by Ronie Kendig
Cassie did as instructed. “Kiew, please.”
“You are not my friend. You work for the government.”
“I work for someone who wants to help you get out of this.”
Her friend laughed. “You have no idea what you are talking about.”
“I know Jin beats you.”
Kiew’s narrow eyes flitted to the door then to Cassie. “So what?”
“So, I can help you get out of this. You don’t have to stay.”
“I’m not staying.” Kiew’s expression mocked her. “I’m leaving. As soon as you get out of my way.”
“We can help you!”
“You are a sweet woman, but this is so much bigger than you.”
“Then tell me,” Cassie said earnestly as she leaned toward her friend. “Come with me and tell me then. We can sort it out.”
“You Americans have a traitor in your midst and you want me to trust you?” Kiew’s caustic laugh stabbed Cassie.
She was going to lose her friend, and who knew what would happen then. Desperation pushed her on as Kiew made her way down a hall. “Please, Kiew. Talk to me. Let me help you.”
“I will not go with those soldiers.”
“Then come with me.” Heart thundering, Cassie advanced. “I’ll sneak you out of here and we can get you to safety.”
Kiew considered her, expression wary. “How?”
Right. How? How would she get them out with the U.S. monitoring the entire complex? “We’ll figure it out. You know this complex better than I do. Show me how to get out then I’ll get you to safety. I have contacts.”
Who weren’t talking to her at the moment, but she’d get them to help her.
“You would do this? Betray your lover and country? For me?”
Mind blazing, Cassie tried not to think of Sal or his team. They’d hang her out to dry. “I want to help you.”
A noise erupted behind them. Sounded like the stairwell. Cassie glanced back, terrified Sal would find her talking with Kiew. Helping her. When she returned her attention to Kiew—she found an empty passage.
Cassie threw herself down the gray-lined walls to a T-juncture. She checked right. It dead-ended and went left. She turned in the other direction as the clang of a door slammed shut.
Cassie pivoted.
Something slammed into her back. Threw her into the wall. Crack! Her vision blurred and went black.
CHAPTER 25
Kabul, Afghanistan
5 April—0430 Hours
Disbelief stabbed Sal as he watched Cassie take a bullet in the back. She pitched forward and collapsed. Heart in his throat, he sprinted forward, right up to the opening into the T-intersection and threw himself against the wall.
“Falcon,” Hawk hissed, padding up beside him.
Sal went to a knee and then whipped around the corner, ready to nail whoever had shot her. The gray hall lay empty. He jerked right, reaching for Cassie as he did. He caught the drag strap on her vest and hauled her, bent in half, into the safety of the other passage.
“I got it,” Hawk said, covering them.
He reached around in front of her and nudged her back into his arms. She flopped, her head lolling against his chest. Sal adjusted and cradled her head in the crook of his arm. “Andra.”
No response. No movement. Two fingers to her carotid verified she was alive. He held his hand to her nose. A whisper of breath skated across his skin. Relieved she was breathing, he laid her down. Traced her body for blood. Nothing. No visible wound. A million thoughts fired through his brain—she could’ve been paralyzed if the bullet had hit a few inches left of the mark. Her heart may very well be in jeopardy. He couldn’t lose her.
Sal patted her face. “Andra!” He did it again, this time harder.
She sucked in a hard breath, arched her spine upward, and reached for her back with a strangled cry.
“Easy, easy.” Relief speared Sal. “You took a bullet. Knocked you out.” A red knot swelled over her brow. “Nearly put a hole in that wall, Walker.”
Tears pushed from between her lids.
“We need to move,” Hawk said.
Cassie rolled onto her side, pain etched into her soft, dirt-smudged features. She grimaced and pulled upright.
Sal held out a hand and tugged her to her feet. When she swayed, he held tighter and braced her back. “Okay?”
“I need to find her.” She wrangled against his hold.
“We will.” Sal tightened his grip, dark meaning tucked squarely between those two words.
“No, she’s not—” She shook her head. “Kiew’s in trouble. I have to help her.” She slapped his arm and barreled into him, pushing him aside.
Pain sluiced through the spot she’d hit, but he focused on Cassie. “Easy, we do this according to plan. Stay on plan, Walker.” On keeping her from doing something stupid.
But she seemed hell-bent on doing just that. Though she walked like a drunk, wincing with each step, Cassie started for the hall.
“No.” He caught her arm. Twisted her around. With a death grip on her, he nudged her back against the wall and pinned her.
Her head thudded against a framed print with a crack. She winced and stilled, chaos swirling in the blue ocean of her gaze. “What—?”
Tweet.
“Just stop. Listen to me. We need to regroup. This isn’t about you and your friend, Andra. It’s about—”
Bleep.
“This is bullcrap,” Hawk snapped. “I told you she was helping that chick.”
“Quiet,” Sal said. What was that noise?
Beep. Beep. Sal’s gaze rose to the ceiling. To the sprinkler set there. To the red light. Beep-beep. It flashed in cadence with the noise. What…?
“She’s working against us. How can you not see that?”
“I am not working against you. I—”
“You’re aiding our enemy, trying to help her escape.”
“Falcon, you okay?” came the calm, steady voice of Dean through the coms.
Sal grabbed Hawk’s vest and jerked him up straight. “Stop,” he growled into his face.
“Is there a situation?” Dean didn’t waste time with politeness.
“No,” Sal said, still honed in on Hawk with one hand and Cassie in the other. But he sent as much fury as he could work into his expression to warn Hawk to stand down. “We’re good.” With a wag of his eyebrows, he dared Hawk to contradict him.
Though Hawk’s nostrils flared he relented, giving a nod.
Beep-beep.
Sal again checked the smoke alarm. A dark feeling crowded his thoughts. “We need to move.” Instead of voicing his ominous thoughts, he focused his energy on Cassie, on getting the mission done and getting out. That’s when he noticed the pale sheen to her face. The graying around her eyes. Her wound was taking its toll. “We have a lot of moving around to do. Are you going to be okay?”
Beep. Beep. Beep.
Was it his imagination or was that beeping getting faster? “Genie, we may have a problem.”
“Go ahead,” Dean said.
“I think they activated something.”
“Alarm or bomb?” Dean’s voice hardened.
Sal looked at the two with him. “Yeah,” was all he could say since he didn’t know which had been set off.
“Clear out,” Dean ordered.
“We can get Tang,” Sal insisted.
“Negative. I want my team alive.”
With a huff, Sal weighed the options. Defying this order could mean they all died. Obeying meant a complete mission failure.
“RTB. We’ll sort it out here,” Dean said, his words edged with defeat.
Sal watched Cassie. Her eyes widened. And curse it all—with each shake of her head, she tugged the thin threads of their relationship. Threads he’d severed the day Vida died, sealing the cauldron of his feelings for her. Feelings that were intense. Fiery. And if she tugged once more…
Why did he even care? Because his mind was still lodged in his throat
back at the instant when he thought the bullet had ripped Andra from his life, too.
It bugged him. He shouldn’t care. Shouldn’t let it affect his decision. His resolute commitment to his team and commanding officer. But it was one thing to lose someone you cared about, and another to lose someone you loved.
He hated himself for that. For not smothering that weakness completely the way he’d convinced himself. But this wasn’t about Cassie and him. He didn’t want to make the wrong move, and the setup of this mission seemed to have the fate of the American military in the balance.
“You can’t,” Cassie pleaded. “She has to be found. I can help her.”
Burnett had said Cassie could read a situation unlike any other person he knew. So if that was true, then was she seeing something he wasn’t?
“Do you copy, Aladdin?” Dean once more penetrated Sal’s thick skull.
Everything in Cassie’s Swiss features begged him not to comply. “Yes,” Sal said, his mind bungeeing back and forth between terra firma and reckless, intentional abandon of protocol. “I hear you.”
But even as he said the words, Cassie threw herself around and sprinted into the hall, no doubt expecting him to follow protocol. “Walker!”
“Falcon, what’s going on?”
“Holy cow,” Hawk hissed, muting his mic. “For once, I’m with the chick. We need Tang.”
“Walker’s gone after Tang,” Sal replied to Dean, his mind raging.
Sal nodded, his mind snagging on the fact he wouldn’t put it past Meng-Li Jin to blow the place if he felt compromised. But without Tang, the mission was a bust. A failure.
“Hawk, Falcon, clear out,” Dean made the call for him.
“Sir, we have to get Tang,” Hawk said.
“It would do you well,” spoke a voice thick with accent and intensity, “to leave immediately. You have four minutes before the bomb detonates.”
“No way. I’m going to bring her Chinese butt in.” Hawk sprinted into the hall.
“Hawk! Wait!”
CHAPTER 26
Kabul, Afghanistan
5 April—0438 Hours
Steel clanged as Cassie rushed down the steps of the stairwell, determined to catch Kiew. She had to be here—it was the only logical course of action. To go down, to the garage, away from the team. And Kiew had said she wanted to leave, which meant she’d find the nearest exit from the building.
Panting as she leapt down to the landing, scaling four steps, Cassie grabbed the rail. Swung herself around.
Knocking steel echoed from below.
“Kiew!” She leaned down to see the maze of stairs. “Kiew, wait!” Hurtling down almost guaranteed she’d get hurt, but Cassie didn’t care. Her friend’s life was in danger.
Again, she hooked the rail and swung herself around.
Right into a booted foot. Kiew swung a round kick straight into Cassie’s face. Connected. Cassie flung backward, shock and pain riddling her body. Her head cracked against the cement wall. Pain jarred her, vibrating her bones and rattling her teeth. A fresh explosion of fire tore through her shoulder and warmth slid down her back. Shock choked her—Kiew attacked her as if she were a threat. Numb at the realization, she almost didn’t see the next kick.
Cassie threw her right arm up and out, shoving Kiew’s foot into the incline of steps. Though adrenaline doused her body and ignited the fight or flight mechanism, Cassie couldn’t think past the fact that her friend was attacking her.
“Kiew, please.” She hopped to her feet.
And came face-to-face with a silenced weapon. Cassie skidded, her boots slipping on the steel floor that offered no traction. Her legs went out, but her grip on the rail prevented her from a bone-jarring fall. She scrambled upright, chin up.
“What will it take to get you to leave me alone?” Kiew’s round face betrayed nothing but the cold, unfeeling words she’d spoken.
Hands up, Cassie eased back a step. “Listen, I know you feel you have—”
“You know nothing about me!” Eyes slit, her friend kept the weapon aimed at Cassie’s face. “You have not seen me in ten years! Christmas and birthday cards do not mean you have any idea who I am or what I want.”
The emotion behind those words betrayed the cold, heartless ones spoken earlier. “I do know you, Kiew. I know the girl with a soft heart who couldn’t get enough of Neon Genesis Evangelion. Who was outraged when Shinji’s father disowned him. You were as strong and outgoing as Mari Makinami, and I was—”
“This is not a manga, you idiot!” Face red, Kiew inched forward.
Affronted, Cassie shuffled back, her boots thudding against the step for the stairs she’d just descended. She struggled to keep her balance.
“This is real life and you are where you do not belong. Now.” She waved the weapon toward the door.
“Kiew—”
“Out! Or I will shoot you. And trust me, you are not the first American I have killed and you will not be the last either.”
Cassie’s hand went to her aching shoulder, wondering if Kiew had shot her as Sal had asked. “But—”
“Tang, stop right there,” came a deep, booming voice. Hawk.
Kiew jumped back, out of view from the center well of the stairwell.
“Please, Kiew,” Cassie said, her aching body warning her to be wary. “I can help you.”
Dark brown eyes lit with intensity. “Yes.” Her nostrils flared. Lightning fast, before Cassie could react, Kiew grabbed her by the collar. Hauled her up against her. “You can help me by being my insurance.”
Cassie went cold. Was this really Kiew Tang? The woman who had shared her room, laughter and love of anime and manga with her a decade ago? A girl who had an amazing career in front of her?
Hooking an arm around Cassie’s neck, Kiew dragged her backward. A fumbling of a handle then they were passing from the stairwell into the eerie silence of a floor of professional offices. By the smell of paint and new carpet, she wasn’t even sure the spaces were occupied.
Kiew shoved Cassie into a wall. Riddled with pain, throbbing in her jaw and fire in her neck and shoulder, Cassie stumbled. Used the wall to gain support and catch her breath. She wanted to scream that she didn’t understand how her friend could do this, how this could be the real woman named Kiew Tang, but she’d seen too many movies where the clichéd line only brought on criticism and ridicule.
Click. Tink.
Beep.
Cassie glanced to her frie—Kiew—and froze. She pressed buttons on a small, round device she’d set on a steel girder. Charges! “What are you doing?”
Kiew pivoted, only then the messenger bag slung over her body draped to reveal a half-dozen more. She lifted her weapon again and motioned with it. “Go. Toward the atrium.”
“No.” Cassie drew straight, her spine suddenly intact and not weakened by the delusion of a friendship long-since dead. “No, I’m not—”
Kiew lifted the weapon. Before Cassie even heard the thwat, gypsum spat at her. “Next one will not miss.”
How… how had she read it so wrong? Read Kiew wrong? “You’re going to kill us. All of us.”
“It is not my fault your team chose to ignore my warning.”
“It was you with Hawk. You nearly killed him.”
“And when I didn’t,” she said as she moved hurriedly down the corridor, “he repaid the favor by knocking me out, killing my associate, and leaving me as raw meat to Jin.”
When they stepped out into the atrium that stood open to eight floors, Kiew clung to the inner wall, apparently nervous Raptor would spot her.
Safety net of belief ripped away, Cassie walked outward, not a lot, but enough for Sal to see her.
Kiew grabbed her arm and yanked Cassie to the wall. “Do not think I am stupid.”
“I don’t know what to think of you.” Her words hit their mark. The mask of anger and heartlessness slipped. Just a little. But enough for Cassie to see.
The gun pushed against her temple. “The last perso
n who tried to betray me dropped several IQ points.”
Cassie swallowed—hard. Maybe she was reading into the situation instead of reading it. Reading Kiew. Shouldn’t she have seen this coldblooded killer the day they had lunch, rather than the manga-loving friend who went to cons and cosplayed with her their senior year?
“I never thought you’d try to kill me.”
“I never thought you’d be so stupid to push my hand.” Kiew stepped back, and for several long, silent seconds she stared at something behind Cassie.
Unsettled, Cassie glanced back. What? What was Kiew looking at? She only saw a teak door with a gold plate with the word PRIVATE etched into it.
“Sit.” She waved the gun to a teak bench with lines as hard and unfeeling as the woman motioning to them.
“You’re setting charges and you want me to sit?”
Kiew reared and slammed the gun into Cassie’s face.
The unexpected move spun Cassie around. Her feet tangled. She pitched forward and down. She shoved out her hands to break her fall. Her forehead rammed into the protective glass barrier. Her eyes glued to the marble floor three floors down. Though her brain told her the glass barrier had broken her fall, her ears rang with dizziness that overtook her.
“Andra!”
The hollow shout of her name pulled her away from the glass. Wobbling, she came to her feet and turned to find Sal and Hawk jogging out from the same stairwell door Kiew had dragged her through.
But she pushed herself to the right. After Kiew. Where had she gone? They had to get her. Stop her. The gloves were off. Cassie’s strength and balance grew with each step.
She made it to the next juncture and heard feet clapping on marble below. Cassie ran to the barrier. A blur of black raced toward the lower exit to the parking garage. “Kiew!”
The door flapped open. And for a second, Kiew paused. Her expression went wide with terror. Then she was gone.
“Cassie!”
She pivoted back to Sal. “I’m going—” Her gaze snapped to blinking lights on the right side of the corridor entrance, just above a silver control panel. Her heartbeat detonated within her chest. Charges.
The instant powered down into an agonizing slow-motion nightmare. She sucked in a breath, the sound a hollow whoosh in her ears. Her pulse thundering—boom. Her breath as if she stood in a protected environmental suit, shielded from the terror, but also forced to witness it.