“I believe you know Miss Wroth,” Poseidon murmured.
“We’ve…met,” Ryan rasped, seeing the same expression on Krysty’s face that he knew had to be on his own craggy visage.
“I thought you were dead,” she said softly, tears welling in her luminous green eyes.
“I was,” Ryan replied, fighting to keep himself seated and calm as he battled the urge to race over and take her in his arms. “Not now. Not anymore.”
“Take her back to the brig—the secure cell. You may leave the albino where he is,” Poseidon snapped. “See that she gets anything she wants. Food, drink, vids. Keep her happy and safe. However, double the watch, just in case Mr. Cawdor gets any foolish notions.”
“Yes sir, Admiral.” The commander gestured with a curled thumb, and the two armed escorts backed Krysty out of the room. Brosnan turned to close the door behind their departure, and the room fell silent.
“Yes, you never know what’s going to turn up in the sea,” Poseidon mused, getting up once more from his leather chair. The polished wood squeaked in protest as his enormous weight left the seat.
“You were there,” Ryan said flatly, “the night the mine blew up our boat.”
“Yes and no. I was there after the explosion, beneath the ocean and the storm in a minisub, a routine cruise interrupted by your stumbling into my domain.”
“You’re scum,” Ryan snapped.
Poseidon smacked the top of Ryan’s skull. “Don’t go all sanctimonious on me! You’re the one who rode in here, destroying my property and killing my men! That whore from upstate? No loss! Her husband? He’s the one who came in here making demands of me! Me! So I keelhauled his whiny ass and gave him fifty lashes and he couldn’t take it!”
The large man straggled to contain his anger. Ryan knew then and there he was peering at madness in human form. He was certainly familiar enough with it to know the signs.
“I saved her, Cawdor, along with that white freak,” the Admiral said. “You owe me.”
“I owe you dick.”
“Then perhaps I’ll take her back where I found her—half-drowned, unconscious and dying.” Poseidon reached over and grabbed Ryan by the hair of the head, bending the one-eyed man’s shoulder back over the top of the chair. “Don’t try and bluff me, you snot-nosed punk. I’ll break you like a glass bottle if you keep sassing me. That raspy voice and eye patch may frighten the ignorant and the stupid, but they hold no truck with me.”
“Just what in the fuck do you want from me?” Ryan asked tightly.
“Information.”
“Such as?”
Poseidon let Ryan’s hair go and strode back to his desk, as calmly as if he’d never shown even the slightest glimpse of anger as opposed to the fullblown performance he’d given since killing Shauna. “Numerals. Symbols. The arcane scripture from the world when mankind was still in command of his manifest destiny.”
“Could you be a little more specific?”
“Certainly. I want you to tell me everything, Cawdor,” Poseidon said, his black eyes gleaming bright. “But first, what do you know about the access codes needed to get into a military redoubt?”
Chapter Twenty-One
Ryan was alive. Alive!
The thought wouldn’t leave Krysty’s brain.
He was alive, and Poseidon had lied. Krysty couldn’t be sure if Ryan had just arrived or had previously been on the base. Her instincts told her the former; otherwise the Admiral wouldn’t have brought her in to show off like a prize heifer. She was smart enough to know when she was being used as a bargaining chip.
The question was, why? What could he want or need from Ryan to use her as a hostage?
After allowing her and Ryan to glimpse each other, Poseidon had ordered her jailers to march her back, but not to the hospital psych ward where she’d been previously kept with Jak.
This time she was walked across the compound to a flat, ugly building made of the same off-white stone as the rest of the base. Apparently this had once been a mass of offices and tiny cloth-walled cubicles. Inert comp terminals were in each little half room. Some of the desks still held photographs in frames or other personal mementos that were very different from the ones she was used to seeing inside the utilitarian military redoubts.