Authors: Stephanie Tyler
“You met him, you spoke to him—it sounds just like him.” There was an urgency in her voice that was hard to ignore, and he wondered why in the hell it was so important to her that it be Aaron.
“It could’ve been anyone. It was a long time ago.” He turned on the overhead light and handed her the file from Max.
“What’s this?”
“The SITREP I wrote after meeting Aaron,” he said.
“Oh.” She placed it on her lap but didn’t make a move to open it. “I know what it says.”
He slid a sideways glance at her before he pulled the car back on the thruway and gunned it to make up for lost time. When it approached ninety, he told her, “You don’t know everything it said. The report you’re holding has been sanitized. I wrote about Aaron in my report—what he did, and how he saved my life. But that information is missing. And there’s something else I didn’t tell you, something that, at the time, I didn’t think you needed to know.”
“What?”
He gripped the wheel hard and floored the accelerator, raised his voice slightly to be heard above the noise. “I didn’t want to ruin your memories of Aaron. I had a promise to keep, and that didn’t involve spilling the man’s secrets.”
“Why the change of heart?”
Because someone wants you dead
. “I have a feeling all of this somehow ties back to what I saw the night Aaron saved my life.”
He didn’t even have to try hard to memorize the numbers Aaron—or whoever it was pretending to be the former soldier—had rattled off. They were the coordinate points of the mission in the Congo, the exact place where everything happened, which didn’t make it into his report.
Latitude: 0.516667
0° 31? 0? N
0 degrees, 31 minutes, 0 seconds North
Longitude: 25.2
25° 12? 0? E
25 degrees, 12 minutes, 0 seconds East
DRC, Africa. Aka, hell on earth
.
With Aaron’s help, Nick half dragged, half carried himself and Joe to the shelter Aaron promised them for the time being. Judging by the way the enemy fire was bouncing through the sky like fucking Fourth of July, the QAF wasn’t coming through anytime soon
.
On the way into the enclosure, he turned slightly to the left to make sure he wasn’t going to trip on anything while walking backward, and noted the bodies. The bodies that had to be the reason Aaron had blood all over his hands, his neck… covering the front of his cammies. At first, Nick convinced himself that the blood was his, even though his mind told him that Aaron had come to him covered in the stuff
.
Looking at the bodies in real time, Nick understood why there had been so much blood. The men had endured torture. They’d possibly been soldiers or mercs—Nick didn’t have the time to find out, as he was letting off as many rounds of ammoas he could to keep the rebels at bay and away from his wounded teammate
.
And Aaron was on his flank, helping him. The AWOL soldier had saved his life, continued to do so, and Nick didn’t have time or energy to wrap his mind around the fact that the same man could be a murderer
.
“I had my reasons,” Aaron said. “I had my orders.”
“You’re AWOL. You don’t take orders once you’re AWOL.”
“You’re still really green, son. Maybe one day you’ll understand.” Aaron paused. “Then again, I hope not… I hope you never understand this.”
Nick shook his head to get the picture out of his mind. “There were bodies.”
“Bodies,” she repeated slowly. “As in…”
“He’d killed them. Aaron had killed the men I saw.”
“How do you know that?”
He hesitated. “I could tell the way the men were taken down, the look in Aaron’s eyes when he saw me notice them. Aaron had blood on his face and neck. I can’t explain it to someone who’s never been in a combat situation—I just knew, Kaylee.”
“But you don’t think Aaron killed them in a combat situation, do you? You think he murdered them.”
“That’s the way it looked. The men weren’t rebel soldiers. But I don’t know if they’d threatened him. I don’t know what the hell I walked in on. All I know is that, for whatever reason, Aaron let me walk away.”
She was completely overwhelmed. He thought about pulling the car over again but figured that might make her fall apart completely. No, she needed the motion and he needed her functioning.
After a long minute, she spoke. “I wish I didn’t know that. I wish I didn’t have to know about any of this. This changes everything for me. Aaron was a killer. He was AWOL and he was a killer. And maybe he still is.”
“You don’t know all the circumstances. No matter what else, he saved my life. And the lives of the other men you met.”
“Does that balance out the other things you said he did?”
“I don’t know how to answer that. We’re paid to do things—things that most civilians don’t want to know … or think about.” He threw a quick glance her way.
“You think he was paid by the military to kill those men?”
“I think there’s a hell of a lot we need to figure out. What do you want to do?”
“I have to bring the money to him. I don’t have a choice.”
“There’s always a choice—you just might not like it much.” He pushed his hand through his hair. “Someone could take it for you.”
“No, he said that it had to be me.”
“And that didn’t raise any red flags?”
“He didn’t want anyone else involved.”
“So he’ll involve the love of his life? A woman he’d do anything for? Think about that—it doesn’t make sense.”
“No, it doesn’t. Aaron was many things, but he’d never willingly put me in danger.”
“Yet he has.”
“I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that Aaron turned into a killer for hire. You probably all lend yourselves out like that. Just like you’re doing now.”
“Don’t lump me in the same category as Aaron.”
“I’m sorry. I never got a chance to take it out on him. Do you know what it’s like never being able to speak your peace to the most significant person in your life? Someone who hurt you so badly you feel permanently scarred inside?”
“Yeah, actually, I do. Contrary to popular belief, not all of us are machines. But there comes a time when you’ve got to let it go, before it breaks you. When are you going to let it go, Kaylee?”
Who the hell was he kidding to give this kind of advice—
any
advice, for that matter? Granted, it was advice Nick had tried his best to follow. Told himself that it would make him stronger.
But when was he ever going to be strong enough? Any stronger and he would be a fucking machine—and he’d seen his share of guys like that. He was almost one of them. And he didn’t want to end up some random merc pining for a lost love, with death and murder behind his eyes.
The fact that Kaylee tugged at him meant he hadn’t gone all the way, that he could climb back slowly from the lonely place he’d found himself in these past years when he’d been all about work and random sex and more work and more sex.
Kaylee, who sat quietly next to him wearing a pair of hot faded jeans—she’d looked long and lean as she’d strode toward him in the hallway outside her apartment tonight—paired with a tight black shirt that made her hair look like it was under klieg lights, Nick could almost forget that they were here together for a very serious reason.
How he’d gotten so close to this woman in such a short amount of time was beyond him.
“If I can get to the bottom of things, I’ll have closure,” she told him now, as if she was trying to convince herself as well.
If he closed his eyes, he could see the bodies, two men, mutilated. Tortured before they’d been killed.
More than likely, they’d prayed for death. Begged for it. If there was closure for them, it wasn’t anything he wanted a part of.
He cursed himself, wondered how he’d gotten pulled into all of this from merely doing his job all those years ago.
The universe gives us what we need when we need it
, Dad always said. Nick had never been one to believe in that superstition bullshit, had a hard time believing his dad and Chris, even though they were always spot on with their Cajun gypsy shit. Nick believed in intuition. Dad. His brothers. His team. Beyond that, the world was a crapshoot and he played the game accordingly.
“First order of business is to figure out if he’s alive or not,” he said.
“The only way to do that is to go to Africa.”
“I know.”
“You’ll come with me?” she asked.
He would. Under normal circumstances, it would be the kind of mystery that intrigued him to the point of taking on the danger single-handedly. Now that he might actually be involved, he realized he had little choice.
“After tonight, I’m in this as deeply as you are. And you’re in danger.” From the authorities perhaps, which was sometimes worse than being in danger from common criminals. “I can’t walk away now.”
“And if I don’t go, if I don’t do something, I’m going to be haunted for the rest of my life.” She swallowed hard before she spoke again. “Do you think that the people who broke into my place would just stop?”
No, they wouldn’t. None of this would just stop—not without interference, and fuck, just how much did he owe Aaron? When did the favor end?
And still, the altered SITREP didn’t sit right in his gut.
He understood government interference. Confidentiality. The need to keep certain mission details—or even certain missions—completely off the record. He’d been on some of those himself. That, coupled with what was happening with Kaylee right now, told him this was bigger than just a single man who’d gone AWOL.
“I don’t understand … I don’t know what happened to him.” She paused, rubbed her hands together as if praying. “I feel like I never really knew him.”
“You did, Kaylee.” He kept his eyes on the road as the world sped by through the tinted windows of the car. “You knew a big part of him. You have to trust what you knew.”
“So there’s a part of you that whoever you’re with will never know?”
He pushed the accelerator further to the floor before he answered, hanging on to the wheel as hard as he could. “There’s a part of all of us no one will ever know.”
Bobby Juniper, aka Clutch, aka someone no one really knew, was a thirty-year-old white man working as a mercenary in one of the most dangerous places on earth. The DRC. Congo. A place that most people tried to get the fuck out of. Clutch and the men—and the one woman—he worked with under the name GOST would head for the hills too, if they could.
Unfortunately, the U.S. government had them completely by the balls.
But the air was heavy with change, so strong he swore he could taste it, imbibe it the way he did the strong local pombay when he wanted to forget who he was now—a man without a country. Africa had never felt like home to him. No place ever had, except maybe lying in Sarah’s arms.
He tried his best not to think about her—it had gone from every minute to every hour and now he was sometimes able to go half a day without feeling the ache.
Settled into the bar in Ubundu, he took a swig of the beer and called for another shot of the local brew to pass the time as he listened to the tourists who’d climbed the Nyiragongo volcano near Goma and who were headed out of the Kisangani Airport come evening.
There was a Congolese woman giving palm readings to the tourists in the corner of the bar. Now she sidled up to him, asking, “Why don’t you let me read your future?”
“I’m not paying you.”
He’d spoken to her in her native language, and she gave a soft smile. “For you, no charge.”
“I’m not—” But she’d taken his free hand in hers, didn’t realize that a move like that could buy her a pass to death in three seconds flat.
She stared at him, big brown eyes growing hard within seconds. “You don’t have much of a soul left, boy. Better hurry and get out before the
masuka
get you.”
Masuka
was the African word for ghost. He jerked his hand away, her words burning him like a brand.
“There’s a way back for you,” she told him.
He regained his composure easily, forcing his heart rate to normalize and his breathing to ease. “I’ll bet you say that to all the soldiers,” he told her, even as he cursed himself for getting taken, had lived here long enough to know you didn’t accept anyone or anything at face value.
No, Africa never felt like home, but he’d tried, kept house staff like he’d been expected to, housekeepers and cooks who did his chores and laundry and made him food and cajoled him into eating, even when he didn’t feel like it. He’d adopted their culture and traditions, given in to the rhythm of the day and night by throwing out his watch and letting his body tell him when it was time to do things—to eat and sleep and play … and work.
When GOST set him free, he’d had time. Nothing but. And so he’d set up house and he’d grabbed a radio and bought books from the local vendors and he’d read. Never thought about finding anyone special.
Women looked—they’d always looked. But he’d never had interest in casual rolls—they would only serve to remind him of what he couldn’t have, a relationship where he could tell all. It was always need-to-know, thanks to many years in Witness Protection and then under the cloak of secrecy that came with being a Delta Force operator, and he’d never found anyone who’d been able to breach his walls.