DARC Ops: The Complete Series

by Jamie Garrett

  Sharky shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t seem to know an awful lot.”

  “Exactly,” he said. “They pay me not to know.”

  “You probably sleep better that way.”

  “Trust me,” Sharky said. “Either way, I’ll be sleeping like a baby tonight.”

  “What do you mean either way?”

  “Here,” Sharky tossed her the phone, which she barely had time to catch. “Just don’t do anything stupid with it.”

  Annica held it at her side. “What do you mean, either way?”

  “Whatever happens from this.”

  “This isn’t the first time I’ve been kidnapped,” she said.

  “This isn’t a—”

  “I’ve been locked in a fucking cage before. Do you know what it’s like to be in a cage?”

  “I’ve been to jail.”

  She held back an eye roll. Probably wouldn’t be in her best interests right now. “Big surprise.”

  She hadn’t looked at her phone yet. Not even a single glance. Though in the back of her mind she wondered if she had time to do it, to make a call, a call for help to Jackson. Maybe even use the stupid alert app he’d insisted Tansy install on her phone. She’d scoffed at the time, but now? She only hoped her GPS was on. She ran through the timeline in her head, wondering if her fingers could hold steady enough, if she could hold Sharky at bay long enough to hit the right buttons.

  But surely he suspected it. They might have been thinking about the exact same thing at that very moment.

  Her fingers hovered above the phone screen, trembling at the thought. Could she do it?

  “Well?” Sharky said. “You forget your secret favorite number?”

  She glanced down at her phone screen, hoping to see a miracle. Maybe Jackson had already noticed she’d gone missing. Her blank splash screen stared back at her. Nothing. The soft pop of the door pushing open sounded and she jerked her head up. It was the sound of someone in a rush. Heavy breathing, too.

  Sharky had looked away from her, keeping his eyes away just long enough for her to pocket the phone. She slid it in her pants and then pulled her hand away, quickly, but not too quickly. Smoothly, not to make it obvious that she’d just performed a perhaps life-saving sleight of hand.

  “How long will it take?” the man asked Sharky.

  “Talk to Roger.”

  “I just did. He wants you there now.”

  The two men were huddled together in conversation, Annica listening as the volume rose to fill the room. The urgency, too. Something was going on in the building, and it sounded much worse than just a simple, solitary intruder.

  “I’m on it,” Sharky said.

  “Hurry up.”

  The man left, slamming the door behind him.

  “What was that?” she asked. “What’s going on?” She wanted to keep him occupied. Rush him with questions so that he wouldn’t have time to notice what she’d done with the phone.

  “What?” He looked distracted, eyes having trouble focusing on her. Perfect.

  Annica smiled and asked again, “What’s going on?”

  “I’m afraid we’ll have to speed up this process.” He finally took his gaze off the floor, staring deep into her eyes.

  “What does that mean?”

  Sharky reached for his side, drawing his gun.

  “No!”

  He raised it up to her head and she could see nothing but the barrel. Blacker than midnight. A black hole. Death.

  She felt her life already being sucked down into the darkness.

  “Hold still.”

  6

  Cole

  He pulled the trigger.

  The sound of gunfire in the small room was deafening, his ears immediately ringing. The room had changed somehow. It was already smoky. For him, it was the smell of death. The other change could be seen on the wall, just to the right of his target. Over Annica’s shoulder was a small black hole, the bullet burrowed into the wall.

  He looked back for her, starting with that shoulder. She’d moved, a good few feet from the hole, hunched over. She was slumped back into the wall, her body quivering. Hands held together at her chest. Her breathing hard but shallow.

  Cole holstered his weapon and took a good look at her. She was like a shell of her once lively, even cocky self. Finally, she was quiet—save for the gasping sounds. She looked pitiful, and he felt guilty about it already. But it had to be done.

  “Hey,” he said softly. “You’re fine. You’re okay.”

  She was still convulsing with terror, but with some words now, half-formed sentences, pleas rattling out of her. What was she trying to say?

  “Hey,” Cole said again, walking toward her slowly like a hunter approaching a downed animal. What could he do? Should he try helping her up? “It’s okay, I’m not going to hurt you.”

  The downed animal suddenly raged back to life, springing to her feet and lunging into him, screaming, scratching, and finally, biting. She had the side of his hand in her teeth, her hands coming back again for his throat. Cole’s free hand shot out to her chest, hard at her sternum to block her away from doing any further damage. The ferocity of her attack was stunning.

  “You fucker,” she cried through gritted teeth.

  He finally got behind her, his arms wrapped around and holding her in place against his body. A bear hug. Not hard enough to squeeze the air out of her, but at least some of the fight.

  Still, she struggled, her feet kicking back at him.

  “Stop,” he whisper-yelled. “I’m trying to save you.” His head was clunked into hers, holding there. His mouth near her ear, whispering, “Please.”

  “What?!” She sounded insane.

  “Please, stop. I’m trying to help.”

  Her struggle began to ease, slightly. “Help me how?”

  She was still struggling, but slower, and quieter.

  “I can get you out of here,” Cole said.

  “How?”

  “Through that door.”

  Now it felt like she really had been shot, all of her efforts coming to a quick halt. “What?” she mumbled, her body went still and loose, her head turning in the direction of the room’s trap door.

  “You see it,” Cole said. “That door right there.”

  “What about it?” She was looking right at it, studying it.

  Cole said, “It’s an escape.”

  She wriggled against him and he forced his body not to react. This was so not the damn time!

  “Can you let go of me? Please.”

  He took a deep breath and let go of her, his captive spilling out of his arms and back into the middle of the room. She spun around to face him, tears glistening on her cheeks. She looked beaten up. Battered. Had he really been that rough with her?

  “I’m sorry,” Cole said. She must be terrified, but fuck, it had been necessary. If she wanted to live. If they both wanted to live. It was a little funny to think about, the urge for self-preservation that he so badly lacked just moments ago. It was that lack that brought him over the rails of the cargo ship. What was it now? What was it about this woman that suddenly lit the spark in him to survive? For both of them to survive . . .

  “What do you mean this fucking door? You want me to crawl though this door? What is it? Where does it go?” She kept going on and on, her face and voice growing more hysterical with each question.

  “Hold on,” he said. “Can you just stop? Just stop and listen for a moment.”

  “What?” she said, her chest heaving.

  “You’re still not listening.”

  “I am.”

  “You’re not.”

  He waited for at least some of the tension across her mouth to ease. For her breathing to relax. For the words to stop flowing out so thoughtlessly. He waited for her to listen, and listen carefully.

  “They think I shot you,” Cole said. “Do you understand?”

  She nodded, with hardly a change in expression. It wa
s like she assumed it all along.

  “That was how this was supposed to end in here,” he said. “That’s what this room is. People get shot, and their bodies get sent down that chute.”

  She looked at the door again.

  “They’re expecting me to dump you through there,” he said. “To get rid of your body.”

  “Jesus,” she muttered, her hand and clawing up to her face, shakily covering her mouth.

  “Now’s not the time to cry about it. Okay? We gotta act.”

  “Yeah.”

  Cole made his way to the door. “We’ll talk later. At least I hope we will.”

  “What’s down there?” she asked, another flash of terror through her eyes. “What’s at the bottom?” It would be twice, just today, that she’d fallen through some mysterious chute.

  “The garbage bin. One of those giant, industrial-sized bins.”

  “What’s . . . What’s in it?”

  “No bodies,” he said, opening the door. “Take a look.”

  She crept over to the door, peering into the darkness. “How far down?”

  “It’s not very steep.”

  “How far?”

  “You won’t go very fast,” Cole said. “I know it sounds bad, but it’s the only way. If we take any other option that doesn’t include you going out this chute, then both of us will probably wind up dead. Do you get me?”

  She looked through the door again.

  “If I didn’t care about you surviving, you’d already be dead.”

  “Yeah,” she muttered, her voice sounding tired and weak, and aimed into the darkness down the chute.

  “My ass is on the line, too,” Cole said. “For you.”

  “Yeah,” she said, a little louder this time. She reached for the door, holding it open wider.

  “I have to go,” Cole said. “Are you ready?”

  She raised her leg, one foot stepping onto the lip of the chute. She turned back quickly to face him, and to say, “Thanks.”

  Cole nodded. “Just make sure you get the hell out of Hawaii.”

  “Okay.”

  “Don’t go to the cops. Don’t tell anyone. Just leave.”

  She crawled in, sitting with her legs pointing down like she was a kid atop a waterslide. And suddenly, as if she just remembered what the chute was used for, she took her hands off the metal bottom, holding them up in the air with a little groan. “Okay,” she said. “I’m going. But you’ll hear from me.”

  The idea of her tracking him down again didn’t bother him as much as he’d thought. It meant they’d both be alive.

  She gave one last nod to him. And then she pushed off and slipped quietly down out of sight.

  7

  Cole

  He knocked on the door and took a deep breath. When he closed his eyes, he could see her again, that last look of fear in her eyes before she turned away from him, before she faced the descent, sliding down into clutches of uncertainty. Now he was there, too, at the door of Captain, rattled with uncertainty. What would be waiting for him beyond that door? Would it be Captain? Or his other alias, Roger? It was a bad sign when he was Roger. Roger meant that someone was about to die.

  Cole had to get himself together. He couldn’t face either alias this way.

  He knocked again, until a voice from inside told him to come in.

  Inside the room, the voice was louder, and clearer, and as pretty as the mouth that did the telling. Captain’s Hawaiian secretary had always smiled at him that way, sexily, inappropriately for the office. Inappropriately for a married woman, certainly. It used to turn him on, but now it just terrified him. Especially today.

  “Interesting morning?” she said, flicking her hair off a bare, tanned shoulder.

  “You mean afternoon?”

  She shrugged. “I just got here.”

  “Where’s Captain?”

  “What happened?”

  “Huh?”

  “Tell me what happened out there,” she said, “with that girl.”

  “It’s nothing you haven’t heard already.”

  She was smiling again, a healthy, youthful shine on her sun-bronzed face. Captain was smart about her, and he lacked the possessiveness and jealousy that would otherwise get in the way of using his girl as a kind of office bait. A little honey trap that could catch any of his workers who’d slip up for even just half a second, the slightest gap of judgment, of thinking with the wrong head.

  Cole had occasionally caught himself slipping over the edge of the trap to peer into his own demise. He’d get flirty, maybe sometimes overly so. But that wasn’t what Captain cared about. He wanted information. He wanted the kind of things mentioned offhand, between the flirting. Slipups. Sometimes Cole even thought she was trained to go after these things. His Hawaiian girl, his secretary, was more like a predator than anything else.

  “We had a break-in,” Cole said.

  She scrunched up her face and said, “Really? A break-in from some girl?”

  “A woman,” Cole said.

  “She’s my age.” Captain’s secretary propped a pen up on her bottom lip, tapping it. “A girl my age, or so I heard.”

  “If you already heard about it—”

  “What was she doing?”

  “I don’t know,” Cole said. “She fell through the ceiling, landed on the beltway.”

  “She hurt?”

  “No.”

  “She still alive?”

  Cole thought for a moment. “No.”

  She sighed, swinging her legs back under her desk. She stared at her screen. “You killed her?”

  “Where’s Captain?” Cole said.

  “Did you?”

  “Should I just walk back there?”

  “Well, hold up,” she said, spinning her chair away from the computer again, away from her work. Perhaps swinging to her real work, working on him. Grinding him down with, “Hold up, come on, come on. Come here.” She nodded to the chair next to her desk. “You’ve been on your feet all day, right?”

  “Afternoon.”

  “Then just chill with me for a minute. Can you? For a minute?”

  “For what?”

  “I dunno.”

  “For the gory details?”

  She shrugged innocently, her dark hair swaying with it.

  “You’re a real sicko,” Cole said.

  “Aren’t we all?”

  Cole took his eyes off her, staring to the hallway behind her desk, to where Captain’s door would be. “I’m going back there.”

  “I don’t care,” she said.

  Cole made it past her desk and into hall. A man was already sitting in a chair next to the closed door of Captain’s office. He was an islander. T-shirt and jeans, baseball cap. No visible weapon at his side. “What’s up?” Cole asked him.

  “Just waiting.”

  “Is he in there?”

  “I don’t even know anymore, man. It’s been a while.”

  Cole knocked on the door a few times, stopping when he heard sounds within. The screech of a closing drawer. Muffled movement toward the door. It opened, a few inches, and there was Captain’s face staring back at him. “Oh, it’s you,” he said around a dangling cigarette. “Get the hell in here.”

  Cole got the hell in there, happy to be finished with the gauntlet of closed doors. He took his usual seat against the wall, next to the always-open filing cabinet, feet up on a stack of banker’s boxes and staring out from his favorite vantage point to the docks through Captain’s wide window. It was a little hard to believe, after all the excitement today, that he had just come from there. From across the Pacific. From the pan to the fire.

  “Hell of a way to start the work week,” Captain said, chuckling to himself. He stood next to the open window, smoking. He stepped in the middle of it to block Cole’s view. “You take care of her?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Good,” he said, stepping back to the side of the window, the sunshine pouring back in. “Was that your second time now?�
�

  “First.”

  “Huh?” Captain sounded amazed, or maybe appalled. “Your first time offing someone?”

  “My first time for you,” Cole said, “in that room.”

  Captain chuckled again, turning away from his killer. “I was gonna say . . .” He took a drag from his cigarette and stared out the window.

  “How often do you have to use that room?”

  “For that?” Captain said. “Not often. I mean we’ll take out the trash, you know, that definitely happens. But as far as actually whacking someone in there . . . How’d she take it? She go easy?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Get anything else out of her?”

  “I didn’t ask her anything.”

  Captain turned around to face him, frowning. “You didn’t? How about her phone’s password?”

  “No.”

  “Well, let’s see that phone,” Captain said, holding out his palm. “Tell me you at least have that.”

  It hit him in the chest first, a hot, burning pain.

  What was that? A heart attack?

  “Hey. Where is it?”

  Cole’s mind scrambled to comprehend how he’d lost the phone. He checked his pockets again to be sure.

  “What the fuck? Did you lose it?!”

  “No,” Cole mumbled, searching his clothes. And then searching his mind, his foggy memory of how and where he could have lost it . . .

  “Seriously. Where is it?”

  Fuck . . . She had it. He’d given it back to her for some reason. And then down she went, down the chute and into the garbage.

  Cole sputtered, “I’m . . . I think . . .” In the deepest throes of desperation, he lifted himself off the chair to check underneath where he’d been sitting, to see if he’d been miraculously sitting right on it.

  Her phone wasn’t there.

  Of course it wasn’t.

  “We’ve got a major problem here,” Captain said. “You have a major problem.”

  “I do,” Cole said. “You’re right.”

  “You’re fucked if you don’t find that phone. You know that. You’re fucked if you don’t find it and get it back to me ASAP. I don’t care if you have to go crawling down that chute yourself.”

  Cole had already stood up on wobbly legs, backing away from the window and from Captain. “I’ll find it. I’ll go look outside.”