Authors: Nicola Claire
“It’s what you know, even if you didn’t realise you knew it. It’s what we’ve been doing, even though we had no idea how far reaching our acts were. But most of all, it’s him, this Director, this man in charge of New Zealand’s spy agency.
“Wayne Pascoe’s not the new drug kingpin. The Director of the Department is.”
Holy fucking shit.
“No,” I rasped. His fingers tightened, he opened his mouth to press home the issue. But I beat him to it. “Not just our new kingpin. He’s bigger than that.” Pascoe was just a front.
Adam frowned.
“The person at the top of the cartel was always a shadow,” I admitted slowly, as the facts started to make sense. “We caught the lieutenants. We got the dealers on the streets. But we never found the shadow. They called him
Yǐngzi
. But no one knew for certain who he actually was. Interpol thought it one of the lieutenants. The DGSE in France thought it someone they held at Le Santé. The Department put it out there that it was another target we’d looked at earlier, but Interpol couldn’t find him when they searched again. But they all agreed on one thing. The cartel was over, with or without
Yǐngzi
.”
I started laughing. It sounded unhinged even to my ears. Ten years I’d followed orders blindly. Ten years I’d done what was required of me without a second thought. Ten years I’d been his soldier. His spy. His agent. Ten fucking years and this?
He was coming for me.
Tell her I'm coming. Tell her it’s time to face the truth. Veritas Lux Mea. There's nowhere to hide.
Veritas Lux Mea.
The truth enlightens me.
God, I felt sick.
T
he sickness didn’t abate
that evening, nor the next day. A constant sense of nausea, a thrumming of anxiety, a tumult of emotions I had no way of countering. Adam kept a wary eye on me, but I no longer felt as though I was under his guard, suspected of escaping at any given moment. Not trusted. It was concern that kept the edges of his lips down. Worry that darkened the blue of his eyes. Frustration that had his hair standing at odd angles, his fingers constantly running though them, as though aerating his scalp would somehow aid in cooling him down.
The rest of ASI was no better. No one spoke to me, but they watched when we passed on our way to the gym for a workout. They stopped talking when we walked into the lunchroom for some food. They turned the TV down when we entered the rec room, as though loud explosions in some action thriller was likely to set me off or give me ideas.
Everyone was on tenterhooks, walking on ice that I could have sworn had been laid down by Anscombe himself.
But by four in the afternoon all the extended family belonging to ASI had been secured in safe houses and we were set to go.
“Just received a message from Caleb,” Amber announced, finding me at the back of the rec room, book open in my lap; God knows what it was about, my attention on everyone else and not the pages.
Brook and Koki were playing foosball in the corner, hollering whenever one of them scored a goal. Jason was cleaning a gun across the way, watching me watching him from the corner of my eye. Adam was pretending to read a car magazine near me, not too close to suffocate, but close enough to come between me and the barely contained testosterone in the room. Eric and Amber had been locked in control. And Ben and Abi had left over an hour ago; finding shadows near my back-up shack to hide in; waiting and watching.
And Nick… Nick was in his office. I’d checked, every time I’d insisted on a bathroom break.
I looked up at Amber now; the reason, if we peeled back the layers, why I was even here. ASI wouldn’t have gone after Wayne Pascoe quite so vigilantly if not for the fact that he’d obliquely threatened Amber Shaw. She didn’t look like a villain. She didn’t look like any mark I’d ever been pitted against before. But Amber Shaw
was
the reason why my world was being destroyed.
She was the reason why the blinkers had been torn off.
“Amber,” I said, noting that Brook and Koki had quietened down their antics in order to hear. That Jason had assembled his gun in case he needed it. And Adam had lowered his magazine, frown lines marring his forehead.
“Another coded message in the dead drop,” she said. “He’s on for tonight. Six o’clock.”
Adam looked at his watch, but I already knew we had less than two hours.
“Is Nick ready?” I asked.
“I’m always ready,” the head of ASI answered as he walked into the room. He glanced around at everyone’s placement and offered a scowl. “The question is, specialist, are you?” His ice blue eyes found me on the last.
Was I ready? It was debatable. Caleb Hart had been as close to a friend as I’d had at the Department. He’d saved my life. Literally. He’d stormed into a heavily fortified warehouse, taking on a dozen heavily armed mercenaries, and risked
everything
to reach me in time.
I’d been tied to a chair, beaten bloody. Fractured cheek. Broken index finger on my right hand. Shattered ribs. Punctured lung. My blood had been pooling on the concrete floor; I could see my bruised reflection in it when I’d managed to open my swollen eyes enough to care. The world had swirled around me, and for a moment the flashes of colour I’d seen had been mistaken for the onset of unconsciousness. Or death.
“Are you clean?”
a voice had asked when the spinning had stopped.
“Did they tag you?”
I’d managed to shake my head, but talking had been difficult.
“Ava’s coming,”
he’d said.
“But I overheard them say they were about to dispose of the body”
My body. “
I couldn’t wait any longer,”
he’d explained
. “But we can’t count on cover if we run.”
He’d untied me, covering my naked body in his coat, then lifting me to my feet. He would have carried me, too, if I’d let him. But he’d needed his hands free to hold his guns. He’d handed me two more. I could barely grip the one in my right hand. Firing it had hurt like hell.
But we had run. And Ava
had
been there, offering cover fire, saving both our arses. And yet Caleb hadn’t known that when he’d stormed the warehouse. He’d come in without backup, because time had run out for me. There’d been no guarantee that he’d make it out again. There’d been no back-up plan, save us.
And one of us had been tortured to within an inch of her life.
And the other had been, until that moment, just a colleague.
But he was my friend. I owed him my life.
No, I wasn’t ready.
“Charlie?” Adam said carefully, pulling my attention back to the room. Back to the silence, the stillness, the lack of breaths as they’d all watched me check out for a few minutes. “Are you OK?”
I looked into his eyes, because to look elsewhere would have made this all too real. Deep bottomless blue held my gaze, anchoring me, holding me, catching me.
I’ll catch you
.
I cleared my throat.
“I’m ready,” I said, and no one called me on it. Whether that was a concession or they didn’t feel it necessary to point out the obvious, I didn’t know.
“Koki and Brook,” Nick said, turning away from staring at me. “Mount up. I want you surveying the immediate area.” Both peas-in-their-pods nodded their heads and left the foosball table, heading out of the room. “Jase, you’re on,” Nick added. “Eric has your rooftop covered by camera, but we need you in situ now.”
Jase holstered his gun, nodded his head, and made for the door. He stopped just this side of it, not looking down at me, but pausing as though he might. He didn’t say anything, just stood there. Silence stretched, which felt weighted. Then he knocked twice on the wall beside the door frame, and strode from the room.
“Anything you want to add about this Caleb Hart guy?” Nick asked, after we’d all watched Jason leave. “Anything you’ve held back, thought not important, or too fucking top secret to share? Now’s the time to come clean. I’m placing my entire fucking team in your hands.”
He didn’t like it. Anger and frustration held him rigid where he stood, staring me down, threatening to slit my throat with an icy glare alone.
I’d told them everything that could give us a tactical advantage. I’d disclosed Caleb’s skills and talents, his quirks and foibles. I’d outlined his training and areas of expertise. His personality and character. His strengths and what few weakness he might have. I’d told them everything, but the most important thing.
Caleb Hart was my friend.
I’d never considered any of my fellow specialists friends. Never. But Caleb, I realised with a dawning sense of horror, was a friend.
“You know everything,” I said, holding his piercing gaze, face impassive, pulse steady, body relaxed. “Just like he will know everything about you.”
“Not everything,” Adam replied. “He doesn’t know that we’ve figured the connection out. He doesn’t know that we’ve uncovered the Director’s secret. He doesn’t know that we’ve got your back.”
My eyes flicked up to Nick’s on those last words.
“Have you?” I asked. “Got my back?”
Nick held my stare with a frosty one of his own, and then finally sighed. He ran a hand through his dark hair, just like Adam does; they could have been brothers.
And in a way, I guess they were, because the next words out of Nick’s mouth were, “Adam trusts you. He seems to think that you’re his.” His? I looked toward Adam, who’d turned a pale shade of pink. He didn’t meet my eyes. “You wouldn’t be
my
pick for him, but I’m not the one who has to deal with your shit. If he thinks he can handle it, then I’m not to judge. He’s claimed you.” Hello, what? “You’re the one he’s picked.”
Nick looked toward Adam then, his face pensive, no ice to be seen.
“I trust Adam,” he finally said. “Adam trusts you. Ergo we’ve got your back.”
Then he turned on his heel and walked out of the room.
Silence met his departure, Adam looking anywhere but at my face. It was kind of endearing, and highly amusing, if I wasn’t still hung up on being “picked.”
“So, how does one claim someone?” I asked, eyebrows arched, arms folded over my chest, legs crossed at the knees, booted foot tapping.
Adam ran a hand over his mouth and chin, then finally met my eyes. There was chagrin there, and a healthy dose of embarrassment.
And then he grinned at my dropped jaw. Offering a one shoulder shrug while he was at it.
I shook my head, but found myself smiling. I’d never been claimed before. I had no fucking idea what it actually meant. But somewhere, deep down inside, a fire had started to burn. Warmth suffused me. The dark hollows that had existed for so long suddenly filled with light.
They had my back
. Because Adam trusted me.
I was losing something today. Losing my family, what colleagues I’d never had the chance to call friends. The Department. I was losing it all in little over an hour’s time.
But it wasn’t so bad. Adam had claimed me. I was the one he’d picked.
“So, what didn’t you tell Nick?” Adam suddenly asked, making the goofy grin I was sure I’d been wearing disappear.
“I told him everything,” I replied steadily.
“No, you told him what he needed to know to have a snowball’s chance at making this operation a success. You did not tell him everything.”
He couldn’t know that.
“There’s nothing else to tell,” I insisted.
Adam stared at me for a long moment and then said, “Nick found me in a dingy underground bar.”
My heart stilled. My eyes met his. So clear and open, nothing to hide.
“I was down to my last dollar. Had been picking up the odd job as a guide in back-country Waikato, but it was off season, and I don’t fucking fish.” He shrugged again. “Bills had piled up since I’d left the Army. Don’t know how, but it might have been the fact that I liked a good bet.”
I couldn’t see it. I couldn’t see the Adam Savill I’d come to know as a gambler.
“My last loss had been to a bored lawyer up in Auckland who had wagered his car for mine. It was probably one of several cars he’d owned, no more important to him than the butt-ugly tie he’d been wearing at the time. Not his home. His livelihood. His last possession. But I took the bet, because fuck it! What else was there to do? I’d survived Afghanistan. I’d returned home alive, when two of my mates hadn’t.”
Survivor’s guilt. It was written all over his face, in the clench of his hands, in the way his jaw tightened, and his brow furrowed, and pink stained his cheeks with rage.
He forcefully released the tension throughout his body, rather like a specialist is trained to let everything go and just do their job. I watched on, recognising the movement for what it was. A survival mechanism. A camouflage. A way to hide your secrets from everyone else.
I leaned forward and reached out a hand to touch his leg. I gave him a squeeze and said, “You lost.”
“Yeah, I lost,” he said, looking down at my hand on his knee. For a second he did nothing, and then he lifted his hand, picked up mine, and returned it to his knee.
I’d never held anyone’s hand before. Not like this. I was puzzling out what it was I was feeling, when Adam added, “He was a friend of Nick’s father. Somehow Nick heard about it. Next thing I know, I’m drinking my last beer, looking at sleeping on a park bench, and he walks into the bar. Offered me a job right then and there, no questions asked.
“Of course, he’d had Eric look into me. Had read my service record and discharge sheet. He knew everything, even why I was throwing away my life as though it was worth nothing.”
Nick ran this company with a tight fist. He expected loyalty and dedication and if not perfection, then something a hell of a lot like it. And yet, every single one of its employees looked up to the man. Deferred to him when he walked in a room. Bent over backwards to do what he asked. Protected him with their last breath.
Because he’d protected them from theirs.
Nick had surrounded himself with a bunch of mercenaries who considered him their brother. And just what did their boss consider them to be?
Family. They were his family. Hand picked, yes. Chosen with care and a sharp eye, for sure. Nick Anscombe was no pushover, he was quick, deadly, and often emotionless. But that did not mean the man didn’t care.
“Adam trusts you. He seems to think that you’re his. You wouldn’t be
my
pick for him, but I’m not the one who has to deal with your shit. If he thinks he can handle it, then I’m not to judge.”
I wanted to be part of this family.
And yet, I knew I never could.
There’s no such thing as an ex-spy. There’s no retirement. There’s no pasture for them to be let out in when they start to fail. A spy is always a spy.
And then they die.
“We all have a past, Charlie,” Adam said softly, his thumb rubbing over the back of my hand in a motion that at once soothed and frightened. “We’ve all had our mountains to climb and our deserts to cross. We’ve bled for our country. We’ve loved and we’ve lost. But none of that matters here. It might get you in, it might be the key that unlocks ASI’s door. But once you’re across that threshold, it’s up to you. What you do then, from that day onwards.
That’s
what makes you part of the team. Part of this family.
“Nick knows my dark secrets. He’s seen into my shadows. And not looked away. He could do the same for you, if you let him.”
I wanted to. I’d never wanted something so much before. I’d never allowed myself to want anything. But this? This was too much. Even for a rogue spy, a burned out specialist. It was too much to want.
The Director would never let me go. The Department may be his to control, for now, but it was a machine that functioned alone. Cut off the head, and the body kept going. Mal. The other handlers. Caleb Hart following his last orders.