by Fiona Quinn
That made him edgy.
He rinsed, shut off the water, and grabbed his towel. From this assessment, Ty concluded that he needed to stay on his toes when it came to operating with White.
She wanted him to do something in Durham, North Carolina. He needed to make sure that her “ask” didn’t put him in the stockades for breaking U.S. laws.
He lifted his briefs, got them turned the right way, then stepped in, adjusting himself into place, then reached for his T-shirt.
The one thing that made him a little easier was that D-Day was marrying Gator, and if Ty heard D-Day right, White was going to be in their wedding party.
You don’t ask someone to be part of your wedding unless you love and trust them, right?
That thought calmed Ty’s mind a bit.
He tugged on his camouflage tactical pants while balancing on his flip-flops to keep his feet dry for his socks.
Ty had so many questions.
Here was the biggest one, though: What could White be cooking up in Durham that allowed the CIA to function there and to need a tier-one operator involved?
Chapter Nine
Ty
White was gone for an hour, and it was just as well.
Ty had hustled to get everything squared away in the thirty-minute window he’d been given. That was what the Unit did: A call for help went out, they grabbed their gear and rode into the storm, no dithering around.
That extra half-hour gave Ty an opportunity to run off some of Rory’s energy. Ty whipped the Frisbee out, and Rory leaped high to snatch it from the air. The athletic grace of a Malinois was glorious. Ty still felt awe when he watched Rory in action.
Ty thought he could never get tired of being a handler for military working dogs. It was hands down the best job in the world.
Feeling White approach, Ty turned her way. It looked like her speed nap had done her some good. Her shoulders were square, and she looked more relaxed.
It was going to be interesting to find out how he and old Rory fit into this picture.
White lifted her paper coffee cup toward him, then climbed onto the plane.
“Last one, Rory,” Ty called as the Frisbee sailed into the distance.
Rory bounded, jumped, then pranced back with the toy clamped between his teeth. He followed along behind Ty as they climbed onto the jet. After sniffing the air and giving everything a quick assessment, Rory walked right over to his crate, stepped in, and curled up with his blanket, only releasing the toy when Ty issued the command.
White watched them closely.
Putting a Malinois in a crate for twenty-plus hours was never a great idea. As a breed, they were too high energy. Ty had some doggy pills from the vet stashed in the front pocket of his tactical pants for later. Right now, with Rory’s tongue hanging long, contented from his playtime, he was good to go.
While Ty pulled a black-out blanket over the top of Rory’s crate, White was getting herself settled in. “Have you ever been in love, Ty?” she asked without preamble.
“I can’t say that I have.” He took the seat across from White and beside Rory.
White reached into her briefcase, pulled out an 8 x 10, looked at it, and then handed it over.
The picture portrayed an older man, a pampered-looking woman in expensive clothes and jewels, D-Day, and White.
While he recognized D-Day, this picture was the first time he’d seen her with makeup and formalwear. The date mark at the bottom of the photo put it in July of last year. This must have been the mission that had turned calamitous.
D-Day stood in the center of the group looking as uncomfortable as he’d ever seen her. Heck, she was much more at ease stealing the Russian helicopter while under paramilitary fire than she was in that photo.
“You know D-Day pretty well,” he said. “Should I recognize the others in the picture? Besides you, of course.” He balanced the photo on his knee where White could take it back once she’d made her point.
They both stalled to pull on their safety belts at the direction of the pilot.
The jet engines sparked to life.
“That’s William Davidson, D-Day’s dad. And the blonde is his newest wife, London Davidson.” White took a sip of coffee, then checked the lid and set it in the cupholder. “London and I became besties last year as part of a wider op I’ve been working.”
“Does this have something to do with Omar the White Whale?”
“Exactly. But what I need you to know here is that I was Christen Davidson – D-Day’s pal when we were growing up. I still am. As a matter of fact, she’s getting married at the end of the month, and I’m her bridesmaid. There’s nothing that would make me happier than to serve in that role with the whale no longer on my catch list.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I’m not the friend adopted into the family—the extra daughter if you will. It’s not that warm of a family. Christen’s sort of arm’s length from the Davidsons.”
“Was this before or after she shot her brother?”
“Ah, you heard. Before and after.”
“London refers to Christen as her daughter? They look the same age.”
“Christen’s older. As you can probably see in the photo, London isn’t a Christen fan. She rarely refers to her at all. Not important at all to what we’re talking about. But what you need to know here is that the Davidson family knows me by a different name. If you were to see a photo of me or hear a story—let it go. That person is a stranger to you.”
“Got it.”
White took the photo back and replaced it with another. Their conversation paused as she gave Ty a moment to look at the image.
Though his eyes were on the photo, he could feel White’s hope. Wasn’t that an interesting thought?
He focused on the clues that he might find in this image. The woman was dressed in yoga pants and a hoody. Protruding from the striped canvas bag, slung casually over her shoulder, was a yoga mat and a bunch of flowers. They were his sister Molly’s favorites, blue hydrangeas. The woman in the photo’s black hair was pulled back into a sleek bun at the nape of her neck. It was a graceful neck. Yes, grace was the word he’d use to describe this woman. A dancer-like quality to her long tight muscles. She seemed like she was engrossed in thought with a little worry line between her carefully plucked brows. Somehow pampered and approachably comfortable at the same time. He thought this woman probably had a lot of nuances. Depth. He bet she would be interesting to have a conversation with.
Ty lifted the photo to look closer, wondering what White wanted him to see here. It intrigued him that this woman, who had a soft vulnerability to her, had anything to do with D-Day, White, or Omar.
She lived in the wrong part of the world for her to have much of a connection. This scene looked like an American suburb with a line of Cape Cod houses. But by her apparent ethnicity, she could well be Saudi like Omar was. A relative?
Ty scowled at White.
“Her name is Shakira al-Attiyah. People call her Kira.” White tipped her head at the picture. “Pretty, don’t you think?”
Yeah, he did. But that question sounded like a trap.
“She’s an INFJ on the Meyers Briggs assessment,” White leaned back in her seat. “Very unusual that. The guess by researchers is that only about one percent of the population is an INFJ. They’re considered the diplomats.”
“Is that what she does?”
“Diplomacy? No. She’s a Ph.D. in humanities. But her life has had to be very diplomatic.”
Cryptic, but he’d wait and see what White wanted from him.
“The interesting thing about the INFJ personality is that they are the most intuitive personality that psychologists have studied.” White leaned forward, her forearms on her thighs, her hands clasped. She nodded toward the photo. “You and Kira will hopefully be spending a great deal of time together over the next few days. When you do, you must always remember, Kira will know if you’re lying to her. Don’t lie. It’s better to say you
don’t want to answer or to distract her than to lie. She must trust you a thousand percent.”
Ty’s brows drew together. So this was going to be a meet and greet assignment. He wouldn’t just be monitoring her movements. The Unit was trained for that by the FBI and CIA. He had some theory and some practice under his belt. But why had White’s opening bid been to ask if he’d ever been in love before?
“You’re an ENTJ. The nice thing about INFJ and ENTJ, along with other psych tests that you’ve both taken—”
He raised his eyes from the photo to focus on White’s face to see if he could read anything there. “Remind me again, Meyers Briggs test?”
“Meyers Briggs has distilled brain function/world views down to sixteen variants. You and Kira are both highly intuitive. That’s the ‘N.’ ‘F’ is feeling. J is judging. Where you differ is she is an introvert ‘I’ and you are an extrovert ’E’ and ‘T’ thinking—ENTJ. That I and E change a lot in how you interact with the world. For example, what Kira has, that you most decidedly do not, is her intuition and introversion, meaning she feels people’s judgements, and she has a high internal pressure around expectations. She hates to let anyone down. Kira is her own worst critic and never wants to be unethical or to disappoint. You don’t have that particular brand of punitive inner critic. Also ethical, also highly intelligent and intuitive, you don’t much care what others think of you. That small change makes the world of difference, in say career choices. She batted her eyelashes. “I got to paw through your files.”
He tipped his head. “Did you like what you found there?”
“For this mission? Yes.” She paused. “The nice thing about your personality tests is that you and Kira have a high level of compatibility in the two ways that are meaningful to this assignment. One, you will ‘get’ each other in an effortless way. If I’m right, when you meet, it will feel like you’ve always known each other. And two, where she is weak, you are strong. She is the yin, and you are the yang, which should make her feel that where she doesn’t have the skills, she’d be willing to defer to yours.”
Ty rubbed his finger and thumb across his brows. He did not like where this was heading.
“She’s feminine, and you’re masculine. She’s intellectual, and you’re brawn and action.” White paused. “Not a stereotypical dumb jock. I get that the Unit only has brilliant tacticians. I’m speaking in an erudite white-tower way. Nope. That’s wrong too, she doesn’t act like an erudite or someone who lives in the white tower. You get what I mean. She’s theoretical, and you’re applied.”
Ty dipped his head to show he got the gist of what she was trying to express.
“She’s holding down the homefront. You’re ‘take me to the action.’ It’s good. I think it will work.”
“Think what will work exactly?”
“I want her to fall in love with you. And we have five days, including today, to make that happen.”
Ty looked White in the eye for a full breath, then threw his head back as laugher erupted from his belly. He laughed until tears dripped down his cheeks. He sobered again when he saw White’s face. Shit. She wasn’t kidding.
“That’s…not something I have any experience in at all,” Ty said. “I’ve actually made it my brand to be anti-love relationship. If you think I can somehow swoop in and be Casanova, you definitely picked the wrong man. I’m plain and easy. I love my country, my brothers, my job. I like a cold beer and hanging out with Rory. Simple. Uncomplicated. A relationship would pull me away from the things I love. And I say that with self-awareness. It sounds selfish, but honestly, I think it’s the opposite. I’m not searching for someone to hitch onto my wagon. Ha. That was a long explanation of—I haven’t got those skills.”
Though, yeah, Ty had recently realized he’d like to change all of that. Maybe he could find a good woman and settle down—a couple of rug rats. But looking for love to turn into a life commitment wasn’t what White was aiming for here.
Make a woman fall in love in five days?
With him?
And then what?
“You don’t need those skills. Your psychologies line up. Your looks line up. I’ve scripted your meet-cute to perfection. She’s going to fall hard. We need for that to happen because she is your vehicle into the compound where we will find Omar Mohamed Imadi. Believe me, I’ve tried other avenues. This is our last hope for a surgical outcome. And surgical is what the Tanzanian government requires of us if we’re going to operate in their country.”
Ty nodded. Just thinking about getting this terror leader sent his heart racing. In his mind, Ty was back in the tent in the middle of the rock-strewn desert, the sour scent of sweat, the tangy coppery smell of blood. A terrorist lay crumpled and lifeless with Ty’s bullet in his brain. But that guy wasn’t the ring leader, Omar was.
Ty wanted justice for so many like Storm Meyers.
“We get you in.” White’s eyes drifted to where Ty’s hands had made fists on the armrests. “You do the recon for Echo and Foxtrot. Once they have the information they need, they get in and get out with Omar in shackles.”
This sounded like what spooks did—honey pots and all that emotional drama—and that wasn’t Ty’s career path at all. “Okay, I’m listening.”
“Falling in love 101.”
Ty rubbed his hands over his face. He’d rather be in a gunfight with a terrorist than sitting on this jet with the air conditioning blasting, learning about love. It seemed…juvenile. Like his birds and bees class back in fifth-grade health.
“I can practically hear the primal scream in your brain,” White said. “I’ll keep it to the basics, but you need this. First, studies have shown that women tend to pick a mate that closely resembles her brother.”
“Okay, well, I can’t imagine I look anything like her brother. Nitro has a more Middle Eastern look than I do.”
“Yes, but Nitro’s married. Also, Kira doesn’t have a brother. What she does have is a best friend next door growing up who had a brother, Ben, seven years their senior, who doted on the girls. He called them his princesses, pretended to be their Prince Charming, putting them on his back and riding them around like he was their horse. Ben was much beloved, breaking Kira’s heart when she was about to turn ten years old, and he joined the Marine’s and moved away. Kira’s father played a shadow figure in her life, he was never around, and she was a girl, so he didn’t pay much attention to her. This is important because Ben created the paradigm for Kira of how a man should behave when he cares for her. She’s wanted a relationship with someone who thinks of her as a treasure and precious, and for whom she feels the same—only, you know, in a brave, manly kind of way.” White popped her brows. “Ben set that high standard that, up until now, ruined her for all men after him. No one treated her with such adoration and well, for lack of a better way of putting it, chivalry.” She stopped and smiled. “Fortunately for our endeavors, that serves us well.”
“And how do you know this?”
“She talked about his importance to her in Ben’s eulogy. Not in those words, but one could easily read between the lines. He was a Marine, killed in a training mission.”
Ty gave her a thoughtful nod as he absorbed that information. “So she knows about military lifestyles and the possible consequences. Will she know I’m a soldier?”
“Yes, a K9 trainer out of Fort Bragg. You look enough like Ben for her brain to think in terms of her youthful adoration and conviction that she would grow up and marry Ben. But you also look different enough that hopefully you won’t trigger her grief and make her want to keep her distance.”
“Tightrope walking.”
“Exactly.” White held out her phone where she’d been scrolling and showed Ty a picture of a man in a Marine uniform that could easily have been Ty’s brother if he’d had one.
Uncanny was the word that came to mind.
“You’re four inches taller and have a lot more muscle,” White said, accepting her phone back.
Ty didn�
��t say anything.
She turned the screen toward her. “It’s the eyes where I see most of the resemblance. The shape. The chocolate brown with depth and warmth.” She pursed her lips, pulling a deep, noisy breath through her nostrils. “Yup. Your eyes were the clincher and why you were chosen.” She dropped the phone into her bag. “Check your stereotypes and prejudgments at the door.”
He looked at her blankly then shook his head.
“So here’s the thing, we will be getting off this plane and right into action. You’ve already had a full day. You’re going to be exhausted with the jetlag. This is to our benefit and to our detriment. Over the next week, you will be mentally exhausted by this process because you’re going to be watching your every move and every word, and it’s fatiguing to be that focused. You need to be ultra-careful of what you say and how you say it. When you’re tired, that’s a harder task.”
“Okay.”
“Here’s another piece of psychology. Mentally fatigued people are perceived as less prejudiced and more direct.”
“Prejudice against her?”
“She’s of Arab descent, so from a different ethnic group.”
“You’re from a different ethnic group. Do you find my behavior to be prejudiced?”
White blinked.
“Look. I’m in the United States military. My fellow soldiers are from every possible ethnic group. They’re my brothers and sisters. I judge people on their character, whether they’ve got my back in a life-or-death situation. We all bleed red, white, and blue.”
“Kira’s not in the military. She’s yoga and chai. She’s books and daydreaming while looking out the window. She’s a cat resting in the crook of her knee while she’s curled up poring over her translations—actually, she’s allergic to cats, so nix that image. Starry nights. Rainy days. Fires in a darkened room. Whispered conversations.”
