Sheik's Revenge(7)

Faith quickly located her watch beside the sink and cursed when she saw the time. She had less than ninety minutes to get into position before the weapons exchange went down. She turned to reach for her clothes and caught sight of her black bra folded neatly on the laundry basket. Sweat broke out over her body—that wasn’t how she’d left it.

She could swear she’d tossed it to the floor after quickly extracting and hiding the note hidden inside. Her pulse began to race.

Dropping to her haunches, Faith ran her fingers along the wall behind the toilet plumbing. She touched paper. Relief washed through her as she extracted the note from where she’d stashed it behind the pipe.

For a horrifying moment she’d feared Santiago might have seen her slipping it into her bra earlier, and that he’d only made a move on her because of it. Faith dragged both hands over her hair and tried to calm her paranoia.

Okay, so she’d fallen for him, inexplicably, hard and fast. And she’d been a complete idiot to take him to bed. But it was done, over. He was gone, and she was never going to see him again. She’d treat it as a little warning sign for next time, but right now she had to think fast, get her brain into gear, steady her mind and her hands before she looked down that sniper’s scope. Because her mission had been made crystal clear—hit only

Escudero, the Tagua cartel leader. Collateral damage was to be avoided at all cost. This was in both U.S. and the Colombian government’s interests.

Pablo Escudero was a drug lord turned international black-market arms dealer and a pain in the collective Colombian government butt. And not only had he made huge inroads into the U.S. gang underground, he was now aligning himself with known terrorist groups, as was evident by this latest deal about to go down. U.S. intel was that Escudero’s cache of Chinese arms was destined for the Western Sahara where the guns would find their way into the hands of the Maghreb Moors—MagMo—a terrorist organization now rivaling al Qaeda.

Faith was to make her hit on Escudero appear as though it came internally from a rival cartel member. And she was to ensure the North African arms broker was not touched—the arms were to continue to North Africa. The CIA operative who’d delivered the details of the exchange was deep undercover in the cartel and he’d tagged the weapons shipment with GPS tracers. The CIA would follow the shipment to the buyers in the Sahara in the hopes of closing in on a key MagMo cell.

Sucking air deep into her lungs, Faith went to her fridge, took out a bottle of cold water and downed the contents. Then she removed her brown contacts and stared at herself in the mirror. Soft amber eyes stared back.

What happened to you last night, Faith?

Her pulse skittered with anxiety, but she tamped it down, quickly showered, tied back her hair, dressed for her mission. Packing only the bare basics, she then pried up the floorboards under which she’d stored the high-tech tools of her trade.

Pausing at the door, weapons bag in hand, Faith scanned the tiny apartment that had been her operations base—her home—for the past six months. It was the last time she’d see this hovel, or use this particular alias.

Goodbye, Liliana Rodriguez.

Quietly pulling the door shut, Faith sneaked down the back stairs. But as she donned her aviator shades and slipped down the jungle path, a sweet, heady scent snared her attention. She stopped, looked up at thick white flowers growing in a creeper that strangled around the trunk of a tree—the same blooms that had been left on her pillow. And in that moment Faith knew that while she could easily leave Lili Rodriguez behind, this time there was one thing she’d not be able to excise from her mind—Santiago Cabrero. And the small chink he’d made in her armor.

Hurrying along the jungle path, she told herself it meant nothing in the bigger picture. It was just a

warning, and she’d heeded it. But a tiny niggle deep down told her different.

And that made her vulnerable.

Faith could not afford vulnerability.

STRIKE couldn’t afford it.

She hoped it wasn’t too late to pull herself together.

* * *

By noon Omair was in position at a little wooden table outside a ramshackle café about seven miles down river from the cantina, straw hat tipped low over his eyes, his legs crossed lazily out in front of him, one ankle over the other. Flies buzzed around the rim of a glass of flat cola, ice long melted.

Lili’s note had said the exchange would go down across the street from this café shortly after noon.

A hot breeze rustled pieces of litter down the street and made a swishing sound high in the tops of thickly leafed trees. Above the jungle canopy, heavy clouds hung low in the sky and an electrical energy crackled in the oppressive air—felt like a storm coming.