Firestorm

by Rachel Grant

  Shit. She needed to send him back to Camp Citron now so she could finish the mission. Except, maybe she couldn’t, because they’d been compromised. It might not be safe to send him back to Djibouti.

  All at once, her happy mood evaporated.

  She’d hoped to protect him from the truth, to give him plausible deniability, but she had to tell him everything. Now.

  Cal was feeling about as relaxed and happy as a soldier could while on a covert op in an African country where being found could mean death. But then Freya’s demeanor changed. It was subtle, but pressed close to her as he was, naked and exposed, it wasn’t something he could miss, even in a postorgasm haze.

  “What’s going on?” he asked. He heard the tension in his own voice and knew that, as much as they’d shared, he still harbored a remnant of suspicion when it came to Savannah James.

  In a flash, Freya the lover was gone. She was Savvy. Had always been Savvy. Any glimpse of Freya had probably been a trick of his mind.

  The thought triggered an ache. Not her fault he’d seen something that wasn’t there.

  She rose from the bed and turned to her suitcase. She pulled out a silk robe she’d purchased in keeping with her role of Jamie the courtesan. “I need to download Lubanga’s files and see what we got.”

  “No electricity.”

  “I’ve got a fully charged portable satellite hotspot.”

  “You said last night we might be compromised. Why?”

  “When I was uploading Lubanga’s files, I saw a document named Zagreus.”

  Cal felt the blood drain from his face. He imagined he’d turned some sickly shade of gray. “What the fuck? How is that possible?”

  “Either Special Forces or the CIA gave him information.”

  “SOCOM wouldn’t—”

  “You’d be surprised what they would do. But I’m with you on this one. I don’t think it was SOCOM.”

  “How many people knew the code name?”

  She shrugged. “Not many. I named him, by the way. The name is unique. Relatively unknown.” She flushed. “My mom was a Greek scholar. She wrote a paper on Zagreus. I chose the name for her.”

  He frowned. Was this mission personal for her, in a way she hadn’t told him? “Does Lubanga have anything to do with your family?”

  Her eyes widened. “No. The CIA wouldn’t allow that. It just…was meant to be a reminder of why I do this shitty job. Both my parents were scholars. My dad studied Vikings—hence my name. Dad named me. Mom named my brother, Apollo. But there’s no connection between my parents and this mission.”

  She had a brother. Parents. It shouldn’t surprise him, but still, it did. She seemed so very alone. As if she’d sprung to life from foamy waves, like Aphrodite. “What happened to them? Why do you do this shitty job?”

  She shook her head. He knew she’d refuse to answer, but it had been worth a try.

  “So we’re compromised.” He rose from the bed. “What do we do now?”

  “I need to go through the files, to be certain. But you need to leave Tanzania. Head back to Kenya, or catch a flight from Dar back to Djibouti.”

  “We,” he said. “We leave together.”

  “I can’t leave.”

  “Why not?”

  She held his gaze for a long moment. Finally, she said, “It depends on what I find in the files, but…for now, officially, my mission isn’t complete.”

  “Your mission was to get the files from Lubanga. You did that.”

  Her jaw tightened. Her eyes flared with…remorse?

  His stomach clenched. “What haven’t you told me, Savvy?”

  “I’m sorry, Cal. The mission changed after I first recruited you. I didn’t know about the change until Seth and Harry arrived. Then Harry—”

  “Skip the excuses and get to the fucking point.”

  “Lubanga’s rise in power is a threat to the stability of DRC. The US wants him removed as a player.”

  “Removed how?”

  “I was ordered to kill him.”

  13

  Cal fixed Savannah James with a hard glare as his stomach churned. The mission was assassination, and she hadn’t bothered to give him a heads-up at any time in the days they’d been traveling together? Anger struck him mute, but in his head, he was yelling.

  He turned, looking for something to punch or kick, but this was a rental. Safe. If their hosts heard the sound of furniture breaking or him shouting at the conniving woman he’d just spent the night screwing, they’d be out on their asses.

  His hands shook with the desire to punch something. He finally managed to speak, the words came out low with restrained anger. “Why. The fuck. Didn’t you. Tell me?”

  She took a step forward, as if she would touch him. He flinched and stepped back.

  Her eyes widened with alarm, as if she thought he might hit her.

  That caused his anger to ratchet up higher. He’d been gutted by the need to hit her last night, and she knew it. He would never lose control like that for real. That had been Mani, a character she created and he had to inhabit. He breathed deeply through his nose, containing the anger. Releasing it in slow, even breaths.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I…I didn’t tell you because if you’d refused the mission, Harry would’ve been sent in your place.”

  He understood why she couldn’t work with Harry, but that didn’t excuse not telling him. Not giving him a choice in this. “If we’re caught, the US will disavow us. My years of military service would mean nothing. My family would be told I was a traitor. They’d tell my mother I was here to cut a deal to traffic in Congolese diamonds. Do you know how many family members she lost in the wars? It would gut her to think one of her sons had joined the men who are raping her homeland.”

  “My plan was to send you back to Camp Citron before I killed him. You can still go. This is my mission. Not yours.”

  “Did you plan to kill Lubanga last night?”

  “No. My orders were to kill him, but I wanted to get his hard drive first.”

  He took a step back. “Copying the hard drive wasn’t your mission? We risked ourselves for…nothing?”

  “Not nothing! My original mission was to copy the drive. When Seth changed the mission, I decided to do both. I mean, how could we pass up the opportunity for this kind of intel? And the original order wasn’t rescinded. Once he’s taken out, someone else is bound to step in to run his operation. We need to know all the players. How they operate. So I made the call. Data first. Then I planned to send you back to Camp Citron and do what the CIA ordered me to do.”

  “Lying comes so easy to you, doesn’t it?”

  She blanched. “I lie for my job, but I’m not lying now.” Her eyes teared. “I was trying to protect you. If you didn’t know about the kill order, you’d have no problem denying it.”

  He doubted her tears were real. Was anything that had passed between them these last few days real?

  Had last night been real?

  “So you didn’t tell me because Harry would rape you. Fine I can accept that. But you continued not telling me to protect me? I’m calling bullshit. You were protecting yourself and no one else.”

  “At first, I was protecting myself, yes. And it made sense not to tell you until we got the invite to the party, because if we didn’t get in, your role would’ve been moot. But then we were in, and I…couldn’t risk you in that way. If the power wasn’t out, if we hadn’t been compromised by someone in the CIA, I’d be driving you to the airport already.”

  For some reason, the idea that she’d expected him to just abandon her while she returned to the lion’s den made him even angrier. She hadn’t trusted him with any aspect of this mission. “But now we’re compromised, and flying out of here under the name Mani Kalenga or Cassius Callahan could be dangerous. We don’t know what they know about me.”

  “Yes.”

  “So I’m stuck here. With you. And if we’re found—which is more and more likely because we’ve be
en fucking compromised—I will be disavowed right along with you. You took me on a black op mission without informing me it’s a black op.”

  She nodded. “You deserved a choice in this. I’m sorry. I hate myself for not seeing this coming and not warning you.”

  “That makes two of us.”

  She flinched, and a tear fell. “I was afraid to be here with Harry. He would have raped me. Again. And I never would have been able to report it, because it would be part of the mission. No one at Langley would do a damn thing about it.”

  “Did it ever occur to you that you could refuse the mission? Send Harry to do the hit and stay at Camp Citron?”

  “I couldn’t. He’d fuck it up. He doesn’t know what Lubanga’s capable of. Plus, I wanted to do it for Zola.”

  “Who is Zola?”

  “She’s Lubanga’s daughter. A refugee who settled in Ethiopia.” Savvy went on to tell a horrific story of rape and murder of young sisters, making their impossible situation even uglier.

  Dammit. Savvy had a point. He wanted Lubanga taken down, but that didn’t excuse her failure to share the nature of their mission. “I always knew you were willing to burn anyone at anytime, if it got you what you were after. I feared you’d do it to me. I just didn’t expect it to happen before the op even started.”

  He ran his hand over his face. His beard was fuller than he liked—per her specifications. He wasn’t even comfortable in his own facial hair. “How can I even believe you had no plans to kill Lubanga last night?”

  “I wasn’t going to do it until after you were gone. I swear.”

  “One thing about being a professional liar, Savvy, is that when you say things like ‘I swear,’ no one believes you.”

  “I lie for the mission. I lie to people like Anton and Jean Paul Lubanga. But I don’t, and haven’t, lied to you.”

  He raised a brow. “Really? So you told me this was a black op days ago, and I didn’t notice?”

  “That wasn’t a lie. It was an omission.”

  “From where I’m standing—compromised and stuck in Tanzania—that feels like the same damn thing.” The anger that filled him was dangerously close to bubbling over. Jesus. He’d made love to her, repeatedly. He’d begun to think maybe he wanted more with her.

  He’d believed he’d been wrong about her for all those months, but his suspicion had been spot-on. “How do you plan to kill him?”

  “I don’t know. I’d hoped he’d take me on as a mistress, but he never looked at me twice. The guard who found me in Lubanga’s quarters said Lubanga doesn’t sleep with whores. Given his lack of interest in the sex show, I’m inclined to agree. Maybe I’ll show up on the boat and offer myself to Gorev. Say I ditched you because you were too rough with me. I’ll figure something out that leaves you out of it.”

  His stomach clenched at the idea of her showing up on that boat again as a sacrifice to Gorev. “You’d have to fuck him if you wanted to stay around long enough to off Lubanga.”

  She shrugged. “Not my favorite plan, but I’m prepared to follow through.”

  “Is that what last night was about? Were you hoping to soften me up for when the truth came out? Was fucking me part of the job too?”

  She flinched as if he’d struck her. “You’re an asshole.”

  He couldn’t deny that. And God, the way she’d flinched. Last night, she’d tried to crawl away from him after he’d backhanded her, and he’d picked her up by her hair. In the middle of the night, he’d held her close and breathed in the scent of that same freshly washed hair.

  “So what happens now? I won’t help you kill him. I’m not a murderer.”

  “I’m not a murderer either. And you’ve killed far more men than I have for Uncle Sam.”

  “In battle. With rules of engagement.”

  “You’ve raided compounds and killed. How is sneaking up on mercs in the middle of the night and slitting their throats any different? Lubanga deals in children and drugs. His legal business—managing mining claims—pays him millions each year in kickbacks and who knows what else. He’s earned what’s coming to him.”

  “And you’re his judge and jury?”

  “No. I’m his executioner. The judge and jury are the US government. Kill orders are never given lightly, and they always come from the top. It’s not my job to question the order, any more than you question yours from SOCOM.”

  “Have you ever assassinated someone before?”

  He didn’t expect an answer. She would say it was classified and leave it at that. But she surprised him and said, “No. I’ve killed in self-defense. Once. I’ve never been given a black op assignment like this before.”

  “How did you receive this order? What’s the protocol?”

  She rubbed her arms. “It was verbal. From Seth. It’s why he flew out to Djibouti. He had a good excuse with the need to pat me on the back for the work with Drugov. Perfect cover for delivering the order—and bringing a covert partner.”

  “Seth gave you the order. And you didn’t confirm it with anyone else?”

  She glared at him. “I exchanged a coded communication with Langley before we left Camp Citron. I’m not a fool.”

  “But it was coded. So it didn’t say, ‘kill Lubanga’ outright.”

  “What’s your point?” she said. Her tears were now gone as she argued with him.

  “My point is that dear old Seth set you up to go on your first assassination mission with a man who raped you. He’s CIA, so he sure as hell could have set it up for you to get confirmation of the kill order that he conveniently delivered himself. I’m saying that you saw Lubanga’s code name on the asshole’s computer. This op was compromised by the CIA, and a smart operator should be looking at her boss and wondering why he set her up.”

  Savvy wasted no time and ran straight for the toilet, where she lost the contents of her stomach. But she hadn’t eaten since before the party last night, so there wasn’t much to lose.

  She slumped against the wall, wiping the sweat from her forehead.

  She wanted to deny Cal’s suspicion, but she couldn’t. There’d been something off about Seth’s sudden arrival. And the fact that he’d brought Harry with him…that had turned her cold. When Harry had been transferred to Seth’s unit, she’d thought he’d finally do something about the rape she’d reported years before. But instead, he’d promised she’d never have to work with Harry on a covert op. Then he broke that promise by bringing the man to Djibouti.

  She’d be here with Harry right now if not for Cal. She owed him so much, and he hated her now. Again.

  Stomach empty, all she had left were tears. She gave herself over to them, crying more for Cal’s loathing than for Seth’s betrayal. Grief over Seth’s betrayal would hit her later, she knew. But right now, she was falling in love with Cassius, and she’d duped him. She’d risked his life and reputation to save herself. He’d never forgive her. Why should he? She’d done nothing to deserve forgiveness.

  She rose from the bathroom floor after mopping her face and wiping her nose with toilet paper. She needed to get her shit together and figure out what was going on. She and Cal were in a lot of trouble. It didn’t matter how he felt about her, they had to work together so they could go back to Camp Citron. Once there, he could go home and she…she could figure out if she was still working for the CIA.

  They’d never see each other again.

  She stuffed the pain down. Later. She could fall apart in Djibouti, after Cal departed.

  She exited the bathroom to find the cottage empty. A note on the counter said Cal had gone to the store to stock up on groceries. Good plan. This house was safe and anonymous; they could—probably should—stay here for a few days.

  With Cal gone, she took a quick shower. The water was lukewarm after hours without power, but it was sweltering hot in the closed-up cottage, so the temperature was welcome.

  They could probably open the windows, but she opted for security over comfort. Bad enough that she and Cal were apart wh
ile he foraged for food. She dressed in yoga pants and a T-shirt, the first time she’d been able to dress comfortably in days, grateful she didn’t have to leave the cottage today.

  She pulled out her laptop, intending to start going through the files, and ground her teeth together when she realized the battery was dead. Fine. If she couldn’t go through Lubanga’s files, she would use a notepad and write down everything she knew about Seth Olsen and Harrison Evers.

  Cal sat in the sedan, holding the small satellite phone SOCOM had given him with instructions to keep it hidden from Savvy. After all, he was spying on her for SOCOM. They’d wanted to know why she had so much power—or autonomy—within the Directorate of Operations. Would SOCOM have wanted him to accept this mission if they’d known it was intended to be a hit?

  Maybe.

  Would he have done it?

  Maybe.

  Did it change how he felt about her omission?

  Not even a little bit.

  But right now, his real question remained: had the kill order really been issued from the top? This might not be a hit mission at all. At least, not a hit on Lubanga. What if Seth Olsen had sent Savvy here to be killed? Had that been why he’d chosen Harry as her partner? There was no doubt Harrison Evers rattled Savvy, throwing her off her game.

  And Lubanga knew his own code name. Damn, they needed to read that document. He should probably wait before making this call, but he doubted he’d be away from Savvy long enough to make a call after this, and he wasn’t ready to fess up and tell her he had a satellite phone. Especially not now.

  He decided to call Pax. Keep his questions off the record. Find out what his team knew about this little field trip with Savannah James.

  The image of her beneath him last night flashed in his mind. Her body wrapped around his as he thrust inside her. Shit.

  He shook his head against the memory. Hours ago, he’d been questioning if he wanted more than a fling. Stupid, stupid fool.

  He understood her reason for not telling him at first. Hell, he hadn’t even seen her until after he’d boarded the plane. There’d been no time to talk from the moment he’d punched Evers. But she could have told him in the hotel that first night. Had she really planned to send him back to Camp Citron to protect him?