from you. You sent him out there, somewhere far from home. You sent him out there, and he isn’t back. You wouldn’t be contacting me if you thought everything was okay. He’s sick and I want you to get out there and bring him home to me. Am I clear?”
“We are doing all that we can. I’m going to ask you again not to come back to this room. If you access the system again, I’ll be forced to lock out Alex’s account, and if he can’t access it, he can’t get in touch with us. Believe me, I’m really hoping he’ll be back and logging in personally soon. I also hope he contacts you, Mrs. Tempest, and I hope that he’s home soon.”
Brin reached for the keyboard, ready to pound out an angry reply, but the window closed and she was returned to the outer chat room, filled with her own message repeated over and over. She closed the program and sat back, lost in thought.
Oddly, her mind returned to the lab and the work she’d been immersed in. Something was tugging at her mind, and she couldn’t quite locate it. Then it hit her. The Far East. The research had come from the MRIS complex near Beijing. It was a long shot, but if Hershel Rand had connections in the Beijing office, and if she could think of a way to ask for his help without giving away anything important—not too much of a stretch since she had no idea where Alex was or what he was doing—she might be able to enlist his help in finding Alex. At least it was a starting point.
Maybe she could even request a business visit to China to consult with the original research team.
She suddenly felt worlds better. She was thinking and planning, and she knew that, whether or not they were useful in the end, there were things she could be doing. At least she’d be geo-graphically closer to him than she was now. Alex had always said that if she had a plan and an open road, she could do anything.
Alex opened his eyes and his first thought was that that bastard Dayne had cut out both of his eyes. He couldn’t see. Then he blinked, and felt no pain, and calmed slightly. He did his best not to move. It was very hard to concentrate through the pain. Every twitch brought a new spasm to his thighs and his hands. He was so cramped he wasn’t certain he could move at all, should he decide to do so.
Then there were the more natural pains. His shoulder ached. It was numb, but the pain had begun to spread down his arm and back. It didn’t feel infected, not yet, but he was certain no care had been taken in applying his dressing. His head throbbed, as well, sending a ringing through his ears when he coughed drily.
He took stock of his body, bit by bit. He had no way to know how much more “fun” Dayne might have had with him after he passed out. For his body, unconsciousness was a simple escape mechanism. He’d hoped that they would believe he’d lost too much blood from the gunshot wounds and just passed out. They didn’t know much about him, so they wouldn’t be surprised to see him display a sign of weakness. Apparently, his ruse had worked.
Moving first one foot and then the other, he tested his legs, which, while sore and cramped, seemed to be functional for the moment. He had no specific pain in his back or sides. As he worked his way up his body, checking for new damage and assessing the impact of the old, he listened. He heard the distant hum of machinery. The sound echoed, as if down a metal-decked passage, but there was nothing else. He heard no footsteps, no murmur of voices. Wherever they’d taken him, they’d left him alone.
Still, he tried not to move noticeably. If they were watching him, waiting for him to regain consciousness, he didn’t want to tip them off by any sudden movement. He needed time to regroup. He slowly tried to move his hands, and realized that they were bound together with a length of plastic cording, but not tied to anything else. The floor was cool, metallic, he thought, and he assumed he was on one of the two lower levels. It wasn’t a deck plate, so he wouldn’t be sliding out through any cable troughs, but if he could find a way to get free, he was still in the portion of the complex most crucial to his mission.
At this thought, he nearly laughed, and had to bite back the sudden rush of emotion.
“At any cost,” he mumbled.
He had never felt as much pain as he did at that moment. He felt a bit short of breath, but every time he took more than a tiny gulp of air into his lungs, a wave of nausea shot through his gut, and he bit it off. Slowly he moved his left leg, bending it at the knee and drawing it up. He tested the joints, found everything intact, returned it to its original position and did the same with his right leg. He listened for a while, heard nothing and began the same process with his arms. His joints ached like fire, but they moved, and he was able to bend and straighten both arms, then press himself gently up off the floor a few inches. He did this several times, using the simple push-up as a test of strength and agility. Despite his injuries, and the rush of blood to the wound in his temple every time he exerted himself, he was able to function.
It was enough.
Finally, there was nothing to do but wait. He wanted to be certain that his motion hadn’t been enough to trigger some alarm or bring the guards back down on him. Alex half expected Dayne to step out of a dark corner, cradling his blade, that sinister smile welcoming him back to the world of the conscious with more fun and games. But it didn’t happen. For whatever reason, they’d stashed him and left him alone, and that meant he had a window, albeit a very small window, to put together a plan, if that was possible.
Alex sat up slowly, crossed his legs, despite the pain this brought him, and worked to relax. He needed to think. As he sat, he stretched, trying to bring his stiff muscles to life and get himself to whatever level of readiness was possible. He had no real way to assess his wounds, no way to know how haphazard the Chinese doctor’s treatment had been and no idea when, or for what purpose, they might return to retrieve him.
He heard a sound in the distance and froze. He thought about returning to his prone position and feigning unconsciousness, but if they were coming for him now, it probably meant he’d been right and they knew he was awake. Prone on the floor would just put him in a more vulnerable position. He closed his eyes and waited, then opened them again, trying to get the proper pupil dilation to pierce the darkness. There was simply nothing to see. He might be in a tiny cell, or a huge, open room. He needed to know.
Even more slowly than he’d moved when sitting up, Alex got to his feet. He nearly toppled as vertigo hit, a combination of the utter darkness, the pounding pulse in his head and nausea. He wavered, then managed to crouch and balance, and began moving away from where he stood. He found a wall within three feet on his left, and began to follow this to the right. Then he stopped, bracing his hands against the wall for balance.
He’d heard another sound. The scrape of a shoe?
Something dropped, but there was no curse, and there were no voices. Alex rested against the wall, thinking hard about his next move. If he attacked too quickly, or failed, he would surely be beaten, and then dragged back to whatever torture Dayne still had planned. If he waited too long, they’d notice he had moved, be on their guard and, in his weakened state, they’d probably get him without much of a struggle. He silently cursed the lack of light and began moving again, slowly, searching the floor by brushing his foot ahead of him, hoping he’d come across something he could use as a weapon.
The sounds drew closer together and nearer to Alex. He heard breathing and soft footsteps.
Whoever it was wasn’t in a hurry to reveal his or her presence. Alex wondered what that meant.
Could it be Dayne? Might he be hoping to come back in private and finish up what he’d started?
He pressed against the wall as the steps drew nearer. He tried to gauge from the sound where the door might be, and he worked his way along one wall toward it. He came to a corner, and, after a quick shuffle along this second wall, his fingers brushed the frame of a doorway. It was a standard door frame, but when he reached around it, he found that the door itself was formed of a frame-work of welded metal bars.
A voice hissed through the darkness.
“Vance?”
He froze. The voice was familiar.
“Vance, where are you?”
Alex stepped to the barred door and peered out.
A second later he detected motion in the utter darkness, heard a snap of sound, and a small lighter was lit. When his eyes recovered from the slash of light and adjusted, he saw Liang grinning at him in the small, flickering pool of light.
“Liang?” he said stupidly.
“Who else?” Liang asked.
“What the hell are you doing here?”
“Seems pretty obvious to me,” Liang said, pulling a tool from his belt. “I’m here to save your sorry American ass. I was ordered to come and get you out.”
“But how did you get in?” Alex asked.
