Gideon

by Cherry Adair

  Table of Contents

  Gideon

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Back Cover Copy

  Acknowledgements

  Map of COSIO

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWENTY-SIX

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  TWENTY-NINE

  THIRTY

  THIRTY-ONE

  THIRTY-TWO

  THIRTY-THREE

  THIRTY-FOUR

  THIRTY-FIVE

  THIRTY-SIX

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  THIRTY-NINE

  FORTY

  FORTY-ONE

  FORTY-TWO

  FORTY-THREE

  FORTY-FOUR

  FORTY-FIVE

  FORTY-SIX

  About Cherry Adair

  Cherry Adair's Book Store

  Copyright

  Title Page

  Back Cover Copy

  T-FLAC is back in an exciting action-adventure romance filled with danger, subterfuge and steamy, red-hot attraction.

  NO MEMORY OF HIS PAST

  Powerful cartel leader Sin Diaz lives a dangerous life filled with secrets and lies, and surrounded by people who claim to have known him all his life. Yet flashes of another life, totally unrelated to the jungles of Cosio, hang tantalizingly on the edges of his memory. He’ll trust no one until he remembers his true past.

  NO VISIONS FOR HER FUTURE

  T-FLAC operative Riva Rimaldi’s mission is simple. Go undercover, learn terrorist Escobar Maza’s agenda, then kill him. But when the helicopter she’s on crashes deep in the jungle she finds herself in the wrong hands. Is the sexy as hell leader of the ANLF, Sin Diaz, the enemy of her enemy, worse than Maza himself?

  TOGETHER THEY HOLD THE KEY

  Sin and Riva must work together to stop a madman who will go to any lengths to attain his terrifying goal. But can they unravel the truth in time? The countdown clock is ticking.

  What they don’t know could get them killed.

  Acknowledgements

  For Mandi Beck because I promised.

  Map of COSIO

  The proverbial shit was about to hit the fan.

  The fan: the vintage SE3160 Alouette helicopter carrying T-FLAC operative Riva Rimaldi.

  The shit: a vision of a fiery explosion followed by the chopper hurtling toward the ground in flaming pieces.

  Five out of the six people on board were about to die.

  In lieu of a seatbelt, Riva gripped the cracked seat on either side of her hips as the chopper shimmied and rattled through pockets of turbulence. Whatever the cause of the explosion, she was sorry she couldn’t forewarn the two operatives accompanying her of their impending death. A head’s up would be useless. That was the bitch of her psychic ability. When she had a vision, she knew precisely what would happen, but not when.

  Cheerful morning sunlight flooded the cabin, highlighting the hirsute, overweight pilot, Manny Ferrari. Anything less like a sleek, Italian sports car would be hard to find. A dirty wife-beater tank top showed hairy, beefy arms oily with sweat. His concentration was evident in the beetling of his Neanderthal brows and his white-knuckled grip on the throttle and cyclic control stick.

  For a moment, she was downwind of him and her eyes watered at the smell. Garlic, sweat, and booze oozed out of his pores. Despite the chopper being doorless, he stank as badly as the two armed soldiers seated behind her.

  She didn’t need to read the microexpressions on his face to know what was going on in his head. He was shit-scared, and praying just as hard as any of his passengers.

  Ferrari let out a string of obscenities as they bounced on a gust of air and he had to fight the controls. The cargo was too heavy; weapons, she knew. It was a damn miracle the bird had managed to lift off the ground in the first place.

  “Are you capable of landing this piece of shit without killing us?” Riva demanded so that she had a reason to lean in and scan the controls. No GPS on this old chopper. Like the helicopter, the comm was crappy and crackled with feedback. His GPS was his watch, which she couldn’t read from her position. Pilot error and antiquated equipment was not what was going to kill him, though.

  Sweat ran from Ferrari’s temple to the thick black shadow of his jaw. It took a full minute for him to respond. “Don’t you know, Señorita Estigarribia?”

  Riva settled back against the ripped plastic seat, cinching her arm more tightly around the bag on her lap.

  “Would you like me to tell your future for you, Manny?” she asked sweetly.

  With a shake of his head and muttering under his breath, the pilot crossed himself, then raised the fingers of his right hand to his lips. Then he was back white-knuckling the controls.

  For the last-minute flight from Montana to Bogotá, she’d been given shots, pills, and the dossier and audio files of the woman she was impersonating—Psychic Graciela Estigarribia. Riva had spent every second in flight reading the intel on Maza and Graciela, and listening to recordings of their conversations. She was immersed in her role.

  Now, it looked as though she might not need any of that intel.

  The engine sounded asthmatic. The shitty condition of the chopper came as a surprise, because Escobar Maza had a fleet of high-tech planes at his disposal. As an added touch to throw off any observers, a faded red cross was visible on the fuselage. He was, quite literally, flying his psychic in under the radar.

  The verdant canopy, whizzing by below, seemed dangerously close. Almost close enough to brush with her fingertips. As far as the eye could see, lush green. Jungle. Mountains. Trees. No signs of habitation, though Riva had no doubt there were plenty of dangerous humans, animals, and assorted other nasties lurking beneath the canopy.

  One million three hundred thousand people lived in Cosio’s two major cities, Abad and Santa de Porres, the capital. The small country, strategically placed between Ecuador, Colombia, and Peru, was just over six thousand square miles, consisting mostly of dense jungle, old emerald mines, and mountains.

  How the hell would she find Maza if she was dropped in the middle of thousands of miles of jungle alone? Presuming her vision of one survivor was correct—she never saw her own future-and if she was the lone survivor, that didn’t mean she’d be ambulatory. She might well live, but be incapacitated. In which case there was a big fat freaking zero chance of survival.

  Riva had just nine days to find Escobar Maza, figure out his plan, then kill him. It would really screw up the plan if she ended up incapacitated.

  Releasing her death grip on the seat, she unzipped the backpack strapped across the front of her body. As subtly as possible, she started removing things that could mean the difference between life and death should she and her pack part company. Small Mag light into her vest pocket, box of ammo for her SIG-Sauer P230SL into a pocket of her cargo pants.

  While she waited to be blasted from the sky, Riva did a mental tally of what she knew. Superstitious Maza, head of the Sangre Y Puño, believed in the afterlife, psychics, and fortune tellers, so much so that he had his own clairvoyant on tap. He did nothing without consulting his psychic first. He spoke to Graciela on the phone daily. T-FLAC knew something was in the wind when
those calls escalated to three, then four times a day.

  Seven hours earlier, he’d insisted that Graciela join him in Cosio immediately. Cosio was not Maza’s territory, Usually operating out of Europe, Maza always moved his base of operations one step ahead of the law. He was savvy as hell. Intel said he’d been in Cosio for five months, arriving with a huge, well-armed army, and shitloads of money provided by his massive drug enterprises.

  To what end? Was the SYP trying to horn in on the ANLF, their biggest competitor?

  The ANLF—the Abadinista National Liberation Front—wasn’t based in the city of Abad. It had nothing to do with liberation, and everything to do with the drug trade, extortion, and arms dealing. Maybe back in the days of the group’s inception it had stood for some politically charged endgame, but those roots were long forgotten. Now the ANLF were international terrorists, extortionists, and killers, their global enterprises run by the mysterious, almost mythical, Sin Diaz.

  Putting Diaz and Maza, two of the world’s most wanted terrorists, in one very small, volatile country was like putting two high explosives in one tiny container. It was only a matter of time before the damn thing blew, and T-FLAC’s intel indicated that time was running out. They knew that Maza had something big in the works. All they had to go on was an educated guess. And Graciela.

  Speculation was currently centered on the possibility that Maza was planning some horrific surprise for the top-secret BRICS Summit being held in Santa de Porres in nine days. Clearly not a secret summit if Maza knew about it and was lying in wait. And if the BRICS Summit wasn’t his target, what the hell was? The conference was all T-FLAC had to go on for now.

  Whatever it was, it was imminent, and important enough that Maza wasn’t content with the increased phone contact with his psychic. Since he insisted on having her on tap for minute-by-minute predictions on site, T-FLAC had switched out Riva for Graciela. Both women were five seven, with dark hair and brown eyes. Riva was in her late twenties to Estigarribia’s mid-thirties. Close enough.

  As far as T-FLAC knew, Maza and his psychic had never met. Sending Riva in was a risk worth taking. It would be easy enough to modulate her voice to match Graciela’s.

  Maza’s soldiers had been waiting at the private strip in Bogotá to pick up Estigarribia and her two bodyguards, all of whom had been whisked off by T-FLAC before they made it to the airfield, leaving Rimaldi, Sanchez, and Castro to take their places.

  Riva dug in her backpack again, then stuffed two protein bars into her hip pocket. More from anticipation than fear, her heartbeat was slightly elevated, yet she felt amazingly calm considering the approaching disaster. She thrived on danger and excitement, but dying before the op even got started wasn’t in her plans.

  Seated beside her, replacing Graciela’s bodyguards, were fellow T-FLAC operatives Steve Sanchez and Ruiz Castro. As indicated by the sheen on his tanned skin, and his convulsive swallowing, Castro was about to puke. Fortunately, he sat on the other side of their commanding officer Sanchez, beside the open door.

  “What’s our estimated time of arrival in Santa de Porres?” Riva shouted in Spanish. She kept her tone cool, pretending a crash wasn’t imminent as she tried like hell to get a fix on where in the damn jungle they were.

  “We’re not going to Santa de Porres, señorita,” Luiz Vidal leaned in to shout directly in her ear. His breath suggested the recent death of a rodent. Maybe not so recent.

  Mierda. “We can’t deviate.” The wind whipped the words away. “Señor Maza expects me.”

  “Do not concern yourself, Señorita Estigarribia. Jefe knows where you will be.”

  She made sure her GPS was safely tucked into the corner of her bag so she’d know where the hell she was.

  The rest of the T-FLAC team expected them in Santa de Porres in a couple of hours. Control constantly tracked their position via satellite so they’d know where and when the chopper went down. The rest was up to Riva to figure out how to navigate six thousand miles of jungle to find her target.

  Sweat trickled down the side of her neck to soak into her already damp T-shirt. It was insanity to travel in this part of the world practically unarmed, yet arriving in all-out combat gear would have created suspicion. That had been the subject of debate at the briefing. Some weapons would be expected. That didn’t mean MP7s, Uzis, or handheld rocket launchers. Riva felt naked with only her SIG in the small of her sweaty back, the fighting knife in an ankle holster, and the mini boot knife hanging on a lanyard between her breasts. No one had blinked at the KA-BAR knife in the thigh holster.

  The heavy backpack on her lap held a few more surprises. To ensure it went where she went, she’d angled and cinched the strap tight across her body. It was uncomfortable as hell, but was the least of her problems.

  The chopper bucked high, then shuddered and dropped. One of the men behind her groaned. Taking a plastic dispenser of Tic Tacs out of her breast pocket, Riva popped several in her mouth. As she returned the container to her pocket she observed the blurred rush of the tree canopy. Three brightly colored macaws flew by the open door in a flash of blue and yellow, then disappeared high into the cloudless sky, indicating just how damned low the chopper flew.

  She freed one hand from the seat to swat away a fist-sized black, buzzing insect, then resignedly addressed her fraying braid that had started to lash her face with loose strands. Given that her hair had a life of its own, and any braid was only a temporary fix, she found a ball cap in a side pocket of the backpack and crammed it onto her head.

  Vidal, a tall, thin Cosian, tapped her on the shoulder. The fact that he’d been sent to pick her up showed how important Graciela was to the Sangre Y Puño. “You have everything you need in there, señorita?“ he yelled, six inches from her ear.

  “Of course,” she said coldly, putting her hand on his forehead and giving him a less than gentle shove to get him out of her face just as the helicopter shook. “I don’t ne—” The words cut off as the engine hiccoughed.

  Riva’s tightened her grip on her backpack with one hand, clinging to the seat with the other as she bounced up, then down, then up once more before landing on her tailbone on the hard seat. Biting her tongue, she tasted blood and annoyance. In a few minutes, biting her own tongue was going to be the very least of her problems.

  A glance at Ferrari showed him leaning forward, all his concentration on flying the doomed chopper. “What’s our ETA?”

  “¡Cuarenta y siete minu- Qué chingados?”

  She saw it as the pilot did. A bright, swiftly moving light headed up at them from the trees below.

  “SAM.“ Surface-to-air missile? Out here? In the middle of nowhere? That answered the shit question.

  Curling into a ball around her bag, one hand wrapped in the straps, Riva braced for impact. She might as well kiss her ass good-bye. Despite what she’d seen, no one would survive the hit, and if she did, she’d wish she hadn’t.

  Between one heartbeat and the next, the missile slammed the tail with a loud, fiery explosion, spinning what was left of the chopper end over end. A blast furnace of heat engulfed her as she was thrown around the cabin like a rag doll. Everything gyrated like a kaleidoscope around her, as if she were separate from the event. In the split second when rational thought was possible, Riva knew she couldn’t jump out. Even if she had a chute, which she didn’t, she’d be sliced and diced like chopped salad by the swiftly spinning blades if she attempted it.

  I’m screwed.

  Death wasn’t the worst thing that could happen to her. At the age of five, Riva had taught herself, out of necessity, to block out fear. T-FLAC training had reinforced her self-taught ability to remain calm when the world turned to chaotic shit. Yet having never been in a helicopter crash before, she couldn’t draw upon the cast-iron will she had created for herself, because reality was nothing like the simulated airplane crashes she’d endured. Things went crazy in ways she hadn’t anticipated.

  One of the men crashed into her and held her in a momen
tary death grip of flailing, fat arms, before metal flew through the air and partially decapitated him. Then her feet were over her head, as another man with burning fuel on his clothes flew past her. His mouth was open in a shriek she couldn’t hear, temporarily deafened by the explosion.

  Primal fear set in and all she could do was scream as she, and what was left of the burning chopper, hurtled uncontrollably toward the trees.

  The acrid stink of burning Jet A fuel hung on the still, muggy air as Sin Diaz and a small group of his men hacked through thick vegetation to reach the crash site. There might be something they could learn from the wreckage. Even better if they found something to use against Escobar Maza.

  Anything to even the battlefield.

  It was a grueling three-hour hike up the mountain, through dense jungle filled with hungry animals and other assorted dangers. Always on the lookout for Maza’s men, they were ever vigilant. They sliced a path with razor-sharp machetes in the direction of the giant fireball and thick plume of black smoke rising high over the tree canopy.

  “This is no way for a man to spend his birthday, amigo,” Sin’s friend and first lieutenant, Andrés Garzon, teased him as they walked abreast. “We should be over at Ascencion’s place. She has two new girls. I’ll give them both to you for your natal day. You’ll like Noely. She has big tits like pillows, and a tight—”

  “Bringing down Maza’s chopper is gift enough for me, mi amigo.” Sin didn’t want to discuss his lack of a sex life, even with his best friend. He forged slightly ahead as a thick tree trunk narrowed the path Tomás was cutting up ahead of them. “Perhaps I’ll take you up on your offer tomorrow, my true birthday. Is that what we usually do for special occasions? Go to the local putas?”

  “You forget even this?” Andrés muttered incredulously. “I’m disappointed, my friend. But not as much as I’m sure you are. Ah, to not remember the pleasure taken in a woman’s arms? It’s time to make new memories then. It will be like your first time, no?”

  “I haven’t forgotten how to do it,” Sin told him dryly, hacking off a low-hanging branch that had whipped up between his head and Tomás’ machete ahead of him. “Have you forgotten Saturday night?”