Page 15 of Covert Vengeance

She shook her head in annoyance as she kitted up for the coming op. She’d killed plenty of times before and never lost any sleep. Now, ever since learning that she might have turned on the wrong person, in addition to finding her long-lost sister, something inside her had shifted.

She’d always had a conscience—almost everyone did except for true sociopaths—but it had never bothered her before. Now it was almost hyper-sensitized. She couldn’t control it, couldn’t shut it off. It kept needling her with worry about what had happened. Pricking her about what had happened to Megan when they were little.

Why hadn’t she fought harder to keep them together? Why had she believed her trainers when they’d told her Megan was dead? Or why had she never looked into it when she was older?

Then there was Hannah. And how Amber could have allowed herself to be manipulated yet again into believing potentially false information.

And now this situation with the man who’d been following her.

Leaving him had bothered her all the way back to Damascus. To the point that she’d even monitored emergency dispatch channels and checked local hospitals to see if he’d been admitted and find out his status. The only thing she’d found was that the man who’d shot at her earlier was now dead.

That one didn’t bother her. But for some reason the guy on the bike did. Because her gut said she might have made another mistake.

He’d protected her before. What if he hadn’t been trying to capture her, but trying to help her instead?

“Then why did he chase you like that for miles, Amber?” she said in exasperation.

She gave herself a mental shake. He’d been alive when she’d left him on the side of the road, and a trucker had been less than a minute behind them. He would have been helped out.

Besides, odds were he’d probably been trying to capture her. Maybe to hand her over to the very people she was going after tonight. And whatever, at least now she didn’t have to worry about him coming after her again. She had to get this done fast.

This was her best shot at rescuing Hannah.

The Escalade she’d put the transmitter on had stopped at what looked like an abandoned warehouse on the very outskirts of southeast Damascus. It bordered a working class neighborhood that was much less densely populated than other parts of the city.

About an hour before she’d arrived back in Damascus and switched vehicles, the system she’d set up on Lady Ada to monitor the radio frequencies had recorded a conversation confirming the location. For the past two hours she’d been looking at satellite images of the area. The images were a few hours old but she had to act on the intel because she couldn’t afford to wait any longer.

At just before midnight she left her rented room dressed in black cargo pants and a long-sleeved black T-shirt, her hair secured in a tight braid, blades and weapons strapped on and her other gear in a backpack. The drive only took ten minutes. She parked behind an old bakery that was closed for the night and stealthily made her way to the two-story warehouse on a quiet street.

The black Escalade with the tracker was parked alongside it, and another was in the back. All the windows on the main floor were dark, the only visible light coming through a tiny gap beneath the edge of a drawn blind on the upper floor.

If the satellite images were accurate and she was right, there were three guards on duty. If she was wrong…

She’d improvise.

Quiet surrounded her as she crept to the back door off the alley. A dog barked somewhere in the distance. Looking up, she focused on her first order of business.

Slipping the crimp device between her teeth, she grabbed hold of the drainpipe on the exterior of the building and climbed it, being as silent as possible. The security camera was mounted beneath the top-floor window, and she stayed out of its line of sight.

Making sure she had a good grip on the pipe with her left hand, she took the crimp device in her right hand and reached out to snap it into position on the camera wire. She waited ten seconds, made sure the tiny LED light stayed green to indicate the signal was jammed, then climbed back down.

So far, so good. She still had the element of surprise going for her.

Her electronic scrambler made short work of the digitized lock on the back door. She slipped it into her back pocket then drew her pistol and screwed on the silencer. Next came her NVGs, allowing her to see in the low light.

She pressed her shoulder to the door as she twisted the knob, cracked it open an inch, and waited. Her heart rate was elevated, because she was finally about to see Hannah.

She paused to take three deep, slow breaths, calming her pulse. The second she went through this door, there was no going back. She would have to be sharp and eliminate any threats that lay inside.

Go.

With the flip of a mental switch, she went into op mode and surged inside, her goggles allowing her to see in the dimness.

A radio or TV was on somewhere inside, possibly upstairs. She crossed the concrete floor silently, heading toward the front of the open-plan building where the bluish light from a TV flickered in another room, probably an office.

In the hallway to the left a guard stood beside a closed door, his back to her. According to the floor plan she’d found, the door led to an underground storage facility. Hannah had to be down there. But to get inside, Amber had to take out this guard without alerting the others. She couldn’t risk merely disarming and tying him up. He was one of Rahman’s men—lethal and connected throughout this city. One alert from him to anyone else and she was screwed.

She had to kill him.

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