Bad Environment (Agent Juliet Book 3)

by E. M. Smith

  When I got to HQ, Nurse Regina was just leaving. She held the door for me, so I didn’t have to punch in my code.

  “Back from an op with no broken bones?” she said. “Miracles do happen all the time.”

  “I didn’t want to have to deal with a smartass nurse,” I said.

  “That sounds like something a dumbass would say.” Nurse Regina shifted feet and sized me up. “You look awful. Feeling any nausea? Fever? Diarrhea? Irregular heartbeat?”

  I’d forgotten about the whole thing with getting my blood tested after Trent’s skull became little bits of shrapnel in my face.

  “I’m fine,” I said.

  “Keep saying that,” Nurse Regina said. “Maybe someday you’ll convince someone.”

  My phone started ringing. I checked the caller ID. It was Ms. Baker.

  “Go by Medical and have them test you again,” Nurse Regina said. “Sometimes it takes a day or two for your levels to spike.”

  I held up my phone. “Much as I like hanging out with people who won’t mind their own business, I got to take this.”

  Nurse Regina rolled her eyes, then headed down the street.

  I hit Answer on my phone. “Hello?”

  “Why didn’t you come to my house?” Eva asked.

  “Hey, Babygirl. Does Gramma know you’re using her phone?”

  “Gramma said you’re not loud so you can’t play with me anymore. Why don’t you be loud, Uncle Jamie? Then you could come to my house.”

  It took me a second to figure out what she meant.

  “Allowed. I ain’t allowed.” Because of your bitch grandma. But Ms. Baker probably hadn’t told them that part. “Did Gramma say anything else about me?”

  Eva’s side of the line was quiet for a few seconds.

  Then, “Do you kill people, Uncle Jamie? Della said you kill people all the time.”

  What the hell was I supposed to say to that? Did little kids even know what “kill” meant?

  “I kill bad people sometimes,” I said.

  “When I’m big, I can kill bad people,” she said.

  Why were we talking about this?

  “Hey, Babygirl, is there anybody at your house right now? Like any guys with guns? Or maybe outside your building?”

  “When I go to Della’s preschool, I can kill people.”

  “Killing people is bad, Eva. You can’t kill people.”

  “But when I’m big—”

  “No. You can’t kill anybody, ever. Now listen to me. Are there any guys at your house?”

  “I can call people on the phone.”

  So much for getting that answered. “Yeah, I know you can, Babygirl. Good job. I’m glad you called me. I missed you.”

  “I have to go,” she said.

  “A’ight. Love you, girl.”

  “No you don’t.”

  “Yes I do.”

  “No you don’t.”

  “Dammit, Eva, I do, too.” Shit. “And don’t say dammit, a’ight? It’s a bad word.”

  “Okay,” she said. “I don’t love you.”

  “Why the hell not?”

  She hung up.

  As I went through the voice, retinal, and print scans to get in the elevator, I tried to tell myself not to take Eva seriously. She was three. Three-year-olds probably said shit they didn’t mean all the time.

  But I couldn’t shake the feeling that Eva had known exactly what she was saying the whole time we talked and that she meant every word.

  *****

  Whiskey wasn’t in the war room or anywhere in the NOC-Unit building that I had clearance to go and I still couldn’t get her on the phone, so I dropped by Medical. The nurse who took my blood didn’t talk to me other than to say “a little sting” and “done.”

  My phone went off on the way out.

  “Hey, Whiskey, I—”

  “Excuse me?” Ms. Baker snapped.

  Shit. Shit, shit, shit. The one time I don’t check the Caller ID.

  “Mr. Kendrick,” she said in that way that means Fuck you, asshole, “You are not to have any kind of contact with either of my grandchildren. What about that don’t you understand?”

  “If you don’t want Eva calling me, don’t leave your fucking phone laying around. She’s not retarded. She knows how to call people.”

  “The day that I take parenting advice from some ass-backward, redneck punk who can barely look after himself—”

  “You ain’t fooling nobody, honey,” I said. “I know you weren’t Talia’s mom. And ain’t no way in hell I’m leaving my girls with you—visitation rights or no visitation rights.”

  Ms. Baker’s voice got stiff and proper. “If you come near these girls, it will be the last thing you ever do.”

  “Bitch, you think dying scares me?”

  “Maybe your death doesn’t,” Ms. Baker said. “But you have two nieces. Dr. White only needs one.”

  *****

  “Do you think that was smart?” Whiskey asked. “Antagonizing her?”

  I took the phone away from my ear. When Ms. Baker hung up on me, I’d just sort of frozen. I hadn’t even realized Whiskey was there.

  “How much of that did you hear?” I asked.

  “You gave up your leverage, Juliet. All of it.”

  “This ain’t a fucking game,” I snapped. “Everybody’s just acting like Della and Eva are these pawns or cards or—or whatever the hell—but they’re not. They’re kids.”

  Whiskey stared at me for a long time.

  Then she said, “The appeal got denied. Your visitation rights have been revoked and the stop-notice stays in effect.”

  I laughed and squeezed my temples, trying to stop the headache that was creeping up on me. “Awesome. Just great.”

  “There’s more,” Whiskey said.

  “There always is,” I said.

  “Emergency op. You and Bravo are wheels-up in two hours.”

  “Me and Bravo? Just us?”

  She headed for the elevator and I followed.

  “Two man team, Rio de Janeiro, plainclothes. Bravo stopped off at barracks to pack the two of you some bags. I’ll brief you both when he gets here.”

  We scanned into the elevator. Whiskey hit the button for 8—the floor the war room was on—then leaned against the rail and watched the doors close.

  “The target’s real,” she said. “I’ve been following him for a while now, tracking where he’s popped up, waiting for a chance to take him down.”

  I started to ask a question, but Whiskey cut me off.

  “Just listen,” she said. “We only have about fifteen seconds left before the silence gets suspicious and they realize something’s scrambling the audio. Command requested you and Bravo specifically for this op. For them to send the two of you right now—while you’re making trouble and Bravo’s threatening to breach national security over his friend—it almost has to be a trap.”

  The elevator stopped on our floor and dinged.

  “Do your job,” Whiskey said. “Take out the target. But don’t get so caught up that you stop watching your six.”

  She walked out into the hall. I had to jog to catch up.

  “Hey, Whiskey, while I’m gone, is there any way you could keep an eye on the girls? Make sure they’re safe?”

  Whiskey held the door to the war room for me.

  “Kids—even young kids—understand more than adults give them credit for,” she said. “Things like life and death they get instinctually. They learn fast what it takes to survive and they do it.”

  “I guess that’s your idea of comforting,” I said.

  For the first time since I’d met her, Whiskey smiled a real, honest-to-Jesus smile. She even kind of laughed.

  “I guess it is,” she said.

  *****

  Whiskey followed me into the war room. I sat down at the table and she went to the projector computer and logged in.

  “While we’re waiting for Bravo,” she said, “How about some forensics practice? Based on wha
t you saw, how old would you say those wounds were on the soldier we recovered in Afghanistan?”

  “The burns or the eye socket from hell?” I asked.

  “Estimate a range of captivity from the oldest wound to the most recent.”

  “The burns were the same color as his skin,” I said. “I actually thought they were his skin until I saw his tats had been burned off. And ink goes deep.”

  I pushed up my sleeve and twisted my forearm around so I could see the lighter burn my former buddy/dealer Bubba had given me as a joke when I passed out in his truck. It was supposed to be shaped like a ball sack with my cross tattoo as the dick, but it just looked like an accident. It’d hurt like fuck and taken forever to heal, but it had just barely distorted the ink.

  “Are you thinking or stalling?” Whiskey asked.

  “Comparing.” I looked at the scar for a little while longer. Mine was a little over nineteen months old and it still had a little red to it. “His burns looked deepest on the shoulder piece. No pink left. Considering he probably didn’t have a lot of medical attention, I’d guess those scars were three years old, at least.”

  As usual, Whiskey’s expression didn’t give anything away.

  “The eye?” she asked.

  “A few days to a week, maybe?” I hadn’t gotten much of my assigned reading on carrion larvae done. I’d been fixing to do it over our next couple of R&R days. “Depending on, uh, exposure to flies?”

  “What if I told you the same soldier—Sgt. Andrew Sacre—was shot and killed fifteen months ago on a classified mission to Afghanistan?” Whiskey asked.

  “I’d say, ‘Bullshit, I just saw the guy.’”

  “Bravo swears to me that all of Sacre’s tattoos were intact and he had no apparent burns at time of death.”

  “Because it’s true,” Bravo said from the doorway.

  I swiveled my chair to face him. He had my gym bag and a backpack.

  “We started calling him ‘Trick’ in basic because he was such a fucking pretty-boy.” Bravo came into the room and dropped the bags by the table. “He took care of his tats like they were his babies. Whoever did this shit knew that—knew him.”

  “You think some foreign insurgents knew your friend?” I said.

  “No, I think some scumfucking traitor sent my detachment into a trap. That’s what I think.”

  “That doesn’t make sense,” I said. “Somebody on this end betrays y’all and then those guys in the cave tear your friend apart for the next year? If it was like you said, then that shit was personal.”

  “If the same fuckwad who told the tangos that we were coming—”

  “We don’t have time to go through this again, Bravo,” Whiskey said. “Your flight leaves JFK in less than two hours and you will be on it.”

  She was turned so that I couldn’t see her face, but I recognized her tone of voice. Bravo must have, too, because he shut his mouth and sat his ass down.

  Whiskey clicked something on the computer and a picture popped up on the projector screen. A tanned, middle-aged blond guy flanked by a pair of bruisers in suits.

  “Dawson Kroeger,” Whiskey said. “He runs guns and drugs around the globe, but he specializes in human trafficking. Every so often he surfaces to negotiate a deal, then disappears. This photo was taken at the Palatial Suites in Rio de Janeiro this morning. One of his aliases is booked in the penthouse.”

  Whiskey tossed us each a manila envelope. I shook mine out onto the table. A passport, New York drivers’ license, some credit cards, a set of keys, and two hundred and fifteen bucks, all worn in like I’d had it forever.

  “There’s a room booked at his hotel under the names on your passports,” Whiskey said. “Check in, locate the target, find a time when you won’t draw any attention, then kill him. And stay as far under the radar as you can. Money and extortion has bought Kroeger loyalty in a lot of high places around the world. If he finds out you’re after him, he’ll make everyone within screaming distance your enemy.”

  Bravo leaned back in his seat and put his knee up against the table.

  “What about the rest of the team?” he asked.

  Whiskey crossed her arms.

  “The rest of us are wheels-up first thing in the morning,” she said. “Coordinated slash-and-burn in Thailand with a local APTF unit. The two of you will be completely alone.” She looked from me to Bravo. “Try not to get yourselves killed.”

  *****

  According to our itinerary, the flight was supposed to take nine and a half hours. I was kind of skeptical about getting any sleep in those tiny, cramped seats—NOC-Unit’s private jets had spoiled me pretty bad—but I only managed to stay awake long enough for the flight attendants to smile and tell me how to buckle my seatbelt.

  Next thing I knew, Bravo was elbowing me.

  “We there?” I asked.

  “Not even,” he said. “You were having a nightmare.”

  “Oh.” From what I could remember, it hadn’t been one of my usual nightmares. In this one, people were shooting at me, but I couldn’t see or move. Then I had started hearing Eva crying somewhere, but I didn’t know how to get to her.

  I sat up my seat and tried to stretch out my back and leg.

  Every now and then, the bones I’d broken on my first op with NOC-Unit would get this antsy feeling in them. Running and listening to my dead brother’s voicemail message were the only things I’d found so far that helped. None of which I could do in-flight.

  Other than a couple of passengers who had their little overhead lights on, most of the cabin was asleep and had their shades down. Nighttime.

  I tried to guess what day of the week it was. Saturday afternoon we’d left for Afghanistan. At least one overnight there. Then back to the States. I was pretty sure I’d seen sunshine at some point in the US. Now to Rio de Janeiro—wherever the hell that was—at night.

  I rubbed my eyes and yawned. I really needed a toothbrush. A shower wouldn’t hurt anything, either.

  “Have a nice nap, bitch-boy?” Bravo asked.

  “Man.” I shook my head. “I know I ought to feel bad for you with everything that happened today—yesterday?—whenever—but you’re such a dickweed. All I really want to do is kick your big, bleached horse-teeth down your throat.”

  “The feeling’s mutual,” he said.

  “Whiskey talk to you?”

  He didn’t ask what I meant, just nodded.

  “At least we’re not going in blind,” Bravo said.

  “Yeah,” I said. Then after a few minutes passed, “Your friend—you’re sure he was dead? When y’all…”

  “Left him,” Bravo said. “When we made a bad fucking assumption and left him. I watched a hostile shoot Trick in the face at close range. And the airstrike fucking leveled that camp. Trick was dead. He had to have been. He couldn’t have lived through that.”

  “I ain’t arguing with you,” I said.

  Bravo was quiet for a long time.

  Then he said, “Did Whiskey mention anything about that lockbox that hostile had? She said she was going to have somebody she knew examine the contents.”

  I shook my head. “Must’ve been pretty important, though, for him to drag it along knowing he was about to die.”

  *****

  When the plane finally landed in Rio de Janeiro—which according to the flight attendant was in Brazil—the sun was coming up.

  Bravo and I got our carry-ons down from the overhead compartments and waited while the rest of the passengers got off the plane ahead of us. None of them tried to kill us.

  So far, so good.

  “I’m starving,” I said. “You think there’s time to grab something here before we head for the hotel?”

  “We have to go through Immigration first.” Bravo just barely managed to stop himself before he said ‘bitch-boy.’ “Haven’t you ever gone on vacation to, like, Cancun or anywhere?”

  “Yeah, I’m a big world-traveler,” I said. “Once I flew all the way to New York City to
see my brother get hisself one of them fancy papers that said he was educated now.”

  “Damn, son,” Bravo said. “You got a bigger chip on your shoulder than a women’s rights activist.”

  “We prefer ‘human rights activist.’”

  “Bem-vindo ao Brasil, gentlemen,” the guy at the desk said. “Passports, please.”

  We handed them over.

  “Business or pleasure?” the guy asked.

  “Pleasure is my business,” Bravo said.

  “Mostly mine, right, honey?” I said, putting my arm around Bravo’s waist.

  He jerked away. “Get the fuck off me.”

  “PDA makes him uncomfortable,” I told the guy behind the counter.

  But the guy behind the counter wasn’t paying us any attention. He was looking at something on his computer screen.

  “Is there a problem with our passports?” Bravo asked.

  “Eh? No, no,” the guy behind the counter said. He stamped our passports and handed them back. “Enjoy your stay, gentlemen.”

  Bravo led the way to Customs. “Wonder what that was about.”

  “Probably nothing good.”

  We were still waiting in line when the policia showed up in full SWAT gear. They fanned out and surrounded us.

  “No chão,” they yelled. “Mãos na cabeça!”

  “Esto es un error,” Bravo said, putting his hands up. “No somos criminales. We’re not—”

  “No chão maltido,” their captain yelled. “Mãos na cabeça, agora!”

  I didn’t speak Brazilian, but I was familiar with this particular police procedure. I dropped to my knees and laced my fingers behind my head.

  “Error,” Bravo yelled more slowly. “Misunderstanding.”

  “No chão!” They were moving in.

  “Get on the floor, dumbass,” I told Bravo.

  “Fuck that. If they think I’m going to go quietly—”

  The SWAT guy behind Bravo cracked him in the head with the butt of his MP5. The first strike stunned Bravo. He spun around and made a grab for the guy. The guy hit him again. Bravo smacked the ground beside me, lights out.

  I stayed put and tried to look compliant.

  Something flashed in my peripheral vision.

  The stock of a rifle. I felt my cheekbone snap, then everything went dark.