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“Wouldn’t you like to know, Kam?”
“I’m going to make you my slave, Dr. Payne. You wait and see.”
“So much for shifter solidarity. So, tell me Kam, why are you telling me all of this?”
She laughed. “You’re smart enough to know the answer.”
Unfortunately, she was right. She’d given him a lot of information, which combined with the data Carson had already smuggled out and the information Emery had put together should give the Resistance a real leg up on what was going on. The only reason she’d have indulged his curiosity to this point was if she fully expected him never to leave Reykjavik.
She didn’t say anything else. She just let the horror of what they planned and what was about to happen to him sink in. She snapped her fingers and the two goons from outside came in with a gurney.
Mason struggled against the restraints, but he could do nothing to stop Perkins from injecting a strong sedative into his system.
“Prepare him. See that he’s secured and taken to Lower Level Three. Put him in a separate cell where he can hear the others. Let’s see how he handles knowing what is going to come. I don’t think he’s going to tell us what we want to know.” She stroked his torso possessively and cupped his groin. “He will serve us in other ways.”
The last thing his conscious mind was able to comprehend was being strapped to the gurney and wheeled out of his room, its wonky wheel squealing and trying to have its way. How the hell were they going to take over the world when they couldn’t even operate a functional gurney?
In the dim recesses of his mind, as the darkness closed in, his cave lion roared.
CHAPTER 15
EMERY
Emery had never given up wearing a watch even though there were plenty of other ways to tell time including her cell phone, her laptop, and the clock on the wall. But still, it was her vintage Rolex she’d given herself as a graduation present. For her the watch was a symbol of stability and that she had achieved the first milestone in her career. Glancing down, she could see she had fifteen minutes until the appointed time.
Earlier in the day, she’d toured the atrium and the rest of Lower Level Three again as it had become part of her daily routine. As far as she could tell, there was no entrance from the atrium to the tunnel system. That had led to her taking an extended tour of the level on which her office/lab was located. Diagonally across from her office was a small office at what appeared to be a dead end. Inside was a man sitting all alone at a desk. Emery had walked past, trying the door to the office, trying to sneak as much of a look as she could through the small window in the door without being obvious.
For the first time, she noticed an alcove just past the office where instead of a door there was a discreet metal latch set into the wall itself. Afraid to pull on it to see if it would open, lest she give her presence away, she took the time to inspect it to see if it could, in fact, be a handle. It hadn’t appeared to be locked or blocked—just closed off and nondescript. It would be risky, for sure, to bring Mason down here, but she felt time running out like the sands in an hourglass. There was no alternative viable escape. This was their best bet.
Tick! Tick! Tick!
She wasn’t sure why she considered it to be an event for which secret agents or special forces operatives might synchronize their watches, but she did. It was almost as if she could feel each tick of the secondhand as it moved around the watch face, even though it actually glided as opposed to ticking.
She watched as the seconds moved inexorably toward the seminal time.
Tick! Tick! Tick!
She saved the files on her laptop and began to shut it down, moved and ensured her microscope had been turned off and put away for the evening. She made a last-minute pit stop to her washroom before moving to the wall of windows overlooking the atrium.
Tick! Tick! Tick!
She was having trouble feeling Mason on the other end of the link. Even when he slept, she could usually feel him. It was only when they’d sedated him into an almost comatose state that the link seemed to weaken.
Tick! Tick! Tick!
She glanced up at the clock on the wall. She should have enough time to rendezvous with Terry. Surely, he meant to help them, but what would she do if his intent was to betray them?
She walked to the door leading from her office to the hallway and paused. She took a deep breath, exhaled, and opened the door. She stepped into the hallway, noting the absence of anyone else and made her way to the elevator, her heels clicking in rhythm to the persistent march of time.
Tick! Tick! Tick!
As she headed to the rendezvous point, she passed Terry along the way. He didn’t pause or even look her in the eye; he just kept whistling. It took her a minute to recognize the tune. She smiled. She and Terry had once discussed over coffee their mutual admiration of the band Journey, especially when their lead singer had been Steve Perry. Terry was whistling Journey’s Don’t Stop Believin’. It had been one of her personal theme songs since the first time she’d heard it. As it always did, it resonated within her, and she took both peace and strength from it.
Tick! Tick! Tick!
Terry gave her a pleasant little nod—the same kind she imagined he’d give to anyone at NLGP—but he managed to catch her eye and glanced at the cameras that lined the ceilings at precise intervals. Surreptitiously, she observed them and saw that the red indicator lights were blinking. He flashed two fingers and then a zero. Twenty. Terry was telling her she had twenty minutes before the cameras came back online.
Tick! Tick! Tick!
