Bad Reputation (Agent Juliet Book 4)

by E. M. Smith

  I smacked his hand away from my face.

  “Asshole.” I opened my eyes. “I ought to sock you in the head again.”

  Bravo smirked. “Try it.”

  Then I felt it—a breeze coming through the tiny crack where I’d broken the sheet of steel away from the floor.

  “Hot damn.” I rolled onto my stomach and pushed my fingers into the gap. It was dark outside. The night air felt like heaven. “I did it.”

  “You got through?” Bravo asked, dropping down beside me. “Move over. Let me get some of that.”

  For the next little while, we took turns sucking in the outside air like it was ice water. No talking, no fighting. It was probably the longest time we’d ever been in the same room and conscious without bitching at each other.

  Six years ago

  In-flight, Mike had joked that he’d always wanted to run away to Paris and become a poet. He’d said he used to have a postcard of this very hotel taped to the wall beside his bed when he was a child.

  At the moment, Whiskey wanted to be anywhere else in the world.

  “Take the shot,” Charlie’s order came through the headset. “Repeat: Whiskey, take the shot now before this fucker cuts and runs.”

  Dawson shook his head at her.

  “You can’t kill me, Mina,” he said. “You’re weak. Always have been.”

  Steel. Her internal organs were encased in steel.

  “You would have pulled the trigger by now if you could have,” he said.

  Kill him. Kill him. Kill him.

  Dawson smiled. Close enough that she could see the crow’s feet crinkle at the corners of his eyes.

  Why couldn’t she do it?

  “Whiskey, what the fuck is going on down there?” Charlie yelled. “Take the fucking shot!”

  Her entire body was steel. Layers and layers of emotionless metal. And none of it could move.

  Dawson went to the sidebar and picked up the .22 Walther PPK that he favored for the same reason any idiot would: James Bond.

  Goddammit, she was a soldier now. Whiskey was strength. Mina was years away, a different lifetime, a person Whiskey wouldn’t even recognize.

  Dawson pulled the .22’s slide and checked the chamber.

  “Do you remember those nights I would come to your room?” he asked. “Before Father started locking your door. Domineering old bastard.”

  Dawson was trying to shake her up, make her drop the gun, scream at him, do something stupid. But he couldn’t break through the steel.

  “That’s why you can’t kill me,” he said. “You still want me.”

  Dawson crossed the room. Slowly. He gave her every opportunity to open fire.

  Whiskey stared down the barrel of her rifle. Somewhere in the background, she could hear Charlie screaming orders.

  Dawson stopped at her side.

  “I’d take you up on it, Mina, give you one more good time, but—” He leaned in until his lips were an inch from her ear. “—you’re too old for me now.”

  Something ignited inside her chest. Whiskey swung around, raising her rifle.

  Too late.

  Dawson shoved the .22 inside the neck of her body armor. The shot was deafening.

  Then Whiskey was on the floor, looking up at the molded plaster of the ceiling. She’d been too slow. Too stupid. Too weak.

  Mike appeared. He yelled something at her and applied pressure to her chest, just over her heart. She tried to tell him to go after Dawson—that the KiloT-4 would heal her—but when she opened her mouth, she started to cough. Hot wetness ran down her cheek and pooled in her ear.

  Darkness hovered at the edges of Whiskey’s sight. Cold crept up from her extremities. The sound of a slowing heartbeat and rushing water overpowered everything else.

  But Mina’s crying brought Whiskey back.

  Fury washed through Whiskey’s veins, and for once she didn’t try to contain it. Mina didn’t have any claim to this body anymore. All of this was Mina’s fault—the inability to move, the slow reaction time, the weakness. Mina had done this to her.

  Whiskey imagined fire burning out of control, a funeral pyre. She forced Mina into the flames.

  When the only thing left was ash, Whiskey let go of consciousness. She knew she would be back. Dawson thought he had won, but all he’d done was make her stronger.

  Present

  Since the box was only five feet on each side, Bravo was able to push on the loose wall with his feet and wedge his shoulders against the opposite side while I worked on widening the gap. I managed to stay up long enough to pop a few more screws, then I dropped.

  “Switch,” I wheezed.

  Bravo didn’t answer, just swiped at a mosquito by his ear and nodded. Underneath his orangey tan, his skin was dark red.

  I brought my arm up to look at it. Red, shaking, hair wet and stuck to the skin. But I didn’t think I was sweating anymore. I wondered how much longer we could keep this up without water.

  “Whatsamatter—” Bravo took a breath. “—bitch-boy? Worried about—your beautiful—complexion?”

  I shook my head and tried to swallow. Felt like hot sandpaper in my throat. I put my shoulders against the wall, then straightened my legs until the tin was bowed out.

  “Thirsty,” I said.

  Bravo grabbed the two-by-four at the top of the frame.

  “Thirsty?” He laughed. Kicked the tin. Stopped to breathe. “Is that all? I’d jizz—my pants if—I smelled water—right now.”

  He kicked again. A few more screws popped loose.

  “Somebody offered me a drink?” I said. “I’d sell ‘em your mom.”

  “That skank ho?” Bravo said. Another kick. “Good luck.”

  I laughed.

  “Even if she—was a sweet—cookie-making—Jesus-loving angel,” I said. “Fuck yes, gimme the water.”

  “Me, too.” Bravo bent over for a second and put his hands on his knees. “Switch.”

  I got up, then leaned against the wall while Bravo got down on the floor.

  “Corner,” he said, scooting over to it. “Start on the welds.”

  I grabbed the upright two-by-four in the corner of the box with one hand and the two-by-four at the top of the frame with the other. Kicked.

  Just noise, no give.

  I reared back and went at it again.

  Five months ago

  Whiskey stood alone in the kitchen of the log home, staring at the body on the hardwood floor. She had no doubt it was Tango, but in the interest of being thorough, Whiskey searched until she found the head on the other side of the cooking island.

  The cat-shaped eyes were wide and empty, but unmistakably Tango’s.

  The husband’s body lay directly opposite. Spatter patterns, directionality, and positioning suggested that they’d been kneeling facing one another when the killer bludgeoned him to death.

  According to NOC-Unit command, Talia Kendrick and her husband, Owen, were murdered by an enemy she had made back when she was still active as Tango. The evidence seemed to support that claim—an attack meant to inflict emotional agony on Talia before her death.

  But Talia hadn’t been beaten, stabbed, or shot. The first and only wounds had detached Talia’s head from her body. By the looks of the scoring, the cuts had been made with a surgical saw. The only way to kill a KiloT-4 test-subject was by removing the head in under eight seconds. This stopped the healing process before it could begin. But Delgado couldn’t have known that.

  “Whiskey, this is Foxtrot,” his voice came through the headset. “Local cops are coming back, and they’re leading the Staties’ crime scene unit. Five miles out and closing fast.”

  “Roger,” Whiskey said. “I’m going to have Donovan pick up the brother. Rendezvous at the airfield at twelve hundred hours.”

  *****

  NOC-Unit command had made it sound like Tango was training a soldier Whiskey would be lucky to have on her team. The man in front of her looked as if he’d been beaten half to death, and he was
smaller than she’d expected. Or maybe it was just because he was on his ass in the gravel.

  “Jamie Kendrick?” she asked, to be sure.

  “What the fuck is—”

  “I don’t do interruptions,” she said. “Don’t talk unless I ask you a question or give you an order. Then I’ll expect a ‘yes, ma’am’ and for you to get your ass doing what I told you to. Understood?”

  She waited.

  “What the fuck’s going on here?” he yelled. “Are they fixing to kill that guy?”

  Whiskey drew her gun and pressed it against his swollen black eye. He grimaced, but didn’t flinch away or start begging.

  “I asked if that was understood, soldier,” Whiskey said. “You fucking answer me when I fucking ask you a question.”

  “Shit—yes—yeah—I mean, I understand.”

  “Ma’am,” Whiskey said.

  “Ma’am,” he said.

  “Work on it.” Whiskey holstered her weapon. “We don’t have a whole lot of time, so for now, just answer yes or no: Do you want to save your nieces and kill the man responsible for your brother’s death?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  No hesitation. No surprise.

  “Get in the van,” she said.

  *****

  Whiskey scanned the room again. Sterile autopsy slabs, metal tray tables, a GC-MS Mass Selective Detector.

  This wasn’t a hideaway or a holding facility. It was a lab.

  Whiskey bit her lips together. She should’ve listened to her instincts back in Arkansas. Delgado may have killed Talia and her husband as payback for destroying his organization years before, but he hadn’t kidnapped her daughters for trafficking. Someone who knew about the KiloT-4 trials had to have tipped him off—maybe even told him that the girls displayed residual effects from the drug. Governments around the globe would willingly bankrupt their countries to get their hands on the Kendrick girls.

  Glass crunched behind Whiskey.

  Juliet. He was studying the room, too, trying to process what he was seeing without any of the facts.

  She ground her teeth. Command had sent her team into this op blind, with a civilian who’d never seen combat, and all while trying to break in Bravo, the team’s new operative. Command had used her past to keep her from asking questions.

  “Status,” Whiskey barked into her headset.

  “Coming down a hallway,” Mike replied. “No injury. Sounds like you guys took most of the heat.”

  “There’s some activity on the second floor,” Fox said. “Can’t tell what.”

  Whiskey shook her head. Father hadn’t fled to the top floor when NOC-Unit attacked, he’d gone for the basement in attempt to access his alternate escape route. She started to turn a slow circle, searching for any shelf, cabinet, or panel ajar.

  “We’re on your three, Juliet,” Mike said. “About to come through the door.”

  There. A metal shelf pushed away from the wall about the width of a hand. The far corner of the shelf hung just a fraction of an inch above the floor. It must have hinges holding it to the wall.

  Mike and Bravo came into the lab from the hallway on Juliet’s right.

  “You and Bravo take upstairs,” Whiskey said. “Juliet and I are taking door number two.”

  *****

  A short, white-haired nurse took Juliet’s vitals. The doctors were keeping him in a medically-induced coma until they could get him into surgery and stabilize his spine.

  Whiskey stood in the doorway and made a mental list for Juliet’s training. Following orders would be number one. Never, ever letting go of his weapon would come second. After that, they could get into martial arts, interrogation techniques and resistance, the basic courses an operative should have under his belt—languages, ballistics, forensics… The list went on and on.

  The nurse exhaled.

  “I can’t tell if I’m getting older or the recruits are getting younger,” she said. She frowned at Whiskey. “You really put this one through the wringer.”

  “He did it himself,” Whiskey said.

  “Fine thing to say.”

  Whiskey shrugged. She’d meant it as a compliment.

  The nurse pushed past Whiskey into the hallway, wheeling the vitals machine along with her.

  Whiskey stayed a little while longer.

  Juliet had a long, painful recovery ahead of him, but Whiskey didn’t doubt that he would make it back to active duty. He ran on emotion. It had kept him moving when he was in pain, when he didn’t know what he was doing, and when he chose to die taking Delgado down rather than live with failure.

  Whiskey hadn’t been able to talk to Juliet yet. She hadn’t had the chance to offer him the spot on her team. She barely knew anything about him. But for the first time in her life, Whiskey felt like she’d made a friend.

  Present

  The sound of moaning brought me out of whatever kind of trance I was in.

  Bravo was on the floor, turned on his side, groaning something about a trap. I was crouched in the corner, with my shoulder and face at a weird angle against the wall. I tried to ask what happened, but I couldn’t get my tongue unstuck from the roof of my mouth.

  I let my body slide the rest of the way down to the floor and shut my eyes. Too hot to breathe. Too hot to move. My skin was on fire.

  I couldn’t remember what I was supposed to be doing. Something about welding. I inched my arm across the floor until I could stick my fingers through the gap we’d made in the box.

  Two days ago

  Whiskey pulled down the projector screen across the wall of the NOC-Unit jet, then went back to the couch and picked up the tablet. She opened the folder on the slash-and-burn in Thailand.

  This was one of the few times Whiskey had been able to track down one of Dawson’s shipments, and only because her Malaysian contact had gotten sloppy drunk with a hotel manager from Bangkok. She wasn’t about to let these kids slip through her fingers.

  “This is the target brothel,” she said, opening an aerial shot of the building. “Porcelain Doll House on the edge of Soi Cowboy. A shipment of children was delivered four days ago. According to a local Anti-Prostitution Task Force, the Porcelain Doll House only has a few men working security, but they’re former military. We might not meet with a lot of manpower, but what’s there is going to be pretty damn efficient.”

  Romeo raised her hand. “Hey, not to distract from the briefing, but Juliet and Bravo? Where are they?”

  There had been a pause after Romeo said Juliet’s name and before she added Bravo’s. Short enough that it was possible Whiskey was the only one who had noticed.

  Whiskey had suspected that something was going on between Juliet and Romeo. What she hadn’t been prepared for was the pang of jealousy that came from hearing the concern in Romeo’s voice.

  “Two-man op in Rio de Janeiro,” Whiskey said. “They’re taking down Dawson Kroeger, the head of the trafficking organization that sold these kids to the Porcelain Doll House. It’s our job to get the kids out so the APTF can send them home.”

  “Is a coordinated attack necessary?” Fox asked. “What are the odds that Kroeger would get word of the raid before we could catch up to him?”

  Whiskey took a deep breath and let it out to keep from snapping at him.

  “Odds are good,” she said. “Kroeger is extremely paranoid and extremely careful. This is the first time he’s surfaced in years. We may not get another shot.”

  “Why Bravo and Juliet?” Romeo asked. “They’ve barely been on the team six months. They don’t know what the hell they’re doing.”

  Mike and Fox glanced at each other, then Whiskey. She felt her eyes narrow.

  Did they think she had sent Bravo and Juliet after Dawson? Mike knew more about her than anyone. How could he not see that she would have given anything to go after Dawson? If not for the kids, she would’ve fought tooth and nail until command let her take the Rio op—or she would’ve gone AWOL and done it herself.

  But the Po
rcelain Doll House supplied other, smaller brothels throughout the city, and the occasional buyer from out of town. Once they started splitting the kids up, finding and rescuing them got more and more difficult. This had to come first. She couldn’t let her family’s empire destroy any more lives.

  “Let’s focus on the briefing,” Whiskey said. “We’ve got two hours until touchdown in Bangkok. We’ll coordinate with the APTF unit when we land, spend some time familiarizing ourselves with the neighborhood, then storm the brothel at oh-five-hundred. The floor plan doesn’t lend itself to snipers and since we’re two men short, Romeo and Fox, you’ll be part of the ground force. We’ll double-team the building, go in through the front entrance and the alley…”

  *****

  Whiskey leaned against the brick alley wall of the Porcelain Doll house, cradling her M16 to her chest. Romeo and two pathetically under-armored APTF officers waited for her signal.

  “Status?” Whiskey said into her headset.

  “In position,” Mike answered. “Breaching in three.”

  She pointed at the officer with the battering ram. He took his place in front of the door.

  “On one,” she said. “Three. Two. One.”

  The officer reared the ram back and smashed just above the handle. The door splintered around the locking mechanism. Another swing and it cracked open. The officer jumped back.

  Whiskey shouldered the door in, leading with her M16.

  A dark hallway. A handgun swung her direction. Whiskey never saw faces on ops, just weapons. She fired. The gun dropped.

  Whiskey heard muffled shots. Mike, Fox, and the rest of the task force entering. She started moving again. She could feel Romeo and the officers on her six. At any other time, she would’ve had the junior operative take the lead to cut down the chances of friendly fire, but Romeo hadn’t been in a real-life interior combat situation before. The risk was too high that she’d freeze up or shoot an unarmed child.

  There was a sound like papers shuffling. Whiskey registered movement overhead just before the assailant dropped on top of her. They smacked the floor in a heap.