Freedom Does Matter (Mercenaries Book 2) Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Description

  The Nest

  Chapter One - The Beginning - Cairo

  Chapter Two - Day One - Minnesota

  Chapter Three - Day One - The Nest

  Chapter Four - Day Three - Cairo

  Chapter Five - Day Five - Cairo

  Chapter Six - Day Six - Cairo

  Chapter Seven - Day Eight - Cairo

  Chapter Eight - Day Nine - Cairo

  Chapter Nine - Day Ten - Almaza Bay

  Chapter Ten - Day Ten - Kansas City

  Chapter Eleven - Day Eleven - Almaza Bay

  Chapter Twelve - Day Twelve - Almaza Bay

  Chapter Thirteen - Day Thirteen - Cairo

  Chapter Fourteen - Day Fifteen - Cairo

  Chapter Fifteen - Day Fifteen - London

  Chapter Sixteen - Day Sixteen - The Nest

  Chapter Seventeen - Day Sixteen - The Nest

  Chapter Eighteen - Day Seventeen - The Nest

  Chapter Nineteen - Day Seventeen - Kansas City

  Chapter Twenty - Day Eighteen - The Nest

  Chapter Twenty-One - Day Twenty-one - en route Cairo

  Chapter Twenty-Two - Day Twenty-three - Cairo

  Chapter Twenty-Three - Day Twenty-five - The Nest

  Chapter Twenty-Four - Day Twenty-five - Cairo

  Chapter Twenty-Five - Day Twenty-seven - Cairo

  Chapter Twenty-Six - Day Twenty-eight - The Nest

  Chapter Twenty-Seven - Day Twenty-nine - The Nest

  Chapter Twenty-Eight - Day Thirty - London

  Chapter Twenty-Nine - Day Thirty-one - London

  Chapter Thirty - Day Thirty-two - London

  Chapter Thirty-One - Day Thirty-two - Kansas City

  Chapter Thirty-Two - Day Thirty-two - London

  Chapter Thirty-Three - Day Thirty-three - London

  Chapter Thirty-Four - Day Thirty-eight - Kansas City

  Chapter Thirty-Five - Day Thirty-nine - The Nest

  Chapter Thirty-Six - Day Forty-one - en route Minnesota

  Chapter Thirty-Seven - Day Forty-one - The Nest

  Chapter Thirty-Eight - Day Forty-three - Minnesota

  Chapter Thirty-Nine - Day Forty-five - Minnesota

  Chapter Forty - Day Forty-five - The Nest

  Chapter Forty-One - Day Forty-six - Kansas City

  Chapter Forty-Two - Day Forty-six - Kansas City

  Chapter Forty-Three - Day Forty-seven - Kansas City

  Chapter Forty-Four - Day Forty-seven - Kansas City

  Epilogue

  Appendices

  Glossary

  References

  The Nest

  Cast

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Also Available - Connections

  Freedom Does Matter

  By

  Tony Lavely

  Copyright © 2015 by tony lavely

  Cover image by Martin Pettitt via Flickr

  Published under Creative Commons License

  CC-BY-2.0

  All Maps of The Nest by Tommi Salama

  [email protected]

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Edition 151224.1

  All rights reserved.

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Amazon.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from Tony Lavely.

  Dedication

  This work is dedicated to my friend, Paul McAlister and his granddaughter, Paige.

  Paul, we miss you and your humor.

  “Inquiring minds want to know.”

  Paige, I regret so much that your future didn’t meet expectations. Your joy and wonder was special; we are better for knowing you.

  Description

  Mid-summer before her sophomore year at college, Beckie Sverdupe is grooming her horse when she receives horrifying news: her fiancé Ian Jamse has been shot.

  Leader of a successful mercenary team, Ian’s not only Beckie’s fiancé; he’s her mentor, training her as a team member after she made it clear that, having fallen in love with him, she would make their group more than just soldiers for hire; they’d be more ‘socially conscious’ mercenaries, with concomitant longer life expectancies. The current job, an Egyptian land dispute negotiation, supposedly filled that requirement to a tee. Except it hadn’t: Ian was dying!

  Instead of returning to campus for Engineering classes, Beckie kisses Ian’s insensate lips and heads to Cairo to complete the negotiations. It’s her first solo assignment, and she’s determined to finish despite her fears for Ian. Tracking the gunman will be an added challenge spurred by renewed assassination attempts targeting the new mediator: her!

  Her quest to gain justice—or revenge—for Ian reveals a conspiracy to incite the final Mideast war by killing thousands at iconic Wembley Stadium in London. As she unravels the plot, she comes head-to-head with one man’s bitter, intransigent attempts to redefine freedom. Will Ian love her again? Can Beckie thwart the terrorist honcho before the attack and eliminate one hateful voice of irrationality?

  While Freedom Does Matter is set in the Mercenaries world, it may be enjoyed on its own.

  Chapter One

  The Beginning - Cairo

  KEVIN DEVEEL SNAPPED THE NOTEBOOK closed and slid it across the table to Ian Jamse, his partner in the mercenary team they’d helmed for almost twenty years. He examined the room one more time, looking for things out of place. Old habits die hard, he mused, even if we’re not quite so much soldiers for hire, now.

  When his sweep was complete, he found Ian watching, a small smile curving his lips. He knows we’ve done this every day we’ve been here, Kevin thought. And that, though well-paid, negotiating a land dispute hardly rises to the level of international terrorism.

  “Any thoughts?” Ian said.

  Kevin decided Ian meant the notebooks. “No. I’m impressed you keep these notes.” He recalled other pads Ian had filled with task related data. Three on this job, so far. “Who’s going to read them?”

  “No one.” Ian’s smile became a knowing grin. “They serve as a reminder of past debates.”

  Kevin grinned in return. “I’ll find Dan and we’ll bring the sheikhs up from downstairs.”

  Their teammate, Dan Wu, was in the hallway chatting with two of the Cairo Trade Center’s security guards. “Everything okay?” Kevin said.

  Dan nodded. “Everything’s secure.” He rubbed his black hair. “Hope Ian can get this deal finished. I’m ready to get home for a few days.”

  “You and me both,” Kevin said. They’d been in Egypt twenty days. He sighed. “We’ve missed the Independence Day celebrations. Patrice flew Shalin and the kids over to Nassau for the Junkanoo parades. They had a great time.” He checked the hallway once more, then his phone. “Let’s go collect the clients,” he said before turning to the security guards. “Let the staff know we’re ready for the coffee and tea, please.”

  Ten minutes later, the dozen Egyptians, one woman amongst the
men, entered the conference room. Kevin, standing half in and half out of the doorway, watched as they took their places. When the passage was clear, he called, “Is Sue still downstairs?”

  “Yeah,” Dan said. “She was checking on the bill for hospitality. It was gonna take a few more minutes.”

  “Move closer to the elevators, then.” He surveyed the conference room. Ian was standing at the head of the table, ready to take his seat. The two sheikhs, Al Hosni on Ian’s right and al-Kassis on his left, had taken their positions behind their chairs, waiting while the attendant finished pouring their coffees. Another server distributed small cups along the table. Kevin took three steps in the direction of the snack table, looking for a bottle of water.

  He heard an obtrusive “Pop!” behind him. The noise echoed in the large room.

  Spinning, he saw Ian sprawled over the end of the table, blood pouring from his head. As he ran headlong toward him, he hollered out the door, “Shooter! Ian’s down, get Sue! Ooof!” He’d run into one of the Egyptians. He caught the man and used him to keep them both from falling. Oaths came unbidden, unspoken, as he thrust the man away.

  While his eyes were locked on Ian’s motionless body, shouts and the clatter of overturned furniture assaulted his ears. He shoved another person toward the door then vaulted a chair to land beside Ian. Along with Ian’s blood, spilled coffee and tea covered the table top and dripped to flood the white marble of the floor. The acrid smell of gunpowder covered that of the spilt coffee.

  The chaos faded. While Kevin kept Ian from sliding to the floor, Dan and the security guards verified that no one else had been injured. They had the room emptied and Ian laid out atop the table before Sue arrived.

  Sue went to work, though her muttered imprecations left Kevin with little doubt about her feelings. She turned her head to face him, cheeks glistening. “I need Millie. This is too much for me. All I can do is basic trauma care: stabilize the injury, keep him from bleeding out…” She choked back a sob. “We need Millie.” She went back to work.

  Kevin began a frantic search to contact Millie Ardan, the team’s chief doctor. In half an hour, he touched Sue’s arm. “Millie’s in Germany. Frankfurt. She’s hiring a charter.”

  Sue rubbed her eyes. “Frankfurt ought to be good for that.”

  He nodded. “Unless you disagree, she wants us to take him to the plane. She’s got everything there, and we can leave as soon as she can get him ready.”

  “Hmm. Okay. Let me call her back.”

  In two hours, they had Ian in the one-room hospital aboard the plane. Kevin wondered if Ian’s breathing was labored; when he asked Sue, she agreed and put an oxygen mask on him.

  An hour later, Millie called; she’d finally gotten a charter and she’d arrive between eight and nine.

  Kevin thought about calling the Nest, their base in the Bahamas, but decided to wait. Millie had put the hospital there on alert, and not only did he have little to report, they could do nothing except worry with him. He didn’t need any help for that! He pulled up a seat beside the gurney supporting Ian. Sue had taken the far side where she could keep watch on Ian’s vitals. Airport noises outside and beeps from the monitors inside were the only sounds.

  Derek Hamilton, the team’s token Brit, poked his head around the partition. “You wanted to debrief, right?”

  Kevin looked up. He didn’t really, but the team’s procedure demanded it, especially when an injury was involved. Or death. “I’ll be right out.”

  “I don’t have anything to add,” Sue said.

  “Yeah. I doubt any of us do, but we need to get… whatever, documented. Stay here with him.” She raised her eyebrows and glared. “Yeah, I know. Thanks.”

  The debrief took less than an hour. Derek had the only new information: “No one knows anything about the shooter—”

  “Nothing? He was right there with us! How could no one have seen him?”

  Derek was holding his hands out. “No one saw anything, ‘cause they were all waiting to die, I guess.” He shrugged. “The police finally arrived. They weren’t as interested, once they found Ian’s a foreign national. Kind of chuffed that we’d taken charge of ‘im.”

  “Less for them to worry about. Damn!” Kevin took a deep breath. “Any thing else?”

  “The Trade Center guys said they’d forward the surveillance video once it’s been vetted for, I don’t know, state secrets or something.”

  “Thanks,” Kevin said. “Okay. Let’s keep up the watch around the plane. I’ll relieve Dan.”

  Alone, taking his turn guarding the plane in the mid-afternoon heat, Kevin castigated himself. I’m the one who allowed it to happen, he thought. All these years of Ian saving my arse, and I don’t help him!

  He pushed his recriminations aside and reached for his phone. The call to the Nest could wait no longer. Telling his wife, Shalin, would be bad enough, but he dreaded talking to Boynton. Maurice Boynton, Ian’s factotum, was almost twice their ages; he had been with them since they’d left South Africa for England.

  His agitation betrayed him: he dropped the phone and in trying to make the save, kicked it ten feet into the plane’s wheel. He retrieved it, then paced the hundred-ten foot length of the airplane seven times. Hardly shaking, he sat on the base of the stairs and scrolled to his wife’s number.

  Brushing his cheek, his palm came away wet. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d cried.

  The conversations went no worse than he expected until, after he’d finished with Boynton, Shalin called him back. The first word she said hit him as hard as anything since the shooting: “Beckie?”

  In his mind’s eye, he saw a girl. An attractive nineteen-year-old girl with long chestnut hair and lustrous green eyes, about five feet tall and slight. Ian’s fiancée, Beckie Sverdupe. No matter what Boynton had said about notifying people, Kevin knew he wouldn’t be the one to hide this from her. Her work with the team would have qualified her even if her relationship with Ian hadn’t.

  “Ask Patrice if he can fly to Minnesota and pick her up tomorrow. Call me back and I’ll let her know when he’ll be there.”

  “Should we do that?”

  Kevin thought for a second. Ian might throw him off the team. If he lived. But if he concealed this from Beckie… In his vision, the girl was now standing arms akimbo glaring at him. If he concealed this from her, she would flay him alive. “Yes.”

  Chapter Two

  Day One - Minnesota

  BECKIE SVERDUPE BRUSHED HOSHI, HER Thoroughbred, after an early morning riding session preparing for Monday’s riding camp. The warm July sunshine, typical for Minnesota, and the familiar smells of Hoshi and the stable exhilarated her. Her whole life had been lived in Prior Lake, west and south of Minneapolis, until last year when high school ended. Before college began, she’d moved to the Nest, located on an archipelago of seven Out Islands in the Bahamas, to live with Ian Jamse, her fiancé.

  This summer, following her freshman year at the University of Miami, was going as well as she could hope, and her plans for the near future were intriguing, at the least. Her visit home would soon end. Ian’s gonna be finished with the Egyptians next week and I’ll fly down to the Nest to meet him there. Spending time with him and the rest of the team will be great!

  Her reverie was demolished when cold flooded her shoulders and back. “Whoa!” Water soaked her shirt and jodhpurs and tried to fill her riding boots. She dropped the grooming brush, then stifled a curse as it splashed in the puddle at her feet.

  Laughter behind her brought her around to see Ginny, obviously egged on by Melissa—my best friend!—holding the hose still playing water over her, though the younger girl had lowered it to knee level.

  Melissa was doubled over in glee, pointing and gasping. Ginny was amused, but less and less so as embarrassment overtook the joke. She turned the nozzle off as Beckie pulled her shirt away from her body.

  Wringing her shirttails, Beckie thought to terrorize the girl, but her motivation dribble
d off along with the water. “Ginny, if you weren’t so good with Hoshi, I’d—” She stopped short as her brother Mike waved from the car. He was holding her phone. Even from a distance, his open mouth and wide eyes left her colder than the well water had.

  Heart pounding, she read the text.

  Patrice otw to pick u up. He’ll b at FCM about 0930. Ian’s been shot. Millie and Jean-Luc r bringing him back. No questions cause thats all we know. K

  At 9:15, she stood, anxious, outside the hangar at Flying Cloud Airport—FCM—where Patrice would refuel the plane for the trip to wherever Ian was going. Her overnight bag lay by her foot. Mike and Melissa were close but there was nothing to say.

  Beckie’s phone rang, jarring her from her wild, roiling thoughts. She snatched it from its holder. The display read ‘Patrice.’

  “Hello?”

  “Beckie?” came back in the man’s cosmopolitan accent. “You ready?”

  “When will you get here?”

  “I should be on the ground in twenty minutes.”

  “Good. Do you have any news?”

  “Except that we’ll go to the Nest, no. Sorry.”

  “Yeah. Okay.”

  Chapter Three

  Day One - The Nest

  ABOARD THE PLANE AT LAST, Beckie sat and stared. Fear’s clammy tendrils crept toward her heart. While she’d been packing, or planning, or even just moving around, she’d been able to press them back, but here… Here there was nothing she could do. Patrice was busy with the airplane; neither he nor his copilot had any information.

  After an hour of trembling in her seat, she sat up straight. Stupid, she thought. Rather than continue doing nothing, she went back over the facts about the job she did have. In their review, no one had suggested there was any risk greater than getting caught in a march to Tahrir Square. Even with the government in turmoil, they believed the danger acceptable. The negotiations, forging an agreement to resolve a land ownership dispute which had lasted for years, had seemed to be an effort to end killing as a solution, not a rationale for attacking the negotiator.