Savage Reborn (Team Savage Book 1) Page 15

  Carlson was one of those. Sometimes, they learned the tricks but sometimes, they were born with them. They lacked the earnestness that came with men like Anderson. They sure as hell could fake it, though.

  The executive and his security chief continued to talk and walk. Savage knew he needed to get away. The two men had resumed their useless chatter about how they were saving the world, and as distracted as they were, he decided he couldn’t stand around watching it. He wasn’t sure his gag reflex could take it.

  As they circled a corner, he waited until he was in the back of the line and broke away from the group. This place was fucking massive, and if he was ever going to find something that would help their cause, he needed to do it on his own. He had a feeling that the planned tour wouldn’t cover any of the really interesting places.

  “So, how was the tour?” Anja asked once he was alone. He stood in front of a men’s lavatory and could smell the sharp odor of urine.

  “Can you see me?” he asked and looked around. A couple of cameras and sensors were clearly visible.

  “Well, the security in the facility is all run on a closed circuit and not connected to the internet,” she said but her chuckle sounded smug. “I needed physical access.”

  “Hi, there,” he grumbled under his breath. “My name’s Physical Access. I’ve heard all the jokes. You don’t need to make it worse. My parents really hated me, and that’s all you need to know.”

  “It’s still better than Jeremiah Savage if you ask me,” she mused aloud.

  “Nobody asked you, Russian hacker-lady,” he retorted.

  “I heard that,” she hissed.

  “Well, I did say it aloud,” he reminded her. “So, now that you’re patched into the camera feeds, do you have any idea of what I’m looking for? Do I need to find a server room or something? Hard drives?”

  “Oh, please,” Anja sneered. “They have the whole place under a web of wireless connections. I couldn’t get in from outside, but now that we’re inside, this whole damn place is my playground. I copied all the files they have online. They might be moving everything out, but they still keep files on what kinds of tests they’re running. If I’m honest, I don’t understand a word of what they’re talking about, but then, I don’t have to.”

  “Let me guess,” Savage said with a sigh. “It’s need to know, and I don’t need to know?”

  “Do you really want to know what Anderson and Monroe are doing?” she asked.

  “Not particularly.” He chuckled. “Then again, I don’t like being kept out of the loop. The last time that happened, my people died, and I’m still angry about that. If people start dying because Anderson and Monroe think they know more about the situation than someone with boots on the ground, you can tell them that the savage they wanted is the savage they’ll get.”

  “Oh, is that a threat?” she asked. Her voice was dead serious now, and he could practically see her suddenly sit straight and rigid in her chair.

  “It’s a promise, actually,” he replied, and his voice gained an extra edge of chill. “But if you’d like to pass it on as a threat, I don’t mind.”

  The Russian was silent for a few moments. “How do you do that?” she asked, her voice a little softer. “Get your voice all mean and menacing like that? It’s a neat trick to have up your sleeve, you know.”

  “I know. But there’s no secret. You simply really have to mean it. Do I actually have to do anything, or should I stick around until you have everything you need?”

  “I need you to keep the connection for thirty seconds,” she said and laughed. “Come on, you should know that’s not how all this works, right? I’ve already copied everything I’ll get from their digital files. You need to look around and see if you can find some hard copies that you can whisk away. Oh, and maybe see if there’s any trace of where they’re sending everything. I haven’t been able to find anything on my end.”

  “Sure,” he said softly as he wound his way slowly through mostly empty halls. “Wait—back on the Pegasus building, on the roof, where was all this alacrity then?”

  “I needed to crack the encryption, that’s all. Once it was done, a couple of seconds, tops. Seriously, what is it about the speed of connections these days that you don’t understand?”

  “The core concept, I think.” Savage kept his voice low and moved cautiously. He could hear people talking. “Too many TV shows. You know, I’ve heard that they rot your brain.”

  “Shut up.” She sounded amused like she tried to be serious but actually enjoyed herself a little too much. “There are some scientists ahead of you, packing up a lab. Apparently, the stuff is a little too delicate for the rough hands of the security boys. If there’s anything to be learned, it’s from them.”

  “Look at you, being all helpful,” he murmured. He couldn’t say any more as he approached the group of men and woman in crisp white lab coats. Unfortunately, it was the only thing that looked crisp about these people. They looked like they had been run ragged.

  His training told him to find a weak link. The people who conducted experiments in a facility like this would be secretive, so he wouldn’t be able to learn anything from them. He needed to find someone who was capable enough to know about what was going on but didn’t care enough about it to keep quiet.

  There were a few extra steps to that, but those escaped him at the moment. He needed to play it by ear. After a casual survey of the group, he identified his target, a younger-looking woman who labeled the vials the rest of the scientists were packing up. She didn’t have the stuffy professor look of the man who pretended to read notes while looking at his phone, but since she was in charge of labeling and not packing, she would at least be knowledgeable of what was happening on location.

  “Hey, how’s everything going around here?” Jeremiah asked casually and tucked his hands in his pockets as he assumed the look of a bored security guard.

  “We’ve been here for the past fifteen hours trying to get everything wrapped up before the weekend,” the woman said and didn’t bother to look up from her work. “How do you think we’re doing?” She did, indeed, look exhausted and her voice dripped sarcasm.

  He tilted his head and his gaze slid across the stacked packages. The writing on the labels was a series of numbers and letters. They looked like some sort of algorithm, he decided. Maybe an obscure filing system but with vials instead of files?

  “I thought the bigwigs were paying overtime for this,” he ventured.

  “Yeah, well, they said they needed it done before the weekend, and you’re crazy if you think I’ll hand my life’s work over to the bozos handling the transport,” she replied and finally turned from her work to peer at him from behind a thick pair of glasses. “Some offense intended.”

  “Some taken,” he replied with an easy grin. As scientists went, she wasn’t quite what the stereotype demanded. While yes, she had to be legally blind without those glasses of hers and there was a ragged look to her features, she looked normal with her thick brown hair wound in a bun over her head. He should have known better than to trust in stereotypes.

  Her hard look at him softened marginally. She sighed and shook her head, then rubbed her eyes under her glasses.

  “I’m sorry,” she said and shrugged apologetically. “It’s been a long month and a half, and I’m stressed because it’s finally over. Soon, anyway. Hi, I’m Dr. Jessica Coleman, one of the…well, I was one of the senior researchers around here. I’m not sure how long that’ll last, though.”

  “What do you mean?” Savage asked and blinked when he realized that the woman had actually extended her hand and offered her name as a form of a polite greeting. “I’m sorry…Raymond Burrows. I was just moved here since Mr. Carlson came to oversee the last day of moving himself. Well, he thinks it’ll be the last day, but who knows at this point, right?”

  “Right.” Coleman shook her head dismissively. “I mean, we want to have everything done here so we can actually continue with our work. Th
ere’s nothing we want more, but at the same time, all the stuff we’ve worked on here—in some cases, for years—could be ruined if improperly stored. Worse, you dumbasses won’t let any of our people ride along in your damn armored cars, which means we have to anticipate that anything you might do will fuck things up and prepare for that. It’s been stressful.”

  “I don’t think there’s anything more stressful than having to anticipate the actions or lack thereof of stupid people.” He deliberately injected a note of sympathy into his tone. “And that’s coming from one of the aforementioned dumbasses. Although, in my defense, we don’t actually work for the same company. They manage all the moving. We only handle the personal protection.”

  “Oh, right,” Coleman replied with a nod. “You know, they never actually gave us a reason for why we’re moving, Yeah, they simply up and told us that the facility would close, fed us a bullshit line about how the funding was drying up in this region and if we wanted to continue to receive grants for our work, we would have to move to a more accessible location. Which would make sense if we worked in some charitable organization, but this is a company-run lab.”

  “Hey, you know as much as I do,” he responded with an offhand shrug. Well, he wasn’t Savage anymore. He was this Raymond fellow and probably liked surfing and taking long walks on the beach when he wasn’t writing poems or playing a ukulele or something.

  “I doubt it,” Coleman replied dryly. “What we’re transporting here is volatile, so unless Mr. Carlson has put in for the paperwork to move it across state lines, we’ll still be in North Carolina. That, along with the fact that the stuff needs to be kept secured… Seriously, this Zoo crap is a frigging nightmare.”

  “The Zoo, huh? I’ve actually spent some time in the area and even made a couple of trips inside the jungle. That considered, your stuff might be in better hands than you think.”

  “But I thought you weren’t going to transport anything?” Coleman asked with a smirk as she tugged something out of her pocket. “But I need to get to work. These vials won’t pack themselves. That said, you should give me a call. We can grab a drink and you can tell me more about the safe hands my life’s work is in.”

  “Fair enough.” Savage grinned broadly, took the card, and noted that the number inscribed on it was a personal number. “I think I might do that when we both don’t have our bosses riding us like rented mules.”

  “I look forward to it,” she said, and he moved casually away. He’d learned everything that he could from this place, and what he needed to do was get the hell out before one of the men he’d left incapacitated woke up and tried to call for help.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Despite the heavy lockdown over the facility, Jeremiah found that getting around the site wasn’t that difficult. With his badge and the vest, people assumed two critical things—that he was security and that he had work to get to that didn’t involve any of them. It seemed that people had an odd view of what security was supposed to be and tended to fill the lack of facts with fiction. It worked in his favor, and he all but had a free run of the facility as he worked his way back the way he’d come.

  Anja was suspiciously quiet for the duration. He assumed that she had better things to do than butt in on the part of the job that actually was his specialty and would only intrude when she no longer had anything more important to do.

  She was a pro like that, he thought.

  He reached the door that he’d entered through. Most of the men in armor had moved away, probably since their job was on the other side of the facility where all the stuff was being moved out. Most of Carlson’s security had gone into the building with him. The driver eyed him from inside the car, but the man didn’t move when he pulled Ray’s cigarettes from his coat pocket, tapped one out, and lit it.

  It had been a while. He’d quit a few years before soon after the divorce when he’d gone through packs each day to deal with the stress of it. He’d quit cold-turkey when he signed up for another tour of duty and hadn’t touched one since. But damn, if it didn’t burn so good all the way down to his lungs.

  He noted that the driver had now turned his attention away. He was cleaning something, but he couldn’t see what it was through the tinted windows. It was probably booze glasses for his boss to use on the drive home. The whole concept of having your own personal driver was such a foreign thing to him. Then again, if he ever was rich, maybe he’d understand it.

  That probably wouldn’t happen, though. The thought didn’t faze him at all.

  Jeremiah wandered aimlessly and assumed the pace of someone who was merely taking a smoke break before they had to get back to work. It was a pace that he was only too familiar with. He sighed and drew in a deep breath as he meandered toward the hole in the fence. Once he was out of sight of the car, he picked up the pace, ducked into the hole, and took a moment to leave the things that he’d taken from the men. They were still unconscious. It couldn’t have been more than fifteen minutes, but they would still have some troubles when they woke up. If they woke up.

  “Are you there, Anja?” he asked once he was clear of the fence and hiked back to where he’d left his rifle and equipment.

  “Yes,” she replied. “I’m passing the information you got from the doctor on to our overlords that the new facilities are still in the state. They’re processing.”

  “It’s not good news.” His muscles burned pleasantly as he upped his pace to a jog. He was out of sight of the facility and headed deeper into the forest that surrounded the building.

  “It’s not bad news either,” she said. “Sure, North Carolina is a big place where a lot of things can be hidden, but it’s a lot smaller than the continental US.”

  “Carlson has handled stuff from the Zoo ever since there was stuff to handle,” he said, and his lungs started to burn as he forced himself to go up a hill at a full sprint. “At least, that’s what I’ve read about the man. If Anderson and Monroe think that he hasn’t figured out how to transport Zoo materials—which is what we’ve now established they’re transporting—we might not be on the winning side of this.”

  “What are you thinking?” Anja asked. “You sound like you’re thinking of switching sides. You know I’d have to tell Courtney and Anderson about that, right?”

  “Perish the thought.” Jeremiah panted for breath as he reached the spot where he’d left his gear. He took a moment and leaned on his knees to recover. When he spoke again, his voice was low and calm and spoke each word in a monotone. “I know people like Carlson. Assholes who think that the world is owed to them because it was written on the silver spoons that were found in their rectum after their pre-planned C-Section. They know how to manipulate people and always think they’re doing the right thing, no matter what. So no, I don’t want to switch sides. But as much as I hate that asshole, we definitely won’t gain anything by underestimating him.”

  He worked swiftly to take the rifle apart and packed the pieces and everything else in his trusty duffel bag. Anja was quiet for a few seconds, and he began to feel bad. He didn’t like sounding preachy, and he knew that it sounded like he was talking down to her. It was stupid, but the day hadn’t quite gone the way he’d wanted. He wasn’t sure what he’d wanted for the day. It had been planned as only a surveillance operation, so why did he feel so unfulfilled?

  “Look,” he said finally as the silence continued and he finished his packing. “That wasn’t how I meant to say it. I don’t want to sound condescending. You probably know more about this whole thing than I do anyway.”

  “You’re right, though,” she said but still sounded a little miffed. “We have to leave the underestimating to Carlson and not make the mistake of thinking that we’re above all that ourselves. And your apology is accepted.”

  He smirked, more relieved than he’d expected. “Thanks for that.”

  “By the way, have you ever actually been in the Zoo, or was that something you fed our lady friend to make her like you?” He could hear the
now familiar creak of her chair in the background.

  “The doctor seemed to be fascinated by anything and everything that came from the Zoo,” he replied, taking his time now as he headed toward the back road where he’d left the rented car. “I assumed that her interests would expand to the people who went in to grab the stuff that she ran tests on. As it turned out, it worked like a charm. I have her on the hook. She gave me a card with her personal number. I think I might give her a call. Do you think I could actually get lucky with a doctor?”

  Anja chuckled. “Well, I think she might normally have higher standards than a jock like you, but you do have an in with all that talk of going into the Zoo. But, by the way, do you actually have any stories about what happens in the Zoo to be able to sell it? She will want to hear about your trips inside and if you don’t indulge her, she might think that you’re full of it.”

  “Well, I am, but she doesn’t need to know that. And while there are stories aplenty that I could pull off this ZooTube site that I’ve seen advertised online, I think that someone as obsessed with the Zoo as our doctor friend is would be able to see right through that.”

  “So, did you have a plan B?” she asked as he reached the car, pulled the trunk open, and placed the duffel bag inside. “Or do you think that you could simply come up with something on the fly and hope it works? Or maybe you thought about plying the poor girl with alcohol and charm? Or maybe, just maybe, I could help fill that gap in your knowledge.”

  Jeremiah tilted his head as he pulled the door to the Prius open and slid inside. The mess was now close to unbearable, and he knew that it was almost time to turn the vehicle in. They had a branch in the city that would take it off his hands and give it a good strong clean on top of that.