Jad Bell: Bravo Part 10

"We're moving him," he says, putting his gun back on his hip.

Nessuno nods.

He picks up his phone again, and she thinks he's going for the door next and will leave without another word, but he turns back toward her, climbs back on the bed on his knees. She sits up, and he takes her face in his hands, big palms cool against her skin. He kisses her, and despite having only three minutes left, he does it slowly, and it is sweet and earnest. She thinks he is as reluctant to let go as she is.

"I'd like to see you again," Bell tells her. "I very much want to see you again."

Then he's out of sight, and she hears the door open, then close and latch. She puts a hand to her mouth, trying to somehow preserve the press of his lips. She can feel herself grinning, feel a rising spur of joy in her breast. She wants to laugh, instead just shakes her head. She climbs out of the bed long enough to go secure the locks before returning to climb back undercover, switch off the bedside lamp, and lie down again to sleep.

When she wakes there's bright sunlight, the feel of late morning. She drifts in its warmth, stretches for the cool corners of the sheets. When she buries her face in the other pillows, she can smell hints of Bell, and she smiles again. Her phone rings, and she doesn't need to remember which name should answer.

"Nessuno, go."

"Tohir's dead," Heath says.

Chapter Ten.

THE CAR HAD been waiting for Bell outside the hotel, but still, he is last to arrive, everyone else already seated. Their gear, what little required for the op, is laid out on two tables at the side of the room, and the room itself is remarkably anonymous, even for this kind of work. They're in an office in one of D.C.'s many federal buildings, repurposed for this briefing.

Bell turns to Jorge and says, "Ribs?"

"Won't be needing them," Jorge says.

Bell holds his friend's gaze for a second, tries to see how much he's lying. Jorge should still be down for rest, but he's here, and so is O'Day, which means Ruiz is drawing extra cards for his hand, so to speak. If Jorge is back on rotation, then O'Day should be with his team, but he isn't, and Bell turns back to face Ruiz, trying not to wonder exactly what they're in for.

"The mission is to transport the a.s.set." Ruiz hits a b.u.t.ton and a projector throws a map onto the wall behind him. "The mission is to transport the a.s.set."

Bell tries to focus on what Ruiz is saying, on the map and the op, and finds it uncharacteristically difficult. He's seeing the route they're to take, hearing the words Ruiz is saying, and he knows he's taking it all in, but he also knows he's not all here, that he's not entirely in the moment as he needs to be. A piece of him has been left behind, is still in a hotel room across town, with a woman he's afraid he's taken advantage of, a woman he'd prefer to be with right now. He's feeling guilty, and he is afraid he has behaved dishonorably. What he is feeling for Petra Nessuno is more than simple physical attraction. It's the first time since Amy that he can remember feeling this way about anyone. He is suspicious of his own motives, and this is made worse because he is suspicious of Nessuno's as well.

Her loyalty is not a question to him, despite everything Tohir said. If she is a traitor, if she has been turned, then Bell and the rest of the team never would have gone to Tashkent. That's simple logic, and if Bell can see it, he is certain that others, higher on the chain, can too. He's a shooter, not a planner, after all, and if his a.n.a.lysis checks, surely theirs will. It's not a question of loyalty.

It's a question of reliability.

There had been moments when it was clear to Bell that she did not know who she was or, perhaps more precisely, who she was supposed to be. Nothing overt, just a subtle s.h.i.+ft in manner, the moments when she'd seem to tense, then relax, when she seemed to come alive with a smile, a look in her eye. Talking about living in Rome, not as cover but as her home. There had been two women with him in the car, at dinner, in the hotel. She had known it, too. She had said as much.

He doesn't know which of those women he's left in the bed at the hotel, which of them had brought him up to the room to begin with. He wants to believe it doesn't matter, that the two form a whole. He wants to believe that Petra or Elisabetta, it makes no difference, but he can't. He cannot rely upon her, and that means he cannot rely on what he is feeling, and that makes him believe his attraction to her is all the more suspect.

The colonel is wrapping it up. Ruiz gives good briefings; the man's sat through his own stack of them, after all, and he's been delivering them for years now.

"Gear, keys, and paper on the table," Ruiz says.

They get up as one, gather their things.

"Where's the target?" Bell asks.

"In the trunk," Ruiz says.

Bell drives, with Steelriver riding shotgun beside him, and neither has anything to say to the other. It's not uncomfortable, but it's not companionable, and Bell thinks that maybe he and O'Day are pondering the same things, because yes, this op is about moving Tohir safely, but it's about something else, too, that much is clear to Bell. Maybe O'Day is thinking the same things, or maybe he's worried about Jorge's ribs, or maybe he's just tired.

Eight minutes past five brings them to Leesburg, and Bell stops the car in the deepest darkness he can find, sits with the engine idling and all the lights off for two minutes, then Cardboard pulls in beside them, gives Bell a significant nod. They're off coms for this part, as directed by Ruiz.

"Good," Bell tells O'Day.

Steelriver climbs out of the vehicle without a word, and Bell pulls the release for the trunk as Cardboard is climbing out of his car. O'Day and Freddie meet at the back of the car, and in less than a minute they've got their pa.s.senger buckled up and in the backseat, all of it done in silence. Freddie closes the trunk, climbs back behind the wheel of his own car, and O'Day buckles up beside Bell once again. Bell checks his watch, waits until the faintly luminescent second hand sweeps past twelve, bringing them to 0511. He puts the car in gear, pulls out, and with Freddie following puts them onto Edwards Ferry Road, heading east.

Traffic is spa.r.s.e, but Bell keeps the car just below the speed limit anyway, at least until they hit the Leesburg Bypa.s.s. Then they're turning north, and he accelerates, Cardboard following suit three car lengths behind. The Leesburg Bypa.s.s becomes the James Monroe Highway, State Route 15, and the town vanishes behind them and the road collapses to two lanes only, and Bell is now doing fifty-five. Cardboard holds his distance.

"Three minutes," O'Day says.

Bell thinks he sounds bored.

Trees cl.u.s.ter along the side of the road, then fade, reveal flat planes of farmland, the occasional shape of a dark home. The smell of summer fields mixes with the scent beginning to fill the inside of the car, a distinct odor that Bell is more familiar with than he cares to admit. Trees spring up once more, fall away once more, and they're pa.s.sing a cl.u.s.ter of commercial businesses dressed in residential clothes. They pa.s.s an antiques store.

"There's the church," O'Day says.

Bell slows, makes the left onto an even narrower two-lane road, now on State Route 663. He feels the adrenaline dump, makes the conscious effort to keep his grip on the wheel from tightening. The road cuts through more farmland on either side, makes a sharp dogleg right, correcting north once more. Cardboard's headlights close up, maybe a length and a half back. Bell checks his speed as they slip past yet another farmhouse, this one bigger, hay bales wrapped in white plastic, now tinged rose with the rising sun. They're heading into a new cl.u.s.ter of trees, thick on both sides once more, and Bell sees the crossroads ahead, the steeple of yet another church just beyond. The trees continue along the left-hand side past the crossroads, as if offering the church some modesty, but along the right-hand side there's nothing but open field and, almost invisible in the light, a tree line marking the edge of that property to the north. Bell checks his speed once more, taps his brakes.

He doesn't see the shot, but he feels it instantly through the car, feels the vehicle gag and shudder. The sound the engine makes is horrific, thousands of smoothly machined revolutions per minute abruptly violated. The car tries to slew left, already slowing, and Bell has to fight to correct it, braking at the same time. O'Day rocks forward against his belt, but behind them, the target stays securely held in his seat.

The second shot punches through the winds.h.i.+eld, safety gla.s.s cracking and the high-speed whip of the round as it pa.s.ses by. Bell feels the air compress against his skin, displaced, hears the bursting from the body behind him. He doesn't move, fights to keep from moving, from flinching, hands on the wheel, and then the third shot comes, and then the fourth, the fifth, the sixth, and he can't see a muzzle flash, but he knows the rounds are being sent from more than three hundred meters away, from that tree line at the edge of the field. The winds.h.i.+eld is in tatters, falling in chunks, and two more rounds pa.s.s between Bell and O'Day, and now the rolling report reaches them, the distant echo of eight .50-caliber shots fired in less than two seconds, and then that fades.

There's the sound of something liquid settling behind Bell, and the sound of the car hissing, and there's nothing else. In the rearview mirror, Bell can see Cardboard's car where it's skidded to a stop, perhaps twenty feet behind them, see Board just now emerging from the vehicle, submachine gun in hand.

Bell pulls his own MP7 from where it's been riding by his leg, looks at O'Day.

"Well," Bell says. "That was exciting."

Chapter Eleven.

IN SEVENTEEN YEARS with the Loudoun County sheriff's department, Deputy Martin Loughridge had never, not once, seen anything like it.

Which is not to say he'd never seen a corpse before, or even corpses made that way through violent means. It wasn't to say he hadn't rolled up on his fair share of MVAs in the past, either, seen the damage a drunk driver could do, seen the fates of teenagers who'd thought their seat belts were only an option. He still carried memories of the three-car accident he'd been first on the scene to, four dead, including a little girl all of three.

That had been heartbreak.

This was akin to horror.

He'd been pouring himself coffee from his Thermos, just seated in his ride outside the Old Lucketts Store, window rolled down and facing south, toward the community center, waiting for dawn and the end of the s.h.i.+ft. Summer nights and kids staying out late, and there'd been some recent vandalism reported in the area, so he'd finished his latest circuit and figured he'd take his break here, just keep an eye on things. In another hour, the hamlet would begin to rouse itself, and shortly thereafter he'd roll back to base and clock out to allow the morning s.h.i.+ft to come on and deal with the commuters, the fender benders. Like most nights in his patrol sector, Loughridge's was a preventative presence rather than a reactive one.

"Unit twelve, we've got a report of gunshots out by Christ Church on Stumptown Road."

He s.h.i.+fted his coffee, almost spilling it, took the handset. "Responding."

"Ten-four."

He rolled without siren but with his lights, took it fast, heading west out of Lucketts, trying to keep an open mind. He wasn't worried, and he wasn't particularly anxious, because he wasn't expecting to find anything. Reports of gunfire were more common than people thought, especially in the summer, when a string of firecrackers could be mistaken for the sound of a weapon by those who couldn't tell the difference. And there was nothing, but nothing, out by Christ Church except, well, Christ Church and a couple of farms. Long, broad stretches of fields broken by stands of trees, exactly the kind of place kids would end up when they stayed out too late and got up to some mischief.

So it was mischief he was expecting when his cruiser flattened out of the bend, coming down the very easy slope of Stumptown Road toward the intersection with 663. Then his lights. .h.i.t the cars in the middle of the road, and he saw the figures and the damage. The car in the front was a Ford, its winds.h.i.+eld all but missing, a puddle of radiator fluid and the last wisps of smoke or steam rising from its front end. Where his headlights. .h.i.t it, he could see a hole the size of a man's fist through the car's grille.

There were three men that he could see, one of them on his knees, doing something on the ground, the two others standing over him, and they were holding weapons, they were holding f.u.c.king submachine guns. Loughridge stomped his brakes, sent his remaining coffee slos.h.i.+ng, and stared at them for a second as they seemed to stare back. Then he grabbed the radio.

"This is unit twelve, intersection of Stumptown and six sixty-three. I have an MVA and three armed suspects. Need backup."

"Marty, what?"

"Three of them, they've got submachine guns."

Then he was out of his car and drawing his own weapon. Abstractly, he knew it wasn't a very smart thing to do, to match his Glock against two, maybe three, submachine guns, but after the fact he understood it had been intuition telling him he'd be safe. The two on their feet, yes, they'd had their weapons to hand, but neither had made a move other than to watch his approach, and some part of him understood that he was safe with them.

"Loudoun County sheriff's department," Loughridge said behind his weapon. "Hold it right there. Drop your weapons."

The one closest to him, the taller of the two standing, raised one empty hand and with his other set his submachine gun on the furrowed hood of the Ford. Loughridge took another half dozen steps forward, and as he did he cleared enough angle on the Ford to see what the third man, the one he thought had been kneeling or praying, was actually doing.

That was when he nearly threw up.

The third one was doing CPR on a fourth, and there clearly wasn't any point. The body was literally missing pieces. Large pieces. That the man kneeling on the ground had even been attempting CPR was nothing less than folly, because it looked like there were chunks of head missing. The blood was everywhere, s.h.i.+ning black in the dawn, dripping from the open rear door of the Ford. When Loughridge looked in the car, he felt his gorge rise again. Gore and bone had been blown against the seat and the shattered rear window as if by a hurricane. Specks of meat mixed with tufts of upholstery. The scent was overwhelming. A trail ran from the backseat to the asphalt, showing where the body had been moved from the vehicle to the ground in an attempt to resuscitate him. Loughridge thought more of the body remained in the car than had been taken outside of it.

The tall man, the one who'd set aside his submachine gun, spoke.

"My name is Jacoby," he said. "United States Army. This is a military operation that's been compromised. I have contacted my command, and military police are en route."

Loughridge looked at him, dumbfounded. He could hear sirens, faint, the approach of the nearest unit responding. It would be Hollister, in sector 11.

"The situation," Jacoby said, "is under control."

Loughridge found his voice. "I need to see some ID."

"This is a military operation that has been compromised," Jacoby repeated. "There are MPs en route."

"I need to see some ID."

Jacoby reached into his coat, removed a billfold, opened it one-handed, and offered it to Loughridge, who took it, holstering his weapon. He brought out his Mini Maglite and flashed it on the card, and it confirmed what Jacoby was saying, his name, that he was a sergeant, that he was military intelligence. Loughridge handed it back.

"I need to see their IDs."

"No, Officer," Jacoby said. "You don't."

"I'm sorry?"

"You don't need to know that."

"This is a crime scene, sir. You're out of your jurisdiction. I'm taking you into custody. You, move away from the body."

The one who'd been doing CPR slowed, then stopped his efforts, looked up at Jacoby. Blood smeared his front, covered his hands. He was slender, blond, whereas Jacoby's hair was black. The third one, the shortest, just ignored him. They were all dressed pretty much alike, Loughridge realized. Windbreakers, jeans, different s.h.i.+rts, of course. They didn't really look military, though, their haircuts all outside the high and tight, and the one who'd been doing CPR actually had a ponytail.

"I'm taking you into custody," Loughridge said. "You're all under arrest."

Jacoby seemed to give this some thought. Then he shrugged, and the other two set their submachine guns aside and all of them moved to stand by the Ford.

Loughridge steeled himself, took another look at the body, then back to Jacoby.

"Who's he?"

"You don't need to know that, either," Jacoby said.

Hollister arrived within a minute, and then Dole two minutes later, from sector 9, and they put cuffs on the three men and put one of them each in the back of their cruisers. None of them resisted, and none of them said anything except Jacoby, and that was during the pat down.

"We are armed, Officer."

They sure as h.e.l.l were, too, and all high-speed stuff. Each of them with a .45-the short one was also carrying a SIG-and each of them with a knife, a real knife, not a for-show combat thing, but Mel Pardue blades, and they looked genuine, not like licensed replicas. Jacoby was the only one carrying ID of any sort at all.

"What the f.u.c.k do you think happened here?" Dole asked after they'd gotten all of them secured in the cars.

"I think somebody murdered the h.e.l.l out of whoever it was they were transporting," Loughridge said.

"Spook stuff," Hollister said.

"Spook stuff," Dole agreed.

Loughridge checked over his shoulder, looking to his car, to where Jacoby had been placed on the rear bench. The man was just sitting there, watching them, and there was nothing to find in his expression. There wasn't any malice, there wasn't any regret, there wasn't even any anxiety.

"I don't think they're military intelligence," Loughridge said. "I think they're something else."

From there, it turned pure cl.u.s.terf.u.c.k as far as Loughridge was concerned. Another three units arrived over the next five minutes, and Loughridge, being first on the scene, was now responsible for securing said scene. They'd just gotten started measuring the skid marks and trying to fix the angles when Lieutenant Lucas showed up, leading the parade of detectives and technicians who would be spending the next six hours or so of their lives here. The chatter over their radios became nearly constant.

"They say they're with military intelligence," Loughridge told Lucas, showing him Jacoby's badge and ID. The badge said that Jacoby was a special agent.

"Yeah, well, they're not on a base and there's nothing special about him." Lucas stormed to the cruiser, opened the door. "You Jacoby? That's you?"

"That's correct."

"These other guys, they're with you?"

"That's correct."

"And the dead guy? Who's the dead guy?"