Awakened (21 page)

Barrett took care of other business once she had returned to her apartment. The folder of Malcolm’s documents she stashed in a desk drawer, not wanting to look at it again for a little while. Pedophilia was nothing new to her, but she needed time to get her anger under control. Then she’d analyze the document more closely for hidden clues to his relationship with the girl. She might be able to find some hint in there of a plan—his—to abduct Jane someday. For her own good—or so he seemed to think. Men like Malcolm Prescott were capable of fooling everyone.

Her cell rang from inside her purse, muffled. She dug around, not finding it, and picked up on the last ring.

“Hey. It’s Nick.”

Barrett stiffened. “Hello.” She hadn’t called him since he’d left without saying good-bye. She hadn’t known what to say.

“You were right, Barrett. The Turning Program hasn’t been shut down. My handler—Director Rick Hallifax—has been lying to me.”

“Hallifax,” she whispered. “I know that name.”

“You should. Apparently he’s the person in charge of Belladonna. Fuck, no wonder he never told me about it. Told me about you. Your whole mission is to contain vampire criminals so the Turning Program
doesn’t
get shut down.”

“How did you find all this out?”

“I went searching. And once I went searching with certain names at my disposal—Peter Lancaster, being one of them—it wasn’t hard for me to come up with the name of Kyle Mahone.”

She sucked in her breath on a hiss. “You
talked
to him?”

“I did.”

“And?”

“And I ran your theory by him. The one about the FBI experimenting with a select few turneds. Then recruiting me to get rid of them when the experiments backfired. We don’t know if it’s true, we might never know, but it’s on his radar now. So, unfortunately, am I.” He took an audible breath. “Barrett, listen—I owe you an explanation.”

“You don’t owe me—”

“I do. And I’m sorry, angel. I know you were just saying what you had to say.”

“And
I
know why you reacted the way you did,” she said quietly. “And why you wouldn’t want to believe it. But it doesn’t change anything, Nick. You did what you had to. You saved your brother needless suffering.”

“Maybe. Or maybe if the FBI poisoned him, it had the means to reverse that poison. Or it might … in time.”

Oh, God. She hadn’t thought of that. “Nick—”

He barked with bitter laughter. “God, we’re a pair, aren’t we. How could we possibly be together? Our combined guilt and baggage doesn’t leave room for much else.”

Was he trying to tell her something? Like he’d changed his mind about how committed he was to her? When he said nothing else, she asked, “So that’s where you’ve been all this time? Tracking down Mahone. Because I was hoping you’d call me eventually.”

There. It wasn’t exactly a declaration of love, but he’d have to know what she’d meant. What
he
meant to her.

“Of course I was going to call you, Barrett.”

Of course, he said. Because of Jane?

Or because of them?

He’d told her he loved her. And she hadn’t said it back, even though she felt the same way. Even now she was relying on his intuition to guess how she felt. Was she really that much of a coward? Maybe at one time.

Nick had accused her of running before. Running away from him. From the certainty that loving him would hurt.

But for the past two days, not knowing where he was or if he’d actually get in touch with her again? That had hurt more than anything she’d ever experienced.

So she wasn’t running again.

She
was
fully committed. Enough for both of them, if need be.

“Anyway,” he said, his voice tight, and the sound of it made her heart clench. “I just wanted to apologize, fill you in on what I learned from Mahone, and let you know what the NSA techs found on the laptop’s hard drive.”

There it was again, that sharp bite of jealousy. By now she knew it was unwarranted, but she couldn’t resist needling him a little. “Hmm. Let me guess. You talked to Ms. Wong again?”

He paused, then spoke, his tone far lighter than it had been. “That’s right. I had to sleep with her and her identical twin sister before she’d talk. Twenty times in all. Together. Apart. Whew. They wore me out.”

Bastard, she thought with more humor than heat. It was no use sticking out her tongue when he couldn’t see her. “I’m sure you did your best, stud. Did the NSA find anything usable on your computer?”

Nick sighed, finally accepting that Barrett had truly accepted his apology. “Easy hacks, apparently. There is no such thing as privacy in cyberspace.”

“So why were we lured into it? Who saw us looking?”

“Whoever wanted us on the hook. For whatever reason.”

“I take it there was no way to identify that person or persons.”

“Correct. The URL wasn’t registered to an individual.” She heard the rustle of paper. Nick sounded like he was looking at notes he’d made. “Let me double-check my hard copies. Okay. Long story short, all of the SexFlash websites are traceable to one hub. Just one. You would think with that much money at stake that they would be more careful, but no.”

She stuck to the subject. “Where is the hub?”

“New City.”

“What about the portal to the video feed from the white room?”

“That came from somewhere very close to a place that hasn’t opened yet, also in New City. Ultra luxury, for the discerning man about town, according to their online ads. Multilevel space, not completed. It’s going to be called Club Red.”

“Seriously? I found a Club Red flyer in Malcolm Prescott’s car trash. It’s opening in a few days. There’s an open call for auditions. Dancers. Strippers.”

“How the fuck about that.”

They were both kind of stunned. She spoke first. “Anything else, Nick?”

“Yeah. The owner has an unusual name—hang on, I have it on my phone.” He paused to tap into a different screen. “Vladimir Ouspensky. Russian national, papers in order, no expired visas, hasn’t done anything bad. Shacks up with a Miss Silicone at the same hotel we stayed at.”

“I wonder if I saw him,” she whispered. “Or her.”

“I’m looking at her photo right now. I know I didn’t. I would have remembered her.” She knew he hadn’t meant that in a good way.

“The FBI’s official task force on trafficking confirmed an influx of several hundred women and girls to the area in the last year. Strip clubs, exotic dance revues, you name it. Club Red is muscling in on the action. And this is interesting. There’s a nice new blood bank in town. I’m thinking their clients might include vampires who can pay top dollar for scary smoothies.”

“Riiight,” Barrett said. “God, of course. So simple. But has Belladonna checked around at any local blood banks? No. Too obvious and a waste of our super spy time.”

“No one can think of everything at once,” he said.

Nice of him not to slam the competition, if her agency actually was any competition for him.

“Let me back up, Nick. Collette is investigating the most important blood businesses in the U.S. We need to get on this.”

“Don’t be too hard on yourself. I’ve got skills,” he said.

“You do, Nick,” she said softly. “The best.”

Had he thought she was being sarcastic? Not anymore. A silence stretched out until he cleared his throat. When he spoke, it was only to say, “Getting back to the flyer and the ads—there has to be a connection between Club Red and Jane.”

“So what am I going to do?”

“You mean, what are
we
going to do? Because one thing’s for sure. I’m not a hired gun for the FBI anymore. Not given what I’ve found. I’m just not going to tell them that yet.”

“Okay. So what are
we
going to do?”

“First, aerial surveillance of the club.”

“You have the chopper.”

“Yeah. But seeing as how my bunker’s no longer safe, both me and the chopper have been holed up at the base just outside of New City.”

“Right,” she said, rubbing her temple.

“You okay?”

“Sometimes I still struggle to process all this, you know?”

“Yeah,” he whispered. “I know.” He cleared his throat. “So, how about you? I’m going to be flying. What are you going to be working on?” he asked.

He was going to get a look at Club Red from the air. It only made sense that she try to do so from the ground. But something stopped her from telling him that. Maybe it was the fact things were already so tense between them. Or that she didn’t want him to try and stop her because he wanted to protect her again. Whatever it was, it guided her answer.

“I’m going to check in with Belladonna. Make sure Ty and Peter and Ana are doing okay. You know, no signs of neuron-rage.” She was also going to call Justine and enlist her help to get inside Club Red.

He didn’t respond, as if he was weighing whether she was being truthful or not.

“Keep me posted,” she finally said.

“Same with you, angel,” he replied. He hesitated for a fraction, as if he wanted to say something else.

But he didn’t. So she did, blurting it out before she lost her nerve. “I love you, Nick. I always have.”

Before he could respond, she hung up.

CHAPTER
SIXTEEN

Nick did another flyover of New City. He didn’t swoop
down or do any wild moves that would attract attention, keeping an eye on the feed from the gyrocam and following its grid, which matched the street layout, except where it ended in sprawl.

Even so, his heart was pumping and his adrenaline was rushing.

He wished he was inside a jet, conducting high-G maneuvers: rolls, climbs, loops, barrels, and turns. He wanted to pump his fists and scream like a madman.

Because Barrett loved him. And she’d actually said it.

And fuck-fuck-fuck, if he wasn’t already up in the air, he’d still feel like he was flying.

Grinning, he shook his head and told himself for the thousandth time to settle down. She’d said it. She’d meant it. The next time she said it, he was going to make sure he was inside her and she had her legs wrapped around him. Until then he had to keep his shit together and focus on the mission at hand—finding and saving Jane. Then there was the fact that the FBI had lied to him, that Barrett had turned vampires for friends and that they might pose a problem in the very near future, and a hundred and one other concerns to deal with.

But right now, Barrett loved him and he was holding that close.

A minute later, he was over Club Red.

It had been built on the outskirts of the city, standing alone in a lot of raw land. Green turf had been laid around the building, and the parking lot spaces marked off.

He used a remote cam to take dozens of photos. You never knew what was going to be important. Visibility was excellent, for what it was worth.

The ground-penetrating radar didn’t show tunnels running into the club, just plumbing. No supersize pipes. If underage girls were being secretly shipped in for private sale, the physical transfer was probably relatively straightforward.

Meaning, Nick thought, that they would need to rely on humans and not just gizmos to find out more. The abducted girls didn’t just stroll in. There were witnesses. The trick was finding one who was willing to talk.

He’d gotten a rough idea of the structure’s height, which would be easy to confirm at the city department that issued the building permit. Just like everywhere, exact dimensions were on file, available to the public. He made a rough mental estimate as to the structure’s square footage, using a car parked next to it for a unit of measurement.

Club Red was big, somewhere around nine thousand to ten thousand square feet. But that was only a guess.

He increased his altitude. Most of the city was so new that planted trees were few and far between. They looked like matchsticks dabbed with green. Nothing aboveground was concealed.

The radio crackled. “That you up there?” Kevin’s southern accent softened the static a little.

“Yeah. Where are you?”

“At the base. Inside the lookout tower. They just tracked a heli. Looked like yours.”

“Not yet, but I’m on my way. What have you been doing?”

“Teaching Aura some new tricks. And letting her teach me.”

Nick smiled. “Smartest dog I know. See you soon, Kev.”

Nick swooped away to the west, toward the base.

There was nothing out of the ordinary about the landing and the runway crews were busy elsewhere. Nick was cool with that. Being more or less invisible fit his MO. He shut down the bird and leaned back, waiting for the rotors to stop spinning. He felt safe on base. The army, he knew. The FBI? Obviously, not so much.

It still pissed him off that he’d been lied to. Every time he thought about it, he wanted to rip someone apart. But again, he had to keep his mind in the current game, including what the hell Barrett was about to get herself into.

Because she’d sounded weird on the phone when he’d asked her what her plans were and he knew Barrett well enough to know what that meant.

She was planning something dangerous.

So what was he going to do about it?

After he settled in, Nick compared the images he’d snapped to hundreds more he’d downloaded from drone archives, taken with cameras that could focus on a milk carton from sixty thousand feet. The drone photos were backdated for months, enabling him to compare large vehicles parked in and around Club Red and other newly developed sites.

A semi was the most likely bet to conceal and transport a cell the size of Jane’s. And there had been several pulled up to the club that sometimes didn’t move for days. As far as human activity around the big trucks, there was very little. If trafficked girls were being moved in, the process wasn’t visible from the air.

Following procedure, he requested information from a classified database with automated entry—for those who had the right code, and Nick did—on one semi in particular. Unmarked from what he could tell, it showed up several times in the more recent images, parked away from the club’s front entrance. It was big. More than one transport cell—he’d made an informed guess as to its dimensions after studying the screen grab—could fit inside.