sensitive friend was going to work this through on his own without getting too upset.
“I don’t understand,” Kell said finally.
“I think you do,” Ortega told him. “Deep inside, you know I’m not the Brigadier. Isn’t that so?”
Kell stared.
“It was the only way I could get in here. To rescue Miranda, who clearly didn’t need rescuing. It was an act, Jonathan. I apologize, but at the time, I thought it was necessary.”
“He did it for me,” Miranda agreed. “And then I convinced him we should stay.”
“To get information from me?” Kell whispered. “To bring down the Brigade? And I was so stupid. I trusted you. Now I’m a dead man. The real Brigadier will kill me for betraying him.”
“The real Brigadier.” Ortega nodded. “The one who used the sample on his own wife, transforming her from a battered woman to a confident, independent female for a few hours.”
Kell’s hand went to his throat, and Miranda knew he thought it was closing up. And maybe it was! She had felt that way for a few seconds on the airplane, and she didn’t scare easily. For Kell, this nightmare had to be unbearable.
“Jonathan-”
“Don’t!” He pushed her away, then took a few steps backward. “You lied to me. You were never my friend. Don’t touch me! Get out of my house!”
“Jonathan,” Ortega told him. “You need to breathe.”
“Shut up! I don’t take orders from you! You’re not the fucking Brigadier, remember?” He gasped for air, but managed to insist, “And neither is Benito Carerra. You killed him, Ortega. I saw you. We left his dead carcass nailed to a tree in the jungle like the animal he was.”
“Actually, my old friend,” said a voice from the narrow doorway that led to the back hallway. “That’s not entirely accurate.”
Chapter 12
As a dozen guards poured into the room from doorways at either end, the distinctive sounds of semiautomatic rifles being readied for firing filled the air. Hammers being cocked, bolts being slid, cartridges being fed into chambers-metal slamming metal-all executed with absolute precision.
There was no point in contesting them. Not yet at least. So Miranda and Ortega raised their hands without protest, allowing the guards to step forward, cuff their wrists behind them, and then pull Ortega’s pistol from his holster, before stepping back so that Benito Carerra’s view of his prisoners was once again unobstructed.
As for Kell, it clearly didn’t matter to him if there was one guard or a thousand. He leaned against a work table, the blood draining from his complexion as though life itself were leaving his body, and stared into the hypnotic eyes of the man who had kept him in a cage and tortured him mercilessly.
Miranda could only imagine what was going on in her lonely friend’s fear-wracked brain, so she tried to reassure him by whispering, “It’s going to be okay, Jonathan. You’re on his side this time, remember? Go and stand with your friends.”
“Your pretty visitor is correct, Jonathan,” Carerra told him. “It’s time to choose sides. I suggest you choose wisely, as Carl here did when he alerted me to the CIA’s presence.”
Tears streamed down Kell’s face as he edged past his tormentor then sunk to the ground in the corner where Miranda and Ortega had found him the previous evening. Except this time, he didn’t have a power pill in front of him. And he was shaking so violently, he probably couldn’t have steadied his hand enough to take one even if it were available.
There was nothing Miranda could do for him, so she turned her full attention to Carerra, trying to make eye contact without seeming to either challenge or submit.
He looked right past her, as though smiling at someone else. “You were right, Alexander. She’s very attractive.”
Alexander?
Miranda felt a wave of dread similar to what she assumed Kell was experiencing. Still, she didn’t want her captors to know what was going on in her mind, so she calmly turned in time to see Gresley enter the laboratory from the other door, along with two other men she recognized from the Brigade files: Victor Chen, a middle-aged, serious-looking fellow who was tall and slender; and the giant Tork, whose brawny build and scarred face confirmed his reputation as a street fighter turned paramilitary leader.
Gresley walked up to her and without missing a beat, slammed his fist into her gut so hard, she doubled over and almost vomited.
“Bastard!” Ortega sprang forward and head-butted Gresley before four guards intervened, wrestling him to the ground. Miranda sent her sometimes-lover a grateful smile, then looked up at Gresley, noticing with satisfaction that Ortega had caused a gash in the bully’s forehead almost as pleasing as the greenish bruise that ran along the side of his jaw, courtesy of Miranda’s blow three days earlier.
“Stand her up again!” Gresley directed the guards with a roar.
Victor Chen surprised Miranda by stepping between her and her assailant. “They’re no use to us unconscious. The Brigadier wants to question them, remember?”
“At least don’t hit her in the mouth,” Tork agreed cheerfully.
“I have other plans for her mouth that have nothing to do with questioning,” Gresley assured him, causing the giant man to burst into laughter.
As alarmed as she was by the Englishman, the giant Tork concerned her more. If he had been the one to hit her with that huge fist of his, powered by those Atlas-like shoulders, she wouldn’t just be gasping for air. She’d be dead.
Carerra waved his hand, and the guards stood her on her feet, then did the same with Ortega, with two of them keeping a grip on him just in case he decided to go berserk again.
Then the Brigadier stood in front of her and asked, “Do you know who I am?”
She nodded.
“So the question is, who are you? Jennifer Aguilar? Miranda Duncan? Jennifer Duncan?”
“I’m Miranda Cutler. I work for the CIA, but they didn’t send me on this op. They don’t even know I’m here.” She licked her lips, then admitted, “They use me exclusively for seduction ops. It’s a waste of my talents and training. So when I heard about the Brigade, I decided to try and impress my superiors by doing what everyone else had failed to do-learn your identity and agenda.”
“Interesting.” Carerra flashed Ortega a wide grin. “For a spy, she’s quite chatty, don’t you think?”
Ortega growled in agreement, but she suspected he knew exactly what she was doing.
She was protecting Kell, pure and simple. If she didn’t tell them what they wanted to hear, they’d question the scientist, and it would destroy him. Even if they didn’t raise a hand to him, the flashbacks from being questioned by this monster again would scare him to death.
So Miranda would cooperate, hopefully not sharing anything with Carerra he hadn’t already figured out from talking to Angelina, Gresley and that sniveling little Carl. It wasn’t as if she knew much, anyway, since Ortega had sent her to bed before the real intel began to flow.
She hoped this maneuver would buy them some time, despite the slim hope of rescue. But Victor Chen had shown a tendency to be reasonable, and he might object to the hasty killing of two American agents. She also wanted to minimize Carerra’s excuse to brutalize them. Assuming a chance for escape would eventually present itself, they needed to be conscious and able to take a few steps without screaming in pain.
So she asked him softly, “Do you want to hear more?”
“Absolutely. Go on.”
“Okay.” She took a deep breath, then continued spilling her guts. “I went to South America to get some information about Jonathan Kell. So that I could seduce him. I figured there would be psych profiles and personnel reports in his employment file at BioGeniSystems, and I was right. I photographed the file, using a camera hidden in a barrette. I also stole a sample of HeetSeek, but your wife interrupted me before I could photograph those files, too. She was there getting her blood tested by that doctor, right? Because she had just taken the power pill? I
