of a dozen sparsely furnished, crypt-like classrooms. The chairs and tables all look left over from the fifties. If this is a top-secret research facility, the government was obviously pouring its resources into something other than creating high-tech, twenty-first-century classrooms.
Chalkboards in two of the rooms contain indecipherable formulas. I take photos of them with my cell. Trying to figure them out might be a good school project for Lonnie.
Satisfied there’s nothing more here for us to see, we venture back to the lobby to explore the other half of the building.
Apart from the humming rattle of the overtaxed air conditioner, everything is quiet and still.
If they are doing top-secret drone research here, then where are the computer labs? The control centers? This can’t be the right place.
The other hallway has a number of classrooms similar to the ones we found earlier, but it also has a door at the end that requires us to swipe the security card again.
I pass the card through the reader, the door opens, and we get our first glimpse into the hangar attached to the back of Building A-13.
Descent
The hangar is dark, but the hallway light that seeps in from behind us is enough for me to see what’s in here.
Three drones sit before us, sleek, stealthy, menacing. They almost look like living creatures lined up, ready and waiting here in their lair.
It’s eerie.
I’ve seen drones before in movies, of course, and on the news, and they look stark and intimidating, but when you see them in person they’re even more impressive.
Xavier walks over as if in a trance and reaches out to touch the one closest to us, but I grab his arm and hold him back. “What if they’re wired like car alarms? That would not be a good thing.”
“Yeah,” he mutters, then points at two narrow missiles hanging from the bottom of it. “This puppy is armed.”
I gaze around the hangar.
All of them are.
Suddenly, I really do not want to be here.
Glancing at my watch I see that we’ve already used up six of our precious minutes. Twenty-four left before we need to return the security pass card to Fred.
“You’re the expert on Groom Lake. Any idea where we go from here?”
Xavier’s eyes are still on the dimly lit drone. “No one’s really an expert except the people who actually work here. But, from what I’ve read, most of the high-level research takes place underground. Bombproof command centers, that sort of thing. I say we look for an elevator.”
In the faint light I study the wall of the building. It looks like there’s a set of sliding doors at the far end near an exit door to the runway.
He’s following my gaze. “You think that’s it?”
I tap my phone’s screen to use it as a flashlight. “Only one way to find out.”
Calista was not able to wake up Jeremy Turnisen.
She realized she’d better hurry if she was really going to let him go free because Derek might be returning to the room any minute.
Or he might just be sitting down there taking his good old time enjoying his steak. Just remembering what it was like when he had his way with you.
Yeah, she could picture him doing that alright.
Either way, if she was going to free Jeremy she needed to wake him up.
“Hey.” She slapped his face. “Jeremy, open your eyes.”
His only reply was a soft groan.
She slapped him again, harder, and blood began to ooze out of one of the wounds Derek had given him and then sewed back up again.
Jeremy didn’t awaken.
She cut the duct tape from his legs and wondered if she should just stop there, just take off, just leave the guy on his own to see if he could get away.
No.
He’d never make it out of the hotel.
And what message would that give Derek? That she was just acting out and cut him free but didn’t have the guts or the brains to see things all the way through?
Okay, but how to get him out of the room?
She dead-bolted the door while she debated what to do.
Yes.
It’s an elevator.
Next to it is a glass door that leads outside, and about a hundred feet beyond the tarmac I can see the outline of the maintenance building we hid the truck behind.
Before stepping onto the elevator, I feel my cell phone vibrate and find a text from Charlene that she’s going to pick up some of Emilio’s notebooks that were found at the Arête.
Hmm.
Notebooks are good.
Notebooks might just mean answers.
Pocketing my phone, I swipe the key card, the elevator doors glide open, and Xavier and I step inside.
There’s only one button. Xavier presses it. “Well, here we go.”
The doors close and we descend into the earth.
When Jesús Garcia’s cell rang, he thought maybe it was his people calling back about the two phone traces that he’d put into play, but it was not.
“Sir, we made it through the USB drive, but it’s empty.”
“What do you mean, it’s empty?”
“I mean, someone set this up so it would erase the files if you got past the security measures.”
“So recover them.”
“We can’t. The files are gone.”
“They’re not gone. They’re—”
“I’m afraid they are, sir.”
“Keep working on it.”
A pause. “Yes, sir.”
Garcia laid the phone down slowly.
The USB drive was a dead end.
Really? Was it really?
Well, if so, Colonel Byrne had better come through with the engineer or else that drone was not going to get delivered.
And if that was the case, there were definitely going to be consequences.
Fionna was in her minivan with her children en route to the Arête when her phone buzzed with a notification.
Charlene had mentioned that she had another errand to run later, so she’d driven separately, and now, not wanting to check her texts while driving, Fionna asked Lonnie, who was in the front passenger seat, to read it for her.
“It says the files were deleted.”
Ah.
So, the blackmailer’s people had finally managed to get through the security codes she’d put on the USB drive.
Now they had nothing.
But they also knew they had nothing.
She had Lonnie text Jevin, Xavier, and Charlene to update them. It might just affect the trajectory of things for the rest of the night.
The elevator stops and the doors slide open.
At last it looks like we’ve reached the high-tech area of the base.
The overheads are off, but sporadic emergency lights allow us to see well enough to make out at least some of what lies in the expansive room.