Free Red Knight Falling by Craig Schaefer

a half-empty bucket of water: a car battery, connected by jumpers to an insulated wooden handle with a copper wire–wrapped sponge on the tip.
    “In South America, they call this the parrilla .” I nodded at the wire bed frame. “Like a barbecue grill.”
    Jessie didn’t say anything. She stared at the corpse, deep in thought, her turquoise eyes glinting in the gloom.
    I pulled back Lawrence’s blood-spattered lips. His front teeth were crooked, the enamel shattered. Broken from how hard he’d clenched his jaw and ground his teeth under the electric current.
    “Minimal lividity,” I said, lifting one of his legs and inspecting the skin. “He’s practically still warm. This is recent.”
    I checked his left wrist. The face of his watch was shattered, the bent dials frozen at 7:22—presumably the hour his kidnappers stormed his cabin. Still, his offhand comment when he was handing out our gear came back to me: “My wristwatch possesses similar functionality.” I thought it might have been a joke, but I still slipped it off his wrist and pocketed it.
    Jessie circled the bed frame on the other side. She lifted his right hand, showing me the ragged stump where his thumb used to be. I remembered the thumbprint protection on his laptop computer.
    “They were working on him all night,” Jessie said, “and they’ve got all the data on his laptop, too. Harmony . . . we have to assume they got everything . We’re burned.”
    We double-timed it back to the lodge, with two goals in mind: to get the rest of our team out of there safe and sound, and to get as far away from Deschutes National Forest as we could, as fast as we could.

    “Negative,” Linder told us, his face a silhouette on Jessie’s phone. “Complete your mission.”
    We huddled over it side by side, back in the hotel room, with Kevin and April at our backs.
    “Sir,” I said, “I repeat, our cover is blown . There’s no reason to suspect Agent Lawrence didn’t break under torture. He knew our names and our faces. That means our opposition—who we still haven’t identified— also knows our names and our faces. We can’t operate here. You need to extract us and send in another team.”
    “There isn’t anyone else,” he said.
    “Sir?”
    He ticked off names on his fingers, his silhouette blurring on the screen.
    “The rest of Beach Cell is deep undercover, and pulling out any more of their members would be a death sentence for the rest of the team. We haven’t found new recruits to replace Redbird Cell in the wake of their liquidation in Miami. Panic Cell is off the grid and can’t be reached. That leaves you , Agents. Your team isn’t just our best hope for dealing with this situation, it’s our only hope. Complete your mission.”
    “How the hell do you suggest we do that?” Jessie demanded. “Our scientist and his data are gone . How are we going to find the Red Knight without them, overlooking—for the moment—that an unknown number of enemy operatives are going to be gunning for us out there?”
    Linder leaned closer to the phone cam, eyes narrowed.
    “You do what you always do, Agent Temple, and you make it work. You and your team have earned a reputation for pulling off impossible victories. Tonight, you need to earn it all over again. The Red Knight is falling, and that thing is coming down with it. If you don’t manage to contain it, nobody else will.”
    “What about the leaks?” I asked. “Somebody posted information about the Red Knight to the deep web, luring civilians to the area for reasons unknown. Then somebody pierced Agent Lawrence’s cover. Sir, we have a serious info-sec problem here, and with all due respect, it’s our lives on the line because of it.”
    “I’m looking into that,” Linder said. “In the meantime, once again: roll your sleeves up, get as dirty as you have to, and make it work . On that note, I’d very much like you to track down Agent Lawrence’s killers. Keep one alive for