Page 30 of I Dream of Danger
Well, the bank could keep the house. She would simply walk away. Others had done it and she would too.
She needed some form of ID, but what? She’d never gotten her driver’s license, and had never been abroad so she had no passport. Rooting through the drawer she touched a small box and brought it out. Her mother’s documents. Her mother’s passport, driver’s license and Kansas ID. All expired, but still. She looked exactly like her mother. Many people had commented on it. The driver’s license photo was from when her mother was 35 and Elle studied the photo. Her mother had actually looked younger at 35 than she did at 20.
Her mother had been a lawyer. As a professional, she’d kept her maiden name.
Laura Elle Connolly.
It was doable.
She could even keep her name, say she used her middle name. That’s who she would become. Her mother. She’d become Laura Elle Connolly, known as Elle.
The wind rattled the windows and she shivered. It felt like she’d been cold for years. Wherever she went, she wanted the sea and warmth. Either Florida or California. There was a quarter on the desk and she held it in her fist until it warmed up.
Heads, Florida.
Tails, California.
She flipped it, watching it spin end over end until she caught it and opened her fist.
Tails.
California it was.
Two years ago, she’d taken down one of her father’s favorite books, a first edition collection of Oscar Wilde’s poems. Inside she’d found two crisp new hundred-dollar bills. She’d kept them in the volume, vowing to use them only in the direst possible emergency. Well, that emergency was here. The money went into the backpack.
She hoisted the backpack over her shoulders, walked out the front door, down the sidewalk to the street, and left the keys in the mailbox. The Greyhound bus station was ten blocks away. She’d checked, and a bus was leaving for San Francisco at 8 p.m. and the fare was more or less half of what she had.
Laura Elle Connolly, known as Elle, walked out of her old house and her old life, turned right, and began the long walk to the bus station and to her new life.
Chapter
Five
Fort Bragg
Fayetteville, North Carolina
Three months later
He was wired again, at last.
As Nick Ross limped out of the debriefing room, his cell was slapped into his hand. SpecOps soldiers aren’t likely to give away sensitive intel on their cells to their buddies, but just in case any soldier went temporarily batshit insane, their personal cells were taken from them before a big op and returned to them after it was over.
He had his connection to the world back now.
It had been a long nightmare of a mission. Three months in the jungle on an Indonesian island, waiting for a specific tango to show up. The tango was delayed, and so for three long, miserable months he and his three teammates lived in trees and camouflaged pup tents, eating cold MREs and taking dumps behind a huge tree root, until the MREs got them too gummed up for any kind of bowel movement at all.
They ate badly, slept badly, and lived like wretches, completely cut off from the rest of the world except for the daily encrypted burst, which always bore the same message: nothing.
Until three days ago, when the Indonesia sky practically lit up with the Gotcha! sign, as Abu al-Wahishi, promoting his candidacy as King of the Shitheads, continued his worldwide recruiting tour. They’d missed him in Yemen and they’d missed him by an hour in Somalia, but they didn’t miss him on Bandar Island. His features were burned into every single team member’s brain cells, right down to the inch-long scar down his right cheek, courtesy of a bomb that went off too soon and barely scratched him, and the slightly crooked nose.
Nick had been at the end of his eight-hour stint up a mangrove tree when a Zil truck drove up, and there he was, Mr. Bad Guy himself, and Nick had the immense pleasure of watching al-Wahishi through his crosshairs as he got out of the passenger side of the Zil, stretched, and then dropped like a sack of meat where he stood, courtesy of a 7.62 mm cartridge, forged in the good old US of A.
One of the reasons they’d been so uncomfortable was that they never made camp. They were prepared at all times to exfiltrate on a second’s notice and after Nick shot the fuckhead right through the bridge of his nose, his pus-filled brain exiting rapidly from the back of his head, they left immediately and made their way to the coast two clicks away.
But not before the guards surrounding al-Wahishi got off several bursts from their AK-47s. Nick’s shot had been silenced so the guards weren’t firing at any target they could see. They just fired at random and damned if one bullet didn’t tear a chunk of Nick’s right thigh away, missing the bone and missing the femoral artery, but hurting like hell all the way to the coast, and nearly causing him to pass out from the pain in the Zodiac, racing over choppy seas to where a helo waited in international waters to pick them up.
Luckily, he was injected with enough morphine on the helo to make the pain go away and make him a very happy man, until he woke up seventeen hours later in Walter Reed Hospital.
