She finally worked up the courage to talk. “I know why you told us all of that,” Parkowski told Everson, “you’re not going to let us out of here alive.”
Everson smiled. “You’ve got a smart one here, Captain DePresti. I’m afraid Ms. Parkowski is correct. I’m going full, open, and honest here because you are never going to be able to tell anyone what you’ve learned.”
Her heart sank. That confirmed her worst fears.
“And, the best part,” Everson continued, “is that you’re going to go to your graves never knowing the full story behind Bronze Knot.”
He leaned back. “I could tell you the truth, or, hell, I could make up a good story about aliens or dragons or whatever I wanted to,” the man said in his deep voice, “but to be honest, the two of you have pissed me off so much over the last few weeks that I’m not going to give you that satisfaction. Instead, you’re going to answer a few questions for me.”
Everson transitioned to interrogating DePresti and Parkowski. He wanted to know just how much they had been able to figure out.
They refused to give him what he wanted.
Parkowski was surprisingly aware of her own mortality. She had come to grips that she was likely going to be killed within the next hour or so. Everson seemed like a hard, mean man, and the other two men who had come in with him even more so. They looked like former special forces types with scraggly beards and wraparound sunglasses and intimidated her without saying a word.
Any one of those three would kill her without blinking.
These could be her last few minutes alive. Regardless, she didn’t give the mysterious operative what he wanted.
But, if Everson had grown annoyed at her and DePresti, he didn’t show it.
“Very well,” he said after getting nowhere with his lines of questioning. “We’re going to take the two of you for a drive. We can’t splatter your brains all over government property.”
He waved the handgun at Parkowski as he stood up from his chair. “Get up, both of you.”
They did as he asked.
One of the two silent men opened the door to the secure room while the other one walked out into the dark hallway beyond.
Everson motioned with the weapon and Parkowski and DePresti followed him out into the interior of Hangar AZ.
They continued down the dimly lit hall until they came to the entrance of the building.
The fake AFOSI/PJ agent pulled a card out of his pocket and scanned it on a reader, unlocking the glass door. Then the five of them walked out into the parking lot.
It was pitch-black. All of the lights that had been on just an hour ago had been turned off, save for a few on the far side of the gaggle of buildings. Everson snapped his fingers and, seemingly out of nowhere, an older paneled work van with government plates turned on and headed towards them at the front of Hangar AZ. Parkowski couldn’t see inside the front as it came in their direction; the window was heavily tinted but it was too dark to see anyway.
It pulled up and the two men who had accompanied Everson opened the rear door.
“Get in,” the older man said.
Parkowski and DePresti didn’t have a choice. They followed Everson’s command and got into the back of the van.
All three of their captors got in after them.
The van then sped off into the dark Florida night.
They sat in the back as whoever was driving the van took them on a journey around the sprawling facility.
Parkowski sat on one side of the van’s interior, DePresti on the other. One of Everson’s goons held a pistol — a much smaller one than the lead agent was armed with — against her forehead, while the other did the same to her boyfriend.
Everson sat at the far end of the van from the door, his handgun next to him. He sat quietly, his eyes never leaving the two young engineers.
They hadn’t bound or gagged either of them. They didn’t have to. Parkowski and DePresti were both terrified.
Parkowski’s eyes darted from side to side like a caged animal, looking for a way to escape. Her arms and legs were tense, and she wanted nothing more than to leap free from her captors. She would have if not for the cold steel of the pistol pressed against her temple.
DePresti was almost in shock. He was a military man, sure, but his desk-bound Space Force career hadn’t prepared him for this moment. He probably hadn’t been in a physical confrontation since his unarmed combat training at the Air Force Academy. He had initially shown quite a bit of resistance to Everson, but that had trailed off as the realization that these could be his final moments had kicked in. He held his head against his knees and rocked quickly back and forth.
She wasn’t sure how they were going to do it, though. Were they going to murder them here, at the Cape, executing them on a grassy bank in the middle of the night and feeding their bodies to the alligators or sharks? Or would they take them out into the water and throw them overboard with weights attached to their legs? Parkowski’s imagination ran wild.
