LITMIR.BIZ

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she demanded in English. No way was she giving away that she understood anything they were saying to one another. “What do you want with me?”

      She didn’t see the blow coming. A fist plowed into her jaw from the right side, snapping her head hard to the left and making her see stars. Dazed, she stared at the first man—the one with golden eyes—wincing silently in front of her.

      Gingerly, she poked her right cheek with her tongue. No teeth felt loose, but the inside of her cheek was shredded. She opened her mouth, flexing her jaw experimentally. It didn’t feel broken.

      Well. That didn’t go as planned. Dazed, she stared at her attackers. Real fear for her life flowed through her. She registered it, cataloged the emotion and forcibly pushed it down. She had no time for fear. Not if she wanted to live. And not if she wanted to protect the kids in this building.

      She had to get these men outside, into the range of armed law enforcement officials, but slowly enough that said officials could get here before these guys fled.

      “You’re sure it’s her?” the third man asked doubtfully in Farsi. “She doesn’t look much like her picture.”

      “Yes, yes,” Goldeneyes snapped back in Farsi. “Blonde. Tall. Thirty years old. And she does match the picture. These Western women wear a lot of makeup and it changes how they look. I’m used to that, and you’re not. I’m telling you it’s her.”

      With that declaration, Goldeneyes apparently sealed some sort of fate for her. The other two men nodded, accepting his word.

      What picture? Part of becoming a Medusa was having her life scrubbed completely off the internet. Completely off. A team of cybersecurity experts did the initial wipe and then maintained continuous scans for any new images that might pop up. Even official public records were scrubbed. She did not exist in cyberspace.

      So, how did these guys know her, let alone have a picture of her? She certainly had no idea who they were.

      Belatedly, her mind working a couple steps slower than normal, she mentally corrected him. She was twenty-seven years old, not thirty, thank you very much.

      In the distance, sirens became audible. God bless the 9-1-1 operator. She’d called in the cavalry, after all.

      “Time’s up. Let’s go,” Jaw Puncher bit out.

      The men hustled her out into the hallway. She briefly considered making a stand right there in the entrance, but they had AK-47s, and one blow from the butt of one of those would knock her out cold. She would just as soon stay conscious if she could. Also, there were all those kids just down the hall. She had no way of knowing if there were any more armed men in the building, and she dared not provoke these guys to start shooting.

      She did her best to slow the men down, though, shortening her steps and resisting moving forward between them in the guise of being too zoned out to do anything but shuffle along drunkenly.

      Irritably, they overpowered her and shoved her outside into the parking lot. More sirens were audible now. Lots of them. Unfortunately, they still sounded a half-dozen blocks away.

      Goldeneyes stepped up close behind her and bodychecked her hard but not painfully, shoving his hip into her lower back, helping the other two men throw her into a white step van. She tumbled to the floor, slamming hard into its metal ribs. Gasping for air, she noted a fourth man darting out of the building to join them. A fifth man drove, pulling away from the front door with a hard lurch of the van.

      One of the men snapped at the driver not to leave tire tracks, and the vehicle lurched again as he slowed down abruptly.

      Fear bubbled up again in her throat, momentarily choking her.

      She did the four-step breathing technique she’d been taught. In. Hold breath and count to four. Out. Count to four. In...

      It took several breaths, but calm prevailed once more over her panic.

      Okay. She was being kidnapped. Major suckage.

      But there had been multiple witnesses. Law enforcement would put out an APB for this van in a few minutes. Houma was a small town deep in the bayou country, which meant there were only so many roads these men could travel in between the copious waterways.

      This would be okay. An hour. Maybe two. A standoff, perhaps. With her, a trained Special Forces operative, on the inside. She would be the police’s secret weapon when it came time for a rescue. All she had to do was stay conscious and keep her wits about her. Trust her training.

      The van pulled out of the parking lot and turned right. That would be south on Maple Street. They went straight for what she estimated to be five minutes, and then they turned left. A few minutes, another right turn and then they accelerated to highway speed. Maybe Bayou Black Drive heading west out of town?

      Which would be ironic. That road would take them right past the unmarked turnoff to the Medusas’ secret facility, where her teammates were gathering for today’s training.

      A sense of unreality washed over her. Surely, she was not being kidnapped by Iranian terrorists. This had to be a bad dream. It couldn’t be happening to her. Was that shock lowering its protective fog over her brain? It felt just the way her instructors had described it. Everything was happening at a distance. Muted. Not really touching her.

      One of the men admonished the driver in Farsi, but she didn’t understand the command. In a second, she felt the vehicle slow down to a more sedate speed. Piper frowned. What on earth did Iranians want with her? She’d never had anything to do with that part of the world before—had never served or even traveled there and had no particular expertise on the region beyond reading her daily intelligence brief. What was going on here? She had to be missing something critical—

      Something heavy smashed painfully into the back of her head, and she toppled forward as everything went dark.

       Chapter 2

      Zane Cosworth swore silently, wincing involuntarily as the terrorist calling himself Yousef clocked the woman prisoner on the back of the head with the butt of his AK-47. “Don’t kill her,” he snapped at the guy, the most volatile of the bunch.

      “Shut up, Amir. I didn’t like how she was looking at me,” Yousef snarled back.

      An urge to return the favor and clock the bastard upside the head made his hands twitch. Zane balled them into fists at his sides.

      Amir was the name he’d used to infiltrate these SOBs’ sleeper cell. Not that they were sleeping after this morning’s little stunt.

      They were a frustrating bunch, closemouthed and stingy with information for him, the new guy on the team. He was the only actual American among them, and he was convinced it was the sole reason he’d been brought on board. They called upon him to interact with other Americans and used him as their errand boy in any public situation where their accents might draw attention.

      But that also meant he was completely expendable if he offended these guys or got in their way of whatever the hell their actual end goal was.

      The team’s leader, Mahmoud, was definitely taking instructions from someone who communicated via encrypted cell phone, or occasionally via a Dark Web site that was even more heavily encrypted.

      Rolling his eyes at Yousef, Zane leaned over the woman, ostensibly to check her pulse. He grabbed her right wrist with his left hand while surreptitiously slipping the ring off her fourth finger with his other hand and palming the piece. No way in hell could he let his compatriots discover that this woman was a West Pointer. If he was gauging Mahmoud correctly, the guy would kill her instantly.

      Mahmoud said practically nothing about his personal beliefs, but he made no secret of despising Americans, particularly military members.

      Zane slipped the ring into his pocket. He was seriously grateful that chance had thrown a female soldier

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