Savage Beauty (The Arrow Tactical Series Book 5)

Chapter 3

Sage didn’t want to barrage her sister with questions or bring on traumatic memories too quickly, so we’ve been pussyfooting around her all day. Bringing her orange juice. Letting her sleep. Answering questions about why she’s in the hospital. Until the Interpol guy appeared, no one asked a single goddamn question of importance. But of course, now that she’s completely lucid, they”re gone, and I’m the one here to lay it all out there for her.

She’s no longer squeezing her eyes shut in pain, and she sounds sincere.

“I’m not sure we have much more knowledge than you do. There’s no report to share. Not yet.”

“Why not?” For someone who took a job abroad so they could skirt international laws, she’s got a lot of self-righteousness jammed up her ass.

I sit up a little straighter. She’s not my commanding officer, and our company has taken tremendous expense to save the prickly PITA. “On this case, we don’t actually have any paying clients?—”

“Who is ‘we’?”

“Arrow Tactical Security. It’s the company Knox and I work for. Missing persons is just one example of the work we do. After the man broke into Sage’s home?—”

“When was that?”

Damn if I can remember. I pull out my phone. It’s a Blackberry. Got used to the thing and have refused to change. I log onto a VPN to pull up our Slack channel.

“What are you doing? Are you—” She leans forward, squinting those eyes as if it’s possible for her to see my screen.

“Patience, woman. Close your eyes and breathe.”

“Saying ‘woman’ in a derogatory manner is unacceptable.”

I probably should have expected a woman like Sloane would take offense at that offhand comment. “Didn’t mean anything by it. Don’t be sensitive.”

“I am not sensitive.”

I blow out my disagreement with that statement in one loud huff. “Just give me a minute. I don’t have the date memorized.”

“Do you keep a diary?”

“Sure do.” Her glare has me grinning. “No, Watson. I don’t keep a diary.” Me and a diary. That’s a good one. “Checking our project log.” It takes a second for me to synch through the VPN. Since I’m outside the US, I need to enter a code that changes every five seconds.

“There. I’m in.” I go back through the notations. Bingo. “Someone broke into her house at approximately two a.m. on July eleventh.”

“That’s two weeks after Anton Solonov took me.” She chews on a fingernail. Her eyes are open, but there’s a glazed effect over her dark brown eyes and minuscule pupils, as if she’s not seeing anything at all. “I was still trapped in a boat at that point. They wouldn’t let me out of the hold. I thought I would die. Why go after Sage?”

“We have a couple of working theories. But we could never interrogate anyone to confirm anything.” Her steady gaze through the window has me pushing up out of the chair and checking the view to see exactly what she’s staring at. My knees pop, and the familiar ache flares. I dig out an Advil pack from my pants pocket. “One theory is that they thought she knew something about what you were working on.”

“She knows nothing.”

“We’re aware. But whoever took you might not be.” Her lips purse as if she’s giving this idea consideration. “We also considered that she’s the only person who would search for you.”

“That’s not true. Dr. Kallio would search for me. Or William. For that matter, any number of my colleagues would search for me.”

“Who’s William?”

“William Salo. He was my boss. He took a new job in Switzerland, and they hired Dr. Kallio.”

“According to your employee file, you resigned.”

“But that’s ridiculous. I didn’t resign. I already told Sage. And you. Why aren’t you listening?”

“There’s an email file on your employee server.”

“I didn’t send an email.”

“Someone did. From your account.”

“I haven’t had access to my email since that psychopath drugged me and locked me on a boat.”

“So, you didn’t do it, but someone did. They probably did it so your colleagues wouldn’t wonder what happened to you. You know, your boss, Dr. Kallio, she’s the one Sage talked to first when you didn’t return her calls. She’s the one who told her you emailed your resignation and said you’d fallen in love and were going to leave to go sailing around the world.”

She removes her finger from her mouth and studies it. I suspect she just chewed a piece of her nail off.

“Admittedly, many companies keep a limited amount of information on employees, but there was no notation of concern from your supervisor.”

“Dr. Kallio wouldn’t make a negative notation in my employee file. I do twice the work of any other researcher.” She still has that faraway look in her eye, looking in the general direction of the window, and it feels like she’s talking to herself, not to me. “I need to get my laptop. I can access the server. See what’s going on.”

“That sounds like a remarkably stupid idea.” Yeah, now she sees me.

“I’m not stupid. I am highly intelligent.”

That’s not the response I was expecting, but I’ll give it to her. She’s refreshingly straightforward. “You realize that if it wasn’t for Arrow taking on this project, you’d be trapped in Cambodia taking blood samples indefinitely. You get that, right?” A little thank you might be nice.

“They were getting ready to move me.”

“To where? How do you know?”

“I heard a man speaking. He spoke in Russian, but I understood some words. I think that’s what he was saying. That I was to finish with the blood samples, and I’d be moved. He assured whoever he was talking to that I was okay. I thought they might put me on another boat. That’s why I took the pill without knowing what it was. Even though Knox said he’d be back, I couldn’t wait.”

“When did you hear them say they were going to move you?”

“The day before Knox showed up. I assumed the man was speaking to Anton, but that was a fear-based assumption. I have no fact-based evidence. He was speaking Russian, but that’s circumstantial.”

Fear-based and fact-based. Sage’s sister disseminates information like a pro.

“It’s a good hunch,” I admit. “We’re looking to see if there’s a connection between Omar Cardenas and Alexis Flores to Anton Solonov. We suspect either he hired them, or the same person who hired Anton hired them.”

“You said you had theories. Plural. What are your other theories?”

“That they wanted Sage to force you to do something.”

“They lied to me. They told me they had her. But they wouldn’t let me speak to her.”

“Did they harm you?”

Those dark eyes seem to double. “They drugged me and locked me in the bottom of a boat. I’d say that’s harmful.”

“Yes. I agree. But did they do anything more? Hit you?”

“No. But I watched them beat a young man. They told me that would be me if I didn’t do as they wanted.”

That counts as a form of torture. “And what did you do?”

“I told them to go ahead and kill me. I think he would’ve liked to, but his boss told him not to hurt me.”

“He told you that?”

“No. I already told you. I overheard them.” That actually matches with what Knox had been told when he entered the compound. When a guard entered, he acted like he was coming on to her, and the guard told Knox there were other women he could have sex with, but not her. Of course, she heard all that. She was standing with Knox when it happened.

“Whoever orchestrated this didn’t want you hurt. Otherwise, they would’ve beaten you into submission. And they wouldn’t have differentiated you between the other women in the compound.”

“They do hurt those people. The ones working on the computers.”

“I didn’t actually enter the compound, but that’s our understanding, yes.”

“If people know about that place, why hasn’t anyone stopped them?”

“It’s connected to a powerful man. A Cambodian senator. He claims the people are there of their own volition and they keep no one against their will.”

“That’s not true.” The faraway off look returns. “I need to get my computer. After I distribute my report, I need to publish an account of what I observed in the compound. I have a contact at The New York Times. She’s in sciences, but?—”

“Sloane, I don’t know you from Adam. I’m here on the job and for my friend Knox. But I strongly advise letting this go. You’re playing with dangerous people. And from what I can tell, connected people. Someone was protecting you. If you go after them publicly, whoever is doing this might not be so willing to let you live.”

“They didn’t let me do anything. You and Knox got me out of there.”

“True.” Can’t really argue with that. “So, tell me something. How do people make money from the research you’re doing?”

“Usually, people ask me to tell them about the research I’m doing.”

“I’ve got the general gist. You’re a cellular biologist. You were working on the effects of rapamycin on cells, and you had another study growing organs in test tubes.”

“That’s not?—”

“It’s close enough, right?”

“Yes.”

“How do people make money off it? I’m asking because right now we have a lot of questions. And generally, when people go around criming, they do it for money. How do people make money from what you do?”

“Our investors and the laboratory will make money if either of my projects prove successful. The rapamycin is simply trying to ascertain the best level of the drug to reap the antiaging benefits without the negative side effect of lowering the immune system. If we can determine the optimal dosage level, it stands to be in greater demand than multivitamins. No one wants to age.”

“Yeah, I’d imagine that’s a pretty big market.”

“Projections set it as a thirty-eight-billion-dollar worldwide market by 2028.”

I whistle because, yeah, people have killed for a shit ton less.

“But I’m not the only one conducting research of that kind. There are multiple companies doing research right now.”

“I’d imagine so.”

“But what I’m doing with organ cellular growth? Imagine a future where someone you loved needed an organ. I could take their stem cells and grow them an organ. There would be no wait list. We could grow organs and have them ready for patients as needed. No one would have to become weak or close to death’s door to receive an organ. Transplants would occur on healthy individuals. Recovery rates would rise exponentially.” Those intelligent eyes sparkle like she’s describing nirvana.

“That’s what you were working on?”

“No.” She waves a hand dismissively. “Well, yes, that’s the long-term vision. Right now, we can legally grow organs up to fourteen days. There’s this ridiculous international law. That’s why we’re working out of the Cayman Islands. Because I have cells that have continued to live substantially past the fourteen-day mark. They don’t become functional organs. But we’re making progress. And that’s why I have to go back. Everything I was working on is in the labs. I don’t think the investors believe in my project. I overheard one of them sharing survival rates, and he was wrong. He was quoting black market data. I don’t know where he got it, but that’s what I was trying to show.”

“Show what?”

“Black market organs have issues.” She says it like I’m a simpleton for not understanding. If she’d been my lab partner in high school, I would’ve wanted to strangle her.

“I’d say black market organs have a pretty big ethical issue.”

“No.” She waves her hand dismissively, once again acting like I’m na?ve or ignorant. “Not that. It’s that many of the donors have alternate health problems. The testing for compatibility isn’t necessarily as strong. Hospitals and surgeons who complete the surgeries aren’t as equipped and trained as more reputable hospitals that would never step outside of international guidelines. The long-term results are inferior to ethical transplants in the US. I was trying to extrapolate the long-term results in an environment without donor health risks. From a financial perspective, if I can grow organs, it would be a financial windfall. Based on my preliminary analysis.” She lets out a sigh. “I need to review the data sources I found on our network. I need to get back there to figure out what is going on.”

There’s not a single person she can trust back there. Any one of them could be complicit in her abduction. “You can come back with us to California. We’ve got a tech team. They can break into anything. We’ll get you on your network.”

“No. I need to go back to Grand Cayman. Everything is in my apartment.”

“Pretty sure they cleared out your apartment.”

“Who?” Another wave, but this time she dismisses herself. “It doesn’t matter. I have to go back.”

“Sloane, you’re dealing with dangerous people. I can’t emphasize that enough. People who stand to gain a lot of money with either your silence or your knowledge. The people holding you in Cambodia? All hired guns. The Wagner Group. Some of the best hired guns money can buy. Anton Solonov? He’s not a cheap hire. You don’t get to hire someone like that without connections. You can’t go back. It’s too risky.”

“The work I’m doing could change the world. Isn’t that worth taking some risks?” We stare each other down, locked in a battle of wills. I don’t blink, but deep in my bones, I know I’m going to end up helping this mad scientist. “What do you do?”

“Me?” I really do not care for how she looks at me like I’m a simpleton. “Well, I told you. I work for a?—”

“Were you in the military? Like my brother?”

“Yes.”

“So, you’re like my brother, Sam Watson?”

“I’m a lot like your brother was. Determined to make this world a better place.”

“And you’re one of the best, right? That’s what he loved. Being among the best.”

Hearing it phrased like that, coming from her mouth, leaves me speechless. I nod as I let the pride filter. Yeah, we are among the best. We’re among the most highly skilled in the world, trained by one of the world’s most advanced militaries.

“Well, Sam believed in taking risks. To better the world. And that’s what I’m going to do.”