Midnight Renegade (Men of Midnight Book 7) Read online

  But now it appeared that she wasn’t alone.

  She had Matt Walker. And the company he worked for.

  Faces … something about faces.

  She rubbed her head.

  “What?” Matt asked.

  “Nothing.” She dropped her hand. “I just —”

  “You were remembering something.”

  “I was?” Her head was such a jumble of images.

  “Think back a second. What was going through your head?”

  Honor wanted to snap at him. Nothing was going through her head. Her mind was chaos, unusually so. She knew enough about herself to know that she was usually clearheaded. Her mind was calm and orderly, except for right now. Now confusion reigned, a jumble of images — the freezing water flowing over her face, the vehicle tumbling down the cliff, the explosion, sounds, voices, faces — no!

  “You’ve remembered something,” he said. He’d seen it on her face, maybe felt it in the tightening of her fingers.

  “Yes, but it’s not helpful.”

  He leaned a little closer. “Let me be the judge of that.”

  “I never saw anyone’s face. There were a few moments when they came in to drug me, when I had a little clarity. They were wearing …” she couldn’t remember the word and gestured at her face with her free hand.

  “Masks?”

  “Yes, only not Halloween-type masks. The knitted kind.”

  “Balaclavas? Ski masks?”

  “Yes. Exactly. But they had cold eyes. Not human. Not very helpful, is it?” Of all the things to remember, full-face masks was not helpful. Fatigue swept over her. She had a hole in her memory, a big fat black hole and she might never understand why she’d been abducted.

  Matt shook his head. “I don’t know. They took you in a very professional way. You were heavily sedated, enough to blow a hole in your memory, but I don’t think you are functionally impaired. That can’t be easy, can it? I mean, you’d have to have knowledge of dosages and human physiology, right? Maybe even have to calculate body mass and put the injections on a schedule, to keep you under but not kill you.”

  Honor blinked. “Yeah, I guess. Ketamine is very powerful. They could have killed me with it, even accidentally, but they didn’t.”

  “You were dosed intravenously, both drugs, and I imagine you were fed and hydrated, too. The puncture site wasn’t infected. All of that that takes some expertise.”

  She nodded. It did.

  “They kept their faces shielded from you. Which means they intended on keeping you alive. Did they speak in your presence?”

  Had they spoken? She closed her eyes, concentrating. She’d only been conscious a few minutes, between dosages. If they’d spoken, said anything at all, she couldn’t remember it.

  “I don’t — I don’t think so.”

  “That might actually be a clue. Maybe they are foreign and if they’d spoken you’d have recognized that.”

  It made a roundabout sense. To the extent that anything at all made sense.

  “Eye color?” he said.

  Eye color. The images in her head were so fleeting, colored by terror and the drugs. She shook her head.

  “How many were there?”

  “Two, that I remember. Both men.”

  Matt nodded. “White?”

  “Yes.” She didn’t have to think. “They didn’t wear latex gloves when switching out the IV bags. I think that shocked me on some level. The skin of their hands was tanned but definitely white. Fair even. One had blond hairs on the backs of his fingers and on his forearms.”

  “That’s helpful. Anything else?”

  Her eyes closed and she found it hard to open them again.

  “You’re exhausted,” he said. He sounded angry, but not at her, at himself. “I shouldn’t be interrogating you. You need to rest.”

  “No, no. That’s okay. I’m not that —” an unstoppable, massive, jaw-stretching yawn overtook her — “tired.”

  He didn’t quite smile but that dent reappeared in his cheek.

  “You might not feel tired, Wonder Woman, but I think you need to rest. Metal was quite clear that you needed what he called a ‘washout’.”

  “Total washout of an amount of ketamine that would keep an adult under for over six days could take months.”

  “All the more reason to start now.” He placed a strong arm around her shoulders and eased her down in the bed.

  Sleep was a black blanket falling over her. “You’ll stay with me?”

  It was suddenly important. She wanted him here. With her. In a world where she’d been snatched and pushed down a black memory hole, he was the one stable element in her universe.

  Once she was flat on the bed, he took her hand again. A lifeline, a point of warmth in the cold darkness. “I’ll be here,” he promised, that deep voice almost a whisper. “Rest now.”

  As if waiting for permission, now that she had it, she tumbled into a deep sleep.

  Los Angeles

  June 15

  Simon Thomas didn’t know where he was except that he was still in LA. They’d taken him ten times, blindfolded, back to his office to send emails he didn’t write and make payments via a fingerprint-protected electronic payment system. No one saw them go in and no one saw them go out.

  He was a prisoner, had been one for two weeks, and no one knew it. As far as anyone knew, he was mostly hard at work in his office, sending out orders, making payments, even negotiating new shipping contracts via email.

  He was lightly sedated, hooded and taken to his headquarters via a company vehicle, a van with a transponder pass. They removed the hood right outside the private entrance to the company compound. The guards never once questioned his driver.

  He couldn’t even estimate the distance because of the sedation. No idea how much time passed between the shot and becoming fully awake in his office. For all he knew, he was being held prisoner a ten minute drive away and the drug was fast acting. Depended on the dosage, he assumed.

  Honor would know.

  Honor. He had a punch to the heart at the thought of his daughter. Whenever he’d shown signs of even a minor rebellion, he’d be shown photographs of his daughter. Walking into the ER, walking out of her apartment building. Grabbing a coffee at a Starbucks.

  They pulled out the big guns when he realized that the captain piloting one of his ships, the Maria Cristina, wasn’t Captain Larry Knowles, who’d worked for Quest Line Shipping for twenty five years. No, it was someone new, someone Simon had never seen before.

  Something terrible was happening. He rebelled.

  That evening the monitor in his cell switched on, audio off, to show him his daughter shackled to a wall. She was drugged, too. All the time, not like him, via an IV bag hung from an IV tree. She was motionless, her head dangling between her shoulders, eyes closed. All he saw were her eyelashes, so thick they cast shadows from the harsh overhead light. She used to give him butterfly kisses with her eyelashes on his cheek when she was a little girl.

  No butterfly kisses afterwards. He’d given her a really hard time when she wanted to study medicine. What the hell had he built a shipping empire for if not to leave it to his only child? But no — she wanted to be a doctor. Always had, actually, even as a child. He’d just refused to see what was before his eyes.

  By the time she’d graduated high school with a perfect 4.0, and he’d called her in to discuss her going to engineering school, or maybe an MBA, she’d coolly informed him that she’d already applied and been accepted at the Oregon Health and Science University in Portland.

  He knew why she’d chosen Portland. The OHSU was an excellent medical school but Portland was also a thousand miles away from Los Angeles. It was far away from LA, but not too far away. With her grades she could have gone anywhere to medical school — even Harvard. But — Honor loved him. Even though he’d been mad at her for not following him in the business, she still loved him.

  They’d been fighting this last month. His daughter complai
ned bitterly that he wasn’t taking care of himself. So, yes, his cholesterol was high and his blood pressure was high. He’d challenge anyone to run a company like his with all the fluctuating exchange rates and abrupt changes in trade tariffs not to have sky-high blood pressure and all sorts of little bombs going off in his blood.

  He’d been thrust unexpectedly into heavy debt. Of course he was neglecting his health as he fought for the survival of his company.

  Honor got on his case about his health so often he’d yelled at her. Something he was profoundly sorry about now. Now look at her. A prisoner on a bed, shackled to a wall, and all because of him.

  She’d been kidnapped by criminals and kept sedated just to keep him in line, because of him.

  His cell door opened and closed. He was in a very comfortable room somewhere but he couldn’t leave. So it was essentially a prison cell.

  Lee Chamness stepped in. Every muscle in Simon’s body clenched. When he’d had a heart attack, they’d put sensors on his chest. If he still had them, they would be going haywire, his heart bouncing around inside his chest, loathing and hatred filling every beat of his heart

  “Hello Simon,” Chamness said as he pulled out the only chair in the room. He tugged at his sharply creased linen trousers so they wouldn’t bag as he sat down.

  He was a dandy. A soulless criminal planning what Simon suspected was a massive shipment of heroin into the country, a traitor and a monster. But an elegant one.

  Simon remembered clearly the day Chamness first walked into his office. There was trouble in his company. Quest Line Shipping was a boutique enterprise. Simon’s ships weren’t huge container behemoths. They were smaller, with unusual features. His ships could deal with vulnerable livestock, valuable art works, sensitive chemicals, delicate high-tech machinery. His ships had advanced temperature controls, strong gyroscopes capable of contrasting waves up to hurricane strength, several rooms in the hold were equipped to be clean rooms up to the highest standards. If you had something really valuable to ship, Quest Line Shipping was for you. It was a good, albeit risky business, and Simon loved what he did. Until disaster struck.

  At exactly the wrong time, two ships had had devastating fires and the insurance company was suspecting arson. Simon would rather have torn out his own throat than set his ships on fire for the insurance money, but the insurance company wasn’t so sure.

  He was down over ten million dollars at a very delicate moment and up popped Lee Chamness. He looked and talked like a real man of the world, knowledgeable, savvy, connected. Former CIA. Simon had checked and he was the real deal. Retired now, but someone who truly understood geopolitics. Simon understood shipping and Chamness understood geopolitics and represented a consortium of investors — a match made in heaven.

  When Chamness offered ten million to become a sleeping partner, off the books, Simon jumped at the opportunity.

  Things went well until, a month ago, Simon questioned anomalies in a ship scheduled to sail from Karachi bound for Los Angeles. The Maria Cristina.

  And then the sleeping partner woke up and turned into a fire-breathing dragon. With scales and fangs and claws. At first, when he realized Chamness was skirting legality for one shipment, Simon pushed back.

  Quest Line Shipping was small, but it had a sterling reputation. It also had an B-43 certificate, a little-known and rare certificate granted to only a few transporters that allowed certain ships facilitated entry into sea ports. Essentially, Quest Line Shipping operated without the close scrutiny other shippers were forced to undergo.

  Eleven million cargo containers entered US waters every year, subject to advanced inspection technology and scans for drugs and WMD. Only a couple of shipping companies were allowed to dock solely on the basis of declared manifests and Quest Line Shipping was one of them. Simon found out too late why Lee Chamness had been willing to give him ten million dollars.

  By Simon’s reckoning, at least ten times that value in heroin could be on the Maria Cristina. Once he’d gathered his data and faced Chamness, Lee had simply laughed and said that yes, there was some heroin, but that was nothing. That something bigger was on the way.

  And then four very large men had entered Simon’s office and one of them had stuck something in his neck and he’d woken up here, in this cell with, horribly, photographs on the table of Honor going about her daily life. And a few days later, a running video of a drugged Honor shackled to a wall.

  It was enough to keep him subdued and obedient on the few occasions when they had to go into his head office, to expedite paperwork only he could sign.

  Chamness had disappeared and a Russian had taken his place. The man was thin and wiry and looked like a scholar, with small round glasses, creases in his lean cheeks. An athlete’s build. The Russian’s English was serviceable but he wasn’t a talker like Chamness was. Chamness reveled in his schemes, some deep perversion in him that made him feel he was winning by smuggling drugs and maybe something worse into his own country.

  The Russian had no emotions whatsoever. It seemed to be purely business for him.

  He would come in, question Simon about security measures, make him send reassuring texts to employees and clients, and sign the documents any CEO needed to sign in an ongoing business . All without a spare word.

  And in the background, for about ten minutes every hour, the screen would show Honor, shackled and unconscious.

  As if his thoughts had conjured her up, the screen switched on and Simon watched his daughter, heartsick that his own weakness had led to his daughter being restrained and drugged and under threat.

  Whatever was coming was big. And he and Honor would not survive it. He knew Chamness and the Russian wouldn’t keep him alive. Nor would they keep Honor alive.

  She looked half dead as it was.

  He watched her drugged sleep. Her eyes were active behind her eyelids. Was she dreaming? About to come out of the drug-induced sleep? She was so beautiful, this daughter of his. So beautiful and smart. He was ashamed that he’d tried to stop her from becoming a doctor. She did so much good in the world. It was what she’d always wanted to do — make a difference.

  And he’d wanted her to — what? Make money shipping things to and fro? How did that compare to saving lives every single day?

  What had he been thinking? It was as if he’d had a decade-long fever and now it had broken.

  His daughter gave a sharp sigh and moved restlessly in her drugged sleep. For a moment, he saw her index and middle finger crossed. She used to do that often when she was a little girl. Fingers crossed for luck. She’d do that before exams, though she always passed with flying colors.

  His eyes teared up as he watched her, crossing her fingers for a moment, leg kicking out briefly in a sleep spasm.

  He blinked. Wait a minute. He’d seen that sequence before. Crossed fingers, kicking leg. In a moment she’d turn her head on the pillow … there it was! He was watching footage he’d seen before! They had the video footage on a loop!

  The only reason to do that would be if they had no more footage to send because … his mind backpedaled, refusing to accept what that might mean.

  No, no, no, no. Honor wasn’t dead. They had no reason to kill her yet. She was the reason he was under their control. No. Simon would have felt it if Honor had died. He’d have felt it in his bones and blood. He loved her more than anything else and she just couldn’t be dead. He refused to even think it.

  Which left — she’d escaped. Yes. That was more like it. Honor was smart and brave and somehow she’d found a way to escape and they were just sending him, on a loop, previously recorded video. Like in that old movie with Sandra Bullock.

  He had to believe that or his heart would implode.

  The Grange

  Matt watched her come up, slowly then fast. Watching her come awake was quickly becoming his second favorite thing. His favorite thing was being with her while she was awake.

  He watched her through the phases of REM sleep, then deep
sleep, then up. She slept well, a restorative sleep. Her face relaxed, the tension gone and it made her beauty more apparent. He’d kept the cove lighting on at very low so she wouldn’t wake up in total darkness and panic, intending to go back to his room when she’d fallen asleep.

  But every time he moved, her hand instinctively tightened around his. Something deep inside her didn’t want him to go. And to be honest, he didn’t want to leave her side either. The armchair was comfortable and he was able to snatch combat sleep in half-hour periods, slumped in the chair, holding her hand. He’d slept under worse conditions. He’d slept in fox holes, he’d slept in a tree, he’d slept on the hard steel floor of a loud C-130.

  Holding her hand and watching Honor Thomas sleep sure wasn’t a hardship.

  Her eyes behind her lids were tracking left to right and back again. Her breathing deepened. Suddenly she opened her eyes and smiled at him. An instinctive smile, recognizing him in an instant. The first time that had happened.

  She was back.

  “Hi,” she said softly.

  “Good morning.”

  “Waking up and seeing you seems to be a habit.” Then she frowned and looked around, orienting herself. “There aren’t any windows. What time is it?”

  Matt pressed a recessed button in the nightstand and the wall to her right suddenly … turned on. No other term for it. The wall was a giant screen and it glowed with sunlight. It was several hours after dawn and the sun had topped the dense trees. “As you can see, a little after eight.”

  She stared. “Wow.”

  Yeah. A lot of things about the Grange were wow. Including this. Most of the Grange was underground so many of its rooms had walls that became screens broadcasting a number of outside views.

  The room glowed and so did she. He pulled his chair closer and looked her over carefully. He told himself it was to assess how she was feeling and part of it was that. Most of it, though, was that he wanted an excuse to stare at the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen.