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A great bolt of lightning illuminated the night sky. Seconds later, thunder boomed, sending the nocturnal critters of the Nevada desert scattering in fear to find shelter, as the low, inky clouds opened, and torrents of rain fell to quench the dry earth.

Cool and dry, herself, beneath the roof of a large storage hangar, Summer O’Riley, who was never called by her given name, watched the downpour through the raised door and sighed in contentment. “I love thunderstorms,” she mused, wrapping her muscled arms around her body. “Didn’t you just love to play in the rain when you were a kid?”

Her companion chuckled. “Nah, not really,” his voice rumbled, as gravelly as the thunder itself. “My grandma always told me I’d catch cold.”

“Psh,” she scoffed. “That’s an urban legend. It takes a virus to get a cold; a little rain’ll never hurt anybody. Not that I had anybody looking out for me anyway. I coulda got myself struck by lightning, and no one would have noticed.” This she said matter-of-factly, not miserably. Then she paused in consideration. “Didja ever wonder what that’d feel like? To get struck by lightning?”

“Honestly, Em?” Jay chuckled. “I hope I never find out.”

“Meh.” Emerald gazed upward, listening to the rain batter against the metal roof over their heads. She had the sudden urge to grab his hand and pull him out into the storm, rip off his wifebeater and her own, and screw his brains out beneath the electric fury of the sky. Storms like this, with thunder and lightening, just made her feel so wild and free, and it was the kind of thing she might have really done ten years ago, when she was chasing rock stars and roadies across the country. Wouldn’t be the first time she’d done it with Jay either. But he was technically her boss now, and even if he was as horny as she suddenly was, it wouldn’t really be appropriate.

Then again, she’d never really been the type to base her decisions on what was appropriate. Emerald Ecstasy tended to do whatever the hell she felt like. She didn’t play by the rules; she made up her own. It was only because she kicked ass as an agent that Himitsu Takana put up with her. That, and the fact that Jay found her irresistible. He was the one who had recruited her in the first place, saving her from the alcoholic, sex-crazed road she’d been heading down as a rock groupie and training her to be the fierce crime-fighter she’d become.

She was significantly more disciplined than she had been when she’d first come to HimTak, but even so, a romp in the rain sounded seriously tempting to her right then. But before she could act on that urge, a bright light flared before her eyes. At first, she thought it was just another bolt of lightning, but then she heard Jay mutter, “What the hell?”

She looked over to find him squinting out of the hangar, at what she now recognized as a pair of headlights, their beams cutting through the sheets of torrential rain. The vehicle – she couldn’t tell what kind beyond the brights – was racing up the narrow road that led to the Himitsu Takana complex. That in itself was a rare sight, for few cars not belonging to the agency itself or the government made it this far. Their headquarters were located in the middle of nowhere and unplotted on civilian maps. The nearby Area 51 attracted its fair share of tourists, who wasted gas and time to come and gawk at its heavily guarded gates, for no reason other than to say they’d been there. But not HimTak. No one knew it was even there.

There was a gate there, too, of course, not so heavily guarded, but surrounded by barbed wire and signs warning of the penalties that awaited trespassers. They’d never had an issue with the latter, not in the few years this compound had been the main headquarters of the organization.

But now, the rogue vehicle raced toward the gate with no sign of slowing its speed. Beside her, Jay uttered an expletive, seconds before the SUV crashed through the gate, bending it all to hell as it was rammed open, and smashing the front fender and hood to boot.

And it didn’t stop there.

The vehicle kept driving, barely even braking, heading straight for the light spilling out of the open hangar in which they stood. Instinctively, Emerald drew the handgun she kept holstered at her hip and looked to Jay. He, too, had pulled out his weapon and stood still, his narrowed eyes trained on the incoming SUV. AJ McLean, for all the tattoos on his rough exterior, was a big softie inside, but when he was in agent mode, he was tough as nails. Emerald could see the intensity in his eyes and knew he wasn’t going to let this guy, whoever he was, get past them any more than she was.

The pair of agents raised their guns at the same time, pointing them straight at the windshield. They could see nothing for all the rain and the headlights shining in their eyes, but Emerald put on her bitch face and glared the SUV down anyway.

And, to both her relief and her unease, it slowed.

The vehicle came to an abrupt stop just a few yards from the hangar, its tires squelching in the sodden sand, leaving deep ruts. Before Emerald or Jay could approach it, the driver’s side door flew open, and the shape of a man jumped out.

“Help!” he bellowed above the roar of the rain, running toward them, waving his arms wildly above his head. “Please, I need help!”

The agents were on guard, but the man seemed genuinely distraught and appeared to be unarmed. Emerald lowered her gun, but kept it clutched tightly in her hand, as the man grew near. When he staggered into the light, they got a better look at him: white guy, early thirties, dressed in a rain-soaked t-shirt and shorts, his hair plastered to his scalp, his face twisted in panic.

“You’ve just trespassed and destroyed private property, sir,” Jay said through his teeth, his voice a growl. “What do you think you’re doing?”

“Please,” the man panted, lifting his hands in defense before doubling over, resting them on his knees while he tried to catch his breath. “I’m sorry, but… my wife… she’s in labor. We’re not gonna make it to the hospital in time, and I think she’s… she’s dying. Please… I know you guys are some kind of government facility; you’ve got to have someone here who knows something about medicine. Don’t you?” He looked from Jay to Emerald, his eyes desperate and pleading.

Emerald thought of Red Jewel, and of the gleaming, high-tech infirmary within their quarters, and looked to Jay. But before she could say anything, he spoke up. “Let me take a look at her.”

Nodding, the man lead him back out into the rain. Emerald followed as they jogged back to the SUV, the rain saturating her hair and clothes within seconds. Wiping the cold droplets from her eyes, she peered into the vehicle as the man opened the back door, allowing light to flood the interior. A woman, obviously pregnant and about to pop, was sprawled across the back seat, both hands clutching her belly, breathing with a series of short, gasping whimpers that made it obvious she was in unbearable pain. Her nightgown was drenched, and there appeared to be a dark stain on the upholstery beneath her bent knees.

That was enough for Emerald. “We can’t turn them away,” she muttered to Jay out of the side of her mouth, hoping, for the love of God, he wouldn’t take any more convincing than that. She was no doctor, but instinct told her this woman didn’t have time for them to argue about it.

Jay closed his eyes for a moment, but made a quick decision. “Fine,” he replied with a nod. “You grab her legs; we’ll get the rest of her.”

As quickly and as carefully as they could, the three of them slid the woman out of the backseat and whisked her out of the storm and into the cave-like hangar, Emerald bearing the dead weight of her legs, while the two men cradled her on either side. They yanked the cover off one of the HimTak cars and spread it out over the poured concrete to provide her with some minimal cushion while they lay her down to wait for back-up.

When the husband’s attention was on his wife, Emerald turned away from them, reached beneath her tank top, and pulled the black strap of her bra toward her mouth. Pressing a tiny button in the center of the strap’s buckle, she spoke quickly. “Send Red to the North hangar, A-sap.”


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Red Jewel came racing into the hangar minutes later with a gurney at her side, her medical bag perched on top.

She had shed her white lab coat for the night and was dressed in a pair of satiny pajama bottoms and a camisole, her ruby cross swinging above the swell of her breasts. But when she knelt down beside the panting woman, she showed the quick-thinking, cool-headed demeanor of a professional.

Emerald and Jay stepped back to watch her work, as she asked the woman her name – “Bree,” came the breathless reply – and took her vital signs.

“We’re going to have to get her inside so I can deliver this baby,” she decided within minutes.

As a rule, civilians were not allowed inside the headquarters, unless they were somehow connected to a case. But all three of them knew, as Emerald had told Jay earlier, that they couldn’t turn their backs on this woman and her frantic husband.

“Good thing Pearl just finished the prototype of those memory-erasing pens,” Emerald muttered to Jay, as they followed the gurney into the central building.


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Dr. Julianne Llewellyn had delivered a number of babies during her semesters at the teaching hospital, but since starting her practice within the walls of Himitsu Takana, Red Jewel had delivered none. To those watching, she appeared calm and collected, but the inside of her latex gloves were slimy with sweat.

Birthing babies was largely an instinctual task… unless there were complications. And everything about her examination of the woman writhing on her infirmary table suggested complications. Her heart rate was unusually high, her color was off, her amniotic fluid appeared bloody, and her pain was severe.

Red had started an IV with a painkiller, but it was not enough to deaden the pain without sedating the newborn as well. She knew her best shot was to get the baby out as quickly as possible.

Though she spent more time bent over the microscope in her lab than an actual patient these days, Red Jewel had been praised during her internship for a bedside manner that was patient and soothing, and she summoned these traits now, as she looked over the woman’s knees, into her eyes, and told her it was time for her baby to be born.

“The next time you feel a contraction, I’m going to have you push, Bree,” she instructed the obviously scared woman. “Push as hard as you can, for as long as I tell you to, and we’ll get your baby out. It would help if your husband could hold your hand on one side…” She gestured to the drenched man who had come in with them, looking like he’d just climbed out of a lake.

“Jim,” Bree choked out his name.

“Jim,” Red repeated, giving the husband a nod of acknowledgment as he took his place next to his wife and gripped her hand. “And Emerald… I think it would help if you were on the other side.” She gave Emerald a meaningful look. The dark-haired woman who exuded such confidence and attitude actually looked nervous, but she didn’t protest. She let Bree’s free hand grip hers and braced herself for the squeezing.

Bree wailed as the next contraction came. Red urged, “Push!” and looked between her legs as the crown of a head appeared. She was thankful it wasn’t breach. The fetus slid out a little at a time, its smooth scalp coated with blood and vernix. The skin beneath appeared bluish-gray, and Red felt a rush of concern that it was suffocating. “One more big push, Bree,” she coached.

The mother screamed as she put the last of her strength into expelling the fetus, and her offspring slid out into Red Jewel’s gloved hands. When the red-haired doctor looked down at what she was holding, her mouth fell open.

Then she, too, began to scream.


± ± ±


Agent Jay could still hear the rumble of distant thunder, though he was seated in an interior room, deep in the central hub of the Himitsu Takana complex. He couldn’t recall ever having a fear of storms, but tonight, the thunder and lightning outside only made things seem eerier inside the headquarters.

The interrogation room in which he sat was dimly lit by a single, fluorescent utility light hanging above the metal table. Emerald sat at the table next to him, unusually quiet and pale. He saw her green eyes flicker across the table to the man, Jim, who was slumped upon it, his face buried in his arms. His drying hair stuck out from his scalp in all directions, and his shoulders shook as he wept shamelessly.

In her office in the medical ward, Jay knew that Red was every bit as distraught. She’d kept her composure long enough to pronounce the death, then fled to the office and locked the door. He’d heard her muffled sobs through the walls as she’d broken down, but there had been no time to see that she was okay. She would be, in time, he knew.

In the meantime, he and Emerald had been forced to bury their own feelings, to delay the reaction that was imminent, after what they had just witnessed. They were faced with the task of seeking answers, of finding an explanation for the traumatic scene that had just played out before them in the infirmary. They had a job to do, and it started with questioning Jim Kimble.

Jay cleared his throat awkwardly, not sure how to continue the interview without seeming insensitive. He felt for the man, having lost his wife less than an hour ago in a way that was both shocking and disturbing. He, himself, was still shaken from what he’d seen, and he knew it would only get worse once he came down from the rush of adrenaline that was keeping him focused now. In a way, he welcomed the mission that had been thrust upon him, welcomed it because it gave him something to do, something to keep his mind from simply replaying the scene over and over again until he went crazy from it. He wondered if that was what was going on in Jim’s head now.

“Jim?” he spoke quietly. “I know this is hard, but we have a few more questions, and it would really help give us a starting point for our investigation if you could answer them for us.”

The man lifted his disheveled head just slightly, only enough for his bloodshot eyes to peer at them over his elbow. Then his head fell back to his arms, as if he’d lost the strength to hold it up any longer.

Jay tried not to sigh, releasing his breath slowly instead. Patience was the key, he knew. Patience and understanding. Two qualities that didn’t come easy to him, nor Emerald. They weren’t the best pair of agents to be doing this part of the job, but they were the only ones who had seen it, and so it was theirs.

Emerald opened her mouth to speak, but she was interrupted by the click of the door opening. Both agents turned to look as Agent K slid in, walking silently across the tiled floor. “Sorry to interrupt,” he apologized. Then, resting his hand on Jay’s shoulder, he bent down, so that his mouth was close to Jay’s ear. “It’s in containment,” he murmured in a low voice, “and the feds have been called. I’ve got this from Pearl, for when you’re done here.”

Underneath the table, he passed Jay what appeared to be an ordinary pen light. Jay turned the pen over in his hand a few times before pocketing it. Catching his eye, Emerald offered a grim nod of approval.

“I’ll be in my office,” said K in a meaningful tone that told Jay he should go straight there once the interview was over. K, of course, had been debriefed on the incident, but there was still much to talk about.

Jay nodded, and K left. When the door latched tightly behind him, Jim looked up. He took a rattling breath, swiped at his red-rimmed eyes, and asked miserably, “What do you want to know? I don’t know any more than you do.”

“I know,” said Jay patiently, believing him. “But even so, what you tell us tonight might point us in the right direction, so that we can all understand what happened here.”

Jim shook his head. “I’ll never understand… never…” he mumbled, speaking more to himself than to the inquisitors.

He was still in a terrible state, but at least he was talking again. Jay took the opportunity to press forward. “Tell us about the pregnancy, Jim. You said Bree was only seven months along. Other than the premature labor, was there anything else unusual about her pregnancy? Any complications or… oddities?”

It seemed a silly question now, but Jim shook his head slowly. “No… nothing. E-everything was perfect. It was like a… a miracle.”

“What made it like a miracle?” Jay probed.

Jim took his time in answering. When he did, his voice wavered. “Well… see, we’d been trying to conceive for a long time… two years, at least. No baby. We went to the doctor and got tested, both of us. Turns out I was the problem.” He paused to swallow hard. “Low sperm count; that’s what the doctor said.”

“And how long ago was this?”

“’Bout a year. Everything seemed to fall apart after that. Bree tried to be understanding; she said she didn’t blame me, but I knew how disappointed she was. And I blamed myself. It was my fault she couldn’t get pregnant.” He sighed, drawing his hand over his eyes. “We wanted to try in vitro fertilization, but it’s expensive, and our insurance wouldn’t cover it. We didn’t have the money.”

“What did you do?”

“So one weekend, I got desperate just thinking about it, and I decided to go to Vegas… you know, see if I could win anything to help pay for it. It was a long shot, but I took it. I… I guess I just sort of needed to get away for a weekend, you know? So I went to Vegas and got wasted the first night. I mean, completely trashed. I met a girl in one of the casinos – real beautiful woman – exotic, you know? She’d actually posed for Playboy, showed me her spread and everything. Next thing I knew, I was waking up next to her in her hotel room.” He sighed again and shook his head, refusing to meet Jay’s eye. “One night stand. First and only one of my life. I’m not proud of it, but… it happened.”

Jay nodded, keeping all signs of judgment off his face. “Did you tell your wife?”

Jim hesitated, then shook his head. “No; I couldn’t. I thought about it… but in the end, I thought it would just hurt our marriage more. We were already struggling. But then…” Suddenly, fresh tears sprung into his eyes, and his voice sounded choked as he squeezed out the rest of his sentence. “Then Bree got pregnant.”

“Right after this Vegas trip?”

“We found out about a month later, yeah.”

Jay nodded again. “Did Bree take any trips herself around the time of conception? Or… pardon my asking, but… do you know if she was involved with anyone else herself?”

Jim didn’t seem to take offense at the question, but he shook his head vigorously. “No, not my Bree. I know she didn’t. She wouldn’t. She was always faithful. I was the cheater.”

“No trips?”

“No… nowhere.”

“And you can’t remember anything unusual that happened around that time?”

Jim racked his brain, but ended up shaking his head again. “Nothing that stands out.”

“Okay.” Jay watched Emerald make some notes on the tablet in front of her, and he eyed the tape recorder that was recording their conversation. “Jim, I know this hasn’t been easy for you, but we appreciate you answering our questions. I just have one more for you right now. The girl you were with in Vegas… you said she’d been in Playboy?”

Jim nodded slowly.

“Do you remember her name?”

Jay felt Emerald kick him beneath the table, but he ignored her, waiting for the man to answer. When he did, he hissed, “Write that down,” to Emerald. He caught the exasperated roll of her green eyes, but she scrawled the name below her notes anyway.

“Thank you, Jim,” Jay went on. “Just one last thing…”

Taking a deep breath, he pulled the pen light out of his pocket and held it up. Pushing a button on its top, he shone it directly into Jim’s eyes. He watched as the man’s pupils dilated, fixed upon the light.

“We’re going to send you to a motel for the night, Jim. When you wake up in the morning, you won’t have any memory of what happened tonight. This is what you will remember: You were involved in a car accident in the storm. You sought shelter in the motel while your car was being towed. You were alone. You’ve always been alone. You never had a wife, or a child. But when you go back home, you’ll get back on the dating scene. You’ll find a new mate and live a happy life, free from the burden of what you witnessed tonight.”

Jay released the button, and the pen light went off with a click. As soon as it did, Jim’s wide, blank eyes drooped shut, and he slumped forward onto the table again, blissfully unconscious.


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