Killing Time

10

Mike woke up with a stiff shoulder and a pain in his neck.

The pain in his ass was awake, too, responding to the flight attendant’s request for her to move her seat to the upright position and prepare for landing in Bogota.

He yawned and stretched and shook the cobwebs from his head. “How long is our layover?”

She reached into her bag and checked her ticket. “Couple of hours.”

“Good. That’ll give us time to grab something to eat. We’ll have a nice little chat and chew. It’ll be fun. You can fill me in—no excuses, no stalling this time, clear?”

Her glare had plenty of bite to it, but she finally nodded. “Clear.”

The El Dorado International Airport in Bogota was a major Central American hub, and the terminal teemed with travelers. Giving a more-than-passing glance at a bar two doors down, Mike stood in line at a fast-food cafe where he grabbed sandwiches, a couple of apples, and two sodas.

“I took a guess and went for the ham.” He tossed the to-go bag on the table she’d found in a relatively quiet corner of the terminal and dropped into a chair across from her. After digging inside for a sandwich, he shoved the bag across the table to her.

“Start from the beginning,” he said after taking a huge bite. He was starving.

She gave him a look. “Can I at least eat my sandwich first?”

He popped the top on a soda, wishing it was a beer, and passed it to her before opening his own. “Multitask. I’ll even give you a place to start. Who are you really?”

The sandwich stopped halfway to her mouth.

Here it comes. Another lie.

It was time to lay things out for her.

He met her eyes over his sandwich. “You think that I’m not going to figure that out once we land in the States? I’ve got a few friends in high places.”

His buddies at Black Ops, Inc. had recently relocated their organization from Buenos Aires to the States. He didn’t know where they were based, because the nature of their covert activities required a high level of anonymity, but he did know how to reach out and touch them. He’d helped them out on their last two missions and knew that all he had to do was ask and they’d get him what he wanted.

“Biometric facial-recognition program. I’m sure you’ve heard of it.” He took another bite, then swiped the corner of his mouth with a paper napkin. “Amazing software. Compares key features of a subject from a photo— nose, eyes, eyebrows, mouth, face shape—to the faces stored in law enforcement and DMV databases. When a requisite number of features match, bingo. It’s gonna spit out a name to go with the face so fast you won’t have time to say, ‘Whoops, I’m so sorry I lied to you, Mike.’ ”

The software wasn’t perfect, but its proponents called it a breakthrough as significant as the introduction of fingerprint technology. And the BOIs had it.

“Too bad you don’t have a photo,” she said.

“Yeah, about that.” He shifted his weight to his left hip, dug into his right pants pocket, and pulled out his phone, which he’d picked up from the Beechcraft. “Smile.” He snapped her picture.

“Oh, wait.” He made a face. “You won’t like that one. Your mouth was open. Not your best look.” He snapped another shot, then admired his work. “Much better. That scowl probably matches your driver’s license picture.”

The noise she made came close to a growl. For the first time since this all started, he actually felt like smiling.

“So… do I hit Send or do you talk?”

He had her, and she knew it.

He set the phone down, wiped his hand on his napkin, and extended it across the table. “Name’s Brown. Mike Brown. And you would be?”

She looked at a spot on the wall behind him before meeting his eyes again. She did not return the handshake. “Eva.” Her eyes were sober and dark. “Eva Salinas.”

Mike withdrew his hand on an indrawn breath as the implication hit him. “Salinas?” He had a sick feeling that he knew exactly what she was going to say.

“Ramon was my husband.”

He’d been hit with a bar stool once. It hadn’t landed as much of a wallop as those two words.

Now it all made sense. No wonder she hated him. No wonder she thought he was lower than dirt on the sole of a terrorist’s boot.

He sank back in the chair. “When? When did that happen?”

“When did we get married?”

He nodded.

“Three months before he redeployed.” She sat back, too, crossing her arms beneath her breasts.

Three months. Mike remembered when Ramon had come back to the unit after his recovery time in the States. He’d been full of his usual bravado and swagger, talking about the hot babe he’d hooked up with. He’d never said one word about getting married.

And he sure as hell hadn’t mentioned a wife to Lieutenant Hot Body from the communications unit. Salinas had resumed their “secret” affair as soon as he’d been boots on the ground back at the FOB.

Mike looked at Ramon’s widow. He could have told her that her husband, the man she hated him for getting killed, was not only a braggart with an axe to grind, but he was the camp Romeo who considered anything with estrogen fair game and hadn’t considered his marriage vows sacred.

But he didn’t say one word. He knew all about the sting of salt in a wound.

“Why didn’t you tell me that up front?” he asked softly.

“Because it’s private.” She avoided his eyes, thought better of it, and drew her shoulders back defensively. “Because I didn’t want to.”

The pain on her face made him feel bad for her, enough to wish Salinas was alive so he could take the jerk down a notch for not keeping it in his pants when he had a woman like this waiting at home.

A woman who would go to the lengths she’d gone to, to find out the truth about his death.

Eva Salinas, aka Pamela Diaz, aka the woman who’d had the cojones to brave the hazards of a foreign country, seduce him, drug him, cuff him to a bed, and kick him in the face, hadn’t deserved to be played. Strangled, maybe, but not played.

Mike was a lot of things—a coward, yeah, he’d cop to that, a dropout, and a screwup—but he wasn’t a cheat. And he had no time for men who were. Which pretty much explained why he and Ramon had never been besties.

“And because I didn’t know if I could trust you,” she added belatedly, the inference being that she’d decided that now she could. “I didn’t know who was following me. For all I knew, you could have arranged it.”

He couldn’t fault her logic. “And the jury was out until we got shot at.”

She shook her head. “Maybe before that.”

When I’d damn near blubbered like a baby.

“Look,” he said, embarrassed and wanting to get some distance from it, “I’m sorry about Ramon. I didn’t like him. He didn’t like me. But he was a good soldier and he didn’t deserve to die the way he did.”

He backed off then, giving her a little time to decide how she wanted to proceed from here.

“Eight years ago,” she said, “when they notified me of his death, they told me he died on a routine training mission. Not in combat. Not on an operation. They blamed him for making a careless mistake that cost him his life.”

Mike frowned. “Ramon was a lot of things, but careless wasn’t one of them. Not when it came to his job.”

“I didn’t know him well enough to know that. But he was Special Forces. I knew he hadn’t earned that green beret by being careless.”

“Yet you bought the report of his death.”