She found herself in a quandary as the mist reached their knees. It went against her training, her core beliefs, and everything she stood for to save herself and watch someone else die in her place. Even if that person made his living as a hired gun.
He thrust the mask into her hands. “Take it, dammit. I’ve been a shit my whole life. Never believed in anything other than money. Never had any regrets . . . until now.”
She sensed his resolve but couldn’t understand it. “Are you sure?”
“You already have honor. Give me the chance to do one honorable thing before I die.” He hesitated. “Just do me a favor.”
She closed her hands over the mask. “What’s that?”
“Find Nemesis and stop him. Lock him away forever, or, better yet, kill the son of a bitch.”
He had given her a mission. A mission greater than herself that demanded her survival. He must have figured it was the only way she would do something so antithetical to all her beliefs. And he’d figured right.
She lifted the mask to her face. “He won’t get away with this,” she said, pulling it over her head and tightening the straps. “I promise.”
The gas rose to their chests, then above their heads. She grasped Toro’s hands, which were trembling. There was nothing more to be said.
Watching him closely, she wondered what his first reaction to the gas would be. Would he convulse and fall from the bench into the fog that now covered the entire floor like a thick blanket? Would he retch? Would he . . .
She kept watching and saw no sign of distress. “Are you okay?” she asked, her voice muffled by the mask.
“Other than needing a fresh pair of boxers, I’m all right,” Toro said.
She gave it some thought, then reached behind her head and loosened the straps.
“What the hell are you doing?” Toro shouted.
She slid the mask off. “I was just thinking the gray mist was covering the floor like a thick layer of fog when it came to me.” She gestured around. “This is water vapor. It’s harmless.”
“What?”
“Nemesis likes to play mind games,” she said. “Torment us into choosing who will live and who will die.”
“He forced us to say goodbye to each other,” Toro said, breathing hard. “For his fucking entertainment.”
Right on cue, the latch opened with a clang that reverberated through the room. Nemesis was watching and listening.
Dani cut through Toro’s colorful stream of expletives, redirecting him to focus on the mission. “We have to go back down through the hatch, and you need your head in the game. I have a feeling the next surprise won’t be harmless.”
CHAPTER 47
Nemesis paced across the control room, teeth grinding. A quick check of the video feed revealed that Daniela Vega was a problem. The woman was changing the dynamics of the game. Her growing legions of fans were skewing the data.
Toro had looked at Vega with something more than admiration. They had pretended to be a couple. Were they starting to fall in love for real? Maybe that was why they were both getting so many upvotes.
Star-crossed lovers. Pathetic.
Some women flirted and strutted, manipulating men at every turn, but Vega seemed to have no clue she was beautiful. The spandex suit clung to her athletic feminine form, and even though the viewers couldn’t see her body through the avatar, Toro certainly could.
And Vega’s avatar had turned out to be strangely accurate. Athena, goddess of wisdom and war, of strategy and logic, was among the most popular in the Greek pantheon. Her persona in the game was proving to be just as charismatic.
Vega was winning the competition and gaining more fans in the bargain. Nemesis had no military background, but the Colonel and Vega were demonstrating what that kind of training and discipline could do. Everyone inside had blood on their hands. They all knew how to kill. But only two of them were battle tested. They were the most dangerous.
Orchestrating a meeting between them would make for a great show. Then it would be simpler to deal with whoever survived that encounter.
Hopefully it would be the Colonel. He deserved special retribution for what he had done. After all this time, no earthly court would convict him, so trial by combat would give him what he deserved. Treadway should die alone, broken, and humiliated, exactly the way he had made others feel.
If it came down to Vega and Toro instead, they would find themselves on the receiving end of another dilemma, and this time one of them would die.
CHAPTER 48
Dani watched the vapor in the room dissipate. Nemesis had finished toying with them for the moment. Now that she literally and figuratively had a moment to breathe, Dani paused to consider the driving force behind the torment. This went beyond revenge. It was obsession.
If she could understand how this all began, perhaps she might figure out who Nemesis was. Calling him out by name might put a stop to his plans. At the very least, if she knew who she was dealing with, she could personalize everyone involved. Nemesis could no longer hide behind an invisible voice, unseen and untouched, and manipulate them like toy soldiers. He would come out from behind the facade and become a real person, which meant they would be real people as well.
Worth a shot.
How could she put a name to the creepy voice that had set her teeth on edge every time she heard it? It dawned on her that cracking the case was like cracking a code. Begin with the known, and work toward the unknown. What did she know?
To put it in military terms, she was collateral damage, not the primary objective. The Colonel and his group had been the targets.
She glanced at Toro. “How many assignments did all twelve of your group go on together?”
“You think you can figure out who Nemesis is,” he said. “I’ve already thought of that, and it’s a dead end.”
“Humor me.”
He frowned in concentration. “I remember three missions with the whole team.”
“Describe them.”
“The first one involved getting technology from a rival developer.”
“Corporate espionage,” she said, refusing to gloss over the crime. “What tech did you steal?”
“You make it sound so ugly,” he said with mock indignation. “A firm in Silicon Valley was working on new software for a cloaking device. We were hired to find out how far they’d gotten along. The turnaround was short, so we had no time to get someone on the inside. We had to break into their off-site lab. Very labor intensive.”
“Who hired you?”
“Only the Colonel knows the identity of the client,” he said. “But it turned out the company that hired us was actually ahead of them, so technically we didn’t steal anything.”
“Which company did you break into?”
“Quasardyne Enterprises. They went out of business a few years later. They were gambling their whole future on getting that DOD contract.”
“What were the other two jobs all of you had as a team?”
“One was a sabotage operation. We introduced malware into the operating system of a company called Zetaform. They’re out of business now too.”
“Why did that take the whole group?”
“They had tons of security and on-site secure servers unconnected to anything online. We had to get into their physical premises to upload the virus.”
“I guess when there are millions at stake, there’s no low you won’t sink to.” She shook her head. “What was the third contract?”
“Kidnapping.”
“Who the hell did you kidnap?”
“You’ve heard of Oscar Brinkley?”
She nodded. “Tech billionaire.” Images of news headlines flooded back to her. “Were you guys behind that fiasco?”
“Fiasco is the right word,” he said, glancing down. “It was supposed to be a ransom job, but it turned into a murder.”
“His wife was killed, and his daughter was returned unharmed—physically anyway,” she said. “But the case went cold.”
“They were both supposed to be returned for ten million each.”
“What happened?”
“When Brinkley didn’t cough up the ransom right away, the Colonel shot the mother,” he said in a neutral tone, as if there had been a slight hiccup in an ordinary business transaction. “After that, he paid up to get his daughter back.” He stopped, eyes widening. “Brinkley called in the FBI.”
A sense of growing momentum rushed through her as connections began to click into place. “What did the Bureau do?”
“They fucked everything up,” he said. “Tried to track the wire money transfer. We figured that out pretty damned fast. In fact, that’s when it happened.”
“When the Colonel shot Brinkley’s wife?”
Toro gave her a quick nod. “I was standing in the room when the Colonel came in. He didn’t say a word, just walked over and drilled a round right into her forehead.”
Dani felt her lip curl. “I would call him an animal, but that’s an insult to animals.”
She slotted this detail in with the other information. She had never read the FBI files on the case, so she was working from memories of media reports.
“I’m assuming you don’t know who the client was?” she asked Toro.
“Like I told you before. It’s our job not to know.”