Kate Donovan - Exit Strategy

“Shit,” Ortega muttered. “Why don’t you just draw him a fucking map?”

“If I could, I would,” she assured him. Then she reminded Carerra, “You said you had two questions?”

“Yes, thank you. I-” He stopped when Carl returned with the barrette in his hand. Examining it quickly, he said, “I see the camera. Very clever. Angelina, do you recognize this?”

To Miranda’s shock, Angelina Carerra stepped out of the hallway and into view for the first time, her movements tentative and unassuming. Accepting the accessory from her husband, she nodded. “It’s true, Benito. She was wearing this at BGS.”

“Hey.” Miranda gave the woman a hesitant smile, uncertain of the reception she would receive. In South America, they had been kindred spirits. But this Angelina was nothing like that one. If Miranda had seen her on the street, she would not have recognized her.

The wife’s posture was submissive, almost to an extreme. There was none of the bravado that had made her so memorable during their last encounter. But this Angelina was special, too-quiet, lovely, graceful. She was visibly making an effort not to look at Ortega, as though the handsome agent might be able to seduce her again, right in front of her maniac husband. And she didn’t seem all that wild about making eye contact with Miranda, either.

The thought that Angelina had gotten in trouble for letting Miranda escape in South America was a concern, but she decided she had enough to do just saving Kell and Ortega. She simply couldn’t handle anyone else. So she settled for giving the wife a smile and saying, “Nice to see you again.”

Angelina grimaced. “I do not know what to think of you. You lied to me. Especially about him,” she added, gesturing unhappily in Ortega’s direction.

“I lied about a lot of things. But not about him. He really did screw me over.” Miranda paused while Carerra and Tork laughed. Then she insisted, “I just wanted to get out of there without being arrested. It never occurred to me that you were part of this.”

The Brigadier stepped up to Ortega. “I’m curious. What is this Miranda woman to you?”

“At the moment, a pain in the ass,” he muttered. Then he added firmly, “She’s just a rookie, Carerra. Let her go. I’m the guy who shot you in the neck. Not Miranda. And not Kell, either. Jonathan’s been religiously loyal to your fucking Brigade.”

“Enough.” Carerra turned to Carl. “Is there a dungeon on these premises?”

The guard nodded. “In the basement.”

“Transfer the prisoners. We will continue the interrogation down there.”

“Why?” Miranda demanded. “I’ve told you everything you need to know.”

Carerra flashed a wide grin. “Haven’t you heard? There are many reasons to torture a person. To get information, certainly. But it is also underrated as a sport. Just ask Jonathan. And speaking of simpering traitors-” He touched Carl’s shoulder and suggested coldly, “Take Kell to the dungeon as well.”

“No!” Miranda’s heart almost stopped. “He’s been so loyal. And you need him to succeed with your plan.”

“All I ever needed from him was the fear drug. Which reminds me. Tork? Find it. It has to be in this lab somewhere.” A smile flitted across his lips. “I believe we have found the perfect subjects upon whom to test it.”

Under the supervision of the hulking Tork, the guards forced Miranda and Ortega down a steep set of stairs that led to the dungeon, relying on the cuffs on their wrists and the weapons at their throats to control them. Meanwhile, Jonathan Kell, while unbound, was so miserably unnerved-so tormented by fears gone amuck-that he had to be flung over Carl’s shoulder and carried.

Even in midafternoon the dungeon was dark, with its only illumination coming from the open door at the top of the stairwell and a narrow one-foot-long window near the ceiling that afforded a glimpse of the ground outside and not much more. Miranda knew that even if she stood on Ortega’s shoulders to reach it, she couldn’t possibly slip through, although she’d be more than willing to try, assuming the opportunity ever presented itself.

The stone walls were damp, a fact the prisoners learned firsthand when they were pinned against one so that their handcuffs could be replaced with manacles imbedded in the stone. Their wrists were fastened to the wall above their heads, while individual leg irons at the ends of short chains kept their ankles from moving more than a foot or so in any direction. Miranda’s position was less than a yard from Ortega on one side, with Kell on the other side of her, but they might as well have been separated by miles for all the good they could do one another beyond moral support.

Carerra paced back and forth in front of them, enjoying his role as captor, regaling them with stories from his ten years of clandestine life. It had taken three of those years, along with four surgeries, he told them, before he had regained his voice. During that time, he had hidden himself away, running the business through Angelina with great success while also “elevating” himself into “enlightenment,” as he called it, by immersing himself in great works of philosophy. He claimed that Kell’s political ramblings about small, mobile powerhouses with no geographic limits had inspired him, and eventually, he had decided to assemble a team to mount a global coup.

He had needed Kell on that team, he admitted without hesitation, not so much for refinement of the concept, since Carerra had already honed it to perfection, but for the antiphobia drug he was sure the scientist had discovered in the time since his captivity. Proceeding through a complicated web of intermediaries, he had finally made contact with his old victim, and the Brigade had been formed. The other elements of the plan-finance, military, and communications-had fallen into place thereafter with such ease, Carerra considered it a sign from heaven that he was destined to be the father of this new political institution.

Originally he had kept his identity a secret for practical purposes, certain that Kell would never knowingly work for him. But the mystique had done wonders for the group dynamic in other ways, and had distracted and confounded the intelligence community when they had finally become aware that something new was in the air.

“The only small disappointment,” Carerra admitted, “was Jonathan’s antifear drug. I had hoped it would usher in a new era of combat, arming the Brigade with superhuman forces. But his power drug worked best on phobics, not soldiers. There was a silver lining, however. One of the early formulae backfired, intensifying rather than alleviating fear. When I heard about that, I knew we had found our new era of combat, not by strengthening Brigade forces, but by weakening our enemy.”

Miranda winced. She had been studying Carerra closely, reluctantly fascinated by his egomaniacal ramblings. But this new mention of the fear drug reminded her that their ordeal had only just begun. Carerra planned to administer it to them, and then to torture them, knowing that their reactions would be intensified by the drug.

For Kell, the man of many fears, it would be unbearable. For Miranda, perhaps it would be survivable. After all, she didn’t have that many actual phobias. Kell had identified most of them, with closed-in spaces and the corresponding lack of perceptible air being the only one that was abnormally intense. The others-the dark, bugs, snakes, rodents-would be manageable, given the fact that the dungeon, like the rest of Kell’s home, was relatively spotless.

There were certainly no snakes, although theoretically some could slither in through the window. The walls were old enough to hide holes that rodents could inhabit, but without a source of food, she imagined they had long since abandoned those old nests. She also hadn’t spotted a single spider or web, or any other bug for that matter, during her entire stay at the fortress.