Wish Her Well (11 page)

Amanda couldn’t keep up. She was still stuck at the beginning of the conversation where Nicole had been found, but couldn’t remember anything.

The doctors in Arizona, Thomas had said. The officer at the FBI desk had said a detective calling from Arizona. It was clearly not their first phonecall about ‘the Arizona girl.’ Thomas had suspected Nicole’s whereabouts and condition for quite some time without telling anyone.

Instead of feeling a surge of anger or suspicion, she just felt crushed. No wonder Thomas wanted her to leave Fantasy Heights.

Watching Thomas and Phillip have a silent conversation conducted via body language and raw nerve endings, she knew the two men would never rest until they’d caught whoever had harmed Nicole. And her questions about amnesia and Janos and Kay Taylor could wait. For now, it was enough to be inside of this room instead of cemented out.

Wordlessly, Amanda began to pick up shards of mug. Both men tracked her with their eyes, as if they couldn’t quite understand why she would bother.

Eventually it was Phillip who broke the strained standoff, coming to join her.

Thomas said, “Amanda, I need to deal with Josh. Don’t go home tonight. Stay in your cabin.”

“I’ll see to her,” Phillip said.

Only once Thomas had gone did Amanda brave a question. “Who or what is Janos?”

He nodded. “It’s a ‘what.’ A bunch of psychological and medical experiments that brought the Accord into being. Right after they bought this facility and the Prescotts found themselves hip-deep in wealthy, connected clients, they got greedy and decided to try their hand at spying and espionage for hire. They hired physicians and psychiatrists to probe the idea that no one is more susceptible to influence than when they’re in love, or in those moments after orgasm. The Prescott scientists took that to an extreme. Drugs. Physical alteration. Blackmail, torture, you name it, they did it to override a subject’s free will and ensure certain outcomes in politics, financial markets, science, commerce… They called it the Janos Project. People were ruined and killed. Hundreds of test subjects and God only knows how many targets. Many of them right here in these tunnels.”

Amanda felt sick with a rising panic, a need to get out of this room, out of the tunnels, away from Fantasy Heights.

“What you’re feeling right now,” Phillip said, “is only a fraction of what Steph and Joshua and Jennifer feel every day. Can you imagine the shame they feel, knowing what their predecessors were capable of? I can only imagine what it must have been like when the program was first discovered. Back then, the Mob and law enforcement had to pull together to hunt down and snuff out all the scientists and subjects. God knows if they ever got them all, but the Accord did their best to destroy the program and quarantine all these records.”

He motioned at the room around them.

“That is, until Kay Prescott, Josh’s wife, came into power. When informed about the Janos project, instead of being horrified, she saw opportunity. She started a company called Harvestment. One component of the company is familiar to you. DriveRate. Another, we fear, is a revival of the Janos project, and they, unlike Kay, are still very much alive and kicking. The symptoms Nicole is exhibiting, the amnesia, strange drug compounds and the localized head trauma sound very much like a Janos cleansing.”

“Cleansing?”

“Whoever did this interfered with Nicole’s ability to record and access memory. And if they did things the way they used to back in the day, we can’t just wish her well again. If she recovers, there will be multiple miracles involved.”

Poor Nicole. Provided any of this was true, why? Why would anyone do such things to another human being?

Phillip continued. “I’m not sure what you’re thinking right now, but don’t blame Josh. He had no idea what sort of monster he’d married until it was far too late. And he thought all of this was over, that Janos was buried again once Dixon killed Kay. And then to be suspected of her murder, a crime he must have dreamed of committing himself… I wouldn’t trade places with him for the world.”

She hardly noticed when Phillip backed her gently into a chair. Limp and shocked, she collapsed into it, grateful, yet wishing he would stop—praying he would stop—talking.

He didn’t. “Thomas’s position is no better, these days. There isn’t much he wouldn’t do for Josh. But he can’t protect him from the truth, that Kay drilled down through the ventilation system to steal Janos files from this room. That Josh went through hell for nothing, because Janos is still out there, alive and thriving, hurting people.”

“We have to stop them.”

“Agreed. But we have to clean our own house first. We have to ferret out these operatives active inside Fantasy Heights.”

“But why do they need people here? I don’t understand.”

“Harvestment has always used this place to prey on clients and scout recruits from the staff. If ever their hunting grounds or operatives are endangered, they have someone in position to issue a correction. And when I say correction, I mean ‘fatality.’ So we have to be extremely careful and extremely secretive about how we proceed.”

She nodded, though at this point, she wasn’t sure what she might be agreeing with.

Phillip said, “If you’re serious about staying here, about helping, then you will do whatever you have to do to make sure the resort runs smoothly. We don’t threaten the hunting grounds, we don’t threaten their people. Until we have a better understanding what and who we’re up against, we can’t afford to goad them into making a correction.”

That much, she did understand. Thomas had been telling her all along to do the job. Do the job, nothing more. Keep the clients happy and the business profitable.

She’d had no idea what was at stake.

The rest of that night was something of a blur. She did remember Helen taking her through tunnels, exiting the spot nearest the staff cabins and walking her the rest of the way. With one last order to be safe, Helen left her to get settled in. The staff cabin was a confining step down from the townhouse but at least help was much closer to hand if anything happened.

First thing in the morning, Beverly called to pass on a message from Kara.

“Don’t keep her waiting,” Beverly ordered. “There’s thirty people taking part in the Parlor Game, and they all have to go through wardrobe.”

Max dropped by a short while later with bad news. Jerod had been unable to locate either Derek or Ridley. The two had disappeared. Thomas was chasing down leads—with help; Wade had been sufficiently rattled to involve the FBI proper immediately this time.

That explained, she thought, why Wade hadn’t called this morning to see if she’d learned anything about Thomas. The rest of the day, she heard nothing from Phillip or Helen, either.

Thomas texted her three times. The first one said no new developments. The second text—about tables and pizza and passenger seats and being forcibly stripped in a hallway—made her blush. His third message said he’d see her at the Parlor Game.

The hours dragged until the cleaning started. So full up on nervous energy, she had to vent it somewhere and the cabin took the brunt. While she scrubbed and dusted and organized, her mind could not keep away from those tunnels. Flashes of imagined horrors, of medical experiments and moaning victims, and the monsters who were so detached from basic human decency that they could do such things, kept battering away at her. She tried to offset it with remembered sensations from Thomas. Josh, too, but then she would remember Derek and Ridley were missing, and she would be back to square one again.

The chaos of wardrobe came as a relief. Pregame preparations were in full swing, with staff and client alike being carefully made up and dressed. When it was Amanda’s turn to be transformed into the dark-side Veronica Lake again, Kara kept making eye contact in the mirror, giving her little meaningful looks.

“What?” Amanda finally asked.

“Do you know what’s going on? Did they tell you why they substituted Jerod and Marla in for Derek and Ridley?”

Amanda fought to maintain her composure. Word must not be out, yet. No one knew Derek and Ridley were missing, and now Jerod and Marla would have to take their places in the Parlor Game.

But what to tell Kara? “Yes, I do know. Can I tell you afterward?”

Kara frowned at her. “Why can’t you tell me now?”

“Sorry. Later is the best I can do.”

She carried Kara’s suspicious look all the way across the quad to the
Isle of Wight
. Every building in the resort was full up of people participating in various events but this place, the people taking part in the Parlor Game, seemed to be the elite.

This time, dressed in black-orchid silk, and dripping in gold and gems, Amanda felt more at home in the exclusive venue. The tables had been moved to the perimeter of the central, oval-shaped dining area. All the action would take place in the fifteen private rooms connected to the
Isle
.

If Amanda understood the rules correctly, the first part of the Parlor Game consisted of each participant writing down a wish, either something they wanted done to them, or something they wished they could do to someone else. All the wishes would be gathered up and put into some sort of lottery machine that would, at random, pair up two participants and two wishes, not necessarily their own. The catch was, each wish had to be carried out completely. Once those were complete, anyone who wanted could return to the
Isle
for round two. Or three, or so on.

There was a lot of money involved. Clients donated six figures to take part. The resort matched funds up to a hundred grand for each staff member on set. Amanda hadn’t heard the final number but knew the beneficiary would have a record donation this year.

Champagne flowed. Jewels and laughter glittered. It all seemed a bit unreal to Amanda, who, like all the staffers, mingled and made sure the clients were relaxed and enjoying themselves while brainstorming their wishes.

Eventually a stream of attendants came out with the paper and pencils, arranging them on tables so people could write down their wishes. Amanda, knowing she could be paired with virtually anyone, male or female, planned to keep hers simple.

The slips of paper were pre-printed with ‘
I wish you would
:’ Amanda filled in
let me tie you up and get you off by hand.

After tucking their wishes into small white envelopes, everyone went back to socializing again until the game’s centerpiece was wheeled in on a cart. She’d heard about it from Beverly; the contraption had been made for the Prescotts way back in the brothel days by a favored client. It looked rather like a Christmas tree made out of red, blue, green and gold Faberge-style eggs, but the base of it was some sort of heavy black metal showing grooves and tracks and a couple gears. Each one of the eggs was about four inches tall. There were thirty eggs exactly, one for each participant, connected to some sort of inner mechanism.

An attendant went to work. He turned a crank on the base, then pulled a lever. She took a surprised step back when something on the inside of the structure began to turn, and the ‘tree’ began to expand. Fine metal workings inside that thing made the eggs spin and twist and change positions until the rods stood straight out, the eggs now dangling like cars on a Ferris wheel.

Each of the participants were invited to come forward, open an egg and take the wish envelope and room key tucked inside. Amanda went third, after Marla and a client she didn’t know.

Her first hint that there might be shenanigans involved was, after Jerod and Thomas had taken their egg’s contents, they had a brief but heated argument, and traded keys and envelopes.

She hoped no one else had noticed. With a furtive glance around, she noticed that, with the exception of herself and Marla, everyone else was too busy having whispered arguments and swapping keys to care one jot what Thomas and Jerod might be doing.

Whatever, she thought. While the attendant closed eggs, she retreated to the
Isle’s
foyer, up the stairs and followed the balcony around to room twelve. Lovely room with a glass-bead mosaic ceiling and walls, ornate sleigh-bed like something straight out of Arabian nights. It helped to get her mind off the troubles, and she could suddenly understand how Thomas could turn himself over so completely to the fantasies. They were respite, a break from the worry and fear and subterfuge. If she were him, she would throw herself into this work, too.

And she did. There wasn’t anything she could do to help Nicole or Derek or Ridley right then except make sure the resort ran smoothly. To do that, she had to please her client. And then she was actually interested to find out who would come through that door, and what sort of wishes they had in those envelopes.

Half tempted to peek, she was about to un-tuck the envelope’s flap when the door on the wrong side of the room opened. Thomas came in through the service corridor. Not a hint of shame on his features. With two glasses of champagne in one hand, the key still in the other, and the corner of the envelope held in his teeth, he came in and closed the door with his foot.

She relieved him of one champagne glass and the envelope, feeling a greedy, jubilant rush of anticipation. “Cheat much?”

He took the envelope back. “I thought I might have to arm-wrestle Jerod for your room key.”