Russell Blake - Jet

“I know. It doesn’t make a lot of sense. But it will.”

“Will?”

He was starting to fade again.

“Can you please change the IV bag when it runs dry? Probably in another few hours.”

“What would you do if I wasn’t here?” she asked.

“Rani is coming by after work. He’s supposed to be here by seven this evening to check on me.”

Just then, she heard the front door push open against the chair.

She grabbed the Glock and dashed into the living room, where a quick glimpse at the screen confirmed that Rani was on the stoop. “Coming,” she called, then moved down the hall to the entrance, slipping the gun into the waist of her jeans and pulling her shirt over it. She removed the chair and unlocked the chain.

Rani pushed his way in a few seconds later, a bag of groceries in one hand and his physician’s bag in the other. She wordlessly took the food from him and carried it to the kitchen as he walked to the bedroom.

A few minutes later, he returned.

“How is he?” she asked.

“Healing. There’s a danger of sepsis, and he shouldn’t move any more than necessary for another forty-eight hours, and then slowly. The good news is that he’s in remarkable physical shape.”

“How long will he be on the morphine?”

“He can start easing off it tomorrow. Pain is the worst during the first twenty-four hours following the surgery. From here, it should get more tolerable. But bear in mind, I had to cut part of his guts out.”

“That’s the technical term?”

Rani smiled.

“There isn’t a lot anyone can do for him now, except wait. Time will heal him or kill him. My money is on a recovery.” Rani got a glass of water in the kitchen and then headed to the door. “I’ll be back tomorrow. If he starts presenting with a fever, call me — that could be infection, and we need to keep a close watch on it. Beyond that, try to keep him down and resting.”

“Is there anything else I can do?”

He scowled as he opened the door and stepped out.

“Pray.”

The next morning, Jet blended breakfast for them both — a combination of bananas, milk and yogurt — and brought the concoction into David’s room. He was still out of it, although his eyes seemed a bit clearer. They sipped their sustenance in silence, then Jet took the empty glasses back to the kitchen and rejoined him.

“Rani said he would come by again today to take a look at you.”

“I remember.”

“Do you remember where you said you would tell me what the hell is going on?”

“Sort of. That part is a little fuzzier.”

“See if this helps. Someone attacked me on the island where I was living, which nobody knew about except for you. I killed nine of them, but they kept on coming. I figured out pretty quickly that you were the only one who could have told them where I was, so I went to Yemen to find Rain — the only member of the team I thought I had a decent chance of locating. I had just gotten there when he was killed in front of me, but not before leaving the return to base signal. So then I snuck into Israel, only to discover you’d been attacked as well. Does that jog your memory at all?”

David looked at her and nodded.

“I originally thought that it was the terrorist cell Rain had infiltrated that killed him, but now I’m not so sure.”

“Why?”

“Because someone killed the other members of the team within a day of his execution.”

Jet’s eyes widened. “They’re all dead? Everyone?”

“Correct. Someone eliminated a group that doesn’t officially exist, and that only a handful of top brass knew about. I found out about the others as information was coming in about Rain. It looks like it was a coordinated strike carried out by professionals.” David paused, frowning. “I have no idea how they tracked them down. Their locations and identities were secret.”

“Good Lord…”

“Then they came for me. To a safe house that nobody knew about. Loaded for bear. It’s only because I got lucky I was able to escape. The plan was for me to be dead, too. I took a bunch of them out, but two survived. So they know I’m still alive.”

“And you have no idea who these people are?”

“Like I said, the only thing I know for sure is that one of the group that tried to kill me was Russian. Probably all of them because he was speaking it into his radio. Did you get a good look at the men who attacked you?”

“They could have been Russian. All Caucasian.”

“So that fits. But it doesn’t mean that the Russian government is trying to terminate us. A lot of ex-Spetsnaz signed on for mercenary work once the wall came down, and that’s still one of the largest sources of mercenaries in the world.”

“Where does that leave us?”

“I’ve got to get healthy enough to be able to put out feelers to some of my non-Mossad contacts. But I can’t rule out that the team was terminated by someone in the Mossad, either.”

“Why would the agency we all worked for want to terminate everyone?”

“I don’t know. But the cleanest way of ensuring there are no loose ends to embarrass you is to end the project permanently, including all personnel.”

“Did you get a foreshadowing of anything like that?”

“No. But there’s always been an elephant in the room when it comes to the team. Operating hit squads on foreign soil, sometimes of friendly nations…to say that it would be embarrassing is an understatement. It would be disastrous for the current administration as well as the nation. I could think of a lot of people who would sleep better if it all just went away. Do I think Mossad is behind this? No. Is it possible? Anything is in this business. You should know that.” He was tiring again, eyes beginning to droop closed. He forced himself back to consciousness with an effort.

“There’s still the question of how they knew I was alive. How they knew where to find me,” she said softly.

“A month ago my condo was robbed. I hadn’t been there for about a week — I was running an op. Nobody knew about it — nobody — I’d only had it for six months, and I used a cutout ID to rent it. Anyway, my neighbor called the police, and by the time I made it into town, a lot of people had been through it: the crime scene techs, the police, the robbers. I’m thinking that they got the information on you when it was robbed. On the rest of the team, I suspect a mole within the agency…but no information existed anywhere about you being alive, nor about your location, so the robbery is the only answer I can come up with.”

“Why didn’t you try to warn me?”

“It never occurred to me. A few items were stolen — the stereo, some cash, a laptop computer, but there wasn’t anything else missing. The problem is that I wasn’t thinking about you when I was burgled.”

She moved around the bed to stare directly into his eyes.

“What did they find?”

“The postcard you sent. I kept it. It was stupid. Sentimental, I suppose. It was on my refrigerator. My guess is that they took photos of everything — you know how that works — and then somehow cracked the encryption on the laptop. It was military grade, supposedly unbreakable, but who knows?”

“You kept the postcard? But it was blank.”

“I know. And I didn’t have anything operational on the computer. But I think there might have been a few files related to my planning for your untimely demise. That’s the only thing that makes any sense. I’m the only one who knew about you, and I haven’t said a word, so it all leads back to someone staging a robbery and devoting insane levels of resources to finding a dead woman.”

She stared at a point on the wall, a thousand miles away.