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  The planning was as good as it could be with six days advance notice. Resources had been allocated, personnel had been scrambled, and the team had been assembled and deployed.

  One of the negatives from Jet’s perspective had been the source of the intel. The CIA had alerted them and had insisted on an observer who could represent its interests. The condition hadn’t been negotiable. The combination of a short timeframe and the presence of an outsider hadn’t sat well with Jet or any of the rest of the team, but in the end it wasn’t their call.

  And now she was on a roof in North Africa, staring through a Hensoldt ZF 4 scope at a heavily fortified group that looked like it was ready for trouble. This wasn’t her ideal scenario. She preferred surgical strikes to brute force, but sometimes circumstances didn’t permit it.

  The ear bud chirped, and then Fire’s voice returned.

  “We’re to hit them as soon as possible. Everyone’s now in position. Engagement to occur in two minutes. Repeat. Engagement in two minutes. Are there any questions?”

  The comm line went silent for several seconds.

  “Negative,” Jet said, and then a chorus of other voices, all male, repeated her statement.

  She depressed the timer button on her watch and waited. This would be a relatively clean operation if things went well. If they executed properly there was no chance that any of the bad guys would make it out alive. Still, the team liked backup. On a mission this big, they couldn’t afford anything going wrong.

  At exactly the two-minute mark, a streak of flame shot from a building eighty yards away from Jet, where Fire and Lightning were concealed with a Kornet 9M133F-1 guided rocket armed with a thermobaric warhead.

  The dining room of the villa exploded outward in a shower of glass, steel and white-hot flame – a direct hit had gutted the room. Jet peered through the scope as the guards stood stunned, first gaping at the destruction, and then alternating between darting to the burning villa and sprinting for their vehicles. She watched as three of the men huddled and one pointed at Fire and Lightning’s hiding place with a radio raised to his lips. Four men ran for a van toting assault rifles.

  She tapped her ear bud. “Alpha, you have heat headed your way. Repeat. You were spotted.”

  “Roger. Lay down cover for as long as you can, then get the hell out of there.”

  “Will do. Delta out.”

  Jet squinted through her scope and fired at one of the three gunmen, obviously the supervisor of the guard detail, and took him out. The rifle’s stock slammed her shoulder, but she ignored the recoil and targeted another man. Two more vehicles tore out of the compound toward them, motors revving over the screams and shouted commands from the villa walls. She fired again, and another man went down. Someone had seen her muzzle flash – within a few moments, bullets began peppering the side of the construction site. The likelihood of being hit was slim, but a stray round was still lethal.

  It was time to pack up.

  “Alpha, hostiles are on their way in.”

  “How many?”

  “Three vehicles.”

  “Can you disable any?”

  “I’m trying, but you can expect company shortly. I’m taking fire.”

  She sighted on the first van, aiming for the driver. Just as she squeezed the trigger, the van jolted against a pothole, and the shot went wide. A hole appeared in the windshield six inches to the left of the driver’s head, and he began taking evasive action. She fired again, but he was swerving and jerking the van around too much.

  Ricochets from the lip of the building intensified as more gunfire was directed at her.

  Sirens sounded in the distance. Her ear bud crackled again.

  “Delta, hostile helicopter inbound. The army must have had a bird in the air. Pull out. Repeat. Pull out now.”

  “Roger that, Alpha. Good shooting, by the way. Expect to engage within sixty seconds. I spotted grenade launchers on their guns. Be careful,” Jet said.

  “You too, Delta. Clear out. This is over.”

  “I’m on the move. Out.”

  Jet scooped up the rifle and ran to the stairwell, taking the raw concrete steps two at a time. It was dark, but her eyes had adjusted to the gloom so she was easily able to avoid the collected construction debris and trash. She hit the second floor running and risked a glance back at the complex. Lights from the approaching vehicles bounced toward her. Maybe thirty seconds now.

  At the ground floor, she sprinted to her car, the headlights of the trucks bouncing their beams on the street. She swung the driver’s door open, tossed the rifle onto the passenger seat, and then cranked the engine.

  The pursuit vehicles separated, two headed to Fire and Lightning’s building, and one came directly at her.

  Fifteen seconds later, the van pulled to a stop fifty yards from Jet’s car, and four men with Kalashnikov assault rifles emptied out.

  Jet’s Ford Festiva exploded in a fireball. Part of a door sailed through the air in a lazy arc and slammed down six yards from the nearest gunman. An oily black cloud of smoke belched from the carcass of the burning car, the flames licking hungrily at the frame as they fought for supremacy.

  The CIA observer would later confirm one friendly casualty, and even though the Mossad remained silent, everyone involved knew that the team with no name had lost a key member. Fire and Lightning had also seen the blast, and the consensus was that there was no possibility anyone could have survived.

  One week later, Jet’s code name was retired, never to be used again.

  There was no memorial service.

  Chapter 7

  Present Day, Paria Peninsula, Venezuela

  Jet walked along the beach, enjoying the warmth of the morning sun on her skin as she approached the little fishing hamlet of Macuro, which had just begun its waking routine. She knew she looked like she’d been dragged behind a bus, and attempted to improve her appearance by tying her untamed mane into a ponytail. Hopefully, she would appear to be a slightly crazy backpacker – a visitor South America was more than familiar with, even in the most remote reaches. She’d check into a motel and clean up as soon as she was near civilization, but this clearly wasn’t the time or place.

  A rooster crowed its eminence to the hens in its harem as Jet moved slowly past the scattering poultry and across the sand to where a shabby fleet of fishing skiffs was beached. She caught the eye of an old man with skin the color of tobacco, who was chatting with another fisherman, cackling at some observation his friend had made as they prepared to launch their boats. He stopped what he was doing as she hesitated a few yards away, eyeing his skiff. She nodded to him – he doffed his straw hat in a flourish of respect, which elicited a sincere smile from Jet, who then inquired about his interest in taking her to the nearest larger town – in this case, the port of Guiria, roughly twenty-five miles west.

  They negotiated back and forth, he discussing the weather and the sturdiness of his craft and the exceptional quality of the fishing that time of year, she bemoaning the life of a gypsy whose only possessions were the ragged clothes on her back. After a few minutes of expected haggling, they arrived at an agreement. Capitan Juan, as he liked to be called, would take her to Guiria for ten dollars – not a bad deal for the native of a country whose gasoline cost under twenty cents a gallon; his total expenditure might come to a dollar, round trip. She pointed out that he could still get in a half-day’s fishing if he made good time, but he waved her off good-naturedly. A decent day’s catch might bring him five dollars if he was lucky. He grinned at her as they shook hands, and she noted that he was missing all his front teeth.

  He pushed the boat into the surf with the help of his friend, and Jet deftly climbed into the bow. After a few energetic pulls on the starter cord the outboard sputtered to life with a puff of smoke, and then the uneven roar settled into a steady drone. When Jet asked Capitan Juan how long the trip would take, he told her an hour, maybe less, maybe more, depending on the seas.

  A trio of pelicans f
ollowed them for the first mile as they cruised along the barren shore, before losing interest and gliding away. Jet occupied herself by watching the rugged coastline glide past her. Most of the peninsula was sheer jungle dropping into the sea, no beaches – the water got deep very quickly only a few feet from land. Waves crashed against the jutting rocks as they moved by, steadily picking up speed, eventually settling into a comfortable pace at what she guessed to be twenty knots.

  With nothing else to do, her mind roamed into her predicament – hunted by unknown adversaries out to do her harm, and now with no home, no friends, and no idea of how to next proceed other than to avoid getting killed. She’d thought this sort of life was behind her, but it was clearly not.

  As the boat’s bow sliced through the azure sea’s undulations, she recalled the last time she’d died, when she’d staged the explosion in Algiers with the help of Ariel, her mentor…and lover. He’d initially balked at her demand to get out of the game, she remembered. She closed her eyes and, for a fleeting moment, could feel his strong, confident touch on her naked skin, as if they were still lying together after a languorous lovemaking session at a secluded seaside bungalow outside of Ashdod, on the Mediterranean.

  “You can’t quit. Nobody quits the team. That’s not an option,” he had softly explained.

  “I know how it works. But I’m not asking. I understand you’re in this until you…you can’t do it anymore. I remember what I signed up for. But I need to get out.”

  “It’s not so simple.” He trailed his fingers along the contour of her stomach, lazily tracing a circle around her navel.

  “Yes, it is.”

  “It’s forbidden. You know that.”

  “So is this.” She rolled onto her side and propped her head up with the palm of her hand, leaning on her elbow as she regarded his profile. He wasn’t handsome in any traditional sense – his features were too imperfect, a touch too rugged and worked. Black wavy hair worn longish, a nose that was a trifle too large, but a sensuality to his lips that she knew was genuine and eyes that she could get lost in for weeks. Jet had never felt like she had been in love before, and what they had together probably wasn’t that, but it was the closest equivalent she’d ever experienced, and when they were together she couldn’t get enough of him.

  “Fair point,” he acknowledged. The rules were abundantly clear. Their trysts – no, their relationship – violated every rule in the book. Operatives were chosen because they had no intimate associations. They were odd beasts who were most at home when on assignment. That made any personal connection impossible. They couldn’t speak about their work, or even tell anyone what they were involved in, and had to disappear for weeks or sometimes years, depending on the mission. There was no room in such a life for any kind of relationships. The team members had sworn allegiance to a higher cause – one of the many sacrifices they made without question.

  “That didn’t stop you. Didn’t stop us,” she corrected.

  Any friendship between operatives was off limits, much less an intimate one. But even worse, he was her control – her superior, her mentor, and the one who had to make dispassionate decisions to send her into harm’s way; into situations that could result in death…or worse. If anyone had any idea that they were involved, it would have been the end of him. Of them both. But that hadn’t stopped them. The chemistry was too intoxicating. She’d been as powerless to resist it as he had – even though he was a decade older than her, they were insatiable when together, he like a wild bull to her wanton tigress.

  “No. It certainly didn’t stop us,” he conceded, turning his head to take in her incredible features – a slightly Asian cast from her mother, but with piercing green eyes, eyes like nothing he’d ever seen before, which she routinely masked with colored contact lenses when she was undercover. He’d been willing to risk everything to be with her, and she him.

  “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.