Last Man Standing

by Cindy Gerard

  Join NSA. Be a spy.

  Be a drone, Stephanie thought sourly. It was exactly how she felt these days. And it was exactly what Rhonda fought against becoming.

  “Take a look at what?” she asked without much enthusiasm.

  Rhonda parked her curvy hips on the edge of Stephanie’s workstation and handed her a file folder.

  “Don’t tell me.” Stephanie tossed the folder onto her desk without bothering to open it. Since it was Friday morning and almost the end of the workweek, she figured she knew what was inside. “Randolph has a project that can’t wait until Monday.”

  Randolph Browne was their supervisor, who periodically took delight in messing with her life.

  Of course, since Joe had left her five weeks ago, she didn’t have a life outside work anyway. Her choice. And right now, it suited her fine.

  She supposed she should be angry, and should probably hate him. At the very least, she should feel vindictive. But she wasn’t made that way. Mostly, she just felt sad. And foolish.

  “Steph?”

  She shook herself away from thoughts of Joe and glanced at Rhonda. Her soft blue eyes were pinched with concern; Rhonda knew exactly where her mind had wandered. Not much got by her.

  “It’s not a project.” Rhonda laid a hand on her arm. “It’s something that came across the wire a while back. I didn’t connect it. Kind of forgot about it until I was cleaning up loose ends this morning.”

  “Connect what?”

  Rhonda notched her chin toward the folder. “Just check it out, okay?”

  Stephanie watched Rhonda walk away, then frowned at the folder. Her disenchantment with life overrode what little curiosity Rhonda had managed to pique.

  Would it always be this way? she wondered, glancing at the clock sharing a shelf with a photo of her parents. It was only nine a.m. and it felt like she’d been here all day. Another day without Joe.

  Would she always measure time in terms of before Joe and after Joe? God, she hoped not, because after Joe sucked.

  I don’t love you. Not enough.

  Okay, he wanted out of her life. Fine. But no one at BOI had heard from him, either. And that, she did not understand. The guys at Black Ops, Inc. were his brothers. Why would he walk out on them?

  “Not your problem,” she muttered under her breath.

  If a black ops warrior decided he wanted to disappear, he disappeared. And if that warrior was Joe Green, there wasn’t an army on earth—or an NSA spy—who could find him.

  She had just enough pride left that she hadn’t tried.

  She was thankful that her career demanded her undivided attention. Day after day, her time was filled sifting through encrypted cyber chatter, searching for certain patterns, phrases, repeated terminology, anything out of the norm or simply out of place. She finessed the software, compiled her reports, and stayed focused and vigilant in her search for some tidbit of information that could reveal a threat to national security.

  It was all about the bigger picture. The little picture—her life—had faded to dismal shades of gray.

  God, she was pathetic.

  She glanced toward her lucky talisman, on the corner of her desk. She rarely took out the ring Bry had given her one Christmas. The “magic decoder” ring had represented such promise for a nine year old who’d dreamed of an exciting and dangerous future as a spy.

  Well, she was a spy. A spy who sat at a desk, before a computer screen, performing complex, time-intensive work, trying not to bemoan the fact that she wasn’t the James Bond–style spy of her childhood fantasies.

  Just like she tried not to mourn the fact that Joe Green had charged into her life two years ago, taken her away from her mundane existence, and made her a believer in white knights, spy thrillers, and happily-ever-afters.

  Would you just get over it?

  Finally, more out of duty than curiosity, she picked up Rhonda’s mysterious folder.

  When she pulled out the photograph paper-clipped to the inside flap, her heart stopped. So did her breath.

  The low drone of chatter from neighboring cubicles, the hum of hundreds of CPUs, and even time and place faded as her entire world shrank to the size of an 8 x 11 inch sheet of paper.

  A photograph of Joe.

  A wave of dizziness hit her. She gripped the edge of her desk to steady herself, then stared hard at the picture.

  The photo was black and white, and grainy, and of horrible quality, but she had no doubt that it was Joe—head down, his arms cuffed behind his back, blood trailing down his temple.

  She squinted harder, horrified. He was surrounded by armed guards carrying assault rifles who appeared to be leading him into a government building. An angry mob had closed in around him.

  The photograph was from a newspaper article dated . . . oh, my God . . . almost a month ago. The print was so small she couldn’t read it clearly. Without tearing her gaze away from the picture, she felt around inside her top desk drawer for her magnifying loupe.

  When she finally found the loupe, her hand shook so hard she had to force herself to breathe deep for calm as she positioned the glass over the newsprint text.

  When she managed to make out the caption, the magnifying glass fell from her suddenly numb hand.

  Freetown, Sierra Leone . . . unidentified man arrested in the brutal slaying of revered Sacred Heart priest . . .

  “It’s some horrible mistake,” Stephanie told Raphael Mendoza when she reached him at Black Ops, Inc. headquarters in Buenos Aires. She’d pleaded sick, clocked out of work, and headed for her apartment as soon as she’d seen the picture. She’d had to talk to Rafe, and she wanted to be as far away from prying eyes and ears as possible. “Joe couldn’t have killed that priest.”

  “Of course he didn’t kill him,” Raphael replied after she’d filled him in on the little that she knew. “You’re certain it’s him in the photo?”

  “It’s him. You’ll see for yourself. I scanned the article and e-mailed it. It should pop up in your in-box any second.”

  She paced back and forth across her living room, holding her cell to her ear and staring at the photograph. She kept telling herself that she shouldn’t care what happened to Joe. But she did. She cared too damn much.

  As she’d raced across town to get home, searching her memory for something to make sense of this, she’d snagged on one haunting midnight conversation.

  She’d awakened in bed one cold, rainy night several months ago. Joe had been lying in the dark, staring at the ceiling. He was wet with sweat and she immediately knew he’d had another nightmare.

  She’d touched a hand to his face and felt the track of a tear trailing down his cheek.

  Devastated by his pain, she’d wrapped him in her arms and begged him to tell her what was haunting him.

  She hadn’t expected him to answer her. But instead of telling her it was nothing like all the other times, he’d started talking. And what he’d said still chilled her.

  “Some never see it coming.” His tone lacked emotion, but the heart that beat heavily beneath her hand told her he was anything but detached. “Some look me right in the eye and I can tell. They know I’m the last thing they’re ever going to see. Not their wife. Not their mother. Not their kid. Me.

  “Now I see them. In the dark. In the night . . .”

  “Hold on,” Rafe said, bringing her back to the moment. She heard a keyboard clicking in the background. “I think it just arrived.”

  She sank down on the sofa and waited for Rafe to open the message with the attached photo. She could picture Rafe’s darkly handsome face pinched with concern when he cursed softly.

  And when he gravely muttered, “Jesus. What the hell has he gotten himself into?” Stephanie knew that he was just as frightened for Joe as she was.

  “When can the team get over there?” she asked, hearing the panic in her own voice.

  The heavy silence on his end sent a wave of apprehension through her.

  “I don’t know, Steph,
” Rafe said, in a tone that foretold of bad news. “Right now, we can’t do a damn thing.”

  It took her a moment to find her voice. “Because he left the team?”

  “Hell, no. And he didn’t leave the team. He . . . damn. I don’t know what’s been eating him, but he needed a time-out. So Nate told him to take it; get whatever was working at him out of his system.”

  So she wasn’t the only one who had sensed a change in him.

  “Did you know he was going to Sierra Leone?”

  “No.” The single word relayed Rafe’s confusion and concern. “And it doesn’t make any sense that he’d go back there. Unless . . .”

  “Unless this has something to do with Bryan,” she concluded. “Someone needs to help him, Rafe.”

  “And we would if we could. But the guys are deployed. Even Nate is in on this op. B.J. and I are the only ones manning the fort.”

  “Then contact them.” Fueled by nervous energy, she paced to the window. Taking care of each other always came first. “Let them know Joe’s in trouble.”

  “Not that simple. They’re total blackout status, cara.”

  “Blackout?”

  “They’re so deep undercover even I don’t know where they are. They’ve been off the grid for seven days now. Could be another seven, maybe more before they surface.”

  “But you can still contact them, right? You always have a way to contact them.” She knew she was starting to sound frantic.

  “Not this time. This op is strictly ‘no commo,’” he said wearily, and her heart dropped. “Fact is, I have no way of reaching them. Even if I did, I wouldn’t. The wrong person monitors a satellite up-link, gets a lock on their position, and the guys are as good as dead.”

  She stared blindly outside. “Just like Joe is as good as dead if someone doesn’t help him.”

  “Steph, I’d be there yesterday if I could.” The frustration in his voice matched hers. “You know I would.”

  Yes, she knew. Rafe was recovering from a severe bout of malaria that had hospitalized him for almost two weeks. He’d just been released yesterday. Stephanie knew this because she’d talked to his wife and BOI teammate, B.J. Chase-Mendoza, in what had become a series of weekly phone calls that B.J. had initiated shortly after Joe disappeared. The usually hard-boiled B.J., whose baby was due any day now, had surprised Stephanie with her empathy and support.

  “What about Ann? Can your mother intervene? Pull some strings?” Rafe asked, searching for another solution. “Maybe put a little pressure on the U.S. embassy to get someone over there to check on him?”

  “The U.S. embassy isn’t an option. The article doesn’t refer to him by name or claim that he’s a U.S. citizen. They called him an ‘unnamed’ assassin. It’s pretty clear that they don’t want to link him to the United States and unleash a media storm.

  “Besides,” she went on, her feeling of helplessness growing, “I can’t ask Mom or Dad for help. Not until I know all the facts.”

  She’d been tempted to call her mother but until she could figure out exactly what was going on, she didn’t dare involve either of her parents. Both were high-profile figures in Washington, her mother in particular. Ann Tompkins held a power position with the Department of Justice.

  “I doubt I can reach them anyway,” she added. “They left yesterday on vacation, somewhere in northern Minnesota. According to Dad, it’s so remote up there that cell service is spotty at best.”

  Her dad had been as excited as a kid. Her mom hadn’t been quite as pumped about getting away from it all in the wilderness, their first vacation in years.

  “The cabin is something out of Log Home Digest,” her dad had said, showing her a picture of the isolated, beautiful cabin nestled on the shore of Lake Kabetogama, Minnesota, a place her father had fallen in love with as a child.

  “It’s a winter wonderland, Steph,” he’d gone on, his excitement clear. “We’re going to snowmobile, cross-country ski, sit by the fire, and get romantic.” He’d winked at her mother, who had rolled her eyes but looked exceedingly happy.

  So, no, for many reasons, her parents couldn’t help. Which left, what? What were Joe’s options?

  There were none, she realized, feeling heartsick.

  “Okay, look,” Rafe said, interrupting her grim thoughts. “We wait it out, okay? Joe’s resourceful. He’s tough. He can take care of himself for a while.”

  “Rafe, it’s already been a month.”

  “In a week, maybe ten days tops,” he continued, attempting to instill calm confidence, “the guys will be back. And if they’re not, then screw doctor’s orders. I’ll go after him.”

  “No, you won’t,” she said on a heavy sigh. He was still too ill. And there were B.J. and the baby to consider.

  He must have heard something in her voice—something that even she hadn’t realized she was contemplating. “Stephanie. What are you thinking?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “Listen to me. Do not do anything foolish, okay? I repeat, Joe knows how to take care of himself. Let him do it. Just wait for the team.”

  “I guess I don’t have much choice, do I?” She walked over to her desk, where she opened up her laptop and logged on to Expedia.

  “Steph, you still with me?”

  Heart beating wildly, she typed in a request for flight information to Freetown.

  This was crazy. She was insane for even thinking about flying over there.

  “Stephanie?”

  “Yeah, I’m here,” she said, distractedly.

  “Please tell me you’re not thinking about doing anything stupid.”

  “I’m not a commando, Rafe. I know my limits.”

  Major limits. She had no business flying to Africa. The hard fact was, she had no business in Joe’s life. Not anymore.

  “Let me know when the team gets back, okay?” she said. “Or if you come up with anything.”

  “You know I will. In the meantime, we’ll start working contacts on this end. If there’s anyone in place over there who might be able to help, B.J. and I will find them. Just hang tight.”

  “Right. Okay, look, I’ve gotta go,” she said abruptly and disconnected before he could give her another warning.

  She sat down and stared at the details on flights bound for Freetown, Sierra Leone, via the Lungi International Airport. There were several seats left on a flight that left Dulles at eight p.m. that night. Her passport was up to date. Her shots weren’t. And she didn’t have a visa. Maybe she could get one there. Or maybe . . .

  She glanced at the picture lying on her desk beside the laptop.

  Arrested in Sierra Leone.

  So many ghosts there. Bryan’s ghost, specifically. She kept coming back to that as her finger hovered over the escape key.

  A rush of adrenaline shot through her blood as she contemplated the unthinkable. Then she drew a deep breath and felt a decisive calm and sense of resignation wash over her.

  And she booked the flight, because in the end she really had no choice.

  4

  Joe leaned against the only wall of his cell that was not constructed of iron bars. The crumbling cinder block was damp with sweat and mold. Once it may have been painted gray, but the only thing that covered it now was the stench of filth and misery.

  His cell was one of a dozen 8 x 8 foot boxes in the cell block. Six cells lined each side of the central incarceration area. Only one had a window: Number three was the farthest away from his on the opposite side of the aisle.

  He could see the window and a slice of blue sky if he stood in just the right spot with his face pressed against the bars. The window was the only outside light source, the only source of fresh air. And the poor schmuck who occupied it was subject to whatever weather Mother Nature chose to dump through the opening. Mostly she dumped in heat, the stink of rot, and the noise of the city that rattled by outside, with no regard to the miserable wretches locked inside without the benefit of jurisprudence or basic human rights.

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nbsp; There was no running water here. His bathroom was a bucket. He slept on the bare dirt floor along with the rats, cockroaches, the occasional lizard, and a host of other creepy crawlies. Twice, he’d had the pleasure of sharing his “bed” with a viper. Both times, he’d had to kill it or be killed by it. Both of the dead snakes had been turned over to his jailers, who promptly cooked them and served them to the “crazy” American whom they both feared and held in awe for his ability to survive the vipers’ deadly attacks.

  The snakes were the only protein he’d had in the thirty days since he’d been arrested and charged with murdering the priest. He had not yet had a trial, but hadn’t missed a daily beating. He expected more sessions with the nunchakus long before he got a session with a judge.

  As he did several times each day, he willed himself to count the bars of the cage holding him prisoner. Counting kept him level. Counting kept him from locking himself into his own mind, where the utter loneliness of his isolation and the helplessness of his situation played games with his sanity. Counting the bars helped him to keep hold of reality. Mathematics did not lie. Occasionally, his mind did.

  Approximately eight feet above him, an 8 x 8 foot grillwork of sixty-four, inch-thick iron bars made his ceiling. The walls to his left and right were composed of thirty-six bars each, with four crossbars dissecting the inch-thick cylinders on both walls. There were another forty-eight bars in the wall facing the aisle—ten of them making up the door that hung on four soldered hinges and was secured with double locks both top and bottom.

  One hundred eighty-four bars. His life had come down to counting, devising an escape plan, and, of course, the nunchakus. His only respite from the unrelenting reality of his imprisonment came in the early hours of the morning, just before he came fully awake.

  For a precious few moments, Steph would be there with him. And God, it was heaven to lie beside her. To watch her breathe as she slept. To feel her heat snuggled up against him.

  Then a key would rattle in the outer room, a prisoner would groan, or a muscle cramp or hunger pains would wake him up to the truth that ripped him back to reality.