Payback. Harper Allen

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СКАЧАТЬ to Lab 33 to explain her hasty departure. But as the complex’s steel doors had begun sliding closed behind her yesterday evening, cutting off her last glimpse of the arid New Mexican canyons and foothills, a sense of complete isolation had overtaken her. And with her first breath of the recycled air supplying the massive underground bunker, a Cold War emergency command center secretly built in the 1950s that had never been utilized, but for years now the site of Aldrich Peters’s shadowy organization, her time away had seemed suddenly unreal.

      For a moment she’d felt a terrible certainty that it had been unreal. There was no such group as the Cassandras; she hadn’t found Lynn White and Faith Corbett, her biological sisters; she’d never learned the truth about her existence. She was a Lab 33 assassin. She answered to Aldrich Peters. She was in a nightmare where nothing had changed.

      In near panic she’d whirled around with the half-formed notion of darting back through the closing doors. At her unexpected movement the nearest guard—a commander, as she’d noted from the dull red flashes on the collar of his field-gray uniform—had jerked his weapon up into firing position, at the same time scrambling clumsily away from her. Behind his face shield she’d seen his eyes, open so wide that rims of white circled his pupils.

      They’re scared of me, Uncle Lee! A long-buried memory flashed into Dawn’s mind. I wanted to play tag with them, but they shouted at me to go away. One of them called me a freak. Am I, Uncle Lee? Am I a freak like they say? In Dawn’s memory, the six-year-old version of herself felt arms scooping her close, smelled the somehow reassuring mixture of harsh tobacco and gun oil, heard a voice whose undertone of anger she knew wasn’t directed at her. They’re the freaks, Dawnie. You’re special, and don’t you ever let the sons of bitches convince you otherwise. They’re scared because they know you’re stronger than everyone here, and I don’t mean just lifting-things strong. Your strength comes from inside you. You understand what I’m saying? Her sobs had subsided by then but she’d stayed in the circle of his arms, happy just to be held by him. I guess. But you’re stronger than the sunsa bits, too, right? The arms around her had tightened. For a moment she’d thought the unthinkable had happened and Uncle Lee was mad at her, but when he’d answered his tone had been filled with such pain that she would have gladly traded it for anger. Maybe once, Dawnie. Now I’m no better than they are. But I promise I’ll always stay strong enough to keep them from owning you—even if staying strong costs me everything I care for in this world.

      Aldrich Peters laid aside a sheet of paper, the crackle as he did so sounding like a gunshot in the oppressive silence. Dawn didn’t flinch. Her nervousness had disappeared in the past few seconds, she realized. She supposed she should be glad it had, but all she felt was anger.

      When the hell are you going to stop falling into the same stupid trap, O’Shaughnessy? she berated herself. Every memory you have of Lee Craig is tainted. Be glad you’ve got something truer than your memories of him to give you strength.

      She had payback. No matter that Kayla Ryan had seemed to think revenge wouldn’t set things right for her. No matter that in the conversation she’d had with her sisters on the subject, Lynn and Faith had both agreed with Kayla. She had no intention of delivering Peters to justice. For one final time, she intended to be judge, jury and executioner herself.

      She concealed a faint wince as the dull throbbing that signaled one of the headaches she’d recently been experiencing set up a low tattoo behind her temples. As if he sensed her momentary vulnerability, Peters slid the papers aside.

      “You passed Section Eight’s tests with flying colors.” His austere features seemed carved in stone. “The lie detector, the bio-and neuro-feedbacks, the psychological workups by Drs. Wang and Sobie. Apparently you were telling the truth when you contacted me yesterday and said you wanted to take up your duties again.”

      A rush of triumph raced through her. Of course she’d passed their tests. She’d grown up here, dammit, and there wasn’t a test invented that hadn’t been run on her. By the age of eleven she’d known how to bend them to her advantage without even try—

      “I would have been shocked if you’d failed,” Peters added brusquely. “After all, if anyone could manipulate the results it would be you.”

      Dawn fought to keep her regard steady. She’d underestimated him, she thought tensely. Whatever his tests and his experts told him, Dr. Aldrich Peters preferred to rely on his own instincts…and those instincts were telling him she was lying. With seconds to revoke her own death warrant, she needed to go on the offensive—now.

      “Maybe I’m being paranoid, but I get the feeling you don’t fully accept my explanation for my disappearance from Lab 33 last winter,” she said, allowing anger to creep into her voice. “At the risk of sounding more paranoid, I also get the feeling you’re making up your mind as to whether I should even walk out of here alive. Am I right?”

      The thin smile that appeared on Aldrich Peters’s lips did little to soften the remoteness of his expression. “I don’t call that paranoid, Dawn, I call that astute. You’re right, I’ve got serious doubts about your story of going into an emotional tailspin after your Uncle Lee was killed. Lab 33’s ultimate killing machine, the protégé Lee Craig was grooming to take his place, falling to pieces like any ordinary woman? I don’t buy it.”

      “You don’t buy it because you’re forgetting one important fact.” She stood abruptly, placing her palms flat on his desktop. “I am an ordinary woman in many respects—ordinary enough to feel pain when the only family member I’ve ever known is torn from me and ordinary enough to know that I haven’t lived an ordinary life. I told you, losing my uncle was a shattering experience and I needed to come to terms with it.”

      She exhaled. “I needed time to come to terms with who and what I am, too. As you just said, I’m not your usual twenty-two-year-old, am I? I’m a superwoman who’s almost indestructible, trained to use my special talents to clandestinely further the best interests of my country as Uncle Lee did. After he died I felt it was time to ask myself if I really wanted to take his place.”

      “What conclusion did you come to?”

      She answered him promptly. “That Lab 33’s the only game in town for someone like me. And as Uncle Lee always told me, at least I’m working on the side of the good guys.”

      “Which leads me to my second question. Do you still believe we’re the good guys, Dawn, or have you taken your allegiance elsewhere during these past nine months? After all, despite your orders, Kayla Ryan is still alive. Carl Bradford, whom I can assure you was on our side, is dead. Why is that?” Peters’s tone held an implied threat. Slowly she let her palms slide from the desk and straightened to her full height.

      “I told you. Bradford interfered with my assassination attempt. He kidnapped Ryan’s daughter, made it a federal case. Then he tried to kill me. I had to take him out. And killing Ryan would have brought on too much heat. I’m certain she and the others are no longer a threat to us. I’ve dedicated my life to Lab 33. I’ve demonstrated my loyalty time and again, and you still feel you have the right to ask me that?”

      This was it, she told herself as Aldrich Peters held her gaze. Either she’d allayed his suspicions or she hadn’t—and if it was the latter, both of them would be dead minutes from now. Her plan of gathering as much information as she could over the next few weeks for the Cassandras before she made her move against him would have to be forgotten. But she wouldn’t be able to stop him from hitting the emergency button on his desk that would bring the guards pouring in, and she had no doubt that they knew her Achilles’ heel.

      A woven-steel garrote had been part of the standard weapons issue for Lab 33 internal security for as long as she could remember…and for СКАЧАТЬ