One Wrong Move by Shannon McKenna Read Free Book Online Page A

me to off her?”
    Rudd sighed. “I always have to spell it out for you. Do you want to read about the amazing effects of psi-max in Time and Newsweek ? What would that do to our edge? Have your Arbatov friend and his thugs help you if your balls aren’t hairy enough. If you can make her tell what she knows, so much the better.
    Everything Kasyanov told her. Who else knows. If there are any doses of the new formula left. Where they are. But after she spills, she dies. Have I made myself clear?”
    “I’m on it,” Roy said hoarsely.
    He broke the connection. His head throbbed. He got the headache often these days. The more psi-max he used, the more it hurt. It was so worth it, though. He reached into his shirt, clutched the vial. Out of eighteen pills, he’d taken one and given six to Dmitri, in exchange for his backup and his personnel. Only eleven left. Fucking shit.
    It drove him nuts, that the bitch could block him. He was not slipping! He was red-hot! A super-hound. Loyal like a hound, too, though all he got for his loyalty was abuse and contempt.
    If Kasyanov’s fairy tale of stabilizing the psi was true, oh God it would be sweet. To be able to use his gift without having to scramble for a dose, to beg and plead and bargain. No headaches.
    No side effects.
    And no Rudd, either.
    If he didn’t need the drug, he wouldn’t need Rudd. In fact, if he were free, he would start making some careful plans for Rudd.
    Plans that involved large amounts of C-4 and det cord. Yeah, that’s right. Boom. Suck my dick, boss. President, his ass. Psi-Max 48 was too good to be true. He hadn’t believed in Santa Claus and the tooth fairy for some time now, but just look what this Nina Christie chick could do. Blocking him and Anabel both, just two hours after initial dose. And look what Kasyanov had done to him that morning.
    The memory still made him shudder, swallowing bile. He rubbed the old scar on his neck. It itched, uncomfortably.
    Too good to be true. But a guy could dream.
    A sense of desperate urgency prodded Helga from below.
    Wake up.
    She resisted. Nothing awaited her up there but pain and terror. She wanted to let go and fall back, arms out. Like she had into the water of the lake, as a child, long ago. Letting the cool dark catch her, embrace her. She’d been dreaming of that deep lake. So cold. So clean.
    Lara. Nina. Not yet. Not yet!
    She rose up, by slow, agonizing increments, as the black turned to angry, pounding red. Every part of her hurt, but para-doxically, her senses were very keen. She heard the breathing of the woman in the next bed, every word spoken in surrounding rooms, wheels on the gurney a hundred yards away. Every beep and whir of monitoring machinery. She was in a hospital. It hardly mattered. She was dying. Day five. The process could not be ar-rested now. Too late. She was just a corpse that still breathed.
    Just a matter of time. And not much time.
    She should be dead already. Deserved to be, certainly, after what she had been forced to do. She’d lasted longer, now, than any of her unfortunate test subjects. It tormented her, that it had been she herself who had identified all those wretched people, gathered their names and addresses into a database in the course of her studies. Before she knew what Rudd was. Before she knew what he would make her do to them. Her own original parapsychological talent was in identifying people with enough latent psi to survive pharmacological enhancement.
    And she’d done nothing but kill with it.
    Her victims’ eyes haunted her. Looking up at her, strapped down to the gurneys, hooked up to the machines. She wondered if they would all be waiting for her when she stepped across the threshold. Their eyes, reproaching her for all eternity. But she could not worry about eternity.
    Lara was still alive. Still captive. And Rudd still needed to die.
    No time for guilt, but still it twisted, like a blade inside her.
    She should not have involved Nina, either, but