Cindy Gerard - [Bodyguards 05]

by Under the Wire

  She was right about one thing. His life back then had been filled with trickery and deceit. He’d lived it. Breathed it. Almost died because of it. And yes, it had colored his perceptions. Still did. There were few men he trusted. Fewer women.

  He wanted to believe her…but what other explanation was there? Who else would have turned him in? Who else knew? His Contra brothers whom he fought with against the Sandinistas every day? No. They would not have turned against him. They would have died for him—and he for them.

  Just as swiftly as it came up, the rain stopped, leaving behind the damp-dust scent of ozone. He tossed the empty water bottle in a refuse bin and stepped outside, still thinking about what Lily had said.

  She was so passionate in her denial. So determined to convince him he was wrong about her.

  And if he was wrong, did that also mean she was right about him? Was it still the boy reacting? The boy who’d lost his love, lost his home and his family, and needed to lash out at the one who caused him pain? Was it the boy who had lived, breathed, and dreamed the nightmare of her betrayal who demanded that the man not give himself permission to believe her?

  Thoughtful, he walked back to the jeep, shut the hood, and washed the windshield.

  Had the Sandinista soldiers lied about Lily? Had Poveda discovered their affair? Manny had seen the way Poveda had watched Lily the night they met. He understood exactly what had been on the general’s mind. That’s why Manny had been so ready to believe Lily was Poveda’s lover. But she insisted they weren’t involved. Maybe that was Manny’s answer. Poveda had wanted her. Wanted her so much that maybe he’d come for Manny out of jealousy, not even knowing that Manny was working against him.

  Or was it someone else? For the first time, Manny allowed himself to seriously consider a possibility that had been swirling like smoke in the back of his mind since Lily had first claimed her innocence.

  Cougar. The CIA operative was known for going to extreme lengths to get what he wanted. He’d wanted Manny for some time. Every time they’d met, Cougar had tried to talk Manny into going to the States, to become an elite soldier, then return and fight the fight.

  In the end, that’s exactly what Cougar had gotten. Could he have orchestrated Manny’s arrest, banking on Manny escaping and coming to him for help?

  God. He didn’t know. And now wasn’t the time to sort it all out. Later. There would be time later. After they found his son.

  And they would find him, Manny resolved with the single-minded conviction that had kept him alive in Nicaragua and Afghanistan. And on the streets of Boston, another, but just as deadly, type of war zone.

  He was ready to go when Lily came back with bananas, cashews, and mangosteens, a sweet, apple-sized reddish-yellow fruit that tasted like a combination of strawberries and grapes. Her white camp shirt was plastered to her lush body; her dark hair, which she’d woven into a single, thick braid somewhere along the way, was damp and glistening from the brief shower.

  A single rain droplet rode the ridge of her cheekbone, hovering on porcelain skin the sun had kissed to a rose petal pink.

  She was so fucking beautiful.

  Men grew distinguished. Women just grew wrinkles.

  One of his lovers had once said that. She had been wrong. At least she’d been wrong about a woman like Lily. The seventeen years, yes, they’d changed her, aged her, but there was a soft sensuality to her body now, a body that had always been lush and responsive and honed with the demands of her work. He’d loved her body then. He craved her body now.

  The small, fine lines around her eyes should have detracted from her beauty, he supposed. Instead, they added a lived-in grace, a wisdom born of experience. In spite of the stress she was under, regardless that her face was free of makeup that would soften and hide imperfections, she looked more beautiful than he had even remembered.

  When I look at you, Liliana…I can only think of having you.

  He had never spoken a greater truth. And he had to get past it.

  “Manny, about what you said earlier—”

  “Forget it,” he said, cutting her off.

  He had to think. He had to focus. And he couldn’t do either when she looked at him that way.

  “Better put on more sunblock,” he said, and stowed some extra containers of bottled water in the backseat.

  Avoiding her puzzled eyes, he climbed back behind the wheel. A bad sunburn might be the least of what happened to her if they encountered the rebel stronghold. He’d already come up with a contingency plan for that.

  “Here’s the route I think will work best.” He spread the map out on the seat between them as the sun broke through the clouds and the early-morning shower rumbled on to the north.

  “I’ll leave the navigation to you,” she said after a moment in which she must have decided to leave well enough alone. “Let’s just get going.”

  “We need to talk about that. Darcy and Ethan shouldn’t be more than three hours behind us.” He checked his watch. “Maybe four. When they arrive, you need to be here to intercept them—”

  “Whoa.” She held up a hand. Pinned him with a look. “Don’t even think about it. I’m going with you.”

  “Lily, someone has to—”

  “Steer Ethan in the right direction? Get serious. Ethan Garrett doesn’t need anyone to get him where he needs to go. So if this is some lame attempt to keep me out of harm’s way, it’s not going to work.

  “This is my son,” she stated firmly when Manny opened his mouth to argue. “My. Son.”

  She pressed a tightly closed fist between her breasts, holding it to her heart. “I don’t care if we meet with the devil himself, no one is going to stop me from getting to him.”

  CHAPTER 15

  Jaffna Peninsula, outside of Navatkuli

  They untied the blindfold and jerked it away from his eyes. Dallas blinked against the sudden light—although “light,” in this case, was a relative term. A single dim bulb hung from a cord dropped from the twenty-foot corrugated ceiling. It was the only illumination in the approximately thirty-by-thirty-foot room.

  Even before they’d removed the blindfold, he’d known he was inside a metal building from the hollow ring of doors opening and closing behind him and from the tinny echo of his own footsteps across a concrete floor. And nothing, nothing, was as hot under a midday sun as the interior of a building covered by a tin roof.

  When his eyes focused, he realized he was standing in an area that, in a stretch, could be called a situation room. Road maps, topography maps, and aerial surveillance maps of every district of Sri Lanka plastered the walls. Tacked-up notes littered a briefing board. Weapon diagrams and instructions for their use papered another wall.

  Dallas didn’t figure it was a good sign that he’d been brought here. He highly suspected that anyone who had ever seen the inside of this room with all of its tactical information was either a trusted loyalist to the cause or marked as a dead man who would never live to see the light of day again. There was little question into which category he fit.

  In the middle of the room was a desk. Behind the desk, with his back to Dallas, sat a man. His dark hair was graying now, his shoulders were rounder than when Dallas had seen him last, but there was no mistaking whose presence Dallas was in.

  “Don’t suppose you could convince your boys here that they can untie my hands now?” Dallas asked without greeting or preface.

  Gen. Ponnambalam Ramanathan, the elusive and reclusive leader of the LTTE, slowly swiveled around in his chair. Other than his trusted inner circle, only a handful of people had seen Ramanathan’s face in the past ten years.

  “Hello, my friend,” Ramanathan said from behind clasped hands as he observed Dallas with a mildly calculating look. “It has been a while.”

  Dallas nodded, would have been heartened by Ramanathan’s use of the word “friend,” had his inflection not dripped with cynicism.

  “And yet it seems like yesterday,” Dallas said with a grim smile. “Wh
y is that, do you suppose?”

  Ramanathan lifted a shoulder, lowered his hands. “Perhaps it is because we are meeting under much the same circumstances.”

  “I don’t recall being your prisoner back then.”

  “Perhaps you should have been.” The Tiger leader dropped all pretense of politeness. “You cost me a great deal of money. I have been looking forward to the opportunity to extract some form of restitution.”

  Dallas smiled. This was the tricky part—if he didn’t consider being held at gunpoint by a squad of soldiers and marched five miles blindfolded with his hands tied behind his back tricky.

  “The deal was solid, General,” he said, giving the rebel leader the respect his rank deserved. “Might I suggest it could be wise to look among your own ranks for the source of the problem?”

  He was bluffing, of course. Dallas had made certain the arms deal—a shipment of twenty SAMs—had gone sour when he’d brokered it three years ago. Posing as a rogue CIA agent when he was stationed in Lebanon with his Force Recon team, he’d infiltrated and happily thrown dozens of wrenches into the works before buyers and sellers alike had gotten wise and he’d had to get the hell out of Dodge—or in that case, Beirut. Same difference. Both were Wild West towns. Both lawless.

  “And why would I be wise to believe you were innocent and someone else was to blame?” the general asked, casually fishing a knife out of his pocket, then using it to clean his stained fingernails.

  As threats went, the knife was none too subtle. Dallas had to appreciate the show, if not the intent.

  “How many deals did I successfully broker for you? Ten? Fifteen?” Dallas asked to remind the general that he had come through time and again. Of course, those very calculated shipments of weaponry were of the type the general would have acquired with or without Dallas’s help. The SAMs had been another story. Those he’d had to intercept.

  “And your point?” Ramanathan asked.

  “My point is, someone fucked me over on that deal, too. The SAMs were my bread-and-butter deal. It was going to set me up for a very long time. The screwup cost me everything. I had to relocate. Reinvent. I’m still not up to speed again.”

  “And I’m to believe that’s why you disappeared along with my surface-to-air missiles.”

  Dallas rolled a shoulder. He was hot. He was dry. The forced march had given him too much time to think. Given his psyche too much time to play and remind him of other ops men who hadn’t been alive when the dust had settled.

  He had to keep his shit together. He was pinning not only his future but also Adam’s on his ability to BS his way out of yet one more dicey situation.

  “You’re no fool, General. You’ll believe what you want. But ask yourself this: Why would I risk coming to you now if I were guilty of cheating you? I’m bold, but I’m not stupid. And make no mistake—it wasn’t an accident that I met up with your posse today.” He lifted his chin toward the soldiers who continued to hold him at gunpoint. “I came looking for you.”

  Ramanathan glanced at his lead man. From the corner of his eye, Dallas saw him nod, confirming that Dallas had, in fact, asked to be brought here.

  Long moments passed. Perspiration trickled down Dallas’s back; the rope binding his wrists swelled with the heaviness of his own sweat.

  The general’s signal was so subtle that Dallas almost missed it. But when the guard moved, his knife drawn, Dallas understood that something crucial was about to happen.

  He braced himself, then breathed his first breath of relief when the knife sliced through the rope and his hands were finally free.

  “Talk,” Ramanathan said. “Convince me why that blade would not have been better used to pierce your heart. And why it shouldn’t yet be used for that purpose.”

  Badulla district, UVA Province

  It was midmorning—or so said the angled slant of sunlight burning bright as fire as they were herded toward the cave entrance. Minrada was so quiet. Worried, Adam watched her walk ahead of him. Quiet but not defeated. Her shoulders were squared, her head held high.

  Her posture was a message to those bastards. You cannot break me, it said. The pride he felt in her swelled in his chest, overrode the pain that pulsed through his body.

  His left eye was swollen shut, the cut above his brow caked with dirt and blood. He didn’t know what a broken rib felt like, but he suspected the stabbing pain that jabbed like a knife every time he took a breath told the tale. And when they’d jerked him up by his arm to march him out of the cave, it felt like they’d dislocated his swollen elbow.

  Physical pain. He’d discovered in the past days that he could handle it. Just like he could handle the hunger. What he couldn’t take was the look on Minrada’s face when he’d asked her what they’d done to her.

  Her beautiful eyes that shined with laughter and light had grown cold. Distant. And she’d looked away.

  An oily, sinking sensation rolled in his gut every time he thought about it. He wanted to cry for her. But a man didn’t cry. And if he was going to get them out of this, he had to be a man.

  He would kill the bastards. He would kill them all for stealing what was hers to give.

  He stumbled when they reached the opening of the cave, temporarily blinded before his pupils adjusted to the sunlight. He caught himself, then startled when he heard Minrada’s soft cry.

  “Ahm-maah.” Mother. “Thaath-thaah.” Father.

  Amithnal and Sathi were waiting for them at the foot of a cliff face; three armed guards lorded over them with rifles.

  Sathi started to cry when she saw Minrada. Minrada rushed to her mother, who looped her bound wrists over Minrada’s shoulders and pulled her close. Adam felt a lump lodge in his throat as the women wept.

  It was the first time he’d seen Minrada cry. Feeling helpless and for the first time in his life feeling hatred for another human being, he lifted his gaze to Amithnal. The man looked destroyed as he watched his wife and daughter. Moments later, Adam understood the reason why.

  A soldier motioned with his rifle for Adam to join the Muhandiramalas, then shoved him hard when he didn’t move fast enough.

  Lined up like targets on a rifle range, they were all forced to kneel. Adam watched with a rising sense of awareness as the soldiers slipped black masks over their heads, then picked up their weapons.

  It was surreal. Like he was watching this happen to someone else. Someone else who was held hostage in a foreign land where terrorists slaughtered at will in the name of their God or their cause.

  Six soldiers lined up behind them. Pointed the rifles directly at the heads.

  His heart exploded. This was it, he thought. The soldiers were going to kill them.

  He looked at Minrada. Silent tears trickled down her cheeks as she met his eyes.

  They stayed like that for what seemed like forever. Gazes locked. Hearts pounding so hard it felt like thunder. Dreams, desires, loss, and love flashed through Adam’s mind. Anger, guilt. His mother’s face. His mother’s smile.

  “Ki-yah-vah-nah-vaah.” Read.

  The single word shocked Adam into lifting his head…and seeing, for the first time, a video camera.

  “Ki-yah-vah-nah-vaah!” the rebel repeated, stabbing an index finger at the piece of paper he’d shoved into Amithnal’s hands.

  Minrada’s father was shaking so hard he couldn’t hold the paper still.

  Cursing under his breath, a soldier snatched it away from Amithnal, faced the small digital camera that Adam now understood was filming, and began to read himself.

  Adam didn’t understand much of it. Couldn’t tell from the reaction on Minrada’s face what was being said. Was barely aware that the soldier had finished, that they were being ordered to stand again, and that the camera had been shut off.

  Adam’s blood pumped like crazy as the four of them were marched back to the cave where he and Minrada had been held. His gut told him to attack. To head butt, kick, and bite any guard he could lay into.

  His head tol
d him it wouldn’t work. There were twenty of them. Only one of him. And they had guns. All he had was hatred…that bred and grew when he was once again shoved into the dark without food or water.

  “What did they say?” he whispered for fear of the guards overhearing him.

  A long silence passed before Minrada whispered back, “They have given the Sinhalese government until midnight tonight to turn over control of both the UVA and the Central Province to the LTTE.”

  “And if they don’t?”

  “Then they will kill us.”

  Near the Wahala-purha temple ruins

  Butterflies and bayonets. Songbirds and soldiers. The contrasts, Lily thought, as she searched the Tiger encampment with Manny’s field glasses, were chilling. As starkly frightening as they were frighteningly stark. Mud brown tents, rusted vehicles, tired-looking soldiers—mostly boys. With weapons. All of them with weapons, the gunmetal gray color of death.

  At the bottom of the gorge where the camp was set up, smoke from several campfires spiraled into the trees; the pungent scent of burning wood permeated the air. Above the scent of smoke hung the deep floral fragrance and decay of the jungle. The rain forest thickened a hundred yards to the left of where she and Manny lay on their bellies on a black stone outcropping.

  Tufts of tall, blade-thin grass shielded the crest of stone. It rustled in the wind like stiff satin and provided cover while they assessed the Tiger camp eighty yards below.

  They’d left the jeep a half a mile back, deep in a ravine and hidden in a copse of Palu trees. Then they’d hiked to the rise. To Lily’s surprise, the jeep had handled the rough off-road trek that had taken them over rock-strewn hillsides, through scrub brush and forest, and across small, meandering creek beds where the tumbling water had licked at the floorboards and sucking sand had threatened to mire them, wheel-hub deep.

  Yeah. The jeep had held up well.

  She, however, wasn’t doing so hot. She’d counted thirty—maybe thirty-five—rebel soldiers milling around the camp. She refocused the glasses and counted again, her heart pounding as she searched for a sign of Adam.