She slapped her phone down on top of the dash with a brisk, “Here,” and then popped open the door and hustled across the parking lot toward the gas station. It happened so fast, and in the flurry of her movement, he’d almost forgotten why he’d even wanted the phone in the first place. He was suddenly faced with a much more enjoyable task, watching her speed-walking away toward the building.
And then he remembered he’d have to keep an eye on her, for much different reasons.
Hurry the hell up.
He pulled a cord from his pocket, something special that Tansy had rigged up. He connected one end of it to his tablet, looking around one last time for Macy, and then connected the other end into her phone, hating himself even as he followed the simple steps to gain access to her cell.
But it was happening anyway, even as the worries ricocheted through his brain like bullet fragments. Even though he knew it was wrong, he had collected her data for the good of the team. For DARC Ops, for the appeasement of Jasper and Jackson and whatever other arbitrary reasons.
Despite all that, he knew he should never have even entertained the idea.
While every bit of data on her phone continued to siphon into his tablet, Tucker looked around him in the parking lot. Another perimeter check. He’d almost lost track of the two cars pulling in and emptying out with men marching into the gas station. They wore the same green fatigues as he’d seen earlier.
A coincidence.
Right?
He looked back at the data transfer, the process nearly half complete.
And then he looked back outside at the increasingly worrying coincidence.
He had taken a risk in stealing her data. And now he was taking another in not stepping out of the car to investigate these strange men, to make sure Macy was safe. He looked back down at the phone. 76% complete.
23
Macy
At first it was mild panic.
She couldn’t find the car.
And then it was annoyance, at herself, that she could even imagine Tucker driving off and leaving her stranded. By now, in just three short and chaotic days, she felt intimately bonded to him. An ultimate trust forged by a longtime friendship, and a newly discovered sexual passion—as well as their dependence on each other to survive the various life-threatening situations they’d found themselves in.
Would there ever be a time when someone wasn’t trying to kill both of them?
By working with DARC Ops, Macy was sure that neither of them could take the ownership of having put the other in danger. She had been the first, yes, in filling Tucker’s life with a little more excitement. But here in South Africa, with a whole other set of assassins coming after Tucker and his men—and now Macy—it was fair to say that things had balanced out a little. They were even. Both in danger. Both in lust for each other.
Things could have been a lot worse.
With increasingly morbid thoughts, Macy forced herself to ignore the specifics of how much worse. She spotted their rental car parked off to the side of the lot, in the shade, empty. No Tucker in sight, inside or out.
After the last few days, it seemed as though any odd little change or surprise had her shocked, on edge. It was like her psyche had been peeled like an onion, exposing the raw surface underneath. A raw jumble of nerves all that was left after several years of constant fear. Maybe Tucker was right about the PTSD. In the past, without Tucker and the protection and normalcy he’d provided, she didn’t have time to worry about such psychological idiosyncrasies. But now, under the safety of his presence, there was room for wandering thoughts. Introspection. Weakness, even. The kind of tactical flab that could wind up getting her killed.
Her approach to the car was slow and cautious, maintaining a line of sight back to the building and on anyone who could potentially be exiting it. When she finally made it back to the car, a sense of relief washed over her. Not because Tucker was waiting inside, but because she’d just turned back to see him leave the store. He was walking with his normal pace, only he wasn’t smiling back at her. His face was tight with concern. Like an infectious disease, that concern spread to Macy. She felt it deep in her bones.
“What’s wrong?” she asked him when he got close enough not to shout. She understood the benefits of hiding her American accent.
But Tucker just kept approaching without saying a word.
“Tucker?”
“What?” he finally said, a look of surprise on his face as if he hadn’t heard her.
“Is everything okay?”
He stood at driver’s-side door, staring at her across the roof of the car.
“What the hell is it?” she said, keeping her voice calm. She wasn’t going to lose it. Not now, when they were so close.
“Oh, um . . . Can you actually go back inside and, uh . . .”
“What?”
“Can you grab something for us to eat?” He started looking through his wallet, flipping through. “I forgot breakfast.”
“There won’t be anything actually edible in there,” she said. “You want junk food?”
“Yeah, can you just, um . . .”
She’d never seen Tucker act like this. He looked guilty about something. Covering, scared.
“Tucker? What’s going on?”
He put his wallet away and then frowned, looking down, away from her eyes at all costs. But she felt it right away anyway, a clear sign that he’d done something. Something . . .
“Tucker?”
He was shaking his head, swearing softly to himself. It horrified her.
“What the hell is going on?” she said.
He didn’t say a word.
And then Macy remembered her phone. She’d left it inside the car. With Tucker. She took a deep breath. “Open the door.” The words came out low and calm, her voice steadying against her growing anxiety.
Tucker finally raised his head up, and with a crooked half smile he said, “Okay . . . Let’s just talk about this for a minute.” But there was a dead look in his eyes that didn’t match the rest of him, especially that chipper voice. He laid it on too thick, like a bad used-car salesman. “Can we just talk about this first?”
“Talk about what?” Her eyes instinctively went back to the car, her gaze through the window, searching for whatever it was that Tucker had been trying so hard to cover up.
“Okay,” he said, “so, Jasper just wanted me to sync up your phone. That’s all. I should have told you, but—”
“What? Sync up my phone?” She saw it now, her phone on the seat, with wires hanging out. “What the fuck is that?”
“We had to sync it up to—”
“What do you mean, sync? What does that mean, Tucker?”
“To connect them.”
“No. You mean to steal my data. My contacts, my calls. Files. History. Is that it?”
“No . . .”
“You needed to spy on me?”
“No.”
“Yes,” she said. “Who was it? Jasper? So Jasper had you spy on me. And this was all planned out, having to use the phone, stopping here.”
“Well, you had to use the bathroom.”
“You lied to me.”
“I didn’t lie.”
“You . . .You fucking . . .”
“No . . . Macy. It wasn’t like that.”
She turned around, away from the car and her phone, and away from his goddamn face. She leaned against the door, arms crossed, watching the traffic roll by, feeling time swirl around, like a little inconsequential drop in a bucket. Meaningless. Everything was meaningless and empty now. She was alone.
She felt alone again for the first time since Luanda. Since before Tucker.
“Come on,” she heard him say, his words barely cutting through the thick cloud that enveloped her.
The door locks clicked open.
“Come on,” he said again. “Let’s get going. I can explain on the way to—”
“Save it,” Macy said, flinging open her door and getti
ng in. The first thing she did inside was disable the wire and toss it out of the car.
“Please, Macy . . .”
“I’m only getting in this car because I . . . have to.”
Did she really?
What were her options?
The old Macy knew it was better to be alone than with someone she couldn’t trust. Especially in this country—or anywhere she’d run to.
Tucker, already on her side of the car, had picked up the wire from the ground. “You don’t have to do anything. You can do or not do whatever you want, and with whoever you want.”
“That’s not true, and you know it,” Macy said. “You know the situation I’m in right now. You know how fucked up it is . . . including this, you hacking into my phone. I can’t believe it, Tucker. I can’t even begin . . .”
“I can explain.” He slipped into the car and sat next to her. Her body instinctively recoiled away. Tucker’s shoulders dropped.
“Come on,” he said. “Please?”
“Please what?” It came out angrily. “How about you please drive? Or can I? Can we just go?”
With a loud sigh, Tucker started the car and idled out of the parking lot, driving out a one-way entrance.
And then he almost slammed into the back of the car in front as it came to an unexpected stop.
“Do me a favor,” she said.
“What?”
“Don’t get us killed, okay? Okay?”
“What are you talking—”
“—Just pay attention!”
“Alright!” he barked back, the two of them sounding to her like an old married couple. “Alright, let’s just . . .”
“Let’s just get to where we’re going,” she said, folding her arms and looking away.
“Macy, I believe you. I mean, I trust you. Totally.” He paused, but she added nothing in between. He grumbled something quietly, and then sighed again in the silence. “It was set up so that I had to prove something to them. I was doing it for you, actually.”
“How nice.”
“Jasper was . . . worried, since the attacks. He just wanted to be sure. I mean, you’re new. New people get vetted like crazy. Fuck! Macy, I just wanted to . . .” He trailed off, as if testing the waters for her reaction. But when none came, Tucker said nothing else. He drove, pulling away quickly from the gas station. She glanced his way when she finally no longer felt his gaze on her. His face was impassive, but his eyes burned, and his hands gripped the wheel so tightly his knuckles and fingers were white with the pressure.
24
Tucker
“I guess there goes the honeymoon stage,” Jasper said.
Tucker kept loading the back of the truck with sand bags, letting each of them slump down loudly against the wooden panel floor of the truck.
“She’ll get over it,” Jasper said from his spot on the tailgate. He’d been sitting there the whole time.
Whenever Tucker would walk by, sandbag in hand, he enjoyed the brief mental image of dropping one of the thirty-pound bags over Jasper’s head. Anything to shut him up. He might even be lucky and get a snapped neck out of it.
“Take it easy with those,” Jasper said after Tucker’s last toss. He’d been increasingly rough with the bags, throwing them from an increasing distance. “Hey,” Jasper said after the following toss. “They might split like that. Then we’ll have sand everywhere.”
For the next bag, and for the furthest distance yet, Tucker stayed outside the truck. After rotating his body like an Olympian hammer thrower, he swung back and then released the bag into the air. It missed Jasper’s head by a few inches as it sailed into the truck.
“What the fuck?” he cried “What the hell was that?”
“Nothing,” Tucker said, wiping the sweat from his brow. “So you’re lucky.”
“I’m lucky?”
“Lucky I’m not doing anything,” Tucker said. “I’m taking it out on the bags, instead.”
“Oh.” Jasper got down off the tuck. “You want to take something out on me?”
Tucker turned from his pile of sandbags. Jasper was taking a few slow steps toward him. “Are you squaring up to me? You sure you want to do that?”
“You’re being a real prick about this,” Jasper said. “I put in a good word about her to Jackson. Without that, she wouldn’t be anywhere near here. And neither would you. Without DARC Ops, you might still be rotting away in some Humvee in Mosul, not knowing if Macy even existed out here. And she’d be back in Angola, probably hanging in a fucking meat locker until someone could pay the bounty.”
Tucker couldn’t hold back the rage. He lurched forward and shoved Jasper against his chest, knocking him back. Jasper stumbled over the pile of sandbags, landing over them on his back. Tucker readied himself in a defensive stance, readying for Jasper to get back up and come forward again. To square up for another exchange. But he just stayed on the ground, smiling.
“Feel better now?” Jasper said. “Get it out of your system?”
Now it was Tucker’s turn to sit on the tailgate, slumping there and holding his head in his hands, seeing Macy’s disappointed face in the darkness. A horrified face. He rubbed his eye sockets with the palms of his hands, but it wouldn’t go away.
“Look, Tucker, I’m sorry it had to play out like that. I really am.”
He didn’t believe him. For all Tucker knew, it could have been a ploy to break them up. To keep him focused. He opened his eyes and fixed his gaze on Jasper, who had hauled himself to his feet while Tucker was brooding.
“But we have to take these preventative measures,” Jasper said. “We have to vet people like that. We did the same with you. You know that. We’re a private intelligence agency. It’s what we do, man.”
“It’s still a pretty shitty thing to do when you know the ramifications.”
“I understand that,” Jasper said. “But it was necessary.”
Tucker muttered, “And the ramification for me, and her. You know what I’m fucking talking about.”
“I know,” Jasper said. “And I’m sorry.”
It was hard for Tucker to accept.
Jasper brushed the dirt and dust off his pants. “So can we get along? Can we move on?”
He’d be fine with moving on with Jasper, eventually. Probably. It wasn’t the first time that they’d bumped heads, but the situation with Macy was more precarious. Since their fight, he’d become more and more convinced that she might just move on, not with him, but from him entirely.
But where could she move on to? Where else in this world could she run alone that would be safer than with DARC’s help?
“What do you say, Tucker? Can we pull this out?”
“Fine,” Tucker said. He walked back to the truck and reached out his hand for a conciliatory handshake. “Yeah, we can do this.”
Jasper pulled in a hug, thumping him on the shoulder. “No hard feelings?”
He thought for a minute. “You’ll have to ask Macy about that.”
“She’ll be fine.”
“Really? You think she’ll actually show up?” Tucker looked around at their work, the sandbags all in place next to the tripod legs of the EMP gun. A 4- by 5-inch slit carved out in the tuck door, the gun port, all ready to go. And Tucker, himself, maybe all ready to go—if he could just figure out what Macy was up to. He hadn’t heard from her since the blowup at the gas station. When they’d arrived at the compound, she’d stormed right inside, right past Jasper’s welcoming smile.
“She’s not too happy,” Tucker said.
“Want me to talk to her for you?”
“And say what? Sorry? Tried that already. It didn’t go down well.”
Jasper shrugged. Tucker knew enough about the army medic that he was at least sometimes reasonable. He must have been aware of that portion of the guy code that outlined, in no uncertain terms, to not cock-block your fellow bro. Though even Tucker could maybe admit that the conquests of his cock paled in importance to the safety of the world. Or at le
ast he could admit that now, thinking with the right head, just as long as Macy’s firm ass wasn’t snug up against him.
Right now, he doubted any part of him would ever be that close to any part of her again.
“I can find her,” Jasper said. “I’ll talk to her.”
“And you’ll say I forced Tucker to steal your data? That I’m an idiot?”
“You want me to say that you’re an idiot?”
“You,” Tucker said. “That you’re an idiot.”
Jasper smiled. “I’m an idiot. Okay. What else?”
“I don’t know. You tell me. What other stunts have you pulled to sabotage me and Macy’s friendship?”
“So it’s a friendship now?”
“Of course it is,” Tucker said. “That’s all it ever was.” He felt the sadness come rushing back.
“Hey,” Jasper said. “Cheer up.”
The few days of friendship they’d had could be the most he’d ever achieve as far as Macy was concerned. He worried that now, since he’d broken her trust, it would just be a steady free-fall through the oblivion. Back through the gaping hole of time and place. From friends to nothing. Could something like that happen so swiftly? Their reuniting, and reignition, certainly happened quickly. A falling out might be even faster.
25
Macy
She found him hunched over his laptop, the nerdiest yet cockiest of the DARC Ops men, Tansy. The hacker. She’d first heard about him from Tucker’s explanation of how he’d found her in Luanda. Tansy, the man behind the hotel searches and the cell tower hacks. If anyone had ordered the hack on her phone, it was him. Or at the very least, it would be him who would be analyzing everything that she once thought was private.
“Reading anything interesting?” she said.
Tansy swiveled around in his office chair, torso first then followed by his legs until he was facing her square on. He didn’t say anything.
DARC Ops: The Complete Series Page 118