Nike's Wings

by Valerie Douglas

  Leaving all of it where it lay as evidence of what had nearly happened, she swung over the edge of the precipice, dropped to the ledge below. Security forces would guess where the assassin had been. It would be a black mark on Garcia’s record. Nike could be satisfied with that. Staying in the shadows, keeping her eyes open and senses alert, she made her way back to her hotel, if not entering it entirely in a conventional manner. She dropped down from the balcony above.

  Exhausted, she dragged herself into the shower.

  At least the target hadn’t died.

  The critical negotiations would continue. Her mission was done. The missiles would have a home here someday, maybe. For whatever good they did and despite Russia’s discomfort at having them on their doorstep.

  She was too restless to sleep, too charged. Dressed in only a long, white, silk nightgown that skimmed her curves - she liked wearing beautiful, feminine things when she wasn’t working - she stepped out onto the balcony of her hotel room, careless of who might see her and let the breeze caress her skin. She had a glass of sherry in one hand.

  The breeze would be the only thing to touch her anytime soon, she thought with a sigh. There was always another assignment. Even if there were someone to hold her, how could she explain what she did for a living, who she was? Or the scars.

  Loneliness was a growing ache.

  As she stared out into the night she remembered a soft touch, a gentle kiss. There were times when it didn’t seem real anymore, but something she’d just imagined, and there were days she couldn’t remember what he’d looked like.

  In her dreams she remembered.

  Sighing, she shook her head at herself. After all this time, she still dreamed.

  It wasn’t as if she hadn’t had other lovers, and yet she knew of course that the first - especially when it had been so good and under such memorable circumstances - was the one you always remembered. By now he would likely have moved on as well and was probably married with 2.5 kids.

  The truth was she didn’t want him to know what she’d become, only that she’d survived, that she was alive.

  Still, when she curled up around her pillow at night, that memory consoled her. And if she pretended there were arms around her, who was to know?

  Morning dawned brilliant and sunny. It was a beautiful day.

  She packed up what little she had, her few clothes, her toothbrush and makeup. Her leathers were packed away – they’d become her working uniform of sorts – and now she was dressed like anyone else, a casual dress perfect for traveling. She had time to kill, though, between checkout and her flight home. Time to be just another tourist.

  Wenceslas Square was busier than usual, the unusual warmth bringing everyone out to enjoy the surprisingly spring-like weather. It was coincidence she was there to share it. She wasn’t immune to people-watching and even had the time to bask briefly in the pretty day before she caught a cab to the airport.

  So she bought something to snack on and went in search of a place to eat it.

  People talked and smiled, lifted their faces to the sun. Laughing children looked back at mommy and daddy, getting ready to run as couples walked arm-in-arm, while one young couple, oblivious to passersby, were locked in a kiss.

  Nike looked at them.

  These people had lives, normal lives; they laughed and loved. Most of the time, she had very little time to herself. They kept her busy. There were hot spots all over the world. Not everything she’d done was an assassination. Like the night before. Unusually, her assignment had been to capture, not kill. She didn’t know how many she’d done; she’d long since lost track. Even when she was at headquarters she rarely had time to think. She was either in or out of training, studying history, politicians, politics, geography. Or her opponents.

  She’d had a few relationships of sorts, but she never stayed anywhere long before she was sent out again. Nothing lasted. None of them ever made her heart leap. Once or twice, she’d thought she’d caught sight of a shock of light hair, close to silver, but it had never been anyone she knew.

  The truth was, she didn’t know anyone. She was a stranger to everyone.

  All around her people walked past her, looked past her.

  They had lives. She had assignments, missions…and sometimes, nightmares.

  Her heart ached, but she wasn’t quite sure why.

  What she did was important. In this case, certainly, but she questioned…and questioning was dangerous.

  To her shock, she suddenly thought she saw a vaguely familiar face in the crowd. Frowning, she turned to catch sight of it again. She stood, alarm mixing with confusion, wariness. Turning. That face had been familiar, but she’d only glimpsed it.

  Dark eyes in a handsome, almost effeminately, handsome face.

  It couldn’t be.

  The man walked with a woman, as a couple. Or had he? Was it a ruse?

  Where had she seen that face before? She’d only caught a flash, out of context, familiar, but not here, not in such ordinary circumstances, in a crowd full of people. She shook her head. It couldn’t be, she had to be mistaken. It made no sense.

  Why would he come back?

  A voice called, “Long time no see. Nike, isn’t it?”

  His voice was surprisingly deep, with no discernible accent. He might’ve been a newscaster his voice was so pure, so beautifully modulated.

  No one here should know her name. He shouldn’t know her name.

  Startled, Nike turned.

  An arm wrapped about her waist with startling intimacy.

  No one touched her.

  Caught off guard, startled at the too familiar gesture Nike looked up into a smiling, familiar face that was far too close. Her eyes widened as her breath escaped her in a rush even as she moved to defend herself, push herself away. She felt an odd sense of invasion even as she looked up into Daniel Garcia’s handsome and too-young face. His arm tightened as she brought her free hand around to strike at him.

  He caught that hand with shocking ease as all the strength drained out of her, as if she were a whiskey barrel that had been tapped, emptying slowly, but steadily. Suddenly she couldn’t catch her breath. Warmth coated her lower back. She felt the knife move inside her, the blade twist between her ribs, and gasped.

  His beautiful dark eyes looked at her as flatly and as expressionlessly as a shark’s, with only the slightest hint of …interest…

  “Why?” she whispered.

  It was all she could manage, suddenly breathless.

  Slowly, he lowered his mouth to hers in a lingering kiss, and to suck her last breath from her.

  His tongue flicked out to taste her when she coughed, catching it in his mouth. He savored the taste of her blood as he drew away. The intimacy of the gesture was another violation, adding insult to injury.

  It was all the answer he would give.

  He let her go abruptly. Stepped back.

  Daniel Garcia just smiled, revealing his perfect teeth, so white, so even, before he melted back into the crowd, his eyes locked on hers as she stared at him in return.

  She staggered. It was as if her legs had turned to water beneath her.

  Someone screamed.

  It was probably the sight of all that blood. Her blood.

  The trip to the hospital was oddly surreal and nightmarish. Pain was like shards of glass, bright and sharp inside her. She was semi-conscious throughout the journey to the hospital, awareness came and went, and then there was the trip through the hospital corridors, the lights appearing to slide away above her. Nike fought to breathe as the emergency personnel worked on her, the edges of her vision going dark, feeling helpless and afraid. Doctors and nurses crowded around to cut away her clothes, inserted needles. She floated down into darkness.

  She awakened in a hospital room as she was shifted from the bed to a gurney by four men dressed in nondescript clothes.

  Although she’d never met them, she knew instantly who they were by what wasn’t in their eyes, by their
neatly cut hair, their unremarkable clothing. Not a shred of emotion showed on their faces, and their glances were quick, impersonal.

  Those others at headquarters, the ones she never saw.

  One looked at her. She knew his orders and looked back even as coldness washed through her, but she let none of it show. If she had, she’d have been dead before she reached the U.S. mainland, her body dumped from the plane over the broad stretch of the Atlantic. It was his job to make sure of that.

  None did.

  She burned his face into her memory.

  Although Victor wasn’t shouting, Nike heard him clearly through the doors. He was pissed. She could hear him talking to the doctor even as she reached for the shower curtain bar, did a slow pull-up. It hurt, but it was bearable.

  “I want her released,” Victor snapped.

  She knew the doctors didn’t want to let her go, not yet. Even these doctors. She particularly liked this one, but his scruples were going to get him bounced from the program. He had a valid point about fit and unfit operatives, but that had nothing to do with Victor’s plans. And, as Victor would have pointed out, the opposition would fight wounded. If they would, she must.

  The doctor protested, but Nike knew it was useless. If Victor wanted her sprung, she’d be sprung. It had to be important.

  In the bathroom mirror, she saw her body, the bandages still stark against her ribs. She carried very little body fat; her ribs and abs were clearly visible, the muscles in her arms tight. Ruthlessly, she ripped off the covering, looked at the stitches beneath it dispassionately. Once they healed, she’d have to have the tattoo repaired; the painted feathers had been damaged a little.

  Taking a breath, she tested her lungs. She’d need to increase her lung capacity, but with Victor shouting that would have to wait.

  A tee shirt and light drawstring pants waited, her usual garb when she’d been injured badly enough to be hospitalized. She pulled them on and went to rescue the doctor from Victor before the doc got himself fired.

  The man himself looked at her in frustrated despair, but she just gave him a crooked smile as she went by before looking at Victor.

  “Talk to me,” she said, as they started down the hall.

  “An agent has been taken,” he said, passing her the file in his hand. “We want him back.”

  Nike opened the file, glanced at the details. It wouldn’t be the first of these she’d done, nor was it likely to be the last.

  Chapter Ten

  The gun dealer gig had been a good one for them over the years, Buck reflected as he looked around the high-end hotel room. A fully stocked wet bar stood against one wall, stocked with the best booze on the planet. A phone call brought him a thick, rare steak at all hours. It had worked well, a guaranteed cover. If you had guns, especially the hard to get stuff, few questions were asked and there were even fewer places on this earth where a man who sold guns wasn’t welcome. None of which eased his worry.

  He hadn’t heard from Ty. There’d been no word. Nothing. No one had seen him. It was as if he’d just vanished from the face of the earth. There’d been no communication. It wasn’t like him. Nothing. Every instinct said something had gone wrong, very wrong, or Ty would’ve made contact at the scheduled time. Yeah, sometimes something held you up – things happened and Buck knew that. But there were the rumblings in the brush as it were. With his coloring, Buck came close enough to pass as an Arab as long as he kept his mouth shut. One thing he couldn’t shake was his Texas twang, however hard he worked at it. And it got worse when he was under stress.

  The word on the street had him seriously under stress.

  He’d made contact with the local station. They’d called him in. That wasn’t good. In fact, it was bad. Really, really bad.

  As he’d walked into the room, no one would look at him.

  Now, looking into the face of the Agent in Charge, his worst fears were confirmed.

  “We just got word,” the AIC said. “They sent a tape to the Arabic TV stations. They gave it to us first.”

  Watching it, Buck felt sick.

  The prisoner portrayed in it was Ty. The blue eyes in the lean face, the hollows under the cheekbones were all unmistakable. They had him, the bad guys had him and they hadn’t been kind. Blood and bruises marked his face and showed on the parts of his body that were visible. But he’d still given them the code words. He hadn’t broken yet. In an odd way, Buck was proud of his partner while in another he was heart-sick and furious knowing what the horror Ty faced.

  “What the hell happened?” Patrick Watson, the AIC, demanded.

  Buck shook his head. “I don’t know. Everything seemed good.”

  Except the request to meet alone, but even that wasn’t so unusual. These days the other side was more careful, more suspicious.

  The voices in the background of the tape were celebratory. Not that of the narrator. His voice was cold, deliberate and cruel.

  It was the usual mix of horrific threats. We’ll cut his head off like Daniel Pearl. Or just parts of him.

  Torture was expected. They’d try to get whatever they could from him, including admissions of guilt, of spying. This time they’d had better teachers. The U.S. Armed Services. Everything the U.S. did, they would do to Ty and more. With the violation of Geneva Conventions at Abu Ghraib, at the foreign sites, all bets were off. Nothing was off the table any more. Beatings, of course. Humiliation was a given. Waterboarding. The gamut.

  But this time it was Ty, his friend, his partner of untold missions and assignments across the globe. This time it was different. It was someone Buck knew.

  “Do we know where they have him?” Buck asked, keeping his voice even with an effort.

  Because he was going in after him. No way was he leaving Ty there.

  Watson looked at him, shook his head not in denial, but in discouragement.

  “We’ve got an idea. Buck, you have to know there’s no way we’ll get anybody close. That whole area is a warren, a maze of buildings occupied by nothing, but their own people. A stranger would be spotted in seconds. We send an armed group in there, anyone in numbers? These people know the drill. They’ll just move him or kill him on the spot. It’s a suicide mission for anyone to go in there. You know that.”

  Buck did. He was still going. The helplessness, the sick, cold impotent fury and grief he kept bottled up inside himself. He wasn’t leaving Ty in there alone.

  “Buck,” Watson said, his tone cautionary, “Langley’s called in a team to extract him, but you have to understand, you have to know, it’s a long shot.”

  Frowning, Buck said, “I thought you said we couldn’t get anyone in.”

  Watson wasn’t telling him everything, his eyes slid away from Buck’s.

  “This is something different,” Watson said, “like I said. A long shot.”

  For a moment, Buck could only stare. “We don’t do suicide missions.”

  You didn’t leave anyone behind, but you didn’t send more people to waste their lives for no reason either.

  It was another thing entirely if he chose to go himself.

  “This is different,” Watson repeated. “To be honest, I’m not comfortable with it either, and some of the rumors I’ve heard about this team…”

  He finally looked at Buck.

  “I told them you’d want to be part of it,” he said. “Maybe if you’re there…”

  “What is it I don’t know?” Buck asked.

  Shaking his head, Watson said, “It’s just rumor…”

  Listening, Buck nodded, hearing what the man hinted. No mistake, he would be part of it. Buck would make sure of that. Whatever the hell was going down, Buck would be there.

  Then the girl walked into the room and everyone went silent. Every head in the office turned as she strode between the desks. Her long dark-brown hair, tinted with red, tumbled in waves over her shoulders. Three armed men, clearly military, flanked her.

  It was the woman who caught your eye, though.

&n
bsp; At best she was barely average height, but she walked like someone six inches taller, limber and lithe. Beautiful. Sexy. Hot as hell. You could tell, it was something in the way she moved.

  It wasn’t strength Buck thought of when he first saw her…it was lust. Along with every other man in the room, except maybe the three with her.

  Her finely tuned torso was barely contained by a thin leather halter. If you could call the square of leather that covered her full breasts and was tied in place with strips of leather by such a grandiose name. Matching thin leather pants clung to every inch of the curve of her hips and her shapely legs.

  A pair of yellow aviator-style shooter’s glasses covered large, long-lashed eyes in a fine-boned face. Behind those lenses, her eyes were unreadable, emotionless. No expression was visible behind those glasses or touched that finely shaped mouth. Her very impassivity made it easy to objectify her.

  She looked like a badass wet dream straight out of a men’s magazine.

  “Buck,” Patrick Watson said, “meet Nike Tallent.”

  The three men ranged themselves behind her, all of them lightly armed at the moment. Two were big in build and height, the third just in build. That one looked barely old enough to shave and was just barely above average height, but he was ripped. His muscles strained at his shirt. All stood at port arms behind her.

  “Mitch Palmer,” one of the two big men said, by way of introduction.

  He was clearly in charge of the two with him, but not the girl. Palmer tilted his head at the other two.

  “Brad and Andy.”

  The men nodded acknowledgement.

  Nike Tallent stood slightly apart from all of them and still did a few hours later standing on the dark street in Doha, Qatar.

  Buck found he still couldn’t believe the plan as Nike Tallent stripped out of the black burqa that had gotten her and them through the streets unnoticed as darkness fell.

  All of them were in native dress, weapons hidden under their clothes. Other weapons were in boxes in the truck behind them, but the team wouldn’t be able to get much closer without raising an alarm.