Terminal Vendetta (A Diana Weick Thriller Book 3)

by Cate Clarke

“Canada,” he said. “Safest place for him to be right now.”

  The focus had set in again. Diana was forgetting some of her basics—where she was going, sleeping, showering. She gave herself an unabashed whiff. It was ripe.

  “You don’t think the Readers are going to be able to follow him to Canada?” Diana asked, tucking her arms in close to her torso as a skinny woman with several plastic bags sat down next to her.

  “Oh, of course they are,” Amber said. “Connections everywhere. But it’s a relatively safe spot when compared to what’s happening in America right now.”

  The flight was long and uncomfortable. Diana spent most of it thinking, staring straight ahead, Amber occasionally throwing her concerned glances. It wasn’t a collection of thoughts or an analysis, but the same thing, the focus, the certainty, ringing over and over again in Diana’s head, that the Readers had to be stopped—a bullet in all of their heads. She would start with Zabójca. But she hadn’t forgotten about Cameron Snowman, the one who had started it all, the one who truly saddened her because she’d seen how good of a SEAL his father had been.

  He didn’t have the right to wasted potential anymore. All of that had been reserved for Wesley.

  Nelson Rank had been a Reader. Carson had been a Reader. Who else worked for this anti-military organization that was doing everything they could to destroy the structure that held up all of America’s defenses?

  Her eyes slid over to Amber. Though he worked for MI6, it was possible that he had unsavory connections as well. It was clear his boss didn’t always follow the rules and was working on her own agenda, and whatever that was, for some reason, it heavily involved Diana.

  No room for trust. No room for hesitancy.

  They landed in Toronto, and from there, Amber hooked up a tablet to the airport’s wifi, getting their next location.

  Diana gave herself a quick pat down in the airport bathroom, using the sink water under her armpits and between her legs to try and cover up the fact that she hadn’t showered in however long. There were still streaks of green paint along her neck.

  As she rubbed at her neck with her fingers, the bathroom door opened. There was a click and a rustle alongside the tingle at the back of her neck.

  In the mirror closest to the door, she saw the back of a man in a long tan coat, affixing the yellow cleaning sign underneath the bathroom knob so they would not be disturbed. He turned around, catching her eyes in the mirror.

  His honey-brown hair was pushed back and flattened out with gel. He had grown a beard that covered the bottom half of his face. His eyes flickered with several expressions at once as he stared at her, tapping his fingers against his pants.

  Taras Kushkin limped forward, raising his hands by his ears.

  “You’re really just going to give up after all this?” Diana asked, turning to him as she rolled lip balm over her mouth. Kushkin had nothing for her. He was of no concern to her anymore. He’d barely been on her mind and maybe that was why he was here—a young, lonely man desperate for attention.

  “I’m not here to give up,” Taras said.

  “Did you follow me?”

  “Yes,” Taras stated. “I did.”

  “Why?”

  “A few reasons…” Taras said, joining her next to the bathroom sink, taking a moment to splash some water on his face. Droplets of it scattering off his almost-blond beard. “I thought first that you may have been hiding Rex from me—”

  “Rex is dead.”

  Taras pressed his lips into a hard line.

  Ignoring her, he said, “Second, I know where you’re going.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “Going after Zabójca and his cronies…those Readers.”

  “It’s interesting that we do that…”

  “What is that?”

  “Separate Zabójca from the rest of the Readers…” Diana said, leaning one hand against the sink as somebody tried the knob, jiggling it and then giving up a moment later.

  “Because he is not the same,” Taras replied.

  “He’s pretty far into the Readers’ plot,” Diana stated.

  There was a strange acceptance that Diana could almost feel, like a piece of Plexiglas balanced between them. Neither of them, for the first time in a long time, was trying to kill each other.

  “For his own reasons…” Taras said, adjusting a roller bag behind his leg and tucking it under the sink. “Not for theirs.”

  “You know more about him than I do,” Diana noted.

  “Of course.” Taras smirked. “I know more about him than your friend outside too.”

  “So what?” Diana asked, pulling out a fresh cardigan from her bag and throwing it over her shoulders. “You’re here to plead your case?”

  “My case has already been pleaded,” Taras started. “I know you are working with Ms. Amita Voss.”

  “Not working with… just lending a hand. I don’t work for anyone—”

  “Aside from yourself. Yes, yes, I understand.” Taras lifted an annoyed palm. “We have a common enemy, Weick. I want to kill the Readers just as badly as you do, if not more. When they decided to kill all of those Americans at the Lieutenant’s funeral, they made enemies out of many. They took away the only person that I had ever seen myself sharing a life with… they took everything from me. They took everything from you. And I cannot sit back and pretend that you and I do not share the same goal.”

  His voice echoed off the bathroom walls—one she’d avoided for so long, for so many years. Across the gray laminate countertops, a small spider ran past Diana’s curled fingers. Both of them watched it crawl into the sink, neither of them flinching.

  “When I was young…” Taras cleared his throat. “I feared spiders. In the winter, we rarely saw them, but on those long summer nights, we all feared the karakurt. I suppose you’ve never heard of it, but it’s this black and yellow creature with a nasty bite. It only takes a matter of minutes for its pain to spread through your body after it’s taken hold. My brother and I were accompanying my father to meet and discuss business with my uncle, near Moscow. We were sitting outside on this courtyard, a fire burning between our bare feet when my uncle was bit. Immediately,” Taras snapped his fingers, “he was in pain, screaming and writhing around, clutching his hand to his ankle. I was terrified. The karakurt could very well kill my uncle in a matter of moments. And it was indeed a karakurt. I saw it skitter away across the concrete… though Andriy never believed that I did see it. My father, however, was a well-read man. He took a match from his pocket, lighting it by striking it against the metal sides of the fire pit. Then, he held the flame up to his brother’s wound. My uncle was screaming curses at my father—no trust in his knowledge. But the heat killed the poison. It stopped it from spreading to the rest of his body. It saved his life.”

  The spider skittered into the drain of the sink, disappearing from view.

  “Wouldn’t that make you more scared of spiders?” Diana asked, crossing her arms and glancing up at Taras, who was keeping his eyes purposefully away from his reflection.

  “No,” Taras replied. “I knew its weakness. I knew exactly what I needed to do in order to stop its poison from spreading. Information is the deadliest weapon when used against your adversaries.”

  Diana thought, pushing her fingertips against the biceps of her crossed arms. “You going to hold up a match to Zabójca and see if you can extract his venom?”

  With a slight smile, Taras said, “I know his weakness.”

  “Care to share?”

  “We can walk and talk,” Taras said.

  “Because you need our information.”

  “Just as you need mine.”

  Chapter 7

  Cameron Snowman

  Near Laredo, Texas

  It was flat and gold outside the car’s window, the Texas countryside seemingly endless with its hay bales, speckled bushes and distant sandy mountains. Asher was blasting EDM, the windows all the way down, the air rushing by leaving no s
pace for Cameron to get a goddamn thought in.

  “Can you turn it down?” Cameron yelled over the music and the wind.

  Asher ignored him, keeping his head still and forward, sunglasses pushed over his eyes, hat pulled down over his forehead.

  At least having the windows open allowed them to air out the smells that had accumulated in the car over the last few days. The backseat was riddled with Chick-fil-A containers and Subway wrappers. Still, this many hours of driving with the near-silent Asher and his head-pounding music had made Cameron rethink taking on this part of the mission instead of going to Korea with Zabójca and David.

  There was a buzz in Cameron’s pocket, and he took out his phone. The number was familiar but one he had deleted from his contacts a while ago. He flashed the ringing phone screen at Asher, and he begrudgingly touched his fingers to the volume dial, barely turning it down. Cameron slid his window up, shook his head and answered the phone.

  “I’m going to say this once and only once,” Park said from the other side.

  “Say it loud and say it proud,” Cameron replied, yelling.

  “Since Hoagland’s out, there are two that they’re considering,” Park continued as if Cameron had said nothing at all. “Lillian Stone and Marianna Axtell.”

  Snapping his fingers at Asher with one hand, his other on the phone, Cameron opened the glove box in front of him with his foot. He grabbed a napkin and a pen, settling the phone into his shoulder as he scribbled the names down.

  “Lillian Stone? Marianna Axtell?” Cameron repeated.

  But the line was dead.

  Park had done his job and thought that meant he was safe. The dense jackass should’ve known that being part of the system in any capacity put him and his family in more and more danger every day. Tucking the phone back into his pocket, Cameron slid the napkin over to Asher.

  “Know those names?” he yelled.

  Asher took a cursory glance away from the long stretch of empty highway. He shook his head.

  “Figures,” Cameron muttered, grabbing the napkin back and stuffing it in his pocket. These were the next targets. But for these ladies, it didn’t need to be quite as simple as recruitment or death—Cameron just needed their information. They could do this bloodlessly.

  The old farmhouse was at the end of a long driveway, more fields of wheat stretching out behind it, miles and miles of emptiness. The house was in bad shape. Shutters were cracked and chipping, some of them hanging only by one hinge. The paint appeared to have once been white but years of dirt and dust had worn it into a faded brown. On the roof, several antennas drew up into the cloudy sky, some of them over ten feet tall.

  Asher pointed to a collection of installed locks on the door, most electronic and way too advanced for a farmhouse like this. It was an amusing confirmation that they were in the right place.

  Cameron knocked on the reinforced door that looked like it was prepared for a horde of zombies instead of solicitors and friendly farmers. Outside the car, Cameron could finally hear the cawing of crows, the buzzing of electronics inside the house and someone rustling behind the door.

  “Nehemias Laird!” Cameron called.

  “Fuck off,” a Texan accent called back through a speaker at the top corner of the door, a camera moving on a swivel to Cameron’s face.

  “We just want to talk,” Cameron said, looking right into the lens.

  “You got another UCAV stocked?” Laird’s electronic voice crackled. “You going to blow my poor mother’s farmhouse to the sky?”

  “If we were going to do that,” Cameron replied, “we wouldn’t have knocked.”

  There was a whirring sound as the camera moved back and forth between them, zooming in and scrutinizing both of their faces.

  “I know who you are,” Laird said.

  “Good,” Cameron stated.

  “We have a job for you,” Asher contributed. “Pays a lot.”

  There was another whirring. Then, the click of the locks, one by one. Some of them like a mechanical grinding, others quick and higher-tech, snapping back with one electric buzz. The door opened inwards, automatically and slowly.

  A semicircle of sun spilled into the front entryway, lighting up the falling bits of dust and smoke from the inside of the farmhouse. Laird was sitting at the base of a set of wooden stairs. There was a shotgun in one of his hands and a joint in the other, burning with a light red glow in the darkness of the house. A leather jacket was draped over his bare shoulders, boxers over his legs but no other clothes on him. There was another gun, a hunting rifle, affixed to a tripwire along the bottom of the doorframe sitting next to him, propped up on old wooden crates and cereal boxes.

  Laird cocked the shotgun and said, “I ain’t interested in your job.”

  The house beyond him was dark, all of the curtains drawn, furniture covered in dusty sheets. Several electric fans hummed behind him, clanging against the cheap painted metal of their parts—one pointed right at Laird but rotating on a steady back and forth, occasionally spinning his long greasy hair into tendrils. Underneath the sound of the fans, there were footsteps up the stairs behind Laird.

  Following Cameron’s gaze up the steps, Laird yelled out, “Ma! Stay up there!”

  “How do you know you’re not interested?” Cameron asked, leaning against the doorframe, being careful not to touch the wire with the tip of his sneakers.

  “I don’t work with terrorists,” Laird replied.

  “You worked with Ratanake,” Cameron said.

  The corner of his mouth twitched slightly, but he brought the joint to his lips to hide it, taking a large, long inhale.

  “Ratanake wasn’t a terrorist,” Laird said. “He was a soldier.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Cameron sighed. “So was I. So were you. So was Asher. We were all damn soldiers.”

  “Until you killed them all at the funeral,” Laird snapped.

  The smell of the weed made its way over to him, collapsing down into his mouth, making him think of college. He shook the memories from him and said, “Not you.”

  “Because I left early,” Laird muttered, the marijuana smoke catching in his throat, stifling his words. He exhaled.

  “Simple as that.” Cameron raised his arms in an outward shrug.

  “What’s the job?” Laird asked.

  Cameron and Asher exchanged glances. There was a certain desperation in him, exactly the type of soldier that the Readers looked for. That was their mistake with Diana Weick. She hadn’t been beaten down enough for them to get through to her. Now she probably was, but there was no way she’d be joining them after what went down at Ratanake’s funeral.

  It wasn’t difficult for Cameron to see a bit of himself in the bloodshot eyes of Laird—that same defeat over a multitude of years serving the wrong people, paying your dues into the wrong conformity. This man had served on the same team as his father, somehow. It was hard to see the SEAL in him now, but that was because Ratanake and the other military officials had picked out every piece of him, molding him to exactly what they needed and then dropping him back inside this decrepit farmhouse, forcing him to crawl his way back.

  It was money for him as it had been for Asher. And Cameron could work with that.

  “Fifty thousand to get us a password,” Cameron said.

  “Whose password?” Laird asked.

  “We’ll forward you the info if you agree,” Cameron replied, not mentioning that they didn’t know whose password they needed yet. They would know soon. The VBA couldn’t leave that position empty forever, though he was sure they would like to.

  Laird clicked his tongue against his teeth. “And if I don’t?”

  “We’ll leave you to your…” Cameron gestured to the house. “Devices.”

  “You got this place pretty rigged up,” Asher noted from the other side of the doorframe, leaning his hat inside to take a look around the corner. With a hard gaze, he followed a labyrinth of wires, stapled to the wall across from a couch that was covered in
a stained sheet. There was a staticky purr coming from all of them like the whole house had electricity running through its foundation.

  “To keep out the aliens,” Laird said, watching Asher follow his surprisingly organized wires.

  Asher and Cameron both looked at him as he waved the shotgun between them.

  “Jesus. Okay.” Laird laughed at their expressions.

  Taking a look around his home, Laird sucked in his cheeks and took another hit of the joint.

  “Aren’t you going to give me the pitch?” he asked. “Get me to join your Girl Scout squad?”

  “Do we need to?” Cameron laughed a little.

  “I’d like to hear it,” Laird said.

  “Must get lonely out here in the middle of fucking nowhere,” Cameron murmured. “I don’t need to pitch you, Laird, because you know exactly why we’re doing what we’re doing. You’re living in it right now. You sat for years on a military secret—yeah, Nelson Rank, we know all about that—and it nearly destroyed you. It wasn’t your responsibility to save Rank. It wasn’t even your responsibility to tell Ratanake that Kushkin had him, yet you felt like you had to because the United States military instilled this guilt in you from the moment you enlisted. They tell you ‘Honor, courage and commitment,’ but how much courage and honor do you see from those guys sitting on their asses up in DC? The only ones who are committed are the guys like you, Laird. You’re so committed that you drive yourself crazy because you didn’t follow orders that you never got. That whole funeral was a bullshit show put on by the officials… pretending like they ever gave a shit about Dominic Ratanake and the soldiers beneath him. They don’t care! Even now, with all those guys dead. What do you think they're up to? The important guys, the rich guys, are in hiding. They’re scared, terrified, of the Readers. As always, letting the young guys, the freshly enlisted, the fucking kids, die for them. Don’t you want to be on the right side of this battle? The side that’s not only going to win, but that’s going to change the way things are done for the rest of our lives. We’re all going to get our payday. We are. We’re going to get what we’re owed. And you can get yours a bit sooner if you step in with us here and now.”