Chapter 3

The sound reverberated across the room. Veni’s head spun, as she groaned back to awareness, her cheek on fire, as she stared balefully at the man who had struck her.

“There you are,” he greeted her, with a smile. “See? You cooperate with me, and I’ll cooperate with you.”

She blinked, trying to clear her head once again, knowing that the dizziness came from the drugs they kept putting into her system. Drugs were the death knell for somebody like her, but these guys didn’t care. As long as it made her more cooperative, they were all for it. That just added more to her pain, not that they cared. It was all about them and what they wanted. She closed her eyes again, earning another slap across the face.

“I said, wake up,” he snarled.

She blinked several times, wincing at the sting on her cheek and at the pounding in her head.

“That’s more like it. Now stay awake or…” he threatened. He studied her, as she gave in to her urge to sleep. “Do I have to hit you again?”

Slowly she shook her head. Her mouth was bound with a gag, her hands and feet were tied in front of her, and her body would soon scream in agony now that she was conscious. Not that he would mind.

“I brought you food and water,” he stated, quickly untying the gag around her mouth. He handed her the water bottle, and she drank greedily. Almost immediately he pulled it back and glared at her. “Drink it slowly.”

She noted this was the same man missing a tooth, who had seemed almost fatherly before, but that persona was long gone. Now she was dealing with this monster, who cared about nothing but making her follow whatever orders he gave. Guys like that were always around, happier to beat and to abuse than to be decent human beings. She shouldn’t be surprised that the Russian government had hired somebody like this. Probably the regular government staff was around, the people nobody ever got to know about, yet they were here nonetheless. She slowly sipped at her drink, afraid that he would snatch it away from her again.

She knew she needed to drink slowly. Otherwise she would throw up. She would also need a bathroom thereafter, which she wasn’t sure whether they would offer or not. Even now, as the water went in, she felt her other bodily systems rising up. She handed him the bottle and whispered, “I need to go to the bathroom.”

He nodded. “It’s about time,” he muttered. “You should have gone a long time ago. I was starting to get worried,” he declared, almost in disgust. “Get up.”

She frowned at him, slowly getting to all fours, then to her knees, struggling to stand, as both her feet and her hands were still bound. But she made it to a vertical position, swaying a bit, slowly gaining control.

“Good, you’re doing better than I expected.” He quickly cut the bindings on her ankles and her hands and barked, “Follow me.”

The bottle of water was still on the table where he’d placed it, and that was the only item in the room. She picked it up and followed him.

When he saw her with the water bottle, he laughed and muttered, “Fat chance,” then took it away from her.

She didn’t say anything. It would have been nice to keep the water bottle, but she wasn’t surprised. Men like this were all about control and obedience, making sure she did what he wanted, causing absolutely no trouble for him. That would be the key to surviving this.

He took her to a small bathroom. “You got a couple minutes, and that’s it.”

She nodded and went inside, grateful when he let her close the door. She went to the bathroom first, her bladder desperate to be emptied, and the relief was huge. She finished, then washed her hands and her face. There was no mirror, but, for that, she was quite grateful. The last thing she wanted was to see what a nightmare she looked like right about now. She opened the door to find him standing in front of it.

He nodded approvingly. “Good, you didn’t overdo your stay in there.”

She shook her head. “Where’s my mother?”

He shrugged. “She’s with somebody else, not me.”

She didn’t say anything to that, and he obviously wouldn’t elaborate. She and her mother had been split up for a reason, and Veni knew it was likely all about control again. Her guard led her back to the same room, and, while they’d been gone, somebody else had left behind a blanket and a mattress, a blow-up one perhaps, placed directly on the floor. Regardless she was grateful for any little bit of comfort.

“I’ll bring you food in a few minutes.”

She nodded and whispered, “Thank you.” Then she walked over to the makeshift bed and sat down. She immediately reached for the blanket and pulled it around her, feeling the chill from before hitting her once more. Nothing like coming off the drugs to have your body react with horrible precision in every way you didn’t want it to.

He frowned at her. “The food will help.”

She didn’t say anything, just shut her eyes and sank down into the corner. He closed the door, leaving her alone. As soon as he was gone, she peeked about, careful to not appear to be too excited—in case she was being filmed. She cast a quick glance around to see where she was and if there were any easy way out. She knew the answer would be a hard no, but she had to try. As she searched the windowless room, she was relieved to see no visible signs of any cameras, which also surprised her. However, this room had a high ceiling with rafters, so she suspected any cameras were up there. In a place like this, a prison, cameras would be everywhere.

This looked like maybe another temporary holding position; she wasn’t sure. Just enough things about it worried her. She huddled in the cold, waiting for her body to warm up, even as her teeth started to chatter.

When the door opened, and the same guard came inside, he frowned at her, probably when he heard her teeth chattering so badly. “Here’s hot soup and some bread.” He placed them on the table and stepped back out again. He gave her a searching gaze, as he left.

She didn’t care. She knew he would be checking out her reactions, everything she did essentially, and there wouldn’t be any easy passes from here on out. Yet she knew that a rescue had to happen. That hope was the only way she and her mother would survive this nightmare. Veni didn’t quite know how it would play out, but it would, and she refused to give up on that idea. At least the British government knew they were missing, their rescue plan having gone awry. Now it required a rethink and some time for somebody to come up with something new in order to get them out.

The trouble was her lack of communication, and, at this point, telepathy was seemingly impossible. She could transmit a message, or maybe she could, if and when the rattling in her brain calmed down and the drugs finally eased out of her system. That was the one thing she was hoping for and counting on to get her and her mother out of here.

Surely somebody would be aware that they were missing and would pick up on any signal she sent. At least that was her hope.

The trouble was, right now, every time she sent a signal, it bounced right back. And her skill wasn’t the same as a phone signal or something of that nature. So even being deep underground didn’t make a difference, at least it never had before. She’d tested it with friends way back when she was in college, when it was all just a big game—until she realized just how dangerous it was and how having this ability was getting her some attention that she didn’t want.

Back then she could send messages, even underground, although they weren’t of any consequence. She didn’t know what, if anything, made a difference now. Somebody could receive them back then too, and that might have made the difference. Maybe it wasn’t about her ability to send as much as it had been about his ability to receive. And it wasn’t the first time she’d thought about Reid in the midst of this nightmare. Or at other times in her life.

She’d wondered about getting his help to secret her out of Russia, but, having no way to contact him, outside of sending telepathic messages, she had held back, just in case somebody else might intercept them. As it was, MI6 had been more than happy to help her and her mother get back to England.

Even now she wondered about Reid. Was he out there? Could she send him a message? Again it might be more about the receiver than the sender. If that were true, he was her best bet. But would he even know what to do or how to contact anybody, assuming he even received her messages? When she finished eating, the door opened, making her suspicious that a camera was in this room, just one that she hadn’t seen, since the timing was just too damn exact.

She waited until the dish was pulled away, then asked in a low tone, “May I see my mother?”

Immediately came a headshake. “Nope, you no longer have that privilege.” And giving that curt response, her guard left and closed the door.

She didn’t want to cry, but it was pretty hard not to because she knew that her mother would be suffering even more than Veni was. These guys would make her mother suffer, as punishment for trying to take Veni away from them. That wasn’t fair, since Veni wanted to leave, particularly after she’d been coerced into joining up with them in the first place. And, for that, she blamed her father.

Even at that thought, she still didn’t know if he was involved. It would break her heart to confirm it, but she wasn’t sure there was any other culpable person in her world. Veni’s abilities had always bothered her father terribly, and that, in itself, made him one of the most likely people to have been involved in finding her again. Not that she and her mother had told her father what their plans were, so that was a bit of a mystery. Yet somebody had obviously known.

Their workplace may have been bugged, though no plans had ever been made or discussed there. So, when Veni had heard rumors that she would be removed from the area where her mother worked, Veni knew that the time element surrounding their escape would be even more of a crunch. Still, she just couldn’t make this change. The news of their taking her away from her mother created a need to speed up their escape plan and to get out of there sooner, which had apparently cost them dearly. Veni found this turn of events to be very hard to live with—until she could find another way out.

And she would find another way out, she vowed. No way she wouldn’t. She had to because this was not living. Being forced to work with the Russian government, with whom she didn’t agree, a government holding her against her will, was definitely not her thing. Not that anybody here cared.

That was the part that was so hard to understand. She was shocked at how little anybody cared what happened to her, or whether she wanted to do this or not. She had always believed that people had free will, and that was true, until you came up against a government that ensured you didn’t, unless your ideas aligned with theirs.

And her kidnapping was too much like her government job. Her day became this unending waiting period, as she anticipated the arrival of her keepers to come back for whatever purpose they had at the time.

Yet it seemed nobody ever came today. She waited and waited, until finally the door opened again, and she was given more food by a different delivery person. She ate quickly, never arguing, never complaining. It didn’t matter what it tasted like. It was just food. Once again, she asked the same question. “May I see my mother?”

Another headshake came, and this person left.

Veni knew this guard was more or less just a lackey, somebody to deliver food and to take away food. That was heartbreaking in itself because where were the rest of the people out there, and what were they doing?

Were they all just enjoying watching her squirm and wait, knowing there would be no end to the pain for her because the answers they were giving her were not what she wanted to hear? She closed her eyes yet again and sent out a message to anybody who could hear her. Silent on the ethers, she transmitted an SOS, hoping that somebody would receive her message. She didn’t get any response once again, not that she really expected it, but she wouldn’t give up hope. Transmissions were like that for her. Sometimes they worked, and sometimes they didn’t. She’d never really had a chance to work out the how or the why of her gift, but, given the opportunity now, she would do things very differently.

Finding the limits of what she could do appealed way more than it ever had before. She’d never been in danger before. Now that her captors had changed things to this point of incarceration, she really wanted to know exactly what she could do, when she could do it, and who could help her. Suddenly her complacent, innocent world was not so complacent at all. Although she desperately wanted to find out exactly the same things that the government wanted to find out about her abilities, she didn’t want it to be with them, and definitely not when they had plans to utilize it against others.

That would never happen. Yet she didn’t know how to stop it because, as long as these people held her and her mother, they would just use her mother against her. And that was something she could never let them do. Hurting her mother wasn’t an option, and that meant either Veni had to get herself and her mother out of here fast or she had to find a way to make everybody cooperate, so they didn’t hurt her mother. To protect her mother, Veni would have to do what these people wanted, whether Veni liked it or not. The only good thing, as far as she could tell, was that this would not be the final location. Nobody had shown her to a lab or had set any protocols for them to do the testing and the work that these people obviously wanted Veni to do, which meant she would be moved again. And that would be her one and only chance to get out of here—if only she could come up with a plan.

If she were really lucky, she would have somebody to help her and her mother.

*

Reid and Anderssat at a coffee shop, something Reid felt terribly guilty about, while Veni remained in captivity. However, until they had a lead, a direction to go in, they had no choice but to wait. They were going through all the files that they’d been sent by Jonas, and frustration mounted on all sides. Apparently Jonas had already called Terk several times, looking for progress. Of course MI6 was especially anxious to get these two women back. Reid just hoped that MI6 wanted them safe and not just for their own nefarious reasons. Reid didn’t have much faith in governments at this point, no matter which one. He looked over at Anders. “Surely, once we get them both to the British government, they will treat them okay, right?”

Anders nodded. “We would like to think so. At least that is the plan. Now, if the UK is on the wrong side of the line, Terk can help them, at least Veni, and Veni will look after her mother. That’s what I’m assuming will happen.” He frowned at him, saw his frustration. “You’re looking really agitated. What’s going on?”

Reid nodded. “Yeah, I’m… I’m feeling something, but I can’t get a lock on it.”

“Is it Veni?” Anders asked, staring at him intently.

“I think so. I think she’s trying to send messages, but she seems restricted somehow,” he replied. “I don’t know whether it’s just that or what. I haven’t heard from her in a really long time, so I’m having trouble picking up on her signal.”

“Okay. I’m not exactly sure how that works, but can you get any kind of location?”

“It feels like it’s coming from some distance. It’s pretty faint.”

“Is that a problem?”

“Generally signals like that don’t get faint based on distance,” he explained. “So I presume it has to do more with her inability to connect right now, due to some obstruction,” he muttered. “I’m getting this weird feeling from…” He stopped, pondered it for a moment, then shrugged and added, “I’ll say almost Kazakhstan.”

“Almost Kazakhstan?” Anders repeated, fascinated.

At that, Reid glared at him. “I get it, and you should know that I don’t have any real reason to say it’s Kazakhstan over even Germany, but”—he shrugged—“Kazakhstan it is.”

“Okay,” Anders replied. “I’m willing to go with that. I mean, it’s not as if I have any other place to go. Still, I highly doubt going hell-bent for leather off to Kazakhstan, with no direction or particular place to go, will be all that helpful.”

“No, probably not,” Reid admitted, feeling frustrated. “We need more than just that feeling.” Almost immediately his phone rang.

“No, we don’t,” Terk declared, on the other end. “We’re looking at Kazakhstan as a possible location.”

“Sure,” Reid noted, “but a possible location isn’t the same thing as an actual destination. If we’re seriously going to Kazakhstan, we need to be on the move now because, by the time we get there, they could have moved Veni and her mom again.”

“We’re trying to get it locked down,” Terk explained. “We have somebody close by who might get boots on the ground for us. Levi is hooked into the satellite, getting us some better information. We can get intel out of Kazakhstan, so that’s not an issue. Give us twenty minutes.”

“We need to be on the move,” Reid reminded him, “so twenty minutes is about all you’ve got.”

With that, Terk disconnected.

Reid looked over at Anders, noting his raised eyebrows, and shrugged. “Yes, Terk can read my thoughts even from here. It’s fine. Terk and I understand each other, and sometimes he needs to read my mind.”

“Apparently,” Anders muttered. “So, he agrees with Kazakhstan?”

“He does, but he’s waiting on some confirming intel to let us know if it’s viable.”

Anders looked around the restaurant. “It’s pretty hard to accept that, just because of a feeling, we’ll move multiple countries away on the off-chance that Veni’s there, when she was last seen right around the corner of this block.”

“I know. But short of us finding anybody who has anything to do with that warehouse and who is still in this part of the world, we might as well start looking ahead, instead of back. Levi’s team has already checked the satellite feeds, and nobody has come in or out any of the entrances or exits of either building here in the last couple days.”

“Which gives us a big fat lot of nothing.” Anders frowned at Reid. “You picked up her energy in that empty warehouse, right?”

“Yes,” Reid replied. “I did.”

“And that energy doesn’t give you anything other than the possibility that she’s been here?”

“It gave us that she had definitely been here, but it doesn’t give me anything on where she’s going. I didn’t pick up any of her energy outside of that warehouse.”

Anders nodded, his fingers thrumming on the table. They’d both been frustrated, having searched inside the building, plus the back and the front of it, with absolutely nothing popping.

“You know what we need?” Anders suggested. “We need Terk to come up with some information out of Kazakhstan. Surely they’ve got some contacts.”

“It sounded like that’s what they were working on,” Reid reminded him.

“Maybe, but it seems we should have some contacts there too.” He pulled out his phone and started texting.

“Who’re you texting?” Reid asked cautiously.

“Levi, just to see if they have anyone over there because, if that’s where we think Veni is, she’s way too close to Russia, to her final destination, and we need to get there fast.”

“Which is something we need to do now.” Reid stood up.

At that, Anders eyed him. “You got a way to get us there?”

“No, but we’ll get one pretty quickly lined up,” he muttered. “We have to. Her time is running out. Once she gets into the Eastern Bloc, we’ll have a hell of a time getting her out of there.”

“Hey, Kazakhstan will already cause us some trouble,” he muttered.

Reid gave him a ghost of a smile. “That’s true, but we can get in and out of there in a heartbeat, and nobody, literally nobody, will be the wiser. But once we start hitting the Russian borders?… That’s kind of the Wild West.”

Anders finished sending the text to Levi, then got up and walked over to the counter, where he changed their orders to take-out. While he waited, he picked up an assortment of snacks from the front counter.

By the time he was done over there, Reid had locked down their transport, then joined Anders and said, “Let’s go.”

“Yeah? How’re we traveling?”

“It’ll be a little bit different,” he replied hesitantly, looking over at him. “I understand you fly helicopters, right?”

“I have a license,” he clarified. “I’ve been working on it at Levi’s place. One of the things I plan to do is stay and be a replacement pilot.”

“Not a bad idea,” he muttered. “Anyway, we’re flying by helicopter from a small landing strip nearby, and apparently Jonas set us up with a trip into Kazakhstan. Not sure what we’ll owe MI6 for this though, or what Veni will want.”

“That’s tomorrow’s issue,” Anders said. “I wonder if MI6 can get us in without raising any alarms, considering they already lost their people.”

“Not only did they lose Veni and her mother, they also lost their own team members,” he reminded him.

“It’s a constant reminder of the world we live in,” Anders noted. “Let’s get going. We don’t have much time to sit and debate the merits of MI6.”

And, with that, a hired car pulled right up in front of the café. They hopped inside, headed to a small helipad, owned by a private corporation. They were airborne within minutes, and, just under an hour later, they landed, quickly boarded a private plane, and were airborne again.

At the smooth moves and shifts, Anders smiled. “Sure glad some people can organize transports like this,” he stated, with a laugh. “It’s frustrating when you have to spend too much time waiting on commercial travel.”

“We don’t have the time or the inclination for commercial travel,” Reid commented. “I mean, as far as I can tell, we’ve got…” Then he hesitated, unsure of whether to say it or not.

“We’ve got what?” Anders asked him. “If you know something, you need to tell me.”

“It’s not that I know something. All I can do is tell you that something out there is coming toward us, that’s not very fun.”

“It never is,” he conceded. “I would still rather know ahead of time, than after the fact, even if I don’t know the details.”

“Got it. I’m just getting this horrible pressure, and I don’t know whether it’s her mother or Veni, but I think she’s sending messages, and I think she’s sending them almost in a panic.”

“Yes, but how else would she send messages?” Anders asked.

His calm reasoning, critical thinking, and accepting nature was something Reid appreciated. “If she were running an experiment, or if she were calm, then her messages would go out at a much greater distance and much quicker. She’s quite a strong transmitter, but she’s not trained, and that could be hindering her right now.”

“When you say, not trained—”

“Meaning that she’s never put any time or effort into seeing what she could do. Back when I knew her, it was little more than a joke to her. Yet she is very powerful. I told her that she should look into it, but she just laughed and said it was a one-off, not for her. I suspect she meant that, right up until it came down to something happening to her mother. At that point in time, all bets were off.”

“If you think about it, that makes a lot of sense. Veni didn’t see any value in developing her skills, having no logical pathway ahead of her. So she probably couldn’t see any point in pursuing it.”

“Exactly. I think that’s spot on. She was also starting to work with her mother in microbiology and potentially put it to use there.”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Anders replied, turning to look at him. “How the hell do you put a gifted transmitter to work in some science or medical lab?”

He gave his partner a ghost of a smile. “She was doing stem cell work, regenerative stem cells, and that is all about sending signals.”

Anders blinked several times. “Hang on a minute. Are you telling me there’s a scientific application for telepathy?”

“It’s possible, but I don’t know. Maybe I’m out to lunch,” Reid said. “I haven’t talked to her and don’t know anything about it. However, it occurred to me that somebody who can send signals in a very different way may very well generate interest from a government that is working hard on cutting-edge stem cell research. There are people in a race all over the world,” he explained, “looking for a way to live forever and all that, and a lot of people think the key to that is coming from stem cells. In particular, if you can get specific stem cells to regenerate or to turn back the clock, which is definitely not my expertise, or cup of tea,” he admitted, “then you think about something or somebody who can send signals, potentially at a deeper level than done before. That scenario could be a recipe for disaster for Veni, yet a recipe for incredible success for the government involved.”

“Sounds like a nightmare,” Anders muttered. “Whatever happened to growing old gracefully? I was kind of looking forward to it.”

Reid burst out laughing. “You just might get that wish. Then again, by the time you get old, there could be half-a-dozen different alternatives to dying.”

“I don’t know about that,” he countered. “Sometimes I think we’re meant to grow old and die, then regenerate. That’s the whole purpose behind life,” he stated. “Living forever, if you’re young and healthy, is one thing, but living forever when you’re already eighty or ninety with various troubles, pains, and broken-down bodies doesn’t exactly appeal.”

“If you want to live forever, then in theory you should live and enjoy the perks of life in a clean, healthy body. But we’re not even close to there yet, and, no, I don’t know any of the details. I’m just someone who’s kind of fascinated with the process.”

“Seems that Veni’s mother is too.”

“It’s the kind of work she was doing, and, if her mother had any idea that this was something that Veni could do, I can see her mother dragging Veni on board to help out. I’ve got mixed feelings as to whether we should be messing with genetics, though.”

Anders nodded. “I’m not sure I’m a believer in that either.”

“Doesn’t matter whether we are or not because, if Veni can pull off this stem cell magic, then both mother and daughter are lost to us, and we’ll never get them free. Not only do the Russians want that kind of information for themselves, they also don’t want the US or the UK or any other country to get that kind of an edge over them.”

They quickly switched to another plane for the next leg of their journey, and, once they were seated, Anders looked over at him. “I’ll crash until we arrive. Wake me up in time, will you?”

Reid nodded, working on his phone.

As Anders got comfortable, he asked, “What will you do?”

“I’ll send some telepathic messages to Veni. The tone of what she is sending has changed,” he shared. “I’ll see if she can receive anything.”

“I thought you told me how she wasn’t a receiver.”

He looked over at him, then smiled. “She’s not.”

Anders stared at him for a moment. “Do I want to know how you’ll do this?”

“Probably not,” he replied, with a big grin. “Doesn’t mean it’ll work, but sometimes,… especially when people are frazzled, worried, and panicked even, you can get in through kind of a back door in their brain that allows you to subdue them, to calm them down, and to let them know they’re not alone.”

“If that were possible, don’t you think Terk would have done it by now?”

“Maybe, but he hasn’t been monitoring how panicked she’s been. She’s getting worse, which means, for whatever reason, either they’re moving her, and she realizes that her chances of getting out of this are now almost impossible, or it’s got something to do with her mother.”

“I presume they’re keeping her mother separate from Veni. Although, if what you say is true, they need both the mother and the daughter, and they need them together in order to make this work.”

“Exactly, and that will also mean they need an agreement from both. However, in order to get it, their captors won’t really care about their methodology.”