Russell Blake - Jet

But for now, she couldn’t risk how he would react. David was a good man, an honorable man, but he was also a control freak — he had to be in his position. He was in command of every aspect of the team, of any operation they were on, of everything that happened, and he had been specially chosen for his personality, just as surely as she had been selected for hers. And while she had strong feelings for him — might even be in love with him if she was honest with herself — she knew him well enough to know she couldn’t predict what he would do, and she couldn’t take the chance that the truth would trigger a disastrous chain of events. This was her choice, and she would do whatever was necessary to keep her baby safe. It ate at her heart to keep it from him, but in the end, she had no other option.

“You know this won’t be easy,” he said, taking her hand and kissing her palm with unexpected tenderness.

She almost started crying — eyes welling up — but David probably thought she was overcome by gratitude. She pulled her hand away and wiped her face with the back of her arm, then fixed him with a calm gaze, the moment over.

“We’ll need a plan,” she said. “I hear you’re pretty good with those.”

“Your idea isn’t bad, but we’ll need to fine-tune it and wait for the appropriate opportunity. When the chance comes, you need to be ready. That means passports, money, weapons, a destination where you’ll be safe…”

“I know.” She rolled off her elbow, onto her back, and stared at the ceiling before closing her eyes. The rest was logistics. Execution. Picking a place far away where nobody would know her, and she could blend into a new life without attracting any attention. Lining up the funding and the paperwork. These were the sorts of details that they both excelled at. The hard part had been deciding to do it and convincing David to help her. She had halfway expected him to refuse, and she wouldn’t have blamed him if he had. She was asking him to help her betray the team and the service, to which he owed everything — his identity, his vocation, his reason for waking up every day.

Neither of them could have known that her chance would come a week and a half later, when the CIA had alerted the Mossad about the Algiers meeting. Once the mission had been fast-tracked, David had worked around the clock to plan the car explosion and her escape. Her disappearance had been flawless, nobody had suspected a thing, and her putative death had gone off without a hitch.

She’d last seen David two days before leaving for Algiers. They’d had no contact since except for a blank postcard she’d sent to let him know she was safe, as they’d agreed.

The boat hit a particularly steep wave, and a shower of spray splashed high into the air, blowing over the sides of the hull and soaking them both. The memories were jarred away by the shock, and in spite of herself, she opened her eyes and laughed, water dripping from her hair and face.

Capitan Juan joined her, and she felt an ephemeral kinship with the old fisherman as they bounced over the swells, laughing mindlessly at having gotten wet.

The breeze and sunshine quickly dried her, and the moment passed. A pair of flying fish catapulted out of the water off the bow, keeping pace as they surfed the glistening spindrift that danced above the waves, to the steady accompanying throb of the boat’s motor.

After a few minutes, Juan pointed at a break in the jungle, where bleached buildings interrupted the seamless green of the shore on the horizon.

“Guiria.”

She nodded, shielding her eyes from the sunlight with her good hand.

“How long?” she asked.

He appeared to ponder the question seriously, brow furrowing before he gave her another toothless smile.

“Maybe fifteen minutes. We made good time.”

She nodded. “Sometimes life’s like that.”

They continued the rest of the journey in silence.

Present Day, Guiria, Venezuela

If there was a grimmer place on the planet than Guiria’s harbor, Jet was yet to encounter it, and she’d languished in some low places in her time. Rusting fishing scows creaked and groaned against crumbling piers, bemoaning the region’s poverty. Once she had climbed up onto the wharf and waved goodbye to Capitan Juan, she turned to survey the little port, and what met her eyes wasn’t heartening. Corroded metal roofs, peeling paint and a pall of rotting stink greeted her senses as she moved from the waterfront into the town’s truculent streets.

She stopped at a small corner market and bought a bag of nuts and a bottle of water, which she drained greedily outside before going back in and getting another. Further up the block, she found a shop that stocked a few tank tops and T-shirts; she chose the least terrible of them, suffering the annoyed look from the old shopkeeper when she paid with dollars — a currency that was officially frowned upon in Venezuela, and yet in reality was accepted by the majority of the locals.

Near the central square, she came across a tired little hotel that had been around since the dawn of time. A few locals sat on the curb, trading familiar jokes and stories as they watched their world go by. They stopped talking as she passed them, and she could hear the whispered snipes when she walked through the hotel’s cracked wooden doors.

A stout woman, wearing a bright yellow dress and with the face of a former heavyweight contender, met her at the reception counter and agreed to rent her a room for seven dollars. Jet asked her about the bus schedule. She shrugged. The stop was two blocks up. Jet was free to check whenever she felt like it.

The room was on the second floor and smelled like a combination of vomit and mildew with a veneer of cleaning product slathered over it. But it would do — there was tepid running water and a bar of white soap in the shower, which was all she had been hoping for.

Half an hour later, she descended the stairs and stepped out into the muggy heat. The same loitering group watched her walk up the sidewalk in the direction of the bus stop, making all the same comments they’d made when she’d entered. Apparently, being a gutter rat in Guiria didn’t require a vast repertoire.

According to a faded agenda mounted on a post near the church, the bus to Caracas ran once a day in the early afternoon. It was scheduled to leave in an hour and a half, so she had time to eat and make it back to catch it.

A few minutes later, she was sitting in a family-style cafe that unsurprisingly featured seafood as its staple. She ordered the grilled fish and considered her next move as the dusty overhead fans creaked ineffective orbits to mitigate the heat.

Her adversaries either thought she was still alive and therefore likely still on Trinidad, or had heard about the exploding boat and thought she was dead. A very distant third possibility was that they remembered her last death by explosion and didn’t believe she’d really been killed, assuming they thought it was her on the boat.

It was the third possibility that troubled her.

If it were Jet conducting the hunt, she would have operatives at any of the major towns on the coast, watching, just in case. It was a long shot, but she’d gotten lucky herself on long shots before. Based on the scale of what she’d seen so far, she couldn’t discount the possibility.

When the fish arrived, Jet devoured it with ravenous enthusiasm, starved after a night with no supper.

Back on the street, she ambled down the shabby sidewalks until she found a stall calling itself Bazaar del Mundo — the bazaar of the world — a lofty claim based on the town and the sad collection of secondhand goods assembled within sight of the street. Washing machines from the Sixties, a TV that was older than she was, fishing nets at the end of their rope…and a rack of used clothing.