Page 9 of Out of Control

“Admit it: you and I have some unfinished business. Gotta say, though. I forgot what a jerk you can be. Maybe I was wrong to think we could work things out.”

Spencer muttered, “Pot, meet kettle.”

He’d walked away from Drago a long time ago and never looked back. As far as he was concerned, they had nothing whatsoever unfinished between them. Except the rendition order, of course.

He muttered, “You could’ve just texted me, you know.”

“Would you have come?”

Probably not.He said nothing aloud.

“Exactly,” Drago snapped. “Anyway, the guy I wanted you to see didn’t show up before the missile hit.”

It took them a while to climb the uneven, rocky slope out of the valley. Drago’s hands and knees were scraped and bloody before they crested the outcropping and started down the sandy back side. Spencer’s work gloves and the kneepads built into his pants protected him. Still, they slipped and slid, and Drago cursed up a blue storm the whole time.

Which Spencer took as a good sign. The man he knew and hated was gradually coming back into the body of his former lover. The hike went faster as Drago regained his balance and recovered from the blast, and Spencer led him to the shallow cave he’d tucked his Land Rover in.

“I’ve got a Jeep a couple of miles from here,” Drago said. “I’d be grateful for a ride.”

As if Spencer was letting the guy out of his custody now that he had him. But they could at least swing by and pick up Drago’s gear. If nothing else, there would be expensive and classified American surveillance equipment in the Jeep that shouldn’t fall into hostile hands.

“Where is it?”

“Head west. I’ll call the turn to the south.”

They drove for fifteen minutes or so to a narrow wadi with a battered Jeep tucked in the bottom of it.

Drago said sarcastically, “Thanks for the ride, Spence. It’s been great seeing ya.” He reached for the door release. “Let’s not do it again soon. Oh, and if you ever fuck with another one of my ops, I’ll kill you.”

Spencer’s jaw tightened.

“Unlock the door, will ya?” Drago muttered.

“Can’t.”

“Why the hell not?”

Spencer turned off the ignition and turned to face Drago. He reached into the front pocket of his fatigue pants and palmed the object inside, in case this came to a close-quarters fight. “Because I was sent here to rendition your sorry ass, Drago.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake. You don’t think you can capture and actually hold me, do you?” Drago snapped.

“You’re in my custody now, aren’t you?”

“I haven’t tried to get out of it yet,” Drago growled. His body coiled, and his hands tightened into fists. “But I’m damned well going to—”

Spencer reached over fast and jammed the spring-loaded hypodermic against Drago’s thigh.

“Fuckety fuck fuck fuuuh….”

Drago slumped in the seat, unconscious.

Spencer worked fast. Drago was gonna be fighting mad when he woke up. He searched Dray’s pockets and found the guy’s car keys; then he jogged over to the Jeep and transferred all of Dray’s gear into the back of the Land Rover.

He left the key in the ignition of the Jeep—a gift to whoever might stumble across it out here at the ass end of nowhere.

He drove fast, heading south for the Jordanian border. Smugglers, militias, and the nomadic tribes who wandered this part of the world had created a network of unmarked roads and trails that crisscrossed the wasteland and made it an easy matter to slip across the border. Once his GPS showed him to be safely inside Jordan, he turned west and headed for Ar Ruwayshid, a dusty town swimming in poverty and despair, and the easternmost permanent settlement in all of Jordan, even though it was nowhere near Jordan’s eastern border with Iraq.

He pulled into a tiny fenced space behind the ramshackle one-story building he’d paid the owner a couple hundred bucks to squat in for a few weeks. It was an abandoned restaurant, a single open room littered with broken chairs and tables, with a primitive kitchen in the back. It had no electricity or running water, but there was a cistern on the roof with a few inches of rainwater in it. The floor was concrete, the roof covered in cheap tin that did little to fend off the daytime heat.

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