Avenging Angels (The Seraphim Chronicles Book 1) (25 page)

The woman looked at Evangeline as she pulled the man to the right, disappearing behind the corner of a building. Evangeline broke into a sprint to follow. She rounded the corner to find they had increased their pace and had already reached the midpoint down the block. She was sure that the man she pursued was the same one who offered Daryl a drink. If not, they were her best lead to finding the man who did. She was determined not to lose their trail.

The couple continued on their hasty stroll, taking a frequent glance behind them to see if Evangeline was still on their tails. Their pace was steady; they were not hastening to shake her off, but neither were they slowing to permit her to catch up.

Evangeline had not bothered being discreet about her chase. “Excuse me!” she called out, panting. “Can I talk to you for a moment, please?”

The couple turned another corner and she sprinted ahead to try to catch up to them. They seemed to have done the same, and Evangeline called out in desperation.

“Can you help me?” her voice echoed down a narrow alley. “I have some follow-up questions about the accident around here the other day. I just want to ask you a few questions!” The couple turned their heads to look but their gait never wavered as they turned around yet another corner and out of her line of sight.

Evangeline quickened her pace again, frustrated at their obvious disregard to her requests.

“I know you were the woman inspecting my TRTV at the scene of the accident!” she screamed as she made her way to the next corner.

Evangeline had chased after them for over four blocks when she recognized the figure eight route they had taken among the dilapidated buildings. Their behavior seemed to confirm their intentions - they either wanted to get her disoriented before they fled from her or they were ascertaining if she was alone. Either way, she regretted that she had not brought her sidearm.

She reached into her pocket to call the local station for backup. When she found the pocket empty, it dawned on her she had left her communicator at home on the kitchen counter. Jack would be upset she left it behind. Even worse, she was alone in an abandoned part of the LTZ with nothing to defend herself but her wits and training. She was in a vulnerable position, but she still needed answers. She hoped that her apprehension was unfounded.

About thirty yards ahead, they stopped and paused under a streetlight at the next intersection. They scanned the empty streets, made eye contact again with Evangeline, and bolted around the corner. They were baiting her. Evangeline knew she was caught up in the game of cat and mouse. She did not know how close she was to getting her answers, so she ignored the danger and ran after them.

She never saw the arm swing around the corner and strike her throat, knocking her off her feet. The impact of her body against the concrete sidewalk knocked the wind out of her lungs. She tried to force her body to inhale a desperate gulp of air as a stun baton struck her in the chest. She thrashed on the ground as a fish caught in a net.

Her violent convulsions ceased with the current. She felt herself slipping past the blurred edge of consciousness. She fought to hold onto her fuzzy vision, and she spied two people emerging from the door on her right. One grabbed her under her arms and the other wrapped his hands under her knees, and together they carried her into the building. She then spotted the couple whom she had been following enter the same building through another door down the block.

A small freight transport was idling in the open space of what appeared to be a vast storage warehouse. They placed Evangeline in the back of the transport, resting her on a thin mattress. From her position on the floor of the transport, she could see a man sitting in the operator’s seat. She thought she had heard him utter the words “jam” and “cameras.” Her mind was in such a fog, she was not sure of anything she saw or heard since she had begun her pursuit through the shadowy alleyways.

The men who had carried her stood close the open rear doors of the vehicle. One of the men who had carried Evangeline spoke as the couple approached the transport. “Felicia, Garrett, we need to move her out of here,” he said in a panicked voice. “B.B. said she wasn’t supposed to be contacted yet. It’s too soon.”

The other man nodded. “I agree,” he said, breathing at a nervous rate. “It’s not safe for her here. If they find her here, they may discover more than we can afford right now. I say we smuggle her back to Olympus and drop her off at a little clinic. We could say we found her passed out near a pub.”

“I say we just dispose of her.”

This remark came from the man Evangeline had been chasing; the one she suspected had given Daryl the poison. All eyes turned to him with looks of surprise.

“She’s one of
them
, now!” Garret spat with disdain. “She’s one of the enemy. And we don’t play nice with the enemy.”

Felicia’s hard eyes studied the three men one by one. The two who had lifted Evangeline off the street wore anxious expressions. Their eyes darted back and forth between Garrett and herself. They felt uneasy about his morbid suggestion. Garrett glared between Felicia and the other men with contempt. He knew what they needed to do to win the war. He was willing to make the hard choices. But at the moment he was outnumbered.

Felicia gazed down at Evangeline with concern. Her instructions were to find out what had happened to the Angel found at the accident the day prior. She was not to initiate contact with Evangeline. She crossed her arms and closed her eyes as she had an internal debate with herself.

The three men had stepped away. Garrett tried to convince them to take his side. He was certain that it was in their best interest to remove Evangeline from the equation before matters became worse. He had been very persuasive; the men were about to yield to his confident determination.

“No, Garrett!” Felicia barked. “It may be sooner than expected, but extracting her was always part of the plan. We’ll take her to the main lab. We’ll let
them
make the decision.” Her words brought an abrupt silence to the group. She stared each one down until she felt their compliance with her decision. Garrett tried in vain to outstare her, but his bravado was no match for her tenacity.

She took one more look at Evangeline then walked toward the driver still seated in the vehicle. “Keep her comfortable, but keep her sedated,” she ordered. “It’s for her protection as much as ours.” The man nodded, got up from his seat, and moved toward the back of the vehicle to open the medical kit attached to the sidewall.

Without another word, Felicia walked away from the transport and toward a set of stairs that headed to the sublevels.

“Felicia, where are you going?” Garrett called as she reached the stairs. She halted in mid-stride as her hand touched the railing.

She took in a deep breath and turned her head around to look at him before she spoke. “I’m going to go help that kid pilot you never should have dosed, Garrett!” she said with stifled rage in her voice. Garrett looked away, unable to meet her eyes. He looked over to the other men for support. They had boarded the back of the transport and were assisting the driver with the sedative. When he saw that he would not get any support from them, he turned his head back to the stairwell. Felicia had already disappeared below the floor line.

“And then what?” Garrett challenged. His voice echoed inside the building. Her voice resonated up through the empty stairwell.

“And then I’m going to find out what her husband knows!”

THIRTY-NINE

Jack stared in disbelief as he and Gideon watched Evangeline’s figure slump to the ground. Someone pulled her into the building right from off the street. The resolution on the display was grainy and shadowy, focused in on Evangeline and her attackers from some distance. As hard as Gideon searched, no other cameras with a better vantage point to the abduction were accessible to his networks. Any cameras that were once in service in that area were simply offline with no records of damage or repair.

Jack disconnected from the virtual workshop and picked up his communicator to call the security department. An automated voice answered the call and began to record his personal information and location. Jack heard a mild beep and another voice spoke up.

“This is Officer Carnes, Mr. Evans. My records show you’re reporting your wife abducted in the LTZ,” he said.

Jack was frantic, but he knew that coming apart at the seams would do nothing to help his wife. “Yes, I just watched her being stunned and pulled into a building on the corner of Apollo Road and Thirty-First Avenue of the industrial district!” He rushed his words, as if forcing them from his mouth faster would elicit a quicker response from a rescue squad.

The security officer replied with unbearable emotional detachment, and perhaps even skepticism. “Mr. Evans, how could you witness your wife being abducted in the LTZ if you are in your home on level seventy-three in Olympus?”

Jack realized this call had been a giant mistake, that he had reached a dead end. There was no way he could tell a security officer that he had created an AI, which had the capacity to hack into camera feeds throughout Olympus and the LTZ. He would implicate himself! He had gotten into trouble for similar infractions in his youth, but those schemes had been nowhere near the magnitude of what he had created with Gideon.

Getting caught hacking again would risk more than his liberty and livelihood. If he wanted to stay out of detention and find out what happened to his wife, he needed to come up with an idea that would let him end the call with the least amount of suspicion. His eyes darted about the room, searching for some kind of inspiration. He glanced at the framed photo on his desk, his favorite picture of their wedding day.

Evangeline had looked so beautiful at the lakeside ceremony. They were both barefoot with their toes curling in the warm sand, and she had worn a short dress with a flowing train. He had chosen his linen suit because it looked like the ones they had seen in vacation pamphlets for the southern ocean resorts. They were both wearing sunglasses and holding up their crystal flutes toward the camera in a toast. He had never smiled so much in his life than he had on that day. He had felt like the luckiest man in the world. His friends had even commented that he had been drunk with happiness.

Drunk…

Jack’s mind started to conjure images of people in restaurants and bars who had consumed too much alcohol, talking with slurred speech and a belligerent attitude. He started yelling into the phone without a second thought, doing his best impression of a clubber.

“I’m telling you! I was standing right here by my window and I saw the whole thing. I have excellent vision, so you can’t tell me I didn’t see what I saw I saw!”

He knocked over a glass for effect, a loud clatter echoing off the walls. “Damn, you just made me spill my drink!” Jack had never been drunk before - he hoped he was not over-selling it. His need to get off the call and brainstorm another plan to find Evangeline consumed him.

“Sir,” Carnes said. “How many alcoholic beverages have you ingested tonight?”

Jack played into the character a little more, walking into the kitchen. “I haven’t been drinking!” he yelled. “And who are you to say I can’t drink in my own house, huh?”

In that moment, Gideon materialized in the kitchen. He opened his mouth, but Evangeline’s voice reached Jack’s ears.

“Jack, who are you yelling at?” he said. Gideon’s improvisational skills impressed Jack more with each performance.

“Where they hell have you been, baby?” He dropped the communicator down from his face. “I just watched you get abducted in the LTZ. How did you get home so quickly?” he bellowed. Gideon watched Jack pretend to be yelling at Evangeline and attempted to act as if he was taking control of the situation. He used his interface with the communication system and broke in on the conversation Jack was having with the officer.

“Give me the phone, Jack,” he said, sounding exasperated in Evangeline’s voice. “Hello? Officer? Hi, this is Evangeline Evans. I’m so sorry for my husband’s outburst. He gets confused when he drinks too much. He was watching a murder mystery program on the display. I’m so sorry for the trouble he’s caused. I’m going to put him to bed. I promise this will never happen again.”

The officer chuckled over the phone. “Would you like us to send over a patrol to check in on you, ma’am?”

“No, but thank you,” Gideon responded. “That’s really not necessary. Again, I’m so sorry for his outburst.”

“Ok, Ma’am. You have a good night,” Carnes replied. “I’ll tell you what; I’ll even cancel the report since it was obviously a mistake. We wouldn’t want there to be any record of something that could be embarrassing for your husband, do we?”

“That’s so kind of you, officer,” Gideon gushed. “I can’t thank you enough. Good night.”

“Good night, Ma’am.”

The call ended. Jack was standing there dumbfounded at how well Gideon executed the spontaneous charade. Then he shook his head and refocused on more pressing matters.

“Okay, Gideon,” Jack said, walking out of the kitchen. “We can’t rely on the authorities to help us. We need to get back into the workshop and figure out what happened to Evangeline. Plus, I need to install some more modifications to your program.”

Gideon dissolved from the kitchen while Jack went back into his study and reconnected with his virtual workshop through his neural interface. 

forty

Bathed in shadows, Campbell gave himself a pat on the back for his foresight into placing a tap on the Evans’ home line, diverting all calls through his command center. He deactivated the headset’s voice-altering feature and put it down on his desk. He brought to his ear the earpiece that gave him a direct channel to General Reynolds. The call connected with a subtle click and Campbell began his report without prompting.

“There’s been a new development,” he said in his characteristic calmness. “Captain Evans was abducted in the LTZ. Her husband is somehow aware of the abduction and he notified security. I was able to intercept his call, so there’s no report on record.”

Campbell could hear Reynolds’ slow, steady breathing. If there was one thing Campbell knew about the man, it was that he was patient, but in a treacherous way.

“This is beginning to get out of hand,” Reynolds warned. “You’d better get control of this situation.” The connection terminated with eerie finality.

Campbell sat back in his chair, folded his arms, and began spinning in his chair in a slow circle. He needed to think and the repetitive circular motions always helped him focus. This new turn of events, her abduction, was not his doing.

“It must be them,” he thought to himself. “Could
they
still be alive? If they are, how have they managed to return to Earth without attracting any attention?” He could not dismiss the possibility that the enemy would be attempting to recruit Evangeline to their cause.

“But, why now?” he asked the empty room. “What has changed that would cause them to risk exposing themselves?

He needed to ascertain what Jack Evans knew regarding the extent of Evangeline’s level of contact with her parents since their disappearance. What secrets did they share that could aid him in his hunt for the fugitives?

An unexpected concern was brewing in Campbell’s mind. Somehow, Jack Evans had witnessed Evangeline’s capture in the LTZ before his own analysts had informed him about it. And why, Campbell wondered, had Jack called security to alert them about his wife’s abduction, just to pull off a half-assed drunken act? Campbell had played along just to let Jack believe he had fooled a security officer, but the fact remained that Jack’s knowledge of events miles away from the citadel troubled him.

Another concern threatened to interfere with the meticulous moves and counter-moves of Campbell’s master plan. Someone had been with Jack, impersonating the missing captain. These red flags only assured Campbell of one thing: Jack Evans became an unexpected player and could not be permitted to survive the night.

Campbell’s chair slowed to a stop facing his desk. He needed someone to go talk to Jack Evans about his wife’s current relationship to her parents. Once that information had been gleaned, the talking would be over and the threat Jack Evans presented would be eradicated.

Campbell needed a friendly, if not familiar face, to fulfill such a sensitive interrogation. He needed someone that would not arouse suspicions, someone that had a legitimate reason for showing up late at night and start asking questions about Evangeline and her parents.

He activated his keyboard and began typing in a message.

“YOUR PARTNER WILL CONTINUE THE SEARCH FOR CAPTAIN EVANS ALONE. PROCEED TO THE HOME OF JACK EVANS. FURTHER INSTRUCTIONS TO FOLLOW.”

It would be a risky move on his part. Sending in his agent under cover might expose more than Reynolds would be willing to risk, but Campbell was confident. This Jack Evans would be alone and emotionally vulnerable, unarmed, and unaware of the danger he would be inviting into his home.