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And now as Indy glanced into Ice’s eyes one last time before crossing that frontier, she saw that he knew it too, knew the risk she was taking opening that door.
He knew it and he was ready for it.
Ready to bring her back from wherever she went.
Ready to bring her back to him.
“Indy, listen, you don’t have to do this if you’re afraid,” he said now, snapping the phone-screen closed and shaking his head. “Maybe we wait until this drug settles down a bit, gets past its peak. If this triggers something, there’s a chance . . . there’s a chance you don’t come all the way back even when the drug wears off.”
Indy gulped back her fear, then shook her head. “You know we can’t wait. If you’re right about this whole vortex of emotional energy thing, then I need to open up that part of me, release all that densely packed dark energy that’s been bottled up for thirty years. It feels viscerally urgent, desperately important. I don’t know how to explain it, and you don’t either—hell, maybe even Benson can’t explain it. But I think we both understand it—temporarily, at least, while we’re still off our rockers.” She shrugged nervously, smiled weakly. “And we both understand that I may not have access to that deeply buried place without what this psychoactive drug is doing to my brain and nervous system right now. If I miss this window, we might not have what we need to end this mission our way.” She laughed hesitantly. “I don’t know why that crazy-talk makes total sense right now, but it does.” She swiped at the air with feigned carelessness. “Of course, the fact that we are tripping our eyeballs out makes it pretty darn likely that this is all just muddled reasoning and overblown imagination. I mean, really, what are the chances that both my motherandmy father tried to murder me in two separate incidents, independent of each other?” She chuckled darkly. “Besides, if Benson really did name Scarlet and Rhett all those years ago, wouldn’t he have named me Bonnie, the tragic baby from the original story? Instead I have a side-character’s name. See? Nothing to worry about. Show me the photograph. Let’s get it over with.”
Ice exhaled, then nodded, flipped the phone open again, punched a couple of buttons, and held the screen up for Indy.
She stared at the handsome older man looking directly at the camera, his eyes a mixture of cold confidence and hot determination, lips holding back something that could be a smile or a sneer.
Indy blinked, swallowed, kept her gaze on the photograph.
And felt nothing.
A glimmer of relief started to brighten her heart.
Then something almost stopped her heart.
She blinked in confusion, wondering if the drug was doing something weird to her gut, twisting her tummy, constricting her insides like there was something gaining mass and volume, power and steam, emotion turning to energy, energy coiling into a spring, all of it winding upwards in a dizzying spiral, spreading outwards in a sickening surge.
She stiffened against the seat, pushing Ice’s steadying arm away as her insides squirmed. There was still no visual memory, no images like she’d seen of her mother, no clear confirmation that Rhett Rodgers was anything more than a name attached to a photograph, a character attached to someone else’s story.
But the sickening sensation kept rising, and now Indy recalled what she’d read about how memories weren’t always stored as visual images, that trauma could live anywhere in the body, that energetic imprints could be branded in places so far from the brain that releasing them was a visceral physical experience, an unleashing of violent energy through the body not the mind, through the flesh not the psyche, through action not words.
And there were no words to describe what was happening to Indy now. She was vaguely aware of Ice’s urgent calls, his arms trying to pull her into his body. And she was almost unaware of herself lashing out with her fists and kicking out with her legs until she felt her own knuckles connect with his nose, her heel smashing into his groin.
Ice shouted something, but Indy could barely hear him over her own screams. She was a flailing mass of legs and arms, her vision splintered, her mind shattered. She couldn’t breathe, was choking on her tongue, the walls were closing in on her, squeezing the air from her lungs, she needed to get out, she needed to get away, run, just run, run fast enough and maybe you can outrun it, outrun yourself, outrun this thing inside you that feels alive and angry, wicked and vengeful.
Somehow her fingers found the doorlatch and Indy tumbled head-first out of the car, scraping her face on the concrete then slamming her palms on the rough pavement and crawling like some four-legged creature, sobbing and gasping, choking and crying, now hunching over and vomiting something vile and viscous, spitting and coughing and puking again, now sucking in lungfuls of air that seemed devoid of oxygen, was pure fire that burned her insides as she stumbled to her feet, lashed out again at hands trying to grab her, tripped over the curb, slammed into the side of a car, bounced off like a pinball, and now she was finally thankfully gratefully running, running, running, couldn’t run fast enough, couldn’t run far enough, couldn’t run hard enough.
Because there was nothing to do but run. Her mind had cracked wide open, unable to cope with memories that had bypassed the brain.
All she had left was her body now.
And all it could do was run.
33
Rhett ran the search again through the CIA personnel database. The results were the same.
Paige Anderson—Voluntary Separation.
There were no annotations, no exit interview notes, no names other than a generic CIA Human Resources date-and-time stamp.
“Damn it, they got to her,” Rhett growled, rapping his fingertips on the glass-topped worktable of his basement home-office. “Kaiser and Benson fucking got to her.”
He stared up at the ceiling, then glared at the walls. The basement room was windowless like a bunker, with thick fiberoptic cables disappearing into the blue-painted subterranean walls like black pythons. The cables passed through a CIA-issued encryption router before connecting to his Agency laptop. It was an official setup, mandated by the Agency a few years earlier to make sure top CIA officials could manage their operations if Langley was locked down for any reason. You couldn’t launch a drone attack with this setup, but Rhett had access to almost everything else from NSA satellite livestreams to NYPD traffic cameras.
Though of course none of it had helped him track down that treacherous bitch Paige Anderson. Her cell and home phones were disconnected. Her email addresses all bounced. Traffic cams and satellite images showed no sign that she’d returned to her Georgetown apartment building after presumably leaving CIA Headquarters at Langley following her “voluntary” termination from the Agency.
Rhett pushed his well-oiled swivel chair away from the horseshoe-shaped workspace, stood up and stretched his arms out wide to open up his cramping back. He’d been hunched over his laptop for hours trying to track Paige down. A part of him still believed she’d held up under Kaiser and Benson’s questioning, had stayed loyal like the little lap-dog he’d thought she was.
But that part of him wasn’t so sure anymore.