Chapter 10
Carter traced the money from the ransoms to a powerful terrorist group run by a man named Jorge Riaz—the Commandant to his followers—to the place in Cantana. They were funding their cartel by kidnapping affluent American tourists and ransoming them back to their families. The Greenwich Country students were the largest group they'd taken to date and a payday they couldn't pass up.
When we breached the compound there was predawn silence, then a symphony of chaos. From our side, each shot was true, hitting its mark, and bodies fell in large numbers. As the blood-soaked ground cooled, the mission was considered a failure.
We rounded up all the servants and a few of the soldiers for interrogation, then we searched the camp thoroughly. It was on the second search of the main house that I found her, Kathryn Rollins. She was locked in an underground cell, tied under a long bench by her arms and legs. She was barely alive.
"Let me die," she pleaded.
I should have slit her throat. If I'd cut her throat she couldn't have said anything to me. Those three little words changed me. My hand paused in cutting her free because no one had ever asked me for death. It was the fact that I was cutting her free that gave me pause. My thoughts felt instantly singular in their focus. Kathryn Rollins.
Not one person in my decade and a half of killing for profit had ever asked me for death. Then this girl, who I was supposed to kill, wanted to die. It was like my heart restarted. I felt hope and despair, only I didn't recognize them. I hadn't had any feelings in a very long time.
I would have granted her request if not for the man who entered the cell behind me to watch my back. At least that's the lie I told myself as I finished cutting her free a full ten minutes after I found her alive.
***
My mind spliced together the briefing six years ago, Cantana, and the present. I had stopped processing in layers, but I was on a mission and my thinking slipped into the familiar routine.
"Let me die," she'd said. It was the irony of asking me for death. I would have been happy—well, I would have been content just living my life the way I always had—if not for Cantana and Kathryn. Yet I'd made her a promise in a field of snow just moments ago.
Everything mixed together in my head: the meeting, the mission, and the now. I tried to understand the events that caused me to know Katie Rollins. I knew a lot about the woman trembling in fear on the seat beside me in the car, probably more than any other person walking the earth than herself.
Katie was alive. She was alive and she had somehow survived almost six months of torture. I felt something I couldn't define for the broken, bruised, dehydrated, and starved girl. I should have killed her then and there, but even if asked now why I didn't, I still couldn't answer the question.
For twenty-four hours I was able to pretend she wasn't there to be saved. She'd just magically shown up at a hospital, alive. The media picked up the story. If Carter knew it was me that rescued her, he'd never said a word. I was paid, Hank was dead and I'd made sure Hank's family got his share. There should have been a price on my head, only there wasn't. For a while I thought I'd gotten away with it.
I should have let that be it. I should have let Jorge and Noel Riaz go. I hadn't, and since Cantana I'd been trying to track them down. "Lived off-mission" was correct. The problem was CJ shouldn't know that about me.
Carter made sure I had little to no options after I failed to complete a mission after Cantana. I still contended I completed that mission; I just missed Carter's deadline. As much as I wanted to I could no longer deny that Carter had a price on my head. Over the last five years he'd dried up almost all of my old contacts. I was easy to set up without my tried and true connections. So when CJ convinced me he knew the current whereabouts of Jorge and Noel Riaz, it was the perfect bait for me.