When she reached the third floor window, she slid her hand into a pocket of the jumpsuit and pulled out a small can of WD-40, which she squirted down into the window runners. Then she went to work on the screen. Her favorite tool, a virtually silent mini-drill with a Phillips bit took care of the screws and she laid the entire panel flat on the platform of the fire escape. If the smoker happened to look up during his next nicotine fix, he shouldn’t notice anything amiss.
She’d been hoping they’d be careless about a third-floor window, but when she tried to push up on the sash, she met resistance. “Shit.”
“What’s wrong?” Gallagher pounced on her word before she’d finished getting it out of her mouth.
“Nothing. It’s locked, that’s all.”
“Can you get by it?”
“Of course.” It would be faster to cut the pane, but it was important the government officials have no idea their offices had been breached. With any luck they wouldn’t know the file was missing until the Group had left Matunisia and it was delivered by courier to the receptionist.
Precious seconds became minutes as she worked at the pivoting lock with a hook and thin, alloy straightedge. Finally the lock disengaged and she slid the slash up. Thanks to the lubricant, it slid almost silently and, after climbing into the office, she lowered it behind her.
“I’m in.” She gave her eyes a few seconds to adjust to the dark interior. When at all possible she avoided wearing night-vision gear. It not only screwed with her depth perception and peripheral vision, but she’d be at a serious, painful disadvantage should somebody flip a light on.
An ancient metal desk took up a quarter of the room and she went to it. She pressed her thumb and forefinger together to turn on the LED light in the tip of her glove. The mail on the desk wasn’t addressed to Keita.
Sticking close to the walls, where the old wooden floors were less likely to squeak, she made her way into the hall. For once Lady Luck was on her side. Cheap metal name plaques hung outside every office.
She was halfway down the hall when the overhead lights came on and heavy footsteps clunked on the stairs.
Chapter Nine
“Carmen, the lights are on.”
No shit, Sherlock. She didn’t say it aloud, though, because she was too busy moving.
The closest office wasn’t Keita’s, but she ducked into it, automatically stepping to the right. Just in case whoever was coming belonged to her current location, she slid between the open door and the wall.
“Situation?” Gallagher barked into her earpiece.
She didn’t dare answer him with those heavy footsteps coming down the hall. But if she didn’t give him something, he was liable to come bursting through the front door and up the stairs, guns blazing. She reached up and tapped her mic twice to acknowledge she’d heard him, while pulling her Taser from its sheath.
Using it would be almost worst case scenario. Rossi had practically run out of oxygen stressing over and over how important it was to leave no trace of their trespassing and it was hard to hide jolting a guy senseless.
As the footsteps continued past her current hiding place, Carmen slid out from behind the door and risked a peek down the hall. Dammit, the guy had a briefcase. Who the hell went to work at four in the morning?
The man turned into an office and flicked his light on. And there, two doors past his, she saw the nameplate for Keita. Of course.
But, at the end of the hallway was a coffee station. The way she saw it, Mr. Early Bird was going to drop his stuff in his office, then get the caffeine brewing.
Without second-guessing herself, Carmen darted across the hall into the darkened office next to his, then waited. The next step would be a little riskier, considering the wattage those bare bulbs were putting out there, but she wasn’t going through this again the following night.
After a few moments of shuffling around, she heard him go into the hallway and she stepped out, too. He was heading for the coffee machine and she fell in behind him, close enough to give him a hit with the Taser if need be, but not close enough to disturb that hair-prickling, personal space zone. She kept her gaze over his shoulder, not staring directly at him and prayed the floor wouldn’t squeak.
When they reached Keita’s office, she let Mr. Early Bird pull away slightly, then shifted into the darkened room. The footsteps stopped as she once again tucked herself between the open door and the wall.
She heard his shoes slide on the wood as he turned, probably wondering if he’d seen movement or if his still caffeine-deprived mind was playing tricks on him.
Keita’s light flipped on and Carmen froze, breathing slowly and silently as seconds tipped by. Then Mr. Early Bird insulted his silliness in French, chuckled and shut the light off.
She waited while he set up the coffee machine and then waited some more while it brewed, the aroma wafting through the offices and making her mouth water. Finally, after she twice had to tap on her mic to silence Gallagher’s demands for an update, Mr. Early Bird shuffled back to his office with his coffee.
It took her less than a minute to pick the lock on Keita’s filing cabinet and then almost as long to open the first drawer. She didn’t want to risk the WD-40 with the documents, but based on the condition of everything else, she was afraid the drawers would squeal.
An additional two minutes to locate the file. After scanning the disappointingly few documents it contained, she slid it into her jumpsuit and closed and relocked the drawer.
Unfortunately now she had to get past Mr. Early Bird’s office while praying there weren’t any more overachievers about to descend on the building. She had no choice but to go back out the window she’d come in. Not only was the fire escape there, but she had to replace the screen to cover her tracks.
Shit.
Poking her head into the hall, Carmen checked out the coffee machine, noting the location of the paper towels and the fact the machine was fed from piping, rather than needing a reservoir filled. Staying close to the wall, she went to the station and hit the brew button. Then she ducked into an office across the hall, but still out of view of the lit office.
It didn’t take very long for the additional coffee to spill out of the already almost full pot Mr. Early Bird had just brewed. The sizzling and spitting drew his attention and he swore as he stepped into the hall. As he fumbled with one hand, taking the full pot out and trying to keep up with the steady drip by putting a mug on the hotplate, and grabbing at paper towels with the other, Carmen backed slowly down the hallway until she reached her point of entry.
“Exit clear?” she asked Gallagher in an almost non-existent voice.
“Clear.”
She slid the sash open and stepped onto the fire escape, then closed it behind her. Within seconds she’d reattached the screen and made her way down the fire escape. When she reached the bottom she caught the bundle Gallagher dropped from the roof and wrapped herself in the bright, oversized scarves favored by the local women.
“Meet you back there,” she said as she walked down the alley toward the hotel.
It took Donovan almost an hour to determine the small guest hut he’d been given was clean. If he’d had a sweeper it would have taken two minutes, but there hadn’t been any way to smuggle one in. After examining every crack, crevice and surface of the room, he was confident the only people who could hear him were the crew back in the hotel.
During the entire search, Isabelle Arceneau—wearing his spare shirt—sat on the edge of the bed, looking down at the floor. He’d noticed right off she didn’t make eye contact. Ever, with anybody.
“What happened to your hair?” he asked, keeping his tone light and hopefully reassuring.
She still wouldn’t look at him. “A kitchen accident. I got too close to the fire.”
“Bullshit. Hair doesn’t burn uniformly around your head like that.”
Her gaze did lift to his face then, but skittered away. “It did burn.”
“They yank you around b
y your hair? Control you with it?” He’d seen it himself on the video they’d sent her father.
Her throat worked before she nodded. “I’m not allowed to have knives or scissors. I used a stick I kept heating in a candle flame.”
“Must have taken a long time. And it was a big risk, making these people unhappy. What they’ve done to you is tame compared to what they’re capable of.”
“I…I know.” And he could see she did by the shudder that rippled through her. “It was worth the risk. It probably sounds stupid to you, but…”
When she didn’t finish, he did it for her. “It was one thing you could control.”
She nodded, and Jack almost smiled, until he noticed the trembling. He could almost imagine her panicking on the inside. Had she told him too much? Would he use her confession to hurt her? When he reached out a hand, intending to give her a comforting touch, she flinched.
Dammit. There were two ways to play his hand, and he was almost to the point of flipping a coin. He could stay in character, even with Isabelle, which was definitely the safest way to play it without having judged the girl’s acting skills. Expecting a traumatized young woman to keep the secret of his identity was risky.
But Hans Koenig, the German arms dealer, would take her to bed and use her until he handed her over to her father, just as he’d told Le Roux. There was no way in hell he’d rape this girl. Even to save her life.
Telling her who he really was, though, was very risky. One slip of the tongue and they’d both be brutally tortured until Le Roux grew bored with their screams and dumped their bodies out behind the latrines.
One good thing about her knowing would be the ability to send reports via the watch from his hut. Another would be the ability to control her. If she was aware of the situation, she was more likely to trust him and react well when things got chaotic. And, considering there was no plan on the table, it was going to get very, very chaotic.
The file was a disappointment. Some aerial shots a little more recent than the ones they’d had. Some intel that might help with a war-crimes trial, but nothing that would help them storm the beaches, so to speak. And no hint at the agent’s identity, not that they’d be able to get that info to Donovan, anyway.
But Gallagher did find a few tidbits. Le Roux’s trucks used a lot of gas and he’d had underground fuel tanks installed in the compound. Probably thought they were safer. The government’s agent had helpfully marked their location, along with which hut housed the bulk of their ammunition.
He’d also detailed the extreme security around the rocket launchers Le Roux had set up after a badly botched aerial assault by the government. Nothing short of a small army could get to those.
“You guys need to get out there and do whatever it is documentary film crews do pretty soon,” Carmen said. “We don’t know where Le Roux has people and we don’t want our arriving on Donovan’s heels to raise suspicion.”
Rossi nodded. “But we don’t know how long we have before Donovan calls—if he’s able to call—so we need something to throw at him.”
Gallagher tapped one of the aerial shots. “I keep going back to this cliff. They’ve got a false sense of security about it, even though it’s not high. See this? The perimeter’s intact, but the posts are a lot more spaced out.”
Rossi knelt next to the coffee table to get a better view. “Can he get through?”
“Not without diverting the attention of everybody in the camp. Even that wouldn’t do him much good because it’s a long fucking walk back.”
“Look at the shots. Every post has a Jeep or a truck.”
“We have to go on the assumption Donovan’ll be unarmed.” Gallagher pointed to different photos arranged in a rough layout of the compound, feeling the slight rush that came with a possible plan. “Massive diversion at the front. Fuel tanks, probably. Donovan and the girl go up the cliff. Two agents coming in dark from the rear take this truck, do the pick up and get the fuck out.”
“How close can we land a helicopter?”
He pointed. “Here. Outside of the rocket launchers, close enough to deploy from and to pick up, central to both the front and back. And they’ll expect the truck to head the other way—toward the main road and the border.”
“I’d hoped for a silent extraction.”
“We always hope for that, but we’ve got to extract this hostage from two hundred or so well-armed, well-trained, highly paranoid guerilla soldiers. Any chance of utilizing local contacts?”
Rossi shook his head. “Nobody’s going to touch a suicide run up against Le Roux.”
“Okay. You man the bird, I’ll stage the diversion then meet up with O’Brien and Olivera to retrieve Donovan and the package.”
He met Carmen’s startled glance with a clenched jaw. Of course she was surprised. A willingness to send her into jungle combat wasn’t his usual modus operandi.
But there was no way to pull it off without her, so he’d said the words fast, like ripping off a bandage. And he knew O’Brien would take the lead. He didn’t work with the guy often, but he’d tapped him for the Group for a reason. He was solid, and a top guy to go through the door with.
“Grace is going to kill me,” Rossi said, seemingly unaware of the undercurrents in the room.
“If we come out of this alive,” Gallagher told him. “I’ll play whipping boy for you. And she’s not stupid. She knew when you boarded the plane you wouldn’t be able to stay clean while we played in the mud.”
“What kind of diversion are we talking about?” Carmen asked, sliding closer to him to get a better look at the photos.
He might have been able to come up with something if her hair wasn’t tickling his arm. “I don’t know yet. The bottom line is that we need to communicate to Donovan that when things suddenly get crazy, he has to get Isabelle up that cliff.”
Rossi took a minute to fill Carmen in on Donovan’s potential climbing freeze. “It could be a really big problem at a really bad time.”
She pulled the shot of the cliff closer. “Will we be close enough to assist?”
“We’ll have our hands full securing the truck,” Gallagher said. “Without the vehicle, none of it matters.”
Rossi grabbed a water and went back to his seat. “If we can communicate the plan to Donovan, we might be able to judge by his response if he can handle it.”
“No, we need to communicate to him he has no choice. There’s a good chance it’ll come down to him handling it or both of them dying.”
Donovan crouched in front of Isabelle. One, he could talk in a very low voice and she could hear him and two, he wanted her to look at him. “I need you to listen to me, Isabelle.”
Her blue eyes gave away her wariness, but she leaned closer.
“I’m here to get you out.” He’d decided to compromise by not telling her his name. For now. That would be the easiest mistake for her to make—especially since she hadn’t known him long enough to entrench the alias in her mind. “You don’t need to know much, but you need to stay close to me, and if something starts happening, you have to trust me completely and do exactly what I tell you, when I tell you.”
“I thought…you aren’t going to trade guns for me?”
“We—the people I work with and I—we can’t give these monsters guns. The offer got me in the door, but we can’t back it up.”
She looked him directly in the eye then, her uncertainty not clouding her sharp intellect. “He said I can’t go until he has his guns.”
“Which is why my team is working on another way to get you out. It’s a risk telling you this. You have to pretend you don’t know, or he’ll kill us both. But the plan might be a little…spontaneous, and you need to know I’m on your side.”
He watched her process that information, knowing how hard it would be for her to believe in him. “Is my father paying you?”
He sighed. Not knowing how loyal she was to her father, he didn’t want to set the Devlin Group—and therefore himself—up as the e
nemy. “Your father was arrested, Isabelle. The government asked us to rescue you in exchange for his testimony against other people. His assets are frozen, so our payment will be his giving information to our government.”
“So why won’t the government pay you?”
“They probably won’t want to be tied financially to the Matunisian situation.” Donovan shrugged. “We’ll be paid for the original job, but there’s a good possibility this little field trip will end up pro bono.”
“I don’t understand. Why would your team risk their lives for nothing?”
“You’re not nothing,” he snapped, and then he softened the words with a sheepish grin. “And, actually, my team came to keep me alive when they couldn’t talk me out of coming.”
“Why me? There are people all over the world who need saving right this minute. Why did you come for me?”
Shit. How had he gotten backed into this conversational corner? What was he supposed to tell her? That he’d looked into her face on the computer screen and…what? Decided by saving her, he’d save himself? That bringing her home alive would chase all the other ghosts away?
“For those others who need saving right now, there are people out there to save them. Nobody else was willing to come to Matunisia.”
Isabelle gave him a small smile, and it hit him like a kick to the chest. God, even scared and frizzy-headed, she was beautiful. “So you’re like Obi-Wan? My only hope?”
The pressure sat on his chest, keeping his lungs from fully inflating. “Something like that.”
Chapter Ten
The last thing Carmen wanted was to be alone with Gallagher, but with the way her luck was running, she wasn’t surprised when Rossi and O’Brien disappeared to schmooze some new local contacts willing to trade stockpiled explosives for American dollars.
Even worse was knowing Rossi originally intended to take Gallagher with him until he gave the boss some kind of signal. He’d taken O’Brien instead.
No Surrender: The Devlin Group, Book 3 Page 8
