Caught off guard, Lucas flew across the room into the far wall. Jennifer yanked one arm free, then frantically began working her hand out of the second loop. Lucas sprang up and rushed her. She snapped out with a side kick, connecting again, and felt the hand slip out.
She jumped off the end of the bed, putting Lucas behind her, the door to the living room to her front. She yanked her pants up with one hand and clawed at the door with the other, getting it open. She almost made it out before he tackled her, bellowing in rage.
They bounced off the table in front of the anteroom television, then hit the floor. She rolled onto her back, Lucas straddling her body and trapping her left arm. She whipped her right elbow up and caught him on the chin, stunning him enough to allow her to snake out of his grasp. She leapt to her feet and he followed suit, slamming her into the wall. Rattled, the blow cutting her ability to think, she felt herself rotated around until her back was to the wall, her arms trapped in his grip.
He leaned into her face, the spittle flying out.
“You fucking bitch. Never want to make it easy. Always want the fucking pain. So be it.”
He reached his hands up to the base of her neck to repeat the pummeling she’d endured earlier. She stared into his snarling visage and felt his hands close. She knew she was done.
She thought of Pike. Of how he wouldn’t quit. Never, ever quit.
She whipped her head forward, catching him just above the bridge of his nose with the bony part of her forehead. He shrieked, and she did it again, feeling the nose crunch underneath the blow. Feeling him back up to escape.
She turned and ran, reaching the door to freedom a millisecond before him. She felt his breath on her neck, his hands grabbing her shirt. She launched a leg backward, felt it connect and heard him grunt, then she was outside.
She sprinted to the north elevator bank. The one with the envoy’s security. She got within sight of it and started walking, checking her appearance. Her shirt was back in place, but she had abrasions on her wrists, and her hair, she knew, must look wild.
She glanced behind her and saw Lucas scowling from the entrance to his room. He pointed a finger at her like a weapon, then blew the tip as if he was clearing smoke before shutting the door. She continued past the elevators until she reached a stairwell, ignoring the stares of the security men. She sprinted down them and ran to her car. A minute later, she was out of the garage and pulled over to the side of the road, throwing up on the shoulder.
She collected herself, sitting in the front seat and panting, unable to fully come to grips with what had just happened. She felt a simmering rage. Pulling out her phone, she saw several missed calls from the team.
At that moment she decided to keep the attack a secret. To pretend the abomination was nothing more than a bad dream that had never happened. She’d help the team find and capture Lucas, then watch him get the Taskforce version of justice. For the first time, she understood fully what that meant. Embraced the reasons why. Wanted to be the one who dropped the hammer.
She texted Pike, telling him she was okay and on the way back. She put the phone away without calling, not caring what had transpired with the Ghost. She drove to their hotel and went to her room. She stripped out of her clothes and went straight to the shower, letting the hot water beat her body.
She began scrubbing furiously as if she was covered in poison, doing whatever it took to cleanse her skin of Lucas’s touch. After an initial flurry, she stopped. She clinically surveyed the damage to keep her mind off the implications of the assault, wondering how she could keep it secret.
She had vicious bruises to her abdomen and a bite mark on one breast, but all of that could be hidden. Lucas had never struck her in the face, so nothing obvious would show. The biggest issue was the abrasions on her wrists. It would be hard to hide them. She thought of how she could bandage them, what she would say to the men of the team, when the enormity of the entire attack came crashing down, flooding her, drowning her.
She curled up in a ball in the bottom of the shower and wept.
63
The makeshift TOC was a flurry of activity, with all hands either deleting computer files, packing up equipment, or talking on the phone. I reached Jennifer’s voice mail yet again and felt a trickle of dread. I’d received a text from her saying she was inbound, but all I really knew was that it had come from her phone. So far, the entire mission had been a debacle, like we had been painted with a curse, and the lack of contact with her was beginning to go beyond the “worried” stage and into the “screw the mission” stage.
Not that I could mess things up any worse. We had barely made it out of the Burj Khalifa intact, with seemingly every first responder in the country rolling in to the alarm calls. The bottom of the basement had looked like someone had detonated a car bomb in it, with the elevator shafts completely destroyed. I would have been happy with simple mechanical damage, but that wasn’t the only thing left behind.
When I’d cleared my head enough to take stock, I’d seen the remains of quite a few people. Torn arms and legs, heads smashed beyond recognition, it was hard to tell how many people were dead. Not that it mattered. Only two counted: the sheikh of Dubai and McMasters. I was pretty sure they would be found in the pile and returned my focus on getting the hell out of the country.
There’d been a rumor that someone had survived, and Blaine had raced out of the TOC to see if he could run anything to ground. I knew he was just wishing. I’d seen the damage. No way anyone lived through a fall like that.
A television in the back of the room, on an English-speaking channel, was going on and on about the disaster. I’d eventually tuned it out, focusing on getting everything sterilized, but Decoy hadn’t. He got my attention.
“What?”
“They’re saying an elevator has failed in the Burj.”
“Okay. I don’t need to watch the news for that. I saw it.”
“No. They’re saying
I stopped what I was doing, now paying attention.
“Did you see two elevators come down?” he asked.
Before I could answer, Blaine entered the room. Smiling. He should have been morose as hell, having given the order for a unilateral hit without Omega authority from the Oversight Council, then having it backfire in his face. He was done and should know it. I wondered if maybe he hadn’t cracked.
“What?”
“We’re okay. You did good work. Saved the day.”
I flipped closed the computer in front of me and said, “Mind explaining?”
“The Ghost placed explosives on both the cables holding the cars and on the emergency brake systems designed to prevent a catastrophe if the cables failed. Your EMP stopped one single charge from going off. The brake system that contained the sheikh and the envoy. They got a wild ride for a few floors, but no permanent damage.”
“So only one elevator came down?”
“Yeah. It’s not pretty. Probably had ten to fifteen people in it, half American. Not good, but certainly not the worst we could be facing.”
I sat back, no longer worried about packing up, letting the relief wash over me. Enjoying the small victory. And feeling a little guilty about calling this a victory when so many had died.
“Okay. I’ll chalk this up as a win. What’s Kurt saying? You going to jail?”
He grinned again. “No. The Council’s okay with it because of the end result. If we hadn’t executed, the envoy would be dead. Kurt’s just a little pissed that I didn’t call him beforehand. I’ll get my ass chewed, but that’s about it.”
I was surprised. “You didn’t call him at all? Even for a SITREP?”
“No. I figured he’d tell me to stand down and that it would be easier to ask for forgiveness than
