Page 8 of Trained

“Sure.”

I secure his wrists with flex cuffs as my men load up all the missiles. Once we have everything, I lead Nasir into the van and buckle our seatbelts. I contact our flight crew when we reach the road so they can start preparing the jet.

With our mission complete except for extraction, I lean back in my seat and take a deep breath. I inhale the cool, filtered air and wash the adrenaline from my blood.

My leg throbs. I hadn’t noticed it while focused on the mission. A bullet’s been lodged in there for months, a chronic source of pain — a visceral reminder of Anton’s malevolence. He could have shot to kill; he didn’t. It’s a mistake he’ll pay for dearly. A surgeon could remove the bullet, but I won’t let one — not until Anton is dead. If Kate’s suffering every day, it’s only fair that I suffer too.

“Hey,” Eyal says once we reach the private airport. “Get some rest. We’ll take care of everything.”

“Thank you.” I clasp Eyal’s hand in mine. “Thank you for everything.”

“There’s more work to do,” he says.

I board the jet, chug down a bottle of water and collapse into bed.

—

I open my eyes twelve hours later. Our jet descends, our compound’s airstrip in sight. I shower and dress as we land, then join my men: besides Eyal, Stanislaw, Henrik and the three-person flight crew. Elyse, our pilot, completes the post-flight routine as the co-pilot, Hasan, heads for his quarters to rest. Baptiste, mobile operations coordinator, sees to Nasir.

Most of the compound has gone dark for the night. Disguised as a house and small farm in the mountains of upstate New York, less than an hour from the Canadian border, the facility used to be a U.S. government bomb shelter. We don’t have any neighbors to pay attention to our daily activities, and we’re surrounded by acres of hunting ground, where hearing distant gunshots isn’t unusual. Little air traffic passes by, allowing us to watch for any incoming attack — and should someone try to launch against us, we can dig in very deep.

We meet in the kitchen; Henrik makes a large salad for us to share. As we eat, we debrief.

“Currently our objective is to determine Anton’s next move and circumvent it,” says Eyal. “Based on satellite footage out of Riyadh, we believe Anton’s jet flew to New York, rather than the Enclave.”

If I were Anton, what would I be doing? Why not bunker down on my own island, which couldn’t be more secure? Perhaps because it’s full of men who hate him, men who might try to exploit the fact that he nearly died.

What if he has a line on another supplier for black market weaponry, a backup in case Hamza failed to deliver?

Or, is he looking to have a word with Kate? What if he’s going to take out his anger on her? I can only hope that he won’t — that he knows she had nothing to do with what happened to him.

As we eat, Eyal fills me in on everything I missed while waiting in the desert. Then he pulls up intelligence reports being disseminated regarding the shootout near Riyadh. The current assessment: an arms deal went south and turned deadly. Although my men burned the SUVs and the bodies, then swept the bullet casings, it didn’t take the CIA long to figure out Hamza Bin Khaled was the victim. They’d been keeping tabs on him for years; they may want to know who killed him and why, but as far as they’re concerned, someone did them a favor.

“Excuse me,” I say, once I’ve eaten. “I should update our silent partner.”

I head for the secure sat phone and make a call.

“Hello?”

“It’s me,” I say.

“How’d it go?”

“Well. We got the package, and made a new friend.”

“Did you offer him a job?”

“We will,” I say. “Pending an interview.”

“Good.” He pauses a moment; I hear his breathing on the other end of the line. “This is really happening, isn’t it?”

“It’s the beginning of the end. The plan is in motion. This will be over soon.”

“For her sake, I hope so,” he says, then hangs up.

I don’t disagree.

—

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