by David Archer
There was another hesitation, but then the operator replied again. “Okay, niner-niner-Charlie-Zulu, you land now. You no leave airport, you buy gas, you take off. Okay?”
“Okay,” Noah said, “niner-niner-Charlie-Zulu, Roger that. Turning for final approach now.”
Noah lined the airplane up on the runway, and lowered his flaps as he reduced throttle. He came in a little fast, not being sure what the actual stall speed was on the old Cessna, but the runway was long and he had no trouble easing its speed down until the tail wheel settled onto the runway. He turned the plane around and taxied toward the terminal, but then they spotted the Gulfstream sitting off by itself.
Noah punched the speed dial button for the pilot and he answered on the first ring. “This is Duncan,” Noah said. “See the little Cessna coming at you? How soon can you get that baby started and ready to fly?”
“Engines are idling,” the pilot replied, “and I can be in the air two minutes after you get aboard. Door’s open and stairs are down.”
Noah shoved the throttle in again and the plane gained a little speed, taking off across the grassy field between the runway and the parking space where the Gulfstream waited for them. The ride was rough and bouncy, and Noah slid the plane to a stop a moment later. The door flew open and Sarah was the first out, followed by Neil, Marco and then Noah, and they all ran for the jet.
A siren started going off, but Noah didn’t bother to look behind him. As soon as the others were in the plane, he dived through the hatch and landed on its floor as one of the flight crew pulled the hatch closed and latched it in place.
“Get into a seat and buckle in,” he yelled as he ran for the cockpit. Noah clambered into a seat beside Sarah and helped her get buckled before he bothered to fasten his own seatbelt, and then the plane was moving.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” came a voice over the loudspeaker, “this is your captain speaking and it looks like we are about to annoy some people. Everyone please hold on, I want to get the hell out of Dodge!”
The plane bumped across the grass onto the runway, and then the engines began to scream their loudest. It seemed like only a few seconds later that the wings bit into the air, and the rumble of the wheels came to an end. They were in the air, and fifteen minutes later the pilot announced that they were over international waters.
According to Noah’s iPhone, it was just a little past eight o’clock. He thought over the events of the day and was amazed that so much could happen in such a short time. He glanced around the plane at his team, looking first at Marco, who was staring out the window at the endless sea of clouds below. Neil had leaned his seat back and had his feet propped on the seat facing him, snoring loudly.
He turned and looked at Sarah beside him. She was awake, and watching his face, and smiled when she saw him turn to face her.
“Am I dreaming?” she asked. “I’m afraid I’m going to suddenly wake up and find out that this is all a dream, that I’m still strapped to that table.”
Noah looked at her for a moment, then reached over and pulled her face toward him. He kissed her lips gently, then pulled back and looked into her eyes. “Did that feel like a dream?”
“Mmmm, no,” she said. “That felt wonderful.” She raised her hand to touch his face, and saw the engagement ring on her finger once again. She held it out in front of them and looked at it, then turned her gaze back to him. “Do you regret this?” she asked, wiggling her hand to indicate the ring. “Is it really what you want to do, or are you just trying to give me what you think I need?”
Noah continued to stare into her eyes for a moment, and then he leaned forward and kissed her again. “I asked you to marry me because it’s what I want,” he said. “I don’t want to be without you, and I’m uncomfortable at the thought of you being with some other man. I find that I want to see you smile, and I want to be one of the reasons that you smile. I want to lay beside you when I go to bed, and I want you with me when I just feel like relaxing. If I have to face the world, I want you at my back, and I want you to know that I will always be at yours.”
Her eyes were wide, and her breathing was a little bit ragged. Their eyes were locked onto each other, and after a moment, Noah blinked.
“The last few days,” he said, “I’ve been—impatient, I guess, impatient to get you back, impatient to find out whether you were all right, impatient to get my hands on whoever did this to you. I’ve had to stay busy because I didn’t want to be overwhelmed by my own thoughts, but there were a few times when there was nothing else to do but think, so I thought about what I was apparently feeling and the only conclusion I can come to is that I love you. I don’t know if it’s the same thing you feel, when you say those words, but I know that it fits the only definition of love that I understand, that love exists when the happiness and well-being of one person is essential to the happiness and well-being of another. Well, your happiness, your well-being, they are essential to my own.”
Sarah was breathing rapidly now, and Noah put an arm around her and pulled her close to him, kissing her again. “I love you, Sarah,” he said.
* * * * *
The plane landed for refueling in San Francisco, and was back in the air in less than an hour, finally touching down at Kirtland at just after one o’clock in the morning. Noah and Sarah held hands as they came down the steps and walked to the Corvette. Marco took charge of their bags, so Noah just fired up the car and headed for home. When they got there, he parked the car and walked around it to open Sarah’s door, then surprised her by sweeping her up into his arms and carrying her to the front door.
And then he found that he couldn’t unlock the door while holding her, so she took the keys out of his hand and managed to get the door open, laughing happily the whole time. He carried her straight through the living room and into their bedroom, then into the bathroom. When she started to undress, he pushed her hands away and unbuttoned her, then lifted the dress over her head and removed her underclothes, then turned and started water running in the big bathtub.
He tried to pick her up and put her in the bath, but Sarah drew the line at that point. She climbed in and lay back in the hot water, ready to soak all of the pain and horror of the day before away, but Noah wasn’t finished. He picked up her favorite bath soap and dipped it in the water, then lathered his hands and began to wash her. She had to sit up a few times to cooperate, and even stand for a moment, but the pure, nonsexual pleasure of letting him wash her body was almost heavenly.
She slid down under the water to get her hair wet, and Noah squirted a tiny bit of shampoo into his hand and worked it in. With her hair so short, it didn’t take much, and when he reached for the conditioner she told him not to bother. She opened the drain with her toe and got to her feet in the tub, while Noah wrapped her in one of their big bath towels and rubbed her head down with a smaller one.
And then he picked her up again, ignoring her protests, and carried her to the bed. He took the towel away and laid her down, pulled the covers up over her and kissed her. “I’ll be right back,” he said, and started stripping his own clothes as he headed back toward the bathroom and a shower.
The shower took Noah only a few moments, and it was less than ten minutes later that he came back to her and slid into bed beside her. Sarah was wide awake, smiling at him as he slid close to her, then put her head on his chest.
“When I was in that house, before things got bad,” she said, “Chung tried every way he could to get me to talk about you. I always refused, and so he would change the subject. He asked me things about myself, things I thought were perfectly safe, so we would just chat like that. He tried to flirt with me, but I told him I was engaged and that my fiancé was an absolutely wonderful man who didn’t know anything about the kind of work I did, and other silly, girlish things that every girl wants to be able to say about the man she loves.”
She rolled over so that she could look up toward his face. “Do you know that he figured me out? I’m not sure how I
gave it away, but the day before Xiao got there, he told me that he knew that my fiancé was you. That was the kind of information that could have gotten him a reward of some kind, it would have meant that he could keep control over the situation, but he had stupidly made me a promise that he wouldn’t reveal anything I told him about my personal life, and he kept his word. He never told Xiao, and I believe he never told anyone else.”
Noah looked at her, his face relaxed. “There was something about him,” Noah said. “I think it’s that he had a sense of honor, and so that promise was something he simply couldn’t break. Sooner or later, he knew that Xiao would figure it out for himself, but he kept his word to you.” He stroked her face gently. “I’m glad I didn’t kill him.”
“Me, too,” Sarah said.
She stopped thinking about Chung and her ordeal, then, and reached out to pull herself closer to Noah. She kissed him, and the passion that flared in her was too hot to control.
EPILOGUE
Noah’s phone rang a few minutes after eight AM, and he answered it on the second ring. “Hello?”
“It’s Allison,” she said, even though he knew it from the caller ID. “Hate to wake you so early, but I need you and your team for debriefing at ten. That ought to give you enough time to find some breakfast somewhere.”
“Yes, Ma’am,” he said, but the line was already dead.
“If that was Allison,” Sarah mumbled, “tell her I died.”
“She wouldn’t care,” he said. “She’d bring in a voodoo doctor to turn you into a zombie and put you back in the field. Get up, we’ve got time for breakfast on the way to debriefing.”
She grumbled, but stumbled her way into the bathroom while Noah called Neil and Marco and told them about the debriefing. Neither of them complained, and they all agreed to meet at The Restaurant, the one that was in the area new recruits were brought to and where Noah had eaten his first meal in Neverland, for breakfast.
The food there was always good, and Noah found the place fascinating because of all the excited, curious expressions on new faces. A lot of the people who worked for E & E, even outside the actual assassination teams, were recruited out of prisons, jails and other situations they wanted to put behind them, and Noah found that he could spot them easily in that part of town. They were the ones with the eager expressions, the look of hope that getting a second chance at life can give you.
When breakfast was finished, they drove downtown and into the underground garage of the main office, then rode the elevator up together. Allison’s secretary simply waved at them as they walked by, and they found her waiting in the conference room where they expected her.
She wasn’t alone, however. Jenny and her team were there, as well, including Randy Mitchell. Randy was sitting in a chair off by himself, his eyes on the floor as Noah, Sarah, Neil and Marco came into the room. The three men froze, but Sarah had never met Randy, and didn’t realize that she was looking at the man who had sold her out.
Jenny leapt to her feet and ran to Sarah, throwing her arms around the girl and pulling her into a hug. They had only met a couple of times before, and hadn’t really ever spoken, but Noah and the guys had told Sarah on the plane how Jenny had worked with them to try to help get her back. She was happy to return the hug.
“Girl,” Jenny said, “you and me have got to go do something together. I have to put up with all these men all the time, and I don’t have any real girlfriends to hang out with, or go shopping with or whatever, and I bet you find yourself feeling the same way, am I right?”
Sarah burst out laughing, and agreed. “That sounds like fun,” she said, “as long as you promise not to torture any of the salespeople. I heard what you did to those guys in Thailand, that was—um, yeah.”
“Oh, don’t worry,” Jenny said. “I only torture people on the job, not when I’m out having fun. I promise, no bloodshed when we’re out having girl time, okay?”
“That sounds great,” Sarah said, but then Allison cleared her throat loudly.
“Girls? We have to get down to business, if that’s okay with you?”
Jenny returned to her seat while Noah and his team settled in, and then Allison turned to Donald Jefferson.
“Now that Sarah is safely back with us,” he began, “we can start to put together the incredible jigsaw puzzle that you two teams have uncovered. We’ve taken all of the information that you gathered, including statements from the agents you rescued in North Korea, from Randy, here”—he pointed at Mitchell—“as well as pulling in a lot of things from station chiefs and their staffs around the world, and we handed it all to some of our top analytical people. One of them managed to make some sense out of it all.” He pushed a button on the desk beside him, and a side door opened.
Molly Hansen, Noah’s childhood friend who happened to be a super genius, walked in. She had learned about Noah almost a year earlier, when he had been forced to reveal that he was still alive in order to keep her safe from someone who wanted to use her as leverage against him. She had been working for a government think tank at the time, but Allison had recruited her for the analysis division of E & E, and she was very happy in her new job.
“Molly?” Jefferson said. “Would you care to tell them what you figured out?”
“Sure. Okay, well, it turns out that there definitely is a mole in the CIA, but after analyzing all of the bits and pieces of information we’ve been able to collect, it’s become obvious that he or she seems to have access to information that should be so compartmentalized that it would be nearly impossible to correlate it. For instance, whoever it is managed to get into sealed files at NSA, which is the only place where E & E operatives’ past lives are recorded. He got deep enough in to find Randy Mitchell’s file, and has been using Randy as a messenger off and on, whenever he’s out of the country on a mission. Now, theoretically, the CIA has no way of knowing when one of our operatives is in country or out of country, but this person always seems to know. What this has to mean is that the mole either holds an extremely high rank in the Company, or has somehow managed to tap into sources of information that we can’t even identify.”
“So,” Jefferson went on, “we are taking an extreme step. After carefully interviewing Mr. Mitchell and wringing him dry, Allison, Doctor Parker and I all agree that he was acting under extreme duress. Now, this doesn’t mean all is forgiven; there are still a number of things he’s going to have to answer for, but right now we desperately need him to continue doing exactly what he’s been doing. As far as we can tell, the mole has no idea that Randy has been exposed as one of his puppets, so we are keeping him on active status. Jenny and her boys can handle him, but we felt that Team Camelot needed to be aware of this, just in case one of you runs into him around town. He’s now under constant monitoring, and absolutely everything he says or does is being recorded on a micro recorder one of Wally’s people came up with. It’s actually under the skin behind his left ear, and everything it records is downloaded through a cell phone several times a day.”
“So he can’t give it away that we are using him to find the mole,” Allison said. “What we’ve got to do is come up with a situation that requires the mole to meet Randy face-to-face. At the moment, we don’t have any idea what kind of situation that might be, but we’ll be ready to take him into custody the moment it happens.”
Sarah had turned her head and was staring at Randy. “So it was you?” she asked. “You’re the one who sold me out?”
Randy swallowed, his eyes flicking up to hers for just a second before going back to the floor. “He had my sisters,” he said softly. “I’m sorry, I know that doesn’t excuse anything, but…”
Sarah stared at him for a moment after he trailed off, her expression cold. “When I was recruited,” she said slowly, “I made a vow that I would never let any threat to my father be used against me. We’ve all had to make that same vow, I know that. That means you had to make it, too.” She looked at him in silence for a few more seconds before
speaking again. “That doesn’t mean I can’t understand the pressure you must’ve been under. I’ll be honest and tell you that I hate your guts right now, and if I could’ve gotten my hands on you a couple of days ago, I would’ve killed you myself. But now, after hearing all this, I just feel sorry for you. No matter what happens next with you, you have to live with this.”
She looked at Alison. “Sorry,” she said. “Didn’t mean to interrupt, but I had to say that.”
Allison only nodded. “Now, as for you,” she said. “I know you’ve been through a horrible ordeal, and I’m ordering Team Camelot to stand down for the next three months. You’re going to be seeing Doctor Parker every weekday for a while, for some intense therapy that will help you put this behind you. And just for the record, I can tell you that it works. How do you think I managed to get back in the saddle so quickly after the Andropov raid?”
Sarah started to grimace at the thought of seeing the psychiatrist, but suddenly her face froze. “Andropov,” she said. “That’s what started this whole mess. When Chung was trying to get me to talk, he told me that the reason they were so concerned about Camelot is because of Nicolaich Andropov. He had so much dirt on so many Chinese officials that he was just about running them like a puppet show, and no matter how they tried, they couldn’t get rid of him. When they heard that an American assassin, code-named Camelot, had destroyed his entire operation and got him disavowed by the Russians, then walked right into two different traps to get me back, they figured he must be some kind of Superman. They’re scared to death he’s going to be coming after some of their people, and that’s why they want to know everything they can about him.”
Allison slowly began to nod, but then Molly gasped and everyone turned to her.
“That’s it,” Molly said. “We need to find something that would make the mole willing to risk exposure? She just handed it to us. From what she just said, I can tell you that the most valuable piece of information in the intelligence world today would be a copy of Noah’s file. If Mitchell had a copy of it, but refused to turn it over to anyone else, I don’t care how security conscious this mole is, that would be a bait he couldn’t possibly resist. Let alone what it would be worth in terms of selling it to the Chinese or any other potential enemy of the United States, this is a man or woman who deals in power, and what greater power could there possibly be than to know how to manipulate and use Camelot himself? I’m telling you, this is it.”
