Blind Rage (7 page)

“You look fine,” Yoshi reassured her.

“Okay, let’s go.”

Tess straightened and held her head high as Yoshi guided her the rest of the way to the kitchen.

“Ah, good,” Alice said. “You’re here. Don’t dawdle now. Tell Rosa what you’d like for breakfast.”

Tess turned toward the sound of a pan banging on the stove. “Something I can eat with my hands, Rosalita,
por favor
. A breakfast burrito, maybe?”

“Si, si. Un momento.”

“Thank you.”

Tess faced the spot where Alice’s voice had come from and stuck her hand out a little to the left. She was angry with Alice for pushing her into this, but at least she could be polite.

“You must be Oliver,” she said.

She heard the scrape of a chair on the floor and felt a rush of air as someone hurriedly stepped in front of her. She smelled soap and just a touch of something astringent. Not sweat, exactly, but perspiration, and definitely masculine. A warm hand clasped hers, dry, not moist, to her surprise.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you,” a male voice said. “I’ve heard practically nothing about you.”

The voice had nice timbre, pitched somewhere between a tenor and a baritone. Deep, but still youthful. And apparently the man behind it had a sense of humor. She bit back a smile.

“You’ll discover, if we don’t scare you away, that we’re full of secrets,” she said. “I’m Tess, by the way. I imagine that’s one of the secrets Alice managed to hide from you.”

She heard him laugh, and the sound made her relax. It might be nice to have a guy around to talk to again. Besides Yoshi, that was. Someone closer to her own age. It had been a while—not since before the accident, she realized. But she remained cautious. She didn’t know this guy.

A hand clasped her arm above the elbow.

“Would you like to sit down?” Oliver said.

“Yes, thank you.”

She let him guide her to the table and heard a chair being pulled away from it. The hand applied just the slightest pressure on the inside of her arm, so she took a step to her left. Almost immediately she felt the edge of the chair gently nudge the backs of her knees. She lowered herself onto the seat, and the chair slid under her. Her father had done that for her mother. He’d opened doors for her mother, too, and her mother had had perfectly good vision. From the way she’d been seated Tess knew that Oliver must have been raised learning the same sorts of manners.

“So, Tess,” Oliver said, sounding awkward, “Alice did tell me you’re going back to school. College?”

Tess laughed nervously. “I wish. No, high school.”

“Really? You look old enough. Oh, that didn’t come out right, did it? I meant that you’d fit right in with all the other students on campus.”

“No, I’m a senior, but . . .”

“You took some time off,” Oliver finished for her.

“Yeah, I guess you might say that.”

“So, are you ready to go back?”

“I don’t know,” Tess said. She squirmed in her chair. “Are you?”

“Ready to go back?” Oliver sounded surprised. “To high school? It will be like going back, won’t it? Frankly, I kind of wish I’d seen the last of high school.”

He sounded so mournful that Tess couldn’t help a laugh this time. “What? You weren’t one of the cool kids?”

“Nope. But I wasn’t one of the geeks who got picked on, either. I guess I was pretty average.”

“Average doesn’t cut it in my school,” Tess said, dread creeping into the edges of her consciousness again.

“You look like you’re far from average, Tess.”

Tess felt her face grow warm and wondered how much it showed. “What would you know? You don’t even know me.”

“I’m sorry,” he said quietly. “You’re right. For all I know you could be a dumb blonde. You’re obviously not. Blonde, that is.”

“No,
you
were right, Oliver,” Alice said. “Tess is far from average—except when it comes to manners sometimes.”

Tess’s ears burned now, and she was sure she must have turned bright red from embarrassment and anger.

“
Aquí está tu burrito, señorita
,” Rosalita said, interrupting just in time.

Tess heard the soft thud of a plate being set on the table in front of her.

“
Gracias
, Rosa.”

She reached for her napkin, found it with her fingers, and spread it on her lap. Then carefully feeling the outline of the plate with both hands, she moved her fingers in until they touched the burrito. She grasped it in both hands and brought it to her mouth. Alice and Rosa were used to seeing her make a mess of her meals, but she suddenly felt self-conscious in front of the stranger at the table. She realized she was too hungry to care and took a big bite. As usual, Rosa’s cooking was amazing. She’d mixed scrambled eggs, chorizo, sautéed onion, fresh cilantro, diced jalapeño,
queso blanco
, and a touch of cumin and rolled them up in a warm, soft flour tortilla.

“
Mmmf
,” she said with her mouth full. “Did you get something to eat, Oliver? You should try this. It’s delicious.”

“Thanks, but Rosa already made me breakfast.”

“Okay, Tess,” Alice interrupted, “it’s almost time to head for school. Finish your breakfast. You don’t want to be late. Oliver, I’ve taken the liberty of preparing directions for you, and there’s a GPS device in the car you’ll be driving in case you take a wrong turn. Here’s a class schedule with a map of the campus. Tess, I’ve got your bag ready with all the books and supplies your teachers say you need. Do you want to carry it, or shall I give it to Oliver?”

“OMG, Alice, it’s the pink one, right? I think I better take it. I doubt it goes with whatever Oliver’s wearing.”

“I suppose you have a point. Oliver, you may want to bring of bag of your own next time so you can help with a few of those books. After all, Tess won’t need them as much as you will.”

“I don’t—” Oliver said.

“Well,
I
certainly can’t read them,” Tess interrupted. “They’re so you can follow along with the work I’m doing, and make sure I understand my assignments. You know, we ‘dumb blondes’ have trouble with that sort of thing.”

One year earlier. . .

“I’ll give you a team,” the general said.

Travis forced his mind to pay attention, still shocked by the enormity of what Turnbull had suggested.

“They’ll have to be off the books, of course,” the general continued, “but I’ll make sure they’re all former SF or SOG. We can’t let any of this be traced back.”

“SOG, sir? Can we trust those guys?”

The Special Operations Group was the CIA’s covert military operations arm. Almost all of its operatives were former Army Special Forces soldiers. But Travis was convinced the CIA played head games with its people. After meeting a few of the guys from SOG in Afghanistan, he understood why its agents were called “spooks.” They were like ghosts, but not just because they were invisible. They also were a little scary. Really intense, and not in a good way. It seemed they were in it only for the thrills, and had lost sight of the big picture—duty and country.

“Don’t worry, I’ll make sure everyone on your team is properly vetted,” Turnbull said. “But it’s important we don’t take anyone currently active in the service. As of today, Travis, you’re officially out of the army. Early retirement, sabbatical—I don’t care what we call it, but if this is going to work, you can’t be one of us anymore.”

“What about resources? I’ll need equipment as well as men.”

“James has agreed to pay for security, so I imagine you’ll have an unlimited budget even though it’s coming out of his own pocket, not the company’s.”

Travis grimaced. Knowing James, the budget might be unlimited, but it would come with all sorts of questions and maybe even a few strings attached. He sighed.

“I understand the assignment, sir,” he said, “and even if I’m no longer in the army you know I’ll do whatever you order me to. But can I think about this idea of yours for a while before making a commitment?”

Turnbull nodded. “Of course, Travis. But don’t take too long. We don’t know how imminent this threat is. We could be talking weeks, but possibly only days.”

“I’ll give you an answer as soon as I can, sir.”

The general inclined his head again. Without even looking at his watch, he said, “Better get moving, captain. You have a flight to catch. Sorry it isn’t first class this time.”

Turnbull stood and extended his hand. Travis met his grip, then stepped back and saluted. After the general acknowledged it with his own, Travis turned a crisp about-face and marched out of the hangar without looking back.

The flight from Andrews AFB outside Washington, DC, to Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington State gave Travis a lot of time to think. The general had been right—the flight was far from first class. He boarded a noisy C-17 Globemaster III, a transport jet even larger and faster than the turboprop he’d flown out of Afghanistan. Filled with a load of soldiers returning home from tours in Iraq, the plane was noisy in more ways than one. On almost every face Travis saw an expression of relief with a little incredulity thrown in, as if they couldn’t believe they’d been lucky enough to walk away from the war alive and unscathed.

Support had filled the cargo bay with rows of seats, five abreast down the center of the plane and a row of jump seats on each side. The plane had no windows, and didn’t offer an in-flight movie. The middle rows of seats looked moderately comfortable, but Travis had been assigned one of the jump seats. As soon as he sat down, he could tell that his butt would hurt within an hour. A master sergeant on one side faced him.

“Looks like we’re stuck with other for the next five hours, sir,” he said. He put out his hand. “Jones. Master Sergeant Hal Jones.”

“Barrett,” Travis said, shaking his hand. “These your soldiers?”

“Some of them. Got most of a company here. A few didn’t make it.”

“Where were you stationed?”

“Diyala Province, north of Baghdad.”

“Stryker brigade?”

“Yes, sir. How about yourself?”

“I’m just hitching a ride, sergeant. I was in Afghanistan and got reassigned.”

Travis made polite conversation with the sergeant for a while, but the enlisted officer quickly got the picture that Travis had a lot on his mind and desired a little solitude.

General Turnbull had given Travis the perfect opportunity to alter the course of events. If Travis could pull off this mission, it would literally be a game-changer. That’s what it was, of course, all of it. A game. A bunch of overgrown kids—boys in men’s bodies mostly, to be honest—in a map room somewhere, surrounded by computers, applying game theory to outmaneuver their opponents. They used people like Travis as pawns in the game, expendable pieces, moving them around the board at whim.

The real irony, Travis knew, was that the biggest gamer of them all, the game-theory genius, was a pacifist at heart. A man who abhorred war. James didn’t understand war’s necessity, didn’t get why countries, religious factions, or ethnic groups couldn’t solve their differences by playing an online video game. Sometimes you could bring those disparate groups to the table and hammer out an agreement. That wasn’t the point. Travis knew that the aspirations and desires of individuals—greed, power, lust—usually outweighed the minor, or even major, differences of the groups they represented. And sometimes the cause was plain evil, pure and simple. Travis firmly believed evil existed in the world. He’d seen too many horrors not to.

Maybe, just maybe, though, this was Travis’s chance to change the game. He’d have to be extremely careful. James wasn’t stupid, and if he got even a whiff that something wasn’t right, the whole thing could blow up in Travis’s face. But if Travis played his cards right, he could take over the whole project, maybe even more, and flush out the threat at the same time. He’d love to see the look on James’s face if he pulled it off. But if he succeeded, James would be out of the picture. Travis went through the pros and cons again.

He came to a decision.

He started to plan, making mental lists of what he’d need.

A few hours later, the big plane touched down at McChord AFB just south of Tacoma. He’d been traveling for more than twenty-six hours, but his watch said he’d left only about fourteen hours ago due to all the time zones he’d crossed. Waiting until all the other soldiers had deplaned, he shouldered his duffel and filed out after them.

Inside, he asked where he could find a car rental agency and was told there was one at the post exchange, or PX, over at Fort Lewis. Travis found it curious that army soldiers served on “posts,” but sailors and airmen served on “bases.” The combined army and air force operations at Fort Lewis and McChord AFB were also called a “base,” though a joint one. He found a map of the base, pinpointed the building that housed the rental agency, went outside, and started walking.

A cold spring rain beat down on his head. Travis turned up the collar of his army combat uniform and tugged his green beret forward a little so the rain wouldn’t drip in his eyes. He longed for his patrol cap. Travis hadn’t walked more than a few hundred yards when a car pulled up next to him. He ignored it, but the passenger window rolled down and a voice called out.

“Captain Barrett!”

Travis turned to see the sergeant from the plane leaning out the window. A pretty blonde woman sat in the driver’s seat.

“Hey, sergeant.”

“Where you headed, captain?”

“Over to the PX to rent a car.”

“Get in. We’ll give you a ride.”

“You just got home. I’m sure your wife has other plans.”

The blonde leaned over the seat. “Not at all. It’s the least we can do. It’s on our way.”

“Well, if you’re sure it’s no imposition.”

Jones turned around and opened the back door. “You heard the lady, captain. Get in out of that rain.”

Travis threw his duffel on the backseat and climbed in after it. He stared out the window on the way across the base, amazed by the activity, the constant motion and noise. Vehicles and planes traveled in every direction. The only movement in the mountains of Afghanistan had been goats and sheep, the occasional Taliban patrol on horseback in the distance, and sometimes a vehicle on the dirt road. Most of the locals were far too poor to own cars.