Close Quarters

by Lucy Monroe

  The knowledge that Ben and the others were not what they appeared only added to the maelstrom ripping apart her insides. If she had discovered their duplicity in other circumstances, she probably would have understood it, but right now, it just felt like one more nail in the coffin of her belief in honor and integrity.

  On top of it all was the certainty that if what Roman said was true, then the organization she had believed in and given her dedication to for almost four years had used her every bit as heartlessly as Roman.

  Someone had put that stolen data on her chip. Who else could have done it but someone working for Sympa-Med?

  Tanya had been used with no regard to her safety, her feelings or her hopes, dreams and beliefs. She had unwittingly betrayed her country and that sat heavily on her. She would never have done so willingly and, even though she had not known anything about it, she still felt a terrible guilt at her part in the espionage.

  How incredibly unfortunate that the very day her mother told Tanya she was proud of her choices was the same day Tanya seriously considered the possibility that her parents and Quinton had been right. There was something wrong with her. There had to be for her to have been the one both the spies and Roman chose to use.

  Another devastating and chilling thought flashed through Tanya’s mind. Was Fleur in on it? No, she couldn’t be. Fleur wasn’t just Tanya’s boss, the doctor was her best friend. The only friend she really counted as such since coming to work for Sympa-Med. Since Tanya did most of her work with the interns, the people she saw on a daily basis changed every few months, which made building lasting friendships tough. So, there had been Fleur. The Tutsi doctor simply could not be in on the espionage. Tanya could not handle it.

  Not with everything else.

  Fleur had been as adamant as headquarters that Tanya follow the dictated schedule for the traveling clinic.

  Tanya might not know all the latest computer gizmos, but she was smart enough to figure out that if she had some super-secret military technology on her security chip, it had gotten there while she was en route for the traveling clinic. And whoever was supposed to get it off had been in Tikikima. So, the schedule was important and Fleur made sure it got followed. But did she do that because it was her job as administrator, or did she have darker reasons behind her insistence that Tanya not break protocol?

  No matter what her heart told her to be true, Tanya couldn’t afford to trust it. Trusting had gotten her into a world of agony and she didn’t see a short path out.

  “Damn it, Tanya, you cannot hide in there all day. We need to talk,” Roman demanded through the door.

  She didn’t want to talk. She didn’t want to see him. She didn’t want to deal with the thoughts swirling through her brain and tormenting her heart.

  Muffled voices sounded on the other side of the door. Fleur’s unmistakable tones were raised in anger. Tanya had never heard the other woman raise her voice. She was doing it now though, yelling at Roman so loudly Tanya could make out some of the words and they weren’t pretty.

  That, more than anything, had her standing and turning to face the door.

  A lighter knock sounded. “Tanna, dear one, please let me in. I am worried about you.”

  Was that the voice of a woman who would sell out her friend’s safety? Tanya didn’t think so, but then if anyone had asked her if Roman was thinking about anything but mind-blowing pleasure when they made love…had sex earlier, she would have said no then too.

  “Please, Tanya, unlock the door.” Fleur’s voice was filled with tears and worry, not the voice of a betrayer.

  No matter what others had done, Tanya refused to doubt her friend without better proof.

  The sound of Roman’s saying something harsh was muffled by the door, but she thought she could guess pretty accurately what it was. He’d force his way in, just like he’d taken what he wanted from her. Oh, not her body—she’d offered that. The information on the chip. All he’d had to do was ask, but he’d chosen to take instead. Her thoughts kept circling back to that reality over and over again.

  At least the first time had been about their mutual passion. She tried to comfort herself, only to have a flashback of the moment he had paused over the scar on her back. He’d had sex with her to look for the chip. But if he’d known it was there, why not just ask to see it? So much of this did not make sense to her, but then she was looking at it from the perspective of someone who thought hurting other people should be avoided.

  Regardless, there were still too many holes in her knowledge of what was going on. Only one thing was certain. Roman Chernichenko was indeed an asshole.

  And she might be a fool, but she wasn’t fragile. She wasn’t weak.

  She rinsed out her mouth and then washed her face, patting it dry as she unlocked the door.

  It slowly pushed forward. Fleur was coming in then. Not Roman. Relief bolstered Tanya’s intention to be strong.

  She stood resolute, determined to reclaim some measure of her dignity. Fleur came into the small washroom and shut the door firmly behind her.

  The Tutsi woman’s eyes swirled with a maelstrom of emotion. Anger, compassion, fear, determination and uncertainty all flickered in her espresso-brown gaze. She didn’t say anything, but simply put her arms out. And Tanya’s determination to stand firm and stand alone crumbled. Just like that.

  She walked into the third hug in her relationship with the other woman, all of them in one day.

  Fleur held her tight. “I will not abandon you.”

  That was her friend, honest even in compassion. She did not promise everything would be okay. She did not assure Tanya no one else would hurt her. Fleur made the one promise she could make: not to abandon Tanya.

  “I don’t want to cry anymore,” Tanya said, unable to give voice to any of the other thoughts or feelings beating at her heart and mind.

  “Then don’t.”

  Tanya laughed, a short cracked sound that held not one ounce of joy, but conveyed her dark amusement at her friend’s advice. She took a deep breath and let it out. “Okay, I won’t.”

  Fleur let go and stepped back. “We cannot change what others do to us, but we can control our reaction to those events.”

  “Can we?”

  “Yes.”

  If anyone else had told her that, Tanya would have called her a liar, but Fleur had survived unspeakable pain.

  Tanya nodded. “I’m not giving in.”

  “That is right.”

  “I have to talk to him.”

  “Yes, you do. You deserve as much understanding of this unacceptable situation as you can get.”

  “Will it help?”

  “Alleviate the pain?” Fleur asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Did it help you? To understand what drove the massacre?”

  “To know the reasons and to understand them are not the same thing, but to answer your question, no, it made it worse. To know so much cruel evil existed in the world in the guise of political maneuvering only destroyed more of my illusions regarding the humane nature of man.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Fleur nodded her acknowledgment of the words, then gave Tanya an ultra-serious look. “We cannot change the past, but we need not let others control our present.”

  Again, if those words had been spoken by someone else, Tanya would not have given them much credence. It certainly felt as though others were controlling her present. Fleur’s eyes acknowledged that reality while demanding that Tanya still accept the higher truth of her statement.

  “Right.” She didn’t know how she would take back control of her life, but somehow, she would.

  “Right.”

  They gave each other mirroring looks of determination. If Tanya’s was tinged with recent pain and Fleur’s was touched by her past, neither commented on it.

  Roman wasn’t alone when the women came out of the bathroom. She couldn’t help wondering what the interns or security personnel would ma
ke of the congregation of soldiers in the hallway, but it looked like right now that they still had the main medical hut to themselves.

  The wellness clinic was being held in an outdoor tent just as it would have been on the road. It wasn’t bad training for the interns, despite the no-travel order from Sympa-Med.

  The order took on more sinister connotations that added to the tension inside her as she surveyed the soldiers congregated around the washroom door.

  All the men who had been in the office were there, as well as Kadin. His face was set in lines of unhidden fury and the looks he kept giving Roman were laced with censure.

  She approached him. “Will you tell me the truth?”

  Kadin jerked, as if surprised she’d talk to him. “Yes.”

  She nodded. She looked at the rest of them. “I’m going to the office with Kadin.”

  He followed her without a word.

  Roman gave orders for two of the others to secure the premises, whatever the heck that meant. He, Ben and Fleur followed Tanya and Kadin into the office.

  Tanya sat at her desk. Fleur dragged her chair over to sit beside her, giving visual proof of their solidarity. Ben leaned against the side of Fleur’s desk closest to Tanya’s, but Kadin stood in front of Tanya’s desk in the classic military at-ease pose. Roman leaned against the wall beside her desk, his gaze fixed on her.

  Tanya ignored the bastard and turned to Fleur. “How is the Marine private doing?”

  Fleur’s eyes widened. “You are worried about him? Of course you are. I will go check on him. Wait to ask your questions until I return?”

  Tanya nodded and then did just that. Fleur was only gone a few minutes, but her expression showed no worry for the patient when she returned to the office. “He’s doing well. Tommy is watching over him quite closely.”

  “You don’t think we should call an intern in?”

  “Not until this conversation has run its course,” Fleur said.

  “Okay.” Tanya met Kadin’s gaze. “Why are you in Zimbabwe?”

  One of his eyes twitched, indicating he had expected her questions to start somewhere else. Too bad. She wanted to understand what was happening and if that required asking what size and style underwear he wore, she’d ask it.

  “We were sent to eliminate an information leak.”

  “‘Information leak’? What does that mean?”

  “Someone has been taking advantage of the U.S. military presence in Africa, culling information and dispersing it for profit,” Ben said from his spot at Fleur’s desk. “It’s one of the unfortunate side effects of trading military training for access to natural resources.”

  “And these information thieves just now decided to use my security chip to transport the data?”

  “No.” Ben looked uncomfortable.

  Tanya asked Kadin, “What does he mean, no?”

  “Your movements have been matched with the information leakage for quite some time.”

  “I see.” What weren’t they saying? The weight of something no one wanted to say sat heavily in the air around them. What could they consider worse than what had already been revealed?

  “You believed Tanya was the leak,” Fleur said, her voice filled with angry disbelief.

  “The Army believes she’s the leak,” Kadin corrected. “We thought the evidence was too circumstantial.”

  “Did you?” But this time her question wasn’t directed at Kadin. She was looking at Roman when she spoke and she didn’t miss the tightening of his jaw.

  “You didn’t,” she said, meaning Roman. “You came here to…what? Get my chip one way or another?”

  But that didn’t make sense either. An important piece of the puzzle was still missing. She just didn’t know what it was, or what it was supposed to look like so she could find it.

  “We didn’t know about the chip,” Kadin offered.

  “So, you thought I was carrying the information some other way.” That made more sense, especially if someone had believed she was the information leak. “That’s why you stopped the strip search. You didn’t want it falling in the wrong hands.”

  Again she’d directed her words at Roman, and his very lack of expression confirmed her suspicions.

  Another lead rock dropped to the bottom of her still queasy stomach. “Last night was you conducting your own strip search.”

  Fleur’s gasp of anger fell into the unnatural quiet that came over the room. She swiveled to face Ben. “Did you know about this?”

  “Not that, no.”

  Fleur glared, but Tanya didn’t think her friend’s hopes for the future were in serious danger, not with the way Ben was looking at the doctor. As if he would say whatever needed saying, promise whatever needed promising, in order to keep the Tutsi woman’s good opinion.

  At least someone would find some happiness out of all this. Regardless of her own pain and still reeling psyche, a shard of happiness for her friend, pierced Tanya’s soul.

  “Okay, so you came here to find whatever is on my chip.”

  “Not exactly,” Kadin said.

  “What then?”

  “They came to eliminate the information leak,” Fleur said in a furious tone, laced with just enough hesitation to imply she’d just worked it all out. “They came to kill you, Tanya.”

  Well, wasn’t that just one more lollipop in the suck that was becoming her life? Tanya didn’t doubt Fleur’s deduction for a single second. It made more sense than any other scenario she had tried to work out.

  She looked at Roman, the shattered pieces of her heart ground into dust by this new revelation. Not that she would let it show.

  On pure principle, she was determined to keep the pain from her expression. “No wonder you didn’t tell Beau you were going to be seeing me. It could put a real cramp in family holidays afterward to have him know you’d assassinated his only sibling.”

  Roman didn’t say anything; she hadn’t really expected him to.

  “So, something made you decide to look further than me for the information,” she said to Kadin, doing her best to pretend Roman had dropped off the face of the earth.

  “Nothing added up. You didn’t fit the profile, and for us, taking orders from idiot brass just goes against the grain.”

  In other circumstances, she would have smiled at his attitude. “Do you know who put the information on my security chip?”

  “We have our suspicions.”

  “I’m sure you do,” Fleur said dryly.

  “Who?” Tanya asked.

  Kadin’s gaze skated to his superior and then back to Tanya. “Who else knows about the chip?”

  “Sympa-Med, the supplier of the chips, the doctor who inserted it, but probably not many others. We aren’t supposed to tell anyone. So, if we’re kidnapped for human trafficking, the bad guys don’t know to cut the chip out.” She saw what he was driving at though. The list wasn’t very long.

  “Sympa-Med controls your travel itinerary,” Fleur said.

  Tanya nodded, her muscles stiff from holding her emotions in check. “They’re very controlling about it too.”

  “So, you think they are involved?” Ben asked.

  Fleur and Tanya both shrugged, but Fleur was the one who spoke. “It would seem the most obvious conclusion, but the situation with Tanya acts as a warning against accepting the obvious without investigating further.”

  Ben nodded. “I agree.” The look he gave Roman said he wasn’t impressed with the initial conclusions drawn by the Army.

  Kadin asked, “Who else could it be?”

  “Tanya already told you,” Ben replied before she could. “Whoever supplies the chips to Sympa-Med, or the doctor who inserts them.”

  “Is it always the same doctor?” Roman asked.

  Tanya ignored him.

  But Fleur chose to answer. “Yes. His clinic is in Lyon, near Sympa-Med’s headquarters. He does all the physicals for new recruits as well before they are assigned to one of Sympa-Med’s field offices.”


  “You don’t happen to know the name of the supplier for the chips, do you?” Ben asked.

  “No,” Fleur said. “But the representatives from the head office should be here any day. We can get that information from them.”

  “What if they’re coming to retrieve the information themselves?”

  “There’s no reason to believe the entire Sympa-Med board is in on the espionage,” Ben said.

  Fleur added, “It could be just one person working for Sympa-Med, or one board member.”

  Tanya was glad Fleur was carrying the conversation for both of them because she was too busy trying to rein in the agony of learning Roman had come to Africa to kill her. This was one of those days that made her wish do-overs were possible.

  “It would have to be someone fairly high up to influence Tanya’s traveling itinerary,” Ben replied.

  “What is on the chip in my body?” Tanya asked Kadin, no longer interested in speculation about who was using her since they had no way of knowing the person’s identity for sure. And the guessing just added to her pain.

  Kadin sent Roman another one of those “Can I tell her?” looks. Whatever he saw in the other man’s face must have given the go ahead because he said, “A high-level Army JCAT.”

  “What’s a JCAT?” she asked, not caring if she sounded stupid.

  “Military training software.”

  “Highly effective, complex, military-training software that the government paid millions to develop, but the money isn’t nearly as important as not allowing our military strategies to get into the wrong hands,” Ben further clarified.

  That awful sense of guilt she’d been feeling earlier came back, but Tanya tried to ignore it, reminding herself that she had not done anything. It had all been done to her.

  Her conscience wouldn’t be fully appeased though. She had been used to betray her country and she wasn’t sure she was ever going to fully come to terms with that.

  “If Roman”—the rat bastard—“has already downloaded the software, why do you have to remove the chip?” she asked, trying to focus on the issue at hand, not unearned guilt she couldn’t do anything about.

  “The hand-held scanner is probably a lot less sophisticated than what they usually use. It has no erase function from what Neil could tell,” Kadin replied.