“I get that the whole thing sucks,” she said.
“It really does. But it’s over now.”
“It is?”
“Well, not until we get you on board, and into the US.”
“Yeah,” she said. “Hopefully that’s it. You know, I’m taking a huge risk coming back there. I’ll find out right away if I get to live or not. If an assassin doesn’t make an attempt in the first week, then I should be good.”
“You know Jackson has a lot of pull in Washington, right?” Tucker said.
Macy paused for a moment. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Well, it could mean that . . . um . . .” He didn’t want to say it. Jackson would probably kill him for even thinking he was some kind of hero, but the guy had worked miracles more than once before. Was it possible he could do it again?
Jasper’s voice crackled over the radio. “You guys ready? Look alive back there.”
Tucker responded with a ten four, and then walked to his position behind the EMP cannon, taking a seat behind the tripod.
“Have you ever done this before?” Macy asked him.
Tucker didn’t need her to be specific. In the past few days, almost everything he did, especially getting intimate with Macy, were first times. The EMP cannon was no different.
“Flying by the seat of my pants,” he said. “I told you it’ll be fun.”
The jostling that resulted from going through another pothole almost jarred the headset off his head. Tucker fixed it over his ears and then asked Macy if she was okay.
“I’m fine, but, what the hell do they expect me to do back here?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, what’s my job?”
Tucker laughed. “I don’t know. Maybe just sit there and look pretty?”
“Sure. Sitting on the floor of some dirty truck, in pitch dark.”
“It’s got to be better than some other places you’ve been.”
“That’s not saying much.”
“And it’s definitely with better company,” Tucker joked, trying to edge closer and closer to normalcy with her. Fake it till you make it.
But Macy just responded with a simple “Yep.”
That was fine. Crawl before you walk. A “yep” was better than most things she could have said.
“Do you want a turn, maybe?”
“Excuse me?”
“At the gun here. The EMP cannon. It’s not as scary as it sounds. If you miss, you just disable a car. You wouldn’t necessarily kill anyone.”
“Are you sure about that?” she said.
He wasn’t sure.
“Won’t the steering wheel seize up? And the brakes . . . what happens with the brakes?”
Tucker hadn’t really thought about it. When he was given his quick run-down about the cannon, Jasper and Tansy just assumed that he was a good-enough shot. And so the topic of collateral damage had been skipped over. But now that Macy mentioned it, the idea of collateral damage in the form of fiery car wrecks began lingering in the back of Tucker’s mind while he swept the cannon’s sights across the road.
He would be the one to make the call, to decide if any vehicle looked menacing enough. If he felt threatened, a simple curl of his finger would end up completely disabling a car—or anything with electronics. He would just have to bear down and concentrate. Use his instincts.
Focus and concentration . . . In that case, whose bright idea was it to have him riding with Macy?
“You’re going quiet on me,” Macy said. “I didn’t mean to plant any doubts in you.”
In the last few hours, she’d definitely planted more than a few doubts in Tucker’s increasingly fragile state of mind. But he said, “No,” anyway, trying to force his concentration to the road behind the truck, the scenery flying backward, the pack of vehicles behind. Which one would come barreling through traffic? Which one was full of terrorists?
“Tucker,” Tansy’s voice came through the radio. “Tucker, do you copy?”
He fixed his headset and said, “Go ahead.”
“I’m just curious about something.”
“Go ahead.”
“Well, I’m starring at the battery pack reading from up here . . .”
“Yeah?”
“Is the fucking thing even turned on?”
At first the words didn’t make sense. The idea that he’d forgotten to power up the EMP weapon. “Ummm,” he mumbled, his brain misfiring as his hands checked in the dark for the EMP’s power switch.
“You don’t, do you?” Tansy muttered.
Tucker flicked the switch. “I do now.”
His radio remained silent, but over the sound of the EMP devices charging on and humming, and over the drone of outside road noise, Tucker almost swore he could hear Jasper’s cursing from the truck’s cab.
“Jesus,” Macy said. “Maybe I should take over.”
“I can’t believe I did that,” Tucker said. God, he had to get his head on straight. Now. No matter what sharing the back of a dark, closed-in truck compartment with Macy was doing to him. Hell, sharing any small, private space with her right now sent his mind reeling with both fear and possibilities. But he couldn’t let it affect this. It wasn’t just their lives at stake right now.
“Okay,” he said, turning to her. “We need to hash it out, for real. No more of this passive-aggressive shit. You got me? So have it out. Let’s hear it. You hate me? You think I suck? Whatever, let’s just get it over with, because neither of us is going to make it anywhere if we keep this up.”
She didn’t say anything,
“So I helped them connect to your phone,” Tucker said. “I’m sorry, I’ll always be sorry I had to do that, but I had to do it. We’ll get you back to the US and that’s all we need in return—to know you were on our side.”
Macy was saying something, but he couldn’t hear. His eyes were trained on a van speeding up through the traffic, swerving around cars, racing to catch up to their speeding truck and the uranium transport in front.
“Hold on,” he told Macy.
“Hold on!?”
He radioed to Jasper, “We might have a bogey on our six.”
“Roger,” replied Jasper. “You know what to do.”
He did. Tucker waited until the vehicle got dangerously close, until he could see through inside to identify the drivers, so he could be dead certain before pulling the trigger. Through his concentrated glare, he could hear Macy’s voice again, worming through his mind like his head was full of mud. “Hold on,” he told her.
27
Macy
“I’m done.”
“What?” Tucker twitched, but didn’t take his eyes off the road.
“I had my say. I vented.”
From Tucker’s silence, she knew he’d missed absolutely every word she’d uttered, instead focusing on whatever was happening with the traffic behind the truck. It must have been pretty important. But so were her fucking feelings.
Watching the concentration of Tucker’s stony gaze, Macy began rationalizing. Maybe her feelings could wait. She felt a little better when he finally breathed a sigh of relief, and then radioed the same sentiment to Jasper. Another sigh before his attention and his still stony gaze concentrated on her. It was just the two of them again.
“So, you were saying . . .”
“It’s nothing.” She settled back against the hard metal wall of the truck, careful to keep her head from banging into it at every bump in the road. Tucker stood near the door behind the EMP tripod, the light glowing through the wisps of his hair like a halo. An angel, in any other circumstance.
Maybe a few hours ago, before she caught him stealing her data, she could have still seen him that way. Maybe in the future she could, too, see him reverting back again into her angelic savior. In every other action but the hack, he had been her angel. He had been her rescuer.
She wasn’t ready to admit it yet, but still, she had a sneaking suspicion that the guy maybe deserved a b
reak.
“Nothing,” she said again, when asked again for an elaboration. She really didn’t want to talk anymore. The action had seemed to die down, and they were well on their way to the port town of Durban. Soon she’d be back in the light, sunlight, its harsh glare and its heat. Soon she’d be back in the world of the living, out of the shadows of Africa—and of the back of a truck.
After Tucker returned to surveillance mode, Macy pulled her phone from her pocket. She winced as she scrolled through her personal text files. It was unsettling—and at the same time, mildly interesting—thinking about Tansy and whoever else rummaging through her files. What did they think of her now, and what had they managed to piece together from the evidence?
Which wasn’t really much.
What did they expect to find, anyway?
Had she been some agent for the South African’s incoming administration, a well-concealed mole with nefarious plans, and would she really be so dumb as to store incriminating communications and evidence on her phone?
Her phone, instead, carried another type of incriminating evidence. A fucking memoir. It began as a diary. Therapy. An outlet for all the stress and toxic secrets she’d kept bottled up. Early on, before she’d given up practically all hope, Macy had dreamed of one day being free again. And by then, she might just have a pretty interesting story to share.
The whole idea seemed laughable now.
She scrolled through the entries, slowing near the section about St. Louis. It was some of the latest work. In real life, she and Tucker at least, seemed to have moved well away room it. But in her mind there were lingering ghosts.
She lingered there now, through her phone, from a dark truck. She read some of her rough work, one particularly long and tortuous passage about Tucker. Occasionally she would look up at him, that glowing angel of hers, and then back down to the glow of her phone where she described, in painful detail, just how she’d gone about destroying that angel. She read her descriptions of how she’d done it, a destruction she’d carried out on the behalf of a crooked police chief, Bill Gormley. Even at the time, in the thick of it, she’d had a hunch that it would be the start of her own destruction, too. Yet she went ahead anyway with the lying and the obstructing. She did it for her career, to save her own ass. By the time she realized what a monumental fuckup the whole situation was, she was already in too deep. That’s what she’d told herself at the time, anyway. Would Tucker ever understand and accept that?
She’d also ruined Tucker’s career, part of her doing it as punishment to him for rejecting her. He’d never accept that one. And perhaps never forgive, either. She wouldn’t, either.
Macy was more trusting back then, naturally. She even trusted a crooked scoundrel, Chief Gormley, trusting him with not only her career, but her life. She didn’t know that her very soul was in the mix, too. Favors after favors, blind eye after blind eye, it was a slow descent into the swamp of corruption. And before she knew it, Macy had found herself wading knee deep in it. The only way out was for her to turn on Tucker. That was the offer Gormley made to her. An offer that she could have only accepted with the aid of anger and emotional turmoil.
She’d suspected that Tucker knew about all this. Certainly, he knew that he’d been done wrong. But perhaps not the details of why. It was nice of him not to ever ask. It came as no surprise that he didn’t want to talk about St. Louis almost as much as she.
Macy was well aware of the guilt. It was, at times, a physical sensation. A sick feeling deep in her bones that seemed to radiate stronger with every minute spent with Tucker. A frustration, too, somehow turning it around against Tucker in some perverted way. But it didn’t have to be like that.
She slid the phone back in her pocket, blinking to adjust her eyes back to the darkness. She found his shape again. “You want me to take over?”
“What?”
“Are you tired? Tired of standing there like that?”
“I’m okay,” he said, his eyes still on the road. “Thanks.”
“Just let me know. I’m sure I could probably handle it. Just point and shoot, right?”
“I’m no expert, but yeah. Something like that. It’s probably pretty intuitive for you.”
“I’m sure I can handle it.”
Their conversation dropped off, and a minute later Macy started feeling tired again. Road noise, the droning of the tires, and the vibration had been lulling her into sleep. She caught herself nodding off a little, her head suddenly feeling heavy, her neck going limp. Trying to wake up, she quickly forced her head back, slamming it against the truck half by mistake, and half intentionally to knock the sleepiness away.
Tucker must have heard it, because his voice wafted through the darkness. “Macy?”
“Yeah?” She waited him for to say something, but he stayed quiet after that. She decided to go ahead: “So how long is the trip supposed to be?”
“We’ll get to the port in half an hour, if everything goes smoothly.”
“Do you think it will?”
“I do,” he said. “If not, I think we would have already known about it by now.”
“So, the traffic looks good to you out there? No one seems suspicious, like a Humvee plowing cars aside to get to us?”
Tucker stayed quiet for a moment, and then said, “Want to come take a look?”
She considered it, ultimately deciding against staring at the front bumpers of hundreds of cars in the midday rush along the outskirts of Johannesburg. “No, I’m good.” She listened again to the droning sound of the road, her body relaxing with it.
“Actually,” Tucker said. “I was just trying to trick you. To get you to come and take over. Do you mind?”
“Um . . . no?”
Tucker had his hand behind his back, massaging up his shoulder. “I’m getting a little sore from hunching over like this.”
Macy got up off the wooden floor and moved toward the light. “You should have said something.”
“I just did.” He moved out of the way and said, “Okay, it’s pretty simple. You just look around for a vehicle plowing through cars and trying to get to us, just like you said. If you can do that, I’ll man the radio.”
She took up his spot behind the EMP cannon, looking through the sights and out of the cutout into the blinding light of day. A panorama of traffic lay behind them, signage and burnt grass, all the infrastructure speeding away. Back at the cannon, she felt even more lost. “So, just . . .” Her breath stopped short when she felt his hand on hers, guiding her to where to hold the cannon.
“Yeah,” he said calmly, “Just like that.”
She stood, holding the cannon just like he’d instructed. “Just like this, huh?” She could almost feel his energy behind her, his breath, again close to hers in the dark. When she turned to face him, he was completely lit up, the whites of his eyes gleaming, the white of teeth from his smile. Her heart raced, and Macy quickly turned around to face the roadway, to keep a watch on any suspicious vehicles. To focus on her job.
Fucking focus.
“Got it?” he said.
“Yeah. Got it.”
28
Macy
She hadn’t been on a ship in years. And never one this big. Macy looked up at the huge vessel, its tall hull taking up half the horizon. Multiple cranes on both sides hoisted multicolored shipping containers aboard, stacking them neatly in place with loud, echoing booms. When hoisted by cranes, the containers looked light, like toys, Legos, fitting all neatly together. But these toys weighed thousands of tons—250 of them being uranium.
She stood next to Tansy, her new hacker friend, as they both watched their container lift up and hang over the ocean. For a moment, she could almost feel his nervousness.
“If that falls . . .” Tansy said, trailing off.
But he didn’t need to finish the sentence. Macy knew exactly how horrible it would be if something happened to that container.
She turned to see the other men, who were once busy with the
ir own mundane tasks, drop everything to watch that single container hoist over the air. Some used tense whispers, someone with a South-African accent crying, “Oh, bloody hell . . .”
Once the container came down and locked into place, there was an audible sigh of relief from their small crowd. She had felt it too, her shoulders finally lowering, her breathing returning to normal. Now it was just excitement she felt, the possibility of finally returning home.
“Is that it for the uranium?” Macy asked Tansy.
“No,” he said. “There’s a few more cubes, including your accommodations.”
“My what?”
“Your bedroom,” he said, pointing to one of the hoisted shipping containers. “There it goes now. Double bed, no cable, no TV. Wireless if it can pass through the metal.”
“Very funny.”
“I have to warn you, though. There is some truth to that. You staying in a container. When we get to the port in the US, that’s where you’ll be, to hide from inspection. You knew that, right?”
No one had told her she would be actually staying in one of the containers. They had joked about it with her, many times, so many that it had become a little grating to hear. But never did she really think . . .
“Is that a problem?” Tansy asked, likely seeing the annoyance on her face.
“No problem at all,” she said, forcing out a smile.
He smiled in reply and then walked back to the group, leaving her to wonder about her actual accommodations. There wouldn’t be many on a ship designed for cargo and a few deck hands. Yesterday it was something to be excited about, the thought of sharing private, tight living quarters with Tucker. It was an idea that made her feel almost nervous. The good kind of nervous that only Tucker could provide. Now, the sensation was different, and not at all pleasant.
She found his face in the crowd, watching how the expressions flowed across that irritatingly handsome face of his, the ideas he was conveying to his men. All business. All concentration. He and the rest of the DARC Ops men were in charge on this voyage, and she liked watching him work. She still liked watching him, especially here on a sunny dock with the ocean breeze playing through his hair. But she was also careful to look away when he noticed her gaze.
Dark Lies (DARC Ops Book 6) Page 16
