by Gennita Low
Lily looked at the landscape outside. Everything was hidden under a thick blanket of snow. For some reason the sight made her tired. “I’ll find a way,” she said.
There was no way she was ever going near a phone. Not as long as the CIA could set off that fucking trigger in her head. She would be damned if she was ever going to be their little weapon again.
* * *
Reed didn’t like being the last one to enter the conference room. It gave him a disadvantage, since all conversation stopped and everyone turned and looked at him. GEM had thought one of their own field agents might be better. He knew he was under the microscope, since he was being sent out at the admiral’s insistence. He didn’t like working without his SEAL brothers, but Admiral Madison had said this was an important mission, so he would do it.
Retrieving the missing weapon was part of Hawk’s assignment when he went undercover in Macedonia. Since it was a Joint Mission, he had two tasks: one, to find the weapons caches that the enemy had so the SEALs could destroy them and two, to locate the explosive device before it fell into enemy hands. However, his commander had only been able to achieve one of the goals; someone had run off with the stolen weapon before he’d been able to get to it.
That culprit had been Llallana Noretski. So now it was Reed’s job to get Llallana before she handed the weapon over to someone else. And he would get it done.
Admiral Madison had insisted that it was still his and his team’s responsibility to retrieve the device for GEM, their partner in this Joint Mission. SEALs always completed their missions. Because Llallana was already familiar with Hawk, they needed someone else. Reed had been surprised when he had been picked. He was hardly a good candidate to sweet talk a woman into giving up a weapon worth millions of dollars.
He soon found out the reason he was chosen. He was the team sharpshooter, one of the best from sniper school. GEM wanted him for a specific reason. He’d also included the languages he spoke in his files. He was sure they were aware that he could speak and understand Croatian and had spent a fair amount of time there, enough to know the cityscape.
There were new people present this time. In previous meetings, one or both of his commanders would be present, depending on whether Admiral Madison could do a satellite video link or not. Hawk was here today. This time he had Amber Hutchens by his side. An Asian woman was sitting at the far end. Probably another GEM operative. The man sitting at the other end of the long table reading some files looked familiar.
The others in the room were operatives he’d met in the last few weeks who had given him quick workshops on language, etiquette, and bar manners, which had privately amused him. They reminded him of the private lessons his mother had made him take when he was a kid, except, of course, the one about bar manners. His mother hadn’t thought of her youngest son growing up to be a Navy SEAL carousing in a bar.
“Reed, this is Jed McNeil, from the COS Command Center.”
The man looked up and Reed met a pair of startling light eyes in a tanned face. His handshake was firm. Close up his eyes appeared almost silver. Reed had seen this man before—wasn’t he the one who’d been some kind of undercover commando with the Triads during the first part of the Joint Mission with GEM? Hawk had filled him in on the various different departments and agencies connected with GEM and COS, how the two agencies had merged two years ago so they could go after a common goal.
“Jed’s part of the third phase of Operation Foxhole to retrieve the explosive device. You’ll be in contact with him when you have any information about the weapon.”
“Good to meet you, sir,” Reed said.
“Call me Jed. We keep things pretty informal here. Have a seat,” Jed McNeil said, indicating the chair next to him. “Admiral Madison spoke highly of you.”
“Thank you.” T joined McNeil on the other side. “You’ve met Miss Hutchens, of course. She’s been helping us with building a more complete profile of the target. Amber accompanied Llallana Noretski on several of her trips before, so we’ve used her information to keep an eye on those routes.”
Hawk had told him about Llallana’s relationship with Amber Hutchens, how Llallana had sabotaged their weapons search and escaped with the device while Hawk had been busy saving Amber. Reed nodded politely at Amber, who smiled back in acknowledgement.
“Miss Hutchens came on board on the specific condition that you give an evaluation of the target’s psychological condition before you take her out.”
And that was his assignment in a nutshell. Retrieve device. Kill Llallana Noretski before she was instructed by her handler to do more harm. GEM wanted him for the job because, as a trained sharpshooter, he wouldn’t have any problem looking at a woman and seeing her as a target. He was also fluent in several languages. Another thing courtesy of his mother.
Reed noticed that Amber had noticeably reacted to Llallana’s being called “the target.” She had looked up sharply at T, then glanced away. Could anyone be tricked by a friend so thoroughly and still be so forgiving? Reed wondered whether he had that kind of generosity in him. He thought of his mother. His father had never forgiven her.
“I don’t know how to do that,” Reed said quietly. He’d never needed to evaluate a target before. “If she could deceive Miss Hutchens so well, how would I be able to tell whether she’s fine or not?”
“Which is why we have Nikki Harden on our team this time,” T responded. The Asian woman gave a slight nod and smile. “Nikki’s one of our top operatives and has expressed interest in this operation because of our target. She’ll be your advisor when it comes to dissecting Llallana’s current mental state. Once you’ve established contact, you have to report to her whenever possible.”
So many people to report to. Reed frowned. He had to establish certain points here. “Pardon my question, ma’am, but how is reporting back and forth about a target’s personality going to help me finish my assignment? I don’t know how to care for a mental patient.” He didn’t want to waste time getting to know Llallana Noretski. Establishing a bond wasn’t good for a sharpshooter. He didn’t say that out loud, though. “I was under the assumption that once I know the weapon’s location, I would retrieve it, and finish up.”
He tried to be tactful because of Amber’s presence. This was what emotional bonding could bring about—the inability to coldly look a target in the eye and pull the trigger.
Nikki Harden’s smile was gentle. “You first have to establish a trust between the two of you, Mr. Vincenzio. There’s another way to do this, of course. Capture Llallana Noretski and make her tell us what we want to know, in which case, she might do one of a few things. A, she could still be under the influence of her handler and be ordered to self-eliminate. B, she could lie several times to us while someone she knows is handling the sale of the weapon. Or, C, the weapon is already gone and she’s just a decoy to distract us. We’ve evaluated a higher probability of retrieving the weapon if you have direct access to it yourself through her. I hope to help you anticipate any problems you might have dealing with her.”
He was a SEAL. He knew how to deal with an enemy. A target. They were requiring of him two very different tasks here.
“Are you a psychiatrist?” Reed asked.
“No,” Nikki replied quietly, “but I’ve had experiences similar to those that Llallana Noretski has gone through and can provide you with insight on the effects of brainwashing and drug manipulation, as well as how the mind deals with fear and mental pain. Do you have any similar experience with these topics so we have a starting point in discussion?”
Reed considered a few seconds. He hadn’t thought this assignment would go quite so deep. He wanted to clarify his position before they went too far into left field. “I’m a SEAL, ma’am. We’re trained to be mentally strong so we can withstand pain from being in extreme conditions, be it from the weather or mental pain. We spend weeks in boot camp with very little sleep while our bodies and minds are broken down into survival mode. But I don’t feel c
omfortable in judging whether a woman’s head is right or not.” He took a deep breath before quietly adding, “I’m not going to play psychiatrist.”
“But you do have something to help you understand Llallana Noretski. You can always report to me using your training as a basis,” Nikki said. “Is that easier?”
“Yes.” He hadn’t thought of his SEAL training as anything to do with mental torture and brainwashing. He would have to think about this later.
“Perhaps this will help put you in perspective about your target,” T said. “We have the final recording of her last conversation moments before she disappeared. The man she’s talking to, Bradford Sun, was a friend of hers and Amber’s. He’s the chief of CIVPOL, the UN drug and human-trafficking arm. During this conversation, we were trying to deactivate Llallana. At that time, we only knew that her key trigger line was ‘Things fall apart.’”
Reed frowned. “From the Yeats poem?”
Nikki nodded. “Yes. Are you familiar with it?”
“Yes,” Reed replied, keeping his expression deliberately blank as T canted an eyebrow. Boarding school had taken care of a lot of his knowledge of classical literature.
“Pay attention to what happens when Llallana says the trigger line,” T said and pressed a button.
The room speakers picked up background sounds of a car moving. Then Reed heard a woman’s voice.
“What am I?” She sounded distant.
“You’re a CIA sleeper. They used your anger and hatred and programmed you. They channeled all your emotions into looking for a sister you don’t have so you could have a purpose in life, and then they put a trigger in that they could set off when the time’s right. All those cell calls you have been taking…don’t let them use you, Lily!”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You don’t have a sister. It’s been you all along! You know this! Stop lying to yourself, Lily.”
“Llallana. ‘Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.’”
There was a slight pause, and then the male voice replied slowly,
“’The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned.’ What comes next, Lily? Say it and be free.”
Reed found himself holding his breath as he listened. This was a sleeper cell awakening from her trigger.
Llallana’s voice sounded faint, even uneasy.
“’The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.’”
The rest of the tape was the male voice calling Llallana’s name over and over. The phone then went dead.
There was a short silence in the room. The recorded conversation had been intense and personal, and Reed felt a twinge of pity for Llallana. The poor woman must have been brought to awareness right at that moment.
The files reported the initial conclusion that Llallana had committed suicide because a car had been found wrecked at the foot of a cliff. However, no body had ever been found. Nor was there any trace of the explosive device.
Llallana, or Lily, as her friends called her, was still out there somewhere. And she might be the only person who had the weapon.
“We want to give you all the help you need to bring Llallana Noretski back here alive,” T told him. “This was our agreement with Amber before she’d agree to come aboard. If Llallana’s too far gone and has become too dangerous, then you must eliminate her, Reed. That’s why we picked you for this job. You have a reputation of being in control of your emotions at all times, and if you see Llallana Noretski selling that device before you can get to it yourself, you have to put her in your crosshairs and take her out, Reed.”
Taking out targets was his expertise. He would do his team proud and finish the original Joint Mission. “Not a problem,” Reed said.
CHAPTER 3
Stimoceiver, developed in the 1950s by Dr. Joseph Delgado and funded by the CIA and the Office of Naval Research. Current miniature telemetry devices.
Reed’s head hurt from thinking about all the implications of what he’d been reading for the past hour. The possibility of a person being implanted with a tiny transceiver to control and modify behavior and emotion was science fiction stuff to him, but, according to these files, it’d been done for decades.
Nikki Harden had told him she didn’t think Llallana Noretski had had such an implant put in her, but it was a possibility because of her sudden erratic change of behavior shortly before she had betrayed Amber. Nikki had wanted him to understand how a person could be subjected to mind control and the different ways this could be achieved.
Reed studied the two women in the room with him. Sitting at the far end, Nikki was pulling out different sheets from her files to compile into one for him, quietly asking Amber questions as she was doing so. The two women worked well together as they went through the different cases and possible ways they could save Llallana Noretski. He liked that they both didn’t view the woman as just a target.
He went back to his reading.
Project BLUEBIRD, 1950s program authorized by the CIA. Operation ARTICHOKE, authorized by Deputy CIA Director Richard Helms. Psychological Warfare. Drug experimentation on subjects to create hypnosis, amnesia and also implant posthypnotic suggestion.
The documents gave accounts of subjects being put into some kind of living hypnotic state and given new identities in different countries. The hypnotic suggestions had successfully stayed with the individuals.
The creation of the perfect sleeper cell: using the subject’s past with implanted hypnotic “triggers.”
There was no way Reed would have believed that the government could actually be doing this to real human beings, except that in the current world, with so many terrorist acts by supposedly normal people, the term “sleeper cell” had entered the vernacular. If the enemy had been doing this, why not his own government?
And Llallana Noretski was one of them. Or so they said. He didn’t really buy all this mumbo jumbo. All his life, he’d held a person to be fully responsible for every one of his or her actions and their consequences. Arch might have blamed Kim’s death, but it was Arch who’d paddled out to sea, who hadn’t swum back. His mother might have blamed his father’s coldness, but it was she who had chosen to—
The door slid open and T walked in, urgency in her stride.
“We’ve got her location,” she said, moving to the panel that controlled the video screens. “She showed up at the bank just as we hoped she would.”
Anticipation arose. Action time. He was growing tired of research and reading. He put down his file and swiveled his chair to face the wall. Amber and Nikki joined him at the main table, their attention on the screen.
The video showed that it was nighttime. A woman walked toward the camera, hands shoved deeply into her heavy fur coat. Her head was covered with a dark scarf, but Reed could see the dark hair curling at the shoulders. She looked up. It was Llallana Noretski.
“We knew there weren’t enough passports in Amber’s safe, so we’ve frozen most of the accounts she and Amber were using,” Nikki explained, “hoping that she’ll still be trying to help the rest of the girls escape.”
“She’s let her hair grow long,” Amber murmured. “Lily’s never had her hair that long in the years I’ve known her. Said long hair tickled her neck.”
“Then perhaps she’s reverting to her former self,” Nikki said. “You mentioned she avoided talking about her sister all that time.”
“Well, we know why, don’t we?”
“Or maybe she’s just trying to hide,” Reed suggested. “I mean, don’t women just change their hairstyles when something drastic happens in their lives?”
T clicked the video on pause, freezing Llallana in the middle of withdrawing money from the machine, and all three women turned and looked at him. He stared back. Maybe he should have kept that observation to himself.
Then T laughed and leaned a hip against the table. “You know, darling, you do say the most interesting things
with the straightest face. Is this hair phenomenon just a standard male assumption or from past experience?”
Darling. When T called him that, Reed was beginning to suspect it meant her mind was targeting him for one of those weird probing conversations. “Darling” was just the distraction. It was the rest of her sentence he had to be careful of. He was still wondering what she knew about his background.
“You were joking, right?” Amber didn’t even try to hide her amusement.
She would be telling Hawk about this later. Reed knew what his commander’s reply would be, since he was known for it. “I don’t joke,” he answered, then he looked at T. “Observation.”
“That many girlfriends then, Reed?” T teased, patting her hair. “Are you the drastic thing in their lives?”
“No, my mo—” Reed stopped, closing his mouth firmly. Damn, she’d done it again. He didn’t want to bring up anything to do with his family. He went back to the subject that had started this. “I was just thinking that since I’m letting my hair grow longer than I like, just like the target is, that maybe she’s trying to hide her true identity. Maybe she just doesn’t like herself at the moment, or her situation, and so she changes her hairstyle.”
The length of his hair was way longer than he was used to. It reminded him of his surfrat days when he used to have the wavy blond mane his friends favored. They had been shocked out of their minds when they’d seen him return one day with all his locks shorn off, after he’d joined the Navy. Now they were back—no longer sun-streaked, and a lot darker, but still the same thick wave.
Nikki and T exchanged a brief glance. They seemed to agree on something.
“We’ll know when you meet her,” Nikki said, turning back to the screen.
T reactivated the video. Llallana made her withdrawal, shoving the cash into her purse. She looked up, straight into the camera. Reed frowned. There was something in her expression….
“This is good,” Nikki said. “This might mean she’s still somewhat in control of her thoughts, that her trigger hasn’t been reactivated, or she wouldn’t care so much about taking care of the rest of the girls.”