“But you did ignore it.”
He shot her a withering look. “The hell I did. But I wasn’t going to rush into anything, and I damn sure wasn’t going to grab the first plane to Panama City. I didn’t know what or who I was dealing with—if the information Felix said he’d left was still there, then it was still safe. I had time.” He rubbed a hand over his chin, along his jaw. “And then—”
“And then Colombia,” she said simply.
“Colombia,” he agreed, the wound still fresh and raw and vicious. “Look, Cooper, I don’t know what Felix found, or what’s in that box. But if I believe what Felix wrote in that letter—and I don’t have reason to doubt him—then six good men were murdered over what’s inside it. By our own government. By your goddamned employer.”
The accusation fell from his mouth like an anvil. Not that she’d killed them directly, that wasn’t what he meant, but that her people had. That she was guilty—or at least suspect—by association.
He had no idea.
“I know,” she admitted, the word little more than a breath of sound that carried the weight of a damning confession. Could he hear it, too?
“What do you know?”
“Everything.” About that day, at least. But it still wasn’t enough. Not by a long shot.
For a moment, he just stared at her. Didn’t move. Didn’t blink. Didn’t say anything. Just looked at her as if he didn’t know her, wasn’t sure what to make of her.
“I think you better start at the beginning.” He shoved a hand through his mop of damp, wavy hair. “The truth, Cooper. All of it. Or I swear to God I’ll walk out that door.”
He didn’t trust her, and worse, he suspected what she was going to say. Had already braced himself—with coiled muscles and cold looks—to hear it. To hate her. By the end of the conversation, he would.
She just had to make him understand that she wasn’t the enemy.
“You know that I enlisted in the army.” She fell into a quick pace to the door, then the bedroom, then back again, the entire journey less than thirty steps.
“I don’t see what that has to do—”
“You said start at the beginning,” she cut him off with a raised palm and a frustrated grunt. “So let me just . . . just let me tell it, okay?”
“Okay.”
She heaved out a breath. “You also know I was selected for sniper school.”
“I do,” Will offered quietly, tracking her as she moved across the room. “And that you were then recruited by the CIA.”
She nodded jerkily. “Right. I wasn’t a full agent, or anything—I spent most of my time deployed with my unit, but occasionally Cole and I—”
“Your spotter.”
“Right.” Her throat tried to close, but she forced words through it anyway. “We’d get a call, catch a helo . . .” She shrugged. “Might be gone a few days, a few months. We never knew.” And had never asked. There’d been no reason. It was the nature of the job. Receive orders and go. And for a while, it had been a thrill. A challenge. A constantly changing landscape with always-moving targets.
She’d just never expected to become one of them.
“You know how it is.”
“I do,” he acknowledged.
“Then, eighteen months ago, Cole and I got orders. Job seemed pretty normal.” Regrettable, but normal. She hadn’t gloried in taking out that unit, but she hadn’t questioned it, either. It wasn’t her place or her job to parse through intel. She was just the final result. The period at the end of the sentence that judged a man guilty and condemned him to death.
“But it wasn’t a typical assignment, was it?”
She stopped pacing. Shoved her fists into her pockets, then pulled them free again.
“I—” She searched for a lie or a half truth, something, anything that could fill the gaps without tipping the conversation in a direction she couldn’t hope to control. It was pointless, and she knew it. “I wouldn’t have any idea just how wrong it was until after. There weren’t any red flags. Cole and I were stateside one minute, overseas forty-eight hours later.” She tucked a chunk of hair behind her ear. “Intel was good. Comprehensive. Names. Photos. But there wasn’t much time. The job had to be handled . . . quietly.” Or at least as quietly as a sniper ever handled anything. Still, even that hadn’t been unusual. Everything the CIA did was quiet. “You know how it is. All hurry up and wait, and wait, and wait and then everything happens in a rush and before you know it, you’re stateside again, like you never left at all.”
“Spent half my career on standby,” he agreed.
Should she have seen something? Realized something was off? She’d looked back on that day often enough, and nothing ever stood out.
“Conditions were good on the ground,” she remembered. Mid-morning. A calm, windless day. Endless blue skies. Great visibility. She’d goaded Cole about being obsolete and redundant. Like an appendix she was forced to carry around but didn’t actually need. “Insertion was clean. I had direct line of sight, distance of two to three hundred meters. Easy.” She should have known. More often than not, the easy jobs turned out to be anything but. Cole used to call them black ice. One second everything was good, and the next, it had all gone sideways and the road was sliding out from under you.
“What changed?” Will asked.
“Nothing. We did the job then pulled back to rendezvous at the extraction point and go home. In and out again in twelve hours.” Had taking lives really been so easy for her? So clinical? She couldn’t remember a time that she’d ever even hesitated. Ever even thought about the gravity of what she was doing. What she was good at. Took pride in.
It was her job. Her calling. And just what the hell did that say about her?
“I did what I was supposed to do, what we’d planned. Orders were to keep everything neat. Clean. Take out the targets in the field and make it look like an operation gone wrong.” She swallowed back the rising tide of useless regret and forced herself to look him in the face as she finished. “Cole called out targets, and I took the shots. Worked my way through the mission systematically, efficiently.” If she closed her eyes, she could still feel the recoil of the rifle into her shoulder. A love tap and a high five all rolled into one. “Six targets. Six traitors double dealing in classified information. Or so the story went.”
“What were their names, Cooper?” Will ground out as he pieced it together, his face hardening and his fists clenching. “Do you even remember?”
She’d never forget, but she ignored him.
“Another team showed up to provide support.”
Like a butterfly knife opening then locking into position, Will stood, unfolding in one smooth, polished movement, ready for use, ready for battle. “Did you know I was there? That I’d been sent in to help men pinned down between enemy combatants and a fucking sniper?”
“Not at first. But . . .”
“But you saw me.”
“At a distance.” She’d missed a shot because of the shock of it. Déjà vu had numbed her hands and stilled her heart. She’d seen him through her scope once before. Tracked him through an operation for very different reasons. If that had been the only time, she might not have recognized Will at all. But he’d contacted her. Texted her. Called her. Sent her pictures from faraway places he’d visited on leave. She’d stared at them enough, searing them into memory, that she’d have recognized him anywhere.
Even in the middle of an operation.
Even when her mind-set was impersonal, engaged, and deadly.
“Suppose I should thank you for not blowing my head off,” he sneered at her.
“You weren’t on the list,” she said simply.
“Would it have mattered to you if I was?”
She wanted to say that yes, of course, it would have fucking mattered.
But she just couldn’t bring herself to lie to him.
“I don’t know,” she admitted. Truthfully, had Will been one of the named targets that day, it only cou
ld have gone two ways. Either there’d have been enough intel to bury him and she’d have done her damn job, or she’d have objected . . . and another team would have been called in to see it through.
Either way, Will would be dead.
“At least you have the decency to admit it.” His body relaxed, but his next words were a blow all the same. “Not that it did Jason any good.”
She sighed. Jason McCurdy—Cole had been forced to call the shot on him twice. Once as her scope had slid over Will’s face and she’d hesitated, then again when she’d forced herself to move away from him. To reengage with the job at hand.
Thirty seconds later, Jason moved, Cole called the location, and Cooper finished the job on sheer force of will. It was the kill she struggled with the most, though she couldn’t quite say why. Seeing Will hadn’t changed anything, and she’d had a job to do.
The shock had lasted the space of a breath, five slow beats of her heart, which had been loud in her ears. But after that, she hadn’t hesitated. Hadn’t even blinked. But it hadn’t been her best shot. Not by far. She’d caught McCurdy in the neck, rather than the head. It would have been fast, but not instant, and that kept her up at night.
“Jason was the last, wasn’t he?”
“Yeah. Six confirmed kills. Clean sweep. We packed up and got out.”
“Well, congratulations, Cooper. You got the job done, but you sure as fuck weren’t clean about it,” Will snapped. “Jason spent the last ninety seconds of his life staring at me from the ground as he choked on his own blood.”
“I know!” She’d seen the spray, watched him go down, and she’d known she’d fucked up. “I know, and I’m sorry, okay?”
“For what? Killing him? Or making a mess of it?”
“I. Didn’t. Know.”
“And you didn’t ask.”
“You wouldn’t have either!” she shouted. “People like us don’t have the luxury of questioning orders and demanding facts. We don’t need to know why.” It was, perhaps, the greatest lie she’d ever told herself . . . and the easiest one she’d ever believed. That it was all bullshit had been the hardest truth she’d ever confronted . . . and the most difficult realization she’d ever had to live with. “I put my faith in the system. In the idea that when I was given a mission, an order, a target, at the end of the day I was doing the right thing. Are you really going to stand there and say anything different? That you were any better?”
He opened his mouth to argue, then snapped it shut again.
“Fine. Just . . .” He sighed and flipped a hand in her direction. “Just finish it. What changed? When did you realize you’d been played?”
“Cole and I were debriefed in Germany. We made our reports, sat through the interviews.” She made a half-hearted attempt to lift a shoulder. “Flight out wasn’t until the next morning, though, so the agency put us up for the night.” Even after all this time, even with the scars embedded in her palms, it all seemed so surreal.
“I walked in and got my hands up a second after I saw the noose hanging from the beam that traversed the room. Caught the garrote against my palms.” She raised a palm, showing him the thick, white line that would never fade. “They’d wanted it to look like I’d hung myself. The attention to detail probably saved my life—and my fingers. The garrote was thick, needed to be if the bruises were going to match the rope. It cut deep when I fought but didn’t sever any nerves.” She pressed her hands flat against her jeans and rubbed away the sweat that felt too much like the memory of blood. “I got lucky. Got a boot up against the island and shoved him into the wall hard enough to slip loose.” Fear, remembered and distant, but potent all the same, slid through her. “All I could think was, ‘God, where’s Cole? Is he back yet? Already dead in the next room?’ I never expected to turn around and find him staring back at me.”
For a moment, Will went perfectly still. “He tried to kill you?”
“It was like he didn’t even recognize me,” she admitted. “There was nothing there. No acknowledgement. No remorse. Just this sort of blank determination to get the job done.”
“I’m sure he had his orders.”
She flinched as if he’d struck her, then responded in kind. “Low blow, Bennett, and fucking beneath you.”
He glanced away, and at least had the good grace to look ashamed.
“But you’re not wrong. I tried talking to Cole. Tried pleading with him. Nothing made a difference.”
“He was determined.”
“He was possessed.” Even then, even amid the terror and the betrayal and the bone-deep disbelief that had very nearly gotten her killed, she’d known something had been terribly, horribly wrong. “He didn’t say anything. Not one word. Not ‘this isn’t personal’ not ‘I’m sorry, Coop.’ Nothing. When I realized he’d really do it, that he was committed, that he’d beat me to death with his own fists . . .” She had to stop. Had to breathe. Had to fight back the memory of what it had felt like when she’d realized that between her and Cole it was kill or be killed . . . and she hadn’t wanted to die.
“I fought back.” The second she’d realized that only one of them was going to walk out of that apartment alive, training had kicked in and instinct had taken over. “I wasn’t armed and damn straight lucky he wasn’t either. But I knew I couldn’t beat him hand to hand. I grabbed the first thing I found—a marble rolling pin on one of the counters.” The crack of his skull echoed through her mind. “Caught him across the head. He went down. Didn’t move.”
Then she’d sat there, breathing through the disbelief and the pain. “Didn’t realize until later that Cole had broken my wrist, cracked four of my ribs, fractured my cheek.” She’d healed, but the hurt had remained. Even now, a year and a half later, the betrayal still seared like a white-hot flame. She’d never forget what his fists, his boots, had felt like.
She’d taken hits before. Worn bruises of both victory and failure.
But they’d never been put there by a friend.
“You killed Cole?” Will asked, his voice sad but his face closed.
“I thought so at the time.” She’d stood over him, every inch of her in agony, watched blood seep into the floor and held onto the shattered pieces of her sanity. Forced herself to act rather than fall apart. “I knew I couldn’t stay, and I didn’t dare report in.”
“You ran.”
“I did.” It hadn’t been easy. She hadn’t been lying when she’d told Will she’d been attached, more than recruited, to the CIA. She and Cole had been put through extensive field training, of course, but all suited toward their specialties and the roles they’d play within the CIA.
“How can you be sure Cole didn’t just turn on you? That they didn’t have some sort of leverage—”
“No,” she said viciously. “I know what our handler said. I know what happened in that room. And I know that Cole would cut his own hand off before he ever laid it against me.”
“He wouldn’t be the first guy to shut down emotionally to get the job done, Cooper—and you wouldn’t be the first to rationalize a trauma.”
“You don’t know him. He was my best friend. My spotter. My partner. I stood at his wedding. Was there when he christened his daughter. Cole was loyal to a fucking fault—it had gotten him into trouble before.” Which was how she knew, how she’d always known, that no matter what, Cole had her back. She’d just never expected the cost of that loyalty to be so goddamned high.
“I didn’t know the first thing about falling—and staying—off the grid. The learning curve was exhausting. The lessons, brutal. But once I got the hang of it, I started looking for answers. Chasing rumors.”
“What kinds of rumors?” he asked.
“Genome mapping. CRISPR. Genetic hacking.” She swallowed hard and went all in. “Mind control.”
“Bullshit.”
She laughed, but the sound came out strangled and broken. “God, how I wish it was. It was all so outlandish and terrifying and utterly outside the scope of anything I
could ever have dreamed up.” Exhaustion weighed her down, rooting her to the spot when all she really wanted to do was pace. “And anyway, I knew I couldn’t run forever, not from the CIA. I needed to know why they wanted me dead.”
“And you found something?”
She nodded. “Curtis Strauss.” Thanks to Pierce, though God only knew how he’d pulled it off.
“Am I supposed to know who that is?” Will scoffed.
“A program director with York Pharmaceuticals. Turns out, they have a number of classified contracts with the Department of Defense. He was in charge of one of them. He filled in a lot of the gaps.”
Will snorted. “And you expect me to believe that you, what, took his word for it? Do you even hear yourself?”
“Of course not,” she snapped. “He had files. Studies. A few names, though most were redacted.” She sighed and shoved a sweaty hand through her hair. “But when it was all spelled out in black and white . . . it became less insane and more terrifying with every page. Genotyping. Using drugs and viruses to target specific genes. To make changes.”
“What you’re talking about—it’s just not possible. Not on the individualized scale you’re talking about. It would take years just to map a single person’s genetic makeup, decades to manipulate more than a single gene.”
Cooper shrugged. “The files referenced some kind of super advanced predictive analysis algorithm that was being used to analyze, enhance, and predict war games and black ops. If the DoD was already using it in one area, it’s not a stretch to assume they were using it in another. That in the right hands it could be used to predict how someone’s genetics would react to drug protocols.”
Will went preternaturally still and silent. He watched her from the other side of the room, his face closed and his gaze calculating.
“Don’t play me, Cooper.”
“I’m not,” she said, willing him to believe her. “I have the files—”
“I’d rather speak to Curtis.”
She dropped her chin and shook her head. “You can’t.”
“Because he doesn’t exist?”
“Because he’s dead,” she snapped out, frustrated with his attitude, even though she’d expected it. “Two days after he passed off the files, he died in a ‘tragic’ car accident.”
Fearless (Somerton Security Book 3) Page 10