CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Draven’s eyes opened, instantly awake as the change in altitude and the sound of the wheels descending brought him out of his sleep. He glanced at his watch. It had been almost seven hours since they’d boarded the C-130 for their escape out of Africa. With the flight time, he could guess where they would land. He turned to Kristof. “Napoli?”
“Yeah.” Kristof nodded. “We’ll head back to Istanbul from there, unless you need a backup to get home?”
“No, we’ll be good from here.” He stroked one hand over Indy’s head and tugged lightly on one ear, hoping to wake her slowly. She swatted at him, but her eyes remained closed. “At least we should be, but we can call Nemesis and see what he thinks.”
“Good thinking.” Kristof nodded to where his fingers tugged at Indy’s ear again. “If you keep doing that, she’s gonna stab you in the balls.”
“She wouldn’t do—” He froze when he felt something poking at his balls and glanced down. “Shit… Indy, what the fuck?”
“Stop pulling my ears, dumbass, you know I hate that.”
Kristof held out his hand and made a gimme signal with his fingers. “You stole my knife right off my belt.”
“If you didn’t want it stolen,” she pulled the knife away and handed it to Kristof, “then you should have kept a better grip on it, shouldn’t you?”
“You know, Indy, I like you.” Kristof replaced his blade on his belt. “And it rocks that you keep him on his toes. Kilkenny deserves every bit of shit you put him through.” The plane touched down with barely any bumps and he tightened his hold on Indy as the brakes engaged and the plane slowed to a stop.
“Thanks, I think.” Indy shrugged out of his hold. “What happens now?”
“We wait for them to get off with their prisoner, and then we go from there.” Kristof jerked his chin toward Wolf and his team. “Someone will tell us where they want us.”
Relief soaked into him. Finally, he could breathe. He had Indy back, and despite all the obstacles, she was safely back on a US Navy base. It hadn’t been pretty, but it was better than the alternative… he’d take it.
Wolf came back up the ramp. “There are a couple of liaisons waiting on you guys,” he said.
“Thank you, Wolf. Thank you for helping get me out of there.”
“You’re welcome, Indy.” He took her hand and gave it a solid shake. “Try and stay outta trouble from here on out.”
Draven snorted. “That’s a tall order, because Indy and trouble are besties.” He stood from the seat and shook Wolf’s hand. “Tell your guys I said thank you, too.”
“Will do.” Wolf nodded. “We’ll be wheels up again in less than twelve hours, but if you need something before then, ask command to call me.” He smiled and turned away as Charlie team and Draven gathered their gear.
“Leave your weapons with me,” Kristof ordered. “The Navy frowns on unauthorized weapons on base. Nemesis will take care of getting them back to us.”
“Yeah.” Draven stripped off all the weapons, dropping them into the go bag Kristof had at his feet. “Indy, your weapons.”
“I—uh—um—” He knew what she was going to say before she continued. “I don’t have any.”
“Excuse me?” She better not be telling him that she was running around one of the most dangerous places on the planet with no weapons. He swallowed down the urge to reprimand her.
“I had a knife, but the assholes took it when they captured me.”
“A knife?” He picked up her ruck. “You don’t have a gun? Or a—anything?” He already knew the answer, and it pissed him off so much it hurt not to yell at her for being an idiot.
“Unless a set of brass knuckles count, no.” She snatched the bag from him. “I don’t.” She clutched the ruck against her chest as if he was going to snatch it from her.
Don’t yell at her.
He opened his mouth and snapped it shut again. Now was not the time nor the place. But they would be having a conversation about this just as soon as they were somewhere they couldn’t be overheard.
Not now.
Say it later.
He scowled at her and turned back to Kristof. “That’s it.”
“Okay.” Kristof zipped the go bag shut and shouldered it. He glanced at the guys as if counting them in his head. “I don’t know how long it’s been since you came through here last, but be prepared to be searched,” he warned as they strode to the door of the plane. “It ain’t fun, but Nem says we gotta behave and comply.”
A couple of hours later and Draven was grateful for the warning Kristof had given. Being searched and the questions and answer session from the brass hadn’t been fun. Thankfully, there had been one person who knew Dalton Knight, and despite reprimanding him for sending a team through the base without prior arrangement, had let them go after speaking to his boss.
He glanced at Indy in the passenger seat of the rental car Dalton had provided for them along with directions to a safe house in northern Italy. “How you doing?” he asked softly.
“There are very few things I prefer the way the CIA does them.” She clasped her fingers around one knee. “How we go through Navy bases in Italy is one of them.”
“I’m sorry…”
“It’s not your fault.” She reached for the paper mug in the holder and took a sip. “It just sucked is all. After the last few days, I don’t want anyone touching me, never mind being strip-searched to make sure I’m not wearing a suicide vest.”
“I hear that.” He resented the fact they’d even checked behind his balls. “While it’s awesome that they make security a high priority, I couldn’t hide enough C-4 behind my balls to cause damage to anything but my freaking balls.”
She spluttered into her mug and smirked at him. “Are you saying you’ve got small balls?” She quirked an eyebrow up at him. “Because if you are…”
“Shut it, brat.”
Just like that, all was right between them again. But he was going to shatter the uneasy truce they seemed to have called at the first opportunity. He should do it now, but he didn’t want to. He needed a minute to just be.
“I gotta pee.”
He glanced at the sign on the side of the highway. “There’s an auto-grill about ten miles up. Can you wait until then, or do I gotta find a ditch?”
“I can wait.” She shifted on the seat. “Is there a reason we aren’t on a plane back to the US right now?”
He’d been waiting for it to come up. “My boss, Dalton, remember him?”
“Yeah.”
“He has some of the guys digging as to why your dad sent you over here and why everything about the job seemed … off? Is off the word I’m looking for?”
“Yeah, off about fits it.”
He changed lanes, getting ready to take the exit for the auto-grill, and in the rearview mirror spotted the black SUV behind them doing the same. “He wanted to look into it some more. While I was waiting for them to finish up with clearing you through the base, I spoke to him and he said he’d sent a couple of the guys down to California to talk to your dad in person. We both felt it was best to wait until we have their input before we put you back in the path of the alphabets.” He switched lanes again, this time squeezing in between two slower cars on the right-hand lane, all the while keeping an eye on the rearview.
“Are we being followed?”
He glanced from the mirror to her face and back again in time to see the SUV behind them do the same. “Maybe.” He lifted one shoulder. “But I could be paranoid.”
“I don’t need to pee that badly.” She placed her feet back on the floor of the car and slipped them into her boots. “Keep going and see if they follow.”
“I’m probably imagining it—”
“How long have you been an operator?” She glanced up from tying her boots.
“Long enough.”
“Exactly, long enough to trust your instincts.” She jerked her thumb over her shoulder. “If it’s nothing, then we’ve booted it down the road for a couple of miles and maybe earned a ticket or two for Nemesis’s bank account. No biggie.”
“And if it is them, then we let them know we see them.”
“Nah.” She grinned at him. “We are gonna have a mock argument the second you miss the turnoff and they’re gonna think I’m mad that you didn’t stop.”
“Genius. I fucking love it.” What was more normal than a couple arguing over when to make a pee stop on a road trip? He resisted the urge to give the SUV behind them the middle finger and just before the exit for the auto-grill switched lanes again to the middle one, and almost jumped straight out of his skin when Indy yelled in his ear.
“What the hell? I wanted to stop there.” She went full on for the Italian experience with her hands flying as she spoke.
Behind them, multiple horns blew as if someone else cut the lanes too short. But he didn’t have time to look as he was too busy trying not to go under the wheels of the eighteen-wheeler. “Jeez, don’t do that.” He got way too close of a look at the underside of the truck before he got the car back under control and firmly between the white lines. “You scared about fifteen years off my life.”
“Just giving them a good show.” She swatted at his head. “Did they follow us?”
He ducked his head out of the way to avoid her hand and peered into the wing mirror. There it was, the front nose of a black SUV. “Yeah.”
“Damn, they are following us.”
He didn’t want it to be the case, but he wouldn’t lie to her either. “Looks like it.” He chewed on the corner of his lip. “Grab my cell out of my pocket, will ya?”
“Should I make it look like I’m still wailing on you?”
He eased them into the fast lane and hit the gas. “Go for it, just don’t make me crash or I’m gonna be pissed.”
“Damn, and I thought you’d crash and I could take off running for the hills.” She swatted at him again, her hands flailing. This time they were completely out of sync with the words coming out of her mouth.
“Grab my phone,” he reminded her. “We need to talk to Nemesis, or at least Trev.”
She nodded and dug into his pocket for his phone. “Code?”
“Four, seven, one, nine, two.” Out of the corner of his eye he saw her frown as she recognized the last five digits of her phone number. “Speed dial one,” he hurried to add on before she could question him on it.
“Okay.” She hit the button and held the phone down on her lap where it wouldn’t be visible if the men in the vehicle tailing them managed to develop super vision and were able to make out the shape of the phone in her hand.
“TOC,” Trev answered. “Is everything okay, Bravo Three?”
“Hey, Trev, I’ve got Indy with me—”
“I should hope so,” Trev snorted. “She’s why you took off from Kentucky’s wedding Hallmark style after all. If you didn’t have her with you, I’d be sending you back to either Napoli or the Congo depending on where you parted ways.”
“Shut it.” He scowled at the phone, his expression darkening when Indy snorted with laughter and waved her hands around again, clearly still in the couple fighting zone. “Indy is my friend.”
“And here I thought she was your sister’s friend,” Trev teased him. “My bad.”
Indy cut off the bickering by clapping her hands together. “All right, all right. We got a problem, TOC, because we’ve picked up a tail,” she said. “Me and Draven think it’s probably the CIA.”
There was a pause and Draven knew Trev was scanning through the mission notes, looking for something which may have alerted the CIA to her presence in Italy. “Do you still have your phone with you?”
“Crap.” Indy leaned between the seats to grab her ruck. “I do.” She rummaged through the pack and came up with her phone. “It’s dead, though.”
“Is that one that you can replace the battery on?” Trev asked.
“No, an iPhone.”
Trev’s sigh was audible. “Then they are probably tracking it. Toss it,” he ordered. “I don’t have the patience to talk you through checking it tonight, and Tex is busy so I can’t call him to do it.”
Indy pressed the button to lower the window. “You want me to toss it right now, even though they can see it?”
“Yup,” Trev replied. “GPS on the rental shows you’re on the A1 and headed toward Florence. Toss the phone, lose the tail. I’ll give you a new target location shortly.”
He knew from past experience that Trev was about to hang up, so Draven hurried to ask, “Just to be clear, I’m to lose them at all costs including any traffic tickets which might come because of it?”
“Yeah,” Trev muttered. “I’ll clear it with Nem.”
“Thanks.” That was all he needed to know. “Toss the phone, babe, then let’s raise a little Cain on this here motorway.”
“Oh, damn, you’ve gone country. We’re screwed.” She dropped the phone out the window and saw it disappear under the wheels of a truck in the lane beside them.
“Hah, you called her babe,” Trev crowed. “I fucking knew it. Hallmark for the win.”
If Draven hadn’t needed both hands on the wheel as they picked up speed, he’d have scrubbed one of them down his face in annoyance. He’d assumed Trev had hung up, just like he did every other time the conversation was done. Trust that the one time he didn’t double-check that Trev would hear him slip and call her babe. The teasing in his future was going to suck.
“What does your TOC keep talking about Hallmark movies for?”
“Inside joke.”
“Nope.” She popped the end of the word and Draven just knew she wasn’t going to let it go. “You don’t get away with it that easy. Spill.”
Thankfully this time they weren’t squeezed between two eighteen wheelers and he could scrub one hand down his face. “I’ll pay you in coffee…”
“Buddy, with those jackasses behind us, I’m not likely to get a pee stop, never mind a coffee stop in the next hundred miles or so,” Indy shot back. “Spill. Now.”
He could probably refuse to answer, and she might let it go. But, and it was a big but, he liked the easy vibe they had going on. He didn’t want to lose it. “When I asked Trev to help me figure out where I was going to find you, he figured out that you are Lizz’s friend,” he said. “Trev being Trev added two and two together, and instead of four, he got about seven, I think.” He took a non-descript exit at the last minute, shooting across in front of a truck, nearly killing them in the process.
Indy yelped and braced her hand on the dash, pressing herself back into the seat. “Jesus. Give me a little warning before you do that.”
“Sorry, I’m just trying to lose our tag-a-long friends.”
“You still could have warned me.”
He could have warned himself, for a second there he thought he’d misjudged the space and it was pure damn luck that he wasn’t stinking up the car and in need of a new pair of shorts. “I’ll warn you the next time,” he promised.
“I think you’re just trying to get out of telling me about the Hallmark thing.”
He wasn’t, but he also wasn’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth either. “Is it working?”
“Not a chance. Tell me the rest.”
How did he know that would be her answer? “So anyway, Trev was doped up on happily ever after shit because of the wedding or something and came up with seven and not four,” he explained.
“You know this doesn’t make a single bit of sense, right?”
“It will, I promise.” He wove them through a small town and came to a stop at the traffic lights before moving forward again as it turned to green. “I think the wedding shook something loose in Trev’s brain or something, because he decided that me coming to save you is like one of those Christmas movies on the... you know?”
“Hallmark channel?”
“Yeah, the Hallmark channel.” He nodded. “Remind me to tease the shit out of him for knowing about Hallmark movies, will ya?”
“You knew about them, too.”
“That’s completely irrelevant.” He slipped them down a side street with no idea of where they were going, but he supposed there were worse places to get lost than in the Italian countryside. “You and me, we aren’t anything like the movies.”
“If you say so.” She glanced over her shoulder, checking each vehicle which came up behind them. “But they sound like the movies Lizz likes to watch, and one of those plots is rescuing your sister’s best friend and falling in love with her while you did it.”