Beijing, China

October 7

Three sharp raps on the window of his cab roused the driver from his nap. Outside, looking at him expectantly, stood three older white women, all rotund and with hair dyed the same unnatural shade of red.

“Are you for hire?” one of them asked.

He nodded and started the meter as one of the trio hefted her bulk into the passenger seat while the other two piled in back. He had parked in the lot next to the Forbidden City and not at the taxi stand in front because he needed a break. He shouldn’t be working today at all; he’d been up sick all night with vomiting and diarrhea, but he had to have the money.

Fate, however, was apparently not going to allow him rest any time soon. The Palace Museum was unusually crowded, and the taxi stand was absent any other vehicles.

“We’d like to go to the Ming Tombs,” the woman in front told him, before turning her attention to her companions. “This was such a great idea. Can you imagine how much our husbands are missing us right now?”

They were halfway to their destination when a sudden coughing spasm hit him. He managed to snatch a tissue from the box on the dash just in time.

“Oh, my God,” the woman beside him said, as she shrank back against the glass on her side. “Is that blood?”

Chapter Three

San Jose del Guaviare, Colombia

October 9

EOO Operative Gianna Truman, code name Fetch, hoisted the backpack of medical supplies onto her shoulders with a groan and departed through the side door of the warehouse into an alley strewn with trash. The sun was so bright she winced and fumbled for her sunglasses. The tedious journeys to town from the remote FARC encampments in the mountains always drained her, and this one was no exception.

It was moments like this she missed the drugs the military and the EOO provided her. Provigil could make her go on for endless nights without sleep, giving her a constant energy boost and awareness that fatigue would normally never allow. Performance enhancers, nootropics. Beta-blockers, particularly propranolol, to regulate her heart and block out panic and fear. Electroporation and biafine to make her heal faster. She and a few other ops were given the right blend of meds to create the perfect soldier, but coming down from them was always time-consuming and even painful.

Fetch had brought a supply with her to the jungle, but her mission had lasted much longer than expected. Though she’d run out weeks ago, she still often felt the effects of withdrawal: headaches, nerve pain, sensitivity to light, mood swings, and even aggression. Right now, she was feeling them all.

When she reached the street, she paused, surveying her surroundings to ensure she wasn’t being watched. Satisfied, she started off toward the rendezvous point five blocks away. The pickup had taken less time than anticipated, so she didn’t hurry. The FARC guerrilla who would drive her back to the camp trail wasn’t due for a half hour.

As she passed a newsstand, she paused to read the headlines of the various newspapers and magazines, to catch up on what had been happening elsewhere since her last foray from the jungle two weeks earlier.

This was exactly what was wrong with the world. Fetch stared at the cover of Tatler, a British import gossip rag. What people like this needed was a dose of life. Real life. Maybe they’d have a little less time to worry about what they were going to wear and who they were going to screw next, mentally or physically, and more time to look around and see how ridiculous their polished lives were.

She wasn’t sure what irritated her more, the caption—ZOE SHAGS TYCOON’S WIFE AT POSH PARTY—or the flippant, uninterested look on the subject’s face. Wealthy British socialite Zoe Anderson-Howe had been caught seducing the wife of Greek shipping mogul Nikos Skouras.

It was bad enough that the privileged often felt they had somehow earned the right to whatever acts of debauchery necessary to keep them entertained. But what bothered Fetch in particular about the article was the look on the spoiled brat’s face, the bored look of, “I’ve been down this road before, and I don’t care what anyone thinks or what the repercussions may be on anyone’s life, including my own.”

Rich people like this Zoe Anderson-Howe didn’t consider whether their impulses might destroy someone else’s career, home, family, or psyche because they could afford to reinvent themselves and move on. The Brit had probably found the tabloid attention unfair and a complete invasion of her privacy, but deep down—or at least as deep as someone like her was capable of—she’d likely have thought it amusing.

They were the same age, Fetch noted—twenty-nine—but that was apparently all they had in common.

Zoe Anderson-Howe lived a life of excess, surrounded by every materialistic luxury that caught her whim, while Fetch didn’t need to hold on to anything. Civilians or even other ops talked about their favorite friend or film, sweater or pictures, souvenirs or cars. Her life’s possessions were minimal, and easily replaceable. She had no attachments at all; she even avoided keeping her own apartment or house. When she wasn’t away on a job, she stayed at the Hotel Vertigo in San Francisco, surrounded by impersonal furnishings and decorations. It wasn’t one of the city’s more upscale establishments, but it was centrally located and the beds were comfortable. And, as with anywhere she stayed, as long as it was clean and aesthetically pleasing she was satisfied. She required only a duffel bag with clean clothes.

While Zoe lived a life of indulgent debauchery, Fetch had chosen a life of battle, one that meant defending the rights and lives of innocents, rich and poor. She felt privileged to be in that position and would do whatever was necessary, including infiltrating the FARC by living in the jungle for months alongside ruthless fanatics. But she couldn’t help feeling frustrated when she saw articles like this, chronicling the careless depravity of some of those she was putting her life on the line for. She seemed at times to care more about these people’s lives than they did. They had so many reasons to want to invest in the future of the planet, but instead chose to invest in their self-indulgent lives.

Don’t be so hard on them, sweetheart. They haven’t seen what we have. They don’t feel the need to fight because they don’t even know they have to.

Fetch could hear Samantha’s voice as though she were standing next to her. Sam was always the voice of reason, the one person who could take away her fears and doubts and make her believe the world contained more than corruption and war. God, how she missed her.

Fetch thought of Sam every day. She kept waiting for the pain to subside, hoping the adage was true that time could heal all and any pain. But although three years had managed to numb her, it hadn’t done anything for the ache in her heart, still as fresh today as that day in Iraq when her world crumbled beneath her. She and Samantha were taking cover behind the remains of what had once been a house. It had been quiet all morning; the insurgents they were sent to eradicate were apparently lying low, plotting their next move.

Samantha was standing beside her, looking out at the ruined buildings around them with a wistful expression. She’d taken off her helmet because of the heat, and her shoulder-length blond hair was tousled and badly in need of a wash. But Fetch couldn’t imagine a more beautiful sight.

When she was sure no other soldiers were in sight, she got down on one knee and withdrew the ring from the thigh pocket of her fatigues. “Marry me.”

“What?” Samantha looked down at the two-carat diamond in its platinum setting and then scanned their surroundings.

“I want you to marry me when we get back next month.”

“Do you realize that someone could see us?” Samantha sat beside her on the dusty ground, her expression one of shock and bewilderment. Homosexuality was not tolerated in the army and the current “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy was a sad attempt at quasi-acceptance. Sam’s ass would be on the line if she were outed. She ran her fingers through her sweaty hair and rested her head against the stone wall, quiet as she stared up at the ceiling. “What are you doing?” Sam finally asked, squinting against the sun that came through the holes and cracks overhead.

“I’m asking you to spend the rest of your life with me.”

“In the middle of a desert, hiding behind a wall?” she asked as she turned to stare at Fetch.

Fetch looked around at their surroundings. “I think it’s original. Don’t you?”

Samantha smiled. “You’re crazy.”

“About you. Say yes.”

“Why are you asking me now, and here of all places?”

Fetch shrugged. “I know it’s not very romantic but it just feels right. It’s how we met, after all.”

Though she made no move to take the ring from Fetch’s hand, Sam’s eyes were moist with emotion and the proposal clearly pleased her. “But there’s so much I don’t know about you. I’ve known you for almost a year, and you still refuse to talk about your life.”

“You know I love you, don’t you?” Fetch placed her hand on Sam’s thigh. “You know that, right?”

“I do,” Samantha replied gently. “But I don’t know who you really are.”

“What do you mean?”

“You come and go as you please, and you won’t tell me how that’s even possible. You’re privy to information and asked to attend meetings that the rest of us aren’t. I’ve seen you make phone calls in town, then deny that you have. Sometimes I…if you’ve been privately contracted, why won’t you just tell me?”

“Someday we’ll talk about all that.” Fetch squeezed Sam’s thigh to reassure her. “But right now you need to trust me. Trust that no matter who I am and what I do, it doesn’t change what I feel for you.” Though she lived and worked with the army battalion that Samantha was assigned to, Fetch was part of an elite and covert counterterrorism squad, whose objective was to capture and kill leaders of Al Qaeda. She passed on emerging EOO intelligence to the unit and headed up all hostage rescue efforts.

“Can you answer this one question?” Sam asked.

“I will if I can.”

Samantha cupped Fetch’s face. “Please don’t lie to me.”

“I’ve never lied to…” The look on Samantha’s face told her she knew—or at least suspected—better. This woman meant the world to her, and Fetch wanted nothing more than to tell her the truth about everything. But now was not the time. They both had to remain focused, and she had to finish this mission. After that, all bets were off. Samantha was due for release next month, and once they were both back in the States, she’d confess as much as she possibly could about her identity. “I hope I won’t have to,” she finally replied.

“Please. It’s important.”

“I’ll try.” Hopefully the desperation in her voice would make it clear that she had no control over what she could say.

Samantha was watching her closely, as though studying her for signs of deceit. “I want to know your name.”

“What? You already know it.”

“No, I don’t. You’re not who you say you are. I’m willing to wait until we get back to find out the rest. No longer than that,” Sam said. “But I want your name now.”

Fetch bit the inside of her lip as she considered the consequences. “Does it really matter that much?”

“It does to me.”

She took a deep breath and let it out. “Gianna.”

Samantha smiled. “That’s beautiful.”

“If you say so.”

“Gianna.” Samantha cupped her face again gently between her hands and looked deep into her eyes. “I look forward to getting to know you as your wife.”

Fetch’s heartbeat suddenly accelerated until it was booming in her chest. “So that’s a yes.”

“Absolutely.”

She’d barely placed the ring on Samantha’s finger when the rat-a-tat of machine guns broke the quiet. Insurgents were moving in on them, firing their AK-47s, and the U.S. forces in the surrounding ruins began to fire back. She and Sam immediately jerked on their helmets, grabbed their M4 rifles, and took up their positions, joining the exchange of gunfire.

The sound was deafening, but over the cacophony Fetch heard a shout for help and turned to her right. One of the U.S. troops firing an RPG from behind the wall of an adjacent ruined building yelled that his partner had been hit, but he couldn’t leave to help him because a barrage of gunfire had him pinned down from all sides.

Fetch could see the injured soldier on the ground between the two buildings. Half of his right leg was missing, but adrenaline kept him conscious and alert as he continued to launch grenades from his M203. He finally collapsed and tried to crawl to cover. It would be only seconds before the rebels finished him off.

The wounded man scanned the area, desperate for a way out. “Fuck, I’m hit!” he screamed, and tried to get up. “I can’t move. Fuck, I can’t move.”

Apaches were gunning down insurgents from above. Fetch half turned to Samantha. “Man down. I’m going out.”

“Go.” Sam’s attention was still focused on the rebels firing at them. “I’ve got you.”

“See you in a sec.” Fetch peeked around the wall. Several of the insurgents had taken up positions in the building across the street.

“Hey, soldier,” Samantha shouted over the din as she laid down a barrage of cover fire from her rifle. “I love you.”

“Yeah, me too.” Fetch raced in a crouch toward the injured man, firing as she ran.

Just as she reached him, a soldier nearby shouted, “Shit, it’s a missile! Get down!”

Instinctively, she dropped, her body covering the injured man, as the distinctive roar of incoming heavy ordnance blotted out all other sound. She looked up in time to see the small house they’d been taking cover in—the place where Samantha still was—be blown to pieces.

In the chaos of dust and noise, three soldiers materialized from behind her and dragged her and the injured man to a ditch protected by a low wall. Though momentarily blinded by the blast and blowing sand, she fought against them, screaming Samantha’s name and trying to break free.

But a brute of a GI held her down, half-sitting on her chest. “She’s gone, Soldier. I’m sorry. She’s gone.”

Not long after, Fetch was back in the U.S., but part of her never returned. Watching Samantha die before her eyes had cost her sanity the first few months. EOO Chief Montgomery Pierce must have seen the hollowness in her eyes, because the few assignments he gave her were trivial. Sleep deprivation had caused hallucinations. She couldn’t stop replaying those moments when her future with Sam, the hope of a normal or at least as normal a life as she could have, died.

Somewhere in her subconscious she realized her slow but steady deterioration and turned to over-the-counter drugs to help her sleep. But then the nightmares and cold sweats started. Too tired to get out of bed, she refused to answer the phone even though she knew the organization would be pissed at her. She got up only for the toilet and occasional food delivery. Pierce and Joanne Grant, another member of the EOO governing trio, showed up at her doorstep one afternoon. She expected them to go ballistic on her and she didn’t care. She opened the door and went back to bed without a word. The organization forced her to get counseling within their facilities. For a year, she was assigned to desk duty and research.

At first, she thought herself weak, and if it hadn’t been for Grant’s comforting words, she would have pretended recovery just to get out of her mundane existence. But as it was, she found solace in the routine.

The EOO had taught her to succeed by any means necessary, but she always sought perfection. For Fetch, failure was not an option, and the rigid rules she had implemented for herself and lived by meant that she was forever unsatisfied. Her world lacked any gray areas, and Samantha had given her those. Now that she was gone, Fetch had reverted to black or white, right or wrong, saint or sinner, good or bad, and nothing in between was even a possibility.

Part of her wanted to fight back the nature of her inner beast and deal with life differently, now that she knew she was capable of a middle ground. But she mostly felt like she had to struggle to jumpstart a new belief, and she didn’t have any fight left. When any emotions returned, they were anger and frustration. Anger at Samantha’s death and frustration at herself for letting herself get close to someone and compromising them both. If Samantha hadn’t been covering her back, maybe she would have seen the missile. She would have gotten out of there.

Samantha had insisted that she learn to see with her heart, but her death had proved that Fetch was right all along. The heart was no different from any other organ. It, too, was a puppet, waiting for the brain to pull its strings and give it orders. As far as Fetch was concerned, what others referred to as passion was nothing but another word for irrational. And she was anything but.

Fetch rebooted to her default settings, once again content and comfortable on the emotional sidelines of life and, soon after, when field work finally seemed feasible, the EOO once again assigned her to SAR missions. If she concentrated on getting the job done, did what she loved and saved lives, she’d eventually reclaim command of her own life. In war-stricken countries, when faced with the injustice done to poor people, she could put her own pain into perspective more easily.

This time she was assigned to Operation Boomerang, a search-and-rescue mission in Colombia. Specializing in infiltration operations, she quickly gained numerous contacts in the region. For this reason she was given her current assignment: penetrate the FARC, locate a group of Western hostages, and pass on the intel to a covert team of U.S. special ops. The leftist rebels of the so-called Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia—the People’s Army—currently held some nine hundred hostages in small encampments throughout the jungle interior that were constantly on the move. Many of the hostages were police, members of the Colombian military, and others seized as bargaining chips in the rebels’ negotiations with the government for political leverage. But a few were foreigners, snatched for large ransoms that helped fund some of the FARC’s activities, like narcotics trafficking—including taxation, cultivation, and distribution.

Three Italians—a telecommunications-firm executive, his wife, and daughter—had been kidnapped more than a year earlier and were believed to be held somewhere in the massive Guaviare jungle southeast of Bogota. The Italian government had asked the U.S. for assistance when negotiations to free the family had stalled at an impossible sixty-million-dollar ransom, but Washington felt that any “official” rescue efforts might compromise its own interests in the area. So arrangements were made to contract the intelligence-gathering mission to the EOO, who would be paid by the Italian telecommunications firm.

Not long after she was dispatched to the region, Fetch had two more kidnap victims added to her mission: a pair of Australian humanitarian-aid workers who’d spent more than two years in captivity. They were believed to be in the same camp as the Italians, and prospects for their release through negotiations were grim. The FARC wanted to exchange the pair for a group of rebels held in a Bogota jail, and the Colombian government flatly refused.

Previous attempts at an armed rescue of kidnap victims had almost all ended in disaster. The rebels would execute their prisoners at the first sign of an approaching helicopter, which was usually the only way to get close to the remote camps. Along with pinpointing where the Westerners were being held, Fetch was supposed to advise the covert extraction team on the best way to get the hostages out without bloodshed.

She spoke fluent Spanish, and with her olive skin, brown eyes, and dark hair, she passed easily as a native. Using the legend of a disillusioned paramilitary medic, she enlisted in the FARC with a group of villagers too poor to have any other means to support their families.

In keeping with its quasi-Marxist philosophy, internal FARC regulations gave female fighters equal status with men, and that was the reality in some of the bigger encampments. Men and women shared cooking duties, washed their own clothes, and both sexes did guard duty and went on patrol. In the smaller camps, it was sometimes a very different matter, more of a reflection of the society at large. Women there were often relegated to the menial jobs: cooking, gathering wood, and tending to the crops and animals.

Fetch’s background as an ex-soldier and her tough, unemotional demeanor, however, quickly set her apart. Her intolerance for sexual advances, a common occurrence for women within these groups, had been met with attempts at rape. But her combat training soon made it clear she was not to be messed with. She’d broken the arms and legs of those who tried to take sexual advantage, and in return they had called her pervertita.

Her medical skills also helped her establish an equal position among the male guerrillas. She wasn’t a doctor but, like all EOO ops, had received extensive medical training so she could treat her own wounds and injuries in the field. Her nickname became La Medica.

After six months in the Guaviare jungle, she’d reached a critical point in her mission. All FARC guerrillas were routinely rotated to new camps, but because of her medical expertise, Fetch got moved around more than most. Often she was sent to tend to a senior officer or valuable hostage, and other times to train other guerrillas in basic wound care and other procedures. When she returned to the jungle after this foray to replenish her medical supplies, she was to finally be sent to the camp that held the Italian and Australian hostages she’d been assigned to locate.

In anticipation of that, she’d made a detour on this trip to San Jose del Guaviare. Before replenishing her medical supplies, she’d retrieved her cell phone from the bus station locker where she kept her EOO gear. With any luck, she would soon be able to accomplish what she’d come here for and return home.

Date: 2015-01-11; view: 998