Firestorm
Page 16
“No. Harrison Evers is a follower, not a leader. I think Seth is the one calling the shots.”
He brushed his lips over hers. “Then Seth Olsen is going to be very sorry. Nobody messes with what’s mine.”
The words were more than a little bit caveman, and ridiculous given that Savvy had saved herself without Cal lifting a finger, but they’d surged from that possessive place where, apparently, Savannah James had been residing for some months, even if he hadn’t wanted to admit it.
But even better, his cheap, juvenile words made her smile. He’d revert to one hundred percent caveman if it made her smile after the trauma she’d just suffered.
She kissed his cheek. “Thank you.”
“Lock the door behind me, and keep your phone and gun within hand’s reach of the shower. I’ll call before I enter the cottage.”
She nodded. Her lips brushed his. He kissed her back, the moment lasting longer than he intended. Outside, he took a deep breath of the muggy air. Shock, rage, fear, and protectiveness all vied for top emotion.
Had Evers raped her today? Not that the distinction mattered. Sure as hell she’d been violated even if the man hadn’t penetrated her.
He wished he’d beat the shit out of the asshole at Camp Citron when he had the chance. Hospitalized, Evers wouldn’t have been able to come after Savvy.
He walked through the gate and scanned the residential street, hitting the alarm button on the key chain. Silence. He figured Evers would park on the main road, where other cars were parked on the street, and headed in that direction. He got lucky and found Evers’s blue sedan parked between two other cars on the busier street. He drove it through the gate on the rental property, noting that the homeowner’s car wasn’t in the garage.
He hoped to hell everyone in the main house was out for the day and heard nothing that had gone on inside their small cottage. He called Savvy and warned her he was returning.
“’Kay. In the shower. Left a present for you in the living room.”
Inside, he found Evers’s body wrapped in the throw rug he’d died on. Savvy had bundled him up and cleaned the mess from the lamp and laptop destruction. All that was missing was a ribbon. He scooped up the rug and stowed the body in the trunk, grateful their landlord didn’t drive up while he was hiding a body and stealing their very nice rug. He’d leave a lot of money on the counter to pay for the loss of rug, lamp, and other damage.
Back inside the cottage, Savvy was out of the shower and getting dressed. She stepped into the main room as she pulled a clean shirt over her head. “I’ve been thinking. We can’t go to the airport here or take a train. People are probably scouting both already. Our best bet is to drive to the airport in Kigoma, on Lake Tanganyika. It’s a long drive, but no one will be looking for us there. You can charter a flight to Nairobi, and from there, you can fly back to Djibouti.”
He stiffened at that. “And where will you go?”
“Congo. Right before Harry showed up, I found a document that referenced Versailles, a subway, and June fifth. I’m wondering if it meant Versailles in the Jungle.”
“Mobutu’s palace,” Cal said. “The legendary ruins.”
“Yeah. Aren’t there tunnels under the palace? Maybe that’s what the word subway referred to.”
“I think so. I don’t know much about Mobutu’s Versailles.”
“I’m going to need a new computer, to download the files and see if I can find more info. But it’s a starting point. June fifth is just two days away.”
“You aren’t going into Congo alone,” Cal said. He opened his suitcase and grabbed a clean shirt. He’d gotten blood on him when he’d held her. This was the second shirt in two days he was abandoning due to being blood soaked. “We’ll get a computer, supplies for Congo, and hit the road.”
“After we dump Harry’s car somewhere.”
He nodded and grabbed the most easily portable food he’d purchased earlier. Bread, peanut butter, fruit. Protein bars. He loaded those and a few other items along with their suitcases into the back of their sedan.
Less than forty-five minutes after he found Savvy sitting beside Harry’s dead body, they were back on the road, Savvy driving their car, Cal driving Harry’s. It took another thirty minutes to reach the outskirts of the city. He drove the vehicle off the road, down a winding track that cut through savannah, and tucked it between trees so it would be hidden from the main road. This wasn’t a full-on wilderness area. There was plenty of traffic and human activity. The car and body could be found in a day or a month. Sooner if Harry had a tracker on his vehicle.
But they would be long gone even if it was found tonight.
Back in the sedan with Savvy, she moved to the passenger seat, and he took the wheel. “Use your phone to find us a sporting goods store,” he said.
“We’re going to play baseball?”
“Not that kind. If we’re going into Congo, we need to be prepared for anything. Outside of the bigger cities, there aren’t hotels or anything. We need a tent, sleeping pads. Basic survival gear.”
They found a shopping mall with both an electronics store and a store with outdoor gear. They loaded up on everything imaginable, paying cash with Gorev’s money. From there, they hit the road. Cal had looked up the route on his GPS. They had at least a twenty-one-hour drive ahead of them, which they’d do in shifts without stopping for more than short rest breaks.
An hour passed before they were far enough from the city that the tightness in Cal’s chest eased. He reached across the console and took Savvy’s hand in his. She glanced sideways and squeezed his fingers.
“I’m not sorry I killed him,” she said softly.
“I’m not either. But I am sorry I wasn’t there to help you.”
“I think he waited until you left. He wasn’t dumb enough to confront us both.” She squeezed his fingers again. “He didn’t rape me this time. He was about to, but I stopped him.”
“I’m glad. But I’m so damn sorry he ever got near you again. I shouldn’t have left. The fact that the document said he was in Dar should have tipped me off. It did actually—it’s why I came back early—but too late to help you.”
“The CIA is going to call it murder.”
“The fact that we didn’t call in and report what happened won’t look good.”
“But if I call—” She took a deep breath. “Seth sent Harry to kill me.” She released his hand. She made a low sound in her throat and murmured, “I wonder if Aunt Kim knows what he is.”
“Aunt Kim?”
“Seth’s wife.”
Shit. If she was “Aunt Kim” to Savvy… Seth’s betrayal would hurt her no matter what, but this cut even deeper than he’d imagined.
“I want you to go back to Camp Citron,” she said. “Harry wasn’t there for you. You aren’t in danger if you return.”
Her offer wasn’t much different from her plan to send him away while she killed the minister, but she needed his help. And he didn’t walk away from a teammate in need. Hell, how long would she have remained frozen in that living room if he hadn’t been there? And who knew what she’d face in DRC?
“You don’t speak Lingala,” he said.
She shrugged. “I’ll find someone who can. I’ve got money. Lots of it.”
He again remembered Drugov’s half billion. No. She hadn’t taken the money. He didn’t believe it. Would never believe it. Savvy had been set up.
But for some reason, her desire to send him packing made his anger spike. “Sweetheart, you think you can replace me that easily?”
“Of course not. But if anything happens to you—I—I wouldn’t be able to live with myself. This is my fault. My problem. It has nothing to do with you. I roped you in because I needed a Lingala speaker. But this isn’t about you. Go back to Camp Citron. Rejoin your team. Finish your deployment and have a good life. I’m releasing you from this mission.”
“You can’t do that.”
“Actually, I can. This is my op.”
She frowned at him, then said, “Eyes on the road, Callahan.”
He turned back to the roadway, seeing a curve up ahead. He should pull over for this conversation because he wanted to see her face, but they had too many miles to cover to waste time with arguing by the side of the road. “I didn’t take this mission because you asked for me.”
She crossed her arms. “Oh, really?”
“Really. My XO ordered me to accept it. SOCOM wants to know how you appeared to have so much autonomy and power. They wanted me to find out where some of your intel is coming from. You said the Yemen op a year ago was a success when it was a failure for my team. Hell, it caused a rift between Pax and Bastian that took a crisis for them to get past.”
“Yemen happened before I was sent to Camp Citron. I had nothing to do with it.”
He shrugged. “Your predecessor also had unusual autonomy. I think SOCOM is as interested in you as in your chain of command.” He cleared his throat and added a suspicion his commanders hadn’t suggested, but which was now very much on the radar. “SOCOM also wants to know if you’ve been pocketing the petty cash used to pay informants. They ordered me to accept this mission so I could spy on you and report back.”
“Did they order you to fuck me to get me to spill my secrets?”
“No!”
She let out a soft laugh. “It would only be fair if they did, considering I asked Bastian to do just that with Brie.”
“I didn’t sleep with you because of orders from SOCOM.”
“Then why did you sleep with me?”
He tightened his hands on the steering wheel. “Because I wanted to.” Lord, how he’d wanted to. And he wanted to again. He’d been right all along about sex with Savvy only making the heat between them worse. Far from getting her out of his system, now that he’d had a taste, he just wanted more. Which was twice as shitty, considering what she’d gone through today.
“And now?”
“What I want now is irrelevant.”
“You know,” she said, “I could call you a hypocrite for being pissed at me for not being forthcoming about the change in the mission, when the only reason you’re here is because you were spying on me.”
He nodded. That was fair.
“Why are you still with me? You can leave. Go back to Camp Citron.”
“I just told you, I have orders. Lubanga might be your mission, but you are mine.”
“And any modicum of power I held within the CIA is gone now. I just killed a coworker, and my mentor—a man who was a father figure to me—is almost certainly the one who set me up and betrayed me. My career is over. There is no reason for SOCOM to want anything from me now. Leaving won’t violate your orders.”
“I’m not leaving you, Freya.”
“Don’t call me that.”
“Why not? You’ve been compromised. Your real name is on the list. Maybe if you tried being Freya, we can figure out a way out of this mess.”
“There is no ‘we’ in this mess. It’s all me.” She tucked herself into the door, moving as far away from him as she could. “You want to know why my alias is Savannah?”
“A name you obviously don’t like? Yeah.”
“Because Harry raped me in a hotel room in Savannah, Georgia. And Seth said I needed to use the experience to make me stronger. A little slice of ‘that which doesn’t kill you’ bullshit, but the real shit of it is, I believed him. He told me I was going to be Savannah James—Savannah because the name would remind me that I was on my own and no one has my back, and James for my Uncle James, a case officer who died in the line of duty, to remind me of honor, sacrifice, and the danger of the job. And I believed his bull crap about needing the name Savannah to make me stronger. When really, it was a nasty move to keep me in my place. To make me remember every damn day that the CIA owned everything about me, even my ability to say ‘no.’ Want to know what Harry’s last words were?”
Cal was afraid to ask, but she needed to tell this story, so he had to listen. “Tell me.”
“He said, ‘You’re no good if you can’t be controlled. So now I will end you as I fuck you.’ He and Seth were in on the emotional torment together. Every time he called me Savannah, he gave it a nasty edge to make sure I knew he was aware of what the name meant. It was a mind fuck from the man who raped me and the man who was the only ‘family’ that came to my college graduation.”
“You’ve known Seth Olsen that long?”
“I interned with the CIA as an undergrad. Seth basically recruited me when I was nineteen.” She rested her forehead on her closed hands. “So I’m well aware of exactly how alone I am in the world, and how screwed I am, and I want you to go back to Camp Citron and resume your happy life with your buddies who all hate me for no other reason than I’m dedicated to my job. Let me handle this my way.”
Cal pulled over to the side of the road. They were way past the point of him being able to drive and listen, let alone talk to her. “Pax and Bastian don’t hate you.”
She shrugged. “Two men out of twelve don’t hate me. Lucky me.”
“I don’t hate you.”
“Right. You said you hate me this morning.”
“I did not.”
“I said I hated myself for not warning you, and you said, ‘That makes two of us.’”
“I was angry. Jesus, I’d just found out you’d withheld a vital piece of information about our mission from me.”
“My mission. This is my mission. Not yours.”
“Why are you working so hard to drive me away?”
“Because I don’t want you to get burned too. I’m destroyed, Cal. There is no way out of this where I come out exonerated. I killed a fellow agent.”
“He assaulted you. Twice. Three times.”
“Yeah, and the only person who can corroborate my account of the rape five years ago is Seth. He can change the story he gave Captain O’Leary, claiming I must’ve lied to him. You know how it will be twisted. They’ll claim I set Harry up. And you…you won’t come out of this well either. You back me, and they’ll gut you. You’ll be off your Special Forces team. Who knows what they’ll implicate you with? You don’t need to burn with me.”
He could tell her he was already implicated, but that would only bolster her argument. If she knew about the stolen Russian money, she’d push him away for sure.
He took her hand and pulled it to his chest. “I’m not going anywhere, Freya, not without you. We’re in this together, to the bitter end. But I need a promise from you.”
She looked at him as if to say he wasn’t in a position to be cutting deals, but he was. Because she didn’t want him to leave. Hell, she needed him.
And not just because he spoke Lingala.
She needed a partner. Someone who would have her back. Nothing quite like helping hide a body to hit home the danger she’d been in. If she’d left Camp Citron with Harrison Evers, she’d probably have been dead before they reached Dar es Salaam. He’d come full circle and was now grateful she’d lied so he’d accept the mission.
“What’s the promise?” she asked.
“Promise you’ll look for a way out of this that doesn’t sacrifice you. Promise you won’t give up. That you’ll fight for this.”
“Of course,” she said, her brow furrowed in confusion. “Why do you think I won’t do everything I can to survive?”
“Because you’re trying to get rid of your best asset—a fluent Lingala speaker who knows the players and the lay of the land. I’ve been to Congo. I’m Special Forces. Munitions expert. Better than average sniper.” He smiled, unable to stop himself from making a joke. “Brilliant in the sack.”
She rewarded him with a laugh.
Emotion hit him in the gut. He could still make her laugh, after the shit she’d just gone through. That meant something. He cleared his throat and got serious. “Pushing me away is a surefire way to sabotage your mission. So why do you want to get r
id of me?”
She dropped her gaze to her feet in the well under the dash. “Because if you leave now—because I told you to go—it will hurt a lot less than being abandoned later.”
He placed a finger under her chin and lifted her face to meet his gaze. “I will never abandon you.” He leaned in and kissed her. He wouldn’t shy away from the change in their partnership. He didn’t know if they’d continue as lovers, but he wouldn’t pretend it didn’t happen.
He pulled back and looked into her eyes. He saw a vulnerability that she usually masked, but then, it would be worse if she slipped into her role of Savannah James after all that had happened in the last twenty-four hours.
The bruise on her cheek had already reached the purple stage. They’d gotten looks at both the electronics and sporting goods store. He ran his fingertips lightly over the ridge of the welt, careful not to press on the swollen, purple skin. She had cuts on her back too. Before leaving the cottage, he’d put antibiotic ointment on and bandaged three shallow cuts. And then there was the slash across her palm that bisected her life line. He’d glued it closed and wrapped it in gauze.
Her full lips twitched as he catalogued her injuries. “You should see the other guy.”
His eyes widened as her meaning sank in, and he couldn’t help it, he laughed. He shook his head and leaned in and kissed her again, quick, lips only, then leaned his forehead to hers. “Note to self: don’t mess with Freya Lange.”
“I’m scared, Cassius.” Her voice was soft. Low. A tone he’d never heard from the confident and wildly skilled SAD operator.
“So am I,” he admitted. He wasn’t afraid of Lubanga, Gorev, or even Seth Olsen. He was scared Freya—the woman inside the operator—would somehow be lost forever in the coming struggle. “We can do this. We’re going to win this battle. Win this war. Together.”
She kissed his cheek and leaned back. “Thank you.”
His heart squeezed at the look she gave him. It was unlike any expression Savannah James wore.
Cassius Callahan, meet Freya Lange.
The name Freya hadn’t fit her in his mind when he first heard it, but now it was becoming how he thought of her. He could see the persona and discern the edges where Savannah ended and Freya began.