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THEO INFORMED ME WHAT Linc was up to. I stood dumbstruck for a long moment, chewing over the last bite of my sandwich. I was on the fence as to whether to trust Linc to begin with. But he had earned that privilege after proving himself in the field. To find out that he was just using me to get closer to Lukas was distressing. Yet I knew I couldn’t blame myself.
Linc had deep ties to both Lukas and Dark Sparrow. That he chose this moment to betray everyone who cared about him wasn’t my doing. It just meant that New Dawn’s reach was deeper than we all suspected.
“If New Dawn was born here,” I said, indicating the four walls that surrounded us, “then there has to be some information.”
“Mr. Abernathy used to have a safe in his smoking room,” Lukas said.
We all trooped through the house to the room our foster father used to use as his private retreat. The house had changed very little since the time we were children. Except for the neglect, everything was basically in the same place it had always been.
We located the safe in the smoking room but found it empty. Of course, Mr. Abernathy wouldn’t have left sensitive materials behind for us to discover. Still, I felt that there must be some hidden cache of documents or records that could provide us with more information. It was just a matter of locating it.
We split up. There were five of us, so we each took a different section of the house. Three of us, me, Z and Lukas had grown up there. Two were new to the mansion, but equally as capable of tossing a room. We searched for an hour before Lukas struck gold.
He was in the master bedroom, and he pried a floorboard loose. Inside was a treasure trove of digital hardware that could be linked up to the computers in the control room. We took a minute to connect all the ports and then sat back to watch the screen explode with windows.
Lukas took a seat at the helm and minimized most of the displays. We concentrated on one at a time, learning more than I ever wanted to know about the New Dawn project. Lukas stopped on one window that displayed a map with multiple coordinates flagged.
“What do you suppose is there?” Theo asked.
“Weapons,” I answered, so sure of my response that I didn’t even need to check. Mr. Abernathy had told us about hidden weapons all across the country. He described a map just like the one we were looking at that would give specific locations of each hidden stockpile. At the time, I thought he meant for them to be used by field operatives who were in need of reinforcements. Now I wasn’t so sure.
“That’s a lot of hidden bunkers,” Theo noted.
“I would estimate at least three hundred guns per location,” I said, feeling uneasy.
“Why so many?” Jasmine asked.
“Mr. Abernathy never did anything halfway,” Lukas replied.
We stared at the map on the screen, doing the math in our heads. We were looking at a hidden collection of more than one hundred thousand weapons, and I didn’t for a minute believe they were all handguns and hunting rifles. There were likely to be tactical assault vehicles in some of the locations, possibly drones and explosives. All the toys Mr. Abernathy had taught us to play with were likely buried in the designated spots across the country. And I didn’t like the sound of that.
“It’s like he was planning for Armageddon,” Z observed.
“Or for a hostile takeover,” I said, feeling a shiver run down my spine.
“What is this?” Lukas asked.
“Mr. Abernathy was in charge of a government project called New Dawn,” I explained. “He was training us to be assassins but not to serve the CIA or the FBI.”
“What was he training us for?” Lukas inquired.
“I don’t know,” I responded heavily. “But it looks like he was planning a quasi-military coup.”
“And now New Dawn is killing Dark Sparrow agents,” Theo elaborated.
“I think Mr. Abernathy killed off a lot of the children he trained,” I reported. Lukas looked at me in horror, and I just shrugged. “That’s what Theo’s grandmother told us.”
We were starting to put the pieces together, but there was still so much that we were missing. If our foster father was thinning the herd, why had Lukas, Z, and I been allowed to live? How was Dark Sparrow connected if not through Lukas? Were they working at cross purposes with New Dawn? And hadn’t New Dawn been shut down by the government? If it was still a going concern, who was in charge?
We were all huddled around one terminal in the control room when Jasmine’s phone rang. She glanced down at the caller ID and then moved out into the hall to take the call. I watched her go, curious about who was calling. We were beyond polite conversation, and if that was someone with new information or an agenda that involved killing one of us, we needed to know.
She returned a moment later and didn’t wait for me to ask. “That was the CIA. They need me back at headquarters.”
“Are they aware that I’m alive?” I asked.
“Not that I know of,” Jasmine said.
“Good,” Theo declared. “Keep it that way.”
Jasmine softened, gazing into my eyes with the true soul of a friend. “I know you didn’t kill those agents.”
“That’s right,” I agreed, including Theo in the conversation. “We didn’t.”
Jasmine glanced over at my boyfriend, and I thought I saw a spark of something like suspicion from him. I chalked it up to a spy’s enhanced sense of caution. Theo didn’t know Jasmine like I did.
I gave her a hug, hoping that this wouldn’t be the last time we would see each other. “Stay safe,” I warned.
“You too,” she replied.
I watched her disappear down the hall before turning back to the monitor. As I did, I felt Theo’s eyes on me. He was worried, and that made me worried. We needed all the friends we could get, and now wasn’t the time to break up the band.
