Russell Blake - Jet

Which brought her up short. So far, she’d been driven by an imperative to get as far from her pursuers as possible. But then what? She hadn’t formulated a plan yet, preferring to react rather than try to steer events.

That couldn’t last. As she browsed the newspaper rack, part of her mind was mulling over possible next moves.

She glanced at her watch and asked the magazine vendor whether there was an electronics store anywhere nearby. She needed a cell phone. With ten hours to kill on the bus, it would be helpful to be able to get on the internet and research things such as flight schedules. The young woman nodded and pointed to a shop across the street.

Jet was quickly able to find a Nokia with web-browsing capability, which she bought, along with several airtime cards. A late-model bus pulled into the station, and she scooped up her purchases and ran for it. The last thing she wanted to do was miss her ride and spend another day in Carupano. It was too close to Trinidad for comfort.

The door opened, and she stood in line with the other passengers. Thankfully, her seat was only a few back from the driver, so she wouldn’t be sitting by the bathroom for the whole trip. Her luck didn’t completely hold, though, when a mother and three small boys took the seats behind her. One immediately began crying when the other smacked him, and Jet turned around and gave the oblivious mother a dark look. She got the message and shifted the little squawker across the aisle then took the seat behind Jet herself.

As the bus bumped along the streets leading to the highway, Jet stuffed tissue in her ears and settled in for the long trip. She had nobody sitting next to her, at least for now, so she closed her eyes and reconciled herself to thinking through her situation and devising a plan.

In order to do so, she needed to understand how whoever was targeting her had located her.

And to do that, she needed to go back down a rabbit hole she thought she’d sealed off forever.

The bus swayed around a gradual curve then straightened out, the steady rumble of its wheels on the weathered asphalt blending with the muted roar of its diesel engine. The odor of spicy food pervaded the cabin as several of the passengers who had made the long trip before opened containers and ate lunch. The driver announced over the speaker that they would be making a ten-minute stop within two hours and that vendors would be selling food there, but the regular travelers preferred to bring their own — for reasons that would shortly become obvious.

Jet opened her eyes and stared at the passing landscape, her mind churning over the ramifications of the attack.

When she had disappeared in a ball of flame in Algiers, her existence had ended. Nobody knew that she was still alive except for David.

Who was also the only person who knew what her final destination had been.

She’d chosen Trinidad because it was far from her stomping grounds in the Middle East. There was basically zero chance there of being recognized by someone from her past life. She’d also considered Indonesia or Brazil, but didn’t speak the native tongues so communicating would have been a barrier. Trinidad’s official language was English, although she discovered after arriving that most spoke a Creole mixture in daily life. Jet spoke perfect English without an accent, thanks to her parents — her mom, born in Israel but of half Japanese and half Dominican heritage, had spoken Spanish as well, but always communicated with her father and her in English.

Nobody but David knew she was going to Trinidad, which left three possibilities: he had knowingly betrayed her, or had unknowingly done so…or they had slipped up somehow and someone had found out. The third scenario was impossible — Jet’s knowledge of craft was such that there was no way she could have been followed or traced.

Besides which, as far as the world was concerned she was dead.

That David would breach her confidence was hard to believe. He had no reason to give her up. And she believed that, in his own way, he loved her. Even if much of their attraction had been physical, over time, she had developed powerful feelings for him, and she knew it was mutual.

Then again, he lived in a no-man’s-land of fluid ethics and constant duplicity, where allegiances could shift in a heartbeat and nothing was sure. It was the spymaster’s life, which defined moral ambiguity. Could he have run into a situation where he’d had to divulge that she was alive? Sold her out? Was she nothing more than a pawn in some unknown game he was playing?

Nothing would have surprised Jet after the things she’d witnessed, but the idea of David betraying her didn’t make any sense. Not for the least reason that once she was dead, she was off the board, of interest to no one. That was the whole point of staging the explosion.

No, it didn’t fit.

But she couldn’t be a hundred percent certain that David hadn’t sold her out. And ninety-nine percent wouldn’t cut it. She needed to know for sure.

Her other problem was that she had no idea who had targeted her, or why.

It really could be anyone. Another intelligence service that she’d crossed during one of her missions. Terrorists. Criminal syndicates. A rogue government — she’d operated all over, including missions against Iran, Syria, Sudan, Libya…

The possible list of enemies was considerable and included her own country. The Mossad couldn’t be completely trusted not to have reasons to want her silenced. The team she had belonged to had carried out operations that were in clear violation of international law and would have severely embarrassed anyone associated with it, had all facts become known. Even a hint of the team’s existence would have been political dynamite.

The truth was that trying to figure out who wanted her head was going to be impossible without knowing how they had discovered she was alive, and then how they had found her.

And that led back to David.

As did all roads.

Which didn’t help her much.

Because like her, David was a ghost. Untraceable. His official existence was top secret, and he moved around constantly, never staying in any one place for more than a few weeks. He was ultra-paranoid and cautious — all the same enemies who would have danced in the streets to kill Jet would have also delighted in getting David, and in truth, the list was probably longer.

So it wasn’t like she could knock on his door and confront him. He could be anywhere, although he tended to stay within Israel’s borders. Which didn’t narrow it down much. There were a lot of places to hide if you were motivated and knew how.

And David was an expert at it.

Other than staying alive long enough to understand who wanted her dead, her number one priority would have to be finding David so she could discover the truth.

Whatever it was.

As the bus slowed to negotiate a series of hairpin turns, the child in the seat across the aisle vomited on the floor. The horrified mother rushed to clean it up, but the smell lingered and permeated the cabin. Jet considered stuffing tissue into her nose as well as her ears, but ultimately reconsidered. She was just going to spend a day in hell. There was no way around it.

It wasn’t like she hadn’t spent plenty there before.

She returned to the question of how to find David, but the more she thought about it, the more difficult it seemed.

The only way she could see was through another member of the team. They always had some way of getting in contact with him. They had to in case a mission blew apart. How she would get the information out of a teammate would come later — her biggest hurdle wasn’t how to get that piece of info, it was how to find any of them. They, like Jet, lived like nomads and were invisible. None of them had homes. She didn’t even know their real identities, just code names nobody would ever admit existed. Even if she could hack into the Mossad servers, which was nearly impossible, there would be no trail to follow — David made a point of ensuring that nothing could lead back to headquarters. It was part of his cautious personality and the nature of the team.