by Fiona Quinn
In this design, the tunic sleeves had a good percentage of Lycra. The form-fitting sleeves kept people from grabbing the fabric and gaining control of her arm. It also gave her the most flexibility. The material used in the tunic construction was called CutPro and protected her against slashes. Outright stabbing? Probably not. But most attackers tried to slash you.
Bonus: it also protected against turkey buzzards.
Remi didn’t have any injuries from the bird’s talons, so that was a plus.
The tights, too, were made from CutPro and had saved her life. Once in Rome, some nut job tried to sever her femoral artery. Between the CutPro pants and the steel-toed shoes, she’d surprised the heck out of that guy. And he’d probably never be able to dig his balls out of his abdominal cavity after her adrenaline-fueled kick shoved them up there nice and high.
The tights had been designed with such a high waist band that Remi could tuck them under the band of her sports bra. The tunic slid over the top. The sides were slit all the way up to her bra line. The cut was purposefully made to allow easy access to her utility belt.
Remi had her survival gear packed into the belt. If she had to drop everything to fight and run, she would be running with gear. She kept practical things like hand sanitizer and tissues and life-saving things like a one-handed tourniquet and a packet of clotting cloth to press into bullet or stab wounds. Among other items, she included small mylar packages that held about a quarter cup of water in each. It was enough to clear her throat of smoke or help wash pepper spray from her eyes. And while she carried MREs in her pack, she was never sure if that would be with her, so she included a couple of meal replacement bars in her utility belt.
Adrenaline sucks calories.
And Remi couldn’t run, leap, and climb to get the story if her limbs were shaking and weak.
Bonus, with the utility belt under her tunic, it thwarted pick pockets. And double bonus, it made her look like she might be pregnant, so men, in general, refrained from being too smarmy around her.
By having this uniform, Remi could whittle her luggage down to one personal backpack and one professional backpack with audio-visual recording equipment, a tactical computer, sat phone, and so forth. Remi chose cross-body backpacks because she could put them on, balance the weight, still access her utility belt, and keep her hands free.
Having your hands available at all times was a survival habit that Remi learned early on and took very seriously.
Her clothing and equipment choices were nothing like how she’d started life as a journalist. She’d honed her way down to these very specific items that were on her body.
She’d developed her habits. Some of them took longer to get used to than others. For example, she had her bedtime shoes.
Remi love being barefooted. Loved it. But bare feet were a luxury.
In the shower or bath—no matter where—she’d learned to wear her shoes. In the bathroom, she wore a pair of bright pink flip-flops. When she stepped out and dried herself off, she pulled on a pair of black cotton ankle socks and her bed shoes. These were a pair of lightweight tennis shoes that were given a bit of extra weight when she’d had that cobbler in India add the steel-toed reinforcement. Remi only wore these shoes at bedtime to keep the sheets clean.
Honestly, she hated them.
But the alternative was much worse.
Remi had been in too many situations where the alarm went up, and she was running for her life. She’d burned her feet. Cut her feet. Had her toes trampled by others.
Yup, comfort was for folks who lived serene lives.
Remi slept in her bed shoes. She also wore a cotton thigh-length night shirt. Over this, she strapped her survival utility belt—running for your life meant needing life-saving supplies. To do that, Remi had to learn to sleep on her back. Remi had read in an article it was best for keeping the face wrinkle-free. So you take the good with the bad.
Dressed for bed, morning outfit set out. The last thing she did was glance over her journalist backpack. For no precise reason, Remi pulled out her wrist braces and made sure they were secured into the side mesh pocket of the bag, ready for an easy grab and go.
They were her weapons of choice since journalists weren’t allowed regular kinds of weapons.
Would she need them here in London?
Doubtful.
But then again, if anyone had asked her if she’d be attacked by vultures and the massive birds of prey would hospitalize her photojournalist, Remi wouldn’t have considered that a viable threat either.
Live and learn: Always be prepared.
Who knew what tomorrow would bring?
Chapter Thirteen
T-Rex
Thursday, London, England.
As soon as they landed in London yesterday, the students and their chaperones went their own way. The robotics competitors had loaded onto buses at the airport. The London-based kids were back home and hosted the Iraqi girls’ team for the two nights they’d be in London. During the day, the girls would be on bus tours of the city.
It occurred to T-Rex that it wouldn’t be hard for one, some, or even all of the girls to ask for asylum or go underground.
Honestly, if it were T-Rex and he was a young woman anywhere near ISIS, he’d take the risk to have a chance at not just surviving but thriving in a country that allowed for women to have egalitarian footing. He’d seen up close, and personal just how difficult survival was for the girls under ISIS.
It would be like the long list of Olympic athletes who grabbed the opportunity to escape their regimes as soon as they set foot in the host country.
It would make headlines. It could also make waves.
T-Rex was agnostic about that idea.
The teens were strategic thinkers; they knew their circumstances best.
If the girls reached for the brass ring, Remi would report that out, he had no doubt.
She had her job. T-Rex had his.
T-Rex had grabbed a couple of hours of shut-eye on the plane yesterday. And had a power nap last night before picking up guard duty in the early morning hours when he relieved Havoc outside of the senator’s hotel room door.
Havoc got in what sleep he could but was in the gym now.
T-Rex lifted his watch. Another fifteen minutes and T-Rex could eat, take a quick shower, and dress in a suit. T-Rex hated suits. Hated them. But his tactical suit was better than most. At least it was cut for his athletic build.
Ty and Rory had already taken off in one of the cars, heading to Oxford, where Senator Blankenship was expected later this morning for her speech on global initiatives to get girls into STEM subjects and careers. Rory would search the venue to make sure there were no surprises. Rory was trained to find explosives. So guns, bullets, anything like that, Rory would sniff out in advance. He was a force multiplier when it came to protection with a small team.
Ty and Rory would guard the auditorium until T-Rex and Havoc escorted Blankenship on site.
Sitting around making plans last night, it was decided that once Blankenship was in the building, Ty and Rory would sit in the car. Protocol said that a car was always ready, engine running, outside of the exfil. In an event, they could just put their principal’s head down and run them to the vehicle, load them up, and zip them out of the threat area.
The other armored cars supplied by the embassy would be parked behind Ty and Rory. The job of the other vehicles was to block and molest while the principal’s car got away.
T-Rex was glad to have had some time at the training loop before coming. Refresh the muscle memory for driving on the left-hand side of the road, even if it was just for this leisurely commute from London to Oxford and back.
Standing here in the empty hotel hallway while everyone slept, T-Rex had time to think.
A lot of that time, he was thinking about Remi.
On the plane, Blankenship, Diamond, and Remi talked about women’s lives in the refugee camps.
“You’ve read Remi’s articles, have
n’t you, T-Rex?” Blankenship had asked him.
T-Rex didn’t want to be pulled into a conversation. Personal protection wasn’t supposed to be “personal.” They were supposed to follow along, ready to go kinetic should a need arise, not distracted by conversation.
There was a truism that attraction equaled distraction. And Remi was proving to be problematic. He’d had trouble pulling his eyes away from her during his first assessment. Good thing this was a short gig. Six days and done.
Of course, that’s what Ty had been told about his assignment with Kira. Less than a week, and Ty would be done, moving on to the next assignment. Ty had moved on to the next mission but definitely hadn’t moved on from Kira.
Maybe after T-Rex was relieved of this assignment, he might reach out to Remi… She was rarely in the States. He was rarely in the States. He let the idea of seeing Remi outside of the scope of his work slip on by.
“The articles?” Blankenship repeated.
“We were given a packet of articles as part of our threat assessment.”
“Threat assessment?” Remi raised her eyebrows. “Wow.”
“That’s not personal. We follow protocol.”
Man, she was amazing in a crisis. Calm, thoughtful, pragmatic. She used what resources she had. She prioritized. No ego. No back-patting. No tears.
Badass.
Someone’s morning alarm buzzed a couple of doors down, pulling T-Rex back from that memory.
Showers could be heard through the thin walls, despite this being a five-star hotel.
Remi would be getting up soon, showering. T-Rex’s brain offered up some tantalizing images of that. He had a movie playing of her using the shower head to pleasure herself.
A door popped open to his right. T-Rex swung his head in that direction.
And there Remi was.
His heart pounded in his chest at the sight of her. He made sure that his eyes identified her, gave her a curt nod, and slipped away. He kept his body in the neutral stance he held while guarding doors.
Remi lifted a hand as she passed by. She wasn’t heading for the elevator. She walked all the way to the window at the end of the corridor and all the way back, pacing the hall.
She wore the exact same thing she had on yesterday, only with a green scarf today. Same shoes, same everything. But clean. No bird feathers, rust, or filth. This must be her uniform, just like he wore the khakis and black polo for travel and guarding hotel doors.
This next time she passed by him—ignoring him completely—T-Rex saw that she had her phone in hand. A cord ran from the cell phone to a headset. The mic sat just in front of her lips, and she spoke in a low tone.
Stress slicked off her body. She tugged the scarf from around her neck, letting it dangle from her hand, dragging it along the floor behind her.
In the team’s planning session, they had speculated that Remi had linked onto this trip with the senator so she could get to Beirut and see her friend Jean Baptiste who had been tortured by ISIS. Maybe she was getting information about her friends.
As he watched Remi pace, she seemed to be making her way through a list of call-backs. Call, talk, bye, and on to the next.
T-Rex wasn’t trying to eavesdrop—and she spoke low enough that he couldn’t even if he wanted to. The thing he was picking up now was how easily she shifted from language to language, dialect to dialect. The names Jean Baptiste, Marie-Claude, and Éloïse were mentioned in almost all of the conversations. Sometimes someone named Liu and a few times Jules.
T-Rex made a mental note to ask how the photographer was doing when they had downtime.
She kept moving up the corridor, her face strained. T-Rex would think that she was getting bad news, but in her line of work, it was all bad news, wasn’t it?
As Remi passed him, she put her hand over her mic and tipped her chin up so she could catch his gaze. “Jules, the photographer, lost his eye. He’s in surgery for his shoulder.”
T-Rex nodded. “I’m sorry for your colleague.”
But she had already moved along, heading down the length of the hallway.
She had a soft voice that had too much breath. It made her sound like she had just been through something and was winded by it—life. She was winded by life. She sounded completely different on camera. When he’d watched some of her videos on YouTube to get a feel for her, Remi’s on-camera voice was much more like the personality she projected. Strong, straightforward, intelligent. Unafraid. And yet, when she talked in what T-Rex assumed was her everyday voice, she sounded like she’d just come in from a run.
His focus as she passed this time slid to her left hand. No gold ring on her finger, Winner had said no love relationships.
He couldn’t imagine that was true. A woman like Remi? She could have her pick…
No, that wasn’t right. She’d have to narrow her choices to men who weren’t afraid of being shown up—outsmarted, out maneuvered. Yeah, you’d have to have worked the kinks out of your ego to survive being in a relationship with someone like Remi. Her bulb burned bright, and it would illuminate a guy’s flaws. If you dated Remi, you’d have to be okay with that.
He’d caught a look in her eyes a couple times when Remi thought he couldn’t see her. Curiosity had been directed his way—interest, maybe even desire. He’d admit it, that had lit a burner on his own imagination. Remi hadn’t exhibited a moment of unprofessionalism on her part. He just had to make sure that was true of his conduct as well.
Four years ago, he’d buried his wife. He’d loved her, fought with her, adored her, been vexed by her, planned with her, hoped, prayed, cried, and made love to her. No one else. Not since they first went out as high school sophomores.
T-Rex had always thought he was a one-woman man.
When Jess died, intimate connection and all that went with it died with her.
That Remi was sparking the kinds of thoughts and feelings that he thought were closed to him… It was throwing him off his game.
Job.
I’m here for the job.
Maybe I could connect with her after this mission was complete, he thought, again.
Yeah, that wasn’t probable. Both Remi and he ran into the fray in the hairiest places on earth. When would they ever be on the same continent?
Let it go, man. Just let this roll on by.
Remi stopped in the middle of the hall, sliding her phone into her thigh pocket. She leaned her head back and tugged the elastic from her hair. Then she pulled the headset off to untangle the cord from the strands. She stuck the headset between her knees as she slicked her hair back into a ponytail, stuck the headset back on her head, and continued her pacing.
Senator Blankenship popped her door open. She startled when she looked at T-Rex. Standing there with her hand on her doorknob, looking a little lost, maybe a little frightened with her eyebrows up in her hairline. Her wiry gray hair rioted out in all directions. The senator stared up the hall at Remi with an empty gaze, almost like she were sleep walking.
“Senator?” T-Rex wasn’t sure that she wasn’t having some kind of medical event.
Blankenship spun and looked him in the eye, then went back into her room.
Remi arrived by his side. “Weird,” she whispered. “Is everything okay?”
That, T-Rex didn’t know.
Chapter Fourteen
Remi
Friday, Oxford England
“On the way back to our hotel this evening,” Senator Blankenship said, “I’d like to drive by the new embassy.” She changed the subject abruptly away from the details of today that Diamond was reading off to her. “I need to make some time to come and give it a tour. Not enough time this go-round.”
“Uhm, yes, ma’am.” Diamond was sitting in the front passenger seat next to T-Rex at Blankenship’s insistence.
He’d wanted one of them, either Remi or Diamond, to ride in the car Havoc was driving in tandem. T-Rex explained that having someone sitting next to him created issues with tactical driving.<
br />
“Psh.” Blankenship had waved a hand in the air. “Now, you know nothing bad’s gonna happen here. The British people have no feud with America—not since the seventeen-hundreds. Well, eighteen-hundreds. Well, okay, not since World War I. We’re fine. Diamond’s my right-hand gal, and I need her. And how is Remi gonna write about me if she’s in a different car? You tell me that, T-Rex.”
After conferring with Havoc, a plan must have been formed because here Remi sat beside Blankenship, and Havoc seemed to be doing some blocking and trailing maneuvers that Remi hadn’t seen before.
“Did I ever tell you, T-Rex, about a close protection guy I had once when I was traveling over to Afghanistan? Delta Force guy named Buzz—you know him?”
“No, ma’am. I don’t believe I know anyone that goes by Buzz.”
“Probably before your time. The last I was in Afghanistan was way back when things were just getting ramped up over there. But Buzz, Buzz was one of the first in your special group back in the day. I mean way back to the time when y’all tried to save them folks in Iran under Jimmy Carter. Big ol’ fireball of planes out in the desert. Anyway, this guy Buzz was a hoot and a half. I thought his name was from his haircut or maybe some crazy fly tactic. Turns out, naw, his friends gave him that name because he was worried about his gal back home. Granted, he wasn’t much to look at, and I saw a picture of his gal. You see those two side by side, and a person’s gonna wonder how that worked out. Anyhow, one night on leave, he got drunk and went out and bought her about a dozen different personal massage wands, if you know what I’m saying. He took ‘em all back to his barracks, where he passed flat out. One of his buddies saw them there and decided to put in the batteries and turn them all on. There was such a buzzing and whirring that everyone headed to his room to find out where all that noise was coming from. He’s been Buzz ever since. To this day, I wonder what came of that man.”
