Brain Storm (A Taylor Morrison Novel Book 1) (29 page)

I had a bad feeling that it didn’t matter how many times Bryan asked him to go over it, it wasn’t going to help. If Mac hadn’t remembered something by now, he wasn’t going to and it probably wouldn’t matter even if he did. We were beating a dead horse. I needed to face the fact that Caleb Brown had disappeared just as thoroughly as Denzel.

As soon as his name popped into my brain, my pulse quickened and the exhaustion that had clouded my thinking was gone in an instant. Bryan had said that Denzel’s name was Marcus. Marcus Adams from Omaha and that’s all they had been able to find out. A name and a place. Everything else had been wiped or didn’t exist. Perhaps they’d done the same thing with Brown and that’s why we couldn’t find him.

As the pieces began to come together in my head, I didn’t know whether to be happy about it or frustrated that it had taken so long for me to figure it out. Relief poured through me at the knowledge that we were finally making some progress. I still didn’t know where Caleb Brown was, but I was 99% sure I could guarantee where he wasn’t.

I turned to get Mac’s attention only to find I already had it. At some point they had stopped talking and were now sitting quietly, watching me.
 

“What is it? What did you think of?” Mac asked, apparently sensing my excitement.

“We’re not going to find him this way. It’s a dead end.” I dropped the paper and stood up, crossing the room to the computer desk. “Tell me about the Agency. Who did Brown report to? Who else works there? I need some names here.”

He thought for a minute and began jotting names on the note pad. “I don’t know many. There’s only a few people I know of besides Brown and that’s only because I meet them when they recruited me or I reported to them at some time. Everything’s very hush-hush. They operate on a strictly need to know basis, to protect the Clients. I have a feeling about this one here,” Mac underlined one of the names he had just written down for me, “and no, I’m not going to tell you why until you do your thing. Then we’ll compare.”

I shooed Bryan out of the way and slipped into the vacated chair. My mind was spinning as I pulled up a search engine and typed in the first name on the list.
 

“How do you know Brown? Why’d you choose him?” I asked Mac, as I waited for information to start popping up on the screen. “What made you think you could trust him?”

“He’s the string I pulled to get assigned to you.” He sat down on the bed behind me and continued to explain at Bryan’s bewildered look. “There are Handlers in the agency and Watchers. Guys like me. The Watchers, do exactly that. We watch and we send in reports. The Handlers evaluate the reports and give advice or whatever. Clients are assigned to Handlers according to their abilities. Brown was your Handler, Sam. He’s the one who sent me to check on you in the first place.”

“What do you mean he’s the string you pulled?” Bryan’s question had me sending Mac a warning look over my shoulder. I didn’t like keeping secrets from the others, but the Empath connection between us was something I wanted to keep quiet a while longer.
 

“Normally Watchers are randomly assigned to Clients. Some Clients progress into their abilities and others never do. From what I saw, Sam here, was going to be one of the former and I figured as long as I was looking at long a term assignment, it might as well be one with some potential. I convinced Brown that I was the right man for the job and viola. Here I am.”

“Yeah, here you are,” Bryan snorted in amusement. “Bet you never figured on this.”

“No, can’t say that I did, but you have to admit, it’s certainly not boring.” He turned his attention back to me. “To answer your question, Sam, I don’t know that we can trust him. He’s what you said you wanted. He’s someone who can train you and there’s the added bonus that he’s familiar with you. He’s the one I sent my reports to, or at least that’s who I used to send them to. When I was called back to the Agency, he was gone. I was told he’d retired but no one ever contacted me with new instructions or a new Handler for you.”

“You mean when you were
unexpectedly
called back just before Marcus showed up. When did you send in your last report?” I asked. “Did you say anything that would alert them?

“It was just before I got called back and yes, my report would have alerted them of a change in the situation.”

I was most of the way through his list already, crossing off names as I went. Knowing what I was looking for made it easy. I had saved the name Mac had underlined for the last, my gut telling me that he was right and this was the guy I was looking for. Finally I typed it in, hit the enter key and waited for the results to come in.
 

“Why didn’t they kill him?” The voice came from across the room and I looked behind me to see Candice rise up on one elbow on the bed. “Why didn’t they just kill Mac when they had the chance? He’s been nothing but trouble for them since this whole thing started.”

Excellent question, I thought as I turned back to the screen. If we’d thought to ask that 24 hours ago, I could have gotten some sleep. Then again, maybe I’d needed the time to figure it out. If necessity was the mother of invention, maybe exhaustion was the mother of thinking outside the box.
 

“They didn’t kill him,” I said over my shoulder as I scanned through the results. and smiled in satisfaction as the last piece of the puzzle fell into place. “for the same reason they didn’t kill our missing Dr. Brown.”

“They didn’t kill Brown because they didn’t need to. He’s out of their way,” Bryan interrupted. “Brown retired, remember?”
 

“How do we know that?” Candice asked, swinging her legs off the bed. “If I was an award winning, highly respected expert in my field, with years ahead of me for research, and the project I’d been working on for years just started showing signs of promise, the last thing I’d do is walk away.”

“I agree, but if that’s the case, then he’s either involved in this, they took him, or he’s dead,” Bryan concluded, counting off the possibilities on his fingers. “Sam here, seems pretty certain he isn’t dead.”

“So what? You think Brown is working for them?” Candice asked me.

“I think if he were behind this or involved in it, he would have stayed put.” I finished going through the search results as I answered her question. “It would be the easiest way to keep tabs on what’s happening and raise the least amount of suspicion, unless of course, something unexpected happened and they moved him.”

“Something like Marcus disappearing?”
 

“Good a guess as any. That certainly would have sent up a red flag for me. The only thing we know for sure, is he’s missing and we can’t find him.”

“And why is that?” Bryan threw up his hands in surrender. “This guy has completely dropped off the radar. Not only is he no longer with the agency, but it’s almost like he never existed. According to Mac, he’s supposed to have won all these awards and be this big wig, but there’s nothing to support it. Where’s the paper trail? “ He stopped short, his eyes looking into the distance instead of focusing on me. I could practically see the wheels turning in his brain as he put it together.

“Marcus,” he whispered so softly I could barely make it out what he said and I was expecting it. “They erased him. Just like Marcus. What makes you think they didn’t kill him?”

“Because
they
didn’t kill Marcus and more importantly, they didn’t kill Mac, even though it was the logical thing to do.” I got up, stretching my legs and giving my eyes a rest from the glare of the computer screen. “The question we need to ask ourselves, isn’t why didn’t they kill him. It’s what was so important, that they needed to keep him alive?”

“Isn’t that the same thing?” Bryan asked.
 

“No,” Candice answered for me. “It’s not. Well, it is, but it’s not. It’s all in how you look at it. You can ask the same question over and over and you’ll always get the same answer. Asked a different way, the brain responds to the new question and you’ll trigger a different response. We use it all the time during trials and depositions. You use it too, Bryan. It’s called interrogation. You just don’t recognize it without a bright light shining in your face.”

I was impressed in spite of myself. She’d calmly explained and still managed to throw a jab in there at Bryan. I looked over at Mac who’d been exceptionally quiet during the past few minutes. Where Bryan and Candice needed to talk things through a logical progression, Mac was more intuitive, relying primarily on his senses to find his way through a problem. Probably because he knew logic, as we knew it, had little do with it anymore. We’d entered a world where the impossible was now possible and the illogical made sense. The ramifications of what I alone could do was overwhelming. What if there were
 
dozens like me? What if there were hundreds? How do you fight a war where there are no rules and no limits, except for those you set for yourself? I had a horrible feeling I was going to find out and it gave me the shivers.

“It’s you,” Mac said quietly, breaking into my thoughts. “You’re the reason we’re alive. They’re after you, but you’re useless to them if you can’t control your power. They need Brown to train you and they kept me around in case things didn’t work out and they needed me back in place.”

“So, we have to assume they have him.” Bryan rubbed his face with his hands, despair evident in his voice as realization sank in. “Question is whether he’s a willing participant or not. Either way, we’ll never find him. I hope you have a plan B,
Samantha
, or we’re in big trouble.”

“We don’t need a plan B,” I said. “Our objective is still the same. I need to learn to control this and we need some answers. We have to find Caleb Brown.”

“Just how do you propose we do that?” Candice asked. “They have him and we have no idea where he is.”

“You’re right. We don’t know where he is, but someone at the Agency does. It’s too good a source of information for them to abandon it. There’s someone there. We find him, we find Brown.” I reached over and pulled Mac’s list of names over to the edge of desk.

“I did searches on the names Mac gave me. They all came back with associated sites on recent and past activity with the exception of one.” I pointed to the name that Mac had underlined on the sheet of paper. “Matthew Hughes. He exists, but barely, and nothing in recent history. Just like Marcus Adams and Caleb Brown. I”m willing to bet he’s there at the Agency, keeping an eye on things. Who is this guy?” I looked over at Mac, waiting. This was the guy he’d picked out too. Now I wanted to know why.
 

“Matthew Hughes is the Head of Security. Doesn’t get much better for them, or much worse for us.”

No kidding. That was about the last thing I wanted to hear. If the Head of Security for the Agency was part of the problem, we couldn’t just walk in the front door looking for answers. His position gave him way too much power and too much freedom to use it however he wanted. It didn’t change our objective. Just made it way more complicated.

“We need to check him out. Find out what he knows and if he’s involved.”

“Well,” said Mac, dusting off his jeans as he rose, “there’s only way to do that. When do you want to leave?“

“Leave? Wait a minute. We’re going to the Agency?” Candice asked. “Is that safe?”

“No, it’s not,” Bryan answered, keeping his focus on me. “In fact, it puts everyone here in a great deal of of danger.”

He was right. It would. This was what they signed up for, but now the rubber was meeting the road for the first time. Mac and I were committed, but it wasn’t too late for them to duck and run. I waited, not saying anything to break the silence. It was their move and I wasn’t going to try to convince them either way.
 

“Okay.” Candice popped up off the bed with a determined look on her face, making the decision for them. “Then I want a gun.”

MAC AND BRYAN went through their little arsenal and finally agreed on a semi-automatic for Candice to go along with the taser she had already appropriated. We spent the afternoon at the shooting range and after a couple hours of practice, Candice could definitely be labeled armed and dangerous.
 

‘Candice’ apparently was into shopping as much as Trinity was. The shooting range was under the gun store, store being the operative word. Before we could make our way through the aisles and out to the car, she had managed to locate a leather shoulder bag with a special concealed compartment for the gun. Once she realized she could carry her wallet, makeup and gun, all in one handy dandy stylish purse, it was a done deal. When she bought two of them, exactly the same, just in different colors, I thought Bryan’s eyes would pop out of his head, but he held his tongue and ushered her out the door into the car like the wise man he was.
 

We stopped by the store to lay in supplies for the trip, ate dinner and went our separate ways. It was the first down time I’d had in a while. We had a destination and a plan. We were together. For the time being, we were safe, and I fully planned to relax and enjoy it, not knowing when it might happen again. Resisting the siren call of the computer, I crawled into bed, still slightly damp, but toasty warm from what had to be the longest shower in history and fell asleep almost as soon as my head hit the pillow.

TWENTY-SEVEN

WE WERE HEADING to Colorado, which had completely taken me by surprise. For whatever reason, I had thought the Agency, being part of the government would be in D.C. We were looking at over 12 hours on the road, hugging I-35 north into Kansas and then cutting onto I-70 to head west into Denver, and that wasn’t counting stops for food, gas and leg stretching. Mac and I might have been able to switch off and make it in a long day, but Bryan was the only driver right now for the RV and he just couldn’t do 817 miles in a day. As anxious as I was to get to the Agency, I preferred we arrive there in once piece, so we stopped for the night in Salina, Kansas.