Dark Lies (DARC Ops Book 6) Read online

  Dark Lies

  DARC Ops Book 6

  Jamie Garrett

  Wild Owl Press

  Contents

  Copyright and Disclaimer

  1. Macy

  2. Tucker

  3. Macy

  4. Tucker

  5. Macy

  6. Tucker

  7. Macy

  8. Macy

  9. Macy

  10. Tucker

  11. Tucker

  12. Macy

  13. Tucker

  14. Tucker

  15. Macy

  16. Tucker

  17. Tucker

  18. Macy

  19. Macy

  20. Tucker

  21. Macy

  22. Tucker

  23. Macy

  24. Tucker

  25. Macy

  26. Tucker

  27. Macy

  28. Macy

  29. Tucker

  30. Macy

  31. Tucker

  32. Macy

  33. Macy

  34. Macy

  35. Macy

  36. Tucker

  Also by Jamie Garrett

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright and Disclaimer

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

  Copyright © 2016 by Jamie Garrett

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law. All requests should be forwarded to [email protected].

  Connect with me on Facebook: http://facebook.com/JamieGarrettBooks

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  Cover design by The Final Wrap.

  Editing by Jennifer Harshman, Harshman Services.

  1

  Macy

  She was finally going crazy.

  As Macy crept through the dark hotel room, hands shaking around her CIA-issued Beretta, she felt her mind unraveling again. A layer of sanity peeled back by another night in a foreign city with no safe harbor and no one to trust. She’d become raw.

  What the hell is that sound?

  All it took was three years of running away from death. She’d felt the hints long before tonight, if she let herself stop and think about it. It was a slow, painful, and confusing process, stretched out through a dozen countries, a chase across two continents, and potentially ending here in a dirty little hotel in Angola. But now Macy knew, as she approached the bathroom door and the strange hissing sound behind it, that she was most certainly going nuts.

  Crazy or not, someone could still be in there, behind the door. Maybe an assassin caught off-guard while waiting for her, washing his hands in the sink.

  Macy listened through the door. It sounded like running water. She slowly turned the knob, kicked the door open hard, and then aimed her gun at an empty bathroom.

  The sound had come from the toilet, its water running. But now there was another problem. The shower curtain . . .

  She gritted her teeth, building up the courage to do it all over again, flung the curtain open with a loud metal screech, and then finally exhaled.

  After sweeping her gun sight across moldy shower tiles, she moved to the toilet, tightening the water supply valve to finally end the distracting white-noise of water. She looked in the mirror, regretfully, into a prematurely aged face, then walked back to the bed.

  Macy was spending the night in the outskirts of Luanda, Angola’s capitol city. She couldn’t afford anything closer than the outskirts. She’d wished she could, because it would be safer. The streets closer to money would be busier, brighter, the people a little less desperate for a quick buck. Two thousand Kwanzas to follow the American woman, to see what hotel she’d gone to.

  It wouldn’t be the first time someone had been hired to hunt her down. It had become routine since Syria, the first round of assassins having been trained and instructed by her own people—and funded by her own tax dollars. It was a big scandal back home, American forces helping Syrian rebels take out a rogue CIA agent. The bigger story, as far as ex-CIA Macy was concerned, was how it got broken up at the last second by some civilian cyber-security company from Washington. That led to a congressional investigation which spurned the largest house cleaning in US history, dozens of high-ranking military and political figures behind bars for life.

  But it solved nothing for Macy. She had been imprisoned with them. An invisible, traveling jail. That jail and its captors had followed her from Syria to Sub-Saharan Africa, despite US media outlets declaring the thing to have been “all wrapped up.”

  She sat down on a hard bed and took a swig of cheap Port wine. It definitely hadn’t been all wrapped up. She’d come down to Luanda for that very reason, a city on the edge of the Atlantic with a major seaport. Here, there were options for an inconspicuous crossing to South America, where she’d try her luck across Panama, and then, somehow, the Mexico–US border.

  She would figure out the details later. For now her focus was on staying alive in a Luanda hotel room. Staying alive and awake with a bottle of Port.

  Sometimes, in a drunken moment, she’d laugh about it, losing track of who was trying to assassinate her. Was it the CIA? Islamic terrorists? The skin color of her adversaries had gone from brown to black. But she knew the real problem color was white. American as apple pie.

  Macy took another swig, letting the gun rest in her lap.

  She had other, older enemies, too. But there was something slightly unbelievable about a corrupt St. Louis police chief, her old boss, having the resources to track her down across the world.

  It almost didn’t matter who it was trying to kill her. She’d still be dead. She had stopped trying to figure it out a long time ago.

  Macy bolted awake.

  She’d been sitting in bed, her back against the headrest, her neck sore. Night had set in and the room was completely dark. Exhaustion had kept her from her plan of staying awake and watching the room across the courtyard. Through her balcony’s sliding glass door, she had a direct line of sight to a darkened Room 210.

  In the log book at the front desk, someone might have found her name, Macy Chandler, written in the column for room 210. She’d signed it herself. When the sun was still up, and with everyone watching, she waltzed into Hotel Topenka and booked herself a room under no false pretenses. No disguises. She spoke loud, obnoxious English to the teenager at the front desk. It was one of the most blatant broadcasts she’d made since arriving in Africa. The bait and switch came after, when she paid the old man to book a room directly across the courtyard. Her real room.

  Macy could deal with cheap wine and bug-infested hotels if it meant she’d have money for a decoy room—a necessity out here. She watched it through the glass. The rooms on either side of 210 had their lights on. But her decoy was still dark. She waited, watching.

  Her heart almost exploded when the telephone rang on the table next to her. Macy jumped off the bed, only to stand motionless and numb in the dark. Frozen, thinking. Don’t answer it. What were the benefits of answering? This was supposed to be Kwame Botha’s room.

  Her blood pressure spiked with each ring. She could hear her pulse buzzing her eardrums. As illogical as it was, it was as if
the rings were drawing unwanted attention. She’d tried so hard to be quiet. And now this.

  It was silly. She’d been silly tonight with the bathroom scare, her almost ripping the shower curtain clips. She’d been crazy.

  Macy looked back outside across the courtyard, through the dark, and into the fully lit window of room 210.

  She gasped between telephone rings, her lungs exploding along with her heart, a puff of air rushing out like she’d been kicked in the stomach. She stumbled in the dark, trying to get closer to the glass. But her legs wouldn’t work right. She was afraid to get any closer to that light across the courtyard, and whoever had turned it on. It was a sickly yellow glow, the kind you’d find seeping out of the basement window of a morgue. Its silence horrified her, as did the idea of a gunman snooping around that room, expecting to find his American payday. He might be in the bathroom right now, pulling back the curtain slowly, the metal clips screeching across.

  He might be figuring out her game.

  Macy rushed back to the bed. She’d forgotten the gun. The Beretta and that old man were the only two things she half-trusted on this side of the Atlantic. And despite having that cold metal by her side for two years, she felt more trust for a white-haired cab driver she’d known for two days. After all, it was the CIA that issued her the piece. Whatever else they’d given her, she’d left in a pile of ashes back in Damascus.

  The Beretta gave her a little more courage to approach the window. Her eyes strained across, her nose almost pressed against the glass when she saw a black shape flicker across the room. Whoever was inside 210 was in a hurry. Aside from tall, she wasn’t sure how else to describe the shape. She waited for another chance to identify her would-be assassin. But nothing. And then the light went out.

  It would have been impossible for her to be identified in the darkness of her room across the courtyard. She knew that. But standing there in the dark still sent chills down her spine. She waited, watching the dark space where she was supposed to have been killed. It was like a stage gone black before the tragedy set. A foreshadow.

  She listened to the hotel’s silence. Nothing in the rooms on either side. Nothing in her hallway. After a while she could hear the cars on Rua Munadi. The siren of an emergency vehicle thrusting its way through traffic. Even from this far away, from the outskirts of the port city, the mournful wail of an ocean freighter reached her ears.

  She wished she was on it.

  Her dream of escape shattered at the sound of voices in the hall.

  And then a knock on the door.

  2

  Tucker

  He knocked on the door and then waited. Everything was still quiet inside. Tucker brought his fist back to the door, but it opened before he could knock. A familiar face stared back at him. A sullen face.

  “Where have you been?” Jasper said, before shoving some kind of pastry in his mouth.

  “My room. What the hell is that?”

  “Breakfast,” Jasper mumbled around his pastry, his mouth full.

  “Jet lag?”

  “Big time.”

  Tucker walked into the double-bed hotel room. Tansy sat in front of a laptop. “Working already?” Tucker asked him.

  “No.” Tansy kept his eyes on the screen. “Sports highlights. Can’t get anything here.”

  “They’ve got football,” Tucker said.

  “The wrong kind.”

  “And cricket.”

  “The wrong kind of baseball.”

  “Alright,” Tucker said. “So I guess we’re off to a slow start.”

  “African time,” Jasper said, scrunching up a plastic wrapper and throwing it in the trash by Tansy’s table. He flopped down on the bed. “The real question, right now, is how the hell did you get your own room?”

  Tansy finally looked up. “No, the real question is why the hell are we sharing one?” He seemed to be sincerely annoyed at his coworker, despite them only having shared the room for an hour. “I don’t get it,” he said. “You’d think Jackson could spring for three separate rooms. We’ve got the budget to fly around the world a hundred times and back again, yet here we are like sardines.”

  “Maybe the hotel was over-booked,” Tucker said. “Or maybe I got the single, because I’m the only one here who’s single. Makes sense, right?”

  Tansy said, “Only if you can somehow convince a girl to come home with you. Until then, it’s a wasted resource.”

  “And hookers don’t count,” Jasper added.

  “Does that mean you were still a virgin until last year?” Tucker said, chuckling. A pillow flew his way.

  “So like I was saying,” Jasper said, sitting up on bed, “you’re late to our first briefing.”

  “African time.” Tucker looked around the small room, his coworkers’ things still mostly packed. The clothes they wore were still rumpled from the flight, their eye sockets extra dark and deep. Tucker had been in South Africa since yesterday and felt only slightly fresher. He figured he should play nice. He sat in the chair in front of grumpy Tansy, who’d turned back to his sports.

  “Tansy,” Jasper said. “You ready?”

  “No, but yeah.” He closed the lid and smiled at Tucker. “You excited, Kid? You made it to the big time.”

  “We’re all excited to be here,” Jasper said. “It’s a great opportunity. A chance to make the world a whole lot safer.”

  Tucker wasn’t sure if he was being sarcastic. He hadn’t heard a pep talk like that in fifteen years. However, they were dealing with 250 tons of enriched uranium—the ingredient for enough nuclear bombs to take out the six largest cities of the world. For now it was safely in the hands of the South African government. But it was an outgoing government.

  “Got some news since our flight,” Jasper said. “The new government has increased their surveillance of the uranium. They know something’s up.”

  The incoming party was hawkish and right-leaning, and their stance on the uranium had been very clear: they intended to reverse the decision of letting the United States take ownership of the dangerous material. Even though the country’s nuclear program had been shut down for decades, they considered it a national disgrace to give away their uranium. Washington considered it an emergency. A race against the clock. If that kind of highly sought-after material fell into the wrong hands . . .

  “We’ll also have to pull some camera tricks,” Jasper said.

  “That’s fine,” Tansy said. “But you don’t think we’ll have to engage with anyone, right?”

  “Hell no,” Jasper said.

  Tucker added, “Unless they engage with us first.”

  Jasper was shaking his head. “If there’s any shooting, it’ll be an international relations nightmare. But Jackson expects no need for engagement. The only reason we’re going armed is for terrorists, the chance we get hijacked during the exchange. That’s the main reason why we’re here in the first place.”

  “ISIS and Al-Qaeda are having a little turf war in Africa,” Tansy said. “Bloods and the Crips.”

  “The ideologies,” Jasper said, “are definitely spreading through the continent.”

  Tansy opened his laptop. “Okay, so we got surveillance cameras to mess with, security systems, what else?”

  “It’s pretty old stuff,” Jasper said.

  “I’ve been at this for decades.”

  “They’ll show you when you get down there.” Jasper checked his watch. “Which should be in about four hours. Will any of you try sleeping?”

  “I’m just staying on Eastern Standard,” Tansy said. “We’re only here five days and our ops are all early morning.”

  It was how Tucker had been doing it, too. No need to try shifting his sleep patterns and getting fucked up and sleepy at the wrong times.

  Jasper switched to talking about the kinds of people they’d be working with, but he stopped when there was a knock at the door. He furrowed his brow, looking at Tansy and Tucker. “No one else knows we’re here.”

  “Thi
nk we’ll have to engage?” Tansy said with a shit-eating grin.

  “Maybe it’s the maid,” Tucker said.

  Tansy grinned. “It’s pretty late. Maybe it’s Tucker’s call girl coming to look for him.”

  “Alright, shut up.” Jasper had made his way to the door, opening it. He blocked Tucker’s view of the guest, but it was clear, even from behind, that Jasper was smiling. He spread his arms wide as another set of arms wrapped around his back. At the doorway, the two men hugged and laughed. When they both walked into the room, Tucker could see a resemblance on their faces. And a resemblance in their reddish hair.

  “Kyle,” Jasper said. “How’s the oil field?”

  “Good. Lots of politics, but I can just tune it out and work. Grunt work, sometimes.”

  “Not grunt pay, though.” Jasper looked to Tucker and Tansy. “You guys know my brother, right?”

  Tucker knew two things about Kyle. One: He’d recently moved to Angola to work with a Saudi oil company—a position Jasper had earned him after protecting a sick Saudi Prince through a hospital terrorist attack. Two: He’d been caught up in the same military scandal that had plagued most of the original DARC Ops guys. Different op, same corrupt commander sending him to train a group of rebels to assassinate an American in Syria. Kyle didn’t know about the American part. That was the little detail which gave a bunch of people life sentences when the mission had been interrupted—all thanks to DARC Ops avenging what had happened to them. The first time around, their time, they hadn’t been so fortunate.

  “I thought we were meeting for dinner,” Jasper said.

  Although Kyle had seemed happy enough meeting his brother for the first time in a year, there was clearly something bugging the guy. His smiles didn’t last. He looked worried.

  “What’s going on?” Jasper asked. “Should we take a walk?”