Nike's Wings

by Valerie Douglas

  Flashing red, blue and white lights surrounded the buildings in question. Police cars.

  Floodlights illuminated every side.

  “We’ll never get in there by conventional means,” Mark said, looking down without the benefit of the infrared binoculars. “We need a fast, silent way in.”

  And they needed to get in soon.

  Ty felt the pressure to make this work – to set, keep and hold the balance – but he wouldn’t let that force him into unwise decisions.

  This was the first joint operation between the national task force and a local one. It would either set the pattern for what was to come or show the flaws, fostering the same resentments between agencies as in the past.

  Letting out a breath, Ty nodded. “I see what you mean.”

  “There are innocent women and children down there,” Miri Cochran said, her blue eyes serious and worried.

  None of them wanted another Waco and that was what it was looked like it might turn into, without the religious overtones, sort of.

  Most of the people in the building were Chechen exiles. Unable to gain action and assistance against the Russians, they’d come to the U.S. for refuge. Many were Muslim.

  ICE agents had moved into the area on complaints from some of the Russian émigrés who lived nearby that the Chechens harbored illegals. With many Chechen exiles in Europe and other countries under siege or being quietly picked off by hired assassins, it wasn’t an unwarranted accusation. With the advent of a pro-Russian president, even the most moderate dissidents in-country suddenly found themselves under arrest and being tortured while the more active outside were hunted down and shot.

  Many of the exiles were afraid and rightly so. Several had been murdered under questionable circumstances while a few had been assassinated in the street by gunmen on motorcycles. To be sent home was an immediate death sentence. After the unkindness of Russia and their abandonment by the US when its focus shifted to Iraq, they had little trust.

  The raid had therefore triggered off a tense standoff between the ICE agents with their police backup and those inside the buildings.

  Now the Chechens threatened to blow the place up rather than be returned home. They wanted to make a statement, tell the world what was happening to them.

  Ty sympathized, but it couldn’t happen. Not this way.

  “If there are explosives…” Miri said.

  They all knew how it could turn out. Everyone remembered the Towers. This would just be smaller.

  “Let’s take her back,” Ty said, signaling to the chopper pilot.

  Unfortunately, they couldn’t let it go.

  A very real danger existed that those inside would do something stupid and sacrifice themselves, or, worse yet, everyone else. If they did have bomb matériel they could send out suicide bombers as well, now that push had come to shove.

  The blueprints they studied at the team’s on-site headquarters after they landed weren’t encouraging, either.

  Buck looked at Ty as an old memory resurfaced – that of Ty’s rescue and the team that had accomplished it. That had seemed impossible, too. He’d done a little research on the q.t. since then. What he’d read had been fascinating.

  Looking at the buildings, he remembered the woman and what they’d said of her in those reports. No building, no security could keep her out. It was said she walked on walls. She had, Buck had witnessed it.

  Absently, Ty rubbed at the scar on his hand, a leftover of those terrible few days.

  Which didn’t make it any easier for Buck to say what he was about to say. He took a deep breath.

  “I might know someone who might be able to help us with this,” he said, quietly. “Let me put out a few quick feelers, ask a few questions.”

  Ty frowned a little. “Who are you thinking of?”

  Buck took a breath and said, “I’d rather not say, not yet. I don’t even know if they’re available.”

  Or alive.

  There was a strong possibility she wasn’t. Everything he’d read said they sent her and her team into situations most would consider suicide missions. Most of the time she went in alone.

  It was a difficult subject to bring up. He knew Ty still had problems with what had happened in Qatar. Bringing it all up again would hurt and Buck didn’t know how to do what he needed to do without doing that.

  What he could do was put it off as long as possible. And contact the members of their team who knew her. Mitch might know how to find her.

  Both Foster and Cochran looked at him curiously as well.

  “Look, let me check it out, make a few phone calls,” Buck said, to their inquiring glances.

  No point in getting their hopes up if she was dead, and given the kinds of missions she’d gone on, it was likely.

  Chapter Fourteen

  With only a split second to assess, to judge, Nike leaped out into the space between the buildings, caught the ledge of the balcony of the opposite building, then sprang off it to catch the one across the way, used it as a launching pad to leap to the next building.

  It was her against concrete and steel. Elemental. Her body, her reflexes, her sense of herself in space as she twisted, turned to put her feet here, to leap there, to spring to that place. She dove and rolled across the roof of the next building, leaped to her feet and ran for the roof of the next, stretching her body’s limits to the maximum, but not beyond. Knowing her capabilities, she pushed them, but didn’t overreach, maintaining the balance between body and mind.

  Her muscles flexed, stretched, locked, held as she caught the railing of the stairway, shot her feet between the top and middle rungs. Her back arched as she shot through, snagged the railing a level up as her feet pushed off a wall to vault her up and over the railing. Nailing the landing, she raced up the stairs to the roof.

  She needed this, needed the balance of mind, body and spirit Parkour gave her, the pure physicality of free-running and Capoeira. They weren’t all the same. Similar, but different. They all kept her sane, held her demons at bay by exhausting both the mind and the body.

  Sometimes.

  Catching the lip of the next roof, she planted her feet on the wall and sprang from it to the lower balcony of the one from which she’d just jumped, pushed off from that and dropped to the balcony below it so it appeared that she jumped from one to the other across the abyss between the buildings. She leaped into space, tucked her body into a somersault so she hit the small patch of grass with her shoulder and rolled to her feet to leap the poor excuse for artwork abandoned in this desolate section of town.

  She was aware of the helicopter that hovered in the near distance. Very aware.

  The phone call she’d received earlier in the day had been a shock and an unpleasant surprise. It had been an even bigger one to find that Evan Halstead had made it from the doorstep of her tiny apartment. He’d been worried, rightly, that she wouldn’t speak to him. She hadn’t seen him since her last days with the Agency.

  Something inside her had gone still again to see him standing there. Whatever had brought him couldn’t be good, to drag Evan Halstead to her threshold.

  He’d changed, grown thinner, more worn.

  Memories washed through her.

  A cold and distant man when she’d known him, he remained one. Not surprising considering what he did, had done. Somewhat tall, with thinning dark hair and hazel eyes, he wasn’t unattractive, but he’d been marked by who and what he’d become. The changes she saw in him were shocking, his bitterness reflected in the lines in his face. If he’d looked hangdog before, now he could’ve given a basset hound lessons, the bags beneath his eyes were so deep.

  He, they, wanted her back and she knew that. At least Victor did.

  There was more to it than that, though. Far more. They were afraid she might talk, that she might tell what they’d done to her.

  What they didn’t understand was that she wanted that no more than they did. It suited her not to give them that information.

 
; “Ty Connor’s been asking about you, about Nike,” Evan said, bluntly, as he’d stepped into her apartment past her. “There’ve been a number of calls in the last hour.”

  The name went through her like a knife. Nothing he said could have come as more of a shock.

  Ty. At just his name, she could see his face in her mind’s eye instantly. Memories washed through her, stirred emotions she couldn’t afford to have. Couldn’t afford to feel. Something twisted inside her.

  She now knew they hadn’t told Ty she was alive, that like so much else that promise had been empty, the words a lie.

  In the end, it had probably been for the best.

  “What did you tell him?” she asked, her tone even.

  Evan had looked at her flatly. “Nothing. I gave him your curriculum vitae, nothing more.”

  In other words the basics, name, rank and serial number of sorts. Where she’d served. Nothing more. Not her history. Not who she’d once been. What she’d become. Not who she’d killed.

  Or saved.

  She let out a breath.

  That had been a different life, a different person. The person Ty Connor had known all those years ago was dead. What hadn’t died in the jungles of South America had been destroyed by her training and the years since. Should she rake all that up again? The grief and the pain? Why?

  And would it be for him…or for her? By now, he’d surely moved on.

  If he knew what she was, what she’d done…? Her throat went tight.

  Standing in her threadbare apartment, she’d looked at Evan.

  “I don’t want him to know,” she said, closing her eyes against the rush of rage, of a fury so strong it nearly overwhelmed her. They’d lied to her about so much. “I don’t want him to know what I’ve become. You owe me that much.”

  Over the years she’d followed Ty’s career, listened to the talk around the Agency about him.

  Along with everything else it made her question what she did, what they’d programmed her to do. It made her think, reevaluate.

  Then there had been Qatar and the chance to return the favor he’d tried to do for her. Those memories of what had been done to him made her heart twist, the emotion unfamiliar, but welcome. At least she felt something every now and then.

  She also remembered the other orders she’d been issued, the unspecific ones. Plausible deniability if she’d done as they’d hinted.

  Another rush of anger nearly blinded her.

  Until finally the questions inside her head had grown too big and she’d walked away.

  Stung for once, Evan snapped, “What you’ve become?”

  It was clear he still couldn’t accept his part in it.

  Looking at him, she had said, “What you and Santiago made me.”

  “And what’s that?” Evan demanded.

  “I read my file, Evan.”

  That was all she said. It was all she’d needed to say.

  Her statement had given even Evan reason to pause.

  Let him pretend. She knew everything now.

  She knew, too, where Victor Torrance had disappeared. She’d made it her business to know. First to Iraq and the hidden prisons overseas, then to Guantanamo, where he could use his talents to even greater effect than he had on her and the others.

  For two years her days had been a nightmare filled with nothing but training in the skills Victor thought she needed to know, languages, self-defense, weapons. Including those coercive techniques he now applied to others. Even some techniques that couldn’t be – shouldn’t ever be – used in the field. How to survive them for a time and how to apply them to others. He’d conditioned her to them. Some of that training she remembered to this day. Vividly. In nightmares. For her the worst hadn’t been the physical torture that she’d suffered on a daily basis. It had been being shut in that box with no light, no sound, alone in the dark until her mind turned and fed on itself, until terror overwhelmed her, until she’d learned to turn off her emotions, to shut off the fear and everything else with it.

  The only problem was that now she didn’t know now how to turn those emotions back on again.

  All except the rage, the fury that sometimes burned inside her so hot she thought it would consume her.

  Then there was the rest.

  “You lied to me, Evan.”

  In truth they’d manipulated and used her from the beginning. Lying to her had been the least of their crimes.

  Evan’s eyes had flashed, but he’d looked away. “Need to know.”

  Need to know. It was their excuse for everything.

  They’d never told Ty Connor she was alive. She kept coming back to that.

  He’d deserved to know. She knew it weighed on him. She’d seen the reports. There wasn’t much anyone could hide from her anymore, they’d trained her far too well, although they didn’t know that.

  For years she’d secretly hoped Ty would come to see her, if only to see how she was and it had hurt when he hadn’t. Then she’d learned why he hadn’t. And she knew why they hadn’t told him.

  “I don’t want him to know what you did to me,” she’d said, fiercely, suddenly furious, the emotion shocking, nearly frightening in its intensity. “I don’t want him to know. Ever.”

  She knew they wouldn’t mind keeping that little secret for her at all.

  “You’re not coming back then,” he’d said.

  “I haven’t decided,” she’d replied honestly.

  The truth was she was discovering there was no place for her in the real world.

  An ex-assassin wasn’t suited for much and she knew it. She could turn mercenary, but that life wasn’t in her any longer. She’d had enough of killing, of death and dying.

  It seemed that after eight or nine years, she’d come back to where she’d begun all those years before in the hospital, looking for a place to belong.

  “What does he want?” she’d asked, belatedly, as Evan reached for the doorknob to leave.

  For a moment, he’d paused, not looking at her.

  “They’ve set up a new branch of Homeland Security, called the NIO, the National Intelligence Organization. You might have heard. It’s a sort of overall quick strike force, independent of the other agencies, a combination of something like the Brits MI-5 and a national emergency services unit. General Hood is running it.”

  She hadn’t heard. She’d taken herself out of the loop deliberately, not that she’d ever really been a part of it. Evan and Victor Torrance had made certain of that.

  General Hood was a good man, though. She’d heard of him, knew he was well respected nationally and internationally.

  “Ty Connor is running the operations side of it.”

  Her breath had caught. It had felt as if everything inside her had gone still.

  Evan had turned and looked at her. “Could you handle seeing him every day?”

  She didn’t know.

  Not even Victor knew what had passed between her and Ty Connor that night in South America, despite his coercive techniques. Not even those in the Agency. It had been her secret and it remained hers.

  They’d thought she might hate him for leaving her there in the jungle, for not saving her, and she let them believe that. If they’d known the truth, they might have destroyed him with it. Taking advantage of her that way? But he hadn’t. He’d saved her, in a way. That memory had allowed her to remember that even in the midst of darkness there could be light.

  Could she handle seeing him every day? With the emotions that just the thought of seeing him aroused in her?

  She hadn’t known then. She didn’t know now.

  “Because if you can,” Evan had said, his hand on the door knob, his head lowered, “you should take what they offer.”

  The expression on his face was nearly unreadable, but she’d thought it might be shame.

  It was the first kind thing he’d ever said to her, nearly an apology. Oddly enough it made her heart ache.

  “They’re on their way. They’ll be here soo
n.”

  “No.”

  The thought had shaken her. She couldn’t face them, him, here… Not in this place. Not when all she felt was rage. She needed to clear her head first. She needed to put some distance between herself and all these strange emotions, center herself, find calm.

  So she’d come here, to the abandoned buildings of the projects.

  Now she put it all aside to concentrate, to empty herself.

  One slip and the concrete was a long way down. It would solve her problem in one way, but to her it was a cheat. While she flirted with death, might even put herself in harm’s way, take risks and chances, she never cheated. She always danced on the edge honestly, to the best of her ability. If death wanted her, he’d have to reach out and take her himself.

  Emotions were dangerous; they could get you killed, a voice in the back of her mind reminded her - Victor, the manipulator, the psychologist. Another voice in the back of her mind whispered, emotions are useless, they make you weak - Santiago…

  A memory surfaced, of the whip in her hand. She shuddered and pushed those thoughts away, too.

  Lightly, she ran toward the wall of one set of the old and abandoned apartment buildings, leaped to plant her feet on one wall to spring over to the other, a quick step along it to keep her momentum going as she pushed off and leaped for the old brass pipe railing that had once surrounded the opposing balcony. It gave beneath her hand and she dropped, her hands catching the edge of the balcony itself.

  Her heart rate never changed, though death had been inches away.

  Pushing off once again, she leaped into space.

  Chapter Fifteen

  It was daylight. Once more they were in a helicopter, this time flying over D.C. The people in the buildings below them were only mildly hostile and not quite as armed to the teeth as the ones they’d left behind. Those inside the chopper watched in astonishment as the woman below leaped from building to building in apparent defiance of gravity.

  She made it look easy, as if what she did wasn’t an exercise in timing, speed, skill and momentum, a delicate balance where one mistake, one error in judgment, wouldn’t send her tumbling to the pavement below. It was an amazing display of acrobatic and physical skill, demonstrating strength, agility, speed and the reflexes of a cat.