"If they'd killed her, they would have left her here and just taken her work. I'm sure they took her out alive."
Alive. Thank God.
"Noelle saved you when you got hit. She used her shirt to tie off your wound. She's one heck of a smart lady. If she hadn't stopped the bleeding, you'd be in bad shape by now."
David cursed. "Smart enough that she had to get tangled up in this mess to begin with. Maybe it's better to be stupid."
Across the cabin, Grant was on the phone, speaking in quiet tones.
Caleb crouched, squeezing his bulk into a fairly small package. David noticed there was blood on Caleb's clothes.
Lots of blood. It was smeared all over him in splotchy patches, some that were already drying. "Did you get wounded?" asked David.
Caleb's jaw tightened. "It's not my blood."
Thank God.
"Did you see or hear anything that might tell us where they've taken her?" asked Caleb.
David concentrated on remembering what happened. It was hard to push aside his grinding emotional response to Noelle's danger—his fear for her, his guilt that he'd let this happen. She was so vulnerable, and if the Swarm did to her what they did to Mary ...
"Focus, Wolfe," barked Caleb, giving David a little shake of his shoulders. "You've got to pull it together."
David knew Caleb was right. If he didn't start thinking with his head instead of his heart, Noelle didn't have a chance.
David pulled in a deep breath and tried to recaffthe last thing he could remember. "I was talking to Monroe about getting some more information. Noelle figured out what the text said, but it was incomplete."
"Grant's on the phone with Monroe right now. Do you remember anything else?"
David felt something swirling in his memory. A kiss, so sweet it nearly brought tears to his eyes. Noelle had kissed him before she'd been taken.
And she'd said something—something about the first time they made love ...
David uttered an acidic curse. How could he have let this happen? How could he have let them take her?
Caleb's strong hand settled on David's shoulder in a comforting grip. "I know you're hurting now, but she needs you. You've got to think. What was she doing while you were talking to Monroe?"
David's head throbbed harder as he tried to remember. "She said something about needing the coordinates of where they'd found the text. She thought it might be the missing info. Monroe had just given them to me so I told Monroe to hold on and gave her the coordinates ..."
"And?"
"And she typed them in and..." David could see the look of triumph on her face, the way she smiled at him so happy it made his heart sing.
"She ran the program and brought up the coordinates on her screen."
"Do you remember the coordinates?"
David shook his head as frustration burst through him. "We've got to figure it out before they do. I'm sure that's got to be where they're taking her. They won't kill her until they have the weapons and know they're done using her. We have to get there first and ambush them."
"How are we going to figure out where to go?"
"I don't know," spat David. "Her work is gone. She's gone!"
Caleb turned to Grant. "How long before our ride arrives?"
"They're closing in now," said Grant. "I've got the helo pilot on the phone. I'm going to go outside and guide him in."
David rose to his feet, being cautious so he wouldn't pass out again. Noelle needed him, and he had to do everything in his power to make sure he was able to help her.
Inside his shirt, he felt something slide down along his chest. He reached inside and pulled out a shiny disk smudged with two small, bloody fingerprints. Noelle's.
A spark of hope lit deep in David's heart.
"Is that what I think it is?" asked Caleb.
David nodded and a feral smile touched his mouth. He was going to find her. "I don't know how she managed to pull it off, but I'm damn glad she did."
Outside, David could hear the faint thrumming of a helicopter flying closer.
David grabbed his weapon and his duffel bag and stepped out onto the porch, ignoring his pain, silently urging the pilot to hurry the hell up.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Noelle woke up on some sort of military aircraft. The hard metal plates under her feet vibrated with the roar of the jet engines. Her ankles were tied to the frame of the seat she occupied. A harness-style seat belt was pulled snug against her torso and her wrists were tied together with flexible plastic handcuffs.
Her head felt like it was going to fly apart and her mouth tasted like it had been cleaned out with dead rat carcasses.
She recognized this feeling—the aftereffects of the tranquilizer they'd shot her with—but this time it was different.
David wasn't here to take care of her.
Noelle stifled her tears as she remembered David lying on the floor of the cabin, bleeding. Was he here? Was he still alive?
Needing to know, Noelle cracked her eyelids a little . wider, gritting her teeth against the painful effects of the dim light filling the aircraft. For a moment, she would have welcomed her head actually exploding it hurt so much. She shut her eyes again and concentrated on not throwing up.
Slowly, the pain subsided to merely excruciating, and she tried again to look around her.
The plane was about twenty feet wide, filled with crates and electronic equipment, and she could only guess about their function. There were half a dozen men wearing black military clothing, but without any flags or symbols to give away their loyalties. They spoke in quiet voices she couldn't hear over the roar of the jet engines, so language was no help.
All she knew was that David was nowhere in sight, which meant she was on her own.
One of the men turned and saw she was awake. He was tall and blond and would have been handsome if not for the horrific burn scar that claimed half of his face.
He took a bottle of water from a compartment and came to stand beside her.
"Are you thirsty?" he asked in an accent that belonged somewhere in Wisconsin.
Noelle looked at the water bottle, which was still sealed. She nodded.
The man opened the bottle and held it to her mouth so she could drink.
He flipped open a small box he'd taken from his pocket and dumped out a couple of pills. "These will help with the headache."
Noelle turned her head, refusing the pills. She didn't trust these men, and she wasn't about to make it easy for them to kill her.
He gave a low, amused chuckle. "Suit yourself."
"Who are you?"
"You can call me Owen. We'll be spending a lot of time together, you and I."
Something in the way he said it made the hair on the back of Noelle's neck stand on end. "What do you want with me?" she croaked, making her throat feel like it was going to split open.
"What a foolish question from such an intelligent woman." He capped the water bottle and shoved it into the space between her thigh and the side of the seat.
He placed one hand on each arm of her seat and leaned down so she could see directly into his pale green eyes.
There was no warmth there, no compassion. Only greed.
It was then that Noelle realized she was a dead woman. Maybe not yet, but as soon as they had what they wanted from her, he'd dispose of her without remorse.
"You're going to tell us what the Russian text said, and you're going to do it now."
Noelle's only chance was to stall them. As soon as David found the disk, he'd figure out how to find her. He'd find a way to stop these madmen. She was sure of it. "I don't know if I can. There was a power surge and my laptop started throwing off sparks. Have you checked to see if it's still working?"
He slapped her hard across the face. Noelle was so shocked it took her a minute before she even realized what had happened. The blow was hard enough that she could already feel her cheek swelling and taste the blood from her split lip.
"I don't think you fully grasp the magnitude of your situation, Dr. Blanche." He grabbed the back of her hair and jerked her head so she was staring straight up at him. The ugly scar on his face had darkened to an angry red. "We know everything about you. We know who your friends are. We have men watching your family. Do you really want them to suffer for your stubbornness?"
Her sister Lilly's face crystallized in Noelle's mind, and she couldn't help the tears that slid silently down her cheeks. "I can't." She didn't explain that she couldn't risk the lives of others so that one person could live. Not even her beloved sister. Lilly had been raised the same way—never compromise your principles, no matter what. They'd both been taught that at their father's knee. They both knew the responsibility they carried because they were smart.
"We'll see," he said, and turned to retrieve a metal box that looked like a toolbox. From inside the box he pulled a syringe and a vial full of liquid.
Noelle trembled, unable to fight back the terror that swelled in her chest. What the hell was that stuff and what was it going to do to her?
He filled the syringe and casually injected it into her arm without worrying about disinfectant. It was just one more sign that they didn't care if she lived long-term.
Heat flew along her veins, making her shiver. After a few seconds, the plane seemed to swell and shrink repeatedly, throbbing with each beat of her heart. For some reason, that didn't seem strange.
The man stared at her, and then shined a small light into each of her eyes. "Don't worry," he said, his voice oily with a mockery of compassion. He stroked her hair with a gentle sweep of his hand. "It won't be long now."
David was nearly insane with impotent rage and frustration. He paced the room while the tech-heads worked to break the password protection on the disk Noelle had given him.
General Monroe watched him from the corner. Grant and Caleb had their heads bent together in a quiet conversation over a map on the other side of the sterile white room.
This small government-contracted lab was the closest place they could go with any sort of technical support— the only place nearby where they might be able to figure out where Noelle had been taken. Specialists were flying in to help, but they wouldn't be here for several more hours.
The white room was littered with wires and the entrails of open computer cases. Fluorescent lights hummed overhead while the muted clicking of keyboard strokes filled one side of the space. Three young men were frantically working to get to the information on that disk.
David wanted to put a gun to their heads to help encourage them to work faster, but he resisted the urge. Barely.
Monroe pushed to his feet, using a cane to help him balance. He'd taken a bullet to the leg during the firefight at the safe house, and although he would recover, he was getting old enough that he no longer bounced back like he used to.
He looked tired. Old.
"Have you thought of anything, Captain?" asked Monroe.
David scrubbed at his face with his hand, trying to rid his eyes of the grit of fatigue. He'd had enough coffee to burn a hole in his stomach, but it didn't help. "There's something she said right before she left, but I don't remember what it was."
"What do you remember?"
David shoved some cables aside and leaned against the edge of a workbench lined with a blue electrostatic discharge protective coating. "It's, uh, personal, sir."