by Lexi Blake
“Getting Kayla Summers out of here alive is my highest priority. Help me get Fain out to the guesthouse and I’ll tell you the whole story,” the dude with a shit ton of names said.
“Yeah, I’d like to hear it, too,” Ezra said.
“Help him,” Bishop ordered. “I’ll take point. And be careful of the bodies. Wouldn’t want you to trip and fall.”
Ezra groaned as he tried to straighten up. Josh put a shoulder under Ezra’s arm, giving him some balance as they began to follow Bishop.
That was a lot of bodies. As they followed the mysterious Bishop through the garden, he counted at least five men down. He hadn’t heard a single shot, and there was a surprising lack of blood. The guards looked as though they’d simply dropped where they stood, one every couple of hundred feet or so. Like a nasty treat trail leading them where they needed to go.
“Did you leave anyone alive?” Ezra complained. “You know sometimes it can be helpful to interrogate people. It’s hard to do when you internally decapitate them.”
“I couldn’t risk putting them out,” Bishop replied. “I don’t know how long they would stay out. Besides, you have no idea what these men have done. Every single one of them. I worked inside a group like this for years. You don’t get this close to the boss without proving how far you’ll go.”
“Oh, I know.” Ezra groaned a little but managed to keep up. “The question is what have you been doing for the last five years? Where have you been since you faked your death and ditched your responsibilities?”
“I found more important responsibilities,” Bishop shot back and then seemed to take control of his temper. “As to what I’ve been doing, would you believe growing a sensationally non-lucrative but cruelty free business selling crafts and organic vegan baked goods while my wife supports us with money she makes writing naughty books? Don’t call them porn. She gets upset at that term. Her books are about love. And sex. Lots of filthy sex, but mostly the love thing.” He stopped and listened for a second before waving them on to the small outer building Shane was staying in.
“No, I wouldn’t believe it,” Ezra shot back. “The idea of you wearing Birkenstocks and eating tofu while selling homemade dream catchers is ridiculous.”
“And yet that’s how I spent last summer, but my present isn’t the problem,” Bishop returned. “My past is back with a fucking vengeance. You hate me for leaving the Agency the way I did. I get that. But don’t think for a second I’m not paying for it right now. I faked my death because I wasn’t sure the Agency would let me leave, and even if they did I would have had enemies coming after me for the rest of my life. And I lied to my wife about my past. I should have been honest, but I didn’t think my Nell would be able to handle the truth. Now she has to face it and the fact that the very reason I faked my own death is coming back for me. I should be at home protecting my pregnant wife, and yet I’m here for one reason and one reason alone—because I owe Kayla Summers.”
“Is this because of what happened with her sister?” Josh asked. Despite what the Ezra guy said, he’d actually watched Bishop eat tofu. He’d developed a taste for the stuff, and nothing about his demeanor this evening made Josh think he was lying.
“Yes,” Bishop replied as he got to the door. “Joshua, let Shane see your face. I’m afraid he doesn’t know me.”
Josh handed Ezra over and knocked on the door.
Shane opened it. “Hey, what’s…holy shit. Ezra?”
“Bad night, man. Op didn’t go the way we thought it would,” Ezra said as Bishop got him through the door. “Shane Landon, this is John Bishop. He’s a dead man and we’re going to join him if we don’t find Kay and get the fuck out of here.”
Shane had pulled out his phone, not bothering to ask another question. He was on the phone to his headquarters the minute he realized things had gone awry. “Boss, sorry to call late, but this thing has gone to shit. Ezra’s shot. I don’t know how bad it is yet. Kay’s been taken by god knows who. I’ve got Hunt, but Riley and Declan are on their way back to the city. And there’s someone here named John Bishop.”
He stepped away, but Josh noted he didn’t turn his back on Bishop.
“If that’s Taggart, tell him Green’s gone rogue and he needs to pull his men out of that drop tomorrow,” Bishop said. “It’s meaningless at best, could be deadly at worst.”
Shane started talking to his boss, relaying the message.
Bishop was busy trying to get a look at Ezra’s wound. Whatever he saw there made him frown.
“Can you get me out of this fucking vest?” Ezra asked. “I can barely breathe. I took one to the back. It didn’t get all the way through, but it hurts like hell. I do thank you for saving me from the assholes who came to bury me.”
“You’re welcome,” he replied. “I was in the shadows. There were too many for me to stop them from taking Kay, but if they’re planning what I think they’re planning, they need her alive for a little while. Eventually they’ll figure out she won’t talk, but for now Levi will try to finesse his way out of this. And no, I can’t get you out of the vest. It’s literally the only thing stopping the bleeding from your chest cavity. I pull this off you anywhere but an OR and you bleed out.”
“Fucking awesome.” Ezra turned a nice shade of pale. “I’m going to kill Levi Green.”
“Not if I get to him first, brother,” Bishop swore.
Josh looked down at the gun in his hand. Could he pull the trigger? Fuck, yeah if it meant saving Kay. Actually, he was thinking about pulling the trigger just to let those assholes know they couldn’t take his sub. A protective instinct like nothing he’d ever known welled up inside him. How fucking dare anyone take her from him.
“Yes, sir. I understand.” Shane hung up, shoving the phone in his pocket and staring at Bishop like he was some mythical creature. “Who the hell are you? My boss told me to do anything you asked of me. He told me you were in charge and if he found out I’d done anything but follow your orders to the letter, he’d…well, he likes to talk about entrails a lot.”
Bishop’s lips curled up. “Young Taggart. He’s made something special of himself and that company of his. He was one of my trainees back in the old days. When I joined the Agency, I was recruited by a man named Franklin Grant. After I became proficient, Grant let me train some of his special recruits, including his adopted son, Tennessee Smith. Ten recruited Taggart and I took him with me on some of his first missions.” Bishop looked back at Josh. “Where is Jiang Kun?”
Shane’s eyes widened. “Kayla’s sister?”
Ezra was looking firmly at Bishop, his eyes practically blazing. “Jiang Kun is dead. She was killed during…you son of a bitch.”
“She’s back in my room. They switched them out and expected I wouldn’t notice the difference.” Josh didn’t care who was a son of a bitch or what Bishop had done in the past. All that mattered was Kayla in the here and now and what they were doing to her. The thought of her alone and in pain gutted him. This was what it felt like to really fucking love someone. He would change places with her in a heartbeat. “She thinks I’m getting condoms.”
“I want to know what happened,” Ezra said. “Big Tag might give you a pass, but I won’t.”
“You want to take me out after this is over, come and find me in Colorado,” Bishop replied, his jaw tight. “You won’t be the only one gunning my way. And what I did with Jiang Kun and Kayla Summers was done with the full approval of the director of the CIA and the president of the United States. Everything I did at the Agency with the exception of how I left was with the support of command. Believe me, they were more than happy to hear this particular plan.”
“What was the plan?” Josh asked.
“When Jiang Kun reached out to the Agency and asked about her twin, I quickly realized the opportunity we had. I put her in touch with Kayla. After Kayla had been properly vetted, of course. Tennessee Smith wanted to bring Kun in immediately, to turn her, but the truth is the minute she came over to our
side, her usefulness gets cut in half, hell, maybe more.”
“Because if MSS knew she’d defected, they would change everything,” Ezra explained. “They would change their protocols, scrap any plans she knew about. You needed to switch them out so MSS never realized it lost an agent.”
“Yes, and I was under orders to do it in a way that Summers and Smith never knew what had happened. They worried Summers would balk because she wanted to be with her sister. It was the point of it all for her. But she showed a propensity not only for deep loyalty but also for revenge. It was why I had Kun write those letters to her, to build a loyalty to family. All the while, I was turning Kayla into a weapon. She tested off the charts and she spoke perfect Mandarin. It was the kind of setup every spymaster dreams of. And it worked perfectly, right down to Ten Smith taking out an operative the South Koreans had been trying to deal with for years. And no one knew we had Kun. I dealt with Kun and soon discovered she’s a sociopath. Whether it was what the Chinese did to her during training or she was born that way, the woman is bad. She gave us what we needed, but it was obvious to me that she was going to cause trouble. We tried giving her what she said she wanted, a nice American life. She robbed a bank. We couldn’t let her go into the penal system. Too many secrets. I took her with me on a few assignments hoping to…I don’t know…Dexter her or something. She liked killing. I gave her bad guys to kill, but at some point in time she made contact with Hector Morales and set up her business, which included blackmailing famous people.”
Josh felt his stomach turn. “She’s my blackmailer?”
Ezra groaned as Bishop kept poking and prodding him.
“Yes, and she got that intel from Hector, whose organization kept up with their products. From what I can tell, he recognized you from certain private films his people had you make when you were a teen. Stay calm or I’ll put you out myself.” Bishop’s words hit him, but it took a minute for him to truly understand them.
Hector had those terrible tapes because Hector had run the business.
All those years of torture and pain and it had been to line Hector Morales’s pockets. His pain. Hannah’s. The horror everyone he’d grown up with had faced had all been about making one evil man’s life better.
“He has Kayla.” Rage was replaced with pure panic.
Bishop stared at him as though willing him to stay calm. “And I’ll handle it. This is my mess. I made it when I decided to walk away. I thought…hell, I was so in love, I didn’t think at all. I just knew I wanted a better life for myself, for Nell. The Agency would go on, I told myself. And it did. Jiang Kun was given a new handler after my unfortunate demise. Levi Green. I don’t know if she turned him or he was already willing to walk on the bad side, but I believe the two of them have been working with Hector.”
“How do you know this?” Ezra asked.
“I’ve stayed away for years,” Bishop explained. “I hid in plain sight. I enjoyed my life and my town. I was normal for once. A few months ago, someone figured out I wasn’t as dead as I’m supposed to be. That was when one of the cartel’s I took down showed up in my quiet little town. So now the Agency knows and I need to find out how and who’s coming after me next. I have a friend who is very likely the best hacker on the planet. He got me the data I needed and I put the pieces together. I still don’t know who figured out I wasn’t dead and gave me up, but I saw the pattern that emerged with Green and Kun. I started investigating and discovered the Morales connection. When I realized they’d drawn McKay-Taggart into this ‘op’ of theirs and specifically Kayla, I knew what they would do. They want to pull off the same switch I did except in reverse, and it’s all about getting to Hope McDonald’s research projects,” Bishop said. “If they can get one of the men McDonald experimented on, they can either be heroes with the Agency or potentially sell the man to any number of interested parties.”
“This is about research?” Josh couldn’t quite put things together in his head.
“Hope McDonald developed a drug that makes it possible to experience time in a different way,” Ezra explained. “It’s miles ahead of anything anyone else has. One of the side effects of later iterations of the drug was memory loss and the subject becoming very susceptible to suggestion in the early days. The men she experimented on were typically soldiers and they retained muscle memory, could fight and do things like put together a complex rifle with no trouble. But they had no memory of their pasts and were eager to please.”
“Super soldiers,” Josh said. “That’s how Kay explained it. They would be like ducklings, desperate to imprint on anyone who could make the world make sense. Ducklings who came out of the shell knowing how to kill.”
“Kayla is close to them. She can walk in and any one of those men would walk out with her, never understanding she’s leading them to slaughter,” Shane said. “They love her. She’s been in charge of them since Big Tag shipped them to London.”
Bishop nodded. “Yes, I believe that’s what they’re counting on. Once she’s got them on the outside, she can either say she lost them and try to stay on, or Damon Knight will believe she turned. What other explanation would there be? No one else knows Jiang Kun’s alive. She’ll take her sister’s place and McKay-Taggart won’t go after Green for vengeance because it’ll be Kay’s fault, not his.”
“You said he won’t kill her right away.” Josh had been a pawn, a means to an end. It had always been Kayla they were after.
“It would be easier if they had the protocols to get into The Garden,” Ezra explained. “But if she won’t give them up, they could still have some uses for her. They could use her to draw Damon Knight out. He wouldn’t understand that he wasn’t getting the right agent back. They would show him the real Kayla being tortured, offer her up for a certain amount of cash, then switch her out for her sister at the last minute. Jiang Kun would be welcomed back into the arms of her ‘family’ and then she would go to work. Any memory lapses could be attributed to PTSD. And then she would get one of the Lost Boys. Hell, maybe more than one.” He looked at Bishop, his eyes narrowed. “Look me in the eyes and tell me you’re not playing some angle.”
Bishop stared at the CIA agent. “I am here because I want to be a man of honor. I left the Agency because I’d lost mine. I came back because I can’t let them get away with this. Because it’s the right thing to do and that is all the skin I have in this game. I will save Kayla and then I will go home and try to rebuild my life there if the Agency will let me. If the world will let me.”
Slowly Ezra shook his head. “All right. I believe you.”
Bishop stood up. “Shane, you got a car here?”
“Yes, I’m driving Hunt and Kayla back to the city in the morning,” Shane replied.
“Not now. Now you’re taking Agent Fain to a hospital,” Bishop explained. “Get Hunt out of here, too.”
“I’m not leaving without Kayla.” He wasn’t a fucking agent, but he wasn’t some wimp either. He could do things. He could take a bullet if he needed to, if it meant her getting out alive. All he knew was he wasn’t getting in a car and leaving her behind.
There was a knock on the door and Bishop went still.
“Take Ezra out the back,” Bishop ordered, his voice a mere whisper. “Hunt, looks like you get your wish. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. Stall her as long as possible. If she takes you to wherever Kayla is, tell them all this.”
He leaned over and whispered in Josh’s ear. Josh nodded. It was a good bit of dialogue. If Bishop ever wanted to give up the vegan-bread-selling game, Josh would let the man work on some of his scripts.
Shane had Ezra, hauling him out as silently as possible. Bishop nodded and then disappeared, too.
Fuck. It was just a role. Another part to play. He went to open the door. Don’t be her. Don’t be her. Don’t be her. Don’t be her.
The gun. He had the gun in his pocket. Would she check him there?
“Josh?”
He leaned down and shoved the small gun into
his dress sock. He was wearing traditional black dress socks and the tuxedo pants were straight cut. It was possible they wouldn’t check. It was also possible he was going to shoot off his own foot, but he needed to give them the best chance he possibly could.
He was back on his feet when the door flew open.
Jiang Kun stood in the doorway, and she wasn’t alone. Three large men with guns flanked her. She said something to them and then two of the men started to run around toward the back of the house, but not before Josh heard the sound of a car peeling away. There were some gunshots, but that car was gone.
Good for Shane.
Maybe Declan and Riley would come back. Maybe. Maybe John Bishop would do everything he said.
Jiang Kun had changed into jeans and a black shirt, one he recognized from Kayla’s closet. “What gave me away?”
She stalked in, her guards following behind.
“A man knows the woman he loves,” he replied. “And I sure as hell don’t love you.”
Kun’s lips curved into a malicious smirk. Her hand touched his chest. “Too bad. I’ll admit getting to fuck the hell out of a man with your prodigious experience was one of the reasons I was going to enjoy this assignment. Your loss. Mine, too. I was going to tape it all and send it to little sis. Guess I can torture you in front of her instead. Boys, let’s take Mr. Hunt to see his one true love. Be careful with him. He’s used to VIP treatment now.”
The two guards took him by the arms and started to haul him out.
At least he would see Kayla.
One last time.
Chapter Twenty
Kayla couldn’t stop shaking. How many times had they put her in that freezing cold water? A hundred? It fucking felt like it. Her lungs hurt from how many times she’d had to cough up water from them.
It had happened over and over. Morales would ask her the same questions. She would tell him to fuck off and they would put her under. She would watch for a moment, seeing the oddly monstrous face distorted by the water, and then the burn would begin. Her lungs would ache and panic would set in as she began to drown. They would haul her out and she would shiver and shake on the cold marble.
