Final Stand

by Lisa Phillips

  When he caught a look at her in the streetlamp, over the roof of the car, she seemed embarrassed. Because she was concerned for her grandfather?

  Mark called out, “Can you call the local police in St. Petersburg and find out if they have any new leads? They might want to talk to this guy.”

  “Tomorrow.” She nodded. “Let’s just get this guy back to your office.”

  Mark nodded. He drove, giving her his gun to hold. Not pointing it at the guy. She didn’t need to risk Vance Davies grabbing it and causing harm. Just in case.

  He kept an eye out for tails. Davies had been the one in the SUV who’d killed Pacer. “Why’d you do it?”

  He had a whole lot more questions than just that but needed to start somewhere. He said, “Why did you kidnap an old man in Florida? Why did you run down the assistant US attorney with an SUV.”

  Mark couldn’t see his face. Not while he was driving. Neither could he ask the guy to scoot across the backseat so he’d be able to get a look in the rearview.

  “I’m not talking without a lawyer.”

  “Smart move.” Not that he’d expect anything less from an agent with years on the job. But confession wasn’t something they could base a case on. Not like the police could. They needed evidence, which they’d have to gather if they were going to make charges stick. The surveillance video was good but might not be enough.

  Victoria shifted in her seat. She hadn’t put her seatbelt on, which made him nervous. But she was angled to watch for any move Davies might make. Probably to protect Mark, even knowing he would object to that. Victoria had always done what she believed to be right no matter what. Not a popular standpoint, given the lengths she would go to safeguard those she loved. Or to get the result she desperately wanted. Thankfully she worked for good and for justice, instead of for her own selfish motives like Oscar Langdon did.

  “I just don’t get it,” she said. “You could have easily walked up to Pacer and shot him. Yet you chose to hit him with your car. That was big, brash, and public. You also didn’t guarantee you’d actually kill him. Were you really only trying to maim him, or what?”

  Mark heard Davies give a low chuckle. “He said you were coldhearted, but I didn’t believe him.”

  “Because I’m not all torn up about my grandfather? Who says I’m not? Just because Langdon thinks I’m coldhearted doesn’t mean it’s true.”

  “I guess it’s all that spy training. You’ll do whatever it takes to get the guy, even betray everything you stand for and everyone you know.” Davies paused for second. “After all, that’s exactly what you’re doing right now.”

  “You’re a late addition, right? I don’t remember your face from Europe. That means you joined up after you met Langdon here.” It was her turn to pause for effect. “You really wanted to lose your wife and kids over him? Why?”

  Davies didn’t answer.

  Mark had his own ideas about why that was. It was possible that the marital problems that led to their divorce didn’t have anything to do with his signing on as one of Langdon’s crew. Then again, it might easily be a symptom of the bigger problem. His wife could have seen the change in him when Langdon started working on Davies to get him to turn against his oath.

  Considering all the psychological testing they went through before and during their training at Quantico, Mark still had a hard time believing any of them malleable. Yet Langdon had managed to form a crew of men who’d gone to great lengths to do his work.

  It had to have been money. He’d never met Langdon, as Colin Pinton had worked out of the San Francisco office. Perhaps he was one of those people who could persuade anyone to buy his line. Then there were the people more susceptible to taking it on board than others.

  Agents with gambling problems. Secret affairs. Those who had taken bribes before.

  No agency or department was completely free of those who might second guess their choice to do the right thing. People not so steady in their resolve.

  It was the antithesis of everything Victoria was and everything she stood for. Of exactly the person she had been since the day he’d met her. Mark wasn’t entirely sure anything would ever change that.

  But if there was one thing he could ask God to do, it was that He might change her heart toward Him, the God who made heaven and earth.

  Davies spoke again. “I guess you guys are gonna offer me some sweet deal for testifying, right?”

  “No,” Victoria said. “We’re going to do something else.”

  Mark knew exactly where she was going. He said, “We’re going to spread it far and wide that you sang like a canary.” He paused. “Do canaries sing? I’ve never understood that expression. But whatever it means, Langdon is going to hear that you told us everything in exchange for special treatment.”

  “You wouldn’t—”

  “If you want to live,” Victoria cut him off. “Then you’ll give us enough that we can get the US attorney to guarantee you protection. Good enough that we’ll get your family into witness security.”

  Davies roared. He whacked the back of the driver’s seat to let out his frustration.

  Victoria tensed in the passenger seat. Those protective instincts leading her to be all the more cautious about what Davies was prepared to do. “If you don’t want Langdon to find out that you spilled everything to us, you are gonna tell us where to find him right now.”

  He could hear the anxiousness in her tone. She wanted to interrogate him until he told her everything he knew about her grandfather and where the man had been taken.

  Davies let out another frustrated cry. “You think I know where he is? It’s not like he checks in with me on his whereabouts.”

  “How do you two communicate?” Mark gripped the wheel and turned a corner onto the street where the office was located. “How did he tell you where to go in Florida and what the plan was?”

  He pulled into a space and put the car in park. He got out and pulled Davies to his feet, despite the man’s reluctance to be brought in. Then again, the man should’ve thought of that before he made the decision to betray his oath.

  He started to walk, holding Davies’s elbow. The man didn’t move. When Mark looked back at him, Davies said, “I want my family protected.”

  “Tell me where Langdon is.”

  Davies shook his head. “Not until I get your guarantee that they are in witness security.”

  “That’s going to take time, considering you murdered the previous US attorney working on this. The new one is going to have to be read in, probably after we rouse him from his hotel bed considering what time it is. Might not make him super amenable to giving you whatever you ask for.”

  Mark moved closer to the man, aware that Victoria had come closer around the hood of the car in order to hear what they were saying over the moving traffic. Even this late at night, the surrounding area droned with activity. “So whatever it is you have to say, it had better be good.”

  Davies worked his jaw side to side. “He’s up to something. That’s what the explosion in Bremerton was about. He needed something from the lab.”

  Mark sucked in a breath. That had been a military research lab. A place where they made electronics that went into all kinds of weapons. Computers. Communications equipment. The possible implications ran like one of those old school calculators that spit the numbers out on a long paper receipt.

  Victoria shifted closer to Davies. “What does he have, and what is he going to do with it?”

  A muscle in Davies’ jaw twitched.

  “You can either tell us,” she said, “or you go to prison knowing your family is directly in the line of fire.”

  Davies shook his head, a defiant look in his eyes. “There’s nothing you can do to stop it. No one can get in the way when Langdon wants something.”

  “What does he want?” Victoria seemed prepared to push him until he broke.

  Mark was the one with the final authority here. He needed to bring this guy in with no bruises. He hoped
that Victoria understood the tight rope he was walking right now. And yet, they both wanted the same result.

  He had never before been open to the idea of deliberately going against what he had been trained to do. There were lines no one was supposed to cross. Despite what all these agents had done.

  Langdon was a guy who did what he wanted, no matter the fallout.

  There were some who thought the ends always justified the means. But Mark wasn’t one of them. Procedure was there for a reason.

  Victoria said, “Answer the question, Davies. Or I ask assistant director Welvern to step inside without us for a minute so we can chat in private.”

  Mark was about to object to that when Davies shifted. The decision had been made. He shoved at both of them, and before Mark could grab him, the man ran flat out toward the street.

  Vance Davies ran out in front of the truck coming head on.

  The collision flipped his body into the air much like Pacer’s had done when Davies hit the guy with that SUV.

  And also like Pacer, Vance Davies was dead when he hit the pavement.

  Chapter 11

  Somewhere over the Atlantic, Thursday 12.42p.m.

  She had turned away. At the last second, right before that car hit Vance Davies, Victoria had turned away.

  Paperback tucked against her stomach, blanket covering her legs, Victoria held her eyes closed behind the sleep mask. Underneath her, the drone of the airplane engine provided white noise. She had a hard time at home if there was too much quiet. Sometimes she played those tracks that were coffee shop noises and conversation, just so she could sleep.

  Her phone buzzed, tucked into her back pocket. She’d logged onto the airplane Wi-Fi so she’d have email during the flight. She pulled it out and looked, then stowed it into her backpack tucked under the seat in front.

  Everything is in place.

  Andrew Jakeman, the Secretary of Defense, didn’t often coordinate directly with the guys whose boots were on the ground overseas. Unless it was a time like this. Unless it meant finding out what Langdon was up to.

  Her friend had pulled strings. It didn’t sit right with her that she’d asked for a favor, but she was cut off from a lot of resources right now, and the asset she needed to speak to was hard to reach.

  Cut off, the way she’d done with Mark.

  It all played back through her mind. That sickening thud. Knowing what Davies had done, how he’d ended his life by his own choice rather than Langdon making that choice for him when he found out Davies was “cooperating.”

  Her fault? Maybe, but she wasn’t going to spend energy regretting her choices. If she did that, she’d never be able to move forward.

  Like regretting her choice to disappear the moment Mark had turned away to make his phone call and get help for the Davies’ situation. She hadn’t looked back. Just walked away from the scene, trying to pretend she hadn’t been there.

  A tear gathered under the sleep mask, wetting the material with a single drop.

  She knew herself well enough to have come to terms with simple facts about herself long ago. She was an ex-spy who didn’t like death. Didn’t want to see death. Didn’t want to be around death. Certainly couldn’t actually kill someone.

  Even being responsible for someone’s death was bothering her.

  Wrong line of work? She hadn’t thought so. The ways Victoria had used her spy skills over the years had little to with all the ways she could kill someone…yes, most of her skills required only her bare hands.

  The airplane lights came on. Flight attendants brought a light breakfast, and she drank the coffee. Black. She’d probably start heaving if she ate anything, and it was easier to get over jet lag in the fasted state as opposed to having a disoriented stomach full of food.

  The guy beside her looked like he wanted to talk, but she just ignored him. What was the point? Plane was going to land in twenty minutes, according to the pilot’s garbled French, relayed over the intercom. Besides, he’d be just one more person she’d disappoint with all the ways she fell short.

  Victoria appeared as any other business woman going through immigration at Charles De Gaulle airport in Paris, and she produced papers for the university symposium she was attending. Supposedly.

  She walked to baggage claim, smiling to herself about supposedly being at the symposium. By the time she was pulling her rolling case out the doors, her amusement had faded.

  Then she saw who was at the curb.

  He held both arms wide and yelled, “Babydoll!”

  Victoria stopped. She cocked one hip and set her free hand there. “I told you to stop callin’ me that.” She used her favorite accent—raised in Georgia, went to school in Tennessee.

  “Was told you needed a care package.” He patted the hood of the ugly old family car he was partly sitting on.

  Two Asian ladies walked between them. As soon as they’d passed, Victoria crossed the distance. Three guys piled out of the backseat of the car, and the driver’s door opened. The five of them circled her.

  “They let you guys out of your cage, just for me?”

  The sergeant grinned. “Just for you.”

  They might not be in uniform, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t a sense of it in the way they all wore jeans, boots, and T-shirts. Couple ball caps…including one on the new guy.

  She gave him a side glance, but no one introduced them. “Welp. Better get going, I guess.”

  The sergeant didn’t move, so neither did the rest of them. “Need some help?”

  “Y’all authorized for that?” She glanced around the team. They weren’t. “I figure the brass won’t be too happy if you guys go off script. The Sec-Def might owe me, but I’m not gonna push it like that.”

  “I don’t like it.” The sergeant folded his huge arms across the bigger expanse of his chest. “It doesn’t sit right with me that a woman swings out there alone.”

  “Some missions require…finesse.”

  He snorted.

  “Not your bull-in-a-china-shop tactics. Even if they are fun to watch.”

  “More fun when they let us blow stuff up.”

  She tipped her head to the side. “Like I said, fun to watch.” Someone chuckled. She didn’t glance around to find out who it was. “I’ll be fine. But thanks.”

  “If I see your body on the ten o’clock news, I’m gonna be seriously pissed.”

  Victoria leaned up and kissed his cheek. “Now you know how I feel.”

  He tossed her the keys, and the team broke off. Victoria climbed in the front seat of the car and watched as Delta Force’s finest disappeared into the Paris airport crowd. It wasn’t the spy way to have a team for backup. Her job really was more about finesse than about brute force, as she’d told them. Both had applications, which was why both existed.

  Besides, she already owed them for saving her once early on in the Sergeant’s career. Back when he’d been the new guy on the team, and she had been a green spy in big trouble.

  Victoria didn’t want to owe him double.

  Two hours later she was winding through countryside hill roads, sunglasses on. She’d stopped to check out the arsenal they’d stuffed in the trunk and found some interesting things that would likely come in handy.

  Victoria checked her watch and pulled off to the side. She parked the car behind cover so that it would be disguised from the street and pulled the spike strip out. She pocketed a stun gun, along with a pistol she didn’t want to use. She strapped on a bullet proof vest and grabbed a baton.

  It didn’t take long until the information she was given proved true.

  A white van. No escort. No markings.

  Victoria tossed the spike strip in front of it. The van tires blew. It veered to the side and off the hard shoulder, into a ditch where it landed on the passenger side.

  Victoria pulled the stun gun out and raced to the driver’s door. She climbed up and saw that both the men upfront—full gear, their helmets off—were unconscious. She zip tied o
ne hand each to the steering wheel and then moved to the back door.

  Inside she could hear movement. Then gunshots. Muffled, given the insulation that had been added to the side panels, the roof, and the doors.

  Victoria stood off to the side as she opened the door. A man raced out, uniformed but unarmed. She zapped him.

  He fell to the grass, still twitching.

  Victoria watched the open door and listened. Slowly she moved until she could see. Three men in uniform, all dead.

  A woman lay sprawled on one, gun in her hands. A hood was placed over her head, secured to the overalls she wore. She held the gun up. Aimed toward the back door despite the fact she couldn’t see anything.

  Victoria moved. She made a sound, but the woman didn’t react to it. After a couple of steps, making sure she was out of the gun’s aim, she knelt on one of the dead men and reached over to tap the woman twice on the shoulder.

  The front of the hood puffed out on an exhale and the gun lowered an inch. Victoria touched the woman’s elbow while she detached the hood from the snaps on the overalls. Then she tugged it over the woman’s head. After that, she pulled out the earplugs that had been stuffed into her ears.

  Not total sensory deprivation, but close to it.

  The woman had dark hair, now threaded with some gray. No makeup. She was a few years older than Victoria, and still as thin as she had been when Victoria first infiltrated her circle and befriended the woman.

  “Took you long enough.” Her accent was thick, east London. Not the speech pattern she’d used when Victoria had first met her.

  Victoria shifted, ready to climb out of the stuffy van. “You think I’m rescuing you?”

  “Then get out of the way.” The woman shifted and handcuffs clinked.

  Victoria shot her a look, then she found a key on one of the men and uncuffed her. Victoria let her keep the gun.

  They climbed out of the van. “Tell me why I shouldn’t shoot you and find whatever car you drove here in?”