Out of Sight (4 page)

Her heart slammed up into her desert-dry throat. Crouching, she followed him across another rooftop, her breath sawing in her lungs, her heart manic. Hot air pushed against her sweaty skin, wrapping her in a thick cocoon.

Suddenly the sharp pinch of a stitch in her side almost doubled her over.

Not now, for God's sake. Not
now.
AJ raced beside him, holding her side as the sharp pain intensified. Jesus, hadn't she screwed up enough already? Did she really have to be a crybaby and yell "cramp"? Of all the ridiculous reasons to get shot in the back. If it weren't so pathetically…
girlie,
she'd laugh at herself.

Crap. No wonder Kane wanted to send her home. She might as well go back on the pageant circuit if she couldn't be a better agent than this.

AJ grimaced as she tried to straighten up. If nothing else, she could match him for speed. At six three he was only five inches taller than she was in her boots. Despite the annoying pain of the stitch, her strides almost matched his as they came to the next rooftop jump over an alley.

This would take them down by at least fifteen feet. Down fifteen, across at least ten. Her spit had dried up an hour ago. Nothing to swallow down her dry throat. She dug the heel of her palm into the now screaming pain of the stitch and gritted her teeth.

More shots. Closer now.

"Crazy glue," Kane said grimly into his lip mic.

"Joined at the hip. Got it." A spear of pain radiated from her side directly to her brain, doubling her over.

"Together—" He jumped, and landed on the rooftop below, light as thistledown, then spun around to make sure she was following. Which she wasn't because the pain was so sharp she was cross-eyed.

He swore under his breath. "What the hell are you waiting for, Cooper?"

She panted through the pain in her side. "Stitch."

"Jesus," he said in her ear. "You'll have more than a fucking stitch if you don't jump. Do it now, Cooper. Now!"

Trying to straighten up as she ran, AJ backtracked to get a running start on the jump. No matter how good an agent she wanted to be, if she didn't shake this paralyzing terror of being shot again, she'd end up dead. Worse, she'd end up responsible for the deaths of other operatives. Perhaps even the mighty Kane Wright.

Forget the stitch. Forget everything. Run like hell. Clear the jump.

That's all I have to do. Run. Clear the jump.

I can do it. I can do it…

Her heart cramped as a bullet tore up the roofing inches from her feet. Raazaq's men closed in. She couldn't control the way she started at the noise and close proximity of the gunfire. Her head went light with fear. Damn. Damn. Damn.

Determined, grim, she rotated to return fire. It was obvious they could see her location. She had nothing to lose. She got off a few shots, then spun back around and started running flat-out for the gap…

Her breath sawed painfully as she ran.

Faster.

Faster.

Twenty yards…

Zigging.

Zagging.

Faster.

Faster.

She tried frantically to put the image of a bullet tearing through her flesh out of her mind. God.

Ten yards…

She struggled with the image. The memory of the feel of the impact. The sharp, hot pain as the bullet sliced through her soft tissue and muscle. The sensation as it went through the back of her shoulder… burning, scorching, agonizingly painful.

"Nonono!"
Concentrate on the now, damn it!
AJ blocked the memory and ran with every ounce of energy in her body. Flat-out.

Three yards and she'd be flying.

One minute she was in full, flat-out motion. The next… nothing.

An agonized scream ripped AJ out of unconsciousness and into heart-pounding awareness.

Not her own scream. Thank God.

What—? Where—?

Preternaturally alert, eyes closed, she remained dead-still where she lay, senses tuned to the sound of violence nearby. Another scream. Male. Cut off mid-shriek. A thump. Something solid connecting with flesh.

Her body jerked in sympathy as another agonized scream ricocheted off the walls and seemed to echo on and on in the blackness surrounding her. Jesus God. A shudder of dread washed through her already sweat-drenched body. Where in God's name was she?

Gingerly, she rolled her head to one side, listening to someone being tortured very close by. She winced as blow after blow rained down on some unlucky bastard. And every groan floating through the darkness reverberated through her body, making her nearly feel each blow. She fought the sensation, aware that at any minute it might be her turn.

Think!
Her brain felt slow, annoyingly sluggish. Pain blossomed behind her eyes and stretched out to every corner of her muddled mind. Didn't matter. She had to think around it. Had to marshal her thoughts so she could figure out where she was and what was going on. And most importantly, how to get the hell out of there.

Damn, the floor beneath her body felt hard as a rock. Foul, putrid odors permeated the air and she breathed through her mouth, trying not to think what she was sucking into her lungs.
Come on. Come on,
she mentally chanted, willing her body to get up. To move. To take action.

Another man's screams of agony joined the first. Tag-team torturing. No interpreter was needed to understand that the two men being viciously beaten next door were begging for mercy and shrieking bloody murder to the accompaniment of the blows.

Goose bumps chased each other down her spine, then settled in the pit other stomach, where they churned into a mass of nerves that had her ready to scream herself. She forced her sticky eyelids open, then blinked a couple of times as the darkness around her wavered and her stomach did queasy flip-flops. The pain in her head was subsiding to a low roar, but she felt new aches and pains popping up all over.

Jesus.

Had she already been tortured?

Where was she, how had she gotten here? More important, how could she escape? Wherever
here
was smelled like old pee and older sweat, and God knew what else. Lucky she couldn't see where she was lying. Or what she was lying on. The stench made her eyes water as she swallowed back nausea.

Something scuttled in the darkness and she drew her knees up, instinctively avoiding what sounded like the Godzilla of rats.

Another scream, blood-chilling and bone-numbing—then abruptly, and terrifyingly, cut off mid-note.

Jesus God.

Silence throbbed like a living presence. Alive with terror. Thick with anticipation of what was to come next.

A sob shattered the unnatural quiet. A plea for mercy. A slap. Quickly followed by a succession of blows.

Muffled Arabic voices bounced and echoed against stone walls. While the men weren't in the same room as she was, their voices were clear enough. AJ tried to decipher the rough dialect through the pain of a king-size headache.

Frowning made the ache in her head worse and didn't improve her hearing. She wasn't able to grasp more than a word here and there, but what she did understand didn't make her any happier. She tried to push herself upright, and instantly regretted it. Quickly, she lowered her head back to the floor as vertigo washed over her, and nausea roiled through her empty stomach.

"Bite the bullet, AJ," she warned herself, pushing the words out through gritted teeth. "What were they always saying at the Academy? Oh, yeah. Make pain your friend." She pressed a hand to her forehead. She didn't care for her new friend.

Next door, the victims were whimpering. Keeping her voice low, she whispered encouragement that they would never hear. "Come on, guys," she said while trying to stop her own world from spinning, "hang on. Don't let 'em win." She hoped to hell they could hang on through the torture, because as soon as the beaters were finished with the beatees, it'd be her turn. And sympathy or no sympathy, better them than her.

She couldn't afford to hurl right now. She willed the dizziness to pass, but because of the darkness, there was nothing to focus her eyes on until the spinning stopped, and she had/to wait it out. She concentrated fiercely on the conversation next door, hoping for a clue. Something to tell her where she was and what was going to happen next. Beyond the obvious torture thing.

Someone was going to die come morning. She got that part. The who, where, and why eluded her. However, the fact that they sounded excited about it filled her with dread. Nothing worse than a bad guy who loved his work. She'd hazard a wild guess there weren't that many victims left to choose from.

Carefully touching the back of her head, AJ discovered a huge, tender lump on the left side. Which accounted for the headache, but didn't tell her who'd hit her or how she'd ended up in this pit.

She rolled to her knees, wanting to put at least a body-length distance between her nose and the floor. The air wasn't much better at two feet than it was at ground level, but at least nothing could crawl into her hair. She was either in a bathroom or a cell. She'd vote for the cell. Or perhaps she was two for two.

It took less than a minute to travel around the room and trace the circumference with her hand. Eight feet by eight feet. Stone walls. No furniture. No toilet. There went the bathroom theory. Cement floor. Wooden door. Locked, of course. That was it.

And one female T-FLAC agent who was shit out of luck.

"Don't panic," she told herself firmly as her heartbeat sped up, and sweat popped out on her brow.
Just don't panic.
Yeah, right. Trapped. Beat up. Maybe about to be killed. Why spoil the fun with panic?

AJ braced her arms on the wall, and shifted her feet apart to do press-ups against the rough stone. She needed energy, and a plan. Thinking about what was happening next door or her various aches and pains wasn't going to achieve either. The physical movement helped her concentrate.

"Come on, AJ," she ordered quietly, "think. You're a smart girl. The cream of the Academy. Now's your chance to prove it." Her muscles quivered in protest as she lowered herself slowly. First she had to figure out where she was. Somewhere hot… it was stifling in here… she raised her body away from the wall, slowly.

Arabic… She got a mental flash of the pyramids. Egypt… Yes! She was here to eliminate Raazaq!

That was it. AJ gusted out a relieved breath. Okay. The blow to the head hadn't scrambled her brains totally. She was here with a team to take out Raazaq.

And the team consisted of—?

And the plan was to—?

She let her forehead rest for a moment on the rough stone wall. Totally or not, her brains were scrambled. "Oh, shit."

Kane slumped against the wall facing the small rural jail on the outskirts of Cairo and took another clumsy swig from the bottle cradled in his gnarled hand. Damn fool woman had got herself locked up. And not by the Cairo police, either. Raazaq had damn long arms.

They'd kill her in the morning. They'd sure as hell worked over the two guys locked up inside with her. Their screams of pain could be heard quite clearly in the hot, still night. Damn it to hell.

Oh, yeah, they'd kill AJ Cooper without a blink.
After
they tortured every scrap of intel she had out of her. In the most painful and brutal ways possible. He suspected the only reason they hadn't interrogated her yet was they were saving the woman for last. To prolong their entertainment.

If they knew how scared she was already, it would probably take all the fun out of it.

She'd spill her guts in two seconds flat at the
fast hint of
torture.

He shuddered at how cleverly cruel they could be. How they'd withheld food and water in exchange for intel. And when he hadn't given it up, how they'd brutalized his team. One at a time. Until he'd thought he'd go mad with their screams of agony. It went on for days, and days…

In a cold sweat, he shoved his personal nightmare aside. Wasn't going to happen. Not on his watch. But Jesus, he fucking
hated
being put in this position again. Responsible for somebody else's very existence…

He was good at a number of things. But keeping his teammates alive wasn't one of them.

Which is why he'd worked alone for the past two years.

He swore viciously under his breath. Angry at himself for giving in to the order to bring her. Angry at Cooper for being the rookie that she was… Hell, angry at God for putting up another roadblock to his sanity.

Never again. Never a-fucking-gain.

And never with a rookie in this lifetime. No matter how good they said she was. No matter how many sniping and sharpshooting medals she'd won. No matter how hard up he was for a sniper.

Damn it. He
needed
her.

Which just went to prove how fucked up this operation had become.

He glanced down to see a scorpion, tail curved to strike, walking across the hand he had braced in the dirt beside him. He flicked it off before it struck, and again lifted the sealed bottle to his mouth, watching the jail through narrowed eyes.

Jesus, it was hot. His scalp itched under the wig. The skin on his face, neck, and chest pulled under the heavy makeup. He ignored the discomfort and concentrated on the task at hand. The same task he'd managed a few hours ago. Getting AJ Cooper out of trouble.

The two guards across the way came out for a smoke. They ignored the old drunk slumped across the alley as they hunkered down on their haunches and lit up. The smoke curled lazily in the still air as they relived the torture they'd just perpetrated on two of their prisoners. Hell, they were practically whistling.

The two prisoners were low on the food chain of Raazaq's army. They hadn't seen the earlier attack out at the ruins, hadn't been prepared for it, and had generally screwed up. They were being used as an example to everyone else in the terrorist's organization of what would happen when an order was not obeyed. Raazaq's first-in-command would be there in the morning to take the bodies back to camp as an example. These two yahoos had a free reign of terror until then.

Was this smoke break just a brief respite before they went back in and started in on Cooper? His insides bunched. He'd been tortured himself. Knew just what they'd be planning for Cooper. And when the beatings were over, he figured the raping would begin. He knew how fond these dirtbags were of beating and raping, but he was not about to let them destroy his best shot at getting Raazaq.

Kane relaxed against the wall. Patient. Waiting. Watching for just the right moment as he listened to the men. He wondered if Cooper was listening, and understanding just what was in store for her.

She had a photographic memory, but how much Arabic did she understand? She'd claimed at least a cursory knowledge of the language. Kane suspected that was an exaggeration. She'd been too eager to please, too damn bright-eyed and bushy-tailed about the prospect of her first field op. Her need to prove she was ready meant she'd probably said anything to get this assignment. But her linguistic skills, or lack thereof, weren't why T-FLAC had sent her—ready or not—in with them.

They'd needed a beautiful woman who was a crack shot. Savage hadn't been available. Plain and simple, Cooper was second choice, and here because she had a great body, a beautiful face, and could put a bullet through a keyhole at three hundred feet.

He'd worked with Savage before. She was good. She was reliable. She was seasoned. But Savage was banged up and not due out of the hospital for months. And they'd needed someone now.

Cooper was it. Lucky him.

Kane hoped to hell the rookie
couldn't
hear or understand the conversation going on right now. These guys were practically salivating at the prospect of interrogating their witness at daybreak. What they had planned for her was enough to chill the sweat on his skin and raise the hair on the back of his neck under the scraggly wig.

"Hey!" he shouted in slurred Arabic. "Gimme a smoke."

The men laughed as they got to their feet. All that alcohol would cause an old man like him to explode with a bang if he lit up, they taunted. Not to mention Allah would see him in hell for his vices.

Kane grumbled, but toasted them with his bottle before wrapping his galabayya around himself and pretending to settle down for the night. Through slitted lids he watched them reenter the small jail. It was too hot to close the door behind them, and they didn't bother. A narrow stream of light speared out into the stinking alley.

With any luck, AJ was in a cell alone. He wasn't in the mood to jailbreak anyone else. No doubt she'd be a gibbering wreck when he sprung her. Enough of a handful without extra baggage. And he couldn't afford to wait any longer. He wasn't risking the guards moving on her before morning.

Kane staggered to his feet and shuffled across the alley, making no effort at stealth. All they'd see was an old beggar, coming to pick up their still-glowing cigarette butts.
He
took his time crossing the narrow alley, then stooped to pinch a smoldering smoke between gnarled fingers, straightening slowly, and with apparent difficulty. The guards noticed his motion near the door, and cursed him halfheartedly. Apathetic in the sultry heat, bored now, they were ready to be diverted. Morning, and the entertainment of interrogating the female prisoner, seemed a long way off.

Kane took a drag off the foul Kevork Ipekian and expelled a cloud of camel-dung-scented smoke into the still night air as he shambled inside.

Fortunately, boredom and heat had the two men too lazy to give him much thought. He didn't waste his time. It took less than a minute to dispose of them with a knife to the kidney. Kane left them slumped over the desk and went in search of his errant agent.

All was quiet. The stone building retained the heat of the day, and the smell in the narrow confines of the corridor leading to the cells was rank. Didn't matter where in the world the jail was, they all smelled the same. Terror, blood, pain, helplessness.