should have resembled a castanet but didn't. His eyes were bleak, hard, and something entirely too much like panic gibbered just below the surface of his tightly focused thoughts.
It was Manpower. It had to be, given the information they wanted, and that meant his sister—his twin—was in the hands of people who routinely used rape and torture as “training tools” and couldn't care less how many mutilated bodies they left in their wake. Worse, they were people who had deeply personal, as well as professional, reasons to hate him and, by extension, his family. It was entirely too likely that whoever had hurt Allison to make the point of his helplessness to him had enjoyed doing it. That they would do it again, with or without the intention of driving him to do their bidding. And it was certain that in the end, they would kill her.
But what did he do about it?
The first thing he did was to stay as far away from the members of his own team as he possibly could. It was possible Manpower hadn't IDed any of the other members of that team, but it was unlikely. And if they did know the team members, they'd have any of them they'd identified under surveillance. They had to know his natural response would have been to reach out to the people he trusted most in the world to help get Allison back, and the instant they saw any of those people doing anything out of the ordinary, they would assume that was exactly what he'd done. At which point, Allison would almost certainly die.
But that didn't mean he couldn't contact anyone in the BSC. He'd just have to be insanely careful about who and how.
He left his apartment, locked the door behind him, and headed for the parking garage. No doubt he was under surveillance at that very moment, but the very information they'd demanded from him gave him a perfectly logical reason to head for the Biological Survey Corps' headquarters at Camp Oswald Avery three hundred kilometers outside Grendel. The sort of detailed information they wanted couldn't be remote accessed without all sorts of challenges and authorizations. From his workstation inside Oswald Avery, over the camp's secure server network, it would be quite another matter.
But so would his ability to communicate without worrying about any eavesdroppers.
* * *
“Damn, I hate it when they pass out that fast,” Giuseppe Ardmore remarked, tossing the neural whip into the air, flipping it end for end and catching it again.
Allison Benton-Ramirez y Chou was still unconscious, drooping in the chair to which she had been strapped, and Ardmore smiled as he watched her breathe. She wasn't blindfolded or hooded, which would have told her brother a great deal about how likely she was ever to leave this room alive. She might not realize that, but she sure as hell knew now that she was in deep, deep shit and sinking fast.
He caught her hair in his free hand, pulling her head back to study her critically. She was a beautiful bitch, he'd give her that, and maybe before it was all over, he'd have the opportunity to take advantage of that, too. But for now—
“Do you really think he's going to roll over for us?” he asked, never lifting his hungry eyes from her face.
Tobin Manischewitz regarded the other man without any particular expression, yet Ardmore's attitude disturbed him. The original concept for the operation had been his, but Ardmore was making it too personal. Manischewitz wasn't going to be a hypocrite and pretend he hadn't known exactly what sort of ugliness his plan entailed, but for him, it was simply the cost of doing business. A man didn't go to work for someone like Manpower if he had much in the way of scruples, and Manischewitz had never claimed he did. He'd always known Ardmore had a vicious streak, as well—it was one of the things which had made him so effective when it came to “wet work”—but it looked like the man had a deeper and uglier vein of sadism to go with it than he'd thought.
In some ways, that suited Manischewitz just fine. Ms. Benton-Ramirez y Chou wasn't going to survive the operation, no matter what happened, and her brother's love for her was both well known and evident. If anything was going to shake his professionalism, get under his skin and cause him to make mistakes, it would be his burning fear of what would