Brain Storm (A Taylor Morrison Novel Book 1) (28 page)

“Candice, Della. Come on in.” I swept my arm back, waving them inside. I picked up the morning paper the hotel staff had left and softly closed the door. “What brings you out so early this morning?”
 

I already knew. You had to be brain dead not to. I looked over at them standing there, bright eyed and bushy tailed and ready to talk, and tried to shake off remnants of sleep that clung to me. Needing to be awake and alert, I stumbled over to the coffee maker and started rummaging around for the makings. I didn’t get very far before Mama D came over and grabbed the pot from my hand, sweeping into the bathroom. I caught Candice’s smile as Mama D filled the pot with water. Within minutes, she was back and the smell of coffee began to filter through the room.

“We’ve been talking and we’ve got some questions,” Candice started in right away, Mama D at her elbow, presenting a united front.
 

“Okay. Shoot,” I said, eyeing the dripping coffee, wishing I’d been able to brace with some caffeine before facing this.

“Say we come along with you,” she asked, “what do you see us doing? What’s our part in this whole thing?”

Ah. I stared at the pot willing the coffee to brew faster. I was on thin ice here and without the benefit of a fully functioning brain. I rubbed the sleep from my eyes stalling for time for the coffee to finish. Suddenly, the stream of coffee slowed to a drip and I snatched the pot out and quickly poured a cup. I took the time to add some sweetener and cream, before I went over to sit on the bed facing them.
 

“First off, you don’t just come along,” I started, pausing to take a long sip of coffee, letting the smooth taste slide down my throat. “You’ll be part of a team. Our team.”
 

I was a little confused about the question here. We had talked about this last night before the meeting. Candice was the one who’d said she wanted to stay, that we were a better team together. In fact, she’d yelled it at me, if I recalled correctly.

I stood up, taking another drink, my brain finally starting to click. Trinity wanted to stay, but she didn’t want to just come along for the ride. I’d been worried about Jonas having a role, feeling needed. Candice and Mama D both needed the same thing. To know their place. To be needed.

“We all have different abilities and experience that we’ll bring to the table. You aren’t going to be out there fighting gun battles, creeping around spying,” I assured her. “We need your brains. You know the law and we’re gonna be walking a fine line there. Probably stepping over it more often than not. We’re going to need information that you’ll know how to find, if you don’t know it already. We’re breaking new ground here, going where no man has gone before. There’s going to be legal ramifications and we’re going to need you to fight those battles.”

She nodded agreement, relief evident in her face. I felt bad. I should have foreseen this and told her last night.
 

“Mama D, you are every bit as important to the team. You have a wisdom and a peace that we need, but even more importantly you represent something that we desperately need and that’s a sense of
home
. Don’t think that we haven’t noticed that you’re making sure we’re fed and taken care of. You’re both important and of value to the team. That’s why I gave you the option of coming.” I wanted them to realize they were wanted and needed, but I also needed them to understand the risk involved.

“Look, I have no intention of involving you in a gun battle or putting you in dangerous positions, but you have to understand, I can’t guarantee anything. They’ve already come after you in surprise attacks and they probably will again. I can’t make any promises.”

Candice looked at me and I could see the doubt and indecision written on her face. Mama D saw it too and took the choice away from her.

“Trinity, I’m going with her. I’ve lost everything and all I have left is you and Taylor. Samantha, I mean.” Mama D looked over at me with an apologetic look that nearly broke my heart. “Candice, I may not be able to fight them, but like Sam said, there’s other things I can do that will help.” She reached over and took Candice’s hand in hers. “Baby, they’ll find us whether we’re with her or not. You can’t protect me forever. I say let’s stick together and fight them.”

Candice wrapped her arms around Mama D and looked over at me, tears running down her face. “Okay. We’re in,” she announced, with a laugh. “What do we do now?”

“Now,” I said, not exactly dry-eyed myself, “We turn me into Samantha White.” I grabbed up the bag of stuff I had gotten at Wal-Mart the previous night and headed into the bathroom with a grin. They were right on my heels.

TWENTY-SIX

BY 7:40 THE transformation was complete. One of the few advantages of being poor was learning how to do things for yourself that people with money pay to have done. As a result, Mama D was a whiz with a pair of scissors. I had a short, breezy new cut and had gone from my medium brown hair to a dark rich brunette with red tipped spikes on the crown. I’d plucked my eyebrows into a thin high arch, added a few rings to my fingers and pair of racy dark shades to finish off the new look and the results had been dramatic.
 

“Well, Samantha. Um Sam,” Candice corrected as I gave her a look over the top of my lowered sunglasses, “I hate to say it, but your new look suits you.”

“I should have taken shears to you ages ago,” Mama D agreed, going through my clothes.

Mama D and Candice were having a ball trashing my old look. The clothes Mac had for me at cabin had been along the lines of what I normally wore. Clothes that were meant to blend in. Bright, bold colors didn’t mesh with the low profile I needed to keep and I avoided them like the plague. With my red tipped hair, I needed some color in my clothes to balance it out. People would see my hair and my clothes. Not me. Which was exactly what I wanted.

“You have some good basics here, but you need a few things to snazz it up a bit, otherwise that cool new hair is just a waste,” Candice said as she pawed through my luggage. “We ought to stop at the Dillards Clearance Center and pick up a few things before we leave Dallas.”
 

My eyes glazed over at the thought of shopping, but before I could say anything, we were interrupted by a knock on the door. I opened it to find Mac standing there, Bryan right behind him.

“Wow!” Mac exclaimed. “ You look fab. Absolutely fab!” He rushed into the room, grabbing my hands and swinging them back and forth.

“I gonna be sick,” Bryan informed us, as he strode into the room, slamming the door behind him. I cringed, hoping the neighbors were already up and about.
 

“Everyone else on this floor is gone,” Mac said, reading my mind. “We have it all to ourselves.”

“Which begs the question, why are you still prancing around like that?” Bryan flopped down on the sofa, in disgust.

I looked over at Mac. I wasn’t the only one who had transformed this morning. Mac had obviously brought along some of his other disguises and was now wearing an ensemble I definitely remembered seeing before.

“Julian?” I ventured.

“Troy, actually,” he corrected. “Bryan is having a little trouble getting used to it, but I think it works. Especially now that I’ve seen your new look.”

“You looked in the bag last night didn’t you, nosy?” I asked him. accusingly.

“Yup, I did. I confess, you caught me! I thought since you were changing your look, I’d do the same and fem up a bit.” At Bryan’s mocking laugh, he conceded maybe he’d fem’ed up more than a bit. “Laugh all you want Bryan, but it gives us an out for staying in different rooms and explains why I let her boss me around. Plus, and this is a big PLUS,” he added dramatically, making Bryan roll his eyes, “It’s a persona that no one in the agency has seen. It’s a good cover.”

“Oh, I’ll give you that,” Bryan said, shaking his head in amazement. “I got worried when Candice wasn’t in her room and went to find Mac. When he opened the door, I was sure I had the wrong room. I’m a cop and I had to do a double take. We figured you were here with Sam since you weren’t downstairs in the dining room.”

At his words, Candice stopped packing the clothes back up. “Why were you looking for me?”

“I wanted to see if you’d decided on what you were doing before we were all back together,” he said, casting a withering look at Troy, who had gone to sort through the clothes with Mama D. “But apparently I arrived a little late for that.”

“Mama D and I came over early this morning,” Candice explained to him, which for me was as hard to believe as Mac’s transformation into Troy. Trinity didn’t explain her business to anyone, most especially to a man, but maybe Candice did. “We had some questions for Sam I needed answered before making any decision.”

“I take it you decided to throw caution to the wind and throw in with her.”
 

At his words, Mac’s hands froze and the room stilled, waiting for the shoe to drop. Of everyone in the room, Bryan had the least connection to the group. The least reason to risk his life.

“Yes, that’s right.” Candice’s voice dripped ice. “We’re throwing in with her, as you put it, but we’re not throwing caution to the wind. I happen to think our odds of coming out of this alive are substantially higher working with Samantha, than running off to hide somewhere, waiting for them to find us.”
 

Ohhh. I could be wrong, but I was pretty sure she just insulted him by insinuating he was going to run. I waited to see if Bryan would rise to the bait. It was a small room for the five of us and when he stood up, his 6’5 inch frame made it small substantially smaller.

“You’re sure?” Bryan snapped at her. “You’re sure this is what you want to do?”

“Yes. I’m sure,” She snapped it right back at him.

“Okay.” Bryan put up his hands in surrender. “ I just needed to know what you had decided to do.” He turned to me, a grin slowly spreading across his face. “I’m in, if the offer’s still open.”

I didn’t even time to nod before Candice was on him. “Wait a minute! You’re happy about this! You wanted to go after them all along. Why didn’t you just tell her that last night instead of dragging this out?”
 

“Because I wasn’t going to let you and Mama D go off by yourselves and wait for those guys to find you. If you decided to leave, I was going with you. There was no way I was going to leave you alone to fend for yourselves.”

Candice stared at him for an instant and then turned and walked out of the room, slamming the door closed behind her. All eyes turned to Bryan, who hadn’t moved an inch.

“Well?” demanded Mama D, snapping him out of it. Within seconds, he was out the door after her.
 

“This could complicate things,” Mac said, turning his attention back to the clothes as Mama D stood there chuckling to herself.
 

Personally I didn’t see how things could get anymore complicated than they already were.

TWO DAYS LATER, I was ready to concede how wrong I’d been. We’d gotten through the banking in Dallas without incident and even made a stop at the Dillards outlet, where we all managed to fill out our wardrobes with surprisingly little damage to our wallets.
 

Bryan and Candice had managed to carve out an uneasy truce and Mama D was having the time of her life between watching the two of them trying to avoid each other and discovering the joys of being on the road.

Things were going smoother than anyone had a right to expect with one big exception. After spending the past 24 hours looking for Mac’s contact at the Agency, we’d come up empty handed. Not only could we not find him. It was like he’d never even existed.
 

We’d pulled up in Wichita Falls, a town about two hours northwest of Dallas. Off the beaten track, but close enough to the major highways to get on the way quickly once we knew where to go. It wasn’t bad as towns go, but after being there for two days straight, I was getting antsy to get on the road.
 

“We’ve got to be missing something here.” Bryan threw the pen he’d been using to jot down notes with onto the desk in disgust. “You sure you’re not forgetting something?”

It had to be the sixth time he had asked Mac the same question and I was somewhat surprised that Mac hadn’t hit him by now. I know I was ready to.

I watched as the pen rolled off the desk and went back to reading the Dallas newspaper that I had picked up in the hotel lobby earlier, ignoring them both. I had bought a notebook computer in Dallas before we left town so I could research in private. I hadn’t realized at the time that my room would become our home base of operations. When Bryan and Mac arrived at 9:00 a.m. bearing breakfast and coffee, I’d already been on line for most of the night with absolutely no reward for my scratchy, blood shot eyes. Candice had popped in around 10:00 leaving Mama D watching Price is Right in their room. She had stretched out on the bed, and proceeded to stare at the ceiling. I didn’t blame her a bit.

I listened now with half an ear as Mac went over it again. We were looking for Caleb Brown PhD, a white caucasian male, age somewhere between 40 and 50, with black hair and gray eyes. At 6 ft. 2 and weighing in at about 180 pounds, he wouldn’t be that hard to find in a crowd, but he was definitely proving to be something of an enigma on the computer.

Apart from knowing that Brown was a Handler that had recently retired, he hadn’t been able to supply any additional information other than that Brown had been recruited into the Agency because he was so highly respected in his field. His research into Parapsychology was cutting edge. Papers had been published, awards had been won and there wasn’t a scrap of evidence that I could find to prove it. I hadn’t logged into my usual search programs, in case they were being monitored, but even so, if he was half the brain that Mac was claiming, I should have gotten some hits on him.