The car seat smelt of sun-baked plastic and farts. The pain of the Taser had finally faded to the point where it disappeared if Emily focused on something else, say the splitting pain in her head or the festering cuts on her face and hands. A large blood-soaked ACE bandage glued one side of her face into immobility and ragged cotton strips covered her palms.

They had been driving for at least an hour since switching cars and abandoning the paramilitary van in a Popeye's parking lot. The only thing she had to mark time and distance was the constant passing of lights on the side of the highway. Their jaundiced glow strobed across the seat, as she lay there motionless.

She didn't sit up. She wouldn't make that mistake again. The memory of the Taser hadn't faded that much. Still, she felt like she giving these bastards too easy of a time.  Her sickening passivity ate at her until she couldn't keep quiet any longer.

"Where are you taking me?" she demanded.

Silence. She could only see the back of the men's buzz cuts as they stared straight ahead ignoring her.

"What do you want with me? I'm not important?"

"Shut up, back there," the driver yelled without glancing over at her.

"If you want money, my boyfriend can get it for you. He can get you a lot. You just have to call him and let him know you have me." Please call Max, her mind urged them. He'd deal with these fuckers.

"Nice try." The passenger turned to her. His face was caught in silhouette by the windshield. His nose was bulbous and his eyebrows were thick and stuck out wildly. "We know all about you and your boyfriend, who he is and what he's capable of. We're not stupid."

"But why me? I'm nobody."

"Not to our employer. Trust me, there is someone out there willing to spend a lot of money for you." She could only make out an impression of a smile as his cheeks creased and his mouth opened, but the smugness wafted off of him like the stink of sour sweat.

"Your employer?" If she could get some more information perhaps she could come up with some kind of plan. "So the raid on Aira was just to get me? What does Torrealba want?"

"Wrong and wrong." The commando seemed to be overjoyed to have inside information. "Never heard of that dude. And the people who ordered us to take out the lab's security couldn't care less about you. We just happened to pick up a very lucrative side contract."

"Will you both shut up," the driver screamed. "I can understand her, but what the hell are you doing? Christ! Keep your stupid mouth closed. You shouldn't be telling anyone our plans, least of all her. She's the fucking package."

"Relax. We're almost there. Another two exits. Soon she'll be someone else's problem. We'll have our money and be long gone. What does it matter?"

"I don't give a shit. One more word and I'll pull over and put you both in the trunk." It sounded like the type of idiotic threat a father in some movie would make to misbehaving children. But Emily wasn't willing to test him.

And apparently neither did the passenger. He folded his arms and turned back toward the road in a pout. They continued on in silence for a while. Laying there contemplating whatever new horrors awaited her, time followed no clock—it stretched and skipped with her anxious thoughts. Who would want her if not Benicio? An old mark? Someone with a grudge to settle?

They made a hard turn onto gravel and rolled to a stop.

The men got out of the car and Emily could hear footsteps approaching. She stretched up to get a look but not high enough to be obvious.

"Where is she? Do you have her?" It was a woman. Her voice was muffled by the sealed car and the words were only just audible.

"She's in the back. Where's the money?"

"The girl first."

There was a drawn-out pause. Perhaps the commando and the woman were staring each other down. Eventually, he said, "Fine."

More footsteps. She could see the man and his buzz cut approaching the door, she lowered her head. She couldn't be sure if the order to stay down was still in effect, but didn't want to find out the hard way. As she ducked, she caught a glimpse of blonde hair beside him, long with dark roots.

The door opened and the stale air conditioning of the car was replaced by a breeze of fresh warm air. She didn't know how wonderful real air could be until her nostrils greedily sucked it in.

"Is it her?" the woman asked the man. Then she leaned in closer and her voice cut directly into Emily, throwing her conscious mind into complete confusion. "Look at me, Emily."

Emily knew her. When her name was spoken, she realized exactly who this woman was. But it couldn't be. It was completely crazy. She looked up to confirm her own insanity.

"My God, what the hell did you do to her? I said unharmed. Do you know the meaning of that word, you meat-head."

"It's only superficial. She had most of those cuts when we picked her up. We only knocked her around a little to keep her in line."

"Why can't people simply do things the way I tell them? That's all I ask."

The woman looked so elegant with her designer dress and pumps, the driver probably didn't see her as the slightest threat. He certainly didn't react when the woman reached into her Vuitton purse with her perfectly manicured hand. In fact, he was still trying to explain himself for Emily's condition, when she drew out a gun and shot him in the chest.

Somewhere in the background of the parking lot there was scuffling as someone unseen took care of the other abductor. The woman bent down to Emily and brushed the hair out of her eyes. "Are you alright, dear?"

Emily looked into the face she hadn't seen in years. She was still too stunned to think. "Mom?"

***

Blackhawk helicopters buzzed overhead, obscured by the plumes of smoke rising from the burned-out husks of cars. Occasionally one would sweep the ground with a spotlight, breaking the night's numerous layers of darkness. Missile hits had left the parking lot a post-apocalyptic junkyard of twisted and charred metal. At the head of the trail of destruction rested the shells of two large vans. One wasted hull lay on its side. The burned corpse of the driver still clutched the steering wheel inside the second one. To a trained eye, the pattern of scorch marks showed the story of the raiding party's failed retreat.

The doors to the building were gone, as were most of the windows on the front of the atrium. Armed soldiers from the Air Force's Emergency Service Team, clustered on the pavement just outside. They cleared a path when the small knot of dignitaries approached.

The scene inside was an even bigger disaster than the warzone of the parking lot. Right at the threshold, there was a body that had to be stepped over. Blood and bullet casings created splashes of color among the sheets of broken glass carpeting the floor. All of it sparkled in the portable tungsten lamps the military had set up around the perimeter of the room.

Grierson silently cursed putting on leather loafers when he hurriedly dressed. Something with thicker soles was required. He had never imagined there would be this much devastation. He had somehow assumed the assault would have been cleaner.

He turned to the attaché on his left. The kid was a lieutenant but barely looked old enough to shave. "Why hasn't anything been done? Why are the dead still here?"

"Orders, sir. We were told to contain the area but not to touch anything until you arrived on the scene." He spoke with a spit-polish, eager to please enthusiasm. It was the type of attitude Grierson loved. That combination of zeal and naivety could be put to good use.

The Major on Grierson's right was not going to be so malleable. He looked as though he was chewing on some of that broken glass they were walking over. His sour face warned of trouble just waiting to surface. Grierson filed it away as the lesser of all the problems he had to deal with.

"Well, I'm here now," he said to the kid, before addressing his top priority problem. "This place needs to be completely scrubbed. I want all the bodies removed and taken back to base. Then we need to clean and repair the site. Make it look like a place of business, not a battlefield. There's going to be a delegation from the press coming through here in a few hours and we need to scale back the visible damage or this whole snafu is going to blow up in all of our faces. Get on it, now."

"Yes, sir." Lieutenant Watson snapped a salute and rushed to the men by the door to pass on the orders.

Major Grady and Grierson continued weaving their way through the death and mayhem. Grierson tried to tread as carefully as possible without appearing dainty about it and without coughing at the gasoline fumes the generators were emitting.

"I think bringing reporters here is the stupidest, goddamn idea I've ever heard. You actually want them to see all of this?" Major Grady was finished stewing and had started to unleash his scorn in a thick Texas drawl, which accentuated his rancor. Grierson was under no illusions that this was anything but the tip of a very deep and resentful iceberg.

It was time to caress the officer's ego and deflect blame. Like all things in his job: it was ninety percent politics.

"Adam, I know this isn't the way you normally do things. Trust me, I would be more than happy to still be home in bed and have you taking care of this. The DOD handed this mess over to the Agency not because they didn't think you could handle it. And God knows, not because the DTAA didn't think you could handle it. But because this is our facility and if this goes any more sideways than it already has, the Secretary of Defense is going to personally hang us by the balls."

 "Putting it in the news is the most sure-fire way to take this situation to the next echelon of fucked.  We need to keep this screw-up quiet not shout it out."

"It's already in the news. We're not so far from civilization that a military operation wasn't noticed. Do you have any idea the gauntlet of press I had to run just to get in here? If your helicopters weren't in the sky, every TV station in three states would have one overhead." Grierson paused to sigh wearily and let the magnitude of the situation sink in. "People are waking up on the east coast hearing reports about unspecified terrorist attacks and State Department officials are already getting tired of saying, no comment. We need to get our story out there as soon as possible and contain this thing."

"How do you plan to contain this?" Grady's hands swept around, encompassing the full scene of carnage.

Grierson looked up in the air as though musing out loud, pretending that he was only thinking of this for the first time. "The buildings cover was as a cosmetic testing lab. We'll sell this as a bombing by a group of radical animal rights activists." The first step was always to find a logical scapegoat, never a difficult task. That was one of the great things about this country: there was a type of crazy for every contingency. If they couldn't find a group radical enough to have done this, they would invent one. And no one would bat an eye.

People were getting nuttier by the day. Each morning brought new threat analyses for kookier people with kookier groups. Just yesterday, a briefing paper crossed his desk about a doomsday cult that practiced an extreme form of body modification to look like their spiritual leader. Next to crackpots like that, vegans with bombs seemed normal.

"Have you seen this place? How are you going to convince anyone a homemade bomb did all of this?"

"I believe I said to scrub it. Replace furniture. Patch the bullet holes. Mop up the blood. Make it so it doesn't look like the shootout at the OK Corral, but we don't hide everything. Everyone knows there were explosions and that the Air Force was called in. If all anyone sees is the shattered atrium ceiling and some broken planters, the idea of it just being a bomb will seem logical. We'll parade through a few select members of the media, who are sympathetic to rational thought and let them know no one was injured and after a full investigation we've ruled out foreign terrorists. Later today, we'll make some arrests and in a few days everyone will have forgotten about this."

They reached the reception desk. It was impossible to tell exactly how many bodies there were with just a brief glance. Grierson tutted as he continued on. "Such a waste."

A member of the Emergency Service Team ran up and addressed Major Grady. "Sir. You should see this." The soldier had desperate air about him, like a dog trying to get people to follow him to a child in a well.

"Lead the way, Corporal," Grierson said genially but casually asserting his command.

The Corporal led them down the hall to the janitor's closet. Amid the buckets and cleaning products was another corpse. They had more than enough of these. Why was this dead man so important?

Before he could ask, the Corporal said, "He appears to have been tortured."

"Does he now?" Grierson tried to sound aloof as Major Grady knelt to examine the body.

Scanning the floor, he spotted some odd things: a bloody strand of gauze, discarded surgical scissors, an empty syringe. It didn't look like torture. It looked like someone had tried to help him. Something no one had done with any of the others. Maybe he was important. May he was the commander of the raiding party.

Continuing his search for evidence, Grierson's eyes stopped on a small puddle of blood in the corner. Some strange glob glistened from its center.

Grierson pointed to it. "What's that?"

The Corporal swallowed hard before answering. "I believe it's his eye."

***

Author's Note: So two more parts making it a total of three for this Friday. At this rate, I hope to have Book One completed in two more weeks.

I really struggled with Emily's fate. I knew whatever happened to her in this chapter would be the bases for her Book Two storyline and I honestly hadn't given it much thought until now. I was happy with what I came up with and think it will make for some great events in the next part of the series. What did you think of the revelation?

And another new POV at the end, but from a character that has been here since the beginning. Grierson will appear again before the book closes. I originally had his two scenes as one but felt it would work better split out, so there wouldn't be a lot of location changes.

Next week, find out what Barbara learned from the dead soldier and what the heck is really happening to poor Horus. Plus the conclusion of Grierson's part of the story.