Page 43 of The Devil's Ransom

Most took it in stride, as I would expect. Jennifer was the only one who was a little put out, asking what the hell we were going to do with Amena. I glanced at the rear of the plane where she was sitting, staring at me with daggers, and said, “Jenn, she’s going home with Jahn and the rest. The Taskforce will escort her to Charleston. Kylie’s house-sitting, so she’ll be fine.”

“We’re going to send her home with a terrorist and some guy we just rescued?”

I saw Brett, Veep, and Knuckles looking at me and said, “Could I see you in the galley for a minute?”

We got there and she was spitting mad, like a momma grizzly, but I was having none of that. She started to talk and I held up my finger, saying, “Wait a minute here.I’mthe one who said we shouldn’t bring her on a cover development trip.You’rethe one who said it would be fun to show her the world. And itwasfun. But the reason I didn’t want her here is precisely this. She’s going home, and that’s it. You need to pull back from the family thing and get your head in the game here.”

She looked at me with a little bit of venom and then shook her head, saying, “So that’s it, huh. Mission before family. We’re going to run off doing something else when Carly is in a box headed to the United States. The mission will always trump anything else.”

I leaned back, now knowing what this was about. It wasn’t Amena. I said, “That’s what you think?”

She slammed a fist into the wall, then felt the pain. She curled up, holding her hand, and I saw the tears. I went to her, wrapping her body. Carly had been one of her best friends, and I should haveknown this would be hard. I was so worried about Knuckles, I’d forgotten about her. She’d seen a friend and operator called Decoy have his head split open right next to her once, and she’d blamed herself for the death. Now, Carly was gone, and she was wondering if the loss was her fault.

They’d worked many, many missions together, and she was now letting that out, incensed that the Taskforce could simply give us another mission like some mechanical part had broken and it had shifted to another piece of the machine.

She brushed her eyes and said, “Do you think this is right? Leaving like this?”

I cupped her chin and said, “Yes. I do. We fucked up with Carly, and we did what we could to fix it. Now, we have another mission. The guys hitting us with ransomware don’t care about Carly. The mission never ends. We can do some good here.”

“It doesn’t seem right. We should at least have a pause to remember her. Somebody in the Taskforce should give a shit.”

“They do. Trust me, they do. We’ll celebrate her in time. Remember Guy? Remember that?”

Her hitching stopped and she said, “Yes.”

“It’s the same way here. Let it go for a while. Dislocate yourself from the death. We have a mission, and we’ll execute that mission.”

She chuckled without any humor and said, “Like a bunch of robots.”

“No, not like robots. Like what you did twenty-four hours ago. Look in the back of this plane and tell me that wasn’t just.”

She nodded, and I could see her remembering breaking the trigger. She said, “That was just.”

I said, “Okay, then, let’s get this done. We’ll mourn Carly’s death, but we have a mission. Are you in?”

She looked at me like she had way back in the day, when I was the only thing standing between her and certain death. When she’d believed in me for the first time. She leaned forward and kissed me on the lips, saying, “I’m always in. As long as you are.”

The trust she placed in me was disconcerting, and I hoped to live up to it.

We’d landed the plane in Zagreb, Croatia, at their general aviation terminal, and sure as shit, George Wolffe had executed. We were met by a group of guys who looked like Croatian immigration, but were not. Well, they might have been—I don’t know—but they certainly didn’t do any immigration work.

We bundled off the terrorist outside of prying eyes, and then escorted Jahn and his niece to the new aircraft. Surprisingly, Amena hadn’t put up a fight at all about going home alone. She seemed to know what was happening, spending all of her time with the niece.

I took Jennifer and Knuckles to do the transfer, because I wanted them to see what the loss of Carly was earning. We reached the plane and Jahn looked at me, saying, “Is this for real? We get to leave for good? To the United States?”

I said, “It’s for real, but don’t let anyone on the far end try to leverage you. You’ve worked with the CIA, right?”

He said, “Yes, why?”

“Because they might want to use you again. You’ve done your duty to our country. You’ve done more for our nation than most of the peopleinmy country. They get to enjoy the freedom out of an accident of being born there. You get it now because you earned it. Don’t let anyone fuck with you. If they do, use my name.”

He laughed and said, “What, just say ‘Pike says this isn’t right’?”

I said, “Yes. That’sexactlywhat you say. When you meet my people, say that. It will hold some weight.”

He looked at me with new eyes and said, “Why?”

“Because if they don’t do what they say, they know I’ll rip off their heads.”

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