by S A Gardner
“Is this what you’ve been telling yourself? That it was all my fault?”
“Don’t put words into my mouth, Calista.”
“Chill, Sir Ashton. You wouldn’t be the first or last to think that. Hell, just this morning I was thinking the exact same thing myself in an unrelated situation.” I shook my head, brought myself back to this one. “But I only confessed to what I did.” What I am living to live down, I wanted to shout. “And that sure as hell wasn’t a crime.”
Another long-suffering sigh that made me see a deeper shade of crimson. “What would you call insubordination and causing the deaths of three teammates?”
“I call it doing my job. And I wasn’t a soldier, or a member of the team. I was a tagalong whose one job there was to save those villagers, and I wasn’t about to leave so many behind if I could do something about it. My plan was a gamble, but I judged that if it worked I might save them all. I admit I was out of line, but it was only my life I risked. I expected the others, who were soldiers, to do their own job, and get my patients and themselves the hell out, and leave me to live, or die, by my decision. It wasn’t even a possibility in my mind that they’d double back and engage the enemy. That I’d live, and they’d be the ones to die.”
I squinted against the glare of the declining sun, pretended it was the reason for the moistness I had to blink back.
I didn’t know what to make of Sir Ashton’s extended silence. This was the first time he’d heard my side of the story in my own words. He hadn’t been present during my interrogation and trial. Due to his personal involvement with me, he’d been barred from attending both.
Not that I’d said that much during either. This was the most I’d ever said of that catastrophe.
He finally sighed again. “The minutiae of the incident and your culpability in it could be debated ad infinitum, Calista.”
“Yeah.” Harsh resignation escaped my constricted lungs under pressure. “There’s no use in rehashing this. I did what I believed I had to do and was ready to take the consequences, death included. I knew I did have to be punished for the chain reaction I caused, understood everyone’s need to resolve the incident by getting rid of its perpetrator. I accepted being indicted by PACT, and getting kicked out of GCA. What I’ll never forgive was having my medical license revoked.”
A full minute passed, reverberating with the raggedness of my last sentence. With all the rage and loss that sentence had inflicted on me.
When he finally talked, that maddening forbearance was again dripping from his tone. “I thought you didn’t want to rehash this.”
Argh.
If only he’d been in front of me. I bet he hadn’t lost one hair of his shock of immaculate, iron-gray mane. One good smack to mess it up…
The image of him with mussed hair and indignant crimson cheeks worked wonders. It calmed me right down.
Enjoying the mental image, I let the vindictiveness twist my lips, seep into my voice. “I don’t. And I don’t need a license from some corruption-ridden establishment filled with blowhards like yourself to be a doctor. It’s what I am whether the system sanctions it or not.”
“So I hear. You’ve been involved in increasingly risky business, Calista. Rules are not all made to be broken.”
“Remember that memo about not being my father?”
His exhalation was filled with the reprimands he barely curbed. For now. That was all I needed. That he postponed any articulate objections to my methods till later. A later I’d make sure would never come.
But since it was clear he wasn’t giving me any useful info, would talk me round in ever-widening circles, I wanted this conversation over. I might still catch my supplier. Dad might still call.
“Listen. You win. As usual. So now you can trot along satisfied that track record of always getting your way remains untarnished.”
A mirthless huff singed my ears in its irony. “You think if I had my way, you would be doing what you do now?”
I pursed my lips over a ridiculous quiver. This implied that he cared, worried…
Nope. Not even letting this register on the spectrum of explanations.
“Always happy to disappoint you.” I laced my words with all the cold sarcasm and serene aggression I could. “And I take it back. I don’t want you to tell me anything. I’ll find out what I need to on my own. But since it was you who called, why don’t you just cut the crap and finally spit out the reason you did?”
“Very well.” Another disapproval radiating moment passed before he continued, his voice that of the supreme iceberg that he really was. “Even though I am no longer the head of GCA, I am calling you on their behalf.”
That silenced everything. My mind, my breathing, even my heart.
Then everything hurtled, zero to sixty. “You told them about me?”
“Of course not.” His negation lashed out like a whip. It said much about me, that I believed him at once. “They are only aware of your early vigilantism after you left the fold, have tried to trace you, to stop you. But they lost track of you since you finally organized your teams and Sanctuaries.”
“Due to my own protocols, or did you have something to do with it?”
The brief silence answered me. He’d had something to do with it. Somehow, he’d kept them off my trail.
Well, I’ll be damned.
When next he talked he didn’t even allude to my question. “But though they’re unaware of your current operations and capabilities, they have an urgent need that I believe only you are equipped to meet.”
My heart still clattering in my chest with the aborted dread of exposure, I snarled, “That sense of humor you had grafted is something else, isn’t it? As if I care what GCA need.”
“You might when you hear what that need is.”
“Whatever it is, I hope their very existence depends on it, cause I’ll help them with it right after hell holds the Winter Olympics. You should have known better than to consider me in something benefiting them, and I’m sorry you considered it reason enough to break a four-year silence. But no harm done. We can now resume the silence as if this conversation never happened. So, goodbye Sir Ashton. Can’t say it was nice hearing from you, since it sure as hell wasn’t. And do stop spying on me. Or helping me. Or whatever the hell you call the creepy you’ve been doing.”
Brushing aside my tirade, his voice was the epitome of pragmatic authority as he got to the point of his call. “A number of GCA operatives long believed dead have been found held hostage. I believe their best hope of being extracted alive rests with you and your team.”
Dammit. Two sentences. That was still all it took him to have me ready to sign on to anything. The canny puppeteer knew me too disturbingly well.
Not that he did only because he’d had a big hand in my creation. He had this super power of reading people down to their last whim, of steering them by their every spark of being. As the prototype of his life’s pet project, I suspected he new me down to my cellular level.
Sir Ashton never did anything that wouldn’t pay off. That was how he’d become a billionaire, among other varied and awe-inspiring achievements. He’d called me because he knew I lived for operations like this. And from his surveillance, he must also know they lay at the heart of my team’s mission statement.
But I was damned if I gave him the instant gratification of my curiosity and eagerness. Let him sweat it.
Yeah, sure. As if he had sweat glands like mere mortals. With a couple more sentences he’d probably have me asking how high when he said jump. Just like when he’d initiated Combat Doctors Program for GCA volunteers and had me pledging my soul for a chance to enlist.
After a pause calculated to mess up my wiring, his voice carried over the ultra-crisp connection, placid, inscrutable. “Before you declare an irrevocable no, and rush to change all your security protocols so I wouldn’t be able to reach you again, you should know one thing. Among the now located operatives is a Dr. Jacob Constantine. I believe he was
your fiancé?”
Four
“That unstable criminal?” The enraged condemnation hurtled from the other room, lodged between my eyes. “You brought Calista St. James here?”
Brushing it and my bangs aside, my eyes moved from the ajar door to my denouncer’s secretary. The forty-something, buttoned-down woman’s horror at realizing she hadn’t closed the door properly after she’d let Sir Ashton in was almost comical.
A you’d-better-not gesture and glare aborted her move up to correct her oversight. Might as well use her employer’s defamation, play the villain. I really wanted to hear this.
Going as ashen as her skirt suit, the woman flopped back down in her chair, shooting me my-God-she’s-deranged-and-dangerous glances. In response, I raised one eyebrow in a mock-evil arch. Her translucent skin blotched and her lips quivered.
Jeez. She really took her boss’s word to heart, didn’t she?
Okay. Enough. I wasn’t in the business of terrorizing innocent bystanders.
But trying to placate her with what I intended to be a sweet smile only had her almost hyperventilating. The poor woman actually began to tremble. Whoa. This was no longer even remotely funny.
Man. I detested that Dr. Steven Davis already. The guy who’d replaced Sir Ashton at the helm of GCA.
From the comprehensive research I’d done on him before coming here, he was a very inferior successor. What GCA was thinking to vote him in for the top job, why Sir Ashton had stepped down in the first place, I had no idea. Yet.
Exhaling, I looked away from the woman who sat quaking behind her desk across the expansive office. The moment I relieved her of my focus, what had been pinning her in place, she rose to unsteady feet, murmured a wavering “I’ll be right back” and fled. Maybe to fetch security. Maybe only to desert her post and save herself.
Sheesh.
Shaking my head and this side show aside, I refocused on the main one. Davis’s voice was now muted as he took the call that had interrupted his first indignation. Waiting for it to resume, I busied myself with smoothing my modest knee-length skirt over my crossed legs.
For moments, I squinted down at the navy, no-iron cloth, as if I was surprised to see it. Which I actually still was. Why had I worn that again?
Yeah, I remember why. That master manipulator in there. He’d used another of his adroit suggestions “to observe a dress code that agreed with GCA’s expectations.” In short, career-fashion, ladylike and boring as hell.
Hell if I knew why I’d complied. He’d always employed such nudges to get me to dress “appropriately.” But I’d by and large disappointed him. Though I could clean up good, I rarely felt like doing so. It had always vexed him to “note my preference for nondescript, unisex garments”. But since I’d obeyed him unquestioningly in everything of significance, I’d made this the one area where I’d poked the tongue of defiance out at him.
I should have done so this time. I should have strutted in here, the den of my enemies, in one of my more outrageous disguises. Full-on Goth outfit with raccoon eyes and black lips would have cured both him and GCA of their “expectations.” I didn’t need to “avoid unnecessary discord” with those fossils. I wasn’t some applicant here. They needed me.
Except, going by Davis’s reaction to my presence, they didn’t agree they did.
Damn. This sucked. Sir Ashton had managed to con me. Again. He’d recruited me against GCA’s directives. Again. And he wasn’t even the boss this time. He hadn’t even warned that bleating guy who was, before ambushing him with me.
Not that I cared. About him or GCA or about the outcome of this meeting. If they didn’t have enough brains to know they needed me, I was staging my own extraction operation. My team was equipped to go it alone anyway. It wouldn’t be our first retrieval mission beyond enemy lines. We’d see who got Jake and the others out.
Jake…
Oh, God. Could it be? He was still alive?
My mind kept flitting away from this possibility. What Sir Ashton insisted was a fact. The finality of Jake’s loss, just like Clara’s, had been a major part of what I’d become. The brutal hope that he was still out there would scramble me completely if I focused on it. And if he was really still alive, I needed to be at my steadiest and sharpest to save him…
Davis ended his call, picked up his outrage without missing a beat. “I cannot contest that outlaw’s presence here enough.”
Outlaw, huh? And that was when he didn’t know one-thousandth of it. His verdict was based on Sudan and the few amateurish raids I’d orchestrated before I’d gotten my act together. And really gotten down to breaking every law written on a daily basis.
Sir Ashton’s calm tones carried to me clearer than Davis’s agitated ones. Had to be voice projection from his Shakespearean theater days. What I wouldn’t give to have seen one of his performances. I bet he’d make a kickass Macbeth or King Lear.
“And I contest that offensive and unsubstantiated outlaw label, Steven.”
Nice, Sir Ashton. Putting the accuser on the defense. And doing it so smoothly. When he knew for a fact I’d been earning said label a dozen times a day for four years. To think I’d ever believed him a by-the-letter-of-the-law kind of guy whose only weakness was being too straightforward. Straightforward my ass.
He now thrust his point home, his reproving tone, as always, as effective as a slap. “I expected more reasoned and less slandering objections from you. There were no legal charges against Dr. St. James.”
“There were convictions,” Davis said, his voice rising to an indignant squeak.
I could almost see the imperturbable force of nature that Sir Ashton was delivering an admonishing glance designed to belittle and wither as he replied, “Not where the law at large is concerned. The convictions were an internal GCA resolution. I’d hardly count the decision of a board of directors to expel her as an affiliate as grounds to criminalize her.”
“But there are outstanding warrants on her alter egos. From “the law at large” as you so quaintly put it. At least, there were until she hid her tracks altogether. But it’s a matter of time before authorities trace old leads back to her.”
“If GCA’s and PACT’s combined resources have failed to pick up her trace once they lost it, when they know who and what to look for, I doubt the FBI or the CIA can.”
“You picked up her trace, if she’s here.”
“I’m—different.”
“Indeed. But you may have done us all a favor, dragging her here. I have half a mind—”
“To report her? Then you would have half a mind. Not only because you’d be as stupid as if you had, but because if she doesn’t knock half your head off if you did it, then I will.”
“Are you threatening me, Howard? With her? For her? This crazy enforcer you want us to put in charge of this delicate mission?”
Enforcer, huh? Though I’d never thought of that particular name for myself, it was one way to look at part of what I did. If you’re the bad guys supplying me with a steady stream of patients and victims. I sure enforced the hell out of them all.
“This impossible mission, you mean.” Was Sir Ashton’s serene qualification.
So he thought it impossible, huh? And he’d come to me. Hmm.
“We don’t know that,” Davis said. But his tone had lost the cutting conviction it had when he’d been condemning me.
“We don’t? You think retrieving our people from the depths of militant-controlled territory in the most chaotic region of the Russian Federation anything but?”
Suddenly a new voice spoke up. A familiar voice. “With PACT in the picture, nothing is impossible.”
General Fitzpatrick? PACT’s high commander? Sonofabitch. The whole war council was gathered in my honor. Only one was missing now. Him.
De Luna. The bastard.
But hey. What was that about PACT being in the picture?
My hearing sharpened. This I had to record.
From the change in Sir Ashton’s tone, I gu
essed he’d turned to Fitzpatrick. “PACT may provide tactical and combat capabilities during the release, and cover during the retreat, but Calista’s team is your one hope of making it that far.”
“You both talk as if this is approved.” That was Davis again, his nails-on-chalkboard voice like a parody between the two other men’s deep, influential tones. The hole he was drilling in my aggravation center was getting bigger. “GCA’s board is wary of the repercussions on our status as a humanitarian organization if it’s ever discovered we used an aid mission as cover for a paramilitary operation. Now you want to add the anarchist presence of St. James to the volatile mix.”
“Are you proposing we leave our operatives rotting in captivity even longer than they had been to preserve GCA’s pristine reputation?”
Whoa. Sir Ashton’s tones had dipped into condescension. His weapon of mass destruction. Boy, did it bring back memories. When I was his protegé, without ever using insults or even raising his voice, he’d had us all scurrying, just so he’d lift its sharp blade off our necks.
It now had Davis in full-flustered mode. “Only until legitimate channels open to secure their release.”
Sir Ashton raised the power of his patronizing to maximum. “If you’d deemed to follow up on their case, as part of the job you inherited from me, you’d know the lengths I’ve gone to for mere news of them. You’d also know there are no such channels. And if GCA’s number one concern isn’t its operatives, who create your “status” sometimes at the expense of their very lives, if you’re not ready to do anything to protect and rescue them, you should just terminate your operations and go play golf. To state the absolute obvious, GCA is the beggar here. And beggars can’t choose who helps them.”
Fitzpatrick cleared his throat. “PACT’s involvement isn’t debatable here, Dr. Davis. We discovered your operatives’ whereabouts.” They had? Who exactly had? Somehow I could guess who. “We’re as much a part of this as GCA. But why St. James and her team, Sir Ashton? As far as we know, only she had gotten any real training. Why not one of GCA’s PACT-trained teams?”