Never Miss

by Melissa Koslin

  “I can’t fly.”

  “Why?”

  “Multiple reasons. But I’ll take you to an airport, and I’ll get there as fast as I can.” Then she added, “Maybe you shouldn’t try flying either.”

  “Because of what happened at Professor Ibekwe’s house.”

  She nodded. “He’s gone to the police by now. If the police have a BOLO out for you, they’ll pick you up and hold you for questioning, and we can’t be sure they’ll let you go. You shouldn’t risk it.”

  “We’ll take turns and drive through the night. We should be able to do it in about . . . forty hours or so.”

  “Less.” She pressed harder on the gas pedal.

  She drove for a while longer. She didn’t even stop to check a map, as if she knew the major freeways across the entire country. He let his mind slip back into shifting around the puzzle pieces.

  The sky grew darker.

  “You should sleep for a while,” he said. “I’ll drive.”

  “You should know some things,” she said. “You need to know—you deserve to know—who you’re getting involved with. You’ve guessed some of my background, but you don’t really have any idea who you’re dealing with.”

  thirteen

  “YOU DON’T HAVE TO TELL ME ANYTHING,” Lyndon said.

  Kadance took a slow breath. “I have to.” It wouldn’t be fair to him to let him get entangled with her without understanding what he was getting into.

  Lyndon quietly let her organize her thoughts.

  “I was in the CIA, Special Activities Center.”

  “Covert operations,” he said. “Black ops.”

  She nodded. Sometimes the fact that he seemed to know at least a little about everything made talking to him easier. She wasn’t used to talking to people, and she liked that she didn’t have to spell out every detail for him. “I specialized as a sniper.”

  “That’s why you have that gun in your back seat and why you spotted the shooter at the storage facility.”

  “It’s a McMillan TAC-50 sniper rifle. I’ve considered getting rid of it several times, but I feel unprepared without it.”

  “Unprepared for what?”

  “I entered service just out of high school. I’ve completed a lot of missions.” She looked over at him. “I’ve killed a lot of people.”

  He nodded.

  She turned back to the road. “I was positioned in the Middle East for years. I was alone, entrenched in cultures so different from America. I speak fluent Farsi and Arabic, and with my coloring, I could blend in pretty well.”

  “They left you there a long time.”

  She closed her eyes for a second and nodded. She’d felt alone, had feared she’d been abandoned at times when she received no communication for months.

  “It was hard on you,” he said.

  “I kept reminding myself of what I was there for—to protect not only our troops and our country but the innocent people trapped by evil regimes and terrorist groups. But some days were much harder than others. I could take action only when orders came in. There was so much I couldn’t stop . . .”

  “Tell me,” he said.

  She glanced at him.

  “I think you’ll feel better if you tell me the details,” he said.

  She wasn’t so sure about that, but she’d started this and needed to follow through. “I spent years with certain villages. They’d give me a backstory and place me, and I had to blend in. The men who ran these villages believed in Sharia law, including hudud.”

  “I’ve heard of Sharia, but not hudud.”

  “It’s the mandated punishments under Sharia law. They’re extreme. Hudud is not enforced widespread, but some want it to be the unwavering standard. So many of these men used Sharia to terrorize. I saw things, and I knew of things going on, but I couldn’t do anything, or else I could risk the larger plans in place.”

  “So you weren’t just a sniper.”

  “It was my job to find intel, get it to my superiors, and when the order came to eliminate certain people, I knew the terrain and the patterns of the community to get it done quietly.” Her handler had called her a “one-stop shop.”

  “Did anyone ever figure out it was you?”

  She didn’t answer.

  He leaned forward to look at her more closely. “Someone did. And you had to eliminate them too.”

  “I did my job.”

  “But it was hard on you,” he said. “More than you’ll admit.”

  She was quiet. He was right—she still felt blood on her hands, of all the people she couldn’t save, even of the evil terrorists she’d killed.

  “I’m not going to sit here and tell you all of it was right. I honestly don’t know.”

  For some reason, his blatant honesty was refreshing. It didn’t make her feel better about what she’d done and seen, but it made her feel okay about not feeling okay. She’d always felt that she was wrong for feeling conflicted about some aspects of her service.

  “But,” he said, “I do know that you tried to protect the innocent. No matter what, that was the right thing to do.”

  She nodded. The problem was she was just scratching the surface of what she needed to tell him.

  “A lot of the time,” she said, “I didn’t know who was in my sights. I had to trust that the intel was good and my superiors made good decisions when they gave me orders. Sometimes I imagined who my targets were leaving behind, but I tried to trust that I was making a difference.”

  He didn’t respond, and she glanced over at him.

  He was looking out the windshield at the darkening sky.

  “I think you probably already guessed that part of my background,” she said. “At least to some degree.”

  “Something like that.”

  “What I really need to tell you,” she said, “is something entirely different.”

  She saw peripherally as he tilted his head.

  “When I finally came home, I was so relieved,” she said. “I’d never truly appreciated this country until I came home after ten years of living in communities where I barely had rights just because I’m female. I saw girls married off at the age of ten, women punished for the offense of having been brutally raped, child suicide bombers, and nonbelievers killed simply because they had a different faith. I became so entrenched in it that I could barely remember what it was like to live here, have rights, be equal.

  “Then I went home. My first night home was hard. My family was so proud of my service, and they wanted to hear my stories, but I didn’t want to relive them. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t concentrate. My dad said I just needed to get back into action. He’s the one who’d trained me as a sniper. He and my uncle and all my cousins are accomplished. He got me out on the range on the ranch and raved about my skill. I’d always been good.” Too good.

  “Are you still dealing with PTSD?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. Probably.”

  She felt his gaze on her.

  “This isn’t the end of your story,” he said.

  “No,” she admitted.

  He reached over, took her hand, and squeezed it. His hand was warm, strong, but his grip gentle. Some emotion that she couldn’t quite identify washed over her. She’d forced all emotion out of her life for so long, she could barely recognize it at all.

  With their hands on the armrest between them, Mac scooted over to Lyndon’s left thigh and rested his front paws and chin on their hands. Then he closed his eyes again. She was shocked at how relaxed Mac was being.

  “Keep talking,” Lyndon said gently.

  “My family took me back out to the range every day. It was familiar, my childhood all over again, and I started sleeping better, eating more. I don’t think I was happy really. I think I was letting the numbness of routine calm me. My father was pleased. He thought I was coming back to my old self, but my old self, the little girl who’d get up at dawn to try to beat her daddy at target practice, was gone.” She sat up straighter in her s
eat. “I’d known that would happen when I went in the CIA. I’d made the decision that protecting my country was worth whatever it did to me.”

  He squeezed her hand.

  “But that ten years isn’t what cut away the last threads of who I was.” She took a slow breath and looked over at Lyndon. “I became an assassin for hire.”

  fourteen

  KADANCE WAITED FOR LYNDON to pull away from her. But he kept his hand wrapped around hers.

  She made herself keep talking. “My father told me about a mission he’d been given by his old superior in the Marines. They needed it to happen quietly. It needed to be off the record and untraceable, and so they’d called up my father, one of the best snipers the Marines has ever seen. The target was a recruiter for ISIS and also planning a large-scale attack on a university, with an estimation of thousands of deaths. But as he researched it, he wasn’t sure if even he could pull it off. The shooter had to wait until just the right opportunity, which could take some time, so it would be better for someone close to college age, who could fit in, to do it. And the shot was going to be extremely tricky—the distance, the angle. That’s when he asked me to do it. I was better than him. I was better than all of them.”

  “You completed it for him.”

  “Yes. He was so proud. He practically jumped up and down with excitement about the skill of the shot. The police didn’t even consider it’d been a sniper. Off the record, untraceable. It was the same thing I’d done for the past ten years. Except it wasn’t.”

  Lyndon tilted his head.

  “The next morning, I woke and looked outside to see my father meeting with someone in the driveway. I couldn’t see the person on the other side of a big truck, but I saw them hand my dad a black duffle bag. I met my father in the kitchen to see what was going on. I asked him who that was, what was in the bag, and he waved it off as nothing and asked me what I wanted for breakfast. He seemed really happy. I walked over to where he’d set the bag on a chair and opened it. It was full of bundles of cash.”

  Lyndon lifted his chin and cursed.

  Kadance didn’t risk looking over at him.

  “He tricked you,” Lyndon said. “The Marines hadn’t asked him to do the job.”

  “No.”

  “Why’d he do that to you?”

  “He didn’t think he was doing anything to me.” She sighed. “That’s what I tell myself. I demanded he explain what’d happened, and as he finally talked, I realized he didn’t see any moral problem with it. He’d been a sniper with the Marines for pay, so what was the problem continuing to get paid for his skill?”

  “How can he think that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Does the rest of your family know what he did?”

  She hesitated.

  He lifted his chin in understanding. “You said they’re all trained as snipers. That wasn’t an isolated incident. Assassination is the family business.”

  “I didn’t know,” she said. “I realize now my upbringing was unique. My cousins and I were trained—survival skills, fighting, shooting, all of it. There were no Barbies and Legos—I didn’t even know what those were until I was a teenager. My uncle and father were grooming us.”

  “When you say survival skills and fighting, you don’t mean how to tie knots and basic self-defense.”

  “No, I mean left out in the woods alone and fight my cousins until one of us was knocked out.” She continued, “My father would go out on assignments, but he always said they were for the Marines. Or maybe that’s what he said a couple of times, and I assumed the rest. But I should’ve realized.”

  “Is this why you’re on the run? Someone figured out you did that job?”

  She appreciated that he was trying to be kind by not calling it what it was. Assassination. Murder. “No,” she said.

  “Your father didn’t give over evidence in retaliation for your leaving?”

  “He would never do that. He was too proud of it, and I have the feeling he didn’t want to cross the client.”

  “You’re running from your family then?”

  “When he finally explained, he seemed to think it wasn’t such a big deal. I lost it. I screamed and yelled. I’d never felt that kind of anger. I’d never thought I could feel like that toward my father.”

  His tone was gentle. “You keep referring to him as your father, but growing up, I suspect you called him Dad, or maybe even Daddy. He was your idol growing up, wasn’t he?”

  She nodded.

  “You spent every moment you could out on the range with him, trying to master what he loved so he’d be proud of you. Am I right?”

  She nodded but couldn’t get any words out.

  THOUGH SHE BLOCKED most emotion from her face, Lyndon was learning to read her—the slight twitch of her brows, the tightening of her lips, the way her eyes deadened. He knew there was nothing he could say to ease her pain, so he said nothing. That urge to hold her raged; he refused to let himself act on it. But he did slowly rub his thumb over the soft skin of her hand. It amazed him how she was hardened and deadly and yet still feminine and lovely.

  After a minute or so of silence, he asked, “Are they trying to bring you into the family business?”

  “He kept talking about how I’m so valuable. That it’s selfish to squander my talents. In those few minutes, I realized my entire life wasn’t what I thought it was. I thought my family was dedicated to the safety of the country, willing to sacrifice for others. But none of it was the truth. It was something I’d fabricated in my own head. I told him I was leaving. At first, he tried reasoning with me. Eventually, he called in my uncle and cousins, and I realized he’d force me to stay.”

  “But you got out.”

  When she hesitated to respond, he knew it’d been hard. She’d probably had to hurt some of her family. He didn’t ask for details. “You think they’ll try to force you back if they find you?”

  “They’re tracking me or trying to.”

  “They’ve caught up to you before?”

  She nodded.

  Again, he didn’t ask her to relive the details.

  She straightened her back but kept her focus out the windshield. “I’ll understand if you don’t want my help. I’m limited in what I can do. I have fake IDs, but they can’t be put under too much scrutiny. I can’t draw attention to myself. If I stay in one place too long, I risk being found.” She paused. “And I’ll understand if you’re uncomfortable being around me.”

  He considered what she’d told him. She had a valid point, certainly. If her ID was flagged or if her family found her, the situation could get a lot more complicated than it already was. Finally, he said, “I don’t think I can do this on my own. I think we’ll need your skills to have any hope of being successful.”

  She glanced at him and then back to the road. “But are you uncomfortable with me?”

  He brushed his thumb over her hand. “Do I seem uncomfortable?”

  She looked at him, met his eyes, and he could start to see actual emotion. But he wasn’t good at reading emotion. She turned back to the road.

  Then she pulled her hand away from his. “I don’t think we should risk complicating things any more than they already are.”

  He wanted to say he was just holding her hand, not asking her to sleep with him, but he held back the words. She was right. He wasn’t sure what he’d been thinking. He shouldn’t be holding her hand or making any kind of physical contact—no matter how attracted he was to her, especially because of how attracted he was. He’d resolved a long time ago not to have romantic relationships. Not after what happened to Angela.

  fifteen

  “WHERE ARE WE?” Kadance woke when she felt the change in speed. She looked out the window from the passenger seat to see they were exiting the freeway.

  “We need food,” Lyndon said. “And I want to find a library.”

  “A library?”

  “If the attack will happen at the State of the Union, we need to
better understand the details. I know there is a designated survivor who would take over the presidency in the case of a major event, as outlined in the 1947 Presidential Succession Act, and since 9/11, at least one member of Congress has also been asked to serve as a designated survivor, but where are they taken? And what are the security and emergency procedures?”

  “You think you’ll find that in books?”

  “I’m sure emergency procedures aren’t fully outlined anywhere for the public to see. But there are computers at libraries.”

  “You’re going to hack into government systems?”

  “Won’t be the first time.”

  “Are you serious?”

  He looked over at her. “Why do people always seem to think I would never take any risks?” His tone sounded serious—he wanted an answer.

  “I think people don’t really understand you.”

  He didn’t answer, but she could see on his face that didn’t make sense to him.

  “I think it’s because you’re different,” she said.

  He drew his eyebrows together. Then he made the turn onto the road off the exit ramp.

  “You really don’t see how different you are, do you?”

  “What do you mean ‘different’?”

  She smiled a little. “Well . . . you’re a genius, first of all. People are on edge around genius.”

  “I don’t go around telling people about my doctorates or how many papers I’ve published or anything else.”

  “Yeah, exactly. They think you’re some average, quiet, geeky guy, and then you pull out random information like it’s normal to quote the 1947 Presidential Succession Act.”

  “I didn’t quote it.”

  “You summarized it. And I bet you could quote it if you wanted to.”

  “I have an eidetic memory,” he defended.

  “What’s an eidetic memory?”

  “Photographic memory.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Of course you do. Add that to the fact that you can shoot and you can fight. People don’t know what to think.”

  “Only the people who see me at the range know I can shoot, and you’re one of a handful of people who know I can fight decently well.”