Personal Target: An Elite Ops Novel (14 page)

The fire from the explosion had taken everything else, so the pesky problem of dealing with her waterlogged house was a moot point. There was absolutely nothing left except the contents of her car and her storage unit. The five by ten foot space held a formal dining room table that had been her aunt’s, a file cabinet from her old office in Austin, and the precious dig pack. That was all Jennifer had left in the world.

No matter what Nick had said, she still didn’t believe Niger was that dangerous. The smuggling mess he had talked about was on the west coast, and the Paleo-Niger site was several days’ travel—even by car—from that chaos. When they got back to the AEGIS office, she’d try explaining it all once more to him from her point of view. If he was still unhappy, at least she would be out of his hair. And Nick could be unhappy from a distance.

Surely it would be all for the best. She could not stay here with him, getting to know him again and opening her emotions and her heart up to him again. That was much more dangerous than anything awaiting her in Africa.

Here, there be dragons.

More than anything she wanted out of Dallas and away from the insanity of the past seventy-two hours. She needed to be as far as possible from this experience and the emotional turmoil of dealing with Nick. Tomorrow she’d fly into New York, then on to Niamey and Ingal. The Paleo-Niger site outside of Ingal was a twelve-hour drive from the nearest commercial airport. No one would want to follow her there, even if they could find her.

She pulled her car up to the security kiosk for the airpark, and Nick told her the code to access the gate. Beyond the five numbers he muttered, he still wasn’t speaking to her. It was time she set the record straight, and if that completely alienated him, it might be for the better.

“I’m sorry you are upset by my choices, but this is my life. You don’t get a say in it. I didn’t howl when you left at the end of that summer ten years ago. You can’t dictate my options now. We didn’t even stay in contact.” She didn’t add that she’d been the one to stop returning his emails and phone calls.

Nick clenched his jaw, and she could practically hear his teeth grinding the enamel off his molars.

“What? What is it?” she snapped. Her vow to stay patient was gone.

“I came back, dammit!”

“What?” Jennifer repeated in a whisper.

“I came back and you were gone on a dig. You’d cut me off and quit emailing. Quit returning calls. Quit communicating completely with anyone who’d known you. I came home to see what was wrong.” Nick’s voice was quiet, but there was no hiding the pain behind his words.

Nick had come back?
She struggled to wrap her head around the idea.

“Turns out nothing was wrong. I was just a fucking idiot. I certainly felt like one when I found out later that you’d gotten married. I thought you’d cut me off because you didn’t want to have anything to do with me or my tainted family.”

No.
Nick had come back, and she’d been off with Collin on that dig in China . . . where he’d proposed. Had Nick really thought she’d dumped him because of his father’s embezzlement? Nothing could have been farther from the truth. Why had Angela never told her Nick had come home for a visit?

It wasn’t her friend’s fault. Jennifer had been so flattened by all that had happened, she’d gone through a period where she wasn’t talking to Angela. She’d known her friend would tell Drew, Nick’s brother, everything they’d discussed. Jennifer wouldn’t have expected Angela not to tell.

God, she and Nick had had such a huge miscue all the way around. She was horrified but not surprised. They had been so young and rash; so confident that they each knew best, they never told the other what they really felt. Had she and Nick really known each other at all?

She hadn’t realized how messed up the situation could get when they didn’t communicate. She’d been so horribly wrong, never understanding the consequences of her actions until it was much too late.

Could she talk to him now?

This was the perfect opportunity. But what would happen once she did? Would he just feel worse?

She was just . . . God, she was tired. And she wanted out of town more than she’d wanted anything in a long time—away from Nick, away from everything. Surely after she told him he’d be so angry, he would let her go.

“Nick, I need to tell you something. It’s about—”

He interrupted. “You know, Jennifer, I don’t want to hear it right now. I’m exhausted, I’m hostile, and I’m hurting. I know we need to talk about the bombing, too, but I can hardly see straight. I won’t take anything you have to say well. Let’s just leave it all until tomorrow.”

She held up a hand to stop him from saying more. “Fine.”

It was settled. The conversation was over. Truly over. She wouldn’t be bringing this up again, ever.

She parked her car in the AEGIS driveway and popped the trunk. Despite his claims of exhaustion, Nick pulled her suitcase and computer case out and hauled them both upstairs to the bedroom she’d slept in last night. She didn’t object, even though she knew it was his room. He grabbed more clothes from a dresser drawer after putting her bags on the bench at the end of the bed.

“Help yourself to whatever is in the fridge. I’m setting the burglar alarm and going to sleep,” he said. “We’ll talk in the morning about how the explosion this afternoon will affect your travel schedule.”

She didn’t like the sound of that. “How do I disarm the security system if I’m up before you?”

He gave her the code, and without another word he closed the door. She stared at the bedroom door a long time after he’d left, twisting the ring on her middle finger. Anger wasn’t the way she’d intended for things to end. She’d meant to tell him . . . everything. To explain what she’d been too scared to spell out before, about how she’d ended up engaged to a man she hadn’t loved while Nick had been off risking his life for his country.

It was just as well he had stopped her. She couldn’t tell him that, especially not now when he couldn’t do anything to change it. Knowing would only make him feel like shit.

She showered, washing her hair multiple times to get rid of the smoky smell. Her conscience nudged her. Despite all the reasons she’d just outlined in her head, she should talk to him before she left.

Drying herself with the thick towel, she stared at her shadowy reflection in the steam-fogged mirror and tried to think of how she’d start that unhappy conversation. She was leaving for Africa tomorrow, no matter what Nick said. Would talking help either of them? He already had enough demons on his shoulder. Surely she could save him that pain?

She made the decision to stop torturing herself with the past and checked her email to find the reservation information from Teddy. Her old teaching advisor and friend was delighted that she was coming to Africa. There wasn’t nearly as much to do as one would suspect when leaving the country for so long, particularly since her house had been completely destroyed. Everything could be taken care of with relative ease before her flight to New York tomorrow.

She was up for a couple more hours, composing emails and making last minute lists. After a final tug of war with her conscience, she wrote Nick a short note thanking him for his help and explaining that she was going on to Africa despite his objections.

She couldn’t be talked out of it or scared out of it either. She knew if she stayed here, there was every chance she’d end up rehashing their past, and that would be disastrous for them both.

The next morning she woke early, grateful she had the alarm code. Without waking Nick, she propped the note to him against the kitchen coffee maker and left, her heart beating a little harder than she would have expected as she shut the door to AEGIS behind her.

She shopped at Walmart and REI, called her landlord, and stopped by the bank, arranging to take care of her finances from out of the country for the next few months. She picked up her dig pack at the storage unit along with her travel documents. After renting a parking slot to store her car onsite, she called a cab from the facility and was at the airport by two
PM
.

Getting out of Dallas as soon as possible had become paramount to everything else. She changed her late-night flight for New York to an earlier one by flying standby. If she had to, she’d spend the evening in JFK before her one
AM
Niamey flight tomorrow morning. She half expected Nick to show up and try to stop her from leaving, but she boarded the New York flight without incident. Watching Dallas grow smaller from her first-class window seat, she felt some of the pent-up tension unwind in her body. Had she finally left Nick, and their past, behind?

Chapter Twelve

Monday afternoon

Mexico

T
HE THREE MEN
sat in overstuffed designer furniture on an Italian marble patio in the late afternoon. Ceiling fans spun lazily overhead amid potted palm trees, exotic hothouse flowers, and landscaping in a home that looked like a spread in
Architectural Digest
. A voluptuous woman dressed in a bikini served drinks and cigars and would later be serving whatever else the men wanted.

It had been a long time since they had all sat down together as allies, although now it was more of a forced coalition. Once, they’d been friends and family, only to become bitter enemies. Today they thought they were united in a common goal.

The man who had travelled the farthest for the meeting sipped his drink and looked around at the others. “The woman survived the bombing,” he said quietly.

“What?” Tomas Rivera cursed in his seat. He should have been a broken man by now. This exercise was to have been revenge for the murder of a beloved wife, a brother-in-law, and an entire houseful of employees.

Rivera didn’t appear to be broken, not yet.

Ernesto Vega sat beside his brother-in-law in silent fury, probably still wondering who had been responsible for his sister’s and brother’s deaths, in addition to the carnage in Mexico and the bomb in the American woman’s house.

Because the attempt to kill Dr. Grayson had failed, no one was going to admit to responsibility for the fiasco. These men wanted to save face and were excellent actors. It would make for an interesting meeting.

“If we do this together, how will you transport the product?” asked Ernesto.

Tomas sipped his drink and shook the ash from his cigar. “I have contacts at the port in Venezuela. The officials have already been paid off. We have additional product on the coast that will be added on the African side. It shouldn’t be difficult to include more weight for the port entry, but we need another solution for shipping across country. We won’t be able to fly from the west coast of the continent to Constantine with that kind of added weight.”

“How will you transport the women?” asked Ernesto, translating weight to people.

Tomas sipped again before answering. “We can always use trucks. Hire guides and drive across the Sahara. We can carry as much weight as we like then.”

The traveller raised an eyebrow. “With that kind of transit time, will the product be viable when it arrives on the Mediterranean?” He didn’t particularly care, but it seemed a valid question.

Tomas shrugged. “There’ll be some spoilage, but the majority should be fine if the packages are kept hydrated.”

Ernesto sipped his drink, seemingly not at all bothered that they were speaking of women as if they were bags of rice or plants. “Very well. We’ll add that extra weight in at the entry port.”

The men all nodded in agreement. Working together to expand their separate empires should be more profitable. It should also be safer. Spreading the risk would certainly make it safer, particularly as someone seemed out to destroy the Rivera and the Vega cartels.

The question remained: Was the threat coming from outside this group more dangerous than the traitor within it?

Chapter Thirteen

Wednesday afternoon

Niamey, Niger

T
WO DAYS LATER
Jennifer stood outside customs in Niamey, desperately searching for someone holding a sign with her name on it from the Russ Foundation. Teddy had said he’d have a car and driver waiting for her. So far she’d had no luck spying either.

Perhaps there was a van outside the airport? Teddy didn’t like women travelling alone on these digs or taking transit the Foundation had not arranged. Tired, hot, and jet-lagged—all she wanted was a hotel room and a shower. The thought of waiting here for a ride that might never come made her slightly nauseated.

Mosquitos swarmed in clouds through the open-air building as if she were standing beside a body of water. The place smelled like a combo of dirty public restroom and marijuana smoke. There were people everywhere, but no one appeared to be moving. They were all just waiting in this hellacious purgatory. Children were crying, and for a moment Jennifer felt like weeping herself.

The last time she’d been in a bed was in Nick’s master bedroom two nights before. She studied her watch, but her mind was too muddled to make out the time differences of the past forty-eight hours in transit. She’d arrived in New York early Monday evening and had waited at the airport because her Niamey flight left so early the following morning. With all the holiday travel going on, that had been a mistake. She was bone-weary before she even got started with the seventeen-hour flight. Then there was the unscheduled layover in Paris. She was cross-eyed from exhaustion, and despite her determination not to be unnerved about travelling alone after all that had happened, she’d been on edge the entire trip.

She knew now she’d been wrong to leave without talking to Nick. She could have claimed it was shock from all that had happened in Mexico and Dallas, but deep down she knew it had been cowardice. To run instead of facing the past and telling him everything was childish. She’d struggled not to call him back from Paris, particularly after the terse message he’d left on her cell phone, reminding her of the danger and asking her to let him know where she was.