Exo: A Novel (Jumper) (55 page)

I tried to jump and it was like being grabbed by vice grips at my wrists, ankles, elbows, and neck.

“Ah—she’s awake.”

I was in a steel chair in the middle of a concrete room. There were steel cuffs over my wrists and forearms, anchored to the chair arms. A steel band around my neck was anchored to something behind me. Something equally firm held my ankles back against the chair legs.

I jerked once, to see if the chair itself would move, but it felt like it was fastened down.

No, actually it felt like it was set into the floor.

The floor, the walls, and a ceiling about twelve feet above me were smooth, cast concrete. Not bricks, not precast panels. It looked like it was all one piece relieved only by a large drain grate in the floor, a steel-framed, mirrored window in front of me, and a door that looked like it belonged on a submarine off to my right.

Oh—and the lights. Bright lights above the mirror pointed into my face. Less-bright lights mounted high on the walls and shining up to the ceiling for indirect lighting reminded me weirdly of the northern hemisphere of Kristen Station.

I tried to voice my earlier thought but it came out as a series of croaks.

Hyacinth Pope shook her head. “Didn’t get that, sorry.” She didn’t look a bit sorry. There was something creepy about the way she leaned toward me, an almost hungry posture.

I swallowed and moistened my lips, then tried again. “Aren’t you supposed to be in prison?”

“Ah!
Someone
is. The system thinks it’s me and is satisfied. I certainly find it satisfactory.”

The voice I’d heard earlier spoke. “I’m glad to see you survived your little shock.” It came from the direction of the window and I finally located the speakers. They were close to the high-intensity spots above the mirror and had been hidden in the glare.

“I don’t feel like I survived it. I feel like I was put in a sack and beaten with sticks, then died.”

Hyacinth laughed.

The voice on the speakers said, “They did have to restart your heart. But it just took a little bit of epinephrine.”

Now
that
was an unsettling thought.

“And of course you were also sedated until we had you … secure.”

I looked around again. “What is this place
for
? It looks like something out of a Bond film.”

The voice said, “It was made
for
your parents. That was before you entered the picture. Oh, by the way, in case you’re thinking of trying your father’s trick, the one with the water, it won’t do any good. Simons’s security detail told us all about that.”

I blinked. It wasn’t hard to look confused, I
was
confused. Maybe they were telling the truth about my heart stopping or maybe their sedative was still in my system. “If that’s the case, why is Hyacinth in here with me?”

Ms. Pope looked slightly unsettled at that response.

“Hyacinth volunteered. She has an
unhealthy
fascination with your family. You’ve all had such a profound effect on the course of her life,” the voice said. “But we shouldn’t tempt you. Bring in
the boy
.”

It felt like my heart
did
stop.

Joe’s hands were cuffed behind him and he had a bruise on his right cheekbone and a split lip. The two guards holding him had hard faces and were wearing black, unmarked fatigues with sidearms in holsters.

Joe saw me, and threw himself sideways at one of his guards, but the guard just sidestepped and tripped him. Without his hands to check his fall, Joe went down
hard
.

I felt that pain again at the neck and wrists. Apparently I’d just tried to jump again and hadn’t even been aware of the intention.

“Mr. Trujeque will be your guarantor.”

One of the guards knelt by the large drain I’d noted and worked some sort of latch, then lifted the grating on unseen hinges. Hyacinth held it open while they wrestled Joe over to it and pushed his head and shoulders down through it, then held his legs and lowered him down in.

I pictured a huge fall, and Joe landing on his head, but when they let go, Joe’s feet were still visible. They pushed the shoes down through the opening and shut the grate. One of them stood on it, while the other operated the latch. When the grate was secure, they parked themselves in the rear corners of the room, just enough on the edge of my vision that I could tell they were there when I turned my head.

“It’s not a
large
oubliette,” the voice said. “Only four feet deep and four feet across, but I assure you that your boyfriend cannot possibly reach the latch from inside and, should you decide to flood this chamber, even to the tippy-tippy-top, it will be Mr. Trujeque who drowns first.

“Even should you decide that that is
worth
it to get at Ms. Pope and the guards, it will not touch
me
at all. The chamber was built to contain a phenomenal amount of pressure. More pressure inside just makes it stronger, forces the door and windows more firmly onto their gaskets.”

He paused. “Frankly, I’m dying to test it, but that would be hard on the staff. And, in the long run, I think we’ll get more cooperation from you if we leave Mr. Trujeque alive.
Mostly
, alive.”

“Cent! Don’t do anything for them!” Joe’s voice echoed weirdly, seeming to come from above me as it bounced off the ceiling.

“Are you all right?”

“Fine. But even if I weren’t, don’t cooperate with them!”

This was where Dad was supposed to show up, or, if I really wanted carnage, Mom. I wondered if there were clues for them to follow, for them to find us. “Joe, where did they get you?”

Hyacinth looked at the window to see if she should stop my questions.

“Coming out of my dorm room this morning, heading for the library.”

The speakers remained silent, so Hyacinth settled back.

“Witnesses?” I asked.

Hyacinth looked amused. “
I
work clean. The boy came out at the crack of dawn. His roommate was appalled, but apparently little Joe here has been neglecting his schoolwork for
your
project and has some catching up to do. I assure you no one saw or heard us bag him.”

“You bugged his room.” I was outraged, which was pretty hypocritical considering I’d almost done it myself.

Hyacinth yawned.

“Is that right, Joe? No witnesses?”

“Well, it
was
pretty early.”

There were certainly no witnesses at Tri-State Medical Oxygen. “What did you do with the people at Tri-State?”

“Their owner was ‘induced’ to send everyone home for the day. We were so pleased how well this worked that we’ve reset the trap. Do you think your parents will come looking for you?”

FORTY

Davy: Trap

They were on the roof of a specialty-welding shop across the street and two businesses down from Tri-City Medical Oxygen.

“Trap?” said Millie.

“Trap. What kind, though?” Davy was terrified he’d find his daughter in there, dead. “
You
stay clear, right?”

Millie said, “You’re not the only one who’s terrified. Don’t be a jerk.”

“I’m
thinking
about your Mom.”

He saw that that got a reaction.

If all three of them were captured or killed, Sam (and currently Jeline and Cory) would be stuck out there beyond the reach of anything short of an emergency Falcon Heavy launch.

“Okay. Understood.” She held up her radio. “I’ll wait here, then.”

Davy looked at her steadily and saw that she meant it. “Right. Give me ten minutes then call the police and say you heard gunshots at this address.”

Millie shuddered. “At least they’ll send an ambulance with the response. Huh. Maybe
that
one.”

Davy turned his head to see what she was pointing at. It was an ambulance, parked between a self-storage business, and a floor-tile wholesaler. “I remember another ambulance, once. Do you?”

“One with an angel on the doors?”

Davy nodded. Back when he’d been captured, before Cent was even born, they’d drugged him and carried him off in an ambulance.

She lifted the binoculars. “It’s pretty generic for an ambulance. All the universal symbols but nothing about an affiliation. Not seeing a town or a city or a county on it.”

“Right.”

He jumped, appearing behind it, and peered in through the smoked glass of the rear doors. Nothing. He jumped inside, looked around, and returned to Millie.

“No driver, no paramedic. The gurney isn’t in there, either.”

“Trap,” she said. “But they wouldn’t have the ambulance unless they wanted to carry away a
living
person.”

Davy took a deep breath and blinked hard.

“Trap. Let’s trip it.”

He entered the building through the office. It was the only room that had a window, giving him a sight inside. The only noise he could detect was running water and once he left the office, it was everywhere, giving credence to the note left in the window.

He walked to the cryo fill tanks, gliding his feet along, not splashing, not lifting his feet and dripping. The rack with
APEX ORB SVS
on it was set back slightly. He noted the blocks of wood lifting it from the water and stopped, looking around for any sign of
them
.

He took out his cell phone and used the light. The cable running up to the rack was nearly invisible, but once he spotted it, he saw where the copper conductor was grounded to the frame with a screw and a freshly drilled hole.

Suddenly he was less sure that his daughter was all right, and absolutely furious. Were they watching? Or did they have something rigged to the current, so they could detect when the trap was sprung that way?

He went back to the office and grabbed a blue-plastic recycling bin that looked sturdy enough. He quietly emptied it onto the floor and, as he returned to the trap, he grabbed one of the dozens of chains used to secure bottles together so they wouldn’t topple.

Back by the rack, he inverted the recycling bin in the water and climbed up onto it, then tossed the chain over the rack, letting the other end drop into the water.

The spark was big enough to make him want to jump away.
They did this next to full oxygen bottles
? But then he heard a beeping noise from the back and the lights went out.

There were just two of them, dressed for the ambulance. One of them had an orange EMT trauma bag and the other one had a bright flashlight.

Screw it
, he thought.
The old ways are best.

He took the one with the flashlight first, and was back for the second one so fast that the first one hadn’t hit the water yet when his partner also appeared fifty feet above the water of the pit.

Back at Tri-City, he ripped the cable off the rack and followed it back to where it was hooked to some kind of power supply plugged into the wall. On a piece of masking tape, someone had written
5,000 volts pulsed ECD
.

He returned to the rooftop across the way. “All clear,” he told Millie.

They found the ambulance gurney in the employee break room. Right behind it, the owner was tied up in the closet.

“They came in before any of my employees. One of them stood beside me, smiling, as I sent them all home. None of them realized he had a gun in my kidney.” The man was shaken. “He took great pains to tell me I’d die slowly. ‘I’m a trained paramedic,’ he said. ‘You’ll bleed out before they can save you. It will really hurt.’”

“Have you seen Space Girl today?” Millie said.

“I’ve been tied up in that closet for five hours. I haven’t seen
anybody
. Bathroom,” he said. “NOW.”

Davy got out of his way.

FORTY-ONE

Cent: Nothing

Partway through the “interview” I decided I really owed Connie del Olmo an apology. Compared to the “interviewer” on the other side of the mirror, Connie was an angel from heaven.

Don’t think I wasn’t scared.

I was.

I was terrified they’d pull Joe back out of the oubliette and start cutting pieces off of him. This wasn’t fanciful imagination on my part. The possibility had already been discussed by the voice. Hyacinth had pulled out a knife clearly sharp enough to do the job and pointed her thumb toward the guards. “I have
all
the help I need.”

I looked past Hyacinth to the mirror. “What do you want, Mr. Gilead?”

I saw the Hyacinth’s eyes widen ever so slightly and knew I’d hit it on the nose.

“Who?” said the voice. He did it well, really, but I didn’t buy it. I just looked in the direction of the mirror and raised my eyebrows.

There was a sound like something brushing the mic, and muffled speech, then the mic was uncovered and a different voice came on, deeper, older, not frail exactly, but definitely not young. “So my name is not unknown to you.”

“Yes.”

“That explains a few things. What are your father’s intentions? Toward me and my organization, that is.”

“Two years ago? He was just following the strings. More recently it’s been getting a little bit more personal. And really, Mr. Gilead, if you’d just ignored us, you could’ve gone on pulling your strings and running things from behind the curtains. But you couldn’t leave well enough alone, could you?” I hadn’t realized how much anger I’d been holding. “All in all, it would’ve been better if you’d just sent an e-mail.”

“I doubt your father would have answered. I have quite a few more questions. For instance, where are your other bases? Who has your father been working with at the CIA? And is it really true that you could destroy any satellite currently in Earth orbit?”

I would’ve pinched the bridge of my nose if I could reach it. My face must’ve shown something of this.

Gilead said, “What would you call that expression, Ms. Pope? Disdain? Disbelief?”

I said, “Disbelief is pretty close. Do you really think you have any chance of getting my cooperation?”

Hyacinth said, “Disbelief and a little bit of contempt, apparently.”