Retribution (SSU Trilogy Book 3) (The Surgical Strike Unit) (5 page)

“No… No…Yes. I don’t know his name, one of the other doctors was treating him, but I remember seeing him in the hallway being led to one of the treatment rooms. I thought he looked like Bruce Willis with a goatee… No…Yes. Again, the man wasn’t one of my patients, but I recognize the scar behind his ear.” Which was about the only identifiable aspect, the face in the photo had been beaten nearly unrecognizable

“No.” Thank God that was the last photo. Her stomach had lodged somewhere in the vicinity of her throat. She fought to take shallow breaths so she wouldn’t gag at the horror of the violence done to those men.

“You still claim you don’t know anything about how these men ended up dead in the back of the truck?”

“That’s right.” God, she knew helping Kaufmann to save her own life had been a questionable move, but she’d never have agreed if she’d suspected men were dying.

The light flipped back up to spear into her eyes.

“Then how do you explain these notes?”

He didn’t lower the light, but he didn’t need to. Her stomach took a nosedive. She knew what he was holding up.

“I stole those notes and the vials from the lower level lab,” she answered. “A lab I knew nothing about until last week. See the crease marks on the notes? You saw how small a square they were folded into. That’s because I smuggled them out in my clothing, hiding them from the evening body check.”

“Why did you need to steal the notes when you’re working on the lower level?”

“I wasn’t working on the lower level. Not then.” She closed her eyes, thinking what a fool she’d been. “I was hired to work in the upper lab, for what I thought was a legitimate project.” Her lips twisted in self-disgust. “Then last week I stumbled across the lower lab and discovered another program. A program that turned men into monsters.” Her cheeks heated with outrage.

“I smuggled out the notes with some idea of escaping and letting the authorities know what was going on.” Panic sent adrenaline through her veins exactly as it had when Kaufmann confronted her in his office.
“But the security cameras I thought were off had come back online and caught me exploring the restricted area. The director threatened my life unless I joined the team in the lower lab.”

She opened her eyes and tried to see the man behind the light. “I had no choice!”

Chapter 5

“V
ery touching.” Rafe clapped. She was good. He’d give her that. She sounded truly outraged. “But somehow I’m not convinced that you were forced to work in this monstrous program.”

She shifted, trying to see past the flashlight to his face. He kept it aimed at her eyes, and ignored his awareness of how attractive she looked even with her lips swollen from the gag and her hair tangled around her face. The long line of her jaw was tight with anger and defiance, in contrast to the sheen of frightened tears that reflected light off her cheeks.

Still, something about her pulled at him. He wanted to soothe her. To run his mouth over her neck and lick away the few drops of blood from where Willits’s knife had nicked her. To dry her tears with his tongue.

But he wasn’t some dumb hormone-crazed teenager. He knew evil could hide in beautiful packages. Dr. Montague was an enemy. Not an innocent.

“The director threatened to throw me to his subjects,” she snapped. “When I discovered the lab, I saw du Braise in a berserker rage. He took a
bite
out of a man’s
throat
. I’d never seen rage like that. I thought my work could give the men some degree of sanity back until I found a way to free them.”

“That woman on the cigarette break? Laurel?” Her voice took on an earnest, cajoling tone. “We have a rescue planned for tonight.” She glanced around, as if searching for something. “What time is it? The rescue is scheduled to start at one thirty. We left chemicals mixed in our labs that will set off a series of explosions. One of the guards is going to help us.”

“Ri-ight. How convenient.” He flicked a disdainful glance over her. “You seriously expect me to believe that two scientists and a guard thought you could take out a well-trained security team and help these monstrous subjects escape?” Gutsy, but hopeless.
If
she was telling the truth.

“We had to do
something
. The men are in extreme physical and mental agony. Forced to commit hideous acts of violence. Dr. Kaufmann has to be stopped.”

Fuck. “What was that name?” Rafe asked with soft menace.

“Dr. Kaufmann. He called himself Dr. Pierce when he offered me the job, but his real name is Dr. Kaufmann.”

Holy. Crap. They’d guessed right. Kaufmann had survived and started his own program.

Rafe studied Dr. Montague. He still wasn’t sure if he believed her, though her outrage seemed real enough. There was more than a hint of evangelical fervor in her tone. If she was telling the truth, this could be exactly the situation they needed to get to Nate. He signaled subtly with his chin and Depaoli slipped out the door to tell the other team to keep a sharp eye on the lab. It was almost one thirty, so they’d see soon enough if she’d lied about the rescue. If she had, he’d make her give him access to the lab if he had to drag her there himself.

“Start at the beginning,” he told her. “From the moment you faked your death.”

She blinked once and her mouth fell open. “What are you talking about? I never pretended to be dead.”

“Then why are you listed as a fatality in a bus accident on your way home from Aruba?”

“But…Dr. Kaufmann picked me up in a private plane. I was never on any bus.”

Her pouty, puzzled frown seemed real enough. But he didn’t trust his instincts tonight. Because despite the evidence of her guilt, he wanted to believe in her innocence. Not because of deduction, but because he wanted her in every way a man wanted a woman.

He saw the instant she made the jump in logic. Her back stiffened and her eyes narrowed. “You’re saying Dr. Kaufmann faked my death? Why? What did it gain him?”

“Once you were declared dead, you fell off the radar,” Rafe explained. “You didn’t have any family to raise questions about what happened to you and your friends had no reason to suspect they’d been lied to. They believed you had died.” The
documentation surrounding her death had been expertly done. Another sign that Kaufmann had a powerful backer.

“No one searches for a dead woman,” he continued.
“
Which means no one accidentally stumbles upon the work that’s being done here. Kaufmann did the same for all the other staff.” The others also had no immediate family.

“Everyone? No, that’s impossible,” she protested. “We have almost three dozen people on staff. Surely someone would notice such a high number of deaths.”

Rafe shook his head, then remembered she couldn’t see him past the light shining at her, although at some point his aim had shifted unconsciously to her chin rather than her eyes. “Do you have any idea how many accidental deaths occur every day? Besides, back in your former lives, none of you worked or lived in the same area, so no one would see a pattern. He was safe.” But the staff weren’t. Rafe wondered if Dr. Montague would reach the same conclusion he had.

She pursed her lips as she thought. When the edges of her top teeth peeked out to worry her bottom lip, Rafe was hit with an unwelcome surge of lust.

Dammit. Not now!

“If we’re already dead, then there’s no way Dr. Kaufmann would want us to draw attention to ourselves and his project by suddenly returning to our lives.” She squinted into the light as if trying to read his expression. “He never planned to keep us alive, did he?”

Rafe was impressed. So much for her naïveté. “No. Probably not.”

He’d expected to see fear on her face. But instead, she looked pissed. And damn if he wasn’t starting to believe she really was telling the truth.

Depaoli slipped back into the room. “Boss, Team Two reports a disturbance at the lower level of the lab. And there’s a team of two security guards on their way to this cabin.”

G
abby froze at the man’s words. The one holding the knife jerked her hair, forcing her head back so she was almost staring at the ceiling, then dug the point of his knife into her throat until it broke the skin. A warm rivulet of blood slipped down her neck.

But it was the man behind the flashlight who snarled, “What the hell have you done? Sent out a silent alarm?”

“No!” Tears stung her eyes again. It wasn’t fair. He’d been softening toward her, she’d heard it in his voice. Now he thought she’d betrayed him, when the only explanation was that something had gone wrong with the rescue and she’d been found out. “I—”

“Can it.” The man switched off the flashlight. In the dark, she was acutely aware of every little sound. Her own panicked breathing. The scratch of her shirt sliding against the jacket of the man with the knife as his arms caged her in. The faint creak of the door opening. Soft rustling that was probably her bedcovers.

She sensed more than heard the man reenter the bathroom. Her night vision was coming online. He’d left the door cracked just enough for her to see the glow of the clock radio.

As the silence lengthened, it felt like the men around her were growing in size and weight, until they took up all the room and stole all the air. Her rapid, shallow breaths sounded as loud as a rocket engine.

She knew it was her panicked imagination, she really did, but that didn’t calm her down. A scream built up in her throat, demanding to be let loose. She clamped her back teeth together, swallowed the scream and fiercely told herself that if she lost it she’d give away their position and get them all killed.

As if to punctuate her thoughts, the main bedroom door squeaked open. Gabby heard two faint pffts, like air being discharged from a pressurized canister, then heavy footsteps crossed her bedroom. A man swore softly.

Faster than she could track, the men around her rushed out of the bathroom.

Except for the one behind her. He released the knife from her throat, picked her up around the waist and tossed her into the bathtub.

“Don’t move,” he breathed. He pulled the shower curtain closed.

And left her alone.

W
hat the fuck was going on? Rafe stared at the pillows he’d shoved underneath Dr. Montague’s covers when Depaoli had reported the security men heading toward the cabin.

He’d figured Dr. Montague had betrayed them and had braced for an assault aimed at his team. He hadn’t expected an assassination attempt against her. But before he’d died, the older of the two security guards had admitted their orders were to kill Dr. Montague, then dump her body in the woods outside the compound’s lower level, where a truck would pick up her corpse. Just another body for disposal at the crematorium.

Fuck. She’d been telling the truth. The thought of her dead, of her body burning, made Rafe want to hit something. Instead, he scrubbed his hand over his hair.

“Boss, we’ve got smoke pouring out of the lower level labs,” Muldovsky’s voice came over the com link. “The garage door is opening. People are streaming out. There’s fighting…Fuck.”

“Report,” Rafe snapped.

“It’s Nate. Christ, he’s like the Tasmanian Devil on steroids. Fighting like a wild thing. Tearing at the security guards with his bare hands.”

Screw this. Rafe gave orders to his team to move out. “We’re heading your way,” he told Muldovsky.

O’Ryan nodded toward the dead men on the bedroom floor.

Rafe muted his mic. “Bring ‘em,” he said. “We’ll dump them at the compound.”

“Yee-haw!” Muldovsky crowed over the com link. “One of the transport trucks just came racing out of the garage like Indiana Jones escaping the Nazis. And Nate just jumped on board.”

“Get control of the truck,” Rafe told him. “Then load up your team. Watch for us along the road. We’re driving to the rendezvous tonight.” They had Nate. Mission accomplished. It was time to get the hell out of Dodge.

“What about the lady doctor?” O’Ryan asked.

Rafe thought about large, frightened eyes and the courage it had taken to plan an escape. He’d find some way to make up for scaring her.

Shoving open the bathroom door, he said, “She’s coming with us.”

Chapter 6

G
abby lay huddled in the bathtub, fighting to hear something, anything over the frantic beating of her heart. She needed to know what was happening in the other room. Was there a fight? Had her mysterious visitors left? Were Kaufmann’s men waiting for her in the cabin?

Or was she alone?

Whatever was going on, she refused to just lie here, waiting helplessly for someone to come fetch her. Using her shoulder to brace her body against the side of the tub, she tucked her bound feet underneath her and shoved upright into an awkward kneeling position.

Unable to see which way was up through the impenetrable darkness, she felt for a moment like she was falling. She pressed her bound hands against the wall and flexed her toes against the bottom of the tub to force her brain to recognize where she was in space.

When her inner ear had adjusted to the new position, and her breathing was calm enough to allow her to hear, she strained to pick up any sound from the bedroom. But the men had shut the door behind them and she couldn’t judge whether she was alone or not.

Still, maybe it was better to stay safely here in the tub, hidden by the shower curtain. That way, if Kaufmann’s men were out there, she’d have a few precious moments to prepare for attack once the bathroom door opened. After sorting through her options, she decided to lie on her back in the tub despite the pain that caused her bound arms. Bending her knees and raising her feet, she prepared to kick out at any attacker. The position seemed rather silly, but at least this way she didn’t feel so helpless.

To give her tired legs a break, she lowered her heels until they rested on the rim of the bathtub. And waited in suffocating silence for something to happen.

An interminable amount of time later, the sharp snick of the bathroom door handle engaging caused her whole body to jerk. She bent her legs, prepared to strike.

“Dr. Montague,” a familiar voice said as the light from a flashlight glowed beyond the shower curtain. It was ridiculous the way her heart leapt to hear the voice of the man who’d pinned her to the bed. But there it was. His husky whisper, despite having threatened her life minutes ago, now gave her a sense of security.