She began inching forward again, grateful for the leather that protected her arms from the culvert’s muck. Over Brandon’s protestations Alisha had insisted on stopping at her own hotel and collecting the equipment she’d purchased from Jon’s people, as well as the gizmos Erika had provided, but she still wore the jacket she’d taken from Reichart’s closet. She would owe him a new one when this was over. The thought made her smile, heat coloring her cheeks. It had been years since the idea of owing Frank Reichart anything had held appeal.
They all had to get out of Sicarii hands alive, though, for her to owe him anything. Alisha’s smile faded and she moved forward with more determination.
It was a bad plan. Neither she nor Brandon had any doubt on that matter, but neither could they see a better way through the mess that was partly of Alisha’s own creating.
Mostly, she amended. Mostly of her own creating. Alone in the dark, there wasn’t much point in lying to herself about it. Had she not interfered with Reichart’s drop, had she not drugged him—
Had he told her the truth early in their relationship, she reminded herself forcefully. Had he not stolen the corrupted Attengee plans or the Firebird’s black box. There was blame to lay all around, and taking it all for herself was as arrogant as accepting none of it. Whose fault it was no longer mattered, if it ever had. A fatalistic streak whispered that all paths led to where she was now: that a life built on deception inevitably came to making the best of nothing more than bad choices.
Had Brandon not betrayed her in Rome. The list of what-might-have-beens insisted on playing itself out. Hairs stood up on the back of Alisha’s neck, making her shiver in the clammy darkness. That, above all, made this a bad plan. Trust takes time, she thought a little wryly, and even still her trust in Brandon Parker was…limited. Wanting to trust and actually investing herself in the emotion were very different things. If they came out of this whole—with or without Reichart, with or without the Firebird—her confidence in him would be well restored. But for now, she had no other partner to choose from. It was Brandon or going it alone, and she liked her odds by herself even less than with a partner of uncertain loyalties.
Cave systems littered the land beneath the fields they’d lost the trucks by. Haunted caves, a schoolboy had told them matter-of-factly. Haunted by the spirits of men and women forty thousand years dead, whose contemporaries had painted the walls of other French caves. It was a matter of youthful masculine pride to explore those caves, although, the boy added with an annoyed sneer, now the girls wanted to explore them, too. Alisha had fought laughter, thanked the boy, and left willing to bet that les filles had been exploring the caves as long as the boys had.
Once upon a time she’d have thought it was romantic, the idea of a secret society hiding beneath the earth, in naturally carved caverns. Once, Alisha thought, a long time before there was mud in her hair and smeared over her nose from scratching itches that wouldn’t go away. The girl who would have found romance in the idea had faded years ago, though not quite enough that Alisha couldn’t remember her.
It wasn’t just years ago. She could remember precisely the moment that anything under the ground had become less appealing. There was a stiffly written journal entry about it: even writing reminded her of how her breath had been taken from her, quite literally, and Alisha had held her breath through much of the chronicling. A missile had been lost underwater in a cave system riddled by coral. Alisha and Cristina had been assigned to retrieve it; weapons were their specialty. It had been a race against the clock, the FSB closing in as quickly as the Agency.
Biting humor lanced through Alisha. Back then she hadn’t known how the FSB had gotten there so quickly. Hindsight told her that Cristina had tipped her people off, though Alisha still thought her pale blond partner was as surprised to find competition as Alisha had been. She’d expected them to be long gone with the missile, but it was more badly entangled in coral and rough rock than anyone had anticipated.
There’d been no warning that her air line was being cut, nothing more than a pull behind her head, and by then it was too late. Sixty feet underwater in a cave half that depth in length. Not an easy distance to swim in the best of circumstances, but it became insurmountable with no chance to hyperventilate and fill lungs and blood with extra oxygen. Even now Alisha felt the tightness in her chest, constricting the airways as frighteningly as it had then.
It was the cave itself that saved her. Rushing air from her cut line had nowhere to go and became trapped at the cave’s roof, making bubbles that Alisha broke into. It took all her conscious effort to breathe slowly and deeply, to not panic and gulp what precious air she had.
And then Cristina came, blue eyes reassuring as she broke into Alisha’s tiny air bubble and popped the breather from her mouth. “To hell with the missile. We’ve got to get you out of here. We can share my oxygen.” Talking used the last of the bubble, but Cristina’s smile was confident. She took Alisha’s hand so they couldn’t lose each other, and together they swam for the surface.
It was only much, much later that Alisha had reason to wonder if it had been Cristina herself who had cut her air line. By the time she wondered, she could no longer ask.
Alisha shuddered in a breath, flexing her shoulders as if doing so would expand her lung capacity. Going into basements and foundations, even underground bunkers, didn’t set off the claustrophobia like caves did. Even being underwater didn’t do it, but caves. Caves she did not like.
Speaking of keeping secrets, she mocked herself. But there was no point in confessing that particular one to Brandon: her claustrophobia was a controlled fear, and, unlike the missing Firebird, was unlikely to put more than herself in danger.
Though if it put anyone else in danger, it would be her partner. Cristina had known, not from Alisha’s words, but from her body language, that caves disturbed her. Having someone else share the secret somehow made it easier to be brave.
But there was no one else who knew, now, and Brandon was squirming through another tunnel down into the cave system, so lingering over self-pity and job-induced trauma would have to wait. The schoolkid had been more than forthcoming with the secret passages used by generations of children to sneak into the higher levels of the caves, though he’d extracted a promise from Alisha that she wouldn’t tell any other adults. She’d promised solemnly, hiding her expression as she wondered just how the boy thought the location of the exploratory tunnels had been passed down to him. Maybe he thought the knowledge had spontaneously erupted in the mind of someone just a year or two older than he was, or, more likely, he’d never thought about it at all. It wasn’t the kind of thing that would have crossed Alisha’s mind as a preteen. Nonetheless, she’d given her promise, and she even intended to keep it. All except a note in her journal.
There had to be a better way into the caves than the grimy tunnels the kid had told them about. Alisha could see a faint brightness now—the light at the end of the tunnel, she thought, amused—but certainly the trucks had come in another way, if she and Brandon were correct about their location. Not that she’d have wanted to follow them in through their front door. There’d be nothing sneaky about that, and ideally they would slip in and out without the Sicarii being any the wiser.
Feeling the strain in her arms, she pulled herself forward the last several yards, coming out on a ledge that was higher up than she expected. There were other small holes littering the rim where she lay, though she saw no sign of Brandon. He would be there, she promised herself.
Craggy walls narrowed and shrank to her left, the ridge she lay on melding with the stone as it became a tunnel. The cavern below was large enough to hold vehicles: the two trucks the Firebird had tracked sat there, their engines long since cooled, though a faint scent of gasoline lingered in the air. The path leading out was well-enough traveled that tire marks were visible in broken rock, but Alisha had no sense of how long the road might be before it broke to the surface. Children exploring this far could find t
hemselves in terrible danger. She hoped the stories of ghosts kept them far enough away to maintain their safety.
Waiting for Brandon only increased her own chances of being discovered. Alisha wriggled along her ledge, careful not to disturb fragments of stone enough to knock them to the floor below. There was a slight downward slope to the rim before it became one with the rest of the cave wall. Enough to make the drop to the ground a little less alarming, though it wasn’t far enough to damage her badly except in the worst circumstances. Alisha held her breath, listening to the sound of her heartbeat and to the silence of the cave before slithering down the wall to land in a crouch beside the next tunnel entrance.
“There you are.” Brandon’s voice, coming from the vehicles behind her. Alisha’s stomach cramped with warning and she turned to watch him step out of one of the trucks. He was impeccably clean, with no sign of having crawled through hundreds of feet of muddy earth. His smile was brief and unapologetic as he turned his focus to someone beyond Alisha.
“I told you I’d deliver them both.”
Chapter 23
“Brandon.” Alisha whispered his name as if it would stop the cold wash of fury and fear that cascaded through her. “Brandon.”
“You make it easy,” he said shortly. “If you’d stayed at Langley where you belonged, I wouldn’t have been able to get to you. You’re a fool, Alisha.”
“Yeah.” Alisha nodded, eyes closed. She didn’t want to look behind her to see who was there. It didn’t really matter. Cold spiraled around her stomach, making a knot of nausea there. You knew, she chided herself, but the castigation was without heat. You knew you shouldn’t trust him, Leesh. And from the chill inside her, she hadn’t. Anger, yes, and dismay, but no surprise. She’d gone in having weighed the risks, and the odds had turned bad on her.
At least now she unquestionably knew where Brandon Parker stood, in the fight between freedom and dictatorship.
“Hands behind your head,” a woman said. Alisha was already lifting them, but the voice made her turn her head incredulously.
“Helen?”
“You remembered. I’m flattered. Hands behind your head.”
“I thought you were with Frank.” Even as she laced her fingers behind her head, Alisha winced at the use of the man’s first name. He knew it as a tell. Whether Helen did or not depended on how much they’d discussed her.
Alisha, perversely, found herself hoping they’d discussed her quite a lot. Helen’s irritated huff of breath told her nothing. “I got a better offer,” the delicate Asian woman said. “It happens.”
“Jesus.” Alisha cast her eyes upward, absurdity overtaking her for a moment. “Is anybody besides me working for who they say they are?”
“You took a walk, Alisha,” Brandon reminded her. “Don’t exclude yourself from the party.”
Alisha set her teeth together. “Right. I forgot.” She kept her head turned, trying to get a look at Helen and anyone who might be with her. “How long? It had to be after Zurich, or you wouldn’t have let me set that virus.”
“After Zurich,” Helen confirmed, but finished with, “now shut up and move. Better yet, give me an excuse to shoot you.”
“Helen.” Brandon’s voice was low, but the warning in it carried. Alisha wished she could see the woman’s expression, sensing that she was snarling. Regardless, she put a hand on Alisha’s shoulder to turn her around, then prodded her in the spine with a gun, repeating, “Move.”
Alisha moved, catching glimpses of other armed men and women in the shadows. “How do you keep the kids from finding you?”
“We’re not here much. And we won’t be back.”
Startled hope sparked in Alisha’s throat, tightening it. “That sounds like you might not be planning on killing us.”
“You’d be dead if I was going to,” Helen said sharply. “But go ahead. Give me an excuse.”
“Someday,” Alisha said under her breath, “we’re going to have a come-to-Jesus meeting, you and I.”
“I look forward to it.” Helen shoved Alisha forward with the barrel of the gun, sending her stumbling into a smaller cavern. Reichart, as bruised and furious looking as Alisha felt, if considerably less muddy, knelt on the hard stone against the farthest wall. His mouth tightened almost imperceptibly as Alisha entered the room.
“Nice hair.”
Alisha managed a faint smile as Helen knocked her into place beside him. “You noticed. I’m so pleased.”
“I try.”
“Shut up,” Helen said. Alisha glanced at her, then back at Reichart.
“I blew the rescue card. Sorry about that.”
“Trusted the wrong guy, didn’t you.”
Anger flared, making Alisha flex her hands against her shorn hair in a futile gesture. “I have a knack for that.” Her attention slid back to Helen and she added, “Maybe you shouldn’t talk.”
Reichart growled, deep and low in his throat. Alisha settled back on her heels, straightening her spine into a comfortable position, satisfied with his response. “So why don’t we have bullets in our brains yet? What do you want?” She could see six mercs, not including Brandon, who leaned against the stone doorway, hands loose and casual in his pockets. His expression was pleasantly neutral, neither smug nor distressed. There should be something there, Alisha thought in frustration. Betrayal ought to carry some kind of mark that could be easily read.
Then again, she could feel her own expression lying to Helen: offhand gaze only mildly interested, her voice carrying cocky arrogance. There was no room to show fear or even anger when she was a prisoner, injured and outnumbered.
“Ransom,” Helen said with a shrug. Alisha laughed, startled out of watching the room.
“The CIA doesn’t negotiate with terrorists, Helen. What do you think you’re going to achieve by trying to ransom us?” She felt Reichart’s eyes on her, though he didn’t make the comment she could all but hear: I’m not CIA, Leesh. Why are you making this an “us”?
Because I’m not leaving here without you, she thought in response to the unasked question.
“That’s none of your concern,” Helen snapped. Alisha slumped her shoulders, then kept a wicked grin from flashing across her face as she looked up again.
“Is this about him?” She tilted her head toward Reichart, still not looking his way. “I mean, since you’ve got me at a disadvantage anyway, can we at least get that cleared up? What is it you’ve got against me? Did he say my name when he was in bed with you, or something? Oh, shit,” she said with another surprised laugh, as fury blanked Helen’s expression. “Christ, Reichart, you really know how to screw up with a woman, don’t you? Maybe you should just shoot him,” she added, speaking to Helen again. The woman’s mouth turned into a thin line and she lifted her gun, butt first.
“Shut up,” she said again. “They said alive. Nobody said anything about being able to talk.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” Reichart muttered. Alisha gave him a genial smile that she then turned on Helen.
“Look, I’m sure he didn’t mean anything by it. You know how men are. They get a piece of ass and it’s all over but the googly eyes. Most of the time I’m surprised they remember their own names, much less ours. After a while you decide, who cares, especially if he does that thing with his tongue wh…oh.” She squinted up apologetically at the Asian woman. “He never did that to you, huh. My bad.” Beyond Helen she could see Brandon’s expression changing, slow incredulity creeping over it. Helen’s cheeks were white with rage. “Well, Jesus, Frank,” Alisha stage-whispered at him, “how was I supposed to know that was reserved for me?”
“It’s not,” Reichart drawled, “but some girls aren’t worth the bother.”
“You son of a bitch.” Helen took two long steps forward, gun raised to bring the butt down across Reichart’s cheek.
Alisha shoved forward, pushing all the way through her toes, and T-boned her shoulder into Helen’s knee. Cartilage and ligaments tore with audible po
ps, the woman collapsing sideways as Alisha’s weight drove her over. Alisha scrambled up her body to wrap a hand around her neck and lift her far enough to crack her skull back down against the rock, teeth bared in a predatory grin. “Shoulda tied our hands, bitch. Reichart?”
“Got it.”
Alisha looked up from the woman she crouched over. The sound of weapons cocking rang loud in her ears, though she hadn’t consciously heard the preparations. Only Brandon was unarmed, the surprise on his face replaced with approval. “I think we have an impasse,” Alisha announced. “Yes? Somebody doesn’t want you to kill us, and between Helen here being down and Reichart having a gun, I think the odds have evened out a bit. Brandon?”
“Why do you think I’m in charge now?”
“Because in a room full of guys with guns, the person in charge is the guy who doesn’t need to carry one. Besides.” Alisha felt her smile grow even more vicious. “You’re the one I’m looking forward to beating to death. They never rescinded my termination orders.”
“I’m sure that was an oversight, Alisha.”
“One I’ll be glad to take advantage of. Reichart and I are going to walk out of here now, and you’re going to let us. I’ll drop Helen somewhere safe. Like federal prison.”
Brandon sighed. “I wish I could tell you how much I regret this.”
Alisha sneered, not liking the feeling of the expression on her face. “But you don’t regret it. Yeah. I know the story.” She fisted her hand in Helen’s shirt and hauled the woman upright, twisting her to wrap her arm around Helen’s throat. Helen groaned and made a retching noise that Alisha ignored. “We walk out of here, everything’s copacetic.”
Brandon turned his head toward the nearest armed merc. “Shoot her.”
Gunfire rang without hesitation.
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