by Cindy Gerard
Stephanie was back home in Maryland, safe, which is exactly where he wanted her to be.
Those keys rattled in the distance now. Two guards held separate sets that they carried on rings attached to the woven belts on their green uniforms. When they came, they entered the cell block through a set of locked doors, each one opened by a different guard with a different set of keys.
All in all, tidy security for a medieval-esque facility. It was almost overkill given that they pretty much starved the prisoners into total submission.
The same two guards patrolled the cell block three times a day. Once with meager portions of stagnant water. Once with a bucket of gruel that passed for a meal. Once to allow the prisoners to dump their waste.
Five-star digs all the way.
Joe dragged a hand over his bearded jaw, felt the loss of muscle tone in his arm. He figured he’d dropped close to twenty pounds since the beginning of his stay in Hotel Hell. Still, he’d been lucky. The open wound on his temple from the blow with the assault rifle had pretty much healed. And though he was fairly certain he’d had a concussion, the nausea and double vision had subsided within a week. The daily beatings were mostly body blows. He knew how to deflect the worst of them and still look like he’d taken enough of a pounding to make them back off.
He figured his unshaven beard, shaggy hair, bare feet, and filthy, ragged clothes gave him a distinct Robinson Crusoe look. But other than being dehydrated and malnourished, he was okay. Banged up a bit, but okay. The same couldn’t be said for some of the men who’d been arrested since his arrival.
At least three prisoners—one of them not much more than a boy—had been carried out dead. Based on the fact that the moaning had stopped in cell number three a few hours ago, he suspected another body would soon be added to the death toll.
Such was life on the wrong side of Sierra Leone law.
He closed his eyes in frustration and leaned his head back against the bars. Waiting was all he could do now. Wait for an opportunity. Wait for a mistake. Wait to die in this shithole. Alone.
He never would have ended up like this if he hadn’t turned his back on the team. “No man left behind” wasn’t just a trumped-up sound bite for the benefit of the media. For the men and women who fought for their country and each other, it was a code they lived by. No man was left behind. Ever. Not when he was part of a team.
If this had been a sanctioned military or a Black Ops, Inc. team mission, he wouldn’t be feeling this desolation because he would know without a doubt that an unstoppable determination would compel his team to get him out of here.
No matter what had to be done, no matter how many had to be killed, no matter how many of them died in the process, his team would have come for him. He still might die, but it wouldn’t be alone.
But he was alone now, because no one knew he was here. Which was exactly the way it had to be.
He’d known when he’d started his hunt that if he ended up being right about who was responsible for Bryan’s death, the fallout from exposing the traitor/murderer would be tantamount to aligning the Pope with Satan. And because of the power that traitor wielded, Joe knew that if he made his allegations public, he would become a target for assassination and the truth would never be revealed.
He grunted and took in his surroundings. Sometimes it was hell being right. He’d barely scratched the surface of the lies and deceit, and he was going to end up dead before he had a chance to expose the traitor.
Shoving back the despair that constantly fought to break him, he forced himself to his feet. Gathering every ounce of strength from his waning reserve, he threw his hands above his head and jumped. He barely made it high enough to grasp the crossbars overhead.
Fire screamed through his weakened muscles as he pulled himself up, let himself down. He repeated the grueling process twenty-five agonizing times before the burn ripping through his muscles and joints forced him to let go and drop, exhausted, to the floor. Sweat oozed from every pore as he lay there gasping for breath, feeling himself grow weaker with each passing hour.
Jesus. At his peak, he could do eighty pull-ups without breaking a sweat. Could push it close to a hundred if there was a bet on the line. Well, his life was on the line now, and twenty-five was the best he could muster.
Fuck.
He had to get out of here soon. He just hoped to hell that it wouldn’t be in a body bag.
He closed his eyes. Thought of Stephanie. The pain in her eyes when he’d said good-bye. The lies on his tongue when he’d told her he didn’t love her.
This was why he’d lied. This was why he’d separated himself from her, from his family, and from Bry’s parents and from his team at BOI. He’d known that he could end up in deep shit, and it was better for everyone that they didn’t know why.
Stephanie worked for the NSA, for Christsake. Her mother had worked her way up—and worked damn hard—into a power position in the Department of Justice; her father had been an advisor to former president Billings and was now in private law practice. None of them could afford to be associated with him if things went FUBAR.
He didn’t want the fallout from his actions to reflect on them as individuals, as professionals, or as a family. Ann and Robert were as important to him as his own parents. He couldn’t drag any of them into the quagmire of lies and treachery he’d known he would uncover, because the odds were slim to none that he could ever prove what he thought he knew, or exonerate himself from the charges stemming from the crimes he would commit in the name of justice.
He’d made Stephanie cry.
He could never get that picture out of his mind. Never forgive himself for getting involved with her in the first place. She hadn’t needed him to fuck with her life. Hadn’t needed the baggage he’d brought with him to the party. And she sure as hell hadn’t needed the pain he’d inflicted when he’d left her behind.
He rolled onto his back. Listened as the guards rattled their keys. Time for dinner. His stomach knotted at the thought of the swill they would bring him.
He’d made her cry.
It was for the best. Much better for her that she didn’t know he had come after the man responsible for Bryan’s death . . . and was most likely going to end up dead because of it.
Eight hours after she’d talked with Rafe, Stephanie sat at the gate at Dulles, waiting impatiently for her flight to be called and fighting a sense of impending doom. She’d added a healthy debt on her credit card with the airfare from D.C. to West Africa, and had put a substantial dent in her savings account for the hastily forged U.S. embassy identification papers, visa, and vaccination records tucked in her wallet. Two grand in cash for a fake ID that might get her in to see Joe, or might get her arrested. Five grand for the ticket, and it was still going to take her nearly twenty-four hours to get there. It was plenty of time for second thoughts to set in, and she’d already had many.
She was alone in this, with no clue about what she was going to do once she arrived. At least she knew why she was risking her life, her career, and possibly her sanity going after Joe.
Two years ago, Joe had literally saved her life. If not for him, the man who had been sent to kill her would be alive, she’d be dead, and her parents would be mourning the loss of both of their children.
B.J. had foiled the hired assassin’s initial attempt to kill Steph, but it was Joe who had taken out the second wave of killers, then kept her safe for a wild several days on the run, while the rest of the BOI team ferreted out and dealt with the mastermind behind not only the contract on her life, but a plot to attack the U.S. and bring an already wavering economy into total collapse.
She absently massaged her right wrist, remembering the violence in which it had been broken. The break had healed long ago, but her wrist still swelled up on occasion, reminding her of the ordeal she’d been through, and of how gentle Joe had been with her. How he had taken care of not only her safety, but of needs she’d never known she had—until she’d met him.
> Before Joe, she’d just gone through the motions of living. With him, she’d lived in life instead of orbiting aimlessly around the outside of it. He’d given her a taste of passion. A sweet, small taste that had shown her there was more to life than work, and hopefully, that someday there would be more to life than the pain of losing him.
No one dies of a broken heart. She would recover. She would move on, but she would never be able to free herself from his memory if she let him die over there.
“It’s your story. You can tell it any way you want to,” Rhonda had said with a worried scowl when she’d dropped Stephanie off at the airport, after they’d picked up the fake credentials from Rhonda’s shady “acquaintance.” “But we both know the real reason you’re risking your life, not to mention your career. You’re still in love with him.”
It never paid to crack a bottle of red with Rhonda. One long, slightly buzzed evening, she’d spilled her guts and her heart.
She stared blankly ahead of her now, not seeing the bustling foot traffic rushing from gate to gate. Yes. She still loved him.
He still loved her, too, damn it. She didn’t care what he’d told her. She was sure this whole disappearing act was because he was trying to protect her from something he was certain would hurt her. Something that could land him in prison and drag her into an international incident. Something, she still suspected, that had to do with Bryan.
He should have confided in her. He should have trusted her. Instead, what he’d done was leave. If she somehow managed to help him get out of this mess, and they were both in one piece when it was over, she had no illusions about where they went from here.
If he couldn’t see her as an equal, as a full partner in his life; if he would always close her out when it came to what ate at him; if he always needed to play protector and see her as a responsibility; then they were doomed anyway.
Don’t think about that now. She fought to keep the depth of the damage to her heart from crippling her with indecision. Stay focused.
She needed to spend her energy coming up with a plan to get him out of that prison. She was a methodical, organized thinker. Yet for the life of her, except for getting the forged U.S. embassy ID that she hoped would get her into the jail to see Joe, she was coming up blank.
Well, I have twenty-four long hours of travel to come up with something, she thought with grim determination. To keep her mind off what she didn’t know, she turned her attention to one of the TV monitors suspended above the rows of chairs.
The evening news was running footage of the president’s press secretary, Karen Cramer, as she’d conducted a briefing earlier today to confirm the rumor that the current secretary of state intended to step down from his post at the end of the month.
Cramer went on to read a short list of candidates in the running to replace the retiring secretary of state. Most of the names barely registered. Stephanie had all but tuned out the TV when she heard Greer Dalmage’s name, and the reporter pointed out that Dalmage, a retired U.S. Army one-star general and one-term state representative from Arizona, was the current liaison between the United West African Nations and the United States.
Her heart picked up a beat. The UWAN included Sierra Leone.
She sat up straighter, riveted on the TV. Dalmage was a constant figure in the news, and she combed her memory banks for what else she knew about him. He was sixty-something, known for his military bearing, close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair, and expensive suits.
Then the report cut away to footage of Dalmage. Several reporters had caught him on the Capitol steps earlier in the day and, fueled by speculation, had thrust their microphones in his face.
“Will you accept the post of secretary of state if it’s offered to you, sir?”
“My life’s work has been serving my country,” Dalmage said with sincere patriotism. “If I’m asked, of course I’ll accept.”
“On a more pressing note, sir.” A reporter from the Catholic Press stepped forward. “Could you please comment on a story that’s recently surfaced out of Sierra Leone, indicating an American citizen has been imprisoned for almost a month for the murder of a priest?”
Stephanie’s heart nearly stopped. This was the first she’d heard that Joe had been identified as an American, and it could only be good news. It meant that the embassy there, or perhaps even Dalmage, could intervene and help him. Maybe she wasn’t alone after all.
Buoyed by the prospect, she rose quickly from her seat and rushed closer to the monitor so she could hear every word Dalmage had to say.
He had sobered abruptly—whether in shock or simply because of the gravity of the situation, she couldn’t tell.
“I am aware of that unfortunate situation. However, neither I nor any of my staff have received corroboration that the man being held for the murder is, in fact, an American. The last I knew, his identity hadn’t even been determined. Best check your sources before making such a serious assumption,” he added with a critical look and turned to leave.
“So you’re saying, sir, that the accused is not an American?” the reporter pressed.
Stephanie waited with her breath trapped in her chest.
Dalmage’s shoulders stiffened beneath his tailored black suit jacket and he turned again to face the reporter, the winter wind painting his cheeks bright red. He did not look pleased. “That is not what I said. I said there is no confirmation that the man is an American. If in fact he is, we will offer any and all assistance at our disposal. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have pressing matters that need my attention.”
The footage ended but the TV anchor continued with the story. “Our sources have since confirmed that the pressing matters Liaison Dalmage referred to involved a flight to Freetown, Sierra Leone, where it is assumed Dalmage will look into the citizenship of the suspect now being held in maximum security in a Freetown, Sierra Leone, jail while awaiting a court date. In other news . . .”
Oh, my God, Stephanie thought, as the first boarding call for her flight was announced. Dalmage had flown to Freetown. But when? She got in line with the other passengers waiting for their boarding zone to be called.
Maybe Dalmage would be there when she arrived, which meant she could have an ally on the ground when she got there. Now Joe might actually have a fighting chance of surviving this.
For the first time since she’d seen that horrifying photograph, she felt stirrings of hope.
5
Suah Korama was fifteen years old and did not recall ever having a permanent home. To his knowledge, he had no living family. He’d been eight when the old man who ran the food pantry at the Kissy mission, in a crime-ridden slum on the east edge of the city, had told him that he had known Suah’s mother. Suah had acknowledged the information with a blank stare; the concept of a mother’s love was already as foreign to him as a full belly.
He had lived on the streets of Freetown and fended for himself as long as he could remember. Three years ago, when he’d been big enough and strong enough to handle a rifle, he’d been grabbed in broad daylight and dragged into a military transport truck at gunpoint. No one had dared defy the rebel soldiers who had taken him. Even before he’d been driven to a remote encampment outside the city, he’d known what his fate would be. He was to become one of hundreds of boy soldiers that Augustine Sesay had recruited for his resurrected Revolutionary United Front army. He’d been twelve years old.
Starting that day, his life had consisted of military drills, regular beatings, and one meal a day. Even though he would carry the scars from Sesay’s whip on his back for the rest of his life, his existence had still been a step up from life on the streets. He had been certain he would die there either by Sesay’s hands or in battle, a virtual prisoner of the RUF. But fate had had different plans for him. In the end, he had outlived Sesay because of one man. The American, Joe Green.
Green was the reason Suah had held vigil outside the city jail for twenty-nine days in a row.
Leaning a shoulder against the
side of a building facing the jail across the busy intersection, he watched again today and struggled with the idea of going inside. To do what, he didn’t know. He only knew that Joe Green was inside that jail and that once again, he owed the American his life. If not for Green, he would be imprisoned in that jail, too. Or dead by now.
He squinted against the sunlight beating down and the heat radiating from the broken concrete sidewalk beneath his bare feet. He did not like being in debt to anyone. Neither did he like the unwelcome sensation that filled his chest when he thought of the big, hard-faced warrior who had first spared his life, then later saved it. Trust was not an idea he could easily embrace. He knew he should be as distrustful of the American’s help as he was of the concept of trust—and yet he did trust him. Friendship, also, was a privilege he withheld from everyone but a chosen few. So he did not choose to befriend the American, even though he found himself wanting to—another reason to question his own judgment.
Though physically he was still a boy, Suah considered himself a man of honor. A man with a debt to repay. So here he stood, watching the jail and waiting. For what, he didn’t know . . . until a dusty city cab pulled up in front of the high security building and a fair-skinned, dark-haired woman stepped out into the street.
He stood at attention and watched her stare uncertainly at the jail. Finally she drew a deep breath, smoothed a hand over the long, loose braid at the back of her neck, and then walked slowly up the steps and through the door.
She was American. Suah was as certain of that as he was that he hadn’t eaten since last night. And he was certain that there was only one reason an American woman would walk into a jail in Freetown, Sierra Leone, of her own free will.
She was here to see Joe Green. This was the moment he had been waiting for.
“What you ask is not possible.”
The stern-eyed, round-bellied officer regarded Stephanie with an inflated air of authority and a firm determination to keep her from seeing his prisoner.