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leigh57Title: What If You Catch Me, Where Would We Land
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
leigh57
Pairing: Jack Bauer/Renee Walker
Word Count: 33,600 total – a little over 9000 for this chapter
Rating/Warnings: R; sex, violence, language, references to physical and sexual abuse, spoilers for the entire series
Summary: But every once in a while when the guards were down, he’d click off the filters and let himself have her back, only for a minute. Light of her smile, smell of the skin on her neck, brush of her hand on his chest, checking for wounds. Rich stereo soundtrack of her voice.
Author's notes: With Chapter One
Another quick note about this chapter. At some point, the ending will be a touch different. Not much, but a little. Just putting that out there.
Chapter 5: Walk away now, and you’re gonna start a war
When it happened, it felt like the blinding white of flash photography, gone before you notice it’s there, leaving behind nagging round purple echoes.
Jack had set his gun on the table so he could get dressed, and although he was relatively confident by now that no one had tailed either of them to London, years of fugitive living and ingrained habits made him glance back and forth between the door and his weapon as he pulled on a pair of jeans. He had just stuck his head into a black t-shirt when he heard a click. He scanned the door; there were two distinct shadows blocking part of the light.
He’d managed one of the two strides to the table (arm extended to grab the gun faster) when something smashed into the middle of his back, slamming him headfirst into the dark wood. Hands pinned his arms and searing pain blurred his vision, but he refocused quickly enough to throw his body sideways, knocking his assailant off balance so that Jack could ram an elbow backwards, hard. With the half second that bought him, he went for the gun again. His fingers closed over it and without turning around he pointed it under his arm and fired two shots, muffled by the silencer. The body behind him hit the ground with a dull thud, and he spun around to find himself face to face with the barrel of a 9 mm.
He opened his mouth to yell for Renee (not that she could probably hear him over the insane bathroom fan that you couldn’t turn off without turning off the light), but the man holding the gun grabbed him by the throat.
“You don’t want to do that,” he said, his voice a low menacing whisper. “One sound, and I will walk in there and splatter her brains all over the pretty tile before she has the chance to retrieve the weapon I’m sure is no more than a few feet away. Understand?”
Jack nodded.
“Good.” The man was taller than Jack, six one or two, with dark brown hair and greyish-blue eyes. His English was better than most Americans’, but the precise consonants and the occasional oddly shaped vowel told Jack he was Russian.
Fuck. They’d finally found him and, because of his idiocy, Renee.
“Give me your weapon.”
Jack released the gun, praying that Renee was in one of her moods where she washed her hair three times.
“Whatever you want,” Jack whispered, “I’ll do it. Just leave her out of it. She has nothing to do with what I did.”
“That’s sweet, dickhead.” The man jerked his head at another man standing closer to the door. “Check Alexei. Is he dead?”
Jack watched as he strode forward and bent over, holding two fingers to the neck of Jack’s victim. “Yes.”
“Well. You can call me Peter. You’ve already got our team a man down, so if you don’t want to piss me off more, listen up.” Jack swallowed, taking in the way this asshole used American idiom despite the slight accent. Interesting. “Come with us, no questions, and we leave her alone. Deal?”
Jack heard the brief squeak as Renee switched off the water. Blood welled in his mouth where he’d bitten down on his tongue.
“Deal. Let’s go. Now.”
The other man gestured at Alexei. “What about him?”
Peter shrugged, pinning Jack’s arms behind his back and binding them with tape he’d pulled out of his leather jacket. “Leave him. She’ll know we’re serious.” Throwing the coat over Jack’s shoulders so nobody glancing at them would notice that his hands were tied, Peter shoved Jack toward the door.
_________________________
Renee turned off the shower, squeezing water from the ends of her hair as she watched the steam float around her in a mini cloud. She rotated her neck and shrugged her shoulders, trying to shake out the remaining tension the shower hadn’t vanquished. The last few days had been . . . well she didn’t know the words for the sensation that had enveloped her the second Jack opened the hotel room door. What she did know was that despite the insanity of the circumstances, she had no memory of the last time she’d been this happy, the last time she hadn’t felt as if there were millions of tiny holes inside her, missing pieces she’d never figure out how to find.
Still, the full-out emotional intensity of it all felt something like sprinting a marathon, and she was exhausted.
Climbing out of the shower, she wrapped a towel around her chest and shot a look at her Glock sitting on the back of the toilet. Jack wouldn’t let her shower alone unless she took it with her, and what the hell – humoring him on that subject was easy enough. She patted her face dry and squeezed some toothpaste onto her toothbrush, the green gel a neat S just like in those idiotic commercials. As she brushed, she surveyed the pile of clothes she’d tossed on the porcelain countertop.
Crap. No bra.
“Hey Luke,” she called through the door, teasing. “Could you hand me my bra?”
Silence.
“Luke?” she yelled, louder.
Silence. Nothing but the last remnants of her shower water dripping out of the faucet and the loud drone of the bathroom fan.
An avalanche of ice exploded at the base of her neck, cold that rocketed down her spine and out across her shoulders and arms.
She tightened the towel and picked up her gun, cocking it at quietly as possible. After two deep breaths, she opened the bathroom door.
A body on the floor, dark blond hair and oh god please no, but higher-order processing kicked in and with a glimpse of the man’s face she knew it wasn’t Jack. Heart slamming with relief and barely suppressed terror, she surveyed the large room, making sure that nobody else was hidden, waiting for her.
When she was satisfied that she was alone with this presumably dead body (she checked for weapons, felt for a pulse), she began going over the room, inch by inch.
Training, goddammit. Focus. Think about right now.
She was reaching into the dead guy’s jeans pocket, searching for ID (or anything that might help her figure out what the fuck was going on), when the room phone rang, the eruption of sound so loud and so unsettling to her frayed nerves that her startle reflex almost knocked her over.
Two long strides and she grabbed the receiver, the cool plastic slippery in her sweaty hand. She didn’t get a word out before a deep distorted male voice said, “Did you enjoy your shower? It’s fortunate that you decided to take a long one.”
“Where is he?” She couldn’t help thinking about the last time she’d said those words, the terror and hopelessness that followed the answers.
“Safe.”
“Let me talk to him.”
“Oh I offered,” said the voice, a hint of amusement detectable even through whatever he was using to mask recognition. “He refuses to say anything.”
Renee shut her eyes. Jack. Of course he wouldn’t get on the phone, even though his refusal to cooperate only cemented her belief that she was talking to the asshole who had him.
“Fine. What do you want?”
“You.”
“So come get me.”
“Save the commands for when you have your boyfriend here back. Are you listening?”
“Yes.” She clutched the carved wood at the edge of the bedside table, her fingernail tapping down each curved layer.
“Meet me at 2350 Bankside, in the alleyway to the left of the building. I’d tell you to come alone but I don’t think I have to worry, do I?” She heard him chuckle into the phone.
“And then what?”
“We’ll take it from there. And don’t even think about surprising us by showing up ahead of time. If I so much as smell your fancy shampoo, I’ll kill him.” A click indicated that he’d hung up.
For a few seconds she stood there, receiver in her hand, staring at the worn tread pattern on the bottom of the dead guy’s shoe. Then she slammed the phone down and grabbed whatever clothing was closest, yanking on her shirt and jeans at practically the same time. Her Glock clutched in her right hand, she pulled both her and Jack’s duffels from the suitcase rack. She tossed them on the bed and went methodically through the room, picking up only what was absolutely necessary and shoving it into Jack’s bag, because it was larger. One change of clothes for both of them. Toothbrush and toothpaste.
Jack’s shoes.
What were they doing to him, right now, because of her?
Keeping the inert man on the floor in her peripheral vision, she pulled the extra clips from her own bag. From Jack’s bag she extracted his spare pistol and the half dozen clips with it. She wiped her right hand on her jeans before taking a firmer grip on her gun as she slipped into her jacket and began to load the interior pockets with ammunition. When she was satisfied that she had taken everything possible that would still permit her to move around without arousing suspicion, she checked the dead guy’s pulse again. Nothing. She inhaled sharply and tucked her gun into the waistband of her jeans before pulling her shirt over it.
At the door, she listened for sounds in the hallway. When it was quiet enough to take the risk, she slung the “Do Not Disturb” sign over the door knob on the off chance it would buy her a few minutes before all hell broke loose. Then she hoisted the heavy duffel over her shoulder and walked down the hallway as quietly as she could, turning into the stairs that would take her to the emergency exit rather than through the lobby.
_________________________
“We should have killed them and gotten the fuck out of here.” Jack heard the crack of a can snapping open, soda or beer and what was probably the scrape of a chair leg along the floor.
“Yuri wants her alive. No money unless she’s alive.”
“You saw what she did to Ziya. And Vladimir. We could put a bullet in his head, shut her up, and be on the plane to Prague before they found the body.”
A crinkling noise, some kind of wrapper. “And then we don’t get paid. Why are you so stupid? You’ll never see the kind of cash we’ll get if we bring her back for Yuri to play with.” Jack squeezed his eyes shut, trying to block the images that rose in his mind and focus on the conversation he could barely hear through the partially open door.
“Maybe I like my thumbs more than you like yours.”
“There are four of us. We know she’s coming.” Peter chuckled. “Did you read her file?”
“I scanned it. Yuri should use bullet points. I fell asleep a third of the way through. Takes him three paragraphs to explain what I could say in a sentence.”
“That’s why you’re never running the op, jackass.” A thud, like something slamming on a table. “As long as we’ve got him, she won’t do a fucking thing. Drink your goddamn soda and wait for her.” A pause. “Fuck.”
“What?”
Peter switched into rapid Russian. It was too fast and too colloquial for Jack to catch anything beyond, “Why the fuck are we speaking English? And close the door before he-” The rest got lost in a swirl of tangled syllables Jack couldn’t keep up with fast enough to decode. Footsteps approached the door and it slammed, leaving the room in semi-darkness. A click and the slide of grinding metal indicated at least two locks in place.
Breathing while his eyes adjusted to the half-light, Jack felt the bouncing echo of Peter’s words pinging on repeat in his brain.
Bring her back for Yuri to play with.
He swallowed the taste of blood that lingered in his mouth where he’d bitten his tongue and concentrated on right now, on requirements, what he needed to do within the next five minutes, ten minutes, half an hour.
The room was small, ten or twelve feet square, with concrete block for walls. They’d blindfolded him in the van, but they’d taken him down a flight of stairs, so he was below street level. No windows, confirming that theory, although there was another door on the wall Jack was facing, the door they’d used to bring him in, so he knew that it led to a corridor or hallway. The only light in the room shone from two long bright rectangles under the doors.
Scanning the area, Jack didn’t see much that might prove useful. Two folding chairs (like the one to which he was bound) leaned against the wall. He twisted his neck to look behind him. A battered scratched-up card table stood in the corner with a couple of empty plastic crates stacked beside it.
Fuck.
He couldn’t be sure what time it was, but he had no doubt that Renee would show up early, perhaps by hours. She’d give herself time to assess the situation, but she’d also want the possibility of surprise on her side.
He needed to get his hands free. Squinting at the card table, he noticed that one of the screws on a crossbar near him was loose – jutting out. Perfect. He gave an experimental shove sideways, testing how much noise his chair would make moving across the floor. Fortunately, the rubber caps covering the cheap metal legs prevented any scraping, and the only noise was a slight swish.
He paused, waiting to see if he’d attracted attention. When the voices in the other room continued to chatter in rapid Russian, he resumed movement, working his chair toward the table a few inches at a time.
Within five minutes he’d closed the distance. It took some maneuvering, but he managed to get his back to the bar from which the screw protruded. Stretching his arms until the strain pulled uncomfortably at his shoulders, he tried to hook the rope on the screw. On the third time it caught, and he exhaled in relief while continuing to watch the door.
Quietly, he began to saw the rope back and forth over the sharp bands of the screw, ignoring the pain when the metal caught his hand again, tiny slices. He watched the door and worked as he felt sweat spreading out across the front of his shirt, rolling in beads down his neck and back, and dripping (salty sting) into his eyes. He kept his breathing even, his eyes focused on the door and his mind focused on the goal.
He had to be mobile by the time Renee got there.
Because if he wasn’t, she’d try to take them alone.
_________________________
Five blocks away from the designated meeting point, Renee parked the green Chevy Aveo she’d hotwired a few streets down from the bed and breakfast. In this industrial section of town (warehouses and the permanent smell of dust and burning), vehicles were rare at this time of night, and although she didn’t love the idea of approaching on foot – no comm, no surveillance, no backup to call – she knew her only choice was to move forward, preferably with so much speed that she didn’t have time to ponder the insanity of what she was about to do.
Even in the cool damp air her jacket felt oppressive, weight of the clips and their jutting edges pressing her ribs as she ran. Her hair stuck to her sweaty temple and she jammed it aside, irritated by the way each slap of her shoes on the pavement seemed to reverberate down the silent street.
A few hundred yards away she slowed, moving in the shadows of the building next to the address she’d been given. Clouds obscured the moon, so she had that working for her. She held up the night vision binoculars she’d found in Jack’s bag, moving the twin circles slowly across the adjacent building’s façade. One guard that she could see, pacing back and forth in front of a double door, automatic slung over his shoulder. A Kevlar vest covered his dark t-shirt. He had a walkie talkie in his hand (bursts of static fuzz she could hear even from her vantage point), and Renee held herself still in the shadows to see if she could pick up a pattern to his communication. Holding her watch under the sleeve of her jacket, she illuminated it to check the time.
9:14. She waited.
At 9:15, the guard spoke briefly into his comm. She was too far away to catch what he said, but his report must have been satisfactory. He resumed pacing.
For fifteen minutes she stood in the large building’s recessed doorway, observing. Although the guard’s body language was tense and he held his weapon as if he expected ambush at any moment, he reported in precisely on the five-minute mark. Otherwise, he didn’t respond to the intermittent traffic on the comm.
When he checked in at 9:30, she was ready. She heard the click indicating he’d received a reply and without hesitation she fired two rounds at his head; the silencer muffled most of the noise. He hit the asphalt, a dark splatter on the concrete wall behind him. Renee darted across the street, her gun pointed at the inert body on the ground. Even ten steps away it was clear she didn’t have to worry. One of her shots had missed, but the other had hit him almost directly between the eyes. She pulled the AK-74 (unpleasant flash to her undercover time with Vladimir’s organization) off his limp arm, stuck his comm unit in her pocket, and – after a final scan of her surroundings to make sure nobody else was outdoors on this side of the building – reached for the door.
_________________________
Jack felt the give as the final thread in the rope binding his arms snapped. He rolled his aching shoulders in three quick circles and then, faster this time because he could use his arms to lift the chair, began to move to his original position. He was surprised they hadn’t checked on him already – unexpected luck. The second he had himself back where Peter had placed him, he put his arms behind his back again and concentrated on slowing his breathing, hoping the sweat trickling down his temple either wouldn’t show in the half-light or could be chalked up to the warmth of the room.
Within a minute Peter walked in, munching on a Crunchie bar. The gold wrapper crinkled as he pulled it down. “You comfortable?”
Jack stared at him as he chewed. In the small echoey room Jack could hear the sound of honeycomb cracking apart. He held his arms motionless behind his back.
“Don’t feel chatty? That’s too bad.” He thumbed a smudge of chocolate off his lip. “My boss wants me to find out whast Ms. Walker told the CIA. And you know, don’t you? Since you two seem-” Peter popped the last bite of the candy bar into his mouth and laughed. “Close.” He balled up the wrapped and aimed it at Jack’s head. “You must have been pretty surprised when she turned up not dead.”
Jack fixed his eyes on the second bar of Velcro decorating Peter’s Kevlar in an attempt to distract himself from how satisfying it would feel to smash the bones of this motherfucker’s nose up into his brain.
Peter sucked chocolate from his teeth and leaned forward, his face so close to Jack’s that Jack held his breath for a second, hoping the angle of the other man’s vision wouldn’t allow him to see that Jack’s hands were no longer secured. “Doesn’t matter what you say or don’t say. You know that, right? As soon as she gets here I’ll let her watch while I put a couple bullets in your brain, and then we’ll take her back to my boss. I’m sure he won’t have a lot of trouble getting her to talk to him.” He smirked. “Yuri has a way with people.”
Peter walked toward the door and turned with his hand on the knob. “I’d better check the perimeter. She’ll undoubtedly be early. So predictable.” He was yammering in Russian before he even shut the door behind him, locks scraping into place.
Immediately, Jack stretched his arms to loosen the muscles and went to work on the duct tape that bound his feet (Who were these guys? Why hadn’t they used rope for his feet, too?). He had to take it inch by inch, or the ripping adhesive would make too much noise. When he finally managed to free his legs, the rope that held his torso to the chair was effortless. Scraped fingers and a little rope burn, but in thirty seconds he was free.
Standing silently, he cased the room for anything he could use as a weapon, but there was nothing, not even a pen or a thumbtack. Jack coiled the length of rope he’d just pulled off himself around one hand, walked cautiously across the room, and put his ear to the opposite door, listening for noise in the hallway.
All he heard was the whoosh of the ventilation system. He tested the doorknob, astonished to find it unlocked. It wasn’t as if he spent a lot of time thinking about his reputation, but given what he’d done to the Russians, Jack was certain that if these assholes knew who he was, they’d be a bit more concerned with containment. He tabled that to puzzle over later, because Renee was either on her way or already here, and he needed to find her before they did. He opened the door a millimeter, checking to see if the hinges would squeak. When they didn’t, he slipped out into the hallway (dim fluorescent lights apparently on the nighttime energy saver setting) and ran, his bare bruised feet painful and cold where they hit the tile.
_________________________
Renee padded down the hallway in her socks now (boots discarded just inside the door because the hallway’s acoustics made the tap of the small heel sound like a jackhammer), trying to GPS the building in her head. She’d come in on the opposite side from where she’d been instructed to enter, but that told her nothing about where they were holding Jack. Her Glock was tucked into her jeans, and she held the dead Russian’s rifle in front of her as she moved.
She’d decided to work her way to the other side of the building when the door no more than ten feet in front of her (marked ‘Stairs’) opened. Renee raised the AK-74, but before she could pull the trigger the man had launched himself at her. She slammed backwards, expecting to feel the crushing impact of the hard tile on the back of her head, but . . . why the fuck was he holding her shoulders, partially breaking her fall? Her head still knocked into the ground with a nauseating thud, full weight of a muscular body on top of her.
“Dmitri!” His thumbs dug into her muscles of her upper arms, holding her still. His breath smelled like cigarettes and candy. He shouted in Russian, “She’s here. Hurry up!”
Suddenly Renee realized that although he had her mostly immobile, her thumb was still on the trigger of the AK-74 that was pinned between them. Sucking in her stomach and chest to give herself a few centimeters to move, she angled the gun and fired off a burst of bullets. Red Square had never used anything but armor piercing, and as the recoil jolted into her ribs she could only hope they hadn’t changed that practice.
The clutching fingers released their grip on her arms. A sucking gurgle rattled through the man’s chest. He choked, violent convulsion of his upper body, and half a second later blood poured from his mouth, gushing onto Renee’s neck and down her chest. She tried to push him off of her, but he still had enough strength to press her down with his legs. She paused, working to breathe, but when she heard the slam of footsteps running, fast, she threw her arms forward and rolled sideways with all her strength, and she was free.
She didn’t even manage to stand all the way up before another man was on her, this one shorter and thinner, but just as strong. He grabbed her wrists and threw her against the wall, where her head smashed into concrete. Despite the pain ricocheting through her skull, she tried to bring her knee up and sideways into her assailant’s groin, but he shifted left and all she got was his hip bone.
“You are a crazy bitch.” His fingers squeezed her wrists so tightly that she could already feel the tingling where her circulation was cut off. “I will never understand why Yuri insists we can’t kill you, because we’re three men down and he doesn’t even have you yet.” She struggled, determined to fight him until he did kill her or she couldn’t move, whichever came first, but he had her pinned too well. The man laughed, chilly grey-blue eyes and the scent of peppermint breath spray. “I don’t remember him saying we couldn’t hurt you.”
One of his hands released her wrist and went for her throat, fingers pressing into her, cutting off her air. “Yuri says you’re beautiful. I bet I’ll find you a lot more attractive when you’re unconscious.” The atmosphere began to float with silver and gold sparkles.
Something moved in her peripheral vision.
An explosive crack and the hands gripping her throat and wrist were gone. Another snap as she choked, sucking in air. She slid down the wall a few feet, dizzy and disoriented, working to make her eyes focus.
A dark shape moved toward her and she reflexively went for the gun she could feel tucked under her shirt.
“Don’t. It’s me. It’s okay.”
The air swirled into focus again and she found herself staring at Jack, who had stopped moving forward the second she went for her gun. Coughing again, she rubbed at her throat, working to revive circulation.
Suddenly Jack was in front of her, face chalk white, his hands pulling at her shirt. “Where’d they hit you? Did the bullet go through? Does it hurt to breathe?”
The dry ache in her throat made it hard to talk, but Jack’s voice told her he was on the verge of meltdown so she responded rapid-fire, the words tumbling out as fast as she could make her mouth move. “Jack, stop. The blood’s not mine. None of it, unless I scraped myself or something. Nobody shot me.”
She nodded toward the motionless body on the tile in front of them, a red pool widening around his chest. “He had me pinned and I managed to pull back enough to get a good angle.” She drew in a steadier breath. “But I couldn’t get him off me right away.”
“You’re sure?” His voice was almost inaudible.
“I’m sure.” She wiped a bloody hand on her jeans and nodded toward the other body that now lay on the floor of the hallway, the man’s neck twisted at a horrifying angle. “We have to get out of here. How many more of them are there?”
Jack swallowed convulsively and for a beat she thought he wasn’t going to answer her, but he muttered, “At least two. Maybe three. I wasn’t in the room with them so I had to guess from the voices.”
From the hallway around the corner she could hear the scuffling thud of boots, syncopation of several pairs, growing louder with each step. She pointed to the “Exit” sign maybe fifteen yards down the hall. Her steps as silent as she could make them, she ran the few strides and pushed open the doorway. She held it, heart hammering, while Jack pulled the bloody AK-74 off the man whose neck he’d snapped. When he’d retrieved it, he sprinted through the door and she pushed it shut behind them just in time to hear the impact of boots echoing off the walls as their pursuers rounded the corner. Bolts of pain lit up the back of her head, but she leaned into the wall, rough cement on the skin of her spine, and waited.
_________________________
Jack held the borrowed automatic ready, trying to make sense of the confusion in the hallway outside the stairwell. His ear was near the door, but he couldn’t stop staring at Renee, at the vivid red that stuck her shirt to her stomach and chest and was beginning to cake on the skin of her arms and neck. The only discoloration on her face was a smudge of dirt on her left cheekbone, and that was comforting. She stood focused, listening to the exchange in rapid Russian. After a second she caught his eye and held up two fingers before pointing outside the door. He nodded.
Suddenly, one of the men said something, to which the other one responded, “Da,” and it went quiet. Greenish-white in the fluorescent light, Renee mouthed, “They’re checking this door,” and stepped backward to give herself a better angle and more cover when the door opened.
With no warning, an explosion of gunfire hit the other side of the door, deafening ring of bullets on steel. In English, Peter said, drawing out the words as if to demonstrate his complete control of the situation, “You’ve killed Dmitri and Sergei and I assume Luka is dead too if you made it past his checkpoint, Ms. Walker.”
Silence. Stillness. A bulb in one of the overhead lights made a faint pop and flickered out.
“Yuri knew what he was dealing with when he sent us to get her,” Peter continued. “If you put your weapons down and come out, I’ll kill you quickly, Mr. Jensen. I’ll also make sure that Ms. Walker is delivered to Yuri unharmed.”
Quiet again. Jack could hear the faint ticking of his own watch. With each click, he thought about what this motherfucker would do to Renee if he got his hands on her. Even on the off-chance he managed to make her talk, he wouldn’t kill her. Jack had seen how Vladimir and his people played. The higher-ups were probably fifty times worse. They’d toy with her for god knows how long. He glanced at Renee, whose eyes were fixed on the handle of the door.
Thirty more seconds of silence, and a staccato burst of bullets hit the outside of the door. The handle turned and all Jack could see from his angle was the weapon’s muzzle, sparks of light and bullets spraying a few feet to the left of where Renee was standing. He couldn’t fire at the gun without the risk of hitting Renee, but he nodded at her and stepped back. Without a second’s hesitation, she took a step forward and began firing, short controlled bursts. One of them knocked the gun sideways a few inches, and the ammo stopped.
On autopilot, Jack jumped forward and grabbed the gun, yanking Peter into the room. Renee was waiting. She dropped him with several rounds to the chest and kicked his weapon, sending it clattering across the room. It bounced off the wall with a thud, and in the beat of silence that followed Jack heard Renee’s rapid breathing and the sound of footsteps, boots thudding down the hallway. Each tap grew fainter.
His weapon still pointed at the door, Jack walked over to Renee. In the dim light she looked ghost-white against the red smears on her skin. He had to take deep breaths to keep himself locked in this moment, focused on the current problem. He touched her face, his eyes scanning hers. “You’re sure you’re okay?”
“I could use a handful of Advil, but yeah, I’m fine.” She rubbed at the back of her neck with her free hand. “Any idea where he’s going?” Renee walked a few steps and picked up Peter’s AK-74.
“Probably back to where they were holding me, if he didn’t run.” Jack couldn’t ignore the way she winced when she straightened up. “How bad is your head?”
She half-smiled. “Don’t start. It’s fine. Let’s go.”
Before he could respond, she shoved the door open with the barrel of her gun, glanced both directions, and said, “You coming?”
He wanted to say, No. And neither are you. But he couldn’t afford to stop and think about this—about the fact that he’d been back in her presence for less than three days and she was already barefoot, covered in blood and bruises, one gun ready to fire, one stuffed into her jeans, ready to walk into a situation that could easily end with her taking a bullet to the head or worse – because if he did there was no chance he’d stay on task.
Right now, they needed to stop the remaining man or men from contacting anyone else. He pulled a clip out of Peter’s coat and rammed it into the weapon. “Yeah. Let’s get this done.”
_________________________
“What’s your name?” Jack flipped the folding chair around and straddled it, one hand resting on the cheap fabric while the other held his SIG in sweaty tired fingers.
“Nikolai. Now go fuck yourself.”
“Maybe later.” Jack chuffed and moved his chair a few inches closer, scrape on the floor amplified by the acoustics of the small room. “Right now I need you to make a phone call.”
The prisoner stared at Jack and said nothing. Blood trickled down the side of his face where Renee had caught him with the butt of her Glock.
Jack looked up at her. She was half-sitting on a stool near the wall, white and sweaty. Her knee bounced back and forth, but she held the AK-74 steady at her side, pointed at the thin, dark-haired Russian tied to the chair in front of her. The blood on her shirt was beginning to dry, the cotton material sticking to her stomach and chest. Jack could feel his head spinning from low blood sugar and adrenaline aftermath, and he had to fight the urge to put a bullet through this motherfucker’s brain, grab Renee, and get the hell out of there.
Focus, goddammit. Think. Anything that buys time..
“Tell me about Yuri.”
Nikolai attempted a stark smile. “He likes Pizza Hut breadsticks and pissing off the CIA. And he’ll cut your girlfriend into small pieces once she tells him what he wants to know and he’s had the chance to enjoy her a little.” He smirked. “He was always jealous of Vladimir’s toys.”
Jack tightened the grip on his gun, careful to keep his finger away from the trigger. “No,” he hissed, his face heating with rage. “That’s not what’s gonna happen.”
“Dmitri called him.” Nikolai didn’t blink. “Before he went with Sergei to find her.”
“Bullshit,” Jack replied, forcing his tone to remain level. “Yuri doesn’t know a fucking thing. Let me tell you how I think the last half an hour went down.” In his peripheral vision, he saw Renee slide all the way onto the stool, one hand massaging her temple. He swallowed and refocused on Nikolai. “Your plan to use me to as bait worked, except for the part where she’s three times smarter than you realized.” He held the cold muzzle of the gun to Nikolai’s cheek. “And a better shot. What you should have done is called in to say you’d fucked up and ask for instructions. But you and Dmitri figured you could get it back under control and none of the higher-ups would have to know, right?”
Nikolai was quiet, but he broke eye contact with Jack, looking at the opposite wall, his face shadowed with the light of the single bulb that hung suspended from the ceiling.
Jack shifted in his chair, pushing his scuffed-up feet into the dirty floor. “Look. You’re a professional. You know there is no scenario where you walk out of this alive.” Nikolai’s eyes snapped back to Jack’s. “The question is how you want to die. Do it my way, and it’s one bullet. You won’t even feel it.” Nikolai swallowed. “Screw with me or make me work for this, and I’ll make it hurt.”
Then Jack leaned closer, his face near the other man’s ear, breathing in the blend of dirt, sweat, greasy unwashed hair, and overused French cologne. He whispered, fighting the tremor that worked its way into his voice when he got close to this subject, “But if anything happens to her, not only will I find the slowest, most painful way to kill you, but I will make it my mission in life to do the same thing to your entire family.” He backed off and cleared his throat, making eye contact with Renee for a split second before refocusing on Nikolai. Maybe it was the poor lighting, but a hint of color seemed to have washed back into her face, and she wasn’t rubbing her head anymore. “Do we understand each other?”
“Who the fuck are you? We told Yuri you were some guy she picked up on her vacation.”
Jack chuffed. “That’s as close to the truth as you’re going to get. I’m waiting for your answer.”
The room went almost silent. Jack could hear the hum of the central heating system. Renee’s stool squeaked as she tipped two of its legs off the floor and reclined against the wall.
Nikolai coughed and readjusted his body to sit straighter. “You’re right. Yuri knows only that we found the two of you. We thought we could grab her, get rid of you, and he’d never find out.”
Jack felt his body relax, the muscles in his legs and torso loosening a little. “Good. Now tell me what Yuri wants with her.”
“When Tokarev shot her, everyone believed he’d completed the task and she was dead. Novakovich. Even Suvarov. But something didn’t sit right with Yuri. He kept pushing, making inquiries even after Suvarov told him to leave it alone and stop risking exposure by seeking out information.” He twisted his neck until it gave a pop. “Yuri doesn’t listen. Through some backchannels he found out that she was being held at Covington, but that’s as far as he got. Whoever ran that op should get a medal, because Yuri has contacts everywhere, but there were no leaks. Nothing.” He shrugged, bound hands bouncing in his lap. “He knew she’d testify before they relocated her. All he wants is to know what she told them.” He looked over his shoulder, addressing Renee. “You knew everything about Vladimir’s operation, didn’t you?”
Renee managed to look grim even as one edge of her mouth tipped up. “Among other things.”
Nikolai smirked. “We all told Vlad he should have killed you when he had the chance. He was so determined to get another piece of you that-”
Jack bolted from his chair and sent it flying sideways as he bashed his forearm full force into Nikolai’s chest. The chair smashed into the floor; a splinter of wood cracked off and slid along the tile. Jack was on top of him (searing white fury and helpless flashbacks to watching Vladimir put his hands all over Renee’s body, knowing what he’d done to her, what she’d given up for a government that had been willing to sell her out without a second thought), knee in his stomach, cocked gun on his cheek, when he heard Renee’s voice through the fog.
“Jack. Stop. Let him go so he can make the call.”
Jack jabbed his knee into the other man’s ribs where he knew it would hurt the most and then stood up, watching Renee’s face for a second before he wiped a hand on his jeans and hauled the chair into the upright position. “Here’s what you’re gonna do if you don’t want the slower version of what I did to Tokarev.”
Nikolai paled. “That was you?”
“Yeah. That was me. You think I’m serious now?”
Nikolai nodded.
"This your phone?” Jack asked, holding up the cell phone Renee had found in the man’s pocket when she’d patted him down.
“Yes.”
“I’ll call Yuri. When he picks up, you’ll tell him that the plan worked perfectly. You killed me, but you’ve got Agent Walker. You’re bringing her in, but you can’t get a flight out until early tomorrow morning.” He slid the phone open and clicked into the ‘contacts’ menu, but he paused. “Don’t even think about fucking with me.” He cocked his had in Renee’s direction. “She speaks flawless Russian, which I’m sure you know, down to idiomatic expressions. If she thinks you’ve screwed up or tried to tip this dickhead off-”
“I won’t,” interrupted Nikolai. “Leave my family out of it. I’ll do whatever you want.”
_________________________
Renee stepped closer as Nikolai dialed, her eyes focused on his face. He spoke in bursts of rapid Russian, a bead of sweat rolling down his temple and off his jaw. Jack’s eyes darted back and forth between Nikolai’s white face – almost green in the pale overhead light – and Renee’s, her mouth set and her forehead lined in concentration.
The conversation was over in less than two minutes. Nikolai slid the phone shut and handed it to Jack. “It’s done. You’ve got at least a day now, perhaps a day and a half.” He swallowed. “Do it. You promised quickly.”
Jack lifted his eyes to Renee’s, absorbing the horrible collision of emotions in her exhausted expression. She nodded.
The vibrations from his SIG traveled up his arm into his neck, making him shiver as he squeezed the trigger and put a bullet through Nikolai’s brain. The body collapsed to the floor with an echoing thud; the chair legs rattled as they settled back to the tile.
The oppressive silence that followed felt almost alive. Jack watched as blood flowed in an expanding pattern across the floor. He could hear Renee’s shallow breathing, the friction of her weapon against her shirt. After another beat she said (the words low and enervated), “Jack, let’s go. We need to get cleaned up before dawn.” She rotated her shoulders, shrugging out tension. “I brought a bag with a change of clothes. The car’s a couple blocks away.”
“Okay.” He walked to the corner and grabbed another AK-74, popping out the magazine to see if it was full. “How’s your ammo?”
“Fine. I grabbed a few more clips from their box. We need to get rid of these guns though.”
“Not ‘til we’re locked down somewhere with a concrete plan. We should be on our way out of the country by tomorrow morning.”
“We can’t go anywhere looking like this!” She pulled a hair tie off her wrist and looped the sweaty mess into a listless ponytail. “We have time for a goddamn shower and a sandwich.” He didn’t miss the edgy irritation that had filtered into her voice.
“Fine,” he relented, still distracted by the crimson that covered her chest. “But we need to get at least a couple hours out of London before we stop.”
_________________________
In the cramped Chevy, Renee huddled into the jacket she’d brought, hugging it around her torso in an attempt to cover the blood. Even with the extra layer she shivered, nauseous yet hungry at the same time, so tired that she had to squinch her eyes shut to moisten them.
Jack stared at the dark road ahead. He clutched the steering wheel with both hands, knuckles pale from the force, and Renee’s peripheral vision caught the tight line of his jaw and the way his shoulders were locked two inches higher than they needed to be.
He hadn’t spoken since they got in the car over an hour ago. Just before she was about to pull open the door, he’d stopped her, fishing a flashlight from the duffel.
I think you might have a concussion. Let me look at your eyes.
Jack-
Please. If I need to take you to the hospital, we’ll figure it out. Let me look.
So she’d humored him as he put his hand over her eyes and held it there, fingers rough and cold, then removed it and made her headache worse by shining the light a few inches above her face. When he’d clicked off the light, he’d paused for a second, hand above the door of the car for support.
I think you’re okay.
I told you it was fine!
You are not a reliable source of information. I’ll check again when we find a place to stop. How much does it hurt?
Not enough to worry about. Let’s go.
She’d touched his hand and tried to catch his eye, but he only gave her finger the briefest squeeze and walked around the car, slamming the door and leaning over to connect the wires.
So she gazed out the window, pressing her aching feet against the glove compartment and watching the trees rush past framed against the faint glow that began to lighten the sky.
She took long, deep breaths (but exhaled inaudibly so Jack wouldn’t hear). She squared her shoulders and straightened her back.
And she got ready to win the fight they’d been waiting to have since the second she hit ‘send’ on the email to Chloe.
_________________________
Jack listened to the swish of the shower spray. It should have been soothing, but under the circumstances it reminded him of the beep on a timer-rigged explosive, each passing second one click closer to detonation.
He’d tried to sit down when Renee got in the shower (he’d offered to let her go first but she said he’d be faster). That had lasted maybe fifteen seconds before he jumped back up, pacing a diagonal path across the small floor of this shitty hotel room. He flexed his hands open and shut, knuckles dry and cracking from cheap soap on top of the various scrapes and cuts he’d received over the last twelve hours. He could feel the skin pulling apart as he stretched it, a welcome distraction from the coming confrontation.
She had to go back.
It was the only option that made sense.
But his mind fucked with him with while he fidgeted – images and sounds, scents and flashes of feeling. The quirk of her eyebrow when he said something she found ridiculous. The low vibration in her throat when he skimmed his finger up the inside of her thigh. The smell of her heated skin when she wasn’t even awake yet, his face pressed between her shoulder and her neck so he could breathe her. The soaring lift in his stomach when she just looked up at him and grinned, smile he hadn’t known she had in her until the past few days, the one that snuck up on him, knocked him sideways every time.
He forced all of that away and replaced it, brutal and surgical.
Eyes closed, he held Teri’s cooling, heavy body in his arms, felt the sticky dampness of her blood on his stomach. He clutched Audrey’s hand, struggled to speak in a way that might make her understand. He ran down the hallway barefoot, blood and the sheet and his own voice that sounded far off in the distance. He put his lips on Renee’s forehead, everything about her face unnaturally clean, as if washing off the blood made death prettier.
He couldn’t do it again.
“Jack?”
He yanked himself back into the present. Renee stood by the bathroom doorframe, a damp towel in her hand.
“You need to go back to Flagstaff,” he blurted, like the statement was all one word. “One phone call and-“ He surprised himself by needing to breathe in the middle of his sentence. “They’ll bitch a little and get you a ticket. You’ll be back by tonight and it won’t take them any time to reassign-“
“Jack, for Christ’s sake just shut up. I’m not going back.”
“Renee, you can’t-”
“No!” she exclaimed, a scary spin as her pitch arced up. “You’re not listening.”
He shook his head, vehement. “You’re the one who’s not listening. It took them less than three days to find you. Three days. His voice was rising, love and terror and fury twisting in his gut. “It’ll be less than a day now before they figure out that their operation went south. And when they do, they won’t send their second tier people for you this time.”
“Then we’d better get moving.” She reached for a shirt she’d tossed on the chair and walked over to the bed, stuffing it into the duffel bag.
“I can’t do this again.” For all his rage, his voice had dropped to a strained whisper.
“You?” She pushed the duffel aside and faced him full-on. “I can’t do this again. I can’t go back to that fucking silent house and that fucking job where the clock goes backwards and eat a bowl of fucking tomato soup every night because I’m too lazy to make anything else. I’m not going back there. It doesn’t matter what you say.” She took a deep breath, but she didn’t bother to push away the tear that was sliding past her cheek to her chin. He watched it splash, soak into her shirt.
“Goddammit, Renee.” He was yelling now, uncontrollable. “You don’t remember the hospital. I couldn’t sit but I couldn’t stand. I was talking to Chloe but I didn’t even know what she was saying. When the doctor came out of the operating room, it was like ten fucking years went by before he even spoke.” He tried to breathe, hands jammed into fists. He wanted to hit something so much it was like compulsion. He pictured his fist hammering into the doorframe, knuckles and blood and indented wood. “And when he did, it was like-”
He stopped. He could hear them both breathing, and further away, the drip of the crappy shower faucet.
His throat so tight that he wasn’t sure how he jammed the words out, he managed, “I’m so angry I shouldn’t even be in this room right now.” Another suck of air. “But I can’t leave you alone, because if anything-”
She moved forward, but he took a step back and said quickly, “Don’t touch me.”
“Okay.” If his words stung her, she didn’t flinch. After a second she sat on the edge of the bed, looking down where her toe made an imprint on the stained grey carpet.
A minute passed, or ten. The faucet stopped dripping and the heating unit pinged and rumbled to life.
When Renee spoke again, her tone was level and calculated. “Jack, listen. If you want to ditch me, I’m sure you can. You have a lot more experience at this than I do.” There was a waver on the last few words, and Jack felt his stomach drop even further as he realized what it was costing her to say this. “So that’s up to you. But even if you leave, I won’t go back to the States. I’d rather run than plant myself somewhere and wait for them to come get me.”
She rubbed a fingernail on the table. “Besides, you said it yourself, Jack. The smart thing is for me to go back, get reassigned. New identity. If you arrived at that conclusion, so will Yuri. Disappearing is at least unpredictable. And I think if the past couple days have proven anything, it’s that I’m safer with you.”
After a beat, he lifted his head and looked at her eyes. They were bloodshot and shiny, but so goddamn determined, one thing that had never changed since his first glance at her face.
“You have a hole in your chest because of me.”
“That is bullshit.” She stood up, cheeks bright pink, and this time when she walked towards him he stayed put. “I have a hole in my chest because I had a dangerous job. A job I loved. Her voice was thick and wavery again, but she didn’t bother trying to control it. “Jack, please. You’re the only thing that’s left.”
He tried to hold onto the anger, desperate because it was his only leverage, but it evaporated as quickly as it had arrived. He should have remembered, should have factored in that against all logic, he’d never managed to stay pissed off at her for more than two minutes at a stretch, even if she was leveling her weapon at him or slapping his face until it stung, left marks.
“I can’t leave unless I know you’ll be safe,” he muttered, defeated. His knees ached; he stepped sideways and sank into a chair, the wood hard on his back. In the moment of silence that followed, he suddenly realized he had one weapon left in his arsenal. “But you need to sit down and take a few minutes to think about what this means.”
“What are you talking about?” She didn’t move.
“Running. It’s not-” He flicked the pad of his thumb over a scab on his arm. “It gets old. Fast.”
“I didn’t figure we’d be hanging out in five-star hotels,” she retorted.
“You’re missing the point. Will you please listen to me?”
“I’m sorry.” She sat down across the tiny table from him, but she held herself stiff and made no move to touch the hand he was resting on the wood. “I’m listening.”
“You never stop looking over your shoulder. Never. When someone stares at you for a second longer than normal, you don’t have the luxury of thinking, ‘It’s probably nothing.’ You have to wonder, put it on your radar.” He slumped in the rigid chair, his foot bumping the table leg. “You get comfortable somewhere, start to feel a little bit settled, and have to leave in ten minutes because something doesn’t feel right. You lie to everyone. You can’t make friends. The college student at the coffee shop – the one who knows you like the double tall skim latte with a half shot of vanilla and carries around pictures of her kid? You talk to her while she makes your drink and wonder if she is a student or she has a kid. The nice old man at the newspaper stand is a potential threat because he might have seen your picture. You never sleep more than two or three hours at a time, and even that’s a luxury.” Jack glanced up, irritated by his sudden awareness of exactly how many places on his body hurt. “Is that what you want your life to be?”
She looked at him for several seconds. Then she whispered, “I want you. So I guess that means ‘yes.’”
Previous Chapter
Next Chapter
Author:
leigh57Pairing: Jack Bauer/Renee Walker
Word Count: 33,600 total – a little over 9000 for this chapter
Rating/Warnings: R; sex, violence, language, references to physical and sexual abuse, spoilers for the entire series
Summary: But every once in a while when the guards were down, he’d click off the filters and let himself have her back, only for a minute. Light of her smile, smell of the skin on her neck, brush of her hand on his chest, checking for wounds. Rich stereo soundtrack of her voice.
Author's notes: With Chapter One
Another quick note about this chapter. At some point, the ending will be a touch different. Not much, but a little. Just putting that out there.
Chapter 5: Walk away now, and you’re gonna start a war
When it happened, it felt like the blinding white of flash photography, gone before you notice it’s there, leaving behind nagging round purple echoes.
Jack had set his gun on the table so he could get dressed, and although he was relatively confident by now that no one had tailed either of them to London, years of fugitive living and ingrained habits made him glance back and forth between the door and his weapon as he pulled on a pair of jeans. He had just stuck his head into a black t-shirt when he heard a click. He scanned the door; there were two distinct shadows blocking part of the light.
He’d managed one of the two strides to the table (arm extended to grab the gun faster) when something smashed into the middle of his back, slamming him headfirst into the dark wood. Hands pinned his arms and searing pain blurred his vision, but he refocused quickly enough to throw his body sideways, knocking his assailant off balance so that Jack could ram an elbow backwards, hard. With the half second that bought him, he went for the gun again. His fingers closed over it and without turning around he pointed it under his arm and fired two shots, muffled by the silencer. The body behind him hit the ground with a dull thud, and he spun around to find himself face to face with the barrel of a 9 mm.
He opened his mouth to yell for Renee (not that she could probably hear him over the insane bathroom fan that you couldn’t turn off without turning off the light), but the man holding the gun grabbed him by the throat.
“You don’t want to do that,” he said, his voice a low menacing whisper. “One sound, and I will walk in there and splatter her brains all over the pretty tile before she has the chance to retrieve the weapon I’m sure is no more than a few feet away. Understand?”
Jack nodded.
“Good.” The man was taller than Jack, six one or two, with dark brown hair and greyish-blue eyes. His English was better than most Americans’, but the precise consonants and the occasional oddly shaped vowel told Jack he was Russian.
Fuck. They’d finally found him and, because of his idiocy, Renee.
“Give me your weapon.”
Jack released the gun, praying that Renee was in one of her moods where she washed her hair three times.
“Whatever you want,” Jack whispered, “I’ll do it. Just leave her out of it. She has nothing to do with what I did.”
“That’s sweet, dickhead.” The man jerked his head at another man standing closer to the door. “Check Alexei. Is he dead?”
Jack watched as he strode forward and bent over, holding two fingers to the neck of Jack’s victim. “Yes.”
“Well. You can call me Peter. You’ve already got our team a man down, so if you don’t want to piss me off more, listen up.” Jack swallowed, taking in the way this asshole used American idiom despite the slight accent. Interesting. “Come with us, no questions, and we leave her alone. Deal?”
Jack heard the brief squeak as Renee switched off the water. Blood welled in his mouth where he’d bitten down on his tongue.
“Deal. Let’s go. Now.”
The other man gestured at Alexei. “What about him?”
Peter shrugged, pinning Jack’s arms behind his back and binding them with tape he’d pulled out of his leather jacket. “Leave him. She’ll know we’re serious.” Throwing the coat over Jack’s shoulders so nobody glancing at them would notice that his hands were tied, Peter shoved Jack toward the door.
_________________________
Renee turned off the shower, squeezing water from the ends of her hair as she watched the steam float around her in a mini cloud. She rotated her neck and shrugged her shoulders, trying to shake out the remaining tension the shower hadn’t vanquished. The last few days had been . . . well she didn’t know the words for the sensation that had enveloped her the second Jack opened the hotel room door. What she did know was that despite the insanity of the circumstances, she had no memory of the last time she’d been this happy, the last time she hadn’t felt as if there were millions of tiny holes inside her, missing pieces she’d never figure out how to find.
Still, the full-out emotional intensity of it all felt something like sprinting a marathon, and she was exhausted.
Climbing out of the shower, she wrapped a towel around her chest and shot a look at her Glock sitting on the back of the toilet. Jack wouldn’t let her shower alone unless she took it with her, and what the hell – humoring him on that subject was easy enough. She patted her face dry and squeezed some toothpaste onto her toothbrush, the green gel a neat S just like in those idiotic commercials. As she brushed, she surveyed the pile of clothes she’d tossed on the porcelain countertop.
Crap. No bra.
“Hey Luke,” she called through the door, teasing. “Could you hand me my bra?”
Silence.
“Luke?” she yelled, louder.
Silence. Nothing but the last remnants of her shower water dripping out of the faucet and the loud drone of the bathroom fan.
An avalanche of ice exploded at the base of her neck, cold that rocketed down her spine and out across her shoulders and arms.
She tightened the towel and picked up her gun, cocking it at quietly as possible. After two deep breaths, she opened the bathroom door.
A body on the floor, dark blond hair and oh god please no, but higher-order processing kicked in and with a glimpse of the man’s face she knew it wasn’t Jack. Heart slamming with relief and barely suppressed terror, she surveyed the large room, making sure that nobody else was hidden, waiting for her.
When she was satisfied that she was alone with this presumably dead body (she checked for weapons, felt for a pulse), she began going over the room, inch by inch.
Training, goddammit. Focus. Think about right now.
She was reaching into the dead guy’s jeans pocket, searching for ID (or anything that might help her figure out what the fuck was going on), when the room phone rang, the eruption of sound so loud and so unsettling to her frayed nerves that her startle reflex almost knocked her over.
Two long strides and she grabbed the receiver, the cool plastic slippery in her sweaty hand. She didn’t get a word out before a deep distorted male voice said, “Did you enjoy your shower? It’s fortunate that you decided to take a long one.”
“Where is he?” She couldn’t help thinking about the last time she’d said those words, the terror and hopelessness that followed the answers.
“Safe.”
“Let me talk to him.”
“Oh I offered,” said the voice, a hint of amusement detectable even through whatever he was using to mask recognition. “He refuses to say anything.”
Renee shut her eyes. Jack. Of course he wouldn’t get on the phone, even though his refusal to cooperate only cemented her belief that she was talking to the asshole who had him.
“Fine. What do you want?”
“You.”
“So come get me.”
“Save the commands for when you have your boyfriend here back. Are you listening?”
“Yes.” She clutched the carved wood at the edge of the bedside table, her fingernail tapping down each curved layer.
“Meet me at 2350 Bankside, in the alleyway to the left of the building. I’d tell you to come alone but I don’t think I have to worry, do I?” She heard him chuckle into the phone.
“And then what?”
“We’ll take it from there. And don’t even think about surprising us by showing up ahead of time. If I so much as smell your fancy shampoo, I’ll kill him.” A click indicated that he’d hung up.
For a few seconds she stood there, receiver in her hand, staring at the worn tread pattern on the bottom of the dead guy’s shoe. Then she slammed the phone down and grabbed whatever clothing was closest, yanking on her shirt and jeans at practically the same time. Her Glock clutched in her right hand, she pulled both her and Jack’s duffels from the suitcase rack. She tossed them on the bed and went methodically through the room, picking up only what was absolutely necessary and shoving it into Jack’s bag, because it was larger. One change of clothes for both of them. Toothbrush and toothpaste.
Jack’s shoes.
What were they doing to him, right now, because of her?
Keeping the inert man on the floor in her peripheral vision, she pulled the extra clips from her own bag. From Jack’s bag she extracted his spare pistol and the half dozen clips with it. She wiped her right hand on her jeans before taking a firmer grip on her gun as she slipped into her jacket and began to load the interior pockets with ammunition. When she was satisfied that she had taken everything possible that would still permit her to move around without arousing suspicion, she checked the dead guy’s pulse again. Nothing. She inhaled sharply and tucked her gun into the waistband of her jeans before pulling her shirt over it.
At the door, she listened for sounds in the hallway. When it was quiet enough to take the risk, she slung the “Do Not Disturb” sign over the door knob on the off chance it would buy her a few minutes before all hell broke loose. Then she hoisted the heavy duffel over her shoulder and walked down the hallway as quietly as she could, turning into the stairs that would take her to the emergency exit rather than through the lobby.
_________________________
“We should have killed them and gotten the fuck out of here.” Jack heard the crack of a can snapping open, soda or beer and what was probably the scrape of a chair leg along the floor.
“Yuri wants her alive. No money unless she’s alive.”
“You saw what she did to Ziya. And Vladimir. We could put a bullet in his head, shut her up, and be on the plane to Prague before they found the body.”
A crinkling noise, some kind of wrapper. “And then we don’t get paid. Why are you so stupid? You’ll never see the kind of cash we’ll get if we bring her back for Yuri to play with.” Jack squeezed his eyes shut, trying to block the images that rose in his mind and focus on the conversation he could barely hear through the partially open door.
“Maybe I like my thumbs more than you like yours.”
“There are four of us. We know she’s coming.” Peter chuckled. “Did you read her file?”
“I scanned it. Yuri should use bullet points. I fell asleep a third of the way through. Takes him three paragraphs to explain what I could say in a sentence.”
“That’s why you’re never running the op, jackass.” A thud, like something slamming on a table. “As long as we’ve got him, she won’t do a fucking thing. Drink your goddamn soda and wait for her.” A pause. “Fuck.”
“What?”
Peter switched into rapid Russian. It was too fast and too colloquial for Jack to catch anything beyond, “Why the fuck are we speaking English? And close the door before he-” The rest got lost in a swirl of tangled syllables Jack couldn’t keep up with fast enough to decode. Footsteps approached the door and it slammed, leaving the room in semi-darkness. A click and the slide of grinding metal indicated at least two locks in place.
Breathing while his eyes adjusted to the half-light, Jack felt the bouncing echo of Peter’s words pinging on repeat in his brain.
Bring her back for Yuri to play with.
He swallowed the taste of blood that lingered in his mouth where he’d bitten his tongue and concentrated on right now, on requirements, what he needed to do within the next five minutes, ten minutes, half an hour.
The room was small, ten or twelve feet square, with concrete block for walls. They’d blindfolded him in the van, but they’d taken him down a flight of stairs, so he was below street level. No windows, confirming that theory, although there was another door on the wall Jack was facing, the door they’d used to bring him in, so he knew that it led to a corridor or hallway. The only light in the room shone from two long bright rectangles under the doors.
Scanning the area, Jack didn’t see much that might prove useful. Two folding chairs (like the one to which he was bound) leaned against the wall. He twisted his neck to look behind him. A battered scratched-up card table stood in the corner with a couple of empty plastic crates stacked beside it.
Fuck.
He couldn’t be sure what time it was, but he had no doubt that Renee would show up early, perhaps by hours. She’d give herself time to assess the situation, but she’d also want the possibility of surprise on her side.
He needed to get his hands free. Squinting at the card table, he noticed that one of the screws on a crossbar near him was loose – jutting out. Perfect. He gave an experimental shove sideways, testing how much noise his chair would make moving across the floor. Fortunately, the rubber caps covering the cheap metal legs prevented any scraping, and the only noise was a slight swish.
He paused, waiting to see if he’d attracted attention. When the voices in the other room continued to chatter in rapid Russian, he resumed movement, working his chair toward the table a few inches at a time.
Within five minutes he’d closed the distance. It took some maneuvering, but he managed to get his back to the bar from which the screw protruded. Stretching his arms until the strain pulled uncomfortably at his shoulders, he tried to hook the rope on the screw. On the third time it caught, and he exhaled in relief while continuing to watch the door.
Quietly, he began to saw the rope back and forth over the sharp bands of the screw, ignoring the pain when the metal caught his hand again, tiny slices. He watched the door and worked as he felt sweat spreading out across the front of his shirt, rolling in beads down his neck and back, and dripping (salty sting) into his eyes. He kept his breathing even, his eyes focused on the door and his mind focused on the goal.
He had to be mobile by the time Renee got there.
Because if he wasn’t, she’d try to take them alone.
_________________________
Five blocks away from the designated meeting point, Renee parked the green Chevy Aveo she’d hotwired a few streets down from the bed and breakfast. In this industrial section of town (warehouses and the permanent smell of dust and burning), vehicles were rare at this time of night, and although she didn’t love the idea of approaching on foot – no comm, no surveillance, no backup to call – she knew her only choice was to move forward, preferably with so much speed that she didn’t have time to ponder the insanity of what she was about to do.
Even in the cool damp air her jacket felt oppressive, weight of the clips and their jutting edges pressing her ribs as she ran. Her hair stuck to her sweaty temple and she jammed it aside, irritated by the way each slap of her shoes on the pavement seemed to reverberate down the silent street.
A few hundred yards away she slowed, moving in the shadows of the building next to the address she’d been given. Clouds obscured the moon, so she had that working for her. She held up the night vision binoculars she’d found in Jack’s bag, moving the twin circles slowly across the adjacent building’s façade. One guard that she could see, pacing back and forth in front of a double door, automatic slung over his shoulder. A Kevlar vest covered his dark t-shirt. He had a walkie talkie in his hand (bursts of static fuzz she could hear even from her vantage point), and Renee held herself still in the shadows to see if she could pick up a pattern to his communication. Holding her watch under the sleeve of her jacket, she illuminated it to check the time.
9:14. She waited.
At 9:15, the guard spoke briefly into his comm. She was too far away to catch what he said, but his report must have been satisfactory. He resumed pacing.
For fifteen minutes she stood in the large building’s recessed doorway, observing. Although the guard’s body language was tense and he held his weapon as if he expected ambush at any moment, he reported in precisely on the five-minute mark. Otherwise, he didn’t respond to the intermittent traffic on the comm.
When he checked in at 9:30, she was ready. She heard the click indicating he’d received a reply and without hesitation she fired two rounds at his head; the silencer muffled most of the noise. He hit the asphalt, a dark splatter on the concrete wall behind him. Renee darted across the street, her gun pointed at the inert body on the ground. Even ten steps away it was clear she didn’t have to worry. One of her shots had missed, but the other had hit him almost directly between the eyes. She pulled the AK-74 (unpleasant flash to her undercover time with Vladimir’s organization) off his limp arm, stuck his comm unit in her pocket, and – after a final scan of her surroundings to make sure nobody else was outdoors on this side of the building – reached for the door.
_________________________
Jack felt the give as the final thread in the rope binding his arms snapped. He rolled his aching shoulders in three quick circles and then, faster this time because he could use his arms to lift the chair, began to move to his original position. He was surprised they hadn’t checked on him already – unexpected luck. The second he had himself back where Peter had placed him, he put his arms behind his back again and concentrated on slowing his breathing, hoping the sweat trickling down his temple either wouldn’t show in the half-light or could be chalked up to the warmth of the room.
Within a minute Peter walked in, munching on a Crunchie bar. The gold wrapper crinkled as he pulled it down. “You comfortable?”
Jack stared at him as he chewed. In the small echoey room Jack could hear the sound of honeycomb cracking apart. He held his arms motionless behind his back.
“Don’t feel chatty? That’s too bad.” He thumbed a smudge of chocolate off his lip. “My boss wants me to find out whast Ms. Walker told the CIA. And you know, don’t you? Since you two seem-” Peter popped the last bite of the candy bar into his mouth and laughed. “Close.” He balled up the wrapped and aimed it at Jack’s head. “You must have been pretty surprised when she turned up not dead.”
Jack fixed his eyes on the second bar of Velcro decorating Peter’s Kevlar in an attempt to distract himself from how satisfying it would feel to smash the bones of this motherfucker’s nose up into his brain.
Peter sucked chocolate from his teeth and leaned forward, his face so close to Jack’s that Jack held his breath for a second, hoping the angle of the other man’s vision wouldn’t allow him to see that Jack’s hands were no longer secured. “Doesn’t matter what you say or don’t say. You know that, right? As soon as she gets here I’ll let her watch while I put a couple bullets in your brain, and then we’ll take her back to my boss. I’m sure he won’t have a lot of trouble getting her to talk to him.” He smirked. “Yuri has a way with people.”
Peter walked toward the door and turned with his hand on the knob. “I’d better check the perimeter. She’ll undoubtedly be early. So predictable.” He was yammering in Russian before he even shut the door behind him, locks scraping into place.
Immediately, Jack stretched his arms to loosen the muscles and went to work on the duct tape that bound his feet (Who were these guys? Why hadn’t they used rope for his feet, too?). He had to take it inch by inch, or the ripping adhesive would make too much noise. When he finally managed to free his legs, the rope that held his torso to the chair was effortless. Scraped fingers and a little rope burn, but in thirty seconds he was free.
Standing silently, he cased the room for anything he could use as a weapon, but there was nothing, not even a pen or a thumbtack. Jack coiled the length of rope he’d just pulled off himself around one hand, walked cautiously across the room, and put his ear to the opposite door, listening for noise in the hallway.
All he heard was the whoosh of the ventilation system. He tested the doorknob, astonished to find it unlocked. It wasn’t as if he spent a lot of time thinking about his reputation, but given what he’d done to the Russians, Jack was certain that if these assholes knew who he was, they’d be a bit more concerned with containment. He tabled that to puzzle over later, because Renee was either on her way or already here, and he needed to find her before they did. He opened the door a millimeter, checking to see if the hinges would squeak. When they didn’t, he slipped out into the hallway (dim fluorescent lights apparently on the nighttime energy saver setting) and ran, his bare bruised feet painful and cold where they hit the tile.
_________________________
Renee padded down the hallway in her socks now (boots discarded just inside the door because the hallway’s acoustics made the tap of the small heel sound like a jackhammer), trying to GPS the building in her head. She’d come in on the opposite side from where she’d been instructed to enter, but that told her nothing about where they were holding Jack. Her Glock was tucked into her jeans, and she held the dead Russian’s rifle in front of her as she moved.
She’d decided to work her way to the other side of the building when the door no more than ten feet in front of her (marked ‘Stairs’) opened. Renee raised the AK-74, but before she could pull the trigger the man had launched himself at her. She slammed backwards, expecting to feel the crushing impact of the hard tile on the back of her head, but . . . why the fuck was he holding her shoulders, partially breaking her fall? Her head still knocked into the ground with a nauseating thud, full weight of a muscular body on top of her.
“Dmitri!” His thumbs dug into her muscles of her upper arms, holding her still. His breath smelled like cigarettes and candy. He shouted in Russian, “She’s here. Hurry up!”
Suddenly Renee realized that although he had her mostly immobile, her thumb was still on the trigger of the AK-74 that was pinned between them. Sucking in her stomach and chest to give herself a few centimeters to move, she angled the gun and fired off a burst of bullets. Red Square had never used anything but armor piercing, and as the recoil jolted into her ribs she could only hope they hadn’t changed that practice.
The clutching fingers released their grip on her arms. A sucking gurgle rattled through the man’s chest. He choked, violent convulsion of his upper body, and half a second later blood poured from his mouth, gushing onto Renee’s neck and down her chest. She tried to push him off of her, but he still had enough strength to press her down with his legs. She paused, working to breathe, but when she heard the slam of footsteps running, fast, she threw her arms forward and rolled sideways with all her strength, and she was free.
She didn’t even manage to stand all the way up before another man was on her, this one shorter and thinner, but just as strong. He grabbed her wrists and threw her against the wall, where her head smashed into concrete. Despite the pain ricocheting through her skull, she tried to bring her knee up and sideways into her assailant’s groin, but he shifted left and all she got was his hip bone.
“You are a crazy bitch.” His fingers squeezed her wrists so tightly that she could already feel the tingling where her circulation was cut off. “I will never understand why Yuri insists we can’t kill you, because we’re three men down and he doesn’t even have you yet.” She struggled, determined to fight him until he did kill her or she couldn’t move, whichever came first, but he had her pinned too well. The man laughed, chilly grey-blue eyes and the scent of peppermint breath spray. “I don’t remember him saying we couldn’t hurt you.”
One of his hands released her wrist and went for her throat, fingers pressing into her, cutting off her air. “Yuri says you’re beautiful. I bet I’ll find you a lot more attractive when you’re unconscious.” The atmosphere began to float with silver and gold sparkles.
Something moved in her peripheral vision.
An explosive crack and the hands gripping her throat and wrist were gone. Another snap as she choked, sucking in air. She slid down the wall a few feet, dizzy and disoriented, working to make her eyes focus.
A dark shape moved toward her and she reflexively went for the gun she could feel tucked under her shirt.
“Don’t. It’s me. It’s okay.”
The air swirled into focus again and she found herself staring at Jack, who had stopped moving forward the second she went for her gun. Coughing again, she rubbed at her throat, working to revive circulation.
Suddenly Jack was in front of her, face chalk white, his hands pulling at her shirt. “Where’d they hit you? Did the bullet go through? Does it hurt to breathe?”
The dry ache in her throat made it hard to talk, but Jack’s voice told her he was on the verge of meltdown so she responded rapid-fire, the words tumbling out as fast as she could make her mouth move. “Jack, stop. The blood’s not mine. None of it, unless I scraped myself or something. Nobody shot me.”
She nodded toward the motionless body on the tile in front of them, a red pool widening around his chest. “He had me pinned and I managed to pull back enough to get a good angle.” She drew in a steadier breath. “But I couldn’t get him off me right away.”
“You’re sure?” His voice was almost inaudible.
“I’m sure.” She wiped a bloody hand on her jeans and nodded toward the other body that now lay on the floor of the hallway, the man’s neck twisted at a horrifying angle. “We have to get out of here. How many more of them are there?”
Jack swallowed convulsively and for a beat she thought he wasn’t going to answer her, but he muttered, “At least two. Maybe three. I wasn’t in the room with them so I had to guess from the voices.”
From the hallway around the corner she could hear the scuffling thud of boots, syncopation of several pairs, growing louder with each step. She pointed to the “Exit” sign maybe fifteen yards down the hall. Her steps as silent as she could make them, she ran the few strides and pushed open the doorway. She held it, heart hammering, while Jack pulled the bloody AK-74 off the man whose neck he’d snapped. When he’d retrieved it, he sprinted through the door and she pushed it shut behind them just in time to hear the impact of boots echoing off the walls as their pursuers rounded the corner. Bolts of pain lit up the back of her head, but she leaned into the wall, rough cement on the skin of her spine, and waited.
_________________________
Jack held the borrowed automatic ready, trying to make sense of the confusion in the hallway outside the stairwell. His ear was near the door, but he couldn’t stop staring at Renee, at the vivid red that stuck her shirt to her stomach and chest and was beginning to cake on the skin of her arms and neck. The only discoloration on her face was a smudge of dirt on her left cheekbone, and that was comforting. She stood focused, listening to the exchange in rapid Russian. After a second she caught his eye and held up two fingers before pointing outside the door. He nodded.
Suddenly, one of the men said something, to which the other one responded, “Da,” and it went quiet. Greenish-white in the fluorescent light, Renee mouthed, “They’re checking this door,” and stepped backward to give herself a better angle and more cover when the door opened.
With no warning, an explosion of gunfire hit the other side of the door, deafening ring of bullets on steel. In English, Peter said, drawing out the words as if to demonstrate his complete control of the situation, “You’ve killed Dmitri and Sergei and I assume Luka is dead too if you made it past his checkpoint, Ms. Walker.”
Silence. Stillness. A bulb in one of the overhead lights made a faint pop and flickered out.
“Yuri knew what he was dealing with when he sent us to get her,” Peter continued. “If you put your weapons down and come out, I’ll kill you quickly, Mr. Jensen. I’ll also make sure that Ms. Walker is delivered to Yuri unharmed.”
Quiet again. Jack could hear the faint ticking of his own watch. With each click, he thought about what this motherfucker would do to Renee if he got his hands on her. Even on the off-chance he managed to make her talk, he wouldn’t kill her. Jack had seen how Vladimir and his people played. The higher-ups were probably fifty times worse. They’d toy with her for god knows how long. He glanced at Renee, whose eyes were fixed on the handle of the door.
Thirty more seconds of silence, and a staccato burst of bullets hit the outside of the door. The handle turned and all Jack could see from his angle was the weapon’s muzzle, sparks of light and bullets spraying a few feet to the left of where Renee was standing. He couldn’t fire at the gun without the risk of hitting Renee, but he nodded at her and stepped back. Without a second’s hesitation, she took a step forward and began firing, short controlled bursts. One of them knocked the gun sideways a few inches, and the ammo stopped.
On autopilot, Jack jumped forward and grabbed the gun, yanking Peter into the room. Renee was waiting. She dropped him with several rounds to the chest and kicked his weapon, sending it clattering across the room. It bounced off the wall with a thud, and in the beat of silence that followed Jack heard Renee’s rapid breathing and the sound of footsteps, boots thudding down the hallway. Each tap grew fainter.
His weapon still pointed at the door, Jack walked over to Renee. In the dim light she looked ghost-white against the red smears on her skin. He had to take deep breaths to keep himself locked in this moment, focused on the current problem. He touched her face, his eyes scanning hers. “You’re sure you’re okay?”
“I could use a handful of Advil, but yeah, I’m fine.” She rubbed at the back of her neck with her free hand. “Any idea where he’s going?” Renee walked a few steps and picked up Peter’s AK-74.
“Probably back to where they were holding me, if he didn’t run.” Jack couldn’t ignore the way she winced when she straightened up. “How bad is your head?”
She half-smiled. “Don’t start. It’s fine. Let’s go.”
Before he could respond, she shoved the door open with the barrel of her gun, glanced both directions, and said, “You coming?”
He wanted to say, No. And neither are you. But he couldn’t afford to stop and think about this—about the fact that he’d been back in her presence for less than three days and she was already barefoot, covered in blood and bruises, one gun ready to fire, one stuffed into her jeans, ready to walk into a situation that could easily end with her taking a bullet to the head or worse – because if he did there was no chance he’d stay on task.
Right now, they needed to stop the remaining man or men from contacting anyone else. He pulled a clip out of Peter’s coat and rammed it into the weapon. “Yeah. Let’s get this done.”
_________________________
“What’s your name?” Jack flipped the folding chair around and straddled it, one hand resting on the cheap fabric while the other held his SIG in sweaty tired fingers.
“Nikolai. Now go fuck yourself.”
“Maybe later.” Jack chuffed and moved his chair a few inches closer, scrape on the floor amplified by the acoustics of the small room. “Right now I need you to make a phone call.”
The prisoner stared at Jack and said nothing. Blood trickled down the side of his face where Renee had caught him with the butt of her Glock.
Jack looked up at her. She was half-sitting on a stool near the wall, white and sweaty. Her knee bounced back and forth, but she held the AK-74 steady at her side, pointed at the thin, dark-haired Russian tied to the chair in front of her. The blood on her shirt was beginning to dry, the cotton material sticking to her stomach and chest. Jack could feel his head spinning from low blood sugar and adrenaline aftermath, and he had to fight the urge to put a bullet through this motherfucker’s brain, grab Renee, and get the hell out of there.
Focus, goddammit. Think. Anything that buys time..
“Tell me about Yuri.”
Nikolai attempted a stark smile. “He likes Pizza Hut breadsticks and pissing off the CIA. And he’ll cut your girlfriend into small pieces once she tells him what he wants to know and he’s had the chance to enjoy her a little.” He smirked. “He was always jealous of Vladimir’s toys.”
Jack tightened the grip on his gun, careful to keep his finger away from the trigger. “No,” he hissed, his face heating with rage. “That’s not what’s gonna happen.”
“Dmitri called him.” Nikolai didn’t blink. “Before he went with Sergei to find her.”
“Bullshit,” Jack replied, forcing his tone to remain level. “Yuri doesn’t know a fucking thing. Let me tell you how I think the last half an hour went down.” In his peripheral vision, he saw Renee slide all the way onto the stool, one hand massaging her temple. He swallowed and refocused on Nikolai. “Your plan to use me to as bait worked, except for the part where she’s three times smarter than you realized.” He held the cold muzzle of the gun to Nikolai’s cheek. “And a better shot. What you should have done is called in to say you’d fucked up and ask for instructions. But you and Dmitri figured you could get it back under control and none of the higher-ups would have to know, right?”
Nikolai was quiet, but he broke eye contact with Jack, looking at the opposite wall, his face shadowed with the light of the single bulb that hung suspended from the ceiling.
Jack shifted in his chair, pushing his scuffed-up feet into the dirty floor. “Look. You’re a professional. You know there is no scenario where you walk out of this alive.” Nikolai’s eyes snapped back to Jack’s. “The question is how you want to die. Do it my way, and it’s one bullet. You won’t even feel it.” Nikolai swallowed. “Screw with me or make me work for this, and I’ll make it hurt.”
Then Jack leaned closer, his face near the other man’s ear, breathing in the blend of dirt, sweat, greasy unwashed hair, and overused French cologne. He whispered, fighting the tremor that worked its way into his voice when he got close to this subject, “But if anything happens to her, not only will I find the slowest, most painful way to kill you, but I will make it my mission in life to do the same thing to your entire family.” He backed off and cleared his throat, making eye contact with Renee for a split second before refocusing on Nikolai. Maybe it was the poor lighting, but a hint of color seemed to have washed back into her face, and she wasn’t rubbing her head anymore. “Do we understand each other?”
“Who the fuck are you? We told Yuri you were some guy she picked up on her vacation.”
Jack chuffed. “That’s as close to the truth as you’re going to get. I’m waiting for your answer.”
The room went almost silent. Jack could hear the hum of the central heating system. Renee’s stool squeaked as she tipped two of its legs off the floor and reclined against the wall.
Nikolai coughed and readjusted his body to sit straighter. “You’re right. Yuri knows only that we found the two of you. We thought we could grab her, get rid of you, and he’d never find out.”
Jack felt his body relax, the muscles in his legs and torso loosening a little. “Good. Now tell me what Yuri wants with her.”
“When Tokarev shot her, everyone believed he’d completed the task and she was dead. Novakovich. Even Suvarov. But something didn’t sit right with Yuri. He kept pushing, making inquiries even after Suvarov told him to leave it alone and stop risking exposure by seeking out information.” He twisted his neck until it gave a pop. “Yuri doesn’t listen. Through some backchannels he found out that she was being held at Covington, but that’s as far as he got. Whoever ran that op should get a medal, because Yuri has contacts everywhere, but there were no leaks. Nothing.” He shrugged, bound hands bouncing in his lap. “He knew she’d testify before they relocated her. All he wants is to know what she told them.” He looked over his shoulder, addressing Renee. “You knew everything about Vladimir’s operation, didn’t you?”
Renee managed to look grim even as one edge of her mouth tipped up. “Among other things.”
Nikolai smirked. “We all told Vlad he should have killed you when he had the chance. He was so determined to get another piece of you that-”
Jack bolted from his chair and sent it flying sideways as he bashed his forearm full force into Nikolai’s chest. The chair smashed into the floor; a splinter of wood cracked off and slid along the tile. Jack was on top of him (searing white fury and helpless flashbacks to watching Vladimir put his hands all over Renee’s body, knowing what he’d done to her, what she’d given up for a government that had been willing to sell her out without a second thought), knee in his stomach, cocked gun on his cheek, when he heard Renee’s voice through the fog.
“Jack. Stop. Let him go so he can make the call.”
Jack jabbed his knee into the other man’s ribs where he knew it would hurt the most and then stood up, watching Renee’s face for a second before he wiped a hand on his jeans and hauled the chair into the upright position. “Here’s what you’re gonna do if you don’t want the slower version of what I did to Tokarev.”
Nikolai paled. “That was you?”
“Yeah. That was me. You think I’m serious now?”
Nikolai nodded.
"This your phone?” Jack asked, holding up the cell phone Renee had found in the man’s pocket when she’d patted him down.
“Yes.”
“I’ll call Yuri. When he picks up, you’ll tell him that the plan worked perfectly. You killed me, but you’ve got Agent Walker. You’re bringing her in, but you can’t get a flight out until early tomorrow morning.” He slid the phone open and clicked into the ‘contacts’ menu, but he paused. “Don’t even think about fucking with me.” He cocked his had in Renee’s direction. “She speaks flawless Russian, which I’m sure you know, down to idiomatic expressions. If she thinks you’ve screwed up or tried to tip this dickhead off-”
“I won’t,” interrupted Nikolai. “Leave my family out of it. I’ll do whatever you want.”
_________________________
Renee stepped closer as Nikolai dialed, her eyes focused on his face. He spoke in bursts of rapid Russian, a bead of sweat rolling down his temple and off his jaw. Jack’s eyes darted back and forth between Nikolai’s white face – almost green in the pale overhead light – and Renee’s, her mouth set and her forehead lined in concentration.
The conversation was over in less than two minutes. Nikolai slid the phone shut and handed it to Jack. “It’s done. You’ve got at least a day now, perhaps a day and a half.” He swallowed. “Do it. You promised quickly.”
Jack lifted his eyes to Renee’s, absorbing the horrible collision of emotions in her exhausted expression. She nodded.
The vibrations from his SIG traveled up his arm into his neck, making him shiver as he squeezed the trigger and put a bullet through Nikolai’s brain. The body collapsed to the floor with an echoing thud; the chair legs rattled as they settled back to the tile.
The oppressive silence that followed felt almost alive. Jack watched as blood flowed in an expanding pattern across the floor. He could hear Renee’s shallow breathing, the friction of her weapon against her shirt. After another beat she said (the words low and enervated), “Jack, let’s go. We need to get cleaned up before dawn.” She rotated her shoulders, shrugging out tension. “I brought a bag with a change of clothes. The car’s a couple blocks away.”
“Okay.” He walked to the corner and grabbed another AK-74, popping out the magazine to see if it was full. “How’s your ammo?”
“Fine. I grabbed a few more clips from their box. We need to get rid of these guns though.”
“Not ‘til we’re locked down somewhere with a concrete plan. We should be on our way out of the country by tomorrow morning.”
“We can’t go anywhere looking like this!” She pulled a hair tie off her wrist and looped the sweaty mess into a listless ponytail. “We have time for a goddamn shower and a sandwich.” He didn’t miss the edgy irritation that had filtered into her voice.
“Fine,” he relented, still distracted by the crimson that covered her chest. “But we need to get at least a couple hours out of London before we stop.”
_________________________
In the cramped Chevy, Renee huddled into the jacket she’d brought, hugging it around her torso in an attempt to cover the blood. Even with the extra layer she shivered, nauseous yet hungry at the same time, so tired that she had to squinch her eyes shut to moisten them.
Jack stared at the dark road ahead. He clutched the steering wheel with both hands, knuckles pale from the force, and Renee’s peripheral vision caught the tight line of his jaw and the way his shoulders were locked two inches higher than they needed to be.
He hadn’t spoken since they got in the car over an hour ago. Just before she was about to pull open the door, he’d stopped her, fishing a flashlight from the duffel.
I think you might have a concussion. Let me look at your eyes.
Jack-
Please. If I need to take you to the hospital, we’ll figure it out. Let me look.
So she’d humored him as he put his hand over her eyes and held it there, fingers rough and cold, then removed it and made her headache worse by shining the light a few inches above her face. When he’d clicked off the light, he’d paused for a second, hand above the door of the car for support.
I think you’re okay.
I told you it was fine!
You are not a reliable source of information. I’ll check again when we find a place to stop. How much does it hurt?
Not enough to worry about. Let’s go.
She’d touched his hand and tried to catch his eye, but he only gave her finger the briefest squeeze and walked around the car, slamming the door and leaning over to connect the wires.
So she gazed out the window, pressing her aching feet against the glove compartment and watching the trees rush past framed against the faint glow that began to lighten the sky.
She took long, deep breaths (but exhaled inaudibly so Jack wouldn’t hear). She squared her shoulders and straightened her back.
And she got ready to win the fight they’d been waiting to have since the second she hit ‘send’ on the email to Chloe.
_________________________
Jack listened to the swish of the shower spray. It should have been soothing, but under the circumstances it reminded him of the beep on a timer-rigged explosive, each passing second one click closer to detonation.
He’d tried to sit down when Renee got in the shower (he’d offered to let her go first but she said he’d be faster). That had lasted maybe fifteen seconds before he jumped back up, pacing a diagonal path across the small floor of this shitty hotel room. He flexed his hands open and shut, knuckles dry and cracking from cheap soap on top of the various scrapes and cuts he’d received over the last twelve hours. He could feel the skin pulling apart as he stretched it, a welcome distraction from the coming confrontation.
She had to go back.
It was the only option that made sense.
But his mind fucked with him with while he fidgeted – images and sounds, scents and flashes of feeling. The quirk of her eyebrow when he said something she found ridiculous. The low vibration in her throat when he skimmed his finger up the inside of her thigh. The smell of her heated skin when she wasn’t even awake yet, his face pressed between her shoulder and her neck so he could breathe her. The soaring lift in his stomach when she just looked up at him and grinned, smile he hadn’t known she had in her until the past few days, the one that snuck up on him, knocked him sideways every time.
He forced all of that away and replaced it, brutal and surgical.
Eyes closed, he held Teri’s cooling, heavy body in his arms, felt the sticky dampness of her blood on his stomach. He clutched Audrey’s hand, struggled to speak in a way that might make her understand. He ran down the hallway barefoot, blood and the sheet and his own voice that sounded far off in the distance. He put his lips on Renee’s forehead, everything about her face unnaturally clean, as if washing off the blood made death prettier.
He couldn’t do it again.
“Jack?”
He yanked himself back into the present. Renee stood by the bathroom doorframe, a damp towel in her hand.
“You need to go back to Flagstaff,” he blurted, like the statement was all one word. “One phone call and-“ He surprised himself by needing to breathe in the middle of his sentence. “They’ll bitch a little and get you a ticket. You’ll be back by tonight and it won’t take them any time to reassign-“
“Jack, for Christ’s sake just shut up. I’m not going back.”
“Renee, you can’t-”
“No!” she exclaimed, a scary spin as her pitch arced up. “You’re not listening.”
He shook his head, vehement. “You’re the one who’s not listening. It took them less than three days to find you. Three days. His voice was rising, love and terror and fury twisting in his gut. “It’ll be less than a day now before they figure out that their operation went south. And when they do, they won’t send their second tier people for you this time.”
“Then we’d better get moving.” She reached for a shirt she’d tossed on the chair and walked over to the bed, stuffing it into the duffel bag.
“I can’t do this again.” For all his rage, his voice had dropped to a strained whisper.
“You?” She pushed the duffel aside and faced him full-on. “I can’t do this again. I can’t go back to that fucking silent house and that fucking job where the clock goes backwards and eat a bowl of fucking tomato soup every night because I’m too lazy to make anything else. I’m not going back there. It doesn’t matter what you say.” She took a deep breath, but she didn’t bother to push away the tear that was sliding past her cheek to her chin. He watched it splash, soak into her shirt.
“Goddammit, Renee.” He was yelling now, uncontrollable. “You don’t remember the hospital. I couldn’t sit but I couldn’t stand. I was talking to Chloe but I didn’t even know what she was saying. When the doctor came out of the operating room, it was like ten fucking years went by before he even spoke.” He tried to breathe, hands jammed into fists. He wanted to hit something so much it was like compulsion. He pictured his fist hammering into the doorframe, knuckles and blood and indented wood. “And when he did, it was like-”
He stopped. He could hear them both breathing, and further away, the drip of the crappy shower faucet.
His throat so tight that he wasn’t sure how he jammed the words out, he managed, “I’m so angry I shouldn’t even be in this room right now.” Another suck of air. “But I can’t leave you alone, because if anything-”
She moved forward, but he took a step back and said quickly, “Don’t touch me.”
“Okay.” If his words stung her, she didn’t flinch. After a second she sat on the edge of the bed, looking down where her toe made an imprint on the stained grey carpet.
A minute passed, or ten. The faucet stopped dripping and the heating unit pinged and rumbled to life.
When Renee spoke again, her tone was level and calculated. “Jack, listen. If you want to ditch me, I’m sure you can. You have a lot more experience at this than I do.” There was a waver on the last few words, and Jack felt his stomach drop even further as he realized what it was costing her to say this. “So that’s up to you. But even if you leave, I won’t go back to the States. I’d rather run than plant myself somewhere and wait for them to come get me.”
She rubbed a fingernail on the table. “Besides, you said it yourself, Jack. The smart thing is for me to go back, get reassigned. New identity. If you arrived at that conclusion, so will Yuri. Disappearing is at least unpredictable. And I think if the past couple days have proven anything, it’s that I’m safer with you.”
After a beat, he lifted his head and looked at her eyes. They were bloodshot and shiny, but so goddamn determined, one thing that had never changed since his first glance at her face.
“You have a hole in your chest because of me.”
“That is bullshit.” She stood up, cheeks bright pink, and this time when she walked towards him he stayed put. “I have a hole in my chest because I had a dangerous job. A job I loved. Her voice was thick and wavery again, but she didn’t bother trying to control it. “Jack, please. You’re the only thing that’s left.”
He tried to hold onto the anger, desperate because it was his only leverage, but it evaporated as quickly as it had arrived. He should have remembered, should have factored in that against all logic, he’d never managed to stay pissed off at her for more than two minutes at a stretch, even if she was leveling her weapon at him or slapping his face until it stung, left marks.
“I can’t leave unless I know you’ll be safe,” he muttered, defeated. His knees ached; he stepped sideways and sank into a chair, the wood hard on his back. In the moment of silence that followed, he suddenly realized he had one weapon left in his arsenal. “But you need to sit down and take a few minutes to think about what this means.”
“What are you talking about?” She didn’t move.
“Running. It’s not-” He flicked the pad of his thumb over a scab on his arm. “It gets old. Fast.”
“I didn’t figure we’d be hanging out in five-star hotels,” she retorted.
“You’re missing the point. Will you please listen to me?”
“I’m sorry.” She sat down across the tiny table from him, but she held herself stiff and made no move to touch the hand he was resting on the wood. “I’m listening.”
“You never stop looking over your shoulder. Never. When someone stares at you for a second longer than normal, you don’t have the luxury of thinking, ‘It’s probably nothing.’ You have to wonder, put it on your radar.” He slumped in the rigid chair, his foot bumping the table leg. “You get comfortable somewhere, start to feel a little bit settled, and have to leave in ten minutes because something doesn’t feel right. You lie to everyone. You can’t make friends. The college student at the coffee shop – the one who knows you like the double tall skim latte with a half shot of vanilla and carries around pictures of her kid? You talk to her while she makes your drink and wonder if she is a student or she has a kid. The nice old man at the newspaper stand is a potential threat because he might have seen your picture. You never sleep more than two or three hours at a time, and even that’s a luxury.” Jack glanced up, irritated by his sudden awareness of exactly how many places on his body hurt. “Is that what you want your life to be?”
She looked at him for several seconds. Then she whispered, “I want you. So I guess that means ‘yes.’”
Next Chapter
