The Sparks Broker, page 12
part #2 of S.A.S.S. Series
“Sure are a lot of maybes in this, Kate. Supposition is rarely an asset in our line of work.” Forester didn’t dispute her, he just wasn’t sure they’d made an accurate conclusion.
“True, but sometimes supposition is all we’ve got and it can lead us to the facts.” She hated to be brutal, but this was a time to be totally frank. “His body should have surfaced by now, Nathan.”
“Unless GRID has him.”
“Unless GRID has him,” she conceded. “But what if it doesn’t? What if he’s just stuck and waiting?”
“Do you really consider that possible?” Nathan grimaced, his finger tracing the points on the map. “Search and Rescue have every piece of electronic equipment known to man at their disposal, and they’re using every resource they’ve got to locate Douglas. If they can’t find him—”
“Nothing takes the place of human intelligence and you know it, Nathan.” She pointed to the map. “Look at this.” She let her fingertip flow over the paper, marking a trail on the map. “These caves are constantly flooded. We think GRID is off-loading illegal cargo at sea. Now look at the currents. They’d bring the weapons right up to the caves and they’re heavy enough. They could be gouging the rocks.”
“Weapons are heavy. They would sink,” he said. “For Christ’s sake, think, Kate. A crate of metal weapons wouldn’t float.”
“What if they didn’t sink and they did float? What if GRID receives the weapons, moves them through the caves and then moves them out through the other side that’s on dry land? From there, they could truck or fly them to the end buyer.”
“The crates would’ve been seen at sea. The Navy would have gotten a visual.”
“What if they didn’t?”
He was losing patience fast. “It’s pretty hard to hide crates of weapons floating in the gulf, Kate.”
“But what if GRID somehow did it?” she persisted. “Look, you’re thinking like a normal human being. Don’t. Think like Thomas Kunz. He hid at least sixty men and women—high-ranking, top-level, security-clearance, card-carrying people—in plain sight. If he could do that, then he could find a way to move weapons.”
“Okay, okay.” The fight went out of Nathan. He lifted his hands, giving up on simple reason. “What do you want to do?”
“I want to explore these caves.” She pointed to them on the map. “At dawn,” she added. “That’s when the current is strongest.”
Forester stepped back from the table. Legs spread, he folded his arms across his chest. “And GRID is just going to let you walk in there and take a look around.”
“Of course not.” She stared up at Nathan, wondering if he’d be nonplussed or repulsed by what she next said. “I’m going to have to kill the men guarding the gate first. Then explore the caves.”
“Oh, I see. That simple. You think?”
“That difficult,” she contradicted him. “Which is why I need you to come with me.”
“Kate, I’m good, but I’m not an expert diver. You need an expert.”
She stared at him a long moment. “I don’t need your diving skills, Nathan. I need someone to watch my back. But if you’d rather not, just say so. I can just as easily go in alone. I’ve done nearly everything in my life that way and watched my own back. I can certainly do it again now.”
He gave her a stoic look. “Then why did you ask me?”
“Honestly, right now, I have no idea.”
“Five minutes ago, then.”
She looked up at him. “Because I trust you and I know what I’m walking into down there. I’ve infiltrated GRID compounds before.” She shifted on her feet, half turned away from him. “Just forget it. I’m fine on my own.”
“Whoa. Hold on.” He softened his voice and clasped her arm. “I never said I wouldn’t go, Kate. Only that one of my divers might be better.”
“He can’t.”
“Kate, they’re more experienced. They’re the experts. I’m just the man who commands them.”
“I said he can’t, and I meant it.”
“You’re not listening. You don’t know—”
“Yes, I do know.” She exposed a stubborn streak a league long.
“How?”
Her gaze softened and she tilted her chin up to look him in the eye. “I know because it’s you I trust, Nathan.” It was hard to say and harder to feel. But it was right and it was time to say it out loud. Maybe then her feelings for him wouldn’t seem so strong and powerful.
“Trust is a fragile thing,” he said. “It shouldn’t be put at risk needlessly.”
She nodded.
“I could fail you, Kate.”
“I could fail Douglas, too.” She hiked her chin. “But just because I know that doesn’t mean I’m not going to try.”
Nathan’s expression turned sour, but he didn’t pop back with a witty or even a dry remark. “All right. You win, and I hope you don’t regret it. I hope neither of us regrets it. At dawn we explore the caves.”
She smiled, lifted a hand to his face and stroked his jaw, earlobe to chin. “Thank you.”
He grunted, not at all happy with developments. “Thank me tomorrow—if we live.”
Chapter Eleven
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 in the world 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 single thing here to make her odds any better. All you’re worried about is covering your own back.” 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 tripwire. 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, angry 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 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 motioned 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 apartment 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.”
