The Protectors (19 page)

CHAPTER 34

W
e had sex. A lot.

At midnight, I thought I’d had enough. I was content to lie next to Lyla and run my fingertips over her stomach, exploring the shallow crevices of her abs and the deep hollow beneath her ribs. When my hand went north of the ribs and found hard nipples, well, it was game on.

By one in the morning, I was convinced we were both done. Then Lyla went south of
my
ribs and I discovered reserves I didn’t think I had. I opened the balcony doors to welcome in the night breeze, and we experienced the chorus of city sounds below; babbling voices, motorcycles, car engines, the nightlife. We were only too happy to add a few moans to the symphony.

By 2 a.m., we’d throttled down to the exhausted-cuddling stage. Neither of us had much left to offer, other than astonished gratitude. The room was still warm so we lay naked on top of the sheets, legs tangled together in postcoital bliss. I noticed Lyla staring at me while she nestled in the crook of my shoulder.

“What?”

“I wish I could read minds,” she said. “What are you thinking about right now—this very second?”

I answered, “So very many things,” which could not possibly have been more accurate. She slapped her palm on my stomach, avoiding the tender sternum.

“Be serious. I want to know.”

I had a sudden, almost uncontrollable urge to tell her, right then and there, everything on my mind. Not just the usual half measure of truth, but all of it. The mix of sexual satisfaction and exhaustion, fear of discovery, fear that Tucker was lying through his Agency-perfected smile . . . hell, I even wanted to tell Lyla I was afraid of her, too. But, in that rare window of total clarity—the moment
after,
completely unclouded by passion—the emotion I experienced more than any other? Shame.

Five YEARS. It takes five years to climb out of the wreckage of Lyla’s embrace, and five seconds of naked flirting leads you right back to the edge of the abyss. You wanna know what I’m thinking, Lyla? I’ve betrayed myself.

Fear, shame, desire, and whatever posed as “love” in Aphrodite’s world—however good it might feel to surrender to complete honesty, sharing those feelings wasn’t the kind of truth bomb I wanted to drop in the middle of a mission. Complex relationships taught a lesson the CIA would be proud of: information conservation is your friend.

“I’m thirsty,” was all I could come up with.

This time, she hit the sternum. “
That’s
what’s on your mind? After what we just did?”

“C’mon, I’m only kidding. I was thinking about how different it is.”

“What’s different?”

“The sex. It was never like that before.”

She shifted her gaze to the ceiling fan and said, “No, it was not,” through a tired, satisfied smile.

We lay there for a long time; me watching the ceiling fan and battling my various internal demons, and Lyla quietly biding her time until she could say the two pillow-talk words most proven to make men cringe:

“What now?”

If she meant “what-now-about-us-as-a-couple,” I sure as hell wasn’t gonna stroll down the middle of that minefield.

“We’re both semi-officially out of the CIA’s clutches—free to cross international borders again, at least probably anywhere but England. What did you have in mind?”

She sat up and sucked in a deep breath.

I made her pause mid-suck. “Crap, you were just waiting for me to ask, weren’t you?”

“Be quiet. Just listen. How many millions of people lie in bed like we’re doing now and talk about the future? Or life? How many conversations about making a difference?”

“Lots, I’d imagine.”

“And to them, changing the world is all about millions of people doing tiny things. If everyone donates to charity, if people ride bikes instead of drive cars, if everyone recycles—each personal action is a raindrop, but do it a billion times and you have an ocean.”

“That’d make a good motivational poster.”

“Funny. Let me ask you a question: why doesn’t it work? Why don’t people really change the world?”

I propped up on my elbows. “I don’t know. I guess because it’s hard to maintain. People are lazy.”

I recycled for a while. When the bin got full one weekend and I didn’t feel like taking it down to the recycling center, I threw a couple of Coke Zero cans in the regular trash. No buzzers went off, no eco-nazis stormed the cabin. Pretty soon my bin was recycling dust while the plastic and aluminum slept peacefully in the landfill.

“Correct. Plus ‘small things’ are self-defeating in the long run. It’s too easy to write them off as insignificant. Real change fails because people lack conviction,” she said. “They just don’t have the stamina. Or the power.”

“Ohhhh shit.”

“No, no . . . stay with me. Before you spout the Prime Directive, I want to ask one final question.”

“Because you had the good sense to use a
Star Trek
reference, I’ll allow it.”

“If a billion people trying to change the world with tiny actions doesn’t work, why not try the opposite? A tiny group of people using huge actions to benefit everyone.”

I groaned and rolled to face her. “The
Time
article.”

“Don’t dismiss it. Just
think
about what we could do.”

My disappointment was difficult to conceal. “You brought it up at
St. Moritz but I thought it was the sleep deprivation talking.”

A dueling editorial piece from the
Time
edition where the Protectors made their debut, the article had gone mostly unnoticed. “Mostly” didn’t include the people on the cover, though, newly branded super-beings who each bought fifty copies and read the entire issue cover to cover more than once. Titled “What a Wonderful World (It Could Be),” after the old Louie Armstrong song, the editorial debated military spending on a global scale. One person explained why it was necessary to spend more than one and a half
trillion
dollars a year to keep the world stable and people employed, while the other pointed out a few of the things even a fraction of that amount could pay for.

Like, for $50 billion, you could develop enough agricultural infrastructure in Africa to feed every man, woman, and child.

Or put a permanent colony on Mars for $200 billion.

Or drop $400 billion and make college free. For everybody.

Total pie-in-the-sky stuff. Except for Lyla, the one person with enough reach to grab the freaking pie.

“I may have been on the edge of psychosis, but the idea is still valid,” she said.

“And what I told you that night is still true. Just because you have the power to change the world doesn’t mean the world will
let
you. As soon as you—sorry, we—started dropping governmental mind-mojo bombs, every country on earth would hunt us down. They’d all be afraid we were coming after them next. That’s not
helping
the world, Lyla . . . that’s
controlling
it.”

She waved her hand in front of her like she was erasing a chalkboard. “No, I don’t mean like that . . .”

The activist bloom on Lyla’s cheeks was a little scary, so I cut her off. “Look, I get it. Being free of the CIA opens all kinds of possibilities, and you’re right—we
can
take an active role, but we have to be very careful. Anything we do, good or bad, can always be viewed as a threat by the Agency or anybody else in power. One misstep and we could spend the rest of our lives like we have the last week—running through every country on earth like it’s hostile territory. I don’t want to live like that. Do you?”

She rolled to her back and exhaled hard. “Well, I am getting tired of running.”

“I’ve only been looking over my shoulder for a week and it blooooows.”

Lyla continued her unfocused stare.

C’mon, McAlister. Bring Lyla back down to earth.

“Why don’t we go to the Cayman Islands?” I said. “We’ll lie on the beach, look at the stars, eat seafood. We can have more naked discussions and figure out a lower-impact way to use our powers for good. One that doesn’t attract snipers. How’s that for a compromise?”

She rolled back and kissed me; the slow, openmouthed kind that lasts forever and doesn’t feel long enough at the same time. When she finally pulled back, my lips wanted to chase her.

Yeah, I was surfing the edge of the abyss, but dammit, until we were out of Iran—and all the way beyond the Agency’s grip—it was a risk I had to take.

CHAPTER 35

F
or a guy called Knockout, I don’t sleep much. Five, six hours a night, tops—and usually no more than a couple of hours at a time. I’ve tried to push my own consciousness button on many sleepless nights, but every time I do, I get woozy and can’t focus enough to press down that final inch. And lemme tell ya, at 3 a.m., that’s the only power I wish I had.

Listening to Lyla’s soft, rhythmic breathing didn’t help, either. When I couldn’t take it anymore, I sat up and turned to the balcony doors. Now closed, they muted the sounds of the streets below. Quite a bit louder were the chaotic thoughts bouncing around my head, given voice by the events of the last few hours. Either way, I wasn’t going to be getting a lot of sleep tonight.

Might as well take a walk,
I thought.
Clear your head, get a plan together for tomorrow. Productive insomnia.

I assumed the Grand Bazaar would be a ghost town this late, but I heard activity filtering up from below. When I stepped out onto the terrace and peeked over the railing, the source was easy to spot.

Two security guards framed the back entrance of the hotel. Hotel guests, some half dressed and fumbling with their belongings, streamed past them and down the street. The guards kept fingers to their lips, hushing the patrons as they ushered them out into the bazaar. I jerked back from the railing and retreated into the room.

They’re evacuating. Why didn’t we hear the alarm? Oh shit.

I wheeled to face the door just as the frame exploded inward. Reflex
brought my arms up in a defensive X, and a sharp pain struck right in the middle of my left forearm. Lyla woke with a scream. In the moment the angry shouting began, with my eyes closed I could see a dozen beacons of consciousness, all huddled by our door and down the hall. I panicked and a blanket drop pulsed over our floor of the hotel. Everybody in range dropped, Lyla included. When I opened my eyes, I saw the unconscious remnants of an assault team, now collapsed in the entryway. Tactical squad, black uniforms, ski masks, no outer markings. These weren’t police.

The sting in my arm was replaced with a cold throbbing, and I looked down expecting to find shrapnel or a bullet wound. What I found was worse: a tranquilizer dart.

“Fuck!” I yelled, ripping the dart out of my arm. It had hit near the bone of my elbow and wasn’t able to sink deep; I didn’t think I’d gotten the full load of whatever nastiness the dart contained. Still, judging from the numbness creeping up my arm, I was moments from being a useless pile on the floor. With Lyla unconscious as well, we’d be defenseless against the entry team’s backup.

I grabbed my belt from the floor and wrapped it around my upper arm, pulling as tight as I could manage before tying it off. A poor man’s tourniquet wouldn’t last long, but it’d slow the barbiturate’s progress toward my brain. Depending on how much of the full dose I’d gotten, I had ten, maybe fifteen minutes—which wasn’t much.

I woke Lyla fairly easily; the tough part was getting her to understand how screwed we were.

“They found us. We gotta get out of here, c’mon!” I draped her arm over my shoulder and hefted her out of the bed. Helping her stand, we paused beside a shattered doorway filled with unconscious, heavily armed men.

“Wha . . . why are you . . . what’s happening?” She was groggy and only supporting about a third of her weight.

“Bad guys, guns, impending death,” I said, shuffling us around the corner of the bed.

I guided her to a pile of discarded clothes and stooped to grab her pants. When I held them up, Lyla stared at me like I was handing her
a potbellied pig.

“How . . . what?”

Goddammit. No time for this.
I dropped the pants and slapped her across the face.

The loud smack was like hitting a reset button. Lyla’s wandering, unfocused eyes snapped back to me and the gold spirals began to twist. Her weak legs rediscovered the floor and she jerked away.

“Easy!” I raised both hands. “We are in some
serious
shit—I need you to focus.”

She did a full 360 and truly saw the room for the first time since waking. Without further prompting, she dove for her clothes.

I slammed my feet into my boots, then took another sweep of the floor with my eyes shut, scanning for any stray consciousness within range.

Nothing.

While Lyla scrambled into her shirt and pants, I examined the entry team. First guy through the door was the guy with the night-night pistol and he had a Kalashnikov assault rifle slung over his torso as backup. The two guys right behind him had stepped in with Tasers, one of which had already fired. The telltale filaments trailed out of the weapon’s barrel; I followed them straight to the electrodes at the ends, now harmlessly burrowed into the wooden sideboard of Lyla’s bed. He’d fired the thing as he dropped, electrifying the one material that didn’t give a shit. One second too late on my mass drop, though, and I’d have gotten the juice right after the tranq dart—down for the count.

More unconscious men lined the hall outside our room, trailing all the way to the elevator, and none of them had nonlethal weaponry. These guys held AKs with fat noise suppressors on the barrels, and several men had hand grenades attached to their tactical vests. The entry team was obviously the “take-them-alive” Plan A, and these assholes were the “just-in-case” Plan B.

I did not approve of either plan.

When I turned back to the room, Lyla was dressed and hunched down over the lead shooter. She pulled off his mask first, then crawled to the other two and did the same.

“Takavar,” she grunted. “Iranian special forces.”

“How do you know?”

“I’ve encountered them before.” Disgust dripped off every word. “No facial hair. They can blend in better on foreign soil, outside the Middle East.” She stood and funneled her hair into a ponytail, asking, “But how did they find us?”

That’s when it finally dawned on me.

Her hair.

When she’d walked in the door earlier, she hadn’t been wearing the niqab. Wasn’t even carrying it.

“You walked through the lobby in plain view, didn’t you?” I asked.

She blinked, eyes shifting back and forth while she ran the mental recording backward. “I . . . no . . . I wouldn’t have . . . ,” she started, then lowered her head. “Damn.”

“You celebrated too early, and someone downstairs ID’d you. Goddammit.” I pushed past her into the room, and her apology bounced off my back. “Doesn’t matter,” I said, grabbing my duster. Only then did Lyla notice the belt around my arm.

“What’s wrong? Are you hit?”

“Tranq dart.” I checked the tourniquet. It had slipped down a little, but still held. My arm was going numb, but that was better than the alternative. I donned the duster, squeezing my left arm through the sleeve. It was uncomfortably tight around my bound-up shoulder, but at least the sleeve would help hold the belt in place.

“Scott, I’m . . . I’m sorry,” Lyla repeated.

“Later.” I stepped over the bodies in the doorway and looked down toward the elevator. “We’re on a clock now . . . I’ve only got minutes before I’m down. Maybe less.”

Lyla didn’t follow me into the hall.

“If you only have a few minutes, let’s make them count.” She loomed over the guy with the tranq gun and pulled him upright by his vest. Her eyes started to rotate as she pulled the unconscious man toward her face.

“Wake them up, one at a time,” she said. “Starting with this one.”

I was happy to oblige.

—

Five minutes later, a full squad of masked soldiers escorted two prisoners straight through the lobby. Draped under black hoods, hands cuffed behind their backs, the two captives were quietly ushered into a waiting evac truck, along with six Takavar escorts. The special-forces troops allowed neither of the two platoons of regular army waiting outside the hotel to assume custody—in fact, when army guards tried to hop in with the prisoners, six masked men pushed them right back out and closed the door. The Takavar captain subsequently relieved the driver of his keys and informed the man that the army’s job was to provide vehicle escort only.

The lieutenant leading the army units looked confused, but refused to argue with a superior officer; particularly one in command of a shadow force like the dreaded Takavar, which had a nasty reputation for disappearing the Ayatollah’s enemies, foreign
and
domestic. The wide-eyed lieutenant was so flustered, he didn’t bother with a simple head count of the special-forces soldiers—which meant he didn’t notice the Takavar squad was four soldiers short.

Or that two of those missing soldiers now sat quietly, hooded and handcuffed, in the back of the evac truck.

Or notice the other two in the front seat of an SUV, pulling around the block from the hotel rear.

And the lieutenant certainly didn’t know that as he gave up both his command and his backbone without protest, the two most-wanted fugitives in his entire country watched it happen from behind the tinted glass of that same SUV.

“How far to the base?” I asked Lyla.

“Bigdeneh is almost fifty kilometers to the west. At least thirty minutes.”

“I wish we could be there to see the base commander’s face when they open the doors to that truck. I assume the guards will pledge undying loyalty to the Goddess of Love?”

“I’m not
quite
that vain. To a man, they will swear that they believed we were in custody.”

“And the ‘prisoners’?”

“They’re content to wait quietly until the hoods are removed.”

My own satisfaction got buried under a sudden wave of dizziness. “Shit. I don’t have much time, we gotta find a safe spot.”

“Biya berim,” Lyla ordered the driver, who immediately pulled away from the curb in a U-turn. He accelerated smoothly in the opposite direction from the departing army trucks. A mile later, the SUV turned off the street bordering the bazaar and dove into a series of quick maneuvers down narrow passages and tiny alleys. Each turn made me more woozy.

Lyla steadied me and asked, “Are you okay?”

“The headlights are spitting out rainbows and you’re starting to sound like Darth Vader, so . . . no. Where are we going?”

“The driver’s aunt lives in a townhouse off the northern edge of the bazaar. Her family is on holiday in Kish, so we should be safe for the night. The streets are quiet right now, but he’s taking us in the back way to avoid prying eyes.”

In moments, the SUV pulled into an alley between tall brick buildings and stopped. The driver tossed a long piece of cloth back to Lyla, who spun it around her neck and over her head in a makeshift hijab—even with dark, empty streets she wasn’t going to risk being noticed this time.

I opened the car door and stepped down . . . and kept on going down. My legs were losing their will faster than my brain. When the driver hopped out and helped Lyla get me to my feet, they had to support my body on either side to keep me vertical. In doing so, they popped the belt loose under the duster sleeve.

“Well, I’m screwed now,” I said, much louder than I wanted.

“Be quiet!” Lyla uttered in a harsh whisper. She issued a couple of Farsi commands with the same hushed urgency, and the other escort replaced her as one of my supports. The Takavar soldiers buddy-carried me through the back door of the townhouse, just as my brain’s house lights started to fade.

By the time Lyla had me deposited in one of the bedrooms, I was barely hanging on.

“You have to . . . we need . . . evac . . .” The mental gears just wouldn’t engage.

“Shhh,” Lyla whispered, combing my hair back with her fingers. “Don’t worry. I’ll take care of everything.”

The last thing I remember before finally giving in was an overwhelming sense of irritation. Being forced into unconsciousness? Against my will?

Dammit, that’s just not fair.