CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
“It’s a little weird to be here,” Alex said.
“It has been a while,” the clerk said. She turned to speak to another customer.
Stepping aside so that a customer could move by her to the bar, Alex walked through the shop to where Jesse was standing.
“This is it,” Jesse said.
Alex opened the door and jogged down a series of wooden steps into the labyrinth of limestone tunnels that run beneath Paris. Five steps, turn, five steps, turn. In the dim light, she counted the steps in her head. Even though the stairs continued into the darkness, she walked forward off the stairs into the fifth passageway and froze.
This was the passageway from her nightmare.
Her heart raced, and her stomach lurched into her throat. Looking up the stairs, she longed to return to the busy shop. But the passageway called to her. Blowing out her feelings of dread, she stepped forward.
She heard the door open above her.
“Alex?” Ben called.
Jesse beckoned her forward into the dark limestone passageway. Round fluorescent ceiling lights flickered and came on, as she walked under them. Each time she stepped into the dark, a light began to flicker overhead. Counting her steps—fifty-seven—she turned at an unmarked door on her right.
No doorknob. No hinges. Just a vague outline of a door cut into the limestone.
Placing her hand on the limestone, a green light scanned her palm. There was a soft click, and a keypad emerged.
Alex looked at Jesse, and he nodded.
Her fingers moved in an automatic rhythm across the key pad. There was a pop, and the door opened a crack. Alex pushed the door open.
The smell hit her like a tidal wave.
Dried blood and death. Blood had dried in thick pools on the floor. Splattered blood patterned the white limestone walls. Crates and boxes around the room bore scars made by violent death. The sound of ragged breathing and dripping blood pounded her ears.
In a series of flashes, she watched it happen.
FF
She stood in front of ten years of her mission journals tucked in a wall compartment. Holding her journal, the large one she carried in her pack, she laughed at Mike. He was bragging about his latest conquest. From his position at the door, Jesse encouraged Mike’s exaggerations with provocative questions. Alex shared a look with Jesse, and they laughed.
Jax, the medic, was changing into his running gear for his first long run since competing in the one hundred and thirty five mile Badwater Ultramarathon. Charlie O’Brien and Dwight Harris, the weapon’s officer, were arguing about the outcome of the last Broncos vs. Raiders football game.
Alex glanced at Scott, the engineer, who was sitting on a crate, talking to Tommy, the communications officer. When she looked away, Scott threw a piece of ice at her. Laughing, Alex caught the ice in her right hand. She threw the ice at Scott and hit him in the head.
Paul, the second engineer, was standing in his boxers, displaying his new dance moves to Dean, the other medic. Laughing at Dean and Paul, Nathan had his foot on a crate so he could tie his shoes.
They were laughing and loose. Having finished their work early, they were ready to play. Their body armor was stacked in a corner. Alex tossed her body armor onto the stack, and turned to put the journal in the compartment. Impatient and ready to go, Nathan started jumping up and down.
Hearing a sound in the hallway, she glanced in Jesse’s direction. Jesse screamed. Falling against the door, his body jerked as a round of machine gun fire hit him in the chest. Reaching for her handgun, Alex’s abdomen and hip exploded. Dazed, she flew backwards and landed on a crate. With round after agonizing round, the machine gun cut into her screaming friends.
Sitting up, she fired in the direction of the shooter but was unable to stabilize against the gun’s recoil. The shot went wild.
The shooter laughed at her efforts and turned to shoot Dwight in the head.
Alex clenched her teeth. Using her free hand to stabilize, she fired twice in quick succession.
Her shots knocked the shooter backward. The shooter sneered. Taunting Alex, he pointed to the spot where her shots hit his body armor. With a cruel laugh, he raised his AK-47 to fire at Alex again.
She pulled one shot, hitting him in the forehead. The shooter fell backward to the floor.
Bleeding heavily, she dropped to the blood-slick floor. Sobbing and unable to stand or walk, she pulled herself from one friend to the next. Their bodies lay in pieces on the limestone. She fell forward over Charlie.
Then she heard the ragged breath. Jesse’s alive.
“Don’t die. Don’t die. Jesse, don’t you dare die. Please. Jesse. Please don’t die. Jesse,” echoed off the limestone walls.
Pushing and pulling herself along the floor, she fell forward in front of his broken body.
Jesse smiled.
Lying on her stomach, she pressed her hands into his wounds, trying to stem the flow of blood.
Jesse shook his head.
She dragged her hips around and moved to sitting. She pulled his head on to her lap.
“I’m dying,” he whispered.
“Please don’t go. Please Jesse. Please . . .” Alex sobbed.
Jesse reached for her hands. Holding her hands, he looked into her eyes.
“Tell Maria that I love her,” he whispered.
He drew in a ragged breath. With his exhale, he said, “We’ll be friends forever.”
“No, Jesse. No!”
Alex screamed. She shook his body, trying to make him take another breath. Overcome with grief, she rocked him in her lap.
She began to fade. With each beat of her heart, her life spilled into the pool of blood on the limestone floor. Preparing for the inevitable, she closed her eyes and let go.
Someone ran down the wooden stairs. She jerked her eyes open.
Looking around, she noticed the team journal. She had propped the journal against the door when she tried to stop Jesse’s bleeding. When she fell over sideways to grab the journal, Jessie’s head pressed deep into her wounds.
She screamed in pain.
With all the strength left in her body, she lifted the nearest crate a tiny crack and stuffed the journal underneath. Righting herself, she kissed Jesse’s forehead and surrendered to the dark.
The next thing she remembered was being carried by Raz through a room of people. She heard her voice begging Raz not to leave her, but she wasn’t sure she’d said a word.
FF
Alex blinked until the memory receded.
She was standing in the team’s storage vault. Glancing around the room, she saw the stack of body armor, weapons, and various supplies the team used.
Closing and opening her eyes, she tried to clear her vertigo.
The journal compartment was empty. Someone had taken her mission journals. Dropping to her knees, she reached under the crate next to the door. Her fingers felt the binding of a journal.
Hearing movement in the hall, she rolled over and pulled her weapon.
“Alex.” Ben appeared in the doorway. He was sweating and breathing hard. Noticing her handgun, he held his hands up. “Alex, what the fuck?”
Alex shook her head and blinked. Was this really Ben? He made an impatient sound. This was Ben.
Holstering her gun, she stood.
“What do you know?”
“I received a telephone call about a hit scheduled on . . . on my daughter and her team at twelve-thirty. It was a courtesy call, you know, designed to warn me but not give me enough time to change the outcome of the hit.”
“Who called you?”
“Someone who is no longer living.”
Alex jerked her head in a nod. Her eyes flitted from one spot to the next, both taking in and avoiding the horror at the same time.
“We looked for you everywhere, everywhere. I couldn’t find you. No one had seen you in hours. Zack was on his way to Afghanistan. You checked out of base at eleven. I called your cel
l phone, but you were down here. Out of range.”
“Where were you?”
Alex’s eyes detected something shiny on the floor. Using a fingernail, she pried Jesse’s St. Christopher medallion from the blood-encrusted floor.
“London. Claire called to remind me that it was Helene’s sixteenth birthday. She mentioned that you had stopped by around noon. She said you were going for absinthe and would meet them for a birthday dinner.”
“I wanted to be here for her big birthday,” Alex said. Pieces of the memory began to click into place. She wiped Jesse’s medallion on her jeans in an effort to clean off the dried blood. “I remember that. How did you find me?”
“I have no idea. Angels? God? I don’t know.” Ben looked around the room. “I could see you from the landing, sitting here, in the doorway, with Jesse’s head in your lap. I checked your pulse, but I must have missed your low pulse. We assumed you were dead. I was in the room . . . Everyone was . . . cut in two by machine gun fire . . . dead. Raz realized you were alive. I guess Jesse’s head stemmed your bleeding. Raz picked you up and ran out of here.”
“I killed the shooter,” Alex said. She slipped Jesse’s St. Christopher into her pocket.
“Yes, his body was right here,” Ben said. He moved to the space where the shooter’s body had been. “When we got here, his head was wrapped in T-shirts.”
“You interrupted someone.”
“Probably. By the time the Army arrived, the shooter’s body was gone. What did you keep here?”
“We kept everything we needed here—cash, random tools, clothing, weapons, or whatever. We kept my journals—the big ones that held our plans, schedules, ideas, and notes—in that vault. We kept our Christmas presents and stuff like that here, too.”
“And the small journals? The ones you carried in your pocket?” Ben asked.
“Here,” Alex said. She walked to another portion of the limestone walls and pressed on the wall. With a loud click, the wall opened, showing a line of pocket-sized notebooks. Looking around the room, she grabbed a large, empty duffle bag and began dropping the journals into the bag.
“Who knew about this place?” Ben asked.
“No one knew it was ours. The shop upstairs rented the space, and Charlie paid for ten years in advance. Cash.”
“Just the team. Does Max know about this?”
“No,” Alex said. “Max knew that I was in Paris for work a lot but not why or what I was doing. You know Max. He couldn’t care less about that kind of thing.”
“Did the Boy Scout know about the vault?” Ben asked.
“I don’t think so,” Alex said. “We never trusted him. We were going to meet him in Afghanistan after a night in Paris. Isn’t that where he was? Afghanistan?”
Ben shook his head.
“No one is quite sure where he was that day. He was on leave. The Army wasn’t tracking him. I’ve heard that he was in Paris.”
Alex walked toward the door.
“Why the cover-up? Why say we were killed in Afghanistan?”
“No one knew what you were doing here. It breaks about a dozen treaties to have an unauthorized Special Forces mission in Europe.”
“We were here all the time.”
“Europe wasn’t your assigned area—right?”
“We rescued hostages in every country.”
“There were no known hostages in Europe at that time.”
“No known . . . Huh,” Alex shrugged. “Can you lift this crate?”
Ben lifted the crate, and Alex pulled the journal from under the crate. Although the journal was marked with bloody handprints, the crate had channeled the blood away from the journal. She flipped through the dry pages.
“I heard footsteps,” she said. “I protected this journal for some reason.”
“Alex, we have to get out of here,” Ben said. “There’s no way to know what events were set off by your presence in this vault.”
Surprised, Alex stared at him for a moment before jumping into action. She stuck the journal into the duffle bag.
“I need a couple things,” Alex said. She walked around the storage unit. “The cash is gone; that’s not too surprising. We were on our way to Afghanistan. We never needed cash there.”
Smiling, she pulled a ten-inch square jewelry box from the floor. The outside of the box stuck to the floor, but the box held its shape. She tucked it into the duffle bag. She went to the wall and pushed open another cabinet that held a small box. She put it in the bag.
“We need to go,” Ben said. Holding a handgun, he looked down the hall.
“Here,” Alex said. She tossed Ben a body armor vest and pulled on another vest. “Army issue.”
“Thanks,” he said. “What about the property?”
Alex looked around the room.
“Nothing stands out. Who knows?”
She slipped her arms through the duffle bag handles. The bag rested on her back. She pushed the door to midway open, causing the door to swing shut. The gears of the lock engaged.
She ran after Ben. Reaching the landing of the stairs, they heard the door open above them. Two people pounded down the wooden stairs toward them.
Following Ben, Alex flew down the stairs into the tunnels below.
The Fey Page 22