Gideon

by Cherry Adair

  “What difference does it make? Surely you two made contingency plans for the day my memory returned.”

  Fuckit, he did not goddamn want to crouch here in the dark chitchatting with a man whose head he’d like to place on a pike. He wanted Andrés dead, but the bastard might have some answers that would help him put the puzzle pieces together. Still, this was a dangerous game. Only one of them would leave alive, and right now he had the upper hand. A few minutes could topple that advantage the other way.

  “Find your family and demand ransom.” Andrés automatically raised his voice because he was finding it hard to hear Gideon, which was exactly what Gideon intended. “Kill you.”

  “So, like the coward you are, you’re here to murder me in the dark? Where you can’t see my eyes as the life blood flows from me?”

  “Do you think I care if I can see you or not?” Andrés said angrily. “You’ll be dead, and I can carry on as I did before she came up with this loco idea.”

  “Since you’re going to kill me anyway, where did she find me?”

  “Venezuela, near Angel Falls.”

  “Jesus.” His fingers flexed on the hilt of the knife. “That’s a thousand miles away. What was I doing there?”

  “How the fuck should I know? A group there sold you to Mama for a shitload of money. Claimed you were from a very wealthy family. Said they pay any amount of money to get you back.”

  Gideon lowered his voice a little more. “And?” It like was taking candy from a baby. Andrés’s ego, coupled with his competitive streak, layered over his need to please Mama, would net Gideon all the answers he needed.

  “But they didn’t know who your family was. Until we knew, we had to keep you alive. You were unconscious for months. It was damned inconvenient to take care of you, but always with the promise of our biggest ransom score ever.”

  “Sorry to disappoint you.”

  “Then you woke up and we realized that you didn’t fucking know who you were. If we couldn’t make money from your family, Mama thought you would be perfect to fill the shoes of Sin.”

  “Where is Sin?”

  “He died years ago. Mama has been making out that her son is still alive all this time. A few of our men knew you weren’t Sin, the others believed us when we told them you’d returned to us.”

  “From the dead?”

  “From Europe, where you were negotiating contracts for our El aliento de demonio distribution.”

  “Ahh.”

  The sound of Andrés’s boots scraping on the wet rock indicated he’d stepped backward where the ground was wet from the spray and was also turning, slowly. Trying to get a fix on Gideon’s location. “She told stories about you. Your bravery. Your machismo. She planted fear and dread in the hearts of those that may one day be unfortunate enough to meet you. The stories spread, got bigger, more graphic. Sin Diaz became larger than life. The boogeyman for grown men to fear. You were El Coco. Everyone feared the Ghost, Sin Diaz.”

  Andrés agitated movements dislodged a pebble and it splashed into the small pool beside him. He sucked in a sharp breath as he caught his balance.

  “I’m no doctor, but soy inteligente. Smart enough to have known all along that your memory would come back. I knew for sure when you stopped taking Mama’s drink. It kept you docile, kept you from remembering. When you stopped— We knew you’d betray us.”

  Gideon rose to his full height, right behind the slightly shorter man. “Betray…you?” Like a cobra strike, he wrapped his forearm across Andrés’s throat, gripping him in a tight bear hold. With arms around him, he limited the other man’s movement as he edged him, more from memory than anything else, right to the precipice of the small pool. Andrés teetered on the brink. “Seriously?”

  He wrenched his “old friend” off center, holding the knife right under his chin. “You took away my past, douchebag, and tried to fucking control my future.” He nicked the underside of the other man’s chin, felt the terrified sweat pour off Andrés’s skin. “You both lied, cheated, fucking hell—drugged me—and now you think you can just stroll up to me and kill my ass, and I’ll bare my neck? Inteligente my ass.”

  He took another light slice at Andrés’s throat with the seven-inch, partially serrated blade. “Feel how close I am to your carotid? I wouldn’t move if I was you.” Andrés gagged, but quit struggling. “Finish the story.”

  “If I finish you’ll kill me.”

  “It’s not a case of if, douchebag, it’s when.” Gideon tilted him a little farther. One move and he’d slice his throat and throw him headfirst into the pool, or better yet, do what he’d do with any other snake: Jettison him through the falls and onto the rocks below. “More importantly, it’s a case of how. We can do this slowly, or we can do this fast. I can stand here for the rest of the night.” He could feel Andrés’s Adam’s apple move convulsively as he swallowed, gasping for air.

  “The timing was perfect. We had you, and Maza showed up in Cosio showing muscle and power. We had to have a show of strength. A woman wasn’t enough of a leader—not a strong enough leader. We needed someone muy fuerte. Sin was that man.”

  “Why weren’t you that man, Andrés?” Gideon mocked against his ear. “Why didn’t you take over? Was it because she knows you’re too weak to take control of such a big enterprise? That you’re whoring, boozing, and use of our products makes you unstable? Yeah, that’s what I think. And you knew what she thought of you, didn’t you? All this time when she made you think you had some control of your own life, she was manipulating you like a marioneta, pulling the strings.”

  “She depends on me.” His voice was a mix of indignation and scorn, with a hint of doubt. “Trusts me to get the job done. You trusted me, confided in me. Told me about your doubts. I reported back to her. Nothing you did was unknown to Mama.”

  Gideon separated the sound of a scrape of a boot heel on rock behind him from the other familiar noises and braced for a rear attack. “Where is she?”

  “Mama? I don’t know. She went back to camp.”

  “Which is it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you have anything else pertinent to add?”

  “I came to warn you,” Andrés said desperately. “To help you—”

  Gideon slashed his throat, then shoved him through the water and over the edge of the falls. “No, dickwad, you didn’t.” At a round of applause, he spun around, knife at the ready. “Enjoy the show?”

  “It was more radio play than Broadway,” Riva told him cheerfully, producing a narrow beam of filtered light between her fingers. “But it was mildly entertaining.” She slung her backpack over her shoulders and made an “oomph” as she picked up his. She shoved it into his chest. “Let’s hit the road, Stark.”

  Christ. Why did this woman amuse him as much as she made his chest and balls ache? Albeit for completely different reasons. “Just like that?”

  “Why?” She looked over at him. “Were you thinking of moving in and putting up drapes? Angélica is out there somewhere, and if that dickhead found us, she can’t be that far behind. Was that my favorite knife you used?”

  With a grin, Gideon crouched beside the pool and swished the blade in the water. Straightening, he wiped it dry on his pant leg. “There.” He handed it to her hilt first. “Good as new. Let’s go find ourselves another bad guy. I’m in a fighting mood. Where’d you disappear to?”

  “My comm beeped,” she told him, sliding the KA-BAR into the thigh holster. Very sexy and Lara-Croft-ish. Same long dark braid, same steely look in her eye. But she wasn’t an actress, and bullets, and knives, and assorted other lethal weapons would make her bleed. Or worse.

  “I climbed a bit to try for better reception.”

  Gideon’s heart thumped hard. The climb up the side of the falls was practically vertical. The rocks were wet and some were slippery with algae. There would’ve been nowhere to hide if anyone saw her. Fully exposed on the mountainside, with a moon, as small as it was, no help. It was suic
ide. But he merely said, “Did you connect?”

  “One of our drones spotted us this afternoon. They ID’d me. Asked about you.”

  “And?”

  “I told them you were Gideon Stark, international playboy, inventor, and head of the ANLF.”

  “What?”

  “Okay. Not the last part. There wasn’t time, and the connection sucked. My team is assembled in Santa de Porres. I’m to complete my op. Meet them there when I’m done. They believe whatever is happening is going down tomorrow instead of in a few days.”

  “What is happening? Something to do with the delegates of the BRICS summit? An SYP takeover of the ANLF? Word War Three or Four? A coup while el presidente is meeting with the US president?” He bit the words out, annoyed. “Seems to me we have multiple questions and no fucking answers. You should probably have some fucking clue before you stroll, whistling a happy tune, into Escobar Maza’s stronghold, don’t you think?”

  “You sound cranky.” She tilted her head to look him up and down. “Are you cranky? If so, why?”

  “They know you’re alone, right?” He’d asked the same fucking rhetorical question before. It bore repeating. He didn’t give a shit that Riva was a well-trained operative. Call him a chauvinist. She might be able to outshoot and outsmart most of the predators in the jungle, but she was still female, and vulnerable. She was still about to walk up to one of the most dangerous, most unpredictable, sadistic terrorists in the world.

  She readjusted her pack on her back. “Each of us has our own section of this operation to complete, Gideon. Just because the two men who were supposed to go in with me are dead, doesn’t mean I run to the others crying. My directive hasn’t changed.” She hooked the second strap over her shoulder. “Coming?”

  Unfortunately not. “Yeah. After you.” And he’d stick to her as if they were goddamned Siamese twins until this was over. He might not be a trained T-FLAC operative, but he brought similar skills to the table. From the fragmented memories of his past, he was discovering that he was a daredevil and unafraid of the biggest, most terrifying challenges. If he trusted his disjointed memories, he’d BASE jumped the tallest buildings in the world. He’d forded rivers that few people had even seen, let alone white-water rafted. He’d hiked deserts, dived with sharks, and was a marksman if the trophies in his memories were real.

  From his most recent past, he was intimately familiar with the jungle, guerrilla warfare, and the inner workings of the ANLF and, to a certain extent, the SYP. He knew his way around guns, knives, bombs, and booby traps.

  And like it or fucking not—and he knew not—he was Riva’s bodyguard.

  “There’s some good news,” Riva told him, shining the narrow beam of light around the cave as if committing the space to memory.

  Since she had to be the least sentimental woman he’d ever met, Gideon presumed she was checking to make sure she wasn’t leaving anything behind. He was ditching whatever had been there when they arrived. He’d never be back here, he knew for damn sure. “Your people are sending in a chopper to evac us when we get to the base?”

  “Better. They’ll have a truck waiting for us on the road up to Maza’s camp. I have the coordinates. It’ll cut six hours or so off our walk. We should be there just in time for breakfast.”

  Gideon finished packing his stuff, slung the backpack over his shoulders, grabbed Riva’s hand, and together they walked through the falls. He couldn’t fucking wait.

  A waning crescent moon did little more than limn the edges of the leaves as they headed to the location where a truck would be waiting. From there, it was, apparently, a twenty-five mile drive up a series of dirt roads to Maza’s stronghold higher in the mountains

  “Angélica isn’t lying in wait for us,” Riva told Gideon, large and moody beside her. “She’s in some sort of bar. Not drunk and not socializing.” Riva had seen her surrounded by men, drunk, and raucous.

  As they’d left the carnage several miles back, the air smelled pleasantly of wet dirt and vegetation. She held back a leafy branch as it curved at her head, then released it when she was clear. Her breathing, now that she was more acclimatized to the elevation, was no longer labored, even though they were still climbing. It was too dark to read Gideon’s microexpressions, but she could certainly read his body language and feel the heat of him every time he got close. He’d been quiet and introspective for the past hour.

  “Good to know she’s boozing it up, and not hot on our trail,” he said in a low voice, not bothering to hide his sarcasm. Every line of his body showed he was hyperalert. Coiled, tense, ready to spring into action. He didn’t believe her. Hell, in his situation, she wouldn’t believe her either.

  “I feel compelled to point out that we have— She has three hundred soldiers back at camp to do her bidding. Several thousand more in both Santa de Porres and Abad. She’s sitting at a bar somewhere waiting for the report to come in of who gets the kill fee. Maybe she’s waiting for Andrés to return.”

  What Riva saw was a black mist surrounding the woman who’d lied to Gideon for months. Riva saw death. But whose? It was moot to tell Gideon that. She didn’t know who was going to die, nor did she know whe—

  Another vision slammed into her as they navigated an enormous section of densely growing ferns taller than Gideon. She sucked in a shuddering breath. Placing one foot in front of the other, she didn’t have the sensation of walking on solid ground. The world around her became ephemeral and insubstantial.

  Dios. Not Angélica. This time, the intensity of the emotions filled her with sheer terror like a body blow. Piercing pain pulsing around her in flashes of red and deep bloodred almost brought her to her knees. Swaying, she stopped in her tracks.

  A stride in front of her, Gideon half-turned. “Okay?”

  His words came through a thick fog of deafening, gut-wrenching fear. “Charlie horse.” Bile rose up the back of her throat. Prickles of hot and cold roughened her skin. Dizzy, disoriented, it was impossible to focus her eyes, and Riva stood there, the trees pressing around her, unable to move or breathe. “Second.”

  This was unlike anything she’d ever seen before. The vision consisted merely of violent, swirling colors, and a feeling of the most intense, profound sorrow she’d ever felt in her life.

  Despair. Death. Unimaginable pain.

  It felt like years, but as suddenly as the vision came it was gone, leaving only moon-tipped leaves in her vision.

  “Riva?” He said her name as though he’d said it several times before. Instead of having the weight of her pack on her back, Gideon’s arms were wrapped tightly around her.

  Not wanting to appear weak, she knew she should pull away, laugh it off. Instead, she dropped her clammy forehead to his chest, and wrapped her shaking arms around his waist.

  “Cariño, talk to me.”

  “I don’t know what that was. I saw.” Her arms tightened around him. “Whatever it was, it scared the crap out of me.” Understatement of the century.

  “Tell me.” He ran his hands over her back in comforting, even strokes. His large hand warmed her icy skin, the steady beat of his heart flub-dub-flub-dubbed under her ear. “Jesus, Riva. You’re shivering.”

  “I feel as though I just walked through an ice storm. That’s never happened before. Give me a second to get my equilibrium back.”

  Gideon slid a hand beneath the length of her braid, his fingers warm on her pebbled skin as he cupped her nape. “Take as long as you need.”

  Breathe in. Breathe out. In. Out.

  Calmer, she spoke quietly. “Usually the visions play out in front of me. I saw Angélica a few minutes ago, in that smoky bar. Sitting in a dark corner like a black widow spider, nursing a drink in a fingerprint-smudged glass, staring at the door. Waiting. For something? For someone? Crystal clear, no ambiguity. In microscopic detail. This—” She shuddered. “This was different.”

  “Can you tell me how it was different? What did you see?”

  Riva shifted to get out of hi
s hold. His arms tightened around her for a second before he released her. She stepped away a few feet and straightened her T-shirt, pulling it down, and adjusting the KA-BAR on her thigh. “I need time to try and process what it was.”

  “And then you’ll tell me?”

  Bending, she hefted up her pack by the strap, then swung it over one arm, indicating with the barrel of her SIG to keep moving. “Sure.”

  A stray glint of white moonlight gleamed in his eyes, and she saw in them that he knew that they’d never have that conversation.

  Unseen monkeys chatted, birds chirped, and a jaguar roared. Time for the animals to rise and shine with the sun and forage for breakfast. Gideon’s stomach rumbled even though he and Riva had had their protein bar breakfast several hours earlier when they left the falls. They’d seen no sign of humans, but Gideon knew that would change by day’s end, if not sooner. In about four hours, they’d reach the location where the truck would be hidden beside the road.

  Mama was out there lying in wait. But if Riva’s vision held true, the bitch was holed up in a bar somewhere. And Riva’s word was good enough for him.

  The sky lightened enough for them to remove their NVGs, and the ground was more flat than sloped, making walking easier. They were making good progress.

  “Okay, that’s gross.” Riva grimaced. The strong stink of putrefying flesh, similar to the stench they’d left several hours earlier back at the falls, made them breathe through their mouths.

  “Could be a carrion flower, or a dead animal.”

  “No flower smells like that. That’s something large and dead.”

  “My vote is something dead, but the plant is a strong contender. A lot of the plants here have developed methods to prevent their leaves from being eaten by animals and insects.” Gideon smiled as she sent him a disbelieving look. “Tough, poisonous, waxy, or strong-smelling leaves enable them to resist predators. Admit it, even if you were starving, you wouldn’t take a bite of something that smelled this bad.”

  They’d barely spoken in the past four hours and his weird rush of memory had been the catalyst to her actually engaging with him again instead of just responding by rote.