Unmasking the Mercenary (2 page)

She picked up her Walther P99 Quick Action 9 mm pistol and tucked it in her belt holster, covering it with her short-sleeved white T-shirt. Like Travis, she wore jeans.

Travis led her out of the room and down the stairs leading to the Mamba Point Hotel lobby. If one could call it a lobby. It looked more like the entrance to an office building, which was what it had once been. Crossing the dark wood floor, she followed Travis outside. A large gravel parking area was enclosed by an eight-foot white cement wall. They got into a Jeep the hotel had retrieved for them and drove to the solid iron gate at the entrance of the parking area. The guard opened the gate and Haley waved as they passed.

Travis drove to United Nations Drive and made a left onto Newport. The Jeep was open, and the wind messed the tendrils of hair that had loosened from her ponytail. When they reached Broad, Travis turned right. Wondering why he passed the restaurant, she saw him glance at the rearview mirror and apprehension reared up in her.

“What’s the matter?” she asked.

“We’re being followed.”

Her heart jumped into an alarmed rhythm. She twisted on the seat and saw a beat-up blue SUV filled with several men. How had this happened? She didn’t understand. Travis was always so careful.

“You couldn’t have been followed to the market,” she said.

“I know.”

He was thinking what she was thinking; someone else had been keeping watch outside the market. Had that someone seen him watching the market owner?

Haley remembered the man outside the hat shop and wondered if she’d made a calculated error not telling Travis. Her judgment may have been clouded by her reaction. Did the man work for the stranger who’d met the market owner? Without more to go on it was hard to tell. She and Travis were here only to gather information. It was just the two of them. But somehow they’d been discovered.

Travis pounded the steering wheel once with his palms and swore. Stepping on the gas, he skidded into a right turn. Battered buildings whizzed past them.

Gunfire exploded. Travis swerved when the back tires gave. The men chasing them were aiming for the tires.

Haley fought the horribly familiar rush of fear and dread. She closed her eyes against memory, then pulled her P99 from her waist holster and twisted in the seat to fire back at the SUV.

Travis turned onto Benson. The U.S. embassy was too far away. As he turned onto Lynch, more gunfire rang. The front left tire blew and Travis couldn’t hold the Jeep. They spun and jerked to a halt.

Haley scrambled out of the Jeep. She aimed over the hood of the vehicle as gunshots splattered the other side of it.

“Travis!” she screamed and fired her gun over and over, trying to cover him.

She heard him moan a swear word.

“Oh, God.”

Dark-skinned rebels holding automatic rifles emerged from the other side of the SUV. She registered other things, dirty clothes, unkempt hair, very little muscle-weight, but kept her mind on defending Travis. She reached into the Jeep and yanked open the glove box for another clip. Reloading, she crouched with her back against the Jeep door. Seeing a hand stretching past the front of the Jeep, she realized Travis had crawled there, but now he wasn’t moving. With the angle of the Jeep, he was safe, for now at least.

Rolling so she could fire over the hood of the Jeep, she saw the men were drawing closer. She took careful aim and fired. She got two of them before she had to duck. There were four left.

Crawling toward Travis, she came around the front of the Jeep. She didn’t have time to check for his pulse. Rising slowly, she fired again. They were so close. One. Two. But she only got the second man’s arm. She ducked again as they fired back, then rose to continue shooting. She ran out of bullets.

The first dark-skinned man approached the front of the Jeep. He was thin and wore a dirty tan shirt that hung to the thighs of his equally dirty jeans. The second went around the back of the Jeep. He was shorter but just as thin. The third followed him, just a young boy, maybe thirteen. Sick fear gave a stark beat to her pulse. She fought it. They weren’t big men. She might be able to overpower them. She’d become a good fighter since Iraq.

Still holding her gun, she moved away from Travis as the three surrounded her. She turned, keeping them in sight. The tallest one wore a leer she would have loved to blast off his face with a bullet. There was an ugly space between his two big front teeth. The one she’d injured said something in his native tongue, something angry. The young boy looked around, keeping watch for any interference. But what people had been on the street had fled with the first round of gunfire.

“You will come with us,” the gap-toothed man said in a rolling West African accent.

She said nothing, just kept backing away.

The gap-toothed man walked faster toward her. Instead of running as she was sure he expected, she waited for him to get close enough. Then she angled her leg for a kick, catching him on the chest and throwing him off balance. He stumbled backward. She whacked him high on the back of his neck with her P99. He dropped to the ground unconscious.

The one she’d injured pushed the barrel of his rifle to the side of her head. She had no choice other than to go still. If she moved at all, would he kill her?

At least she’d die fighting.

“You come quiet or we kill you now,” he said.

The insurgents had told her that in Iraq, too. Back then, she’d gone. This time…

Two moves, one with her hand slamming the barrel of the rifle upward, the other driving her elbow back to give his solar plexus a good jab, were enough to distract him. A shot rang out but she didn’t pause. She pivoted just enough and drove a hard kick to the man’s groin. He dropped in agony. Not so tough after all. Skinny bastard.

She went for his gun, but before she reached it, the kid appeared in her peripheral vision, raising his rifle and hitting her with the end of the handle hard on the back of her head. She lost coherency for a minute. Blinking, she realized she was sprawled on the ground. She rolled onto her butt, unable to focus very well. She searched the ground for a gun. One lay a few feet from the man she’d kicked in the groin, who still squirmed in pain. The other lay near the gap-toothed man’s unconscious body, but he was farther away.

The kid gripped her arm and started to pull her to her feet. A sound made him let go and straighten, turning to look toward the Jeep.

Haley blinked more and cleared her vision enough to see a huge man striding toward them, aiming a pistol.

“Get away from her,” he said.

His deadly tone and ground-eating strides should have been enough to deter any man less than half his size. And then it dawned on her who he was. The man who’d stood outside the hat shop. Was he going to help her?

The kid let go of her arm and aimed his rifle.

The man from the hat shop fired once. Yelping, the kid dropped the rifle with a clatter, holding his arm as he fell onto his backside.

Movement to her right made her look there. The man she’d kicked in the groin was trying to crawl toward his gun. His hand curled around the handle and he rolled onto his backside. Another gunshot stilled him. The hat shop man had shot him in the chest.

She reached for the fallen rifle the same time the kid went for it. He yanked it from her grasping hands just before the hat shop man swung his meaty fist, smashing against the boy’s head. The kid fell back and didn’t move, unconscious. She wouldn’t have been able to kill a teenager, either, although it wasn’t uncommon to see Liberia’s youth among the corrupted.

Head still spinning, Haley once again reached for the rifle. But the hat shop man picked it up and straightened, looking down at her with that same impassive expression that had chilled her when she’d first seen him. Then he searched their surroundings, propping the barrel of the rifle on his hulking shoulder while eyes shadowed by an ominous brow missed nothing. Apparently satisfied that the volley of gunfire had scared off anything with a pulse, he turned and went to the Jeep. Haley held her breath while he knelt beside Travis and checked for breath and then a heartbeat.

Travis.

Oh, God, please let him live.

The big man pulled a knife from a pocket on his pant leg and cut Travis’s T-shirt down the front. Then he ripped a strip of it away, pushing some of it into the gunshot wound he’d exposed to help stop the bleeding. He was unemotional and methodical. When he finished, he stood and stepped toward her with those long, smooth strides that showed his intimidating strength. He was not afraid of anything. His body language shouted it. There was a darkness about him, hanging all around him and setting her on edge.

When he knelt in front of her, she had to stifle an audible sound of alarm. Thick black hair accentuated his terrifying light blue eyes. So much power there.

“Is he okay?” she asked.

“We need to get him to a doctor. I know one that’s less than five minutes from here. Can you walk?”

She started to climb to her feet. He helped her, but she pulled her arm free of his grip, stumbling back as her head swam. He appeared to want to help her and Travis, but trust was difficult for her even under normal circumstances. She shoved away his reaching hand and started toward Travis. The motion made her head swim. Nausea gathered and pooled.

Not now.

She lost her balance and began to fall. No. She was going to pass out. The hat shop man’s arm against her back stopped her, and the last thing she registered was him lifting her.

Rem D’Evereux put the woman in the passenger’s seat of his SUV and went to get her partner. He carried the man to the backseat and deposited him there. He wasn’t a light man, so the task wasn’t graceful. Hurrying around to the driver’s side, Rem sat behind the wheel and glanced over at the woman as he started the SUV. She had to be an operative just like her partner. He tried not to let her beauty make that hard for him to absorb, but it was.

Why were they watching Habib? Who had sent them? And why?

He didn’t think they knew about Ammar Farid Salloum. Rem had been following the man for a week now and hadn’t noticed any indicators anyone else was doing the same. It had taken him a while to catch up to him. He still couldn’t believe how blind he’d been. He should have been able to predict Ammar’s motives, but grief and anger had interfered. Now it made him dream of seeing the man gutted and served to the cannibal rebels of Monrovia, men who ate their enemies for spiritual strength.

Had two American operatives gotten a whiff of the same foul scent? Were they working for the U.S. government or someone else? If he had to guess, it was the former. How much did they know? Was it Habib they were interested in? And if so, why? It made Rem uncomfortable. He couldn’t have anyone learning too much about his reasons for tailing Ammar. Especially any special forces types.

He looked over at the woman again. Her partner was seen leaving the market, and that man had followed him to the Mamba Point Hotel. Rem had lagged far enough behind to stay inconspicuous. He’d watched along with the other man as the woman’s partner reemerged from the hotel with her. Her beauty arrested him. There was something odd about her. She strangled her long, dark hair in a ponytail and wore jeans and a T-shirt as if she wanted to pass as a man. He’d like to be the one to let her know there wasn’t a chance in an all-male hell of that. Not only was she beautiful, there was an air of fragility about her. And that was what had struck him as odd. What was a woman like her doing snooping around in a cesspool like Monrovia?

It was one of the first questions he’d ask her when she regained consciousness. Had someone with the U.S. government caught on to what Rem already knew? It grated his nerves the same as it made him want to smile.

Ammar thought he was untouchable. Over the last week, Rem had wiped the smirk off that worthless terrorist’s face by turning up when least expected, hovering, watching. Always a threat—an unpredictable one. More than once, Rem could have killed him, but he hadn’t. And Ammar knew it. Everything had been going according to plan.

Until the two American operatives showed up.

He’d never been any good at prying information from women. He couldn’t hurt them the way he could hurt men. But the one next to him might know something important. Tall and slender, she had the deepest blue eyes he’d ever seen, and that long, dark chocolate hair would look so much better out of the ponytail. His desire to see it that way made him uncomfortable. Why was he so interested in a do-gooder like her?

He drove to a stop in front of Essam Haddad’s shack of a home that doubled as a clinic. Reddish dirt and gravel surrounded the one-story building packed among a hodgepodge of other shacks. The only thing adorning the front yard was a step leading to the front door.

Rem left the woman and hefted the man from the backseat and carried him to the door, leaving a trail of dropped blood. Essam opened the door and spoke rapidly in his native tongue, helping Rem carry the big man inside. Through the front room, they entered a one-room clinic. It didn’t look like much, but if Rem were ever in need of lifesaving treatment, he’d trust Essam over any other place offering medical treatment in this country.

With the man on one of two clinic beds, Rem turned and went to retrieve the woman. Essam looked up from his busy hands and shook his head as Rem came back into the clinic and deposited the woman on the other narrow bed.

“You should quit your foolishness, Rem. How many more of these will I have to patch up before you’re the one brought to me bleeding?” He swept his bloodied glove over his patient before resuming his work. “You will end up like this.” He’d already inserted an IV and was now digging around in his patient’s wounds.

“I don’t know who these people are. I think they came to check out Habib Maalouf and someone didn’t like it, as you can see.” He nodded down at the shot-up man.

Essam didn’t look up from his work. “Yes, but you were there. One of these times Ammar will be ready for you and then what, hmm?”

“I won’t be easy to kill.”