Freedom Does Matter (Mercenaries Book 2) (2 page)

Kevin thought about calling the Nest, their base in the Bahamas, but decided to wait. Millie had put the hospital there on alert, and not only did he have little to report, they could do nothing except worry with him. He didn’t need any help for that! He pulled up a seat beside the gurney supporting Ian. Sue had taken the far side where she could keep watch on Ian’s vitals. Airport noises outside and beeps from the monitors inside were the only sounds.

Derek Hamilton, the team’s token Brit, poked his head around the partition. “You wanted to debrief, right?”

Kevin looked up. He didn’t really, but the team’s procedure demanded it, especially when an injury was involved. Or death. “I’ll be right out.”

“I don’t have anything to add,” Sue said.

“Yeah. I doubt any of us do, but we need to get… whatever, documented. Stay here with him.” She raised her eyebrows and glared. “Yeah, I know. Thanks.”

The debrief took less than an hour. Derek had the only new information: “No one knows anything about the shooter—”

“Nothing? He was right there with us! How could no one have seen him?”

Derek was holding his hands out. “No one saw anything, ‘cause they were all waiting to die, I guess.” He shrugged. “The police finally arrived. They weren’t as interested, once they found Ian’s a foreign national. Kind of chuffed that we’d taken charge of ‘im.”

“Less for them to worry about. Damn!” Kevin took a deep breath. “Any thing else?”

“The Trade Center guys said they’d forward the surveillance video once it’s been vetted for, I don’t know, state secrets or something.”

“Thanks,” Kevin said. “Okay. Let’s keep up the watch around the plane. I’ll relieve Dan.”

Alone, taking his turn guarding the plane in the mid-afternoon heat, Kevin castigated himself. I’m the one who allowed it to happen, he thought. All these years of Ian saving my arse, and I don’t help him!

He pushed his recriminations aside and reached for his phone. The call to the Nest could wait no longer. Telling his wife, Shalin, would be bad enough, but he dreaded talking to Boynton. Maurice Boynton, Ian’s factotum, was almost twice their ages; he had been with them since they’d left South Africa for England.

His agitation betrayed him: he dropped the phone and in trying to make the save, kicked it ten feet into the plane’s wheel. He retrieved it, then paced the hundred-ten foot length of the airplane seven times. Hardly shaking, he sat on the base of the stairs and scrolled to his wife’s number.

Brushing his cheek, his palm came away wet. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d cried.

The conversations went no worse than he expected until, after he’d finished with Boynton, Shalin called him back. The first word she said hit him as hard as anything since the shooting: “Beckie?”

In his mind’s eye, he saw a girl. An attractive nineteen-year-old girl with long chestnut hair and lustrous green eyes, about five feet tall and slight. Ian’s fiancée, Beckie Sverdupe. No matter what Boynton had said about notifying people, Kevin knew he wouldn’t be the one to hide this from her. Her work with the team would have qualified her even if her relationship with Ian hadn’t.

“Ask Patrice if he can fly to Minnesota and pick her up tomorrow. Call me back and I’ll let her know when he’ll be there.”

“Should we do that?”

Kevin thought for a second. Ian might throw him off the team. If he lived. But if he concealed this from Beckie… In his vision, the girl was now standing arms akimbo glaring at him. If he concealed this from her, she would flay him alive. “Yes.”

Chapter Two

Day One - Minnesota

BECKIE SVERDUPE BRUSHED HOSHI, HER Thoroughbred, after an early morning riding session preparing for Monday’s riding camp. The warm July sunshine, typical for Minnesota, and the familiar smells of Hoshi and the stable exhilarated her. Her whole life had been lived in Prior Lake, west and south of Minneapolis, until last year when high school ended. Before college began, she’d moved to the Nest, located on an archipelago of seven Out Islands in the Bahamas, to live with Ian Jamse, her fiancé.

This summer, following her freshman year at the University of Miami, was going as well as she could hope, and her plans for the near future were intriguing, at the least. Her visit home would soon end. Ian’s gonna be finished with the Egyptians next week and I’ll fly down to the Nest to meet him there. Spending time with him and the rest of the team will be great!

Her reverie was demolished when cold flooded her shoulders and back. “Whoa!” Water soaked her shirt and jodhpurs and tried to fill her riding boots. She dropped the grooming brush, then stifled a curse as it splashed in the puddle at her feet.

Laughter behind her brought her around to see Ginny, obviously egged on by Melissa—my best friend!—holding the hose still playing water over her, though the younger girl had lowered it to knee level.

Melissa was doubled over in glee, pointing and gasping. Ginny was amused, but less and less so as embarrassment overtook the joke. She turned the nozzle off as Beckie pulled her shirt away from her body.

Wringing her shirttails, Beckie thought to terrorize the girl, but her motivation dribbled off along with the water. “Ginny, if you weren’t so good with Hoshi, I’d—” She stopped short as her brother Mike waved from the car. He was holding her phone. Even from a distance, his open mouth and wide eyes left her colder than the well water had.

Heart pounding, she read the text.

Patrice otw to pick u up. He’ll b at FCM about 0930. Ian’s been shot. Millie and Jean-Luc r bringing him back. No questions cause thats all we know. K

At 9:15, she stood, anxious, outside the hangar at Flying Cloud Airport—FCM—where Patrice would refuel the plane for the trip to wherever Ian was going. Her overnight bag lay by her foot. Mike and Melissa were close but there was nothing to say.

Beckie’s phone rang, jarring her from her wild, roiling thoughts. She snatched it from its holder. The display read ‘Patrice.’

“Hello?”

“Beckie?” came back in the man’s cosmopolitan accent. “You ready?”

“When will you get here?”

“I should be on the ground in twenty minutes.”

“Good. Do you have any news?”

“Except that we’ll go to the Nest, no. Sorry.”

“Yeah. Okay.”

Chapter Three

Day One - The Nest

ABOARD THE PLANE AT LAST, Beckie sat and stared. Fear’s clammy tendrils crept toward her heart. While she’d been packing, or planning, or even just moving around, she’d been able to press them back, but here… Here there was nothing she could do. Patrice was busy with the airplane; neither he nor his copilot had any information.

After an hour of trembling in her seat, she sat up straight. Stupid, she thought. Rather than continue doing nothing, she went back over the facts about the job she did have. In their review, no one had suggested there was any risk greater than getting caught in a march to Tahrir Square. Even with the government in turmoil, they believed the danger acceptable. The negotiations, forging an agreement to resolve a land ownership dispute which had lasted for years, had seemed to be an effort to end killing as a solution, not a rationale for attacking the negotiator.

So what the fuck went wrong? She leaned her head back and closed her eyes. The images didn’t stop until Patrice called, “We’re about eight minutes out.”

As the plane rolled to a stop, Beckie was at the door, unlatching and dropping the stairs before the suspension settled. A look around the airfield on Port Cay told her the 737 she expected hadn’t arrived.

“Beckie! Beckie!” Shalin deVeel’s voice rang out over the noise of the engines spinning down.

When she looked again, Shalin was obvious, running toward her from the hangar’s office. The two friends met in a crash of emotions.

“I’m so sorry, Beckie! It’s just—”

“Don’t. There’s nothing you could have done. Any word?”

“Jean-Luc is about a half-hour out. Millie’s been in touch with the hospital.” She waved across the channel separating the airfield from the neat two-story building. “Medics will be here in a few minutes with the ambulance.” Shalin paused, looking at Beckie’s face. Beckie thought she must look a mess, but maybe not as wild as when she kissed Mike and Melissa goodbye. “Millie wants you to stay back till she’s got Ian in—”

“Bullshit! I pushed Patrice to break speed records all the way so I’d be here when Ian arrived. I won’t sit on my butt and wait. Even if I can’t do anything.”

“Yes, she said she expected that.” Shalin’s twisted grin spoke of different things to Beckie, wondering if the woman was recalling the time she and Kevin met—in the aftermath of a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv. She took Beckie’s arm and began walking toward the hangar. “She will demand that you not touch him in any way, since he’s not stabilized yet and—”

“That’s more medic crap. If there was any risk, she wouldn’t have moved him!” She stopped and turned to Shalin. “I’m not angry with you, you know that, right? I’m not even angry with Millie. I won’t jump on him or throw myself across his head. If I understood Patrice?”

“I know, Beckie. Her message before leaving said it was a headshot, yes. There are very few good outcomes from that kind of wound.”

Tears welled up, spilled over Beckie’s cheeks. “It can’t be, Shalin. It just can’t be. He had so much…
We
had so many plans.” She looked up through the tears. “Millie told you to remind me of that, didn’t she? To set my expectations low so I wouldn’t be so shocked if… if… if he’s died. Or he has so little brain left he might as well have.

“Bless her for… I hope she’s doing half the job for him she’s doing for me.”

A glint in the northeastern sky caught Beckie’s eye. She scrubbed her tears away and allowed Shalin to guide her to a safer viewpoint. Once the plane stopped, Beckie ran to the mechanics pushing the portable stairs into place.

“Beckie, stay back, please,” Patrice said. “We’ll get everyone off, then use the lift to bring the bed out. You can’t…”

Beckie heard no more; she was up the steps helping the mechanic swing the door open. She shoved through the people waiting to debark, heedless of their greetings.

Running by the pallet of seats where the departing passengers had been seated, she focused on the pallet with a hospital bed attached. It was even worse than the picture in her imagination. A plastic tent over a body—No, dammit! That’s Ian… Unless Millie’s brought someone else, too. She felt a brief flash of guilt that she hadn’t thought of that earlier.

No, there was only the one gurney. The canopy covered the upper half of Ian’s body. An unbelievable number of IV bottles were almost still after the landing. The tent ended just below Ian’s waist; he wore what he referred to as his dress camos. No brown in the pattern, just greens and grays. He’d told her he wore them for negotiation sessions. From the look of the small blanket covering his feet, his boots were gone. On the side facing her, a hand, punctured by needles, squeezed out from under the tent to lie on the mattress.

Millie Ardan stood behind the pallet; Beckie realized the doctor hadn’t noticed her. At the foot of the bed, she peered, hoping her vision could penetrate the cloudy tent wall. Frustrated, she slid a hand under the blanket to reach Ian’s foot. Its warmth was a greater relief to her than she’d expected.

“Thank you, Millie,” she murmured with all the love she could muster for the doctor who had so far kept Ian alive. “I promise I won’t get in the way, but I am gonna stay with him.”

“Okay. Before you ask, no change. I stabilized him to get him here after opening his skull to relieve the pressure. It’ll be tomorrow or the next day till we know more. And weeks before we have any real prognosis. You remember that Congresswoman a while back? You can hope for as good an outcome, but don’t plan on it.”

“Thanks, Doc.” Beckie took a deep breath. “Just so you know, Shalin told me everything you asked her to, so it’s on me, not her.”

She got a nod in return as Millie finished up her checks.