A
shoe scuffed the dirt at the tent flap.
The noise startled Kate awake.
The gunman was back!
Adrenaline rocketed through her veins, but she forced herself to stay still. A man. She smelled his sweat. He had feather-light footsteps, a short stride. At most, he had to be medium weight, medium height.
Curled up on her cot in her underwear, she eased her hand to the floor, retrieved her gun and then whipped around rapidly to take aim on his hulking shadow. “Hold it right there.”
“Don’t shoot, Kate! It’s me.” The man moved closer in. “Gaston.”
“Are you stupid?” She blew out a rattled breath. “What the hell are you doing, sneaking around like some idiot rookie? You want to wake up dead?”
“I need to talk to you.”
She turned on a battery-powered lantern that filled the
tent with a soft gold light. “Try knocking, for pity’s sake.” He’d scared ten years off her and nearly gotten himself killed. It was an outrageous mistake for a seasoned operative. “Never mind. Just tell me what you want.”
He walked over, stopped short of a full approach. “I want to know why you’re here.”
“You sneak into my tent in the dead of night and risk getting shot to ask me
that?
”
“Yeah.” Lean and wiry, he shoved his hands into his pockets, assuming a nonthreatening pose.
His sheared hair was nearly nonexistent. She hadn’t noticed that earlier; he’d had on his hat. “I’m updating my diving certification. The instructors authorized to sign off on it are over here, so here I am.” She lied, and didn’t feel a second’s worth of remorse about doing it.
Gaston clearly knew it. He pointed an irritated finger at her. “If you’re here for GRID, I’m warning you, Kate. Stay out of my way. The last thing I need is you coming in now and screwing me up.”
“Exactly what would I be screwing up?”
He clenched his jaw. “I hate it when you play dumb. You’re not good at it.” He wiped his hand across his head as if he still had hair. “I need those weapons.”
“And I need the hostages—if they’re here—
and
the weapons.” Kate sat up, pulled the blanket over her legs and let her feet rest on the cool dirt floor. “Are the hostages here, Gaston?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t seen them, or heard anything about them being here.” He shrugged and his jaw went tight. “Unfortunately that doesn’t mean diddly squat. They could be right under my nose and I wouldn’t know it because Sandross would kill anyone who mentioned it anywhere. Kunz’s orders, of course.”
Clearly, Gaston was being truthful. That level of bitterness was impossible to fake. You felt it or you didn’t, and Gaston definitely felt it. “I shouldn’t have to remind you that we’re on the same side, you know.”
“Listen, you haven’t been here,” he said. “You don’t get the big picture, and I can’t explain it. But if I don’t get those weapons, I’m a dead man, Kate, and that’s a fact.”
She believed him. He was too shaken up for it to be anything but the truth. She pushed a hank of hair back from her face. “Who’s going to kill you?”
Gaston shook his head, refusing to answer. He couldn’t, or wouldn’t, tell her. And that had suspicion rearing its ugly head, invading and nibbling at her. Regardless of what Darcy had said about Gaston not existing on paper, and because he didn’t, Kunz wouldn’t know of him to double him, Kate still had to double-check to make sure that the man standing in front of her wasn’t a GRID double posing as Gaston.
One of the first intel secrets Kate learned was to never ask a question that she couldn’t already answer. It was time to take that lesson out for a run and put it to the test. “Okay. Then tell me why it’s okay for you to know the location of this outpost, and not me.”
He hesitated before answering, then lifted a supplicating hand. “It’s for your own protection, Kate. There’s nothing more to it than that.”
A flat-out lie—and he’d looked her right in the eye while doing it, too. “I don’t believe you.” She couldn’t get more frank than that. “Try again.”
He lifted his arms, palms up. “You can’t tell what you don’t know. I know you’re assigned to S.A.S.S., and I know every S.A.S.S. mission carries lousy odds. It’s almost statistically impossible that you’ll complete this mission without being either captured or killed.”
Kate took his comments in stride. He hadn’t said anything she didn’t already know, and he couldn’t be more frank than that.
“That’s enough, Gaston.” A man’s angry voice boomed from the door. “From everything I’ve seen, you’re not doing a damn thing here to make her odds any better. All you’re worried about is covering your own ass.” Nathan walked into the tent, looked from Gaston to Kate, and radically altered his tone from outraged to concerned. “Do you need anything?”
Clothes would be nice, since it appeared they were going to have a midnight convention in her tent. But she couldn’t very well ask for those. “I don’t think so, thanks.” She tucked the edges of the blanket tighter around her thighs and studied Nathan, hoping he hadn’t jumped to the conclusion that Gaston had been here all night. But he didn’t seem in the least surprised to find Gaston in her tent. The trip wire. Gaston must have set it off. The only logical reason Nathan knew he was here, Kate surmised. “Gaston was just leaving.”
“Ah, good.” Nathan got between the man and the exit and looked down at him. “Don’t make the mistake again of coming into this tent during the night. If Kate doesn’t shoot you, I will.”
“Back off, Commander,” Gaston said. “I needed to talk with her.”
“Fine. Then talk outside, preferably during decent hours—unless you’re in a life-threatening situation.” Nathan crossed his arms. “Are you in a life-threatening situation, Gaston?”
He rocked foot to foot, pissed but not willing to overtly cross Nathan in his own outpost. Here, he ruled. “Not at the present moment, no.”
Nathan had a satisfied look on his face that amused Kate and frosted Gaston. “Well, then, there’s no reason for you to be here.” His jaw tightened. “Good night.”
Summarily dismissed and totally peeved about it, Gaston turned to leave, but he couldn’t resist firing off a parting shot. “Don’t forget what I said, Kate.”
She stared at him and said nothing.
He left the tent, and when the flap closed behind him, she looked at Nathan. “Are you in a life-threatening situation, Nathan?”
“Around you?” he asked. “Always.”
“Commander?” Riley called from outside.
Kate let out a huffy sigh. “Doesn’t anyone sleep in this damn unit?”
“Sorry to disturb you, ma’am.” That from Riley, standing on the other side of the tent, who then added, “General Shaw will call back in forty-five minutes, sir.”
“Thanks, Riley. I’ll be there. Put on a pot of coffee, will you?”
“Yes, sir.” The sound of Riley’s retreating footsteps faded.
General Shaw? Kate’s boss, Colonel Drake, answered to General Shaw. He was in her chain of command, not Nathan’s. So what was going on here? And why had Kate been omitted from the need-to-know loop? She hiked her eyebrows, silently putting the question to Nathan.
He ignored it and walked over to her cot. “Mind if I sit down?”
Surprised he had deviated yet again from his distance policy and stayed in her tent, Kate nodded that she didn’t mind.
He sat beside her. The cot creaked under his weight and the scent of his soap tickled her nose. “You said you trusted
me, Kate. Well, the truth is, I trust you, too.” He looked up from the floor to her. “It’s time.”
“Time for what?” She wasn’t playing coy. She didn’t have a clue what he was talking about.
“For full disclosure,” he said, asking her to enlighten him in a roundabout way uncommon to him.
Normally, Nathan Forester was very direct. But coupling Douglas’s disappearance with Gaston’s comments about her survival odds, would give Nathan serious concerns. For one thing, he was her host, responsible for her, and for another, he had full disclosure authorization. There was no valid reason for her not to tell him everything. And she trusted him.
Until now, she had disclosed topical bits she had felt compelled to disclose. But now, with everything that was happening, it was time for her to fill in the substantial gaps she’d deliberately left in place.
“Okay,” she said. “Full disclosure. But, Nathan, swear to me you’ll never make me regret this. I’ll believe you because you’ve proven that you’re a good man. Still, I want your word.”
“You’ve got it, Kate.”
“On Emily’s soul,” she said, looking him right in the eye, knowing that any vow Nathan Forester made that put his dead wife’s soul on the line was a vow he’d never break.
“On Emily’s soul.”
Satisfied, Kate licked at her dry lips and started at the beginning. She put all the proverbial cards on the table. Disclosed everything about Thomas Kunz. About witnessing the remnants of some of his tortured victims. About Amanda being taken hostage and doubled, and running into the woman face-to-face in a GRID replica of her apart
ment that matched her real one down to the brand of salt in the kitchen cabinet. All of her things—even her toothbrush and articles of clothing—had been duplicated and put in their proper place.
Kate told him about the sensory-deprivation chambers and the surgical clinics discovered in the three GRID compounds S.A.S.S. already had taken down. The clinics that were better equipped than most top-notch U.S. hospitals. And with a hitch in her chest and a knot in her throat, Kate told Nathan about a nanny named Rosalita, who loved Jeremy, a child not even her own, so much she had sacrificed her life to save him and his parents, Dr. Joan Foster and her husband, Simon.
And the more Kate told Nathan, the more there seemed to be to tell, including S.A.S.S. fears that there were many more GRID compounds scattered throughout the world, many more doubled operatives already inserted into positions within the government that would be nearly impossible to expose. She told him specifics that S.A.S.S. had discovered about the people doubled, that the doctor, Joan Foster, a victim herself, had used psychological warfare techniques, including memory manipulation, to prepare GRID doubles for their roles as U.S. employees. It was a comprehensive process so successful that even the doubles didn’t know that they were doubles unless Kunz wanted them to know.
Nathan listened intently, not once interrupting Kate, but his expression grew more solemn by degree, more grim with each disclosure. And while Kate talked, she imagined how hard it would be to assimilate all of this at once. Even aware that Black World operations had held the technology to do all of these things for years, that someone would deliberately subvert that technology and use it for such inhuman purposes would slay Kate.
Clearly, it bothered Nathan, too, and that made his assimilation of all the nasty tentacles in this even more challenging. Watching him, his body language, the look in his eyes turn from haunted to bleak, she realized how much of an advantage it had been to learn of all these things in segments. And she wanted to say something to let him know she understood the difficulty for him. “Nathan.” She pressed her hand lightly against his forearm. “This truly is a complex mission. It has more facets than a cut diamond, and that makes it enormously complicated.”
“Yes,” he softly agreed. “It certainly does.”
“But it’s not hopeless.” Her mouth dry, she licked at her lips. “The minute we give in and feel hopeless, that’s the minute Thomas Kunz wins. If he wins with us, what will he do to the rest of the world? We’re the last superpower, Nathan. If we can’t stop him, no one can. So we don’t dare to feel hopeless or helpless. It’s just too high a price for all of us to pay.”
He stared at her a long second, then blinked hard three times in rapid succession. His expression remained grim, but it wasn’t horror that reflected in his eyes now. It was resolve. “What about GRID itself? I know the basics. Fill in the blanks for me. How does it operate?”
Relieved by his change in attitude, Kate relayed everything she remembered about GRID’s structure and organizational philosophy. Like every other S.A.S.S. member who learned to what extent greed drove GRID, Nathan was repulsed. And when she told him about GRID’s new second-in-command, Marcus Sandross, Nathan didn’t bother to hide his contempt.
“It’s hard to believe any man could justify what they’re doing in his own mind.”
She agreed. “Dr. Joan Foster, our psyche specialist,
says they don’t try. She’s convinced Kunz knows right from wrong, he just doesn’t consider that perspective in his decision-making. He wants what he wants and that’s all he wants. For him, that’s where it ends.”
Nathan’s brows shot up on his forehead. “He can’t be pushing that perspective to recruits. It doesn’t make sense to a rational person, not even one motivated by greed.”
His deduction was insightful, and correct. Kate shared with him the tripe Kunz fed new recruits. “One man’s terrorist is another man’s liberator.”
Nathan rolled his eyes. “But for him, it is all about money.”
“Absolutely. Money can liberate, Nathan,” Kate said. “Kunz was an abuse victim, remember? With money, he’s not reliant on any other human being to fulfill his basic needs or his desires. Maggie says he equates having money to being free.”
“That makes a twisted kind of sense. But the costs of that kind of freedom, you would think, would make it clear it’s a false premise.”
Kate countered. “Not to him. To him it holds together just fine.”
“Which is why we’re in the spot we’re in.”
“According to Maggie, yes,” Kate said. Then going beyond what she knew, she did something totally alien to her. Something she could never remember doing before in her life. Something she could hardly believe she was doing now.
She shared with Nathan her personal fear.
Fear that, through his doubles, Kunz would compromise the country, that he would successfully destroy the economy, that he would kill not hundreds or thousands, but millions of Americans.
And encouraged by quiet acceptance, his receptive concern for all she revealed, she took a huge leap of faith and revealed her greatest fear of all.