My Next Breath by Shannon McKenna

Author:Shannon McKenna [McKenna, Shannon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Romance, Paranormal, Suspense
Publisher: Shannon McKenna
Published: 2017-07-10T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 18

“Nine in all,” Phillip Holt said. “He neutralized nine ultimate generation operatives. Plus your bodyguard. A former Special Forces soldier, no less.”

“Unfortunately, that’s correct.” Despite his humiliation, Rand stayed calm, following Holt’s progress constantly with his eyes as he paced around the conference table.

He didn’t dare turn his back on the man.

“Jordan, take note,” Holt said to his son. “This is the downside of delegating. Letting supposedly competent people make decisions with no oversight is asking for trouble. That’s exactly what we have now. Big trouble.”

Rand bristled at the man’s lecturing tone. “Nine operatives seemed like more than enough to take down one man,” he said defensively. “After what happened at Fayette’s, I decided—”

“You misjudged catastrophically. This has to be fixed, fast. And as quietly as possible. Or there will be unpleasant consequences for all of us.”

Rand was cowed into silence, which allowed the audio from the video clip of the recent disaster at Simone’s house to be heard. Holt had set the recording to loop. Shouts, shrieks, howls, and grunts of pain were the backdrop of this conversation.

Holt let out a sharp sigh of annoyance and paused the clip. By some evil chance, it froze on Rand as he rushed through the frame. Eyes wide with alarm, mouth slack. It was an extremely unflattering angle for his chin.

“The DNA from the dart tips didn’t match anything in the database,” Jordan said. “And the facial recog bots haven’t matched him to any missing rogue operatives, either. Though I suppose he could’ve had plastic surgery.”

“The database won’t help us if he’s a Midlands escapee,” Holt said. “We have all their control codes on file, but still no way of matching the codes to the respective test subjects. Those paranoid idiot researchers kept all their data on-site back then. It was lost in the fire. All of it.”

Rand jumped in. “So there’s no telling even how many of them got away.”

Holt shot him a quelling look. Rand took the hint and shut up. Baby boy Jordan had his father’s full attention.

“His age fits, for Midlands,” Jordan said, tapping his pencil against his lip. “They used mostly teenage runaways back then. The lab facilities in Asia and Eastern Europe are starting them much younger now.” He looked around. “They die young anyway, right?”

“His resistance to Corbatrix suggests that he’s from one of the extreme lines of experimentation,” Holt mused. “One dose of Corbatrix would kill an unmod. It killed your security man, correct?”

“Yes,” Rand said. “Kruger was dead in minutes.”

Holt grunted absently, his gaze faraway as he drummed his fingertips on the conference table. “Hmm. The drug knocked out all the modified operatives that took a dart, even though the doses were almost exhausted. But our mystery man was still on his feet after six fully loaded Corbatrix darts. That narrows the field quite a bit. I’m thinking he’s from the early days, and I’m betting heavily on Midlands. He could be one of Braxton’s test subjects. Braxton always pushed the mods to the absolute limit.

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