Eve B Hart
A Debt Unpaid
Part 1
Disclaimer: Some of the
characters – like Edward, Anita, and Van Cleef – belong to Laurell K. Hamilton,
and some – like Eleanor and Logan Cates, and Mac Duncan – belong to me. The
Stratford Compound and several characters are based on – and the general plot
is borrowed from – the video game House of the Dead III.
Any
comments are greatly appreciated.
Chapter
One – Ellie
Edward liked it best when a job was
finished. It meant that he was no longer obligated to the person who’d taken
out the contract in the first place. It meant going back to Santa Fe, back to
being Ted Forrester.
The desk clerk smiled as the
assassin strode through the front doors of the hotel that he was staying at.
Edward nodded at her on his way to the elevator. Thankfully, the elevator was
empty – he hated sharing such a small space with someone he didn’t know – on
his way up to the sixth floor. Before he had even slid his card into the slot,
he knew that something was amiss.
He slipped his hand into his pants
pocket, closing it around the derringer located there, as he turned the handle.
Slowly pushing open the door, Edward heard the clink of glass on glass inside
the room. Taking a quick glance around the corridor, he drew the gun slowly out
of his pocket.
“Oh,
for God’s sake, Edward, you don’t have to be so dramatic,” a young woman’s
voice chided from inside. “Get in here already.”
Edward let out a slow breath of
relief, sliding the firearm back to its place and walking readily into the
hotel room. Sitting at the table with the phone and a glass of clear liquor
near her was Eleanor Cates, the twenty-five year-old daughter of Edward’s
oldest friend.
She was wearing jeans and fairly
low-heeled boots with a red V-neck T-shirt, and her dark brown hair, which had
been shoulder-length the last time Edward had seen her, was now cut incredibly
short. She wore no make-up, as usual, and a sapphire solitaire around her neck.
Edward flashed her a grin. “Where’s
Logan?” Eleanor averted her eyes without a word. “You should have called me.
I’d have wanted to be at the service.”
“There
wasn’t a service,” she said quietly. “Hell, Edward, there wasn’t even a body.”
Edward nodded his acknowledgement.
“So what are you doing here, then?”
Eleanor’s solemn mien slid into a
wry grin, all of the melancholy dissolving from her face. “You’re not gonna
like it.”
“I never do,” Edward replied
wearily, taking his jacket off and draping it over the sofa arm. He then took
the seat across the table from her. “Out with it,” he ordered.
“Someone has reopened the Stratford
Compound.”
Edward went pale. The Stratford
incident was probably the most horrific thing he’d ever been a part of. Over
four hundred lives – most of them innocent, though Edward didn’t classify
people that way anymore – had been lost as a result of Dr. Michael Stratford’s
appalling experimentations on people in his zealous quest to find everlasting
life for mere mortals such as himself. Edward still had nightmares. “Tell me
more.”
“Well, because the Stratford incident
was so heinous, we send a team in to check the compound every year. Th-"
“Wait a minute,” Edward interrupted.
“There was an order to implode the entire compound.”
Eleanor nodded. “There was, but the
bosses decided to eight-six that particular command. No one knows why.”
His brow knitted, then relaxed as he
nodded at her. “Continue.”
“Five people are sent to the
compound once a year. They check out any oddities, anything out of place, any
additions. It’s a migraine to go through the list and positions of everything
they have to check.” At Edward’s expectant expression, she quickly moved on.
“Anyway, this time, the quintet found that the electric fence surrounding the
compound had been activated and the generators that power the compound were
running. Some fancy footwork – and some very impressive computer hacking – and
they got inside.” Eleanor drained her glass. “They weren’t even a minute and a
half inside the compound before we lost contact with them. They hadn’t even
reached the parking garage yet. There weren’t any sounds to suggest what had
happened. The next team that went in found pieces of them . . . right
before they cut out, too.”
“Don’t tell me,” Edward said dryly,
“the scenario repeats itself multiple times?”
Eleanor smiled grimly at him. “Ten,
actually. And the boys at the top are out for blood, so they’re calling for
you, since you are the only one who can help fix this.”
He pondered this for a moment.
“That’s a shame, Ellie. But in case you’ve forgotten, I was released.”
Eleanor bit her lip hesitantly.
“Actually, Edward, you weren’t.” He opened his mouth to reply, but she
continued. “Your discharge was based on your success with the Stratford
operation. They’re saying that since the mission failed, your release contract
is null and void. So you’re obligated. If you don’t do this Edward, they’re
declaring you AWOL and they’re gonna hunt you down.” She paused, not sure if
she should proceed. “And that means hunting down anyone you know for
information.”
“Including Donna,” Edward finished
for her.
“And those two kids of hers.”
He let out a rarely heard string of
curses. “Is that why you’re here?”
“They were going to send Mac. He
would have just shot you, bound you, wrapped you in canvas, and hauled you back
in the bed of his truck.”
“If he lived long enough to,” Edward
murmured.
Eleanor met his cool blue eyes.
“He’s good, Edward. Better than before.”
Mac
Duncan had been Eleanor’s main rival at the academy, although he was four years
her senior. Years before the Stratford operation had even begun, Mac had been
Edward’s protégé. He hadn’t really been able to live up to his mentor’s stellar
reputation – he’d been rather clumsy, hesitant, had a conscience, and was just
all around unconvincing as an assassin
- but over the past decade, there had been an unbelievable improvement.
He was quicker, colder, and more confident.
Edward let out a slow breath. “If
you say so.”
Eleanor tried to suppress her
agitation. “Edward, we’ve lost over four dozen people in three weeks’ time.
Now, we need someone in there who knows the case, who knows the compound, and
who knows what the hell he’s doing!”
Edward was silent for several
moments, contemplating. Inexorably, he decided that the more quickly he did
this, the more quickly he could get back home to his fiancée. “So,” he said,
meeting Eleanor’s brown eyes, “what’s next on the list?”
“We need another animator – Margo
Whitley gave up the ghost back in April.”
“What, were the past three weeks practice runs? You didn’t think
you’d need an animator then?”
Eleanor wrinkled her nose, a habit
she had when she began losing her patience. “Edward, until a team makes it all
the way to the elevator shaft, we’re not sending in someone that valuable.”
Edward watched her long enough and
intensely enough that she shifted uncomfortably in her seat. Finally, he
smiled. “I think I’ve got just the person for you.”
_*_*_*_*_
“So your past rears its ugly head
again,” Anita Blake remarked, crossing her arms over her ribs. “Do I get a
sliver of honesty this time?”
Anita was a small woman with black
curly hair and pale skin. She wore jeans and an oversized T-shirt. Apparently,
Edward and Eleanor had interrupted what was to be a relaxing, stress-free
weekend with Micah, whom Eleanor gathered from Edward was an addition to
Anita’s already full love life. Eleanor almost felt sorry for the woman, but
she had bigger fish to fry.
Eleanor, Anita, and Edward sat at
Anita’s kitchen table with coffee in front of them, while Micah leaned against
the wall, surveying the trio.
“Anita, you don’t owe me any more
favors,” Edward said forthrightly. “But-"
“But without you,” Eleanor
interrupted impatiently, “Michael Stratford will continue to experiment and
will eventually unleash a terror on the world that will make the Plagues look
like the Beatitudes.”
Anita turned her eyes to Edward, who
nodded solemnly. “She’s right. That is exactly what is going to happen if you
don’t help us.”
She raised her gaze and met Micah’s
eyes, and some sort of unspoken communication went between them. Eleanor had
never understood the couples who could do that – her parents had never done it,
and God knew she’d never had the other half who could arouse such intimacy in
her. She shrugged it off and waited, scratching her index fingernail against
the side of her thumb, a nervous habit that she’d picked up from her sister
Lisa.
Anita sighed heavily, some dark
emotion playing behind her brown eyes. Finally, she spoke. “When do we leave?”
_*_*_*_*_
When they arrived around eleven p.m.
two days later at what all past and present employees referred to as “Van
Cleef’s Camelot,” two men were waiting for the threesome, who were just now
pulling into the parking garage in Eleanor’s Explorer.
The first was a tall brown-haired
man who went by the nickname of Red. Everyone who studied under Van Cleef got a
nickname based on some trait of his or hers. Red was nicknamed for the scarlet
hue his face took on when he got angry. The other man was smaller than the
first, with orange hair and freckles whom everyone called Buggy, named so for
his standard diet of insects.
Eleanor got out of the car with
Edward and Anita.
“Who’s the other chick?”
“Buggy, lay off,” Eleanor snapped
before Anita could open her mouth to say anything. “We’ve been driving for
twelve hours straight today, and none of us are in the mood.”
Red, the quieter of the two, spoke
up, a slight Oklahoman accent present in his voice. “We’re to take you three to
the conference room.”
Eleanor and Edward both nodded as
they followed the two men inside. After riding in two elevators and walking
down God knows how many hallways, Eleanor cut through the silence.
“Has the nostalgia kicked in yet?”
she asked dryly as the five of them walked down the corridor together. Red and Buggy seemed more tense
and primed to attack than Edward did.
Edward said nothing in response. He
was caught between taking in his surroundings and reliving all the other times
he’d walked this corridor on his way to the conference room. There had been
plenty of them.
Coming from the opposite end was
Lucky Vitale, a woman shorter than Anita with shoulder-length blonde hair and
café au lait skin who insisted on referring to everyone collectively as
“people.” “Plans have been changed around, people. Undertaker, Friday, and the
new girl will be going directly to the compound – we lost another crew.”
“’Friday?’” Edward asked
bemusedly of Eleanor.
“Girl
Friday,” she explained, glancing over her shoulder. “Everyone treats me like
I’m their personal assistant. As if I don’t have an actual job here.”
Lucky tapped her right index finger
twice firmly against the watch face on her left wrist. “You’ve got seven
minutes, people. I suggest you hurry. You’ll be briefed on the plane.”
Anita paled. “Plane?”