The Heart of War: Book Seven of the What's Left of My World Series

by C. A. Rudolph

  A vicious backhanded slap to Sasha’s cheek converted her remaining words to a single yelp. She tumbled to the gravel, groaning and coughing as blood seeped from a torn lower lip.

  “Damn, Phil!” the right guard cried. “What’s wrong with you? You didn’t have to do that!”

  “Someone had to. Bitch was being crude, and I don’t want that shit in my presence. I don’t recognize the value of crudeness.”

  “That’s no excuse to hit her!”

  “I agree, but I didn’t hit her. She fell.” Phil observed the third guard, who’d been following silently behind. “Did you see me hit her?”

  Guard number three looked away, shaking his head. “I didn’t see anything.”

  “See? The bitch fell, tripped over her own big feet attached to those unsightly cankles of hers. Shame…looks like she busted her lip pretty good.” He kicked Sasha’s boot. “You should be more careful, inmate. Brush it off and help yourself up. We got places to be.”

  Sasha struggled to rise on her own but couldn’t quite manage.

  Watching her wriggle about, the guard who’d been escorting her on the right knelt to offer aid. “Easy…let me help you.” He rose with her and brushed her off. “Are you okay? Can you walk?”

  Sasha conveyed a broken smile. “Precious, I could dance a fucking jig right now.”

  “Um, good to know,” he said awkwardly, examining the fresh gash on her lip, “but we should probably get that cut looked at.”

  “Yeah, we probably should, but sadly there’s no time,” Phil the guard said. “It’s less than an hour from breakfast. And she’s late for work.”

  “Late for work?” Sasha prompted, her voice raspier than before.

  Three guards helping Sasha along, they made their way to their destination. Moving to an indoor setting, they removed her restraints and finally her blindfold.

  Sasha blinked a few times and allowed her eyes to adjust to the intensity of the fluorescent lighting. A line of stainless shelved tables stood before her and, on either side, rows of commercial appliances, more tables, cookware, and a griddle. Steam wafted from each end of a commercial dishwasher at the far end of the room. The tile walls were lined with stainless-steel panels that hadn’t been cleaned in a while. The room had all the markings of a commercial kitchen, only not one found in a restaurant. She assumed this to be a cafeteria kitchen in one of the former schools within the campus grounds.

  “What do you think of your new digs, inmate?” Phil the guard asked.

  Sasha sighed. “Oh, Phil. You really don’t want to know what I think.”

  “You’re probably right. That disrespectful tongue of yours might earn you another helping of accidental discipline.” He chuckled, hand outstretched. “Meet your new office. You’ve been designated a work detail. Congratulations.”

  “Lovely,” Sasha moaned. “Any reason why this particular one was chosen for me?”

  “If you ask me, it’s a perfect fit,” Phil mused, grinning ear to ear now. “One look at you screams sandwich maker. And our dishwasher’s been making funny noises, probably ready to crap out. By the looks of those hands, you’ve scrubbed a few dishes…but almost certainly skimped on the Palmolive. Madge wouldn’t be pleased if she knew.”

  The guards collectively snorted.

  Busted lip on proud display, Sasha feigned laughter, then sent Phil a devilish smirk. “That’s some funny shit, McCracken. You got jokes. It’s cute. Real cute.”

  “Glad you think so. I’ve been working on that delivery,” Phil said, then closed in on her. “All jokes aside, the girls working this detail could use a helping hand. Maybe you could coach them, mother them or something…they’ve been having issues getting our meals done right.”

  “Why’s that, Phil? Is DHS no longer recruiting graduates from Subway University?”

  “We don’t recruit. We instruct and they obey,” Phil thundered. “Same goes for you, and we are flat-out tired of the excuses.” He pointed toward the pantry, where a group of young women were huddled. “That’s your workforce over there. Wrangle them, get their heads right, and prepare the hardworking staff of this camp a legitimate breakfast, not some unseasoned, bland concoction fit for a hog trough. And don’t fuck it up, or I promise you, there’ll be hell to pay.” Phil and guard number three hastily took their leave, leaving the most considerate of the trio to lag behind with his conscience showing.

  Sasha ogled him with a brow raised.

  “I just wanted to say that I’m sorry for what happened,” the guard said. “Phil isn’t usually this…brash. Something you said must’ve set him off.”

  Sasha felt her busted lip, grinning behind her fingertips. “Oh, precious, that’s sweet. But it’s fine and I’m fine. I can take a beating.”

  “That doesn’t mean you should. I can have someone stop by and clean up that cut for you…seeing as how a trip to the infirmary’s been ruled out.”

  Sasha kindly refused his offer.

  “Okay.” He poked his thumb at the door. “I’d better get going…before McCracken cracks his whip.”

  Sasha sniggered, jutting her chin toward the pantry. “Before you do, any idea what the real problem is here? I get the feeling ole Phil was holding back the full story.”

  The guard sighed. “No one knows, really. Lack of flavor has always been a problem, but every day it’s a new excuse. Lately they’ve been saying substituting is necessary because we’re running low on the most popular items, which is somewhat difficult to believe. I know we’re mandated to ration our foodstuffs once they reach a certain threshold, but the consensus is that mountains are being made out of molehills.” He looked to the door. “I’d better go.”

  Sasha stood by her lonesome and watched him leave, then spent a moment gauging the setting. “Another fine mess you’ve gotten yourself into.” Hands to her hips, she shuffled over to the group of younger girls clustered together at the commercial pantry. Once close enough, Sasha began recognizing voices and faces. The girls had been amongst those her motorcycle club had kidnapped, terrorized and forgotten, left to rot in locked basements in the neighborhood they’d sequestered. The same ones she had lobbied Chad and Mark Mason to locate and free if the valley survived an impending attack, the ones Sasha had gone along with them to do just that, only to find themselves captured and imprisoned by the DHS.

  One of the girls turned and inhaled a scream at seeing Sasha’s face. “Oh my gosh!”

  The others followed suit, all but one seeming to cower in her presence.

  “Geez, ladies. By those reactions, I can’t tell if you’re happy to see me.” Sasha tilted her head. “Relax, it’s me; but not the old me, she’s dead, and the MC is toast. I’m not an elder or Dan’s old lady anymore; I’m just Sasha. A prisoner in this stink box, same as you.”

  One of the girls pushed her way through the others to get a better look. “It’s really you?”

  “It’s me.” Sasha gently brushed the girl’s hair with her fingers. “It’s Carly, right?”

  “You remembered.”

  “Barely, doll. Barely.”

  Carly reached for Sasha. “We…heard you were dead.”

  “An exaggeration, sort of. I think I was dead for a few days, then God gifted me this wicked twist of fate.”

  Carly giggled, enshrouded by Sasha’s arms, inciting a few chuckles from the others. “How did you get here?”

  “The same way all of you did. A ride on a blacked-out float in a federal agent parade. Ironically, it happened right after a couple of friends and I went looking for you guys. Sorry we didn’t make it in time. How’ve you all been holding up?”

  “It hasn’t been that bad, all things considered,” a redhead to Carly’s right said. “The beds are better than sleeping on a concrete floor, and we haven’t had to worry about someone barging into our room in the middle of the night.”

  Sasha smiled internally. She’d hoped for this, that the girls, if taken here, would be fostered and treated more fairly than they had by
the club. It wasn’t living by their own free will, but at least it was living. “I want to hear more, but we can do our catching-up later, chicas. I’ve been informed that breakfast is expected soon, and the guards are in a bit of an uproar over shoddy cooking skills.”

  Carly pulled away. “It has nothing to do with cooking skills…it’s the lack of things to cook.”

  Sasha squinted. “Really…”

  “Yeah. We keep telling them that, but they won’t listen to us,” another girl said. “Bunch of chauvinistic jackoffs.”

  “No one wants to admit it, but we’re running out of food,” Carly explained. “The whole camp has been rationing for months, but something else has been going on—something shady. Every time we open this door, we find more stuff missing. We think staff has been coming in after hours and taking what they want for themselves. And we’re afraid to say anything about it because we know they’ll just blame us for it.”

  Sasha slid past and looked inside. “Whoa. This is a sad state of affairs unless you adore steel cut oats, powdered nonfat milk and salt. Damn, that’s a lot of salt. What do these germs usually prefer to eat in the morning?”

  Carly chuckled. “Are you kidding? All they want are the same things every day—bacon, eggs and fresh coffee, all the shit we don’t have.”

  “We used to get all the bacon fresh,” the redhead said, “but that stopped when they slaughtered the last hog a month ago. We started using the freeze-dried, ready-to-eat stuff, and we’re almost out of that. All our eggs came from a chicken farm down the road, but that stopped when the chickens started disappearing a while back.” She rotated. “Morgan, you were the last one there, how many are we down to?”

  A skinny, peaked brunette replied timidly, “Two, I think.”

  “Right. Two measly hens. We’ve been using the bulk powdered eggs, the ones that taste like crap. We’ve been trying to make them taste better, but it’s hard.”

  “Just try adding a little salt, doll.” Sasha knelt before a line of white, labeled food-grade buckets. “I’ve never seen so much damn salt stacked in one place before. Do you guys ever use this stuff?”

  “Not really, no one ever asks for it,” said the redhead.

  Sasha thought a moment. “Ladies, I think the time has come to make good use of what we have in abundance.”

  Carly looked confused. “You want us to feed them salt?”

  A devious grin spread across Sasha’s face. “No, sweets, not just salt. That wouldn’t be palatable. One of the complaints I heard voiced on the way in regarded the cuisine here as being unseasoned and bland. I’d say that calls for some spicing up.”

  “Spicing up,” Carly muttered. “So, salt, then. Added to everything?”

  “Since there’s so damn much of it, why not?” Sasha agreed. “What else do we have in the spice rack? Bay leaves? Any cinnamon or nutmeg?”

  The girls in the group traded stares.

  “We probably have containers of all that,” Carly said.

  Sasha rose with a grin. “Superb. We’ll use what we have to season their meals up something nice…they’ll never know what hit them.”

  “Okaaay…but what if we accidentally go too far?” the redhead asked. “Like if we overseason their food. They probably wouldn’t like that.”

  “Right,” Carly agreed. “And what if they’re allergic or something? Couldn’t they get sick?”

  “I’m not sure, but it sounds entirely possible,” Sasha crooned. “Remember, girls, we’re just sandwich makers and dishwashers, we’re not dieticians. How would we know?”

  Chapter 7

  Beatrice wasn’t enthused. Her dialogue yesterday with beau Doug Bronson hadn’t worked out as planned. Instead of rolling over, as he had so many times already, and kowtowing to her suggestions, he’d demonstrated resistance and had talked down to her. He’d even taken her constructive criticism personally, as if her overall brilliance on the matters at hand had insulted him rather than rendered him awestricken. What a pompous ass.

  Beatrice had awoken this morning to one of the worst bad-hair days she’d encountered in her life. No matter what she tried, she couldn’t control it. It was as if a thousand newly formed gravitational, magnetic, and electrostatic forces had been instituted in other dimensions to specifically target her locks and drag them in every direction. They were all out of whack until she gave up and wrangled them into a bun.

  She’d gone to bed alone the previous evening. A deviation to her normal plans, she had remained home and in her own bed for a change. Her husband hadn’t been around. His latest assignment, one she had penned herself, had placed him and his team at mobile encampments outside the wire for the foreseeable future. Everything had been working out in glorious fashion for Beatrice until recently. Until an old acquaintance manifested out of thin air, out of literally goddamn nowhere, and put down her hammer-toed, unsophisticated combat-boot-wearing feet smack-dab in the wrong area of operations.

  Beatrice despised her. She’d hated Constance Hensley for years, and for good reason. The two had butted heads on many occasions in the past, and by some means, Beatrice’s opponent had always gotten the upper hand even though Beatrice knew she was better at everything. Smarter, too. And miles lovelier. But none of those things ever mattered. The bitch had become her nemesis. She’d always pulled out the win, and there was no way in hell Beatrice was going to allow that nonsense to continue. She had taken too many strides forward since being here. She’d climbed too many rungs on this ladder. There would be no starting over at ground level. Any actions made going forward were to be direct and sadistic. Callous and inhuman. No more pussyfooting. It didn’t matter who it was—if anyone stood in her way or offered any hindrance, Beatrice was going to kill them.

  She sat with near flawless posture at the two-person table in her kitchenette, alternating stares through the window, northeast to the structures within the camp’s confines, and to the analog clock above. A can of V8 juice nearing empty spun about in the fingers in her left hand, and her service weapon, a Beretta 92, lay prone on the table below her right. She had spent the day stewing and plotting, but mostly stewing over what she had witnessed after leaving Doug Bronson’s office yesterday. She had walked out and Tori had walked in, and that was helping Beatrice align herself with her next move.

  The clock’s second hand clicked, giving off the air of a metronome. Beatrice reminisced backward several years to her last encounter with Special Agent Constance Hensley. Beatrice had been stationed in Tel Aviv on special assignment to secure assets and gather intelligence on a Palestinian political insurgency that was metastasizing.

  Her counterpart’s role had been diplomatic security. Hensley had been assigned to the US Embassy Tel Aviv Branch Office as security attaché and was second in command of the ambassador’s protection detail. The CIA’s presence in Tel Aviv was top secret, but insurgency and terrorism were common threats, and the entities convened daily to discuss plans, share intel, and maintain transparency. The CIA station chief or team leaders briefed DoS on any moves they were plotting, impending dangers, or kinetic operations. If the ambassador had plans to move about in public, DoS gave the CIA outpost prior notice and forwarded his agenda. The departments’ missions hadn’t been one and the same, but congruence between them had been paramount.

  That congruence aside, Beatrice only ever assigned priority to one thing: her mission. Everything else beyond that was secondary. She knew Hensley would get in her way eventually. Their first phone conversation and the manner in which Hensley had spoken to her told her everything. Every word the woman used attested her level of tutelage but was nonetheless riddled in an unnecessary snootiness.

  Beatrice had done what any agent of her merit would’ve, she’d scoured databases and delved into her colleague’s dossier for something she could use to gain the upper hand should she need it, but the woman’s record was spotless. Not a single soiled word. She’d spent her career doing everything right and proper. Commendations here, promotions there
, commitment, diligence, determination. Fair play. All the right moves. Her hands had never been dirty. The damn dossier might as well have been carved into stone tablets by God’s own unspoiled fingernail.

  That was all hullabaloo and poppycock to Beatrice. She had always been of the belief that none of that prim and proper bullshit was necessary to achieve success. You just had to be willing to do what needed to be done, come hell or high water, right, wrong or indifferent. Kill one or kill a hundred. If it served the mission, it was justified. Dirty hands were requisite to dirty work. And regardless of what it had taken for her to get where she was or how she had gone about it, Beatrice’s success rate had always been exemplary, but so had Connie Hensley’s. And that made Beatrice detest her even more.

  During one morning’s interdepartmental briefing, the embassy had informed the CIA outpost that the ambassador would be attending a festival in the old city of Jaffa that evening on the mayor’s invitation. The station chief had apprised DSS that a deep cover operation had been in progress within Jaffa’s ancient walls for months, and the chance of the op going kinetic during the festival was credible. Dissenting words had been exchanged, but neither agency had backed off. The station chief had recommended that the operation be postponed, but in the end, left the final decision to his operatives’ discretion.

  Beatrice, then one of the leads, wouldn’t hear of postponement, and the operation had gone forward as planned. That evening, she’d led a team of twenty armed operatives in plain clothes to mingle with the crowd and hunt for their mark. Special Agent Hensley and a fifteen-member diplomatic security agent team attended as well, some escorting the ambassador, others scattered amongst the crowd. Most of the evening had gone off without a hitch, but several hours in, Beatrice’s overwatch had identified their mark. They’d surrounded and confronted him and had attempted to take him quietly into custody, but the mark had been concealing an AK-47 Draco pistol with a seventy-five-round drum beneath his robe. CIA agents had converged, drawn their weapons, and shouted commands. The crowd had panicked, chaos had ensued, and DSS had moved in quickly to protect the ambassador and attempt to maintain order, but it had been no use. Everything had gone to shit after the first gunshot, fired by one of Beatrice’s junior operatives.