Collingwood didn’t answer right away, just jerked his head again and Buzz-cut closed in on me, the pickup driver keeping his injured leg at a safe distance. I must have just nicked him, otherwise he’d be on crutches.
I braced myself, glancing across at my mother, who was pale as death behind the bars.
“I’m not going anywhere without her,” I said.
Collingwood swung round, got right in my face.
“Come now, Charlie,” he murmured. “Do you really want her to see what we’re about to do to you?”
The soft words hit harder than Vondie’s punch to the gut. Before I knew it, I’d allowed myself to be dragged out, down a short corridor, into another room. It was empty with painted block walls, a concrete floor, and concealed lighting panels in the ceiling. It might have been a storeroom or an empty office, but it felt like a cell, or worse.
It was a reasonably sized space, but with Collingwood and Vondie, and the two men, it felt oppressively overcrowded in there.
Vondie set about searching through my pockets and quickly found the switched-off mobile phone. I’d emptied out everything else before we’d left Terry’s house. I thought of Sean’s phone and hoped that he was using it to call Parker right now.
I don’t know how much cavalry I can rustle up if you get yourselves into trouble, Parker had told me, but I’ll do what I can.
The only thing I could do was give them both a little time.
Vondie showed the phone to Collingwood, who nodded back towards me.
“Let her turn it on, just in case.”
“Do you really think we’ve rigged it?” I asked. “Wow, you’re more scared of us than we thought.”
The pickup driver stepped up behind me and cut the PlastiCuffs. I flexed my hands a few times, then obligingly thumbed the phone into life. Vondie snatched it out of my hands and pressed a few keys, scowling.
“Nothing.”
“It’s called being a professional,” I said sweetly. “You should try it some time.”
“Where will Meyer have taken your father?” Collingwood asked, folding his arms and leaning against one wall.
I shrugged. “Who knows,” I said. “He could go anywhere. I hear Phoenix is nice this time of year.”
“How much have you told your boss?”
“Everything,” I said without hesitation. “We’ve kept him fully briefed and he’s making moves as we speak to have the pair of you hauled in for treason—if that’s a recognized crime over here. Back home, you’d probably be sent to the Tower of London and beheaded with an ax for what you’ve done.”
Collingwood’s face showed emotion for the first time. “I’m doing my job,” he said, darkening with the fervor of a true fanatic. “My superiors may not like my, ah, methods, but I love my country, and if we don’t get the jump on this nation’s enemies, you can be sure as hell they’ll try and get the jump on us.”
“Your superiors don’t know what you’re up to,” I said. “Come to that, if you’re not taking a backhander from Storax, why the hell are you trying to bury a drug that doesn’t work?”
“But it does work,” Collingwood said, levering himself off the wall abruptly and pacing, and there was a zealous gleam in his eyes now. “It targets a particular genetic code. Do you have any idea what could be done with that?”
I stared at him blankly. “You’re talking about a bioweapon,” I said. I laughed. “Jeremy Lee’s family were originally from Korea. Is that what this is all about? You’ve gone to all this trouble for the possibility of developing a side effect into a weapon. What are you intending to do, Collingwood, stand on the battlefield and wait for your enemies’ bones to crumble?”
Collingwood stared at me for a moment, then shook his head. “You don’t understand the possibilities, just like the bureaucrats above me when I first got wind of this. The Storax people were trying to play down the whole thing, so they could get their license, but I saw what could be done with it, even if they didn’t.”
I didn’t want to let him reel me in, but I couldn’t help asking, “How ?”
He gave the slightest of smiles, as though he’d known I wouldn’t be able to resist his rhetoric.
“Any company that handles government contracts has to be checked out regularly,” he said. “I have unlimited access to Storax’s files and I like to be thorough.”
“So you’re a glorified filing clerk,” I said.
His face tightened. “You’re not an American, Charlie, and you don’t understand the threats facing this country,” he said. “But, right now, you’re one of them.” He glanced across at Vondie. “We need to contain this as fast as possible. Find out what she knows and who she’s talked to—and where Meyer and Foxcroft are likely to be,” he said. “Do it, but with no … outward damage. If we have to trade her, she needs to look to be in one piece, if nothing else.”
“There won’t be a mark on her,” Vondie promised, almost a purr. “Don’t you worry about that.”
Collingwood nodded and walked out without a backward glance. The door closed behind him.
“Well, hardly a mark,” Vondie amended. She eyed me, triumphant, savoring the moment. “Okay, boys,” she said. “Strip her.”
I fought them then, hard and dirty. Knowing what they were trying to do set off all kinds of echoes back down the line, reaching viciously into the past and slashing through reason and training to carve a strake of outright bloody fear.
Even through the white-hot smear of rage, I recognized the fact they had their hands tied. They’d been told not to do anything to me that was going to show, and I was giving it everything I had and a little more besides. So, even outnumbered, I was more than holding my own and I reckoned we were pretty much at stalemate.
And then, as Buzz-cut staggered back, doubled over and starting to retch as he clutched at his balls, Vondie finally stepped in with an exasperated bark of, “Oh, for fuck’s sake …” and stunned me.
I didn’t see her pull it. She reached under my thrashing arms and dug the double electrodes of the TASER directly into my rib cage just below my left breast, which was probably as close to my heart as she could get it.
There was an almost infinitesimal delay, then the stunner’s electro-muscular disruption technology stampeded over my neural pathways with all the tact and delicacy of a boot camp drill sergeant. It didn’t bother trying to modify the control signals from my brain to my muscles, it blasted them into the ether, screeching commands in their place that I was unable to ignore or defy.
I’d been trained against the older type of stun guns, to focus and to fight through the charge they delivered, but this was like nothing I’d experienced before. I gave it a damn good go, flailing, but my coordination was blown to shit. Fifty thousand volts through your chest will do that to you.
The pain had a jagged quality all its own, ripping out chunks of my nervous system and spinning them away like debris from an explosion, so that some parts of my mind seemed magnified a hundred times and others were just big blank holes of frenzied nothingness.
Next thing I knew I was on the floor, my body rigid. I was peripherally aware that my head was banging on the concrete and that was probably not a good thing, but I couldn’t stop the twitching dance of my limbs. My hands had distorted into the twisted claws of an arthritis-ravaged geriatric. I couldn’t see, couldn’t breathe. It was the worst cramp I’d ever had in my life, the most violent fever, the meanest hangover, all rolled into one.
After that, I don’t remember much. They handled me roughly, yanked at my clothes, stuck something sharp in my arm. I think I heard someone groaning out the word, “Bitch!” over and over.