Agent Out

by Francine Pascal

  But still, it was Catherine who was missing the big picture here. Because Gaia wasn’t about to be recruited for any kind of Socorro D-day. All she was thinking about was how to get that gun from Catherine’s hands and get her ass under arrest and back to Quantico.

  “Gaia, you’ve got to help us break Nino out of that courthouse,” Catherine declared. “This is the day. His parole hearing. You need to help us create chaos in that courthouse and then lead him back here through those water tunnels….”

  The longer Catherine babbled about her ludicrous agenda, the more Gaia noticed that she didn’t have quite the same discipline with the handgun as her father did. She wasn’t pointing the gun at Gaia quite as relentlessly—in fact, she seemed not to be paying much attention to the gun at all. Gaia inched a step closer, feeling the adrenaline start to rush through her veins at full speed.

  “With Ramon free and with Dad and you joining us, Gaia, we’ll be unstoppable,” Catherine continued. “Can’t you see that?”

  “No,” Gaia snapped. “No, I don’t see that happening.”

  “Don’t say that, Gaia,” Catherine warned. “Please say you’ll do this. I told him I could get you to do this voluntarily, but if I can’t, they will use force, and I don’t want see that happen. I need you to see it now, okay? You’re perfect for us. You’re brilliant, a devastating fighter, a born leader—and you’re just like me—you hate rules and authority. You’ve got to follow the beat of a different drummer. Believe me, when you hear what Nino has to say, it will all make sense to you—rebellion’s in your blood, Gaia. And that’s why you’ll be a great freedom fighter—a natural Socorro soldier.”

  The door was opening, and through its aperture Gaia could hear a crowd of people moving to enter the room. Catherine heard it, too—her attention was pulled marginally away from Gaia, and her father’s Beretta slipped farther downward.

  This was Gaia’s moment and she knew it. Not just the moment to escape this nightmare—but the moment to exact some revenge for everything Catherine had put her through.

  In the blink of an eye Gaia leaped forward and dove into the air, aiming a swift downward kick at Catherine’s gun hand. Catherine was fast, raising the gun and firing, but not fast enough—the bullet blasted downward, ricocheting loudly off the concrete floor and smacking into the concrete wall back out in the tunnel. The gun clattered to the cement floor and slid far away to one side. Gaia landed, spun, and aimed another kick, but Catherine had suddenly stabbed out her own fist for a block, knocking Gaia off balance.

  Catherine was a much better fighter than Gaia had ever realized. She had obviously been hiding her strength and her skill since the day they’d met—the day that, Gaia remembered, Catherine had fallen off the obstacle course. She was extremely strong, and her moves were as precise and devastating as one would expect from a young terrorist who’d been receiving combat training from her father her entire life.

  Catherine slammed a karate chop into Gaia’s shoulder, and the searing pain distracted her while Catherine spun around and aimed a kick at Gaia’s solar plexus. Gaia lost her breath completely, slamming to the floor, seeing red. Ignoring the pain in her bruised abdomen, she reached out from her position on the floor and grabbed Catherine’s foot, twisting it to bring her down. Behind Catherine, Gaia could see that Marsh and several Socorro henchmen had re-entered the room—James Rossiter was among them. Once Catherine hit the floor, the five henchmen from before came forward and Gaia, her lungs burning, gasping for breath, barely had time to get to her feet before the men closed in and she was fighting all six of them.

  And right then Gaia finally let all of her anger take over completely. Her entire hellish journey flashed through her head in an instant—the midnight drive, the horror of Catherine’s hairs on Rossiter’s basement cot, the agents chasing her down, the day spent on the run with Marsh, poor Will potentially throwing away his entire career for her and for this mad chase … and all of it for nothing. For terrorist traitor who obviously had a screw loose.

  Gaia let go of the last vestiges of her restraint and went into a near transcendent state of combat. She unleashed a series of moves so quick that even she wasn’t altogether conscious of her combinations. Offense melded together with defense as she tore into Catherine and the five men. The moves were like a complex chess game at high speed, and she was seconds from prevailing, beating them all, when suddenly—

  Click.

  Gaia wasn’t sure how she knew—how she recognized the sound instantly and what it meant and how it sent a chill through her body so complete that she stopped moving, her leg poised to kick one of the henchmen in the side of the head, and turned toward the quiet, deadly sound she’d heard.

  James Rossiter stood with a gun held to the head of a figure kneeling on the floor.

  It was Will.

  He was poised there, halfway out from the crate he’d been hiding behind, and Rossiter was right behind him, his hand clamped on Will’s shoulder, holding a .45 Magnum pistol against Will’s head.

  “Stop,” Rossiter ordered Gaia.

  Will—!

  Will locked his eyes with Gaia’s, telegraphing all his frustration, regret, and remorse in one ironic crooked smile. “Turns out I followed you anyway,” he said. “I couldn’t leave a lady in distress. Guess it didn’t work out so well.”

  “It didn’t,” Rossiter agreed, the lights glinting off his yellowing teeth as he stared at her. Gaia could see the gun’s cylinder moving as Rossiter began to squeeze the trigger. “Get your hands behind your back, Gaia. I got no problem blowing a hole in your boyfriend’s head.”

  “Don’t listen to him, Gaia,” Will said easily. “We can take them.”

  No, Gaia thought. No, no, no.

  Not again.

  If there was one lesson she’d learned, and learned harder than anything else she’d learned in her whole, strange, sad, violent life, it was this one.

  I won’t do it, she told Will with her eyes. She couldn’t tell—maybe he understood. I can’t take the chance of losing you, and I won’t let you take it either. I cant let you try to be a hero here. That’s how I lost Jake, and it nearly killed me.

  Slowly, making no sudden moves, Gaia lowered her suspended leg and placed her hands behind her back.

  Giving up.

  “What—? Gaia, no!”

  Will sounded furious as Rossiter roughly pulled him to his feet. Gaia felt the Socorro henchmen roughly pushing her forward and pulling her hands behind her back. She let them do it. She had nearly gone limp.

  “Good,” Catherine said, looking Gaia in the eye from up close. “Smart move, Gaia. Very smart. I knew you had it in you.”

  Gaia stared right back at Catherine. She didn’t say a word.

  “All right—let’s get these two locked up,” Marsh ordered the henchmen, clapping. “Once you’ve done that, go back to preparing the weapons.”

  The henchmen started leading Will and Gaia out of the room toward the metal doors.

  “Back to work, people,” Catherine called out. “Today we finally see some justice. Today Nino goes free. El Dia has begun. And they don’t see it coming.”

  002

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  “Our time is at hand! The liberation is near!”

  Winston Marsh was standing at the front of the makeshift bunker three stories below the streets of Philadelphia, speaking to his assembled players. His daughter, Catherine Sanders, stood to his left, her eyes lit up with pride as she gazed at him. Before him stood six henchmen of various shapes, sizes, and ages, all of them well trained in weapons and hand-to-hand combat. And all of them unquestionably loyal.

  “Comrades, all of your faith and hard work is about to pay off,” Marsh continued. “In a couple of hours our leader will be with us once again!”

  A cheer rose up among the group, and Catherine clapped lou
dly. In all the weeks Gaia had roomed with Catherine at the FBI training facility at Quantico, she had never seen her look quite so happy—or quite so brainwashed.

  “I still can’t believe Catherine is part of this,” Will mumbled.

  They sat slouched against a rough-hewn wall in the back of the room, watching Marsh’s pep rally. Both were stripped of their guns and their hands were bound tightly behind their backs.

  “It’s surreal,” Will went on. “She and her dad are terrorists, Gaia. If she infiltrated the academy, who knows how many more of them there are.”

  “Who knows if we’ll be alive to find out,” Gaia said sternly. It was awful, but it was true. Believing her roommate was in danger, Gaia had actually left base without permission, trekked across three states, tangled with FBI agents on her tail, and broke other various laws and regulations in an effort to find her friend. And she found her. Here. With her psycho daddy and his pet gunmen. Ready to carry out an insurgent kidnapping plot they’d been planning for months, and they’d been expecting her to help them out somehow.

  And the worst of it was, they might kill her and Will if she refused to cooperate.

  “We’ve got to get out of here,” Will whispered.

  Gaia could hear the half-cloaked fear in Will’s voice. It enraged her that she’d dragged him into this. She’d deserved to fall into their trap, but not him. He’d only been trying to help her. She closed her eyes and remembered the look of stunned terror on his face as he shuffled into the room with Marsh’s gun pointed at his head. An all-too-familiar clod of grief welled up in her throat.

  It was like Jake all over again. Her worst nightmare, part two.

  Jake … It was hard to picture her former boyfriend the way he’d usually been: smiling and cocksure. Instead she could only picture him the way he’d looked in his last few minutes of life: gasping and blood soaked, staring at her urgently, his broad chest torn to shreds.

  Not again, she thought. It wasn’t so much a lamentation as it was an order—to herself. It will not happen again! She was being given another chance to save someone she cared deeply about. And this time she wouldn’t blow it.

  “Can you get your hands free?” Will asked.

  “No.” She’d been trying for the last hour, but it was no use. Marsh’s henchmen must have roped cattle in their previous lives. Her main concern now was to catch them off guard and overpower them.

  “What are you guys doing over there?”

  It was James Rossiter, Marsh’s favorite go-to guy—and Gaia’s least favorite of the thugs. She noticed he’d tried desperately to squeeze his paunch into the standard-issue fatigues the others had on, but they looked more like a mottled potato sack on his stocky frame. Yet even though Rossiter wasn’t as lean and athletic as the others, he was still a force to be reckoned with. Her throat probably still had marks from their brutal tangle two days earlier.

  Rossiter lumbered over and glared down at Gaia. “You know, I’d get some real pleasure from gagging you.”

  “Is there a problem?” Marsh called from the front of the room. He seemed slightly perturbed that his speech had been interrupted.

  “These two were whispering,” Rossiter explained.

  Marsh smiled slickly. He lifted his gun and stalked over to Gaia and Will. Catherine followed him. “It’s okay, Jimmy, I’ll handle it. You and your team need to get ready. You leave for the courthouse in a few minutes.”

  Rossiter grunted his assent and after a final glower at Gaia walked off to join three other thugs in the corner.

  “Don’t make me use this, Miss Moore,” Marsh said, waggling his hand with the gun in it so that the tip of the barrel made a spiraling motion over Will’s skull.

  “Dad, why are you threatening him?” Catherine asked, staring at Will with conflicted eyes. “There’s nothing he can do to stand in our way.”

  “I disagree,” Marsh replied. He paced back and forth in front of Will, looking him over intensely as if he was the target of a stakeout. “He made it this far, didn’t he? We may have to neutralize him if we want to ensure our mission gets carried out without further interruption.”

  “But if keep him alive, we can coerce Gaia into doing what we instruct,” Catherine replied.

  Suddenly the girl did something really weird, something that Gaia thought she’d imagined. Catherine winked at her, as if to indicate that she was just trying to keep her father from blowing away an innocent person who was only out to save a friend—or, Gaia hoped, more than a friend.

  Catherine and I are more alike than I thought, she said to herself, a twinge of empathy running through her. She and Catherine were merely victims of their own upbringing. Instead of recruiting the perfect soldier, Marsh had tried to make one within his own genetic pool. She could only imagine what Catherine’s childhood must have been like. The lessons and drills. The repeated methods of indoctrination. To Gaia it represented what her own life would have been like had she been raised by her father. Then again, was she in any less danger now that her life was in her own hands?

  “Catherine, keep an eye on these two while I go over the details one last time with Jimmy,” Marsh instructed. “When I come back, I’ll have found something to shut them up with.”

  “Yes, sir,” Catherine said.

  Marsh gave his daughter a peck on the cheek and then stalked across the room to Rossiter.

  “I don’t know if I should thank you or end you,” Gaia grumbled.

  “I don’t think you’re in a position to do much of anything.” Catherine pointed her pistol directly at Gaia’s nose. Gaia could feel Will stiffen beside her.

  “But you are,” Gaia went on, ignoring the gun. She needed to appeal to Catherine’s good side. To try and make her see the irrationality of her actions. “It’s not your fault your dad is a psycho terrorist. You might think you have no choice in the matter, but you do.”

  “My dad is a great man.”

  Gaia rolled her eyes. “Then why is he out to hurt people?”

  “He’s out to help people,” Catherine said solemnly, and sat down on an overturned crate. “Besides, you and I both know that there are always casualties in war.”

  “War? What war? Just because he declares one doesn’t mean it exists. There are other ways he could get his point across. Peaceful, legal ways.”

  Gaia noticed that her words were flustering Catherine, but her ex-roommate still had a tight grip on the gun. “You don’t think we’ve tried that? We have! And it never works. Those corporate monsters hide behind red tape and politics to get whatever they want. It doesn’t do any good to go through proper channels when all those channels are owned or controlled by the people you’re fighting.”

  “That may be, but why become as bad as them? You don’t have to become a monster yourself.”

  Catherine shook her head. “God, you are so naive,” she said in a condescending tone that Gaia was sure Marsh had used on his daughter many, many times. “You think if there was any other way, we wouldn’t use it? Our people are suffering. We need to do something now, not wait years and years for the international courts to get their acts together. And the only thing those cold, bureaucratic bastards pay attention to is the bottom line. We can’t get them to be humanitarian, so we must get them to leave. And the only way they will leave is if it becomes too expensive for them to run their slave operations.”

  “So you ruin their property and kill personnel,” Gaia concluded for her.

  “Exactly. Soon they realize they will have to spend billions to secure their enterprises from our liberating forces, making it impossible to turn a profit. So they give up. They turn and run like babies.”

  Gaia stared at Catherine. There was something familiar about her wild-eyed expression, something that hit very close to home. Suddenly she realized who it reminded her of … her uncle Loki. He was always able to rationalize doing horrible acts in the name of a “greater good.” Using only words, he could twist the most abhorrent crime into something brave and valia
nt. In his mind he was prophetic, not psychotic—a harbinger of the future, not doom and despair. Catherine, it seemed, had a similar pair of rose-colored terrorist glasses.

  Which gave her an idea …

  Maybe this could end up working in our favor. If there was one positive thing about Gaia’s screwed-up childhood, it was that she got very good at dealing with people with twisted senses of reality. All she had to do was make Catherine think she was winning her over—not too easily, but enough to make her lower her defenses.

  It would require an Oscar-winning performance, but Gaia could do it. After all, it might be their only hope.

  HOG-TlED, OUTNUMBERED, OUTGUNNED

  Will kept staring at Gaia with equal parts awe and annoyance. It was unnerving to see her registering zero fear, despite the fact that they were in a place no one knew about surrounded by a handful of armed brutes. Not only did she seem all la-di-da about the whole trapped-in-terrorist-headquarters aspect of their situation, she was actually using this time to chat with Catherine as if they were at a slumber party.

  “Don’t mind me, y’all,” he said, slouching against the wall. “You gals just keep visiting. I’ll probably just take a nap.”

  He’d meant it half as a joke, to try and quell his rapid pulse, but also as a subtle hint to Gaia that she was wasting valuable time and energy.

  It didn’t work. After a quick glance in his direction, Gaia bowed her head toward Catherine again. “But there are humanitarian organizations that could help,” she said. “Why not go to them instead of taking matters in your own hands?”

  Will groaned and bumped his back against the wall. He was hungry, tired, frustrated as hell, and barely keeping his panic in check. And now his partner was more interested in debating world economics than preventing them from meeting a grisly death.