Dark Choices - I. T. Lucas Page 0,64

herself out.

With exhaustion fueling her paranoia, she kept looking in the rearview mirror while forcing herself to stay within the speed limit.

That late at night the roads were deserted, and if anyone had followed her she would have known, but no one had. Perhaps she was indeed paranoid, and Roberts considered her a closed case.

Back at her place, Eleanor made herself instant coffee, packed the few belongings she’d brought with her into a single suitcase, and left a note for her landlady together with next month’s rent.

Living on the run was nothing new to her, which was why she’d been smart enough to keep a couple of fake identities that neither Simmons nor Roberts had known about. Her money was distributed between five bank accounts under several different names, and she also had plenty of cash on hand.

With her compulsion ability, carrying around a small fortune wasn’t a problem. If anyone tried to rob her, she could freeze them and then command them to march themselves to the nearest police station.

So why was she running scared?

Because Roberts knew about her ability, and therefore he could circumvent it. He could send an assassin who was wearing earplugs, or one who was either immune or deaf. Or a sniper could just shoot her from a distance, or an operative could clobber her over the head from behind. And those were just a few of the scenarios she’d come up with while her brain was on the verge of shutting down.

Roberts was clever, and he might find even more ways to get rid of her that would look like an accident or natural causes.

That was why the first thing she did after getting into her car was to check that the brakes were still working.

When Eleanor left her car in Charlottesville Albemarle Airport long term parking lot, it was after seven in the morning. And it was nine-thirty when she boarded a flight to Atlanta.

Buckling up, she debated whether to utilize the hour and a half for a short nap, or to pull out the notebooks and finally get a look at what was inside.

Despite her exhaustion, curiosity won, and as soon as the plane was at cruising altitude, she pulled down the folding table and put the stack of notebooks on top of it.

Conveniently, they were dated, and the first one corresponded with Simmons’s nomination as the program’s director. In his neat handwriting, he’d outlined his ambitious goals, those the higher-ups approved, and those they hadn’t been aware of, like the breeding super-paranormals program. He’d drawn detailed charts of combining and recombining abilities to produce his supers.

Except, he couldn’t have hoped to see the results during his lifetime. Had that been the purpose of the notebooks? Had he planned to give them to a successor?

After a while, Eleanor got bored with the genetic combination charts and Simmons’s crazy ideas about changing the world by bringing about the next leap in human evolution, and just kept flipping pages until she reached the last notebook.

That was where things got really interesting, and her excitement burned through the haze of exhaustion.

When the trainees had escaped, Simmons’s first suspicion was that they had been taken by the Chinese, who he’d known were collecting paranormal talents as well. But then the nano trackers with which the trainees had been injected started transmitting. He’d written down all the locations from which the signals had been received.

After getting the phone message from Wendy, in which she’d told him that the people who’d assisted the escape belonged to an organization of paranormally talented people, he’d still suspected the Chinese, but his mole in their organization had reported that they didn’t have them.

His next step had been to send private detectives to investigate the locations from which the signals had been coming. Jacki had been tracked to a mansion in the Bay Area, Richard’s and Wendy’s had come up and then winked out, and Jin’s had transmitted from an unpopulated area in the Malibu mountains before winking out as well.

Simmons and Roberts had gone to the Bay Area with a crazy plan of attacking the mansion with a long-range noise cannon and capturing the paranormals they’d suspected were living there, but only Roberts had returned alive.

Simmons hadn’t.

Had the fatal accident been faked? Had those paranormals captured Simmons and were they holding him captive? And if so, whose body was in the casket?

Perhaps it had been empty.

Or was he really dead, but not as a result of a fatal accident?

What if the