Pierce frowned. “I thought she might try something like that. I arranged for Aegis to keep an eye on them. If nothing else works, try to reach them through the Gibraltar office. I know she has her phone. She just tried to call me.”
“Dr. Pierce, listen to me. I checked with the airlines. Dr. Gallo and Fiona went to Greece—”
“Damn it,” Pierce muttered.
Dourado was not finished. “And Dr. Gallo’s vehicle was involved in an accident near the city of Argos.”
Now at last, Dourado’s apprehension made sense. A chill went through Pierce. “What do you mean, involved?”
“The police are investigating, but I can find no indication that she was at the crash site or taken to a hospital.”
Pierce heard himself speaking, asking nonsensical questions, parsing Dourado’s words in a futile attempt to ignore the painfully obvious fact that Gallo and Fiona had been taken.
Cerberus had them.
22
Unknown Location
Gallo awoke in a groggy panic. Even before the world came into focus, she knew that something was amiss. The feel of a firm mattress beneath her, blurred outlines dimly illuminated, the faint odor of a citrus cleaning solution, the complete absence of any sound but her own breathing. It was all…wrong.
I was driving. There was a…crash…explosion?
She could not grasp hold of the last bit, but she knew something bad had happened. The fact that she was in a strange place, a hospital room perhaps, indicated that she was far from where she had been.
She sat up, an action she immediately regretted as a wave of pain shot through her entire body. Her gut clenched, and she heaved so violently that she rolled off the bed and crashed onto the floor, the impact triggering a second round of full-bodied agony. Bitter bile stung her mouth and nostrils. She retched again, but there was nothing for her stomach to expel. It was not the pain her body was rebelling against, but something else.
God, I’m hungover.
Except she knew that was not quite right. This was not the result of alcohol. It was more like the nausea that sometimes followed anesthesia.
Someone drugged me. After the crash.
That made a strange sort of sense. If she had sustained serious injuries, perhaps the medical responders had given her a sedative or a strong painkiller. Yet something about that explanation did not quite ring true.
As the initial surge of pain receded into a dull ache, she took stock of her condition. The discomfort was mostly felt in her extremities and in the muscles of her back. She had taken a beating, but she felt certain her body was intact. No broken bones. No internal injuries.
She managed to draw a few quick breaths, fought through the urge to vomit again and blinked until her eyes were clear enough to see that she was not in a hospital room.
The bed she had fallen out of was a simple single mattress without headboard or footboard. The walls were a butterscotch yellow, with no pictures or other decorations—and no windows. There was a single door with no knob and a plain wooden chair beside the bed. She had probably come within an inch of cracking her head on it. Aside from that, the only other thing in the room was a large flat-screen television mounted high on the wall, opposite the bed.
“Hello?” Her voice was a hoarse croak. “Anybody here?”
For several seconds, the silence persisted. Then, a faint whine drew her attention to the television screen, which was now displaying the image of a room very much like the one she was in, with one notable difference. Stretched out on the bed was the motionless form of Fiona.
“Fi!” Gallo managed to shout this time, and strangely, the sleeping figure began to stir.
“Aunt Gus?”
Gallo heard the mumbled words as clearly as if Fiona were in the bed next to her, and although she loathed Fiona’s pet name for her, she promised never to disparage it again. “Easy darlin’,” she warned. “Waking up from this is like getting kicked by a mule.”
Despite the warning, Fiona sat up and then swung her legs around to meet the floor. She was visibly woozy but not to the same extent Gallo had been. “Where are we?”
“I don’t know yet.” She was tempted to say more, but as the pieces came together in her head, she recognized what this place truly was: a prison. “Just hush now. Take your time waking up.”
“Your apprehension is unnecessary,” came a voice, high-pitched and asthmatic, much louder than Fiona’s soft murmurings, but it was almost certainly due to electronic amplification. “Let us speak plainly. You are my hostages.”
The fact that their captor made no attempt to soften the blow did not bode well. In response, Fiona unleashed an almost incoherent torrent of accusations, demands and colorful insults. She abruptly went silent a few seconds later, but Gallo could still see the girl raging at the screen in her own room. The feed had been muted.
The elderly man spoke again. “Dr. Gallo, I have brought you both here for one reason. I want you to translate a historical document.”