The Devil Colony (Sigma Force 7)

He glanced around the presidential suite, situated at the top of the Grand America Hotel at the heart of Salt Lake City. For the first time since arriving in the States, he almost felt at home, ensconced amid all the European appointments of the room: the handcrafted cherrywood Richelieu furniture, the Carrara marble in the spa bathroom, the seventeenth-century Flemish tapestries. From his perch atop the hotel, floor-to-ceiling windows looked out onto breathtaking views of the mountains and down to the meticulously tended parterre gardens far below.

A sniffling sob dampened his good mood.

He turned to the scrawny young man, stripped naked and taped to one of the Richelieu dining chairs. Duct tape sealed his mouth. Twin lines of snot ran from his nose. He gasped, struggling for air, eyes wide and glassy like a wounded fox.

But he wasn’t a fox.

He was Rafe’s hawk . . . a hawk he’d sent hunting.

The biographical data on Kai Quocheets had listed her affiliations, including her participation in WAHYA, the fierce young wolves fighting for Native American rights. It had taken less than an hour to determine where the organization’s leader had squirreled himself away. He’d come to Salt Lake City to be close to the action in the mountains, ready for the exposure that came with such a tragedy. But apparently John Hawkes had other needs, too. Bern had collected him out of a strip club near the airport. Seems the Native American activist liked his women white and blond, with perky fake br**sts.

Another whimper rose from the chair.

Rafe held up a finger. “Patience, Mr. Hawkes. We’ll get back to you soon enough. You’ve been most cooperative. But first let’s make sure your hunt was successful.”

It had not taken much to convert John Hawkes to their cause. Two of his fingers still pointed toward the ceiling. Ashanda had snapped them back as easily as breaking small twigs. Rafe, with his brittle bones, knew that particular exquisite pain. Over the course of his life, he’d broken every one of his fingers and toes.

Not always by accident.

Eventually they won Mr. Hawkes’s cooperation, gaining all the necessary insight and personal details about Kai to craft a letter intended to draw out Rafe’s little escaped bird. And it had apparently worked.

Much faster than I expected . . .

In the e-mail sent out, he’d set a noon deadline for her to respond. She wasn’t wasting any time. He didn’t intend to either.

“Sir, we’ve succeeded in decrypting the e-mail’s text,” the team’s computer asset informed him.

Rafe turned to the man. The technician went simply by the name TJ—but Rafe had never been curious enough to ask what those initials stood for. He was an American, emaciated, often hyped on stimulants so he could run code for days at a time. The expert stood before a bevy of mini–mainframe/servers, all interconnected by Cat 6 cables and hooked into a T2 broadband line.

Rafe didn’t understand a tenth of it. All he cared about were results.

“The text will be coming up on your personal screen in a moment, sir. We’re tracking IP addresses, triangulating sat-nodes, sifting server connections, and running a killer algorithm to untangle packet pathways.”

“Just find where it was sent from.”

“We’re working on it.”

Rafe rolled his eyes at the use of the word we. TJ was no more than a glorified assistant. The true digital magician sat in the center of the wired nest of equipment. Ashanda’s long fingers danced over three keyboards, as swiftly and elegantly as any concert pianist’s on a baby grand. In place of sheet music, her gaze swept through lines of flowing code. On another screen, server nodes and gateway protocols splintered into a tangled web that spread across a digital global map. Nothing could stand in her way. Firewalls toppled before her like dominoes.

Satisfied, Rafe crossed to his personal laptop and read the text message on the screen from Kai Quocheets. He tapped a finger against his lower lip as he read through the wash of teenage angst and hurt feelings. A small part of him felt a twinge of sympathy, drawn by her passion, by her raw exposure on the screen. He glanced over to John Hawkes, suddenly feeling like breaking a third finger on the man’s hand. Clearly the leader sorely used his fellow members, taking advantage of their youth and exuberance. In the end, he let others suffer the consequences while he took all of the glory.

That was simply poor management practices.

TJ whistled, drawing back Rafe’s attention. He leaned over Ashanda’s shoulder. “I think she’s got it!” he said, his voice rising in pitch. “She’s crashing through the last doors!”

Rafe stepped over, nudging TJ to the side. If they were victorious, he wanted to savor the moment with Ashanda.

Standing behind her, he leaned to her ear. “Show me what you can do . . .”

She gave no sign of acknowledgment. She was lost in her own world, as surely as any artist in the heat of inspiration. This was her medium. It was said that when a person lost one sense, another would grow stronger. This was Ashanda’s new sense, a digital extension of herself.

He ran a hand down one of her arms, feeling the old bumps of scarification under her skin. Such scarring was a ritualistic practice among the African tribe to which she had belonged. The bumps had been more prominent when she arrived at the château as a child. Now they could be felt only under the fingertips, like reading Braille.

“She’s almost there!” TJ said, breathless.

Ashanda leaned ever so slightly closer to Rafe’s cheek. He felt the warmth of her skin across the distance. No one truly understood their relationship. He couldn’t put it into words himself, and that was certainly true for her as well. They’d been inseparable since childhood. She was his nanny, his nurse, his sister, his confidante. Throughout his life, she was the silent well into which he could cast his hopes, his fears, his desires. In turn, he offered her security, a life without want—but also love, sometimes even physical, though that was rare. He was impotent, a side effect of his brittle disease. It seemed that even that most intimate of bones was damaged.

He studied her hands as they flew between the keyboards. He remembered how in private moments she would occasionally bend his finger, torturing him between agony and ecstasy until it finally snapped. It wasn’t masochism. Rather, there was a kind of purity in that pain that he found freeing. It taught him not to fear his body’s weakness but to embrace it, to tap into a primal well of sensation that was unique to him.

She let out the softest sigh.

“She did it!” TJ whooped, lifting his arms high, like a soccer fan after a goal.