Freedom Does Matter (Mercenaries Book 2) Read online

  So what the fuck went wrong? She leaned her head back and closed her eyes. The images didn’t stop until Patrice called, “We’re about eight minutes out.”

  As the plane rolled to a stop, Beckie was at the door, unlatching and dropping the stairs before the suspension settled. A look around the airfield on Port Cay told her the 737 she expected hadn’t arrived.

  “Beckie! Beckie!” Shalin deVeel’s voice rang out over the noise of the engines spinning down.

  When she looked again, Shalin was obvious, running toward her from the hangar’s office. The two friends met in a crash of emotions.

  “I’m so sorry, Beckie! It’s just—”

  “Don’t. There’s nothing you could have done. Any word?”

  “Jean-Luc is about a half-hour out. Millie’s been in touch with the hospital.” She waved across the channel separating the airfield from the neat two-story building. “Medics will be here in a few minutes with the ambulance.” Shalin paused, looking at Beckie’s face. Beckie thought she must look a mess, but maybe not as wild as when she kissed Mike and Melissa goodbye. “Millie wants you to stay back till she’s got Ian in—”

  “Bullshit! I pushed Patrice to break speed records all the way so I’d be here when Ian arrived. I won’t sit on my butt and wait. Even if I can’t do anything.”

  “Yes, she said she expected that.” Shalin’s twisted grin spoke of different things to Beckie, wondering if the woman was recalling the time she and Kevin met—in the aftermath of a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv. She took Beckie’s arm and began walking toward the hangar. “She will demand that you not touch him in any way, since he’s not stabilized yet and—”

  “That’s more medic crap. If there was any risk, she wouldn’t have moved him!” She stopped and turned to Shalin. “I’m not angry with you, you know that, right? I’m not even angry with Millie. I won’t jump on him or throw myself across his head. If I understood Patrice?”

  “I know, Beckie. Her message before leaving said it was a headshot, yes. There are very few good outcomes from that kind of wound.”

  Tears welled up, spilled over Beckie’s cheeks. “It can’t be, Shalin. It just can’t be. He had so much… We had so many plans.” She looked up through the tears. “Millie told you to remind me of that, didn’t she? To set my expectations low so I wouldn’t be so shocked if… if… if he’s died. Or he has so little brain left he might as well have.

  “Bless her for… I hope she’s doing half the job for him she’s doing for me.”

  A glint in the northeastern sky caught Beckie’s eye. She scrubbed her tears away and allowed Shalin to guide her to a safer viewpoint. Once the plane stopped, Beckie ran to the mechanics pushing the portable stairs into place.

  “Beckie, stay back, please,” Patrice said. “We’ll get everyone off, then use the lift to bring the bed out. You can’t…”

  Beckie heard no more; she was up the steps helping the mechanic swing the door open. She shoved through the people waiting to debark, heedless of their greetings.

  Running by the pallet of seats where the departing passengers had been seated, she focused on the pallet with a hospital bed attached. It was even worse than the picture in her imagination. A plastic tent over a body—No, dammit! That’s Ian… Unless Millie’s brought someone else, too. She felt a brief flash of guilt that she hadn’t thought of that earlier.

  No, there was only the one gurney. The canopy covered the upper half of Ian’s body. An unbelievable number of IV bottles were almost still after the landing. The tent ended just below Ian’s waist; he wore what he referred to as his dress camos. No brown in the pattern, just greens and grays. He’d told her he wore them for negotiation sessions. From the look of the small blanket covering his feet, his boots were gone. On the side facing her, a hand, punctured by needles, squeezed out from under the tent to lie on the mattress.

  Millie Ardan stood behind the pallet; Beckie realized the doctor hadn’t noticed her. At the foot of the bed, she peered, hoping her vision could penetrate the cloudy tent wall. Frustrated, she slid a hand under the blanket to reach Ian’s foot. Its warmth was a greater relief to her than she’d expected.

  “Thank you, Millie,” she murmured with all the love she could muster for the doctor who had so far kept Ian alive. “I promise I won’t get in the way, but I am gonna stay with him.”

  “Okay. Before you ask, no change. I stabilized him to get him here after opening his skull to relieve the pressure. It’ll be tomorrow or the next day till we know more. And weeks before we have any real prognosis. You remember that Congresswoman a while back? You can hope for as good an outcome, but don’t plan on it.”

  “Thanks, Doc.” Beckie took a deep breath. “Just so you know, Shalin told me everything you asked her to, so it’s on me, not her.”

  She got a nod in return as Millie finished up her checks.

  “Patrice,” Millie called from the open cargo door, “is the ambulance here yet?”

  “Just pulling up now, Doc.”

  “Okay. Have them pick up the bed. After the ammo we usually carry, the extra weight…” She nodded toward Beckie. “… won’t upset the lift. They can put the pallet right on the boat.”

  Beckie scrunched as close to the foot of the bed as she could, using one hand to grip the frame while keeping the other against Ian’s bare ankle. She caught her breath when the pallet lurched, but no one else seemed to give it a second thought.

  When the lift set the pallet down, Millie stepped off and hugged a teenage girl. Beckie hadn’t noticed her before, but the doctor had a smile on her face as she turned to the strange vehicle waiting. Millie glanced at Beckie and said, “My daughter.”

  The back of the amphibian ambulance dropped with a clatter that startled Beckie, but as she recovered, the lift raised the pallet and moved slowly. After too long a time, the pallet had been fastened to the deck of the vehicle.

  At the hospital, Beckie allowed Millie to disengage her. She stood to the side while orderlies freed the gurney and its associated equipment from the pallet, then rolled it into the building.

  Over the past two years, Beckie had visited Millie’s hospital; it had impressed her as much as the one at home where she’d visited a schoolmate recovering from an accident. Now, however, overwhelmed, she cast a forlorn look at the doctor.

  Millie nodded. “We’ll do the best we can. It will be as it will.”

  Beckie’d heard that before; she made no response as the bed, equipment and Ian were installed in the over-bright room.

  Millie turned as if to speak, but her phone rang. The call was short.

  “Well, that’s good,” Millie said. “I asked a group of specialists to help us. Three of them will land in half an hour and the others will arrive tomorrow.”

  “Good! What kind of specialists?”

  “Gunshot wounds, head wounds, brain injury. We’ll get who we need.”

  “Thank you.”

  “We all love him, too,” she responded in a voice so matter-of-fact that Beckie was surprised. “Now, those doctors will refuse to work with a civilian in the room.” Beckie didn’t need the finger pointed at her to understand. “Especially his fiancée. They won’t feel able to speak freely. I suspect they’d throw me out, too, if they could stay for the whole course of treatment. But since they do have to hand it off…”

  Beckie nodded. Millie had already been more tolerant than she’d expected. She decided she’d not try to disguise herself as a nurse just yet. “I’ll wait over with Shalin. Call me when you leave, so I can come back.”

  “Okay for tonight. But you will not sleep here. I’ve got nurses scheduled with him ‘round the clock, and I don’t need you falling over from stress or fatigue.”

  “Yes, Mom.”

  “I’m serious, Beckie. You have to understand that, for now, your being here is for you, not him.”

  “All right. But let’s get him to the point where it’s for him, too, okay? Soon!”

  “They kicked me out,” Beckie told Shalin as she opened the door.

  On the way to the kitchen, Shalin looked Beckie up and down. “I could find a glass of wine?”

  “No, thanks.” Gratitude filled her voice and tears trickled out again. Shalin was Muslim and alcohol was almost never found in her home. “They’re supposed to tell me when they’ve finished the lab experiment.” Her tears now weren’t from gratitude. “It’s terrible. I could hardly see him under the tent. All the bottles and tubes. Horrible! The only part I could touch was his foot. But I could feel his pulse. That’s good, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, Beckie.” Shalin hugged the girl. “That’s good.”

  After an hour of tea and small talk, comforting included, Kevin deVeel burst through the door to the kitchen. “We just got video of the attack!”

  “Well, let’s see it,” Beckie said, not allowing herself to be put off by Kevin’s chagrin at seeing her. “Com’on, Kevin. I’ve gotta know what happens, for good or for bad. If I need any coddling, I’ll get it from Shalin or the kids. I don’t need it from you.”

  “It isn’t pretty.”

  “How can I tell you that’s not a surprise? It is so not a surprise. I knew that looking at him on the hospital bed.” She stood and grabbed his arm.

  Shalin gave her husband a nod. “She’ll be okay. The video won’t scar her any more.”

  Kevin shrugged. “The kids aren’t around, right?”

  “Not for another hour. It’s not that long, I guess.”

  “No, the interesting part lasts about thirty seconds.”

  While the video was as bad as Kevin promised, Beckie had inured herself to seeing Ian injured. What horrified her as much as it shocked Kevin was the assassin: a girl of no more than fourteen or fifteen. She’d appeared in camera range about
ninety seconds before the attack, distributing cups and saucers along the table, but moving nervously. Skittishly, to Beckie’s eye.

  “Why didn’t someone stop her, ask why she’s so… so frantic? That’s the kind of thing they throw you in jail for at an airport.”

  Kevin reset the video.“I can’t speak for anyone else, but I didn’t see her. Even if I had, I wouldn’t have given her a thought. I mean, com’on, she’s a kid, nothing else. There to help with the service.”

  “Yeah, I see it with the clarity of hindsight, too. I didn’t notice her until she crouched behind Ian. So… Why’d she do it? Was she just trying to break up the negotiations? And what happened to her?” She put her hands flat on the table. “Does anything make sense?”

  “Derek, Dan and I talked. We don’t know any of those things. In the chaos, with everybody throwing themselves or their charges out of the line of fire, she managed to slither away. By the time order’d been restored, she was long gone.

  “As for why, we surmise she was acting for a tribal group who expect to lose more than they’ll gain from the negotiations. But that’s only an assumption.” He gazed at Beckie for a long second. “We were together all the time. There’s no possibility this was personal. She was after the negotiator, not Ian.”

  Beckie didn’t feel like she had to even respond to Kevin. The thought that Ian had been taken in a personal vendetta was so far from any place her thoughts had gone.

  She planned to spend the night sitting next to Ian once Millie called to give her the all-clear.

  “They are cautiously optimistic,” the doctor told Beckie.

  “That just means they’re going to let the next guys tell us what they think,” Beckie groused.

  “So cynical for one so young,” Millie remonstrated, but Beckie noticed she didn’t disagree.

  Sitting beside Ian, Beckie was almost in heaven: she was allowed to hold his hand. While Millie had told her he was in an induced coma, she was still disappointed in his lack of awareness.

  After noticing he still wore his camo pants, she dropped her head to rest on his hand and remembered the previous summer. She’d worked hard to survive and learn from Kevin, Willie and Sue as they gave her the basic training needed to protect both herself and them. Willie, for all his size, was as competent with a knife as Sam. And hand-to-hand fighting. He taught her tricks to compensate for her small size. Once he’d finished, Elena had taken her to Tiny Cay, an aptly named island which boasted nothing but beach and heavy undergrowth. They’d spent three days there while Elena tested her.

  When they weren’t fighting, they did tactics until Beckie’s head hurt.

  She touched her throat where in one of the knife exercises, Elena had managed to land a blow with the dulled edge. Beckie had gasped for several minutes while continuing to hold off Elena. The bruise had appalled Elena when Beckie finally allowed her to see it. And Ian! Ian was fit to be tied. However, it had been well worth the pain to feel his lips soothing the dull ache on her return. Warm and quivery feelings filled her as she remembered Ian’s hand caressing her… other places. Now, in July a year later, she squeezed his hand for the umpteenth time, still with no response.

  When the orderly came in at midnight, Beckie relinquished her station and walked and boated back to the deVeel’s home. At the back door, she let herself in. With smiles, the team welcomed her as she trudged across the kitchen to sit alongside Kevin at the island. She answered the questions about Ian’s condition with the same dearth of information Millie’d given her.

  “So,” she said, “what about the negotiations?”

  “We should be ‘eaded right back to Cairo,” Derek said, “so the Sheikhs won’t try to go off by themselves. I talked to Dan a couple ‘ours ago and ‘e said they’ve asked if we were going to bring another negotiator in to replace Ian.”

  Beckie sat up and raised her hand. “Here’s his replacement.”

  “Well, Beckie, I’m not sure I’ll sign up for you stepping into Ian’s place,” Willie said with a grin. “First, don’t forget you’re a girl—”

  “What do you mean, I’m ‘a girl’? Never expected to hear you say that, Mr. Llorens.”

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa! I didn’t mean you’re a gurl, or whatever. You are female, and a lot of people we’re dealing with haven’t gotten past women are chattel, good for babies and cooking. Also, I’m not convinced you’re ready for that kind of negotiation.”

  “I can study the negotiations piece on the way. I’ve worked with Ian enough to know he’s got everything written down. The background, what he expected and updates till… till he was shot,” she finished quickly. “As for their feudal attitude, maybe it’s time they get past it. After all, that Saudi king did, a little, anyway. Maybe women can even drive there, now.” She sat back and sighed, thinking about the latest Egyptian president. “Probably not, though.” She stretched, then sat up again. “That’s not our job, anyway. And we hired that lawyer, right?”

  Kevin gave her a look as if he’d hoped she hadn’t remembered that. “Yeah. Amun Hassan.” He smiled. “I guess if you can get by him, we’ll be okay.”

  “So that’s the plan, then. We’ll head back and—”

  “You know Ian wouldn’t approve of this,” Kevin said.

  “No, Kev. I don’t know that and neither do you. I’ll grant you I don’t know he would approve it either, but this contract was important enough for us to take. And he worked it himself. He’d want us to go forward as best we can.

  “When the job came up, Ian and I talked about it, a lot. He liked that for the first time, these Bedouin leaders were willing to use negotiation. Maybe the fact that they’d killed twenty or thirty family members motivated them, too, but whatever. I wanted to support them in not murdering people. I think it’s a necessary step between the old conflict resolution of shooting or knifing people till they go away and accepting the legal system as the final arbiter. You guys know the legal system still doesn’t work well in Egypt, especially in land and water disputes. Too much to lose, I guess.”

  “Yeah,” Kevin said. “Ian told us most of that in the run-up to the meeting. But I’m not sure why it makes you a good candidate for moving into Ian’s chair.”

  “Tell you what. We’re all headed back, right?” She included everyone in the sweep of her hand. “Derek’s role’s been defined by the earlier meetings.” Derek nodded. “Dan’s, too. So you, Willie and I will work on the plane and in the hotel there with the lawyer until the meeting reconvenes. The one of us we all agree can do the best job will do it.” She sipped her tea. “Unless there’s someone else I’m forgetting?”

  “No, no one else knows enough to help. And leave me out of it,” Kevin said. “I was there, too. I’d be no good at it. While it’ll be between you and Willie, all of us will work with both of you, and come to a joint decision.”

  “Cool beans.” Beckie slid off her stool to pat him on the back before placing her cup in the sink. “It’s late. I’m going to visit Ian in the morning.” She pursed her lips, thinking. “How about we see if Jean-Luc can leave around noon?”

  Early the next morning, Beckie rolled out of her bed. She slipped out of the house and crossed to the hospital. The orderly welcomed her and allowed her to again sit by Ian’s bed. Alone.

  “Ian,” she whispered, “I’m gonna let Millie do her job, along with the doctors she’s got lined up. Me, I’ll get out of her hair. I’m going to go to Cairo with Kevin, so we can restart the negotiations.” She paused. “The guys aren’t sure I can do it, I guess ‘cause I’ve been working with you and not them. I feel like I’m gonna have to… No, that’s not right. I will earn their trust. We talked last night. None of them are right for this, I don’t think. Except Kevin. He’d be good, but he says no, so… We wanted this to work, remember? I can do it.”

  She blinked back a couple of tears before standing and kissing his cheek. She straightened and gave him a twisted smile. “Yeah, and I’m gonna hunt the shooter, too. You know I will. I don’t understand why she wanted to take you away from me. That’s my plan for now, till you’re back to where you appreciate me being here, anyway. And we will make love the first chance we get! I am not gonna wait any longer!”