- - - - - - - - - - - Reese's Story - - - - - - - - - - -
"Uhhgh…" Seth's head pounded as he came to. He was vaguely aware of bright light, though his eyes were still closed. Something was also stirring behind him; it brushed his hands, which were tied behind his back.
"W-wha'? Where are we?" a voice mumbled. A girl's voice.
"Reese?"
"Yesmhere. I—wait…no way…why?" There was a note of terror in that last word that sent ominous chills down Seth's spine.
"Reese…where are we?"
"She knows where we are," answered a cool, emotionless voice. "I changed my mind at the last minute. It should be more conducive to…coercion, considering the circumstances." Seth realized he knew that voice. His eyes snapped open.
They sat in the center of a bare warehouse floor. Evening sunlight poured in the grimy windows to Seth's left. He squinted and twisted around toward the direction of the voice. The van was parked inside, and Trenton was leaning against its driver's-side door.
"You?"
"Yes, Seth Plummer, it's me. You're instincts were correct not to trust me when I started dating your sister—don't think I didn't notice. But it looks like you fell for the act in the end, anyway."
Seth was finding it hard to concentrate with his head still throbbing. "Whadda you mean?"
Trenton chuckled to himself. "Well, she is quite the convincing actress, though I'll admit she had me worried towards the end. Or maybe I'm just giving you too much credit. Your girlfriend here has been working for me longer than she's worked for the CIA. She's the reason I now have the super computer."
"Reese?" Seth twisted as far around as he could. The girl had bowed her head, avoiding him. Blood streaked the right side of her face.
"I'm sorry I had to hurt you, love," Trenton continued, obviously speaking to her now. "You know I couldn't risk taking your nosy agency on in the open. You had to keep quiet. If that means one more bump on the head, so be it. But we're all friends here, so we can do things businesslike. I'll be back in a couple of hours."
As soon as the door closed, Seth finally allowed himself to return to a more comfortable position, or as close as he could get to one. His mind was spinning. Reese, a traitor? "So, um, it sounds like he sure likes to here himself talk," he finally said hopefully. "I mean, he's just toying with us, right?"
An audible sniff came from behind him. It was the first sound she'd made in several minutes.
"Reese?"
"He's telling the truth," she quietly choked out, "in a really twisted, sickening way."
"You really did help him steal this thing out from under the CIA's nose? Why? "
"It's a long story," Reese snapped. "But first you gotta understand something. Whatever idiot in Hollywood decided that all secret agents are trained to face anything and not be afraid to die has it so wrong.
"I mean, sure, there's quite a few in the field who have nothing to lose; some degree of fearlessness is required to do your job right. But when it comes down to it, in a situation like this, a lot of us are scared of what's going to happen in the end. I'm sixteen, Seth. I haven't even had time to get a driver's license 'cause 'a Trenton. I don't want to die, thank you."
Though he wasn't sure how, Seth realized that this ran a lot deeper into Reese's memories and emotions than she let on. "What happened three years ago, Reese?" he asked slowly. At first, he thought she wasn't going to answer.
"They'd been tailing this mob boss up and down the East Coast for five or six years," Reese said with obvious effort. "When he couldn't escape custody altogether, he managed to wriggle out in the courts. My parents finally asked to hand the mission over to another team, since the longer they were undercover, the longer I was kept under strict government protection. Yeah, all the moving around, getting acting jobs under a different name, the whole bit to keep me occupied. Anyway, arrangements were sorted out, and we were cleared for a vacation. All classified, of course.
"I don't know how he found us. Mob bosses just have a knack for it, I guess. We were abducted from a train station partway through the trip, and brought to an abandoned warehouse. This one, in fact." She was showing less and less composure. "Weeks passed. My parents were, coerced, if you will, for information the CIA had on this guy. Sometimes…sometimes they tortured me to try to crack them. We didn't even see the boss himself most of the time. He had an assistant to do his dirty work, a boy barely a few years older than me, but raised around organized crime and espionage.
"Trenton started to take pity on me. He said my parents had gotten in too deep, but I was young and 'untainted.' He avoided truly hurting me as much as possible while his boss cut deals with the government—we would be released, provided no authority be sent after him again. Of course, neither side trusted the other to stick to it."
At this point, Reese's emotions finally seemed to overcome her. She was sobbing uncontrollably, trapped in whatever vivid memories this place had to be recalling. Seth fumbled with his bound hands until he found hers and held them tight.
"It's okay to be scared. We can make it through this. Shane'll've realized something's gone wrong and be figuring out a plan."
"The day we were supposed to be released, the mobster lined us up right here, in the center of the floor," Reese barreled on as if she hadn't heard him. "He didn't want to chance a meeting with the CIA no matter what they said. Said only one thing ensured people would keep quiet. Trenton…waited while…while the monster…put a round in each of my parents. B-both fatal shots, but by no means…quick and painless, shall we say? Then he unexpectedly found him self out of ammunition."
"Lucky break for you?" Seth immediately knew this was the wrong thing to blurt out. He was desperate for some happy ending to this nightmare story.
"Lucky? I got to watch my parents thrash around until they died, Seth. I still remember everything in slow motion. Their flailing and screams of pain, and then the gun being pointed at me. 'I'm awful sorry you had to see all this' he said. I closed my eyes, trying to block it all out…a shot fired, but I felt no pain. It took me a minute to realize that Trenton had pulled a gun on his own boss. He saved me that day…"
Something in her voice made Seth twist around despite his protesting head. Reese's eyes had a faraway look, even from this angle, her face oddly relaxed and peaceful. Suddenly another piece fell into place.
"You liked him, didn't you?"
Reese turned and looked Seth in the eye for the first time since their arrival. "Yes."
"But he'd just killed a guy! He did all that stuff to your parents, to you. How does that make him any less of a monster than his boss? What's left to like about 'im?"
"Ever heard of Stockholm's Syndrome?" It was neither a demand nor an insult. "At the most basic level, it's when a captive develops an emotional attachment—most often a form of love—to his or her captor. In the midst of a waking nightmare, Trenton showed me pity and condolence. He said he would do all he could for me. And he eventually saved my life. I was naïve. I never expected he would want something in return.
"He played on my fears and desire for fairness, wove stories that promised I wouldn't be hurt anymore. All I had to do was let him keep in touch with me, and…assist him in things from time to time. I should have picked up that something wasn't right. The tasks had more and more to do with the government as I was taken in and trained by the CIA as a specialized agent. Whenever I got reluctant, Trenton started blackmailing me with my parents' murders. I got confused. How could the boy I'd fallen for be willing to threaten as soon as sweet talk me? My mind threw up red flags continually about this, but somewhere deep inside I guess I still wanted his old promises to come true. He represented a closeness I'd never felt with my surrogate family."
"Even though you knew the truth?" Seth offered to finish.
"Yeah, I know," Reese admitted. "So you see why I'm stuck now. It's a sort of love-hate thing. I'm appalled at some of the stuff he's done in the past, and yet I can't bring myself to walk away. Well, you can't just walk away from anything in this kind of work…"
"So what happened when he became your mission?"
"I've never taken on anything so difficult in my life. The only reason I had so much more success with it than others was because Trenton would feed the CIA bits of information through me—tips and such from fabricated sources. I told you he was brilliant. He pulled the strings on nearly every move the CIA has made on the case. But something happened in the last stage of the plan."
"What?"
"You. Yeah, I was supposed to befriend you or one of the others to gain access to anything your dad left behind. What I didn't count on was feeling something real—like you said." Reese shifted in her chair. "And you didn't just let me feel what it would be like not to be in the CIA. You showed me that I was still capable of a real life and a real relationship, one outside Trenton's control. Trouble is, he caught on that I was starting to see things differently, and now I've dragged you into it."
"Hey, I got myself into this," Seth protested. "Though it doesn't make me feel any better about it. I knew something was wrong with the whole thing."
"Yeah…me."
"No. I figured if Trenton was going to make any other moves, it would be today. I showed up because I wanted to be sure nothing happened to you."
"Well, honorable as they are, good intentions aren't going to be enough to help us now. He's only just begun. If he taps into the arsenal of methods used on my parents—" she swallowed hard; "you haven't seen anything yet." The windows were now considerably dimmer now, having turned a soft shade of liquid gold.
"You can still fight 'im. What more could he want from you?"
"Access to that computer, for one. It's very effectively locked away in that van right now, and only I know how to retrieve it."
"What an excellent way to start off our time together," Trenton cut in to announce his return. "Why don't you tell me how to open the safe?"
When Reese remained nervously silent, Seth knew they were in for it.