The Phoenix Encounter. Linda Castillo
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to stay conscious, struggling even harder to keep his head.
“Lily.” He’d intended to shout, but her name came out as little more than a puff of air between clenched teeth.
Dear God, she couldn’t be dead. Not Lily. She was too strong. Too vital. He loved her.
He lay there in the snow and mud, breathing as if he’d just run a mile, staring at the violent night sky, and cursed fate for being so cruel.
He didn’t hear the jeep approach. Barely felt the strong hands that lifted him onto the stretcher. All he could think about was Lily.
Robert fought the hands pressing him down. “Got to…find her,” he said.
“It’s okay, mate,” a British voice said. “I’m a medic with the Allied Medical Forces. We’re going to get you out of here. Looks like you’ve got a bit of a problem with that leg. Try to relax, all right?”
Robert tried to tell the medic that he didn’t want to leave. That he couldn’t leave without Lily, but his thoughts were jumbled, his voice weak. “There’s a woman,” he said. “In the pub. Jesus.”
The young man in the red jumpsuit looked over his shoulder at the crumpled building. There was knowledge in his eyes when he looked at Robert. “There aren’t any survivors in there, chap.”
“No…”
The young man glanced at Robert’s leg and muttered a curse. “I need some morphine over here!”
“No!” Robert shoved at the hands pinning him. “I’ve got to find her. For God’s sake…”
“Easy, mate, we’re going to take care of you.”
The needle bit into his arm. Robert fought the drug, but it dragged at him. He stared at the flames and smoke and debris while he slowly came apart inside. “Lily,” he whispered.
And then the drug sent him to a place where he couldn’t feel anything at all.
Chapter 1
Twenty-one months later
Somewhere in Virginia
Doctor Robert Davidson left his BMW in the parking lot and took the redbrick path toward the building at the rear of the complex. It was a path he’d walked plenty of times in the last year and a half. A path he’d never imagined he would take. But even though he’d been reluctant at first, he walked it with a great sense of pride. Of duty. Of respect.
Just that morning Robert had been summoned by Samuel Hatch, director of the top-secret division of the CIA known only as ARIES. The call had come just before 5:00 a.m. Like all of Hatch’s transmissions, it had been brief and to the point, with few details. Hatch needed an agent with Robert’s expertise and credentials. He would be deployed immediately. Long-term assignment. High-level security clearance. Top-secret mission.
The drive from Robert’s home outside Washington D.C. had taken just over two hours. Stiff from the long drive, he ignored the tinge of pain in his thigh as he passed several low-rise buildings where ivy flourished on the redbrick exterior. From the outside, the center looked like an Ivy League college financed by trust funds and old money. Robert knew differently. Behind the genteel facade lay one of the American government’s most top-secret facilities in the world. With emphasis on foreign intelligence, biomedical research, genetic engineering and high-tech gadgetry, the ARIES boys and girls played with toys the CIA didn’t even dream of. Toys that, in the eyes of the rest of the world, hadn’t yet been invented. The ARIES agents, scientists and researchers had the best of everything. Money was never a problem because when it came to ARIES, Uncle Sam had bottomless pockets.
Robert told himself he wasn’t nervous as he swiped his security card through the reader, then punched in his six-digit PIN number. He didn’t get nervous. Once a man had had his world shaken the way he had twenty-one months ago, it took a lot more than a cryptic call in the middle of the night to shake him.
The steel-core door slid open to a small, windowless room with a tile floor and three white walls. Dead ahead, an elevator door dominated the fourth wall. In the center of the room, black inlaid tile formed a thick line on the floor. Robert stepped up to the line, then looked into the lens of the camera glaring at him and waited for the identification scan to begin. An instant later, a green light flickered, letting him know the retinal scan was complete. The elevator door swished open, and he stepped inside. Frowning at the panel mounted next to the door, he set his palm against the glass and waited while his palm and fingerprints were scanned and the images run through the ARIES personal identification database. Like every other piece of equipment at the ARIES center, the security system was light-years ahead of its time and utterly fail-safe.
Once the green light flashed to tell him his prints had been scanned and approved, Robert pressed the button to the underground level, and the elevator rushed him toward ARIES’s inner sanctum and Samuel Hatch’s private office a hundred feet below ground.
He assured himself a second time that it wasn’t nerves gnawing at his gut. For one thing, Robert didn’t believe in premonitions. Still, he couldn’t deny he had a feeling about this assignment. Hatch didn’t call on his ARIES agents for anything but the most difficult of tasks. He wondered what the good director was going to ask him to do this time.
The elevator doors whooshed open. Robert stepped into a large room filled with low-rise cubicles, about half of them occupied by men and women hunched over computers or speaking into communication headsets. He spotted Carla Juarez, who waved, flashed a dazzling smile, then turned her wheelchair and headed in his direction. Robert watched her approach and smiled for the first time that day. He liked Carla. She was young and pretty with a lovely sense of humor. Up until a year ago she’d been a field operative. Then she’d taken a bullet in her back during a deep cover operation in Eastern Europe. The injury had left her partially paralyzed. She’d been through hell in the last year—something he identified with even though they’d never discussed anything so personal. But unlike Robert, Carla had never grown bitter.
“Hey, Dr. Davidson, how’s it going?” she asked.
Because he didn’t want to answer that truthfully, Robert put on a grin and lied through his teeth. “Couldn’t be better.”
She rolled her eyes. “For an agent, you’re not a very good liar.”
“Thanks.” Leaning forward, he pressed a kiss to her cheek. “I think.”
“Pin bothering you?”
Subconsciously, he brushed his hand over his left thigh. “Must be a front coming in,” he said shortly, not because he was annoyed but because it embarrassed him to complain about his leg to a woman with a severed spinal cord.
“Takes time,” she said breezily. “Been able to run yet?”
“I’m up to two miles.” It hurt like hell, but he ran. He’d be damned if he was going to spend the rest of his life letting the residual damage from a shattered femur keep him idle. “Played basketball a couple of weeks ago.”
“Ethan told me he beat your butt.”
“I guess that makes him a better liar than me.”
“And a sore loser.” She smiled. “Hatch is expecting you.”
“Thanks.” Robert opened the door to find Samuel Hatch standing at the back of his office looking at a tiny, withered plant.
He looked over his shoulder at Robert and scowled. “Damn strawberry plant is going to die on me,” he muttered.
“They need sunlight.”
“Security had a cow when I suggested I get an office with a view.”
Robert stepped closer and glanced at the plant, wondering why a man like Hatch was so concerned with a scraggly little plant no one cared about. “They like sandy soil,” he offered. “Or maybe some cow manure.”
At Hatch’s questioning