We were headed north. I could tell that easily enough. But where? After an hour I gave in and asked. “Aren’t you the curious thing?” Raynor said. “And I do mean ‘thing.’ We’re going to Montana. I already have contractors in place building a new Institute and an adjoining rehabilitation facility. Busy, busy, busy. I’ve a lot to do and I was never one to let flies light on me.”
Ariel opened her mouth when he said Institute, her smooth brow under pink bangs creased. I shook my head at her and she remained quiet. “And you think you’ll be able to catch the others the same as you did me?” I said.
She started to open her mouth again when I gave the same shake of my head. You’d think being kidnapped would have anyone afraid, man or woman. So far, I’d seen her pissed off, highly pissed off, extremely pissed off, and entertained by my lies, but I hadn’t seen fear on her face once. She showed what the old movies called moxie or spunk. She would know. She had watched those old movies with me from across the country, every week.
“Then why don’t you let Ariel go? She won’t be any use to you at a new Institute.”
“I told you. She’s my assurance you’ll behave. You’re a very naughty young man, Michael, what with trying to kill me and all. Not to mention we will need a starter kit, so to speak, for the new Basement. You can’t have a Playground if there’s nothing to play with, can you? I think she’ll do nicely.”
“How much assurance do you think that is?” I asked flatly. “She’s better off dead here than in the Basement.”
Her eyes widened slightly and this time when I shook my head, she kicked me again. I was lucky to be a chimera or my ribs would’ve been sore for a month. “I like you, Misha. I really do. I always have. You’re special and brilliant and quirky and one of the most amazing people I’ve ever known, but if you try to shut me up one more time, the next kick will be to your face. It’s a pretty face too. I especially like your eyes . . . fox green, but a fox that would never eat a chicken or clean out a henhouse. A vegetarian fox. You have nice teeth too, probably a killer smile. Try to not make me kick it in, all right? If I want to talk to the psycho, I’ll talk to the psycho. And since you won’t tell me anything, the psycho is my only other option.”
This time it was me opening and shutting my mouth, and not at a shake of the head, but at the lift of a sandaled foot. “Psycho,” she said, realizing I was going to obey the Foot of Doom, “what the hell is going on? You’re government, I can tell. I’ve worked government contracts before. You’re too megalomaniacal to be a cop or a crook and too egotistical to be another country’s spy. So who exactly are you? CIA? FBI? Or my first guess—Homeland Security. That’s it, isn’t it? You have the attitude. Didn’t you asses ever bother to think Homeland sounds a lot like the Fatherland or the Motherland and none of those things worked out too well for Germany or Russia?”
If Raynor had pulled the car over and pistol-whipped her, I wouldn’t have been surprised. Fortunately, dealing with Jericho and his successor had taught him patience; either that or he was impressed. I knew I was. She was like a force of nature—a whirling pastel-colored verbal tornado cutting down anything in her path. Then there was the Basement, a worse punishment than any pistol-whipping, shooting, or roadside torture.
“I’m all of those things, little girl.” I saw the reflection of his grin in the rearview mirror. “But I’m also more. You might say I’m a government agency of one. The blackest of ops and every conspiracy nut’s worst nightmare. I’m going to take your boyfriend here, who now happens to be my personal property as everyone else who could lay claim is dead, and I’m going to torture him at great length, brainwash him, turn his mind and soul inside out until he does exactly as I say. And if that doesn’t work, I’m going to put several bullets in his brain.” There was the grin again, colder and sharper with anticipation.
“Being that he’s actually worth something to me in the monetary sense and you are not worth a dime,” he continued on with Ariel, “you might want to think twice about what I could do to you. I can find an off-ramp, a deserted road, and carve the tongue right out of your smart-ass mouth. That would shut you up. Of course, once I get started, it is difficult to stop. We all have our vices.”
I’d thought Raynor was smart, and he was, and from his files I knew he did love interrogation. That might have been his problem. He was used to torture, used to victims already put through more than any mind or body should have to suffer. He was used to the broken.
Ariel was not broken.
She was an adamantine spirit who’d just been told the best she could hope for was a miserable death here or something worse in someplace called the Basement. You didn’t need to be a genius to figure out it was better to die quickly than pick behind what was beyond those two doors. You didn’t need to be a genius, but she was one.