Take No Prisoners

by Gayle Wilson

  “So much so,” Dalton agreed, “that as a result of her testimony, the powers-that-be found Chancellor a new assignment.”

  “Let me guess. Reading satellite images.”

  “Something slightly more challenging.” Despite the seriousness of the situation, Dalton found himself smiling at the reminder of how hated that particular assignment was among Cabot’s agents. “They put her in charge of stopping the heroin traffic out of Afghanistan.”

  Landon laughed, the sound short and harsh. “I’m surprised they didn’t give her a spoon and a bucket and point her toward the nearest ocean.”

  Again Landon was on target with his assessment of the task Chancellor had been given. Halting the exportation of heroin from Afghanistan was an impossible job, considering the entrenched culture of poppy production. It had been made even more difficult now by the lawlessness of the vast areas that lay outside the direct control of the Afghan government or the forces of the international coalition.

  “Chancellor wanted to see the extent of the problem for herself,” Dalton went on, “as well as every aspect of the process by which the drugs are transported out of the country.”

  There was a noise from the other end of the line that sounded like derision. Unsure, Dalton decided to ignore it.

  “The Army provided her with a military escort, some lieutenant colonel who was supposed to know the ropes and show her around. Chancellor probably knew more about what was going on before she arrived in the country than he did after several months there.”

  “And knowing Chancellor,” Landon said, “she didn’t tell him that.”

  Probably not, Dalton thought, but he ignored the interruption to go on with his story. “The Kiowa they were riding in was hit by small-arms fire. Fortunately the pilot was able to set the chopper down, but…”

  “Go on,” Landon urged when Dalton paused.

  The voice on the other end of the line had become very soft. It was a timbre anyone who had worked in the field with Landon James would have recognized immediately. The more tense the situation, the quieter he became.

  “The body of the colonel’s aide was found with the helicopter. Lt. Colonel Stern, the pilot and Grace Chancellor were not.”

  “Where did they go down?”

  “The mountains just north of Kabul.”

  “Son of a bitch.” The expletive was again soft, but obviously heartfelt. “How long ago?”

  This was the part Dalton had most dreaded. So far the Agency had been tight-lipped about the incident. There had been a brief report in the media, no names provided. If Neil Andrews hadn’t contacted Griff, they might never have known Grace was involved.

  “Nearly two weeks.”

  The expletive Landon uttered this time was expressive of his contempt. “And of course, no one at Langley has a clue who took them. Or where.”

  Those were not questions. They were assumptions, flatly articulated and based on Landon’s lack of respect for the kind of information gathering that had passed for intel in that area for years.

  “Not a clue. At least, according to Griff’s sources within the Agency.”

  “Griff wants me to find her?”

  The hesitation this time was Dalton’s. “He recognizes that he has no right to ask you to do anything. He simply wanted me to make you aware of what had happened.”

  “Okay,” Landon said. “Tell him I’m aware.”

  Which didn’t sound promising. Nor did it reveal what the ex-operative intended to do. If anything.

  Dalton suspected his boss wasn’t going to be satisfied if he brought back that enigmatic answer. He knew Griff well enough to know that if James didn’t accept the task, Cabot would find someone who would.

  His loyalty toward those he considered the good guys within the CIA extended beyond the agents who had worked for him. Apparently, it covered Grace Chancellor, as well. And Griff would damn well want to know if the rescue mission he’d been hoping for was going to take place.

  “Are you going to find her?” Dalton asked.

  “If she’s still alive.”

  “We have no reason to believe she isn’t.”

  And none to believe she is.

  “Anybody had an offer?”

  “For ransom, you mean?”

  “Someone in that region is holding a senior CIA analyst, an American colonel and an American pilot, and they aren’t trying to negotiate a deal for their release? Doesn’t that strike you as strange?”

  “It’s a pretty remote area. A lot of tribesmen—”

  “You just made the same kind of mistake our former employer so frequently makes,” Landon interrupted. “Don’t judge sophistication by lifestyle. Just because someone lives in a cave doesn’t mean he doesn’t know what’s going on in the outside world. That should have been one lesson we all learned from 9/11.”

  “Then…why wouldn’t anyone have been approached for ransom?”

  “I don’t know, but I can tell you that single fact bothers me more than anything else you’ve told me.”

  Dalton swallowed his own misgivings over the way the capture of the three Americans had played out reinforced by Landon’s certainty that something was wrong with the entire scenario.

  “Someone mentioned the possibility that this has been organized by the drug lords,” he said. “Something designed to show that no matter how many people Washington sends out, they’re still in control.”

  “If there’s to be any chance of Grace Chancellor being returned alive, you better hope whoever told you that is wrong.”

  Dalton had no idea what to say to that. It sounded ominous. And absolutely assured.

  “I still don’t know what you want me to tell Griff.”

  “Tell him I don’t work for him anymore.”

  “Believe me, he knows that, Landon.”

  “Does he?” James asked, the hint of amusement Dalton had heard at the beginning of the conversation back in his voice. “And yet, strangely enough, this conversation sounds exactly like those he used to employ to get me interested in whatever he wanted me interested in during the External Security Team days.”

  “Are you? Interested, I mean?”

  “I’m a few years older and light-years wiser than I was when I worked for the CIA.”

  “I don’t believe you’ve changed that much.”

  Although Dalton had probably been the closest thing to a friend Landon James had had on the EST, he hadn’t seen his fellow operative in years. At Cabot’s request, he’d made the occasional contact to try to recruit him on the Phoenix’s behalf, only to be turned down each time.

  He had no idea what Landon was doing right now. Griff probably knew, but he hadn’t passed on that information along with James’s phone number.

  “Apparently not enough that Griff can’t manage to hit all the right buttons.”

  “I don’t think that’s what he’s trying to do. I think he just hoped that since this is your area of expertise…”

  “I’d ride to the rescue.”

  “With all your expenses paid by the Phoenix, of course.”

  “Paid on whose behalf?”

  The Phoenix was very much a “for-hire” operation, although their charges were usually dependent on the client’s ability to pay. More than a few missions were undertaken on a pro bono basis, however, especially if Cabot felt that justice could be achieved only through their intervention.

  “I don’t believe Grace has any family—” Dalton began, only to be cut off in midsentence.

  “She doesn’t. I suspect our illustrious leader will be footing the bill himself. Not that he can’t afford it.”

  Griff Cabot came from very old money. A lot of it. And James was right. He could afford to mount any quixotic rescue he believed should be undertaken.

  “I don’t think he’s counting the cost on this one.”

  “No, Griff always did have a penchant for lost causes.”

  “Then… You think they’re dead?”

  “Actually, that
wasn’t what I meant at all.”

  The amusement was back, but Dalton had no idea what had caused it. Nor did he have a clue as to what James was talking about.

  “I don’t understand—” he began.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Landon said briskly. “Tell Griff he pushed the right buttons this time. Obviously he hasn’t lost the fine art of leadership.”

  “Then you’re going after them?” Dalton couldn’t keep the relief out of his voice.

  “I’m going after Gracie. If the others are there, I’ll try my best to get them out, too.

  Gracie? In all the years Dalton had known Grace Chancellor, he had never heard anyone ever refer to her as Gracie. The nickname was totally foreign to the cool, collected persona the intelligence analyst exuded.

  Or maybe, Dalton thought, as a click and then the dial tone reverberated in his ear, it was just that he didn’t know Grace Chancellor nearly so well as Landon James did.

  Something else Cabot had apparently failed to tell him.

  LANDON JAMES PUT DOWN the phone and swiveled his desk chair around until he was looking out over the tops of some of the tallest buildings in New York. He’d been able to lease this office space high above the city for a song in the days immediately after the terrorist attack. No one, it seemed, had wanted to work in the clouds anymore.

  After a moment he stood up and walked across the huge room to a wall of windows, thinking instead about the phone call he’d just concluded. Despite his attempt to block them, images of Grace Chancellor had flooded his brain since Dalton had mentioned her name. Memories of the woman he had first met almost…almost ten years ago, he realized with a sense of wonder.

  He couldn’t believe it had been that long. He should, he acknowledged. A lot had changed in that time.

  Including him. Maybe especially him.

  He realized that he was unconsciously fingering the patch that covered the empty socket of what had been his right eye. He forced his fingers away from it, his lips tightening as he remembered how that loss had occurred.

  Grace Chancellor and Afghanistan. Two items of unfinished—and very personal—business.

  There weren’t many of either in his life these days. Other than the security consultation firm he’d started almost as soon as he resigned from the Agency, there was very little that touched him personally anymore. Both of those did.

  Grace Chancellor and Afghanistan.

  How well Griff knew him, he thought, his lips lifting in a smile of self-derision. And how cleverly he had chosen his weapons.

  Landon hadn’t made many mistakes in the years he’d been an operative. In his line of work, he couldn’t afford them.

  What Cabot had set before him this morning, like the food and water the ancient gods had set before Tantalus, was a chance to rectify the two most spectacular ones he’d made in his entire life. And to do it at Griff’s expense.

  That wasn’t entirely true, he acknowledged, no matter what Dalton offered. Money was the least of what this journey would cost. And there was no guarantee that he would be able to do what the U.S. Special Forces in the area had not be able to accomplish and find the three Americans. That didn’t mean he wasn’t going to try.

  If Grace was alive, he’d find her. And if she wasn’t… He took a deep breath, thinking about what that loss would mean.

  “Hang on, Gracie,” he whispered, looking down on the area still marked by the attack of madmen. “The bastards haven’t won one yet. They damn sure aren’t going to win this time, either.”

  Chapter Two

  “Better?”

  Mike Mitchell opened fever-bright eyes to look up into hers. His cracked lips lifted in a ghastly semblance of a smile. “Thanks,” he whispered.

  Grace set down the cup of tepid water from which she’d just helped the pilot drink. She put her hand on his chest, wishing there was something else she could do to ease his suffering. Not that any complaints had crossed his lips in the weeks of their captivity.

  Every day, however, she had watched a little more life slip out of those blue eyes. And every night she had listened to his labored breathing until she fell asleep, praying that she would still be able to hear it when she awoke.

  “Try to get some rest,” she said inanely.

  The grin widened before it became a grimace. Mitchell closed his eyes against the wave of pain, but when he opened them, he smiled at her again.

  “I didn’t have anything much on my agenda for today.”

  “That’s good,” she said, returning the smile, despite her fury at their captors.

  Although she and Colonel Stern had begged for a doctor to see the pilot or for some kind of exchange to be made that would put him in the hands of either the coalition forces or the International Red Cross, their entreaties had been met with stony-eyed indifference. And with each day of their captivity, Mitchell had lost ground.

  The infection that could have, at one time at least, been easily treated with antibiotics now ran rampant throughout his wasted body. If something didn’t change soon…

  She turned away, trying to pretend that she’d been distracted by a noise outside the cave. In reality she needed a moment to regain control of her emotions. And she didn’t intend for Mike to see her tears.

  Actually, she didn’t intend to shed any, she decided, fighting the burn at the back of her eyes. She had always despised crying women.

  She hadn’t broken down when the Agency had “disciplined” her. Or in those first few terrifying hours after the crash. She wasn’t going to do it now. Not in front of a man who had kept his sense of humor and his will to live intact, despite the battle of survival he had been fighting—and was now losing.

  She recognized that the causes of her emotional vulnerability ran even deeper than her anger over Mike Mitchell’s treatment. There was also the gnawing uncertainty about what was going to happen to them, as well as the frustration of having no control over whatever did.

  Despite Stern’s insistence that they be afforded the same protections given prisoners of war—an insistence that had earned him the butt of a rifle in his stomach the last time he’d made it—the conditions under which they were kept had been both primitive and deliberately intimidating. Her immediate fear that she might be subject to sexual assault had thankfully not proven true.

  Of course, neither had her hope that the men who held them would ransom them to some of the friendly forces in the area come to fruition. And again, frustratingly, she knew that those forces were very close.

  For one thing, they had been moved three times in as many weeks. In the distance behind them they had heard both small-arms fire and the sounds of heavy bombardment. Not surprisingly, considering what she knew about the reliability of U.S. humint in the region, their captors seemed to have better information than whoever was searching for them.

  Please God, let them still be searching for us…

  Mitchell’s hand, almost skeletal now, closed over hers. She turned back, looking down at him.

  He was lying on a rough pallet of rugs and blankets, which were all they’d been provided in the way of bedding. Despite the cold mountain nights, she and the colonel had given most of their share of those to keep Mitchell as warm and comfortable as possible, even as the relentless infection spread from the bullet hole in his thigh throughout his body.

  She should have known what kind of treatment they were in for when one of the horsemen who had surrounded the downed chopper shot the pilot as he’d climbed out of the cockpit, his hands in the air. Stern’s aide had reacted by going for the weapon he’d already thrown down. He had died in the attempt.

  “It’s going to be okay,” Mike said.

  She smiled at him in response, refusing to comment on that ridiculous promise.

  “You got somebody, Grace?”

  “What?”

  “Somebody who’s waiting for you back home.”

  Mitchell had already shown her pictures of his wife and two children, a little girl almost t
hree and a six-month-old baby boy. She couldn’t begin to imagine what these weeks must have been like for them. And for Mike, of course, thinking about what their life would be without him.

  “Not really,” she said.

  “You should have.”

  “I guess I’ve been too busy with other things,” she said, a trace of defensiveness creeping into her voice.

  “Lying here like this… Thinking about it all…” He attempted a laugh, which turned into a cough. “I guess this sounds stupid, but lying here, I’ve been thinking about life. You know?”

  Life and death. How well she knew.

  “And what earth-shattering conclusions have you come to?”

  She dipped the piece of cloth she’d torn from one of the blankets into the bucket of water at the head of his pallet. She used the rag to bathe his face, although by this late in the day, the temperature of the water she’d been allowed to bring inside the cave was almost as hot as the surrounding air. Still, it was cooler than the brow of the man who was literally burning up before her eyes.

  “That it’s all that matters.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  Her attention had been momentarily distracted by the dry heat of his skin. It seemed hotter this afternoon than she had ever felt it before.

  And she realized belatedly that it had been more than twelve hours since Mike had asked Stern to help him urinate. She wasn’t sure what that meant medically, but obviously it wasn’t anything good.

  “Having somebody to love you. Somebody you love in return. It’s the only thing that matters.”

  With her heart breaking for the young wife and children who had loved this good, strong man, she smiled at him, once more fighting the sting of tears.

  “I need to work on that,” she said, squeezing the water out of the cloth and preparing to lay it over his forehead.

  His hand lifted, grasping her wrist before she could. “I mean it.”

  “I know. I know you do. It’s just that… Not all of us are as lucky as you and Karen. Some of us…” She hesitated, trying to find words to describe the long-ago decision that had left her so alone. “Either we don’t find the right person to share our lives with or they don’t feel the same way about us that we feel about them.”