Black Gate: Timewalker Chronicles, Book 4 (3 page)

He was a very dangerous kind of fool, but she needed him, needed his resources and his men, and so she played a very dangerous game of cat and mouse with the system, the military, and the spooks. She worked her ass off and she kept her secrets.

“Yes, Sir?” She purposely relaxed her body and continued to move silently down the darkened concrete stairwell. Despite her earlier chill, her dark French braid was soaked with sweat and stuck to the back of her neck before its long tail fell to hit her squarely between the shoulder blades.

“Be careful.Thecareful. The others can feel it now, too.””

“Understood.” A cold sense of dread squeezed her throat nearly closed. The others the Rear Admiral referred to were the lower level psychics embedded with each team outside. They had good instincts and helped make their missions successful, but none of them could touch her level of telepathy or her power to manipulate energy. Normally, she was the critical member on any retrieval. Today? As much as she hated to admit it, she was nothing but bad news. She needed a tranquilizer shot big enough to knock out a horse and about three days of unconsciousness to calm her nerve endings into some semblance of normalcy. She shouldn’t even be here and he knew it. She knew it. Hell, her whole team knew it.

“Be very, very careful..” The Rear Admiral’s voice was gruff and more clipped than usual. The rest of her team remained silent, listening. Assessing and adapting, as they always did. Was it fear in his voice? Worry?

No. Resignation. He knew she was a mess, and still he sent her in after it…whatever it was. He was an ass, but he wouldn’t risk her if he didn’t desperately want whatever was hidden here. And she was the one who had led him right to it, demanded that they load the airplane and move. Today. Now.

Palms cold and clammy with fear, Katherine passed through the doorway at the base of the stairs. It led belowground, into the hidden caves that hid secrets beneath the house. “Any luck with the scans? Have you located the object, Sir?”

“No, but it’s down there. You are to find it, assess and advise. Nothing more. Do not touch it yourself. Is that understood?” The Rear Admiral’s voice drifted through her earpiece, but she wasn’t really listening anymore.

“Yes, Sir.” She lied easily. The thing she hunted was closer. It tugged on her mind, filled her body with renewed energy. She wanted it.
Needed
it.

Damn the man for ordering Frank to take the hit. Her team was, as far as she knew, very, very human. They were tough, brilliant soldiers, but they weren’t supernatural. They didn’t go anywhere without her. They didn’t touch alien artifacts. And they sure as hell didn’t mess around with unknown power sources so strong they caused her to bow up out of a dead sleep, screaming.

“I mean it, Katherine. Touch nothing. Frank’s on it. Once you’ve located the object, he will retrieve it. Is. That. Clear?” The Rear Admiral wasn’t playing nice at all. Find the artifact, then let Frank, married father of three teenage boys, risk his life instead of hers. It was wrong.

“I’ll handle it, Sir,” Frank assured the asshole. All business in that tone. Great. Frank wasn’t going to have much of a sense of humor about it if she tried to talk her way around him.

She’d figure it out when she got there.

“Katherine?”

“Yes, Sir. I’ll behave.” For now. Her radio went silent as she moved into the lower levels of the house to another, hidden stairwell. Counting each step, she went deeper under the house, under the mountain. One hundred fifteen steps down the winding metal staircase of doom into a brightly lit tunnel.

The rock walls were covered with wood paneling and art, the stone floor lined with plush carpeting that absorbed the slightest noise from her feet. The ceiling was bare rock, strung with wires and lights. She could believe she was in a normal home, if she didn’t look up.

She continued through a labyrinth of twisting hallways and steep inclines, deeper and deeper under the mountain. The weight of earth settled on her senses, the heaviness blanketing her mind from the usual psychic noise of the surface. It was peaceful down here. Peaceful and beautiful, with hand-carved doors, paintings and statues lining the walls. The collection was exquisite, and very expensive. It would have been welcomed in the top museums in the world. It didn’t feel like a paramilitary bunker, or an evil criminal’s hideout. It felt like a home.

These tunnels were within ancient, abandoned caves in the Rocky Mountains, where manmade underground walkways snaked beneath a mountain estate not far from the Cave of the Winds. The home and what lay beneath had been retrofitted to serve a new purpose. She understood why bad guys liked to stay underground most of the time. Fewer eyes. No rules.

No room. No privacy. Nowhere to run. Total control. And communications? Monitored 24/7. Nothing got in or out without their leader knowing it. Unless this place had a long-range telepath slinking around, one who had another telepath on the receiving end of a personal psychic hotline.

It was possible. Katherine would know.

She was, and she did. Sarah. Thank God for her cousin. That connection was the only thing that kept her sane these days. There were other telepaths among the Timewalker descendants, but none she’d met were as strong as Sarah, and at times, even her cousin wasn’t enough to keep her from being totally alone in the dark.

Eerie quiet threatened to suffocate her and she picked up her pace to a soft jog. Her team was ahead, she could feel their presence like flickering lights inside her mind. They never had to radio her to tell her where they were. She always knew. And she was close.

“Frank, don’t touch anything.” Katherine’s instincts slithered a warning through her gut like an arctic snake winding its way through her intestines inch by icy inch. Moving and alive. Ice cold. Real. Frank was old enough to be her father, but he listened to her, had her back, and kept his mouth shut. And she loved him for it.

“We’re all set down here. Just drinking a beer and kicking up our heels waiting on your slow ass.” Frank’s confidence helped her keep it together as she turned another corner. The object was close, so very close, and it was frying her system like an injection of liquid nitrogen into her bloodstream.
Can’t lose it right now. Keep it together. Keep moving
.

Her feeling of foreboding grew. She sprinted through the corridors, slammed doors open on their hinges and raced through the tunnels. Seconds felt like hours. She knew this place like the back of her hand, and not just because she’d studied the layout of the house and grounds with the rest of her team. She felt like she was a ghost, a ghost who had haunted this house for years and was finally being allowed to come home.

The closer she got to her destination, the tighter the apprehension in her stomach coiled, making it hard to breathe. The men outside the building barked at each other in her ear, they had fresh arrivals outside. The team on watch outside the grounds would handle it. She ignored them all. They were shifting position up top, giving her team time and keeping their escape route clear. Frank moved the pieces on the chessboard around to be sure they won the game. They always won.

The fear, the tug in her gut, was the reason the Rear Admiral kept her around. This was the reason she got away with throwing off the Weasel’s shackles once a month and demanding a tiny modicum of freedom. When the base started to smother her and the constant monitoring became too much, she had to get out. And he had to allow her some down time, outside the base and away from the men, or the Rear Admiral would lose her. She’d made that clear after her third flawless escape. Technically, she was a civilian contractor, and she reminded him of it every chance she got. She’d even flipped him a very elegant finger gesture right before she blew out the last surveillance camera and stole his car.

She’d come back to base four days later, rested and recharged, dropped his keys on his desk and her ass in the seat across from him, ready for the next op. After that, he’d never tried to stop her from leaving again. He didn’t own her the way he owned the guys on her team. They were all lifers, all different branches and backgrounds, recruited and retasked to this project.

Katherine was in college when her mother, the leader of their secret network of Timewalker descendants, had discovered the existence of the Rear Admiral’s Casper Program. After that, Katherine Higgins, beloved daughter of Maggie and Robert Higgins, foreign language major, became Katherine Green, runaway and abandoned daughter of a drug-addicted mother who’d overdosed when she was fifteen. No father. Self-motivated brat who’d worked her way through the foster care system and ended up graduating from college at twenty-six with a psychology and foreign language double major. She spoke four languages. And, thanks to her mother’s network, she had all the right paper trails, witnesses and documentation to prove it.

After that, she’d stolen an alien sidearm from a “collector’s” home, a very private collector of alien artifacts who happened to be a grade A asshole. Her mother had watched the collector for months and feared he was going to become a problem. The Rear Admiral didn’t know the man existed. So, after she stole it, Katherine started a “look-how-stupid-I-am” blog about alien artifacts and “are we alone?” psychobabble. She’d posted a video of herself wearing a mask and “anonymously” boasting about her raid, and how she’d done it to keep that kind of thing “out of the hands of the bad guys”. Then, she’d taken a video of herself firing the weapon. The gun had disintegrated a concrete block with one shot.

The Rear Admiral’s boys had been on her doorstep in less than two hours. Her mother was happy, and she’d had her “in”.

Hours of interrogation, where she’d eventually and very “reluctantly” revealed that she had some supernatural “abilities” and that those talents were what led her to the alien artifacts.

Three days in lockup. Brain scans. Background checks. She’d waited and kept her cool. When finally, the Rear Admiral himself came to her and offered her a deal. She’d signed an agreement. Given her word for a whole lot of reasons the Rear Admiral didn’t ever need to know about. The Casper Project needed her. The Rear Admiral needed her to bring him new toys. And she needed them. Their airplanes, their money and resources, and the men who knew how to get things done, the boys who always had her back. Breaking and entering was their thing…not hers.

That was when she’d found her second family, the team of men assigned as to her. Good guys. Her brothers. The men watching, waiting for her now.

Dense, pulsating power filled the corridor. The vibrations hit her chest like she was standing in front of a giant base speaker at a rock concert. The energy touched her, flowed around and over her, so thick she felt like she could literally lean into it without falling over. Palatable. Solid…

Alive.

“Oh, my God.” Katherine crossed her arms over her chest in a futile attempt to protect her heart from the power undulating through her body. She leaned forward to push through the syrup-like opacity of the air toward her team, who surrounded a closed door. “Report. Have you found it?” The Rear Admiral’s voice felt far away, like a dream. She swayed on her feet. Andrew stepped up and grabbed her upper arm to steady her and Frank moved to catch her if she fell.

“You all right?” Frank covered his mouthpiece and whispered the question, not wanting to alert the Rear Admiral to her reaction. Or her weakness. Her eyes met Frank’s serious brown gaze. She knew this was going to be bad, and by the look in those eyes, so did he.

She nodded and gently shoved his shoulder to move him away from the door. Andrew stayed close but let her arm go as she moved up and pressed her palms flat to the door. “It’s in there.”

“Then let’s go get it and get the hell out of here.” Andrew smiled at her and shifted his rifle to the other shoulder, his fair skin hidden beneath camo face paint. “You know I don’t like holes.”

No, he didn’t. He was a genius with computers, ex-Navy boy, and a gorgeous, blond, California surfing champion who had a history of broken hearts behind him. Cheat death while twenty-foot waves crashed over his head? He was fine. But caves? Earth and rock pressing down with the weight of the ages, and he was one miserable man.

“I’m going in.” Katherine ignored the men around her and focused on her goal. Her sixth sense told her that no living thing waited behind it, just dead space and power pulsed through the wood. The door was stained oak, beautifully carved with a swirl of leaves and vines. The door should belong to a fairy princess in a castle, not a power-hungry cult leaderoutleader out to conquer the world.

The knob turned easily in her hand and she swung the door open to reveal ornate living quarters. A four-poster bed with burgundy silk sheets was visible through an arched entrance off the main room. Before her, in the main living area was a nerd’s wet dream. Computers networked onto three giant screens were the latest and greatest, not yet available to the public. Thick cables fed it data from the outside. Black leather massage chair with plug-and-play headphones. A giant television hung on the wall in front of plush suede couches and a recliner. A top-line gaming system was wired in and remotes were scattered about the cushions. A small but well-stocked kitchen area held the latest appliances and gadgets. The whole room smelled like popcorn.

She loved popcorn. Extra butter. Extra salt.

Five men filed through the doorway behind her and shuffled into the room, overtaking her position like a black flood of water coming around her and filling in the edges of her vision. She knew every one of them by the way they moved, the way they held their weapons. She knew them, knew nothing would get past them, not even the Rear Admiral. Not if it mattered. Not biologically related, but brothers in spirit, she’d die for any one of them, and they knew it.