JET, no. 3 Page 7

  “I have an idea, David.” Jet had forced his real name out of him after their first lovemaking tryst two and a half years earlier. He was the only member of the team who knew her as Maya, and she, the only one who knew his real identity. To everyone else, he was Ariel.

  “I don’t want to hear your idea,” he protested, but she saw a flicker in his eyes that betrayed him.

  She laid out her plan in a dispassionate tone. She had to die, preferably during an operation, in a manner that would never be questioned. He immediately understood what she was proposing, as well as the logic behind it. The only way she would ever be safe would be if she was dead. Safe from the reach of the Mossad, safe from any enemies she might have made in the course of her missions, safe from a world in which she was a predator, a combatant to be exterminated on sight.

  “But, Maya. Why? That’s my question. I mean, with your history…what else will you do? You were made to be on this team.” David knew everything one could about Jet from her dossier, and she had confided in him things in her past that she’d never told anyone else about. Her foster father. The night he had come for her when she was thirteen, as he had been coming for years, when she’d finally ended the nightmare, only to be plunged into a worse one. Juvenile lockup. Psychiatrists. The state taking over her care. Countless fights in institutions that were unforgiving and brutal. An endless battery of depersonalizing traumas nobody should ever have to endure.

  “I want to live, David. I want to be free of the past and start over. I want to be about something besides revenge and killing and hate. Is that really so hard to grasp?” She paused and reached to him, brushing a lock of his hair from where it dangled in his eyes. “I need to start over. And you know me well enough. If you won’t help me, I’ll do it by myself.” A trace of steel edged her tone.

  He sighed. “But why now? After everything we’ve been through. That you’ve been through. Why, my angel?”

  “Because it’s time, David. It’s time.”

  He nodded, a subtle, almost imperceptible gesture that spoke louder than any screamed oration could have.

  She couldn’t tell him the real reason. She couldn’t tell anyone. Why everything had changed in the blink of an eye, and she’d suddenly had a glimpse of an alternative future – a future without killing or danger. A future filled with love. The love she’d never had…since her parents died.

  Two weeks earlier, Jet had discovered she was pregnant.

  There could be no mistake. She’d taken the test three times to confirm it.

  And everything had suddenly become different.

  Her past had been filled with enough horror to last ten lifetimes, and she’d shared a large part of it with David as they’d grown more connected. It had been difficult trusting him with that part of her, but she’d done so, and to his credit, he’d shouldered the burden. But she’d also told him that she would never have children, that she’d be the worst parent in the world – and even though the declaration had been hyperbolic, there was an element of truth to it. She killed for a living. Her emotions had to be glacial for her to be effective, with no second guessing…and no compassion. It had been drilled into her when training for the team, and life had pounded her with the truth of it for a long time before. The only way you could be safe and avoid being hurt was to not feel. Feeling meant pain. Feeling meant suffering.

  But feeling also meant being alive.

  The sad reality was that she’d been dead inside all her adult life and most of her childhood. The only spark of feeling that had ever been ignited inside of her had been lit by David, and even then she couldn’t fully share it with him or let it grow beyond a certain point. But when she’d peed on that strip and seen it show positive, her entire world had tilted, and suddenly a long-forgotten feeling had surfaced. An emotion so powerful it had taken her breath away.

  The urge to protect.

  She couldn’t tell David; she tortured herself with this decision for a dozen sleepless nights, but he couldn’t know. At least, not yet. Maybe once she had the baby and had settled into a new life, where things were stabilized and she was safe…maybe then she could tell him. And maybe then he would also choose a different path.

  But for now, she couldn’t risk how he would react. David was a good man, an honorable man, but he was also a control freak – he had to be in his position. He was in command of every aspect of the team, of any operation they were on, of everything that happened, and he had been specially chosen for his personality, just as surely as she had been selected for hers. And while she had strong feelings for him – might even be in love with him if she was honest with herself – she knew him well enough to know she couldn’t predict what he would do, and she couldn’t take the chance that the truth would trigger a disastrous chain of events. This was her choice, and she would do whatever was necessary to keep her baby safe. It ate at her heart to keep it from him, but at the end of the day, she had no other option.

  “You know this won’t be easy,” he said, taking her hand and kissing her palm with unexpected tenderness.

  She almost started crying – eyes welling up – and David probably thought she was overcome by gratitude. She pulled her hand away and wiped her face with the back of her arm, then fixed him with a calm gaze, the moment over.

  “We’ll need a plan,” she said. “I hear you’re pretty good with those.”

  “Your idea isn’t bad, but we’ll need to fine-tune it and wait for the appropriate opportunity. When the chance comes, you need to be ready. That means passports, money, weapons, a destination where you’ll be safe…”

  “I know.” She rolled off her elbow, onto her back, and stared at the ceiling before closing her eyes. The rest was logistics. Execution. Picking a place far away where nobody would know her, and she could blend into a new life without attracting any attention. Lining up the funding and the paperwork. These were the sorts of details that they both excelled at. The hard part had been deciding to do it and convincing David to help her. She had halfway expected him to refuse, and she wouldn’t have blamed him if he had. She was asking him to help her betray the team and the service, to which he owed everything – his identity, his vocation, his reason for waking up every day.

  Neither of them could have known that her chance would come a week and a half later, when the CIA had alerted the Mossad about the Algiers meeting. Once the mission had been fast-tracked, David had worked around the clock to plan the car explosion and her escape. Her disappearance had been flawless, nobody had suspected a thing, and her putative death had gone off without a hitch.

  She’d last seen David two days before leaving for Algiers. They’d had no contact since except for a blank postcard she’d sent to let him know she was safe, as they’d agreed.

  The boat hit a particularly steep wave, and a shower of spray splashed high into the air, blowing over the sides of the hull and soaking them both. The memories were jarred away by the shock, and in spite of herself, she opened her eyes and laughed, water dripping from her hair and face.

  Capitan Juan joined her, and she felt an ephemeral kinship with the old fisherman as they bounced over the swells, laughing mindlessly at having gotten wet.

  The breeze and sunshine quickly dried her, and the moment passed. A pair of flying fish catapulted out of the water off the bow, keeping pace as they surfed the glistening spindrift that danced above the waves, to the steady accompanying throb of the boat’s motor.

  After a few minutes, Juan pointed at a break in the jungle, where bleached buildings interrupted the seamless green of the shore on the horizon.

  “Guiria.”

  She nodded, shielding her eyes from the sunlight with her good hand.

  “How long?” she asked.

  He appeared to ponder the question seriously, brow furrowing before he gave her another toothless smile.

  “Maybe fifteen minutes. We made good time.”

  She nodded. “Sometimes life’s like that.”
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  They continued the rest of the journey in silence.

  Chapter 8

  Present Day, Guiria, Venezuela

  If there was a grimmer place on the planet than Guiria’s harbor, Jet was yet to encounter it, and she’d languished in some low places in her time. Rusting fishing scows creaked and groaned against crumbling piers, bemoaning the region’s poverty. Once she had climbed up onto the wharf and waved goodbye to Capitan Juan, she turned to survey the little port, and what met her eyes wasn’t heartening. Corroded metal roofs, peeling paint and a pall of rotting stink greeted her as she moved from the waterfront into the town’s shabby streets.

  She stopped at a small corner market and bought a bag of nuts and a bottle of water, which she drained greedily outside before going back in and getting another. Further up the block, she found a shop that stocked a few tank tops and T-shirts; she chose the least terrible of them, suffering the annoyed look from the old shopkeeper when she paid with dollars – a currency that was officially frowned upon in Venezuela, and yet in reality was accepted by the majority of the locals.

  Near the central square, she came across a tired little hotel that had been around since the dawn of time. A few locals sat on the curb, trading familiar jokes and stories as they watched their world go by. They stopped talking as she passed them, and she could hear the whispered snipes when she walked through the hotel’s cracked wooden doors.

  A stout woman, wearing a bright yellow dress and with the face of a former heavyweight contender, met her at the reception counter and agreed to rent her a room for seven dollars. Jet asked her about the bus schedule. She shrugged. The stop was two blocks up. Jet was free to check whenever she felt like it.

  The room was on the second floor and smelled like a combination of vomit and mildew with a veneer of cleaning product slathered over it. But it would do – there was tepid running water and a bar of white soap in the shower, which was all she had been hoping for.

  Half an hour later, Jet descended the stairs and stepped out into the muggy heat. The same loitering group watched her walk up the sidewalk in the direction of the bus stop, making all the same comments they’d made when she’d entered. Apparently, being a gutter rat in Guiria didn’t require a vast repertoire.

  According to a faded agenda mounted on a post near the church, the bus to Caracas ran once a day in the early afternoon. It was scheduled to leave in an hour and a half, so she had time to eat and make it back to catch it.

  A few minutes later she was sitting in a family-style café that unsurprisingly featured seafood as its staple. She ordered the grilled fish and considered her next move as the dusty overhead fans creaked ineffective orbits to mitigate the heat.

  Her adversaries either thought she was still alive and therefore likely still on Trinidad, or had heard about the exploding boat and thought she was dead. A very distant third possibility was that they remembered her last death by explosion and didn’t believe she’d really been killed, assuming they thought it was her on the boat.

  It was the third possibility that troubled her.

  If it were Jet conducting the hunt, she would have operatives at any of the major towns on the coast, watching, just in case. It was a long shot, but she’d gotten lucky herself on long shots before. Based on the scale of what she’d seen so far, she couldn’t discount the possibility.

  When the fish arrived, Jet devoured it with ravenous enthusiasm, starved after a night with no supper.

  Back on the street, she ambled down the cracking sidewalks until she found a stall calling itself Bazaar del Mundo – the bazaar of the world – a lofty claim based on the town and the sad collection of secondhand goods assembled within sight of the street. Washing machines from the Sixties, a TV that was older than she was, fishing nets at the end of their rope…and a rack of used clothing.

  Jet entered the stifling emporium and browsed its sorry offerings, and within five minutes had made her selections, including an ancient cardboard suitcase that had probably been there since Columbus landed.

  Once in the hotel, she changed into her new outfit – a shapeless, loose-fitting black skirt with a frayed hem, a crème-colored native blouse that looked like it hailed from the disco era, and a dark blue scarf for her head. The ensemble was completed with a pair of sandals that someone had probably died wearing. She peered at herself in the mirror, and a Venezuelan peasant woman looked back at her – only one whose face was still far too memorable. Her features were distinctive in the sense that she looked either Asian or Slavic – high cheekbones, slightly almond-shaped eyes, perfect symmetry. But that could easily pass for native – there was a decent amount of indigenous blood in the population, which also had similar attributes.

  She went into the bathroom and balled up some toilet paper and stuffed it between her cheeks and her bottom molars, then returned to consider her reflection. It was still missing something. Stooping down, she scraped up some dark brown filth from a corner of the room and rubbed it beneath each eye. Much better. Now she looked at least ten years older, ridden hard by a harsh life. More in keeping with the likely passenger profile on a rural bus to nowhere.

  Jet packed her clothes into the suitcase, along with her shoes, and snapped the latches closed. It wasn’t a perfect disguise, but anyone looking for her based on a description or her old passport photo wouldn’t give her a second glance.

  On her way out of the hotel, she dropped the key on the counter, not waiting for the clerk to come out of the back and witness her remarkable transformation. She didn’t think that anyone would be questioning the unfriendly matron, but better to play it safe than take an unnecessary risk.

  As she approached the bus stop, she slowed, scanning the few vehicles and taking in the people waiting nearby.

  The hair on the back of her neck prickled. Something was off.

  There.

  Fifty yards up on the opposite side of the street, a Caucasian man leaned against the wall of a neighboring building, reading a paper, occasionally glancing at the waiting passengers when he flipped the pages.

  He hadn’t seen her. Or if he had, he hadn’t registered her as anything besides what she appeared to be – a late thirties peasant woman down on her luck.

  She turned and moved back down the street then ducked into a tiny market, where she bought a bottle of water and considered her options.

  Thank God she’d decided to play dress up. She would have stuck out from a mile away if she hadn’t.

  But her basic problem remained. How to get off the peninsula?

  The small airport wasn’t a solution. It would also be watched if the bus stop was.

  She resumed her walk, passing the little secondhand store, then backtracked and asked the proprietor if he knew anyone that could give her a ride to Carupano – a relatively large town on the Caribbean side that would have more buses to Caracas – the only international gateway she knew of. He rolled his eyes, considering the request.

  “You can catch the bus. It leaves in a few minutes. Takes you there on the way to Caracas,” he offered.

  “No. I’ve had bad experiences with rural buses. It’s worth it to me to pay a little more and have someone drive me.”

  “It’s going to cost more than just a little more.”

  “Well, I’m obviously not rich, but where there’s a will…”

  He studied her. “I may know someone.”

  “Could you call them?”

  “What do you think is a fair price?”

  “I don’t really know. How far is it?” she asked.

  “Maybe eighty or ninety miles by road. Mostly bad roads.”

  “What do you think is the right price?”

  He laughed. “For you or for the driver?”

  After another few minutes of banter, they agreed that twelve dollars seemed fair.

  “My name’s Cesar. I’ll close up the shop.”

  She nodded, her suspicion confirmed. “What’s your car like,
Cesar?”

  “It’s made it so far. Like me. A lot of miles, but still runs okay.”

  He swung a rusting gate closed across the stall and slid a padlock through the latch, then motioned for her to follow him. Two blocks later they arrived at a small house with a tin roof and chickens swarming the yard. A skinny brown mongrel dog growled from one side of the shaded front porch, but didn’t bother to move.

  “Don’t let him scare you. He’s too lazy to bother to attack if it means getting up or coming into the sun,” Cesar said, then pointed at a sagging gray Isuzu Trooper that was more rust than metal.

  She eyed it skeptically. “Are you sure that’ll make it?”

  “It would make it to Alaska for the right kind of money.”

  He walked to the side of the SUV and pulled free a filthy rag that served as a gas cap, and then lifted a dented jerry can.

  “Just need to fill it up. Then we can go.”

  Jet began to get a sinking feeling, but simply nodded. Anyone watching for her wouldn’t be looking for a native woman in the world’s losing-est truck. She walked slowly around the vehicle, noting the nearly bald tires and the wire that appeared to be holding on one of the fenders.

  “Jefe! Come on. You want to go for a ride?” Cesar called out.

  The dog’s ears perked up and it sluggishly raised its head. Cesar slapped his leg in invitation, and the animal stood and stretched, then sidled over to where his master was finishing pouring gas into the tank, and watched with measured curiosity. Cesar returned the can to the side of the house and then opened the rear cargo door. The dog jumped up with remarkable dexterity and plopped down in the back.

  “Hop in. We’ll be there in no time,” Cesar said.

  She tossed her bags onto the rear bench seat, watching the dog for any sign of aggression before climbing into the passenger seat. The door sounded like it was going to fall off its hinges when she slammed it shut. Jefe began panting his anticipation and the vehicle immediately smelled like dog breath.