The Betrayed Series: Ultimate Omnibus Collection With EXCLUSIVE Post-Shiva Short Story (66 page)

“He’s the one that told the Knot where we were every step of the way,” Brandt pressed.

“But…” Lopez stuttered. “That’s who got Svengurd killed.”

Rebecca sympathized with Lopez. She herself had to reconcile the young, enthusiastic, and devoted Private Davidson with the insidious snake in the grass Davidson. Clearly as Lopez raised his own Gloc, the corporal was getting the picture.

“How could you?” he hissed at Davidson.

“I can only ask forgiveness,” Davidson said, although his words came out slurred due to the burn damage to his lips. If you didn’t know better you might assume he sounded like the young man had a stroke. It took a little getting used to in order to understand him fully. Especially if he was stressed. Like right now with a gun pointed at him.

Brandt’s arm was up. His finger wrapped around the trigger. “I am going to warn you one more time, Monroe. Get out of my way.”

By now the other two of Brandt’s team had taken up position around the lab. There was no backing out of the room. No escape.

“Sarge, do we have shoot-on-sight orders?” Talli asked.

“No,” Lopez answered quickly, still obviously conflicted between his previous brotherly bond with the private and this new, damning information.

Brandt however seemed crystal clear. “Only because
she
lied and reported Davidson was dead.”

Rebecca’s cheeks burned red hot. She had lied, but only in an attempt to put the ugly events to rest. What good would it have done for them to hunt down Davidson? After everything else that had happened in that cavern under Rome, what did one man matter?

“He saved us,” Rebecca explained to Brandt. “You. Me.
Both
of us.”

“Good for him,” he responded, grinding his jaw, looking to find a shot.

“He’s not the same man,” Rebecca pleaded. “Please, just look at him.”

Davidson cringed but held steady under the scrutiny. Ever since she’d found him in a clinic in Morocco, he’d hidden his labyrinth of scars and melted flesh behind a hoodie and glasses. Unless he was in the lab. This space had become sacred to both of them. Somewhere to hide from a world that had been unkind to them both.

“If you don’t think he’s already been punished for his crimes…” Rebecca added. This was why she hadn’t turned Davidson in herself. The man who had betrayed them no longer existed. There were just the shattered remains of a life to rebuild.

“Doesn’t work that way, Monroe,” Brandt answered through clenched teeth. “Step aside.”

Rebecca had no intention whatsoever of doing such a thing, however Davidson moved out from her shadow.

“I am ready, Rebecca,” he said with only a slight lisp. “I must answer for my crimes.”

She fought back tears as she scanned Davidson’s ruined features. He’d become a younger brother to her. A beloved younger brother. A family where none had existed before. Rebecca knew Brandt though. He wasn’t going to let this go. Not even for her. Or maybe just to spite her.

“Zip tie him,” Brandt ordered.

Lopez stepped forward, bringing out the tough plastic restraints.

“Please,” Rebecca begged, “the tissue on his hands and wrists is still too fragile to—”

The entire room shook as a blast wave knocked over beakers.

“Get down!” Brandt ordered.

Rebecca was already on her way to the floor.

* * *

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

Fire alarms sounded as sprinklers sprayed down. Screams echoed from the hallway.

Brandt sheltered Rebecca’s body with his own, waiting for another RPG to hit the building yet none did. His body begged to stay here with Rebecca. Who could blame him? His arms wrapping around her were only protecting her. He wasn’t breaking any vows. Then his training kicked in as he released her from his embrace.

“Report,” he barked, trying to cover the huskiness that had suddenly crept into his voice.

Harvish was at the window. “The explosion looks like it was twelve doors down,”

“RPG hit, you mean?” Brandt questioned.

The redhead shook his head, spraying water. “No. The directionality of the blast is outward. That explosion happened inside the room and blew out.”

“So maybe this is an accident? A coincidence?” Talli asked.

Even if it weren’t an RPG there was absolutely nothing accidental or coincidental about Rebecca, him, and a bomb.
Nothing.

“Harvish, check the hallway,” Brandt barked. “Prep for evac.”

Then he grabbed Davidson by the arm and jerked him up nice and close. “What the fuck is your game?” Rebecca tried to force herself between them, but Brandt would have none of it. “Well?”

“I have no idea what is happening,” Davidson said, trying to sound all convincing.

“No!” Rebecca urged. “He had nothing to do with it.”

Brandt kept his fists at Davidson’s collar. “I’d like some proof of that.”

“Damn it, Brandt,” Rebecca protested. “He couldn’t.” This time she was able to wedge an arm between the two men, which she then used to leverage Brandt back an inch. He’d forgotten exactly how strong the researcher could be when she wanted to. “If you would just break your death glare and listen.”

Oh how he wanted to sucker punch Davidson. Really just smash his fist into the bastard’s face. But this wasn’t about the private’s betrayal, this was about staying alive right now.

“The laboratory that was hit was
my
first lab,” Rebecca explained as red emergency lighting strobed the room.

“Remember?” she asked Brandt.

The incident Rebecca wanted him to recall felt like another life. Back when he and Rebecca were engaged. The tour of the London Research Institute had been a blur. Honestly he’d just nodded his head and oohed and aahed at whatever Rebecca was saying in an attempt to get them back to the hotel quickly so they could make the most of the last three days of his leave. Then Maria showed up.

That had been a bombshell, but now he needed to worry about an actual bomb.

Rebecca pressed on. “That lab didn’t have the ultracentrifuge I needed plus a bunch of other equipment that had been promised to me.”

“So,” Lopez said as his eyes narrowed. “They bombed your old office. And if Davidson were behind it, he kind of would have known which lab to blow.”

“Exactly,” Rebecca said as her head bobbed. “Yes.”

As much as Brandt wanted this to be about Davidson, it didn’t seem to be.

“Harvish, the hallway?”

Before the point man could answer, a scream sounded…from right outside their window. Brandt didn’t have to order anyone down, they were already flat on their bellies.

Another scream from not far away. “That’s sniper fire,” Davidson whispered in his weird slurred voice. “Far-sighted, accurate sniper fire.”

Damn if the bastard wasn’t correct. Lopez rose halfway up, peering through the blinds. “They’re taking out anyone trying to escape the building out the western exit.”

The exit they would have been taking had Brandt not been ragging on Davidson. He was
not
going to give the private credit for that either.

“Harvish, still waiting on a sit rep.”

“Just people fleeing from—” Harvish jerked back from the cracked open door. He closed it gently. “Gunmen in the hall.”

Damn it. This was an organized attack. It wouldn’t take whoever had planted that bomb long to figure out Rebecca wasn’t in that lab. Then the door-to-door search would begin.

“Options?” he asked Harvish.

“I need to check the egress…” their supposed point man wavered.

Davidson pointed to the wall to their right. “The stairwell to the garage is just on the other side.”

Brandt looked to Rebecca for confirmation. You knew your point man sucked if you were looking to a former traitor and a civilian for your exit strategy.

“Yes,” she said, nodding. “The stairwell is there.”

He nodded to Lopez. “Make the blast directional and discreet.” While the corporal strategically placed the C-4, Brandt turned to Talli. “Move that cabinet over. I want our exit covered if at all possible.”

Even a few seconds could mean a successful retreat versus…well, versus a bunch of dead bodies.

“Fire in the hole,” Lopez announced.

Talli shoved the cabinet over to catch any shrapnel before Lopez lit up the C-4. The blast was exactly as ordered. Directional and discreet. But discreet enough to not be heard over the alarms and screams ten doors down? That was still a question to be answered.

“Move out,” Brandt ordered.

Harvish was the first to crawl through the hole at the base of the wall. It was a tight fit for the broad-shouldered Irishman, yet he disappeared quickly.

“All clear,” Harvish announced.

Lopez followed. Then Talli. Brandt nodded to Davidson, whose lean frame shimmied right through. Rebecca grabbed her laptop, clutching it to her chest before making her way out of the laboratory. That thing was like her security blanket. A security blanket that had gotten them out of more jams than Brandt liked to consider.

Then it was his turn to squeeze himself through the narrow hole. Once on the other side, Brandt reached through and grabbed the legs to the cabinet, pulling the object flush with the wall.

“Move it,” he ordered.

Instantly Harvish and the rest were surging ahead.

Only Rebecca hesitated. She looked up at him. Those blue eyes brimming with unshed tears. The months washed away. His marriage a dim memory as she blinked, biting her lip.

“Brandt…if this isn’t the Knot,” Rebecca asked, “then who is it?”

Even after everything they’d been through, Brandt still couldn’t lie to her.

“Hell if I know.”

* * *

Aunush stood upon the roof of the Lionel Robbins Building, the wind tousling her dark, close-cropped hair. The mission was perfection incarnate. The destruction of the researcher’s laboratory now complete. Time for a little sport.

Her sniper lay stomach down on the roof, his eye pressed against his sight. He fired again as the crack of the gun was whisked away by the wind. The slamming back of the bolt, resetting the sights then another round. Each action jarred her bone marrow.

She brought the digital binoculars up and watched the sniper’s handiwork. The next shot pierced a woman’s heart then continued through to land in another man’s belly. Aunush brushed her calf gently against the sniper’s shoulder as a reward. If he kept shooting like this they might have to get a room.

Smoke billowed out of the London Research Institute, the ruined husk of Monroe’s laboratory. She hoped the woman was caught in the periphery of the blast so that she suffered now. Her men were only seconds away from confirming the whole group had been killed in the strike.

It pleased her no end that her target was a bastion of science. They thought themselves insulated by logic and reason. Thinking themselves better than God and His Word. Playing with God’s melody, thinking they could somehow force it to sing their own tune.

Another crack of the gun. Aunush watched as a woman’s head exploded before she dropped to the ground. Funny how even with her starched laboratory coat, the scientist’s gray matter looked no different than any other Aunush had seen.

Tiring of waiting on word of Monroe’s demise, Aunush scanned the city’s horizon from her lofty perch. From the top of the building that housed the London School of Economics, she could see nearly every bit of the famed city. Big Ben and Buckingham Palace to the west. Lincoln’s Inn Fields to the north, and of course the wide, slow River Thames to the south. She could make out the tip of the tall, white London Eye across the banks. So odd for London, a hub of culture steeped in a great and long history, to have their most visited landmark now be a silly Ferris wheel. A large, impressive feat of machinery no doubt, but a Ferris wheel nonetheless.

She scanned back to the research building as her sniper fired three shots in rapid succession, taking down five people with his efforts. Oh yes. Tonight should be very interesting.

Aunush breathed in the thick London air. To be so blessed. To have her passion and her job be one and the same.

A crackling in her ear disturbed her musing.

“Come again?” Aunush asked.

“No joy. I repeat, no joy,” her team captain stated between bursts of static.

No joy? Aunush took in another deep breath. Not to savor it but to keep herself from giving the kill order for her own men. “What exactly do you mean by no joy? Over.”

“This is not Dr. Monroe’s office. All killed are the Institute’s staff. Over.”

“Where is she then?” Aunush demanded.

“She is in the wind. Over.”

The firecracker-like shots next to her ceased. The sniper ended his reign of terror and began searching the grounds for their elusive researcher. If anyone could spot a fleeing paleo-DNA-archeologist with her American military escort it was her sniper.

CHAPTER 2

══════════════════

London, England

7:14 p.m. GMT (Daylight Savings)

Rebecca tried to get comfortable in the backseat of the SUV, then realized it was no use. The thing was made of cracked vinyl with the stuffing protruding in all the wrong places.

“Seriously, we couldn’t have stolen a Mercedes or something?” Who’d ever heard of a Vauxhall Frontera anyway?

“Sorry, darling, I had to pick a beater,” Lopez said as he glanced into the rearview mirror. Once they bounced their way out of the parking garage and onto Lincoln Inn Fields Drive heading toward she could only assume the Kingsway, the corporal continued, “Didn’t have time to deal with a complicated alarm or GPS system.”

“Sorry,” she said, realizing he had picked a car that could not be easily traced. “Never should have doubted you.”

Lopez threw a wink to her as horns blared when he gunned the Frontera into the London traffic. “No, you shouldn’t have.”

His wide smile faded as his eyes scanned to her right, taking in Davidson’s distorted face. The spark to his voice faded as Lopez asked Brandt, “Where to, boss?”

“Heathrow is too obvious,” Brandt answered. “Still head north, we’ll go to Croughton.”

Rebecca frowned. “Isn’t that a Royal Air Force base?”

When Brandt ignored her question and went back to studying the map in his hands, Davidson answered. “Yeah, but it’s leased by the US Air Force. We can hitch a ride back to the States under the radar there.”