by Cate Clarke
“A handoff,” Diana interjected. “What do you think’s going to happen to Jeremy Messer after that?”
“I’ve got an inkling,” Cameron said, walking next to her.
They walked through the lines of cubicles and through another steel door, leading them back out into the main terminal, bypassing security. Diana’s backpack rustled against her back. Ratanake had left the paperwork in there, all of the lines she needed to gain access again to the resources of the United States Government.
“I can’t believe we were too late,” Diana muttered as they weaved around a family of tourists with taped cardboard boxes of stuff.
“Their schedule is tight,” Cameron replied. “They had this bang-bang…one right after the other.”
“Ratanake and Rex should be here in about an hour,” Diana said. “Park, you can get them over to the right gate?”
Over his shoulder, Park said, “Yeah, that’s me now, I guess, glorified tour guide.”
It was clear that Park didn’t like her. He’d seen the weakness in the motel room and her influence over his partner—everything he said to her had a bit of a bite to it, a hateful snap.
“So they go to Romania,” Diana said. “And we go to Ukraine to try and intercept.”
“One step ahead,” Cameron said. “It makes sense. One thing we know for sure is that the huge mansion they have by the Black Sea—that’s where they do a lot of their processing. She’s gotta end up there at some point. And that borderline-castle is pretty hard to miss.”
“That’s some Navy-grade stuff, Snowman,” Diana replied. “You sure you don’t want to cross over to the SEALs?”
Cameron laughed. “I mean, we work pretty closely with y’all, and that’s not going to stop anytime soon. I’m more comfortable working from home base.”
Diana nodded, keeping her eyes up and alert in case any of Kushkin’s men were hanging around, looking for her. Kennedy was gone. They had shown her the screenshot from the CCTV at the boarding desk, and that had already been two hours too late.
They were racing against it, this bomb that Kushkin had set. Weaving past a stand of newspapers, she looked for Kennedy’s face. They had been too late for that as well. Though Kennedy’s pictures had been circled across the Seattle papers and news, the media hadn’t reached this far south, and Ratanake hated using the public as a resource. There was no Merino here looking out for a local girl. This was an airport with slot machines in the lobby. This was closer to Kushkin’s territory than it was to Diana’s.
They sat down at Gate C19 and waited. Park sat across from them, spreading out his legs across the aisle in the middle of the thin steel chairs.
“So… I know this is kind of a loaded question,” Cameron began after about fifteen minutes of law enforcement small talk. “But could you tell me a little bit about my dad? I mean he was away almost all of my childhood… I didn’t really know him that well.”
“Your dad was a great SEAL,” Diana said. “He went above and beyond to protect everyone that he could.”
Inside the steel basement of the Russian compound—alarm going off, Laird in her ear, Rank screaming. Kushkin was upstairs, waiting for them, but they had to do this first. They had to try and save the hostages. It was three women from Italy, bound in the corner by their arms and feet, Rank trying to get their ties off by sliding them over their bloodied skin. They looked at Diana with wide frightened eyes as she held the cutters over the wires.
“Which one is it, Laird?” Diana hissed.
“Stop moving your head, Weick!” He crackled back, the earpiece rubbing as a drop of sweat pooled behind it. “Stay still.”
She tried to point the helmet cam down at the ticking bomb—two minutes left. Snowman was in the hall, standing watch. Rank had his helmet camera propped up on a screen on Diana’s other side.
“Progress?” Rank asked, moving the woman over to the door.
Diana looked at him.
“Goddammit, Weick!” Laird yelled, and she moved her head to one side to try and get away from the static. “Head down! Let me see the fucking thing!”
Back to the bomb, the wires strung across in jagged crescents of yellow, silver and red. The body of it was coated with yellow insulation that bubbled between the layers of the chemicals inside. It was reconstituted out of something else, maybe an old gun case or a toy chest, covered in plastic wrap and homemade.
“Snowman,” Rank hissed as he left the woman by the door, picking up the screen and flipping it to Diana. He was talking to two guards outside of the door. Snowman lifted his hands as they screamed at him.
The steel door muffled a lot of it, but Diana heard the guards screech, “Where are they?!”
Guns raised pointed directly at Snowman’s forehead as they put him on the ground and placed his arms behind his back. The camera shook, showing only a shot of the tile floor and walls he was facing.
“Shit,” Rank whispered. “Cut the wire, Weick. Now.”
“Yellow one,” Laird said. “Farthest one from you.”
One minute.
“Where are they?” The guards screamed again, louder and piercing through the door. The women whimpered, pressing themselves to the dirt walls and clutching to one another’s bare arms.
“Upstairs!” Snowman screamed back, sacrificing himself.
“Cut the wire!” Rank and Laird said almost at the same time.
A gun went off. On the small screen, Snowman went still. She cut the yellow wire and fell back, the red timer freezing at 0:31 seconds. The wire cutters shook between her fingers as she watched the blood slowly pool out from underneath Snowman on the screen, spreading across the tile in front of his helmet cam. It was just outside the door, and yet it didn’t feel real. Maybe it was because she’d watched it on the small grayscale screen in Rank’s trembling hands, the same device they’d used to watch Netflix on the plane there. Or it was because she couldn’t think about it until they were out, and the mission was complete. Either way, she’d never thought about his death in its entirety until she sat down next to Snowman’s son at the McCarran Airport.
She told him everything she could remember. Cameron nodded along, his lips pushed into a line. There was a brief moment of welled tears at the corner of his eye, but he was quick to straighten up and clear his throat when she was done.
“He was also great at chess, you know?” Diana said after a moment, leaning back in the chair.
“Really?” Cameron asked, laughing a little.
“Yup. Me and him were really the only two that knew the rules well enough to play in training,” she said, thinking back to their late-night games in the rec room, pacing around the room while thinking of her next move. Snowman just sitting there, smiling with a wide grin. Cameron had the same smile, slightly crooked but genuinely happy and contagious.
“I didn’t know that,” Cameron said and pasted on the grin.
“His flight is coming in now,” Park said, standing up and stretching, finally putting his phone away after almost an hour of staring at it and ignoring them. “I’ll go get him and bring him here.”
As he started to walk away, Park gave Diana another look, somewhat of a glare, still not bothering to hide the bad taste in his mouth that she had left. She’d had someone tell her that before—in basic training.
“I don’t know what it is about you, but you leave a bad taste in my mouth.”
There were few things that she remembered from that age, but she remembered that pimply-faced Air Force guy. No matter how much she tried to make people like her—she always did better by just showing them how capable she was instead. Who needed to be liked when you could beat their obstacle course time?
“He really doesn’t like me, hey?” Diana asked once Park was out of earshot.
“Don’t take it personally,” Cameron replied and shrugged. “He doesn’t like anyone.”
Ten minutes later, Park, Rex and Ratanake came hustling down through the terminal. Travelers quickly got out of their way
—the authority of a military uniform almost always kept people at bay. Especially when you were a giant black man like Ratanake. Rex, on the other hand, was wearing a slouchy hoodie and sweatpants— if he did still have his uniform, it probably didn’t fit anymore.
They met at the end of the chairs, the flight just beginning to board and Ukrainians moving around them to get to the desk attendants.
Ratanake immediately handed Diana a bag, and she handed them the paperwork.
“All good?” he asked.
Diana nodded.
Rex pulled her into a surprise hug.
“So glad you’re okay,” he whispered in her ear. Her whole face went hot as she felt the awkward eyes of the FBI agents and Ratanake watching them. From her peripherals, she saw Ratanake roll his eyes.
“No time,” Ratanake muttered, pushing them into the line.
“Wait!” Park said as they began to get swept up in the flow of foot traffic. “Did you get that?”
“Get what?”
“The info from base—the computer.”
Diana stopped moving, the people behind her glaring as she circled out of the line, going back to the grouped agents who were staring at Park’s phone screen.
“This is from the Lefferts?” Ratanake asked, plucking the phone out of his fingers and examining it.
“What is it?” Diana asked, adjusting the heavy bag against her shoulder.
“This is huge,” Cameron said, grinning at Diana.
“Contact information. The Lefferts' contact—Andriy Kushkin,” Ratanake said and flashed the screen at both Rex and Diana. It was an address and a phone number, all listed under a fake name, but linked to the Kushkins’ corporation number. “They traced the IP to here.”
“We go there first,” Diana said.
Ratanake nodded. “You might be able to find some leverage.”
“What do you mean by that?” Rex asked, but Diana was already pulling him away.
“I’m sending it right now,” Ratanake called after her, but they were down the line and at the desk. Diana was finally feeling as if they had an advantage. They knew where Kennedy was going to end up, and now, they had information on Taras's closest bodyguard and family member. Were the tables turning? She didn’t want to get her hopes up, but she couldn’t help but feel a certain optimism as she stepped into the plane with her ex-husband and backup. They just had to survive the next twelve hours trapped in an airplane next to each other.
Chapter 23
Kennedy Tennison-Weick
Bucharest, Romania
Black streams of dye swirled in the sink, sliding down and into the drain around the metal rim. There were streaks of it everywhere. Kennedy did her best to clean up her mess with the cheap toilet paper, but it had been unsurprisingly difficult to dye her hair in an airplane bathroom, even if it was a first-class one.
Looking at herself in the mirror, dye dripping down the sides of her face, Kennedy began to cry. The tears pushed out of her dry eyes as she examined the wet black curls that now covered her head. It looked terrible. It was patchy and uneven, and it made her look older than she was. She used the towel that Jeremy had given her to dry it, pushing out the water and then throwing out the stained towel into the garbage as she’d been instructed.
Putting the hood up and over the new ugly hair, she came out of the bathroom and returned to her seat.
“Just in time,” Jeremy said. “We’re landing in like twenty minutes.”
Kennedy kept her head down and her eyes out the window, damp curls sticking to her forehead.
“You okay?” he asked.
She pulled the hood farther over her face.
“Okay, well,” he sighed as he started digging through the bag by his feet. “You’re not done yet.”
Lipstick, mascara and concealer were all placed on the folding tray in front of her. Kennedy looked down at it, resisting the urge to shove the mascara into Jeremy’s eye. Had he not once been her friend? Now not only was he dragging her overseas to hand her over to some terrible guys, but he was getting her to change everything about herself.
“Come on, Kennedy,” Jeremy whispered. “Just put it on or we’re really going to get into trouble when we land.”
He passed her a small hand mirror, opening up her clenched fist with ease and shoving it into her palm. Though Kennedy had watched quite a few YouTube and Instagram videos of makeup looks, she had done very little on herself. There were some girls at her school that already wore it every day, but every time she put it on she ended up not recognizing herself. But, she guessed, that was the point.
Shoving the mascara over her eyelashes and painting her face with the concealer, Kennedy used her fingers for the whole thing, still keeping her hood up and her eyes away from Jeremy. The lipstick was dark red and when she put it over her lips, she missed her natural lines and ended up getting some all over her cheeks.
She cried again.
Defeated. Trapped. No choice.
With a light touch, Jeremy turned her face toward him by tucking his finger under her chin. He took the lipstick out of her hands and licked his thumb so he could clear away the mistakes she’d made. He was gentle but she still tried to pull away. Holding her firm between his thumb and his index finger, he used his other hand to glide the lipstick along her mouth—there was a slight tremble in both of his hands.
“There,” he whispered and pulled away. In one last gesture, he pulled the hood off her head, letting the black curls fall around her shoulders.
“You look…” He paused, looking her over. “Beautiful.”
They both pulled away from each other, staring. Kennedy pulled at her curls, trying to straighten them as he’d said. She looked again in the hand mirror. She looked older. The makeup was smeared in just the right places, but she had a hard time seeing what Jeremy saw.
As the flight attendant passed, she said, “Please put up your tray tables. We’re about to land.”
They clicked their trays into place, leaned back in their seats, and Kennedy pocketed the mirror in the hoodie.
There were two men in uniforms, checking the faces of all the women that were entering the Romanian airport. Jeremy held tight to Kennedy’s arm as they approached, stepping forward in the line. To flex Kushkin’s power again, Jeremy gave her a second look at the drones that were keeping an eye on her house, the explosives ready to go at any moment she decided to not go along with what they said. Jeremy had brushed her hair in front of her face, somehow pinning it into makeshift bangs as they’d made their descent.
The soldiers weren’t even checking the woman carefully—it was two glances and then sent through. Kennedy knew there was no hope. She’d already given up. But things had to get worse. A young woman about four people ahead of them was pulled aside. They yanked her away from the line, peeling her away from her mother as they compared Kennedy’s photo to her face.
They confirmed it was her.
Curly brown hair. Wide brown eyes. Round face and about the right age.
The mother ran after them, and one of the soldiers turned to arrest her.
“We need to do something!” Kennedy hissed in Jeremy’s ear.
“Play it cool,” he replied. With the soldiers filtering off in the other direction, arguing with the mother in Romanian, the line from the plane moved forwards and into the terminal. His grip tight around Kennedy’s bicep, Jeremy hurled them to the front, weaving through the chairs and other travelers to get them as far away from the soldiers as possible. Kennedy looked over her shoulder.
The soldiers were screaming in the crying girl’s face, yelling in English, but they were drowned out by the business of the airport. The mother was pounding her feet against the airport carpet. Nobody came to help. And in moments, they were gone.
Kennedy and Jeremy were out of the airport and shoved into a van by two large women. There were two other girls in the back of the van, huddled together, hands clutched around each other’s wrists. Their faces were streaked with dirt
and tears, a dewy shine on their skin.
“Where are we going?” Kennedy asked, leaning forward in her seat. One of the women in the passenger seat punched her in the face.
Jeremy gasped. Kennedy’s nose trickled blood as the pain radiated across her sinuses and into her mouth.
“Sit down and shut up,” the woman said, retreating her fist back to her lap. Jeremy tried to dab at the blood on Kennedy’s upper lip with his sleeve, but she pushed him away with both hands. In one large swipe, she wiped the blood and the lipstick onto the sleeve of Bobby Lefferts’ hoodie, leaving a dark red streak that would stain. It would serve as a reminder for Kennedy that she was no longer on American soil, and her chances for escape were narrowing by the minute.
The hand mirror was still in her pocket. She could smash it and use the glass for blades or as a reflection to give someone a signal—
Her thoughts were interrupted when one of the girls in the back began to vomit.
The woman driving groaned and, Kennedy assumed, swore in a harsh unknown language. They all began to argue, yelling back and forth with Kennedy and Jeremy between them, squirming in their seats.
They pulled over into a parking lot.
At first, Kennedy thought it was because of the vomiting and the smell that was seeping through the van. But instead, she was shoved out of the van and into another one. Just Kennedy. The two girls in ripped clothing were standing next to Jeremy and the two tall women in high boots, looking down at them with sneers across their faces, whispering to each other.
The driver of the new van got out. It was a man in a long navy coat, a thick beard of gray over his collar, and dirty curls pushed out of his deeply creased forehead. Without even a glance at the women, he pulled a silenced pistol out of the pocket and shot Jeremy once in the head.
Kennedy screamed from inside the van.
Jeremy fell to the ground. Dead.
The man got back into the van and started the ignition, not looking back at the blood soaking the pavement, the women forcing the girls back into the backseat or at Kennedy, eyes stuck open in fear, glued to the stain she’d made on her sweatshirt.
