23
1026 Words
NINE
NAZ
“Don’t f**k this up.”
“I’m not going to f**k anything up.”
“You have to be extremely careful.”
“You think I don’t know that?”
“He could have the place booby-trapped. He could have scouts, cameras, who knows what. It could all be a setup.”
Killian rolls his eyes. “Stop fretting. You’re like an old woman.”
I’m still lying on the cot, all my holes stitched, now hooked up to IV antibiotics, watching Killian gear up and get ready to go to the last location of Eva’s GPS, and feeling like an absolute failure of a man because he’s going in my place.
My woman. My responsibility. Period.
Except for the bullet hole bullshit, which is really pissing me off.
“I need a phone.”
“Doc will give you whatever you need.”
Killian jerks his chin toward Doc, who’s on the other side of the warehouse, rummaging through a big stainless-steel refrigerator. He said sewing me up gave him a craving for a burger, which is all kinds of f*****g strange, but I was too preoccupied with Killian and his mission to get into it.
Not that I really wanna know, anyway.
“You got backup?”
Killian makes a face at me, like I’m being silly because he’s way too good to need backup. That pisses me off, too.
“I need details. This is driving me nuts.”
“You were already nuts, mate.”
“Killian. Please.”
He stops, arrested by the tone of my voice, and by the word please, which I’m sure I’ve never uttered before in his presence.
My voice rough, I say, “She’s my life. She’s my whole life.”
After staring at my expression for a moment, he zips up his flak jacket and slings a pack over his shoulders. He changed out of his suit faster than Clark Kent changes in a phone booth, and now he’s in full tactical gear and a pair of scuffed combat boots, which are annoyingly big.
He probably stuffs socks into the toes.
He says, “So when I bring her back in one piece, you’ll owe me.”
Then he’s gone, leaving me spitting obscenities after him.
From across the warehouse, Doc calls out, “You want a burger, man? I make a mean bacon cheeseburger with all the trimmings.”
I holler, “I don’t want a f*****g hamburger! I want a f*****g phone!”
“You want a phone, but what you need is a chill pill, dude.” He ambles over to the desk where the computers are, munching on a stalk of celery. “If anybody can get your girl back, it’s that man who just left. He’s legendary.”
I swear a blood vessel in my brain is about to burst. “So he keeps telling me.”
From a drawer of the desk, Doc removes a black cell phone. He turns it on, presses a few buttons, then brings it over to me.
“Is this secure?”
“Duh.”
I take it from him and start dialing Connor’s number. “I suppose if I asked you about Killian, you wouldn’t tell me anything.”
“Not at all. Ask away.”
He’s so nonchalant and the answer is so unexpected, I stop in the middle of dialing and look up.
“Okay. Who is he?”
“You mean who is he really? I have no clue, man. I don’t even know if Killian is his real name.”
I deadpan, “Thanks. That’s super helpful. So glad we had this heart-to-heart.”
“I’m just telling you the truth. He operates on a need-to-know basis, and pretty much everything about him is do-not-need-to-know.”
“How’d you meet him?”
“I was freelancing for Uncle Sam—”
“You’re American?”
“Nope.”
We stare at each other. “I think the follow-up question is pretty obvious.”
He says, “What does my nationality have to do with anything? Governments all over the world hire noncitizens for black ops. The US just happens to have a really fat budget for back-channel jobs, so I work with them most often.”
“So you’re a spy.”
“First and foremost, I’m a doctor. I just go where the work takes me. And in Killian’s case, it was a job in Pakistan. I met him right before he tipped off the CIA to bin Laden’s location—”
“Wait.” I prop myself up on my elbows, prickling with disbelief. “You’re telling me Killian was responsible for taking down bin Laden?”
“No, man,” he says, eyes glinting with mischief. “SEAL Team Six took down bin Laden. Killian just told them where he was hiding.”
“Bullshit. He made that up.”
Doc lifts his hands. “I’m only saying, I overheard the man make a phone call and give somebody an address to a compound in Abbottabad, and not even an hour later, bin Laden was dead at a compound at that address in Abbottabad. You do the math.”
“If you overheard him, he wanted you to overhear him! He was probably talking to a dial tone!”
“Nah, there’ve been way too many other things like that. He’s the real deal. Anyway, he and I got friendly after I saved his brother’s leg. Stepped on an antipersonnel mine over in Rawalpindi—”
“What? Killian has a brother?”
“A twin, yeah. He’s in the biz, too.”
We stare at each other. Doc munches on his celery. I say, “A twin. This just keeps getting better and better.”
“They look exactly alike. Kinda creepy, actually. Same tattoos and everything.”
“That is creepy.”
“Tell me about it. There’ve been a few times I wasn’t sure which one of them I was talking to.”
“What’s the brother’s name?”
“Liam.”
“Do you know their last name?”
- Writer
