“Like Jude? And you?” Rawls glanced at the four elderly men on their benches. “And them?” He took Wolf’s grunt as an affirmative.
But after a moment he turned back to the rock circle. He still had plenty of questions left. “Where did you take the scientists?”
Biesel laughed. “Where else? Silicon Valley. Who’s gonna notice another lab springing up there?”
Rawls repeated the address the ghost rattled off, and committed it to memory. “They’re still alive?”
“How the hell should I know? I’m dead and stuck to you, you moron.”
Biesel took him through the layout of the lab where they’d stashed Faith’s team, and Rawls committed every room, every guard to memory. All this shit would come in handy when they moved in to rescue the hostages.
After several minutes of questions and answers, there was only one thing left to ask. “How did they track you to Yosemite?”
The smirk was clear on the transparent face. “Through the same shit they dumped into little Brendan and Benji’s veins. Poor bastards. They’re a walking data stream now.”
Rawls’s mouth tightened at the bastard’s callousness. “How can the compound be neutralized?”
“It can’t, far as I know. Or at least that information wasn’t made available to us.”
Rawls scowled. Unfortunately, the bastard didn’t appear to be lying about that. It was more like he simply didn’t care. Which was believable since it no longer affected him.
“Who developed the compound?” Whoever had developed it had to have an antidote.
“I don’t know. Someone at Dynamic Solutions. Ask James Link. He brought that shit with him when he came on board.” Biesel’s voice turned impatient. “Look, I answered all your damn questions. You want to let me out of this damn cage?”
“Not my call. I’m just a guest here,” Rawls said, although from the Arapahos’ reaction to having a ghost present, he’d bet that Biesel wouldn’t be getting loose anytime soon, if at all. The interrogation wrapped up soon afterward, and Rawls turned to Wolf.
“It would be handy if we could keep him on ice like this, in case any more questions come up,” he said in a low voice.
Apparently Biesel had the ears of a cat. “Ah, come on, man, that’s inhumane. This thing’s smaller than a fucking cell.”
Wolf shook his head. “Too dangerous. Biitei grow stronger with age. It must cross back over.”
“Now wait one Goddamn minute.” Biesel’s voice climbed. “I can help you. I know lots of things we haven’t even touched on.”
With a ceremonial half bow, Wolf nodded to the elders. Four male voices rose in chant. In unison, the men stood and emptied their leather pouches into the fire at their feet. Flames hissed and crackled and shot so high in the air they touched the ceiling.
The reflection of the fires engulfed the rock circle and the translucent figure within it. Ravenous orange tongues engulfed the writhing, gyrating form. This time Rawls couldn’t hear the screams. The crackle and pop of the fires drowned the ghost’s cries out.
As the fires burned hotter, the figure inside the circle disintegrated, until there was nothing left but flames.
Her stomach a tight knot, Faith pushed a pair of green beans around with her fork. The tension had started the moment Rawls and Wolf had returned, and it continued to build steadily during lunch. From the reassuring looks he kept sending her, and his comments about how good all her tests looked, Rawls had picked up on her anxiety and assumed it was associated with her heart and the tests she’d undergone, or the tests still to come. He thought she was having trouble adjusting to this miraculous new life Kait had given her.
How to tell him her worry wasn’t linked to her health, rather it was driven by fear for his?
For sure the tests had shown a miracle. A completely functional, totally restored heart. The echocardiogram and EKG had given her reason to believe in a new life. A life without restrictions. A normal life. One where she didn’t have to worry about organ rejections or replacement. She’d barely had a chance to process this realization, to accept it—when Rawls had returned with Wolf and told her that Pachico had told them where her fellow scientists had been taken.
Just listening to Rawls banter with his buddies during lunch had deepened the dark cloud of foreboding hanging over her. From the suppressed tension and barely leashed anticipation emitted by the four men, they were planning something . . . And then there was this big meeting with the brass of Shadow Mountain the four men were headed to after lunch.
Her belly cramped and a light gloss of perspiration broke out down her spine. She was very much afraid she knew what the meeting was about, and why the men were vibrating with such adrenaline-fueled anticipation.
If they’d located her fellow scientists, then they had all the information they needed to run off and rescue them. Or try to, anyway.