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Enthroned in a leather chair was the ruling lord of all this. And of Dan's life. Jésus Carreras wasn't yet forty. His body was as sleek and deadly as a rattlesnake's. His eyes were just as cold.
"Colonel Collins," Carreras acknowledged without bothering to rise from his seat. "That will be all, Nelson."
The linebacker retreated silently into the elevator. Dan's personal bodyguard took up a position between Dan and the elevator.
The sweat trickling down his armpits stank. Don't blow this, don't blow it...
"Four months," Carreras said quietly. "Four very interesting, trouble-free months." He shook his head slowly, then rose almost lazily to his feet and strolled toward Dan.
"Do you know, Colonel," Carreras continued quietly, making Dan feel like a dying fish with the shark circling in for the kill, "in those four months I have almost come to like you?" His black eyes glinted briefly with some i
A smashing backhand caught Dan's mouth. The blow sent him staggering back a step. Dan grunted and fought the urge to retaliate. He knew better, but his gut didn't. Slowly, to distract the fight-or-flight tension in his belly, Dan wiped blood from his lips.
"How is it, Colonel," Carreras hissed, "that you failed to inform me of this little situation in a timely fashion?"
Dan sounded like a grammar-school truant and knew it. "I wanted to give you as much information as possible on him."
"Ah. I see." Carreras paced a few steps, hands clasped behind his back. "Tell me, Colonel," he asked over one shoulder, "how is your lovely wife these days? And your charming son?"
Dan spat out something profoundly ugly.
Carreras clucked chidingly. "Temper, Colonel. Let me see," he said, tipping his head back in evident reflection, "if we pulled the generators, the temperatures in the shelter would probably drop to fatal levels in, what, six hours? Seven?"
Dan clenched his fists at his sides and didn't dare answer.
"Yes. It would be a pity, wouldn't it? Such a lovely marriage, such a lovely family."
Dan couldn't look at him, couldn't look at the laughter in those reptilian eyes. If he met Carreras' gaze, he'd kill him. And that would be the worst disaster yet.
"Tell me, Colonel," Carreras went on, as though the threats hanging between them didn't exist, "what do you think we should do with this McKee fellow?"
Dan flexed his fingers and risked glancing up. "Lock him in a psych ward. He's crazy. Who'd believe him?"
A brief smile touched the Latin's dark face. "Who, indeed?" Carreras paused for a moment, apparently lost in thought. "No, Colonel," he said at length. "We ca
Dan was sure Carreras would tell him, if it suited Carreras' plans.
"I think our friend McKee isn't crazy at all."
Dan twitched. "What? I questioned him myself, under truth drugs. Carreras, his mind never came home from 'Nam. He's as certifiable as they come."
Carreras smiled. Dan suppressed a shiver.
"I think," Carreras said, leaning easily against the edge of his massive desk, "that our friend is a killer without purpose. Without a job. When he is placed in war, he is like the orca, deadly and efficient in his own element. Take him out of war... Tell me, Colonel, have you ever seen a beached whale? The seagulls peck at it, pluck at its eyes, nibble it to death."
"So what do you want me to do with him? Find a nice, bloody little war for him?"
Carreras chuckled. "No, Colonel. I do not want you to find a war for him." Carreras rested his palms against the desktop and glanced into one corner of the vast room. "He knows too much."
"He doesn't know anything—" Dan protested.
"He knows this place!" Carreras struck the desktop with one fist and propelled himself toward Dan. "He knows that he has been... displaced. When I get my hands on Tony..." Carreras muttered. "I warned that fool... ."
Dan didn't want to hear this. Men had died for knowing less. Men, he realized with a sickening lurch, like McKee.
When Carreras straightened, Dan already knew what he was going to say. He wasn't wrong.
"Kill him, Collins."
Dan shook his head in a hopeless bid to save the man's life. "He doesn't know anything, Carreras. Nobody's going to believe a crazy man. And with his record—"
"Need I remind you, Colonel"—Carreras' voice was an icy whiplash—"that you are in no position to defy my orders?"
Dan bit back the rest of his arguments and swallowed. "I know," he managed.
A polished obsidian gaze caught and pi
"You wouldn't—!" Dan halted abruptly. Carreras would dare and there was absolutely nothing Dan could do to stop him. Dan shrank away from Carreras' contemptuous look, from the knowledge that he was a traitor, a coward, a crawling worm... .
Jésus Carreras' voice was as cold as the Arctic night wind. "Kill McKee, Collins. See to it personally. I don't care how or where. Pick a time, a place, program the jump. I'll send a couple of my men to help manhandle him through, since he is clearly a dangerous fighter, even unarmed. Once you've taken him through, Collins, kill him. Quickly and neatly. Or I'll start sending you pieces of your family."
Dan stumbled into the waiting elevator. He hid his face in the corner, unable to face his bodyguard or the polished metal of the door. One day, he swore, clenching his fists so tightly his hands hurt, one day...
He drove himself home, alone with the hated guard. Dan nearly wrecked the jeep twice and received a jab in the ribs with a gun muzzle for his trouble. Once home, Dan locked himself into his study with a bottle of bourbon. The guard stationed himself, as always, in the hall just outside. He knew from bitter experience there were also guards outside his windows. After three brimming tumblers of straight bourbon, Dan picked up a family portrait and ran his fingertips across the images of his shattered life.
If he'd been any kind of a man, he'd have slid a knife into Carreras' ribs long ago. Hostages never got out alive. Not Carreras' hostages. Dan swore and hurled the picture across the room. It smashed against the wall. The photograph fell with a crash of broken glass and bent metal.
They'd taken him to see Lucille, Da
But 30,000 years in the past.
The cell where they kept his family was crowded, but livable. Well heated, too, with a small diesel plant and several barrels of fuel. They'd stored plenty of food in lockers. Their jailers had even provided army cots. All in one prefabbed package, complete with guards to make sure no one went anywhere. Not that there'd have been anywhere for them to go in the year 28,000 b.c. Not with an ice sheet covering the Endicott Mountains and the Philip Smith range to the west, another strangling the Alaska Range from Fort Yukon south through Fairbanks and on to the sea, and a third that stretched from the Canadian Yukon all the way to the Atlantic Ocean.
Carreras had dropped Dan's family into a neat little ice-free pocket, surrounded by miles and endless miles of nothing. And if they tried to escape anyway, or if someone attempted a rescue...
Dan swallowed hard. He would finally have access to the equipment—at least until he'd disposed of McKee—but the guards had orders to kill every last hostage at the first hint of a rescue attempt.