He knocked twice, paused, and then three times more. The door opened immediately and he went inside. The room was in darkness until the chain was applied to the door. A small light on the dresser came on.
‘Peter.’
‘Valerie.’
He looked at the middle-aged woman. This time she was dressed as a soccer mom, in matching blue sweatshirt and pants. Her dark brown hair was pulled back in a ponytail and she wore no makeup.
‘Did they win?’ he asked.
She ignored that and sat down on one of the beds. ‘I’ve heard something that disturbs me.’
Sebastian kept a smile on his lips, hoping that the somersault his stomach had just taken wasn’t obvious. If Valerie Hinton had found out about the stunt he was pulling with Matt Wells, he’d be in deep shit.
He stayed on his feet. ‘What’s that?’
‘Sit down,’ she said, refusing to allow him a dominant position and locking eyes with his. ‘You’ve been playing hardball with Sir Andrew Frogget.’
‘So?’
‘So stop. Right now. That’s an order.’
Sebastian looked down, aware that by breaking eye contact he had handed the field to her. He needed to find out how much she knew. ‘His company worked for Heinz Rothmann-who, I would remind you, tried to take out the President and most of the cabinet.’
‘Routh Limited is off-limits, Peter. I’m serious.’
‘What’s the CIA’s interest?’
Valerie Hinton gave him a brief smile. ‘That’s way above your pay grade, Peter. Just do what I say. I’ll leave first.’
He watched her go. During the fifteen minutes that the established protocol required him to wait before leaving, he thought about the order. The CIA had been interested in Rothmann from the beginning. He had been told to pass all his case notes to the agency as soon as the Nazi’s involvement in the attack on the President was confirmed. Thankfully they hadn’t used the information in a way that would implicate him-at least, not yet.
Sebastian had been working as a CIA informant for years, ever since he was caught screwing a woman with links to a drug gang in Puerto Rico. He’d have been shit-canned by the Bureau if the CIA hadn’t buried his involvement, but he’d been blackmailed into keeping them advised of all his activities. So why were they so interested in Rothmann? Did they want to use his conditioning process? The Agency had a history of mind control experiments. Then again, did they imagine they could they get away with using a method developed by the children of a Nazi doctor who had worked with Mengele at Auschwitz, and had nearly assassinated the President?
The answer to that was obvious.
The real question was, could anyone stop them?
Twenty-Five
‘No, Matt.’ The female voice was tender, but authoritative. ‘No.’
Suddenly I was reunited with my body. I stopped in midthrust, the knifepoint a few inches from Quincy’s throat. I let the weapon drop to the floor.
‘Karen?’ I said, a wave of joy breaking over me as I turned to find her. The realization that I had remembered her name, that she was no longer one of the nameless, came at the same time as I saw Rothmann advancing toward me. He struck me several times on the face before I raised my arm to protect myself.
Karen. She wasn’t here, but she had spoken to me.
‘Schalk!’ Rothmann screamed, tearing off the hyena mask. ‘Kill the negro now!’
Bolts of electricity galvanized nerves all over my body, but my consciousness didn’t rise up like it had before. The conditioning wasn’t working anymore.
‘Screw you,’ I said, lowering my head and charging him. There was a satisfying impact and I heard the breath shoot out of his lungs. I landed on top of him, sat up and punched him on each side of his face. That didn’t go down too well with his congregation. I looked up as they started to yell, and then move toward the platform with the inverted crosses. Guards in blue denim were heading my way as well, their weapons raised. I only had one option.
‘Stop!’ I yelled, my hands tightening on Rothmann’s throat. ‘Stay where you are! I can crush his windpipe in a split second.’
That arrested their progress. There were guns trained on me, but even the highly conditioned guards were hesitant. I pressed my thumbs down harder and locked eyes with Rothmann. I wanted to kill him, I wanted to join Karen wherever she was-the sound of her voice had made me even more desperate to see her again. The bastard beneath me squirmed and bucked like a dying fish, his eyes bulging. He knew exactly how serious I was.
A loud report took everyone by surprise. The guard nearest to me sprawled forward, his head an eruption of atomized bone and brain matter. More shots felled the young man and woman on either side of me. Then the barn was filled with screams and the rattle of automatic weapons fire. I had let go of Rothmann at the first shot and rolled behind him. He was gasping for breath, his hands at his throat. I could have finished him with a single blow, but I had another priority-getting Quincy Jerome and Mary Upson off the crosses. Quincy’s was nearer so I went to him first, picking up Nora Jacobsen’s knife on the way.
I stood on the cross’s horizontal bar, avoiding Quincy’s bound wrists. Bullets flew past as I reached for the rope that held his ankles. It was thick and had been dipped in something tarry, so it took me some time to saw through the strands. When I was almost finished, I got down and started on the ropes on his wrists. I looked at the pandemonium in front of me as I was cutting. There were bodies on the floor. People were on their knees clutching wounds. The guards seemed to have taken a beating from members of the congregation, some of whom had seized their weapons and used them against the men and women in blue denim.
I got Quincy’s upper body free and pulled him away from the cross. That broke the last strands of the rope on his ankles and he slid to the ground in my arms.
‘Keep your head down,’ I said, then turned to Mary.
To my surprise, she was already down. The black-robed figure in the gargoyle mask was leading her to the door, bending low and brandishing a long knife. I was about to go after them, when a line of shots appeared in the wooden floor ahead. I looked around desperately for a weapon. The nearest was by the side of a dead guard, but I was warned off that by more well-directed gunfire. Someone wanted me to stay where I was. Who was taking such care to tie me down, but not to hit me? I peered out at the crowd. Someone had pulled the rear doors of the barn open and people were disappearing into the night.
Rothmann got to his feet unsteadily and stumbled toward the nearest exit. He was warned off in the same way, bullets kicking up splinters from the wooden floor in front of him. He yelped and sank to his knees. He didn’t have the air of a master now. I found that the desire to revenge myself on him physically had completely gone. That didn’t mean I was going to let him escape justice-assuming I myself got out of this alive.
Gradually the gunfire died down. Through the cloud of discharged smoke, I made out six people still standing. Four of them were naked, three men and a woman, one other man was pulling on the clothes he had stripped from a dead guard, and the remaining one, a woman, was fully dressed. She was carrying a machine-pistol in one hand and a pistol in the other. None of the guards seemed to have survived.
‘Got any idea what’s going on?’ Quincy asked. He was still dazed from his time on the cross.
I shook my head. ‘I think we might be about to find out.’
The man who had got dressed pointed the naked people in the direction of the various exits. They took up positions there, pulling clothes from the bodies of guards. They were all toting weapons. Then he joined the armed woman and they embraced.
‘Touching,’ Quincy muttered. ‘Even assholes have feelings.’
I had slipped the knife under my body and was trying to get it into my pocket.
‘Throw the blade over here,’ the woman said, pointing the pistol at me.