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“That’s right!” Mac said angrily. “Your idiotic zombie theory! For fuck’s sake, Caleb, you might have got us all killed!”
“Mac, you’ve got to listen…there’s evidence…”
“Evidence of what?”
“Dan Murdoch was Primus. He uncovered the Frankenstein Project…they’re experimenting on people, Mac, and Primus was afraid they’d come for the children…”
“You’re twenty-three, Caleb. Grow up! Life is not some stupid video game—you’re not saving the world!” His gaze was cold and furious and unwavering.
“But we are…at least we’re trying to. You have to listen, Mac. There’s a book. They killed Primus for it… I thought Theo had killed Primus for them… I was afraid for you.”
“Who is them?” Mac wasn’t sure he wanted to know, but he asked anyway.
“The Minotaur…that’s what Primus called them.” Caleb brightened at what he thought was a sign of interest. “They’re an alliance of corporate giants who think they can cure death.”
For a few seconds Mac said nothing. Caleb’s explanations only made him angrier. “This is stupid,” he said finally. “Completely and utterly stupid, but even if it weren’t, I trusted you, Caleb. Despite everything, I counted on you. Since when do you betray family?”
Caleb wiped his face. He knew what he knew, but Mac was right. He had broken faith with his family. For the past six months he’d lived in terror of them finding out. Suddenly, he was a child again, appealing to his big brother. “Are you going to tell?”
“I’ve already told Gus. You’re lucky he’s in no condition to beat the hell out of you, because I don’t think I’d stop him. But I won’t tell the others, and neither will he, but you have to show us everything you’ve been posting on whatever dark web sites you’ve been accessing. I want to know why the hell this thing blew up the way it did!”
CHAPTER 31
Mac Etheridge lent Gus Benton his shoulder for the spiral staircase that led up to the tower. Gus was able to walk on crutches now, but stairs were tough physically. Everything else was tough in other ways.
But still, they were at least free men now.
Mac’s return had been a grind of rebuilding bridges and networks, reassuring old clients, and reestablishing his reputation. And readjusting after months of incarceration and interrogation.
Still, he’d had a job to return to, something on which to anchor his life; Gus Benton’s career had been destroyed by what had happened. He’d been forced out of his own firm, and in the months that followed his release from the hospital, it became clear that he was not going to be welcomed into another. His house had been burned down by Mary Cowell’s grieving father in a drama that had brought the media down upon him again. It had been one thing after another, but though it seemed that Theo had transferred her payout from their grandfather’s trust to Gus around the time she disappeared, he steadfastly refused to touch it.
“Whoa!” Mac grabbed Gus as one crutch slipped and clattered down the stairs. Gus swore.
Mac pulled Gus’s arm over his shoulder. “Do you want to stop?”
“No… It’ll be just as bloody hard going down.”
They limped up the last steps and Mac eased Gus into a chair. “You all right?”
“Dandy.”
Mac’s housekeeper followed them up with a tray of coffee and sandwiches, and the crutch, which she had retrieved from the bottom of the staircase. Gus exhaled, mildly mortified by the ease with which the middle-aged woman managed the stairs. She poured the coffee and left them to it.
Mac was aware that Gus Benton had of late given up coffee and tea for something harder, self-medicating pain of all sorts with bourbon and gin, but he wanted him completely sober for this conversation. He needed to know exactly what had happened if he was going to help Gus, if they were ever going to find Theo.
“Okay, Mac,” Gus said, “what was so confidential that we couldn’t talk at a bar?”
“Do you want to tell me why you stabbed Jacob Curtis?”
Gus’s eyes hardened and flashed. “Not really.”
“Do it anyway.”
For a moment Gus resisted, and then he sighed. “Jacob Curtis was part of the community in which we lived when we were in Tassie. A place called Harmony. We grew our own food, made our own clothes, were home-schooled and had very little to do with the outside world.”
“Curtis says you stabbed him because he was spending time with Theo…that you were pathologically jealous of anyone who even spoke to your little sister.”
Gus responded with a string of profanity. If he’d been able, he might have left.
