Page 8 of Belgian Betrayal

“Just don’t get yourself killed.”

Tires squealed on the pavement outside the church garden.

“Fuck,” Catya muttered and pushed to her feet. “Gotta go.” She ended the call, ran to the back of the garden, scaled the wall and dropped to the ground on the other side.

She took a few precious seconds to stomp on the cell phone until the lights blinked out, and it was dead, along with the video of the murder of her mother and father.

Catya squared her shoulders. She couldn’t grieve. Not now. The people responsible for her parents’ deaths had to pay, and she had to find Atkins and the disk to get it into the right hands.

Whose hands those were was an entirely different question. Once she had the disk, she’d figure that out as well. And she’d kill Atkins for taking it.

The men who’d found her in the churchyard couldn’t follow her any further without the cell phone.

She ran several blocks, darting in and out of streets and alleys until she was well over a mile from the church.

Catya made her way toward the center of Rome with nightclubs that stayed open into the early morning hours.

One of her contacts lived near there. She dropped her Baretta in his mail slot. He’d hold it for her until she could get back to claim it. The man would do anything for her after she’d taken care of his sister’s rapist. That bastard had lied his way through court and had been freed to rape three more women before Catya had put an end to his terror.

After ditching her weapon, Catya found a taxi to take her to the airport.

Ducking her head low, she hurried inside, found an all-night souvenir shop and purchased a ball cap, an oversized sweatshirt and a box of chocolates.

In a ladies’ room, she hiked her leg up to the sink and ran water over the flesh wound on her calf. Then she rinsed the blood off her pants. She couldn’t do much about the bullet hole, but the pants were dark, and the hole was on the back side. Hopefully, no one would be staring at her pantleg from behind.

Catya dragged the sweatshirt over her jacket. She pulled her go-to disguise from her pocket and glued a fake beard over her mouth and chin. She attached matching bushy eyebrows over her own.

She had the restroom to herself as she wound her long black braid into a coil, tucked it into the ball cap and pulled the brim low over her forehead. From another pocket, she removed a passport. The picture inside matched her disguise—Willem Bakker, a Dutch national. The sweatshirt over the leather jacket made her body bulkier and her shoulders broader.

An older woman wandered into the restroom and blinked when she spotted Catya in her beard.

Catya muttered an apology in Italian for mistaking the women’s toilet for the men’s. She hurried out, made her way to a ticket counter and purchased a one-way flight to Amsterdam, flashing her passport to the woman behind the counter.

Flying into Brussels would get her to Bruges faster. Not that it would do her any good. She didn’t have the disk. Having ditched her gun earlier, she needed to pick up another weapon, plenty of ammunition and anything else she might need to bring to justice the men who’d murdered her mother and father.

She had a small apartment in a shadowy corner of Amsterdam, rented under one of her many aliases. Her laptop gave her access to the internet and, from there, the dark web. She’d tap into any information she could find about the whereabouts of a certain rogue MI6 agent carrying a valuable disk. Forty-eight hours wasn’t much when she had no idea where to find Atkins, retrieve the disk and return to Bruges.

What if she couldn’t find Atkins and the disk in that time?

She snorted softly. It wasn’t like she’d give them the disk either way. Having possession of the disk might give her the leverage she needed to ferret out who was behind this operation. She’d hold onto it until she got to the source—the people from MI6 who’d sent her on a suicide mission.

With only thirty minutes until her flight took off, she made her way through security, her box of chocolates her only carry-on. For all appearances, she was a man on his way to visit his sweetheart with a gift of chocolates.

With her senses on high alert, she made it to her gate without incident. Not until she was on the plane, the doors had been closed and the plane pushed away from the jetway, did she relax. Hopefully, by destroying her cell phone, she’d severed her attackers’ ability to track her. That didn’t mean she could let down her guard.

She hadn’t lived as long as she had by throwing caution to the winds.

Catya used her flight time to go through everything she knew or had observed that night. She concluded that her handler had sent her to kill Gia, giving Atkins the chance to steal the disk. Obviously, Atkins had known about the disk. Catya, on the other hand, had been set up. Had the people behind the setup also been the ones who’d sent the other gunmen to kill her, allowing Atkins to get away? Or were they in with the people who’d killed her parents? Or were they all in it together?

Her handler would deny any wrongdoing. Since he’d more or less sent her to her death, she couldn’t trust him.

She had to find Atkins. He’d have answers.

What the hell was on that disk, and how deep within the MI6 did the betrayal go?

Fearghas Gordon stepped off the train in Amsterdam shortly after seven o’clock in the evening. With an eight o’clock deadline to get to the designated meeting location, he hurried out of the station and into the narrow streets of old Amsterdam.

He would have left on an earlier train, but he’d let his new boss, former US Navy SEAL, Ace Hammerson, know of his plans to help an old friend in trouble.

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