by Cindy Dees
The man’s eyes lit with recognition as he spied the chunky ring and its dark green central stone.
Dammit.
“Here she is!” he called out to the others in Farsi.
What? These men were here for her? How on earth did they know who she was? Nobody knew about the Medusa Project. It had been resurrected from ashes less than a year ago, for crying out loud.
Everyone had been led to believe the program was defunct and the military had abandoned the idea of training and equipping a team of female Special Forces operatives after the second Medusa team was wiped out in a mission gone terribly wrong.
The other two masked men grabbed her by her arms and hauled her upright. Adrenaline roared through her body, and it took all the discipline she had not to lash out and fight for her life against these men. She was hopelessly outgunned, and three on one was not the kind of odds she wanted to take into a fistfight.
She was a good hand-to-hand fighter, but she wasn’t invincible. Martial artists won against three attackers only in the movies. Carefully choreographed and scripted movies. Not real life. Not in an elementary school full of children.
“You’re sure this is her?” one of the other men asked the terrorist who’d hidden the little girl.
He stared at her indecisively. His gaze strayed to a telephone sitting on the desk beside her, to the exit door and then back to her face. He exhaled hard. Regret glinted in his stare. “Yes. That’s her.” His voice was a rough baritone and sounded stressed.
Who in the hell did they think she was? Who were they?
Her only play was to delay these guys as long as she could. Give the police time to respond to her call.
“Who are you?” she demanded in English. No way was she giving away that she understood anything they were saying to one another. “What do you want with me?”
She didn’t see the blow coming. A fist plowed into her jaw from the right side, snapping her head hard to the left and making her see stars. Dazed, she stared at the first man—the one with golden eyes—wincing silently in front of her.
Gingerly, she poked her right cheek with her tongue. No teeth felt loose, but the inside of her cheek was shredded. She opened her mouth, flexing her jaw experimentally. It didn’t feel broken.
Well. That didn’t go as planned. Dazed, she stared at her attackers. Real fear for her life flowed through her. She registered it, cataloged the emotion and forcibly pushed it down. She had no time for fear. Not if she wanted to live. And not if she wanted to protect the kids in this building.
She had to get these men outside, into the range of armed law enforcement officials, but slowly enough that said officials could get here before these guys fled.
“You’re sure it’s her?” the third man asked doubtfully in Farsi. “She doesn’t look much like her picture.”
“Yes, yes,” Goldeneyes snapped back in Farsi. “Blonde. Tall. Thirty years old. And she does match the picture. These Western women wear a lot of makeup and it changes how they look. I’m used to that, and you’re not. I’m telling you it’s her.”
With that declaration, Goldeneyes apparently sealed some sort of fate for her. The other two men nodded, accepting his word.
What picture? Part of becoming a Medusa was having her life scrubbed completely off the internet. Completely off. A team of cybersecurity experts did the initial wipe and then maintained continuous scans for any new images that might pop up. Even official public records were scrubbed. She did not exist in cyberspace.
So, how did these guys know her, let alone have a picture of her? She certainly had no idea who they were.
Belatedly, her mind working a couple steps slower than normal, she mentally corrected him. She was twenty-seven years old, not thirty, thank you very much.
In the distance, sirens became audible. God bless the 9-1-1 operator. She’d called in the cavalry, after all.
“Time’s up. Let’s go,” Jaw Puncher bit out.
The men hustled her out into the hallway. She briefly considered making a stand right there in the entrance, but they had AK-47s, and one blow from the butt of one of those would knock her out cold. She would just as soon stay conscious if she could. Also, there were all those kids just down the hall. She had no way of knowing if there were any more armed men in the building, and she dared not provoke these guys to start shooting.
She did her best to slow the men down, though, shortening her steps and resisting moving forward between them in the guise of being too zoned out to do anything but shuffle along drunkenly.
Irritably, they overpowered her and shoved her outside into the parking lot. More sirens were audible now. Lots of them. Unfortunately, they still sounded a half-dozen blocks away.
Goldeneyes stepped up close behind her and bodychecked her hard but not painfully, shoving his hip into her lower back, helping the other two men throw her into a white step van. She tumbled to the floor, slamming hard into its metal ribs. Gasping for air, she noted a fourth man darting out of the building to join them. A fifth man drove, pulling away from the front door with a hard lurch of the van.
One of the men snapped at the driver not to leave tire tracks, and the vehicle lurched again as he slowed down abruptly.
Fear bubbled up again in her throat, momentarily choking her.
She did the four-step breathing technique she’d been taught. In. Hold breath and count to four. Out. Count to four. In...
It took several breaths, but calm prevailed once more over her panic.
Okay. She was being kidnapped. Major suckage.
But there had been multiple witnesses. Law enforcement would put out an APB for this van in a few minutes. Houma was a small town deep in the bayou country, which meant there were only so many roads these men could travel in between the copious waterways.
This would be okay. An hour. Maybe two. A standoff, perhaps. With her, a trained Special Forces operative, on the inside. She would be the police’s secret weapon when it came time for a rescue. All she had to do was stay conscious and keep her wits about her. Trust her training.
The van pulled out of the parking lot and turned right. That would be south on Maple Street. They went straight for what she estimated to be five minutes, and then they turned left. A few minutes, another right turn and then they accelerated to highway speed. Maybe Bayou Black Drive heading west out of town?
Which would be ironic. That road would take them right past the unmarked turnoff to the Medusas’ secret facility, where her teammates were gathering for today’s training.
A sense of unreality washed over her. Surely, she was not being kidnapped by Iranian terrorists. This had to be a bad dream. It couldn’t be happening to her. Was that shock lowering its protective fog over her brain? It felt just the way her instructors had described it. Everything was happening at a distance. Muted. Not really touching her.
One of the men admonished the driver in Farsi, but she didn’t understand the command. In a second, she felt the vehicle slow down to a more sedate speed. Piper frowned. What on earth did Iranians want with her? She’d never had anything to do with that part of the world before—had never served or even traveled there and had no particular expertise on the region beyond reading her daily intelligence brief. What was going on here? She had to be missing something critical—
Something heavy smashed painfully into the back of her head, and she toppled forward as everything went dark.
Chapter 2
Zane Cosworth swore silently, wincing involuntarily as the terrorist calling himself Yousef clocked the woman prisoner on the back of the head with the butt of his AK-47. “Don’t kill her,” he snapped at the guy, the most volatile of the bunch.
“Shut up, Amir. I didn’t like how she was looking at me,” Yousef snarled back.
An urge to return the favor and clock the bastard upside the head made his hands twitch. Zane balled them
into fists at his sides.
Amir was the name he’d used to infiltrate these SOBs’ sleeper cell. Not that they were sleeping after this morning’s little stunt.
They were a frustrating bunch, closemouthed and stingy with information for him, the new guy on the team. He was the only actual American among them, and he was convinced it was the sole reason he’d been brought on board. They called upon him to interact with other Americans and used him as their errand boy in any public situation where their accents might draw attention.
But that also meant he was completely expendable if he offended these guys or got in their way of whatever the hell their actual end goal was.
The team’s leader, Mahmoud, was definitely taking instructions from someone who communicated via encrypted cell phone, or occasionally via a Dark Web site that was even more heavily encrypted.
Rolling his eyes at Yousef, Zane leaned over the woman, ostensibly to check her pulse. He grabbed her right wrist with his left hand while surreptitiously slipping the ring off her fourth finger with his other hand and palming the piece. No way in hell could he let his compatriots discover that this woman was a West Pointer. If he was gauging Mahmoud correctly, the guy would kill her instantly.
Mahmoud said practically nothing about his personal beliefs, but he made no secret of despising Americans, particularly military members.
Zane slipped the ring into his pocket. He was seriously grateful that chance had thrown a female soldier in his path this morning. What she was doing at some elementary school in a small town in southern Louisiana, nowhere near an active military base, he had no idea. Call it a small act of God that had gone his way.
Not that he was a whole lot happier about throwing a soldier to the lions than he would be about doing it to some random civilian woman.
But he’d been forced to make the best of an impossible situation.
Of the four women cowering on the floor in the school’s front office, she’d looked to be by far the youngest and fittest of the bunch. Naming her as the target had been the least awful choice under the circumstances. Which wasn’t saying much.
Honestly, he’d feared that if he told the others he didn’t see their target in the office, where she normally worked as an assistant principal, they would start shooting kids to get the woman to reveal herself.
Mahmoud was a cagey bastard and had barely shared any information with any of his men about this fiasco. He’d briefed the cell members only about an anonymous woman they were supposed to find and kidnap.
Zane hadn’t thought it was enough detail to pass on to his superiors. He’d assumed Mahmoud and his boys would spend days or weeks finding the target, doing surveillance on her, picking the perfect spot to abduct her and then launching an operation to kidnap the woman.
Zane thought he had plenty of time to find out who the woman was, slip away from the other men and send a message to his superiors about this little operation. It galled him to have been outmaneuvered by a freaking terrorist like this.
Mahmoud also hadn’t given the team any indication whatsoever that today would be the actual snatch.
Zane had been nearly as shocked as the teachers and kids of Southdown Elementary School when they’d piled out of the van for real, armed with actual weapons and ammunition.
Mahmoud had passed around a picture and name of the target, Persephone Black—whoever the hell she was—in the van as they turned into the school parking lot. Zane hadn’t even had time to send an emergency text to his handlers to let them know who the target was and that an attack was imminent before Mahmoud had ordered them out of the van and barged into a flipping elementary school, armed to kill.
The picture itself had been informative. It was fuzzy and taken from a distance. The woman had been with a man on a crowded street that looked like some place in Europe. She was looking over her shoulder at something, and the shot of her face had been snapped in that moment. For all the world, it looked like a surveillance photo taken by someone following the couple.
Did that mean Mahmoud and his men were in the US on behalf of some foreign government with an intelligence service of its own? Iran was the obvious candidate, given that they sounded like native Farsi speakers.
Regardless, they were some sort of black-ops team, and they’d proved this morning that they were not averse to using violence.
As soon as he’d heard that the real target was out sick, he’d known he had a big problem. Mahmoud and his boys wouldn’t hesitate to shoot up a school full of little kids in retaliation for their victim being absent.
He felt really bad for this woman he’d inaccurately fingered as the target. He glanced down at her, crumpled on the floor of the van at his feet, and silently vowed to make it up to her somehow.
One thing Zane hated worse than just about anything else was being forced into a no-win choice. And God knew he’d faced one of those already today. He could either go along with assaulting a school, snatching a woman and scaring the hell out of a bunch of kids...or he could blow his cover, and throw away months’ worth of work gaining Mahmoud’s trust and worming his way inside what Zane’s superiors believed to be a dangerous and violent sleeper cell.
He’d very nearly gone ahead and turned his weapon on his coconspirators to take them out this morning. The one thing that had stopped him was being in an elementary school. The possibility of an innocent child being hit in the cross fire was the only reason any of these bastards were still alive.
If he just knew who they were, he would end this farce right now.
He did know one thing about them. They would never say anything under interrogation. They were all fanatic enough to die before giving up even their names.
He’d lived and worked with Mahmoud and his fellow psychopaths for months, and he still didn’t have any idea who they worked for or what their ultimate goal was. That was how closemouthed these men were.
Normally, Zane would pull the plug on an undercover op like this immediately and get the civilian victim out. Hell, he was on the verge of doing that very thing right now.
The only thing stopping him was that ring in his pocket. If the kidnapped woman was a West Pointer, maybe he could let this thing play out just a bit more—a few minutes or a few hours—and get his answers before he called in the big guns to take these jerks down.
Thing was, if Mahmoud and company did work for Iran, they would only be replaced by another sleeper cell of trained killers when US authorities took these guys out.
Hence the urgent need to know who they worked for and what their end goal was. He didn’t for a minute believe that kidnapping some woman from an elementary school was the primary reason this cell had infiltrated the United States.
They posed some much-greater national security threat. But what?
Nope, he’d had no choice today. He had to throw this woman he’d never seen before under the bus and maintain his cover a little longer. He hated it, and he would do whatever he had to do to protect her.
Just a little while, he mentally promised her.
The unconscious woman beside him moved faintly and then subsided again. Yousef had hit her way too damned hard if she was still out cold. Zane knew from long experience in the field that if she was unconscious more than a few minutes, she would likely be out for the next couple hours.
Patience, Zane. Now was not the time to make his move to rescue her. He was probably her only chance of survival. But he would get one shot—and no more than one shot—at rescuing her. He had to wait until she was conscious, able to move fast and willing to cooperate with him.
He hoped to God she understood his choice and one day forgave him for it.
Did it make him a dreadful human being that he’d forced her into helping him figure out what these terrorists were up to? That he’d potentially sacrificed this woman’s emotional well-being, and maybe her life, to save many more lives down th
e road?
Hell, he was already a dreadful human being. As an undercover agent, he deceived people and lied for a living. He’d even done criminal acts in the name of keeping his covers. He drew the line at hurting or killing innocent victims, although he was skirting dangerously close to that line today. Hell, sometimes he wondered if he was even one of the good guys anymore.
He owed this woman huge. When the time was right, he silently promised her he would find a way to save her from these men.
But how...and when...he had no idea.
Scowling, he leaned back beside her slumped body. He propped an elbow casually on his upraised knee. “Anyone following us?” he asked Bijan, the youngest of the crew, who crouched at the dirty rear window of the van.
“No. We’re clear,” the kid answered.
Zane had to give these guys credit. They’d run the grab-and-go to perfection, managing their time on scene to the second and getting away moments before the first police car arrived. His certainty that they were military trained—more specifically, Special Forces trained—intensified.
His concern for the woman intensified, as well. Men like this wouldn’t hesitate to kill her if and when they figured out they had grabbed the wrong person.
He studied her face. She was pretty. Her hair was dark blond and her skin was smooth and slightly olive complexioned. The combination was unusual and striking. Her legs were lean in her blue jeans, and her shirt was currently twisted tight against some nice curves. Her fingers were long and slender with short, cracked fingernails.
Those fingernails surprised him. She looked put together enough to be the kind of woman to always have a perfect manicure. What did she do to beat up her hands like that?
“Pull over at the next gas station,” Mahmoud, the team leader, ordered Hassan, the driver.
It took a few minutes, but Zane felt the van decelerate. They pulled around to the side of a tiny rural gas station advertising with a hand-painted sign that it also sold beer, fishing bait and, more alarmingly, gator bait.
