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“I took an acting class in college. I was awful.”

“How could you be awful at anything?”

“I was.” She touched his jaw. “I had two lines in a one-act play. I was so bad that the prof assigned me to paint sets.”

“Yeah, well, he should have seen your performance tonight.” Dec kissed her. “You were perfect.” He tilted her face up to his. “Honey. Are you sure you’re okay?”

“I’m fine.”

She wasn’t fine. She was trembling. And Dec had never loved her more than he did at that minute.

He drew her against him. “I thought I’d never seen you again, Anoushka,” he whispered.

He felt her tears against his neck. “I love you, Declan. I’ll always love you.”

He kissed her, kissed her again. Then he looked at the men for whom he would willingly give his life and grinned.

“All right, you clowns. It’s safe to turn around.”

The guys swung towards them. “Didn’t want to see a sloppy scene straight out of a chick flick,” Chay said.

They all smiled.

And Dec and Annie knew that, at long last, they were on the journey that would be the start of their new life.

END

EPILOGUE

The debriefing took several days.

First there were the STUD debriefings, conducted by James Black.

Next came other debriefings: First a guy from State, then a woman from the DOD, followed by a colonel—not Stuart, who had not been heard from again—who represented the Joint Chiefs of Staff. A guy with a big smile and empty eyes flashed a badge none of them recognized and said he’d explain who he was, but then he’d have to kill them. Everybody laughed. Nobody asked for a further explanation. There was a pair of studious types from CIA and a woman who chewed her nails from Homeland Security. A guy from NSA stopped in for a two-hour chat. A trio of intense-looking, intense-sounding guys from the alphabet-soup agency that oversaw STUD rounded out the cast of characters

After a week, the men of STUD One were all talked out.

The Secretary of State flew in from Washington to meet with Annie.

She had a phone call from that same city.

It provided the one light moment in a hard week.

“Princess Anoushka,” a somewhat familiar voice said, “this is the President.”

“Give me a break,” Annie replied. “Who are you? And which guy in Dec’s unit put you up to this?”

It turned out the call really was from the President. It took a couple of minutes until Annie was convinced, and then she did a lot of babbling to apologize. Fortunately, the President found her reaction charming and told her so.

And then, at last, Operation Renegade was officially over.

So was the reign of Cyrus of Qaram. He stood trial before three judges. Nobody was surprised by the sentence of death.

The citizens of Tharsalonia, emboldened by the actions of their Qarami neighbors, had deposed their king as well.

Altair Amjad, the Deliverer, had himself been delivered. To the justice system. Some kind of justice system, at any rate. The last Dec heard about him was from Black, who said not to quote him, but the word was that the badass terrorist was in a badass place and singing like a canary.

Now, all that remained was what Dec worried might be an even tougher operation.