She tried the sat phone one last time after dinner but still got no response, and as she lay her head on the down pillow for the evening she had a sense of dread in the pit of her stomach.
Something was wrong.
She knew it.
Chapter 35
The following morning, Matt answered on the third ring.
“Where have you been? Is everything okay?” Jet demanded.
“No. There was an attack yesterday. We took heavy casualties.”
“Are you okay?”
“For now.”
His voice sounded odd. Tight.
“What happened?”
“Best I can tell the drug lord who provided the men sold me out. That’s the only possibility. They knew where the camp was.”
“Tribesmen?”
“Negative. American, by the looks of them. Four. All dead.”
Her thoughts raced at the implications. “All they understand is retribution. You know that. The drug lord has to go.”
“I know. I’m making plans to take him out tonight, before word gets back to him. But…I don’t know how to tell you this…”
“What? Tell me what?” she asked, her heart sinking.
“It’s Lawan. She was hit by a stray bullet. She didn’t make it. She’s dead.”
Jet couldn’t breathe. It felt like someone was standing on her chest, and Matt’s voice seemed to come from the end of a long tunnel. Then the sensation passed, and she gulped air. Her hand shook almost imperceptibly as she brushed away the beginnings of a tear.
“Those bastards. Saved from a nightmare only to be killed by…this had to be Arthur’s doing.” She fought back the rage, replacing it with a glacial calm. “Did she suffer?”
“No. I don’t think so.” The lie trembled over the line.
“Bury her and say a few words for me, will you, Matt? She deserves at least that.”
“I will. I’m sorry.”
“Just make sure you take care of yourself. You’ve used up all nine of your lives.” She paused. “What are you going to do?”
“Kill the warlord and then move the camp to one of my other sites.”
“All right. This cinches it. I’m going to go in tonight. This will be over soon.”
“Believe me. There’s nothing I want more. But I’ll believe it when I hear you confirm it, not before.”
An uncomfortable stillness hung between them.
“I’m going to get going. Good luck,” Matt said.
“Luck will have nothing to do with it,” Jet responded, then stabbed the cell off.
She brushed her arm against her eyes, blotting tears, and then overcome by fury again, hurled the phone at the wall. It exploded into fragments. Jet buried her head into the pillow and sobbed for Lawan, whose life was over before it began, her brutally short interlude marked by tragedy and abuse. Shuddering rocked her as she screamed her anger and frustration into the bed, and then she quieted, her body growing still as the emotional storm blew over.
She looked up at the mirror on the far wall, face distorted and eyes red, and vowed silently to avenge Lawan, even though it wouldn’t make anything better or bring her back. It didn’t matter.
They would pay.
Jet’s tires whirred beneath her as the anthracite mountain bike carved through the moist soil and dirty gray patches of snow that clung to the ground between the tall trees. Her breath steamed out of her mouth as she panted, having ridden two miles from where she’d left the Explorer. The moon peered through the patchwork of heavy clouds, pregnant with snow, as she glided like a silent wraith through the woods.
When she was a hundred yards from the house, she leaned the bike against a tree and adjusted her backpack, then trotted towards the hedges that ringed the palatial rear yard.
The lights were on in the ground-floor living room of Briggs’ house, and she watched as he reposed in a green silk bathrobe, reading the paper, a bottle of expensive cognac on the table beside him. Upstairs, she could see a woman in her fifties sitting at a makeup table brushing her hair, her face a mask of unhappy resignation as she considered her reflection, a glass of wine near her right hand.
A dog barked several homes down the row, and she waited until the animal settled down before edging to the rear dining room door, next to the room where her target sat scratching himself. She reached into her backpack and pulled out plastic bags, which she quickly slipped over her feet, holding them in place with a rubber band on each ankle, then donned a pair of latex gloves. The lock took twenty seconds to open, and then she was creeping into the house, the soft soles of her Doc Martens boots inside the plastic sheathes soundless on the hardwood floor.
Briggs must have sensed her presence a few moments before she looped the wire over his head. He was in the process of turning when she wrenched it tight, the wire biting into his skin as he writhed in an attempt to get free. A line of blood trickled from the gash it had sliced, and then a geyser sprayed forth as the garrote severed his carotid artery.
“Honey? What’s going on down there?”
The woman’s voice sounded worried, but obviously not enough to descend the stairs. Briggs’s blood sprayed the painting that hung lavishly on the wall in front of him; a stern nobleman rendered in ancient oil — now with crimson splatter marring the surface.
Briggs stiffened and then went limp.
“Honey? Answer me.” Annoyed now, the words slightly slurred.
Jet dipped her finger into Briggs’ blood and scrawled Lawan’s name across his forehead, then pulled the wire free and glided quietly back to the dining room door, leaving blood-smeared footprints on the polished hardwood as she went. Once outside, she retrieved a liter water bottle filled with gasoline from her backpack and unscrewed the top, then stuffed a rag into the neck and lit it with a disposable lighter, leaning it next to the home’s wood siding before vanishing into the dark.
A minute later, Jet heard the woman’s scream even through the closed windows, a muffled high-pitched bleat of shock and horror. She slid the bloody shoe bags off her boots and packed them into a third bag along with the gloves and the garrote, and then bolted for her bike as flames licked at the outside of the house, the gasoline having erupted a few seconds before, igniting the shingles in a fiery blaze.
By the time the police arrived, there was no trace of her, a phantom come to exact a terrible retribution before disappearing into the night.
She looked at her watch as she pedaled hard through the woods. She would be at the second target’s home within ten minutes. Jet turned onto the pavement a quarter mile away and pointed the handlebars east.
The assistant director of the CIA stirred and turned onto his side, his small frame dwarfed by the ornately-wrought headboard of the king-sized bed. An antique that had been chosen by his third wife, he’d battled her for the bed during a bitter divorce and eventually won. It wasn’t so much that it was important to him as it meant a lot to her. She loved the damned thing. Not that she ever seemed to enjoy being in it with him.
Something caused him to start, and he slowly came awake, opening his eyes to see the shadowy outline of a figure standing at the foot of the bed. A figure dressed entirely in black. He tried hard to focus without his glasses and saw that it was a woman. A beautiful woman.
Pointing a gun at him.
He sat up.
“I…I have some money in my wallet, and my watch is a Piaget,” he stammered.
“That figures. Piagets are crappy watches for rich morons with no taste.”
“It’s…worth a lot of money. Take it. And I have a few thousand dollars here.”
“That’s good to know.”
Confused by her tone, he reached for the bedside lamp.
“Move one more inch and I blow your head off.”
He froze, then slowly resumed his sitting position.
“What do you want?”
“I’m here with a message.”
“A message?”
“Yes. It’s a short one. Either you die by the gun tonight, or you die by the needle. Your choice.”