Leave No Trace (Black Ops, #5.5)
Author: Cindy Gerard

It is not power that corrupts, but fear. Fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it and fear of the scourge of power corrupts those who are subject to it.

—Aung San Suu Kyi, 1990

One

It had become too much about the scotch, Cav admitted with brutal honesty. Too much about relying on it to make it through the nights. Too much about craving it to help him deal with a life where the shots called him, instead of him calling the shots.

With a heavy breath, he leaned back in the mahogany and leather desk chair in the Jakarta mansion that had been his base of operations for the past six years. He slowly swiveled until he faced his office window, then rocked back and held the heavy-bottomed glass aloft, watching the sunlight play over the amber oblivion before indulging in another sip.

Yeah. Way too much about the scotch.

That was all about to change.

Everything was about to change.

Tomorrow morning he was going to give notice via his handler. After a decade and a half of being a good little spook, David Cavanaugh and the CIA were finally going to part ways.

It was past time.

He watched the ebb and flow of traffic shooting by the window and wondered why he didn’t feel relief. Instead, ever since he’d made his decision, he’d been overrun with recurrent flashes of guilt. And, yeah, panic. What now? What next? Where did he go from here? What did he have left to give?

The sound of light footsteps on the polished teak floor brought his head around. He’d dismissed the two bodyguards that were a part of his cover earlier, but Dira, his aman, stood in the towering office doorway, the wide strap of her woven straw purse slung over her shoulder. The twelve-foot ceilings dwarfed the quiet Indonesian woman’s five-foot stature.

“Is there anything else I can do for you, Mr. Windle?”

Frank Windle had been Cav’s CIA cover for the past six years. Windle’s expat, unprincipled venture capitalist persona came with this fully staffed luxury mansion, the personal bodyguards, a force of jangas—armed guards with dogs who patrolled the high cement wall surrounding the compound—and an expense account that would make the Prince of Wales weep with envy.

He’d come a long way since his initial CIA assignment in Ouagadougou, Africa, working undercover as a lowly U.S. embassy staffer and sharing a three-room tenement flat with fellow rookies Wyatt Savage and Joe Green. He lived in luxury in Jakarta now, and he regularly rubbed elbows with the scum of the earth.

“I’m good, Dira, thanks.” He dismissed his longtime housekeeper with a soft smile. “Enjoy your evening.”

He planned to enjoy his. Alone. With a farewell toast to both the Company and his love affair with Glenlivet.

With grim determination, he looked around the polished opulence of the wood-paneled room. He wouldn’t miss the subterfuge, but he’d sure as hell miss this place. The spacious office was one of twenty luxurious rooms in a mansion that personified the historical Dutch East Indies architecture with its steeply pitched gables, large airy rooms, and soaring finials. The house was a jewel. Cool, airy, and regal… and living here had choked the life out of him.

He downed the last of the fine single malt and wondered how the Company would explain it when Windle, who’d made a name for himself as an unscrupulous player in not only the Indonesian but the international black market by being open to any number of illicit business transactions, made a sudden departure from Jakarta and cut off its intel pipeline.

The Company’s problem, not mine.

Right. So why did a knot of anxiety tighten inside his chest like a fist? And, Jesus, why the guilt? He’d been a good Company man. He’d had plenty of incentives to flip and go over to the dark side. Lucrative incentives. And while he wasn’t as naive about the international spy game as he had been when he’d first signed on to play, he was still a patriot. He didn’t need to feel guilty about anything—not about his work, not about leaving. And yet…

“Screw it,” he muttered. Screw the guilt. It was someone else’s turn to run the gauntlet. He’d be thirty-five next month, and some days he felt as old as f**king Methuselah. It was the weight of those dead bodies and repeat adrenaline burns. He’d carried both as long as both his body and his soul could bear.

He rubbed at a scar on his right thigh, a memento from an AK-47 round in Beirut in ’99. And whenever it rained his collarbone ached like hell from when he’d broken it escaping an op gone wrong in Mogadishu in ’05.

His cell phone rang, Private Number showing on the readout. He’d personally fitted the security screens on his cell—this phone, even the CIA didn’t know about—but just in case he answered with his cover. “Windle.”

“Cav, it’s Wyatt.”

The chair creaked as Cav sank back. It had been months since he’d heard Wyatt Savage’s soft southern drawl, yet his old friend was one of the few constants in Cav’s history. He hoped that would be true in his future as well. In the spook world, where black and white too often bled into shades of gray, there had never been a question that Wyatt was also one of the good guys.

That didn’t mean he couldn’t give his old partner a hard time.

“Why is it that every time the phone rings and I hear your voice, I feel a knee-jerk reaction to say ‘wrong number’ and hang the hell up?”

“I need your help.”

“Ah. That would be the reason.” The last time Wyatt had enlisted Cav’s help it had involved infiltrating a human trafficking ring, the takedown of a rat-bastard Chinese crime boss, and several blown-up buildings near the Jakarta wharfs.

“Look, Cav. I don’t have a lot of time. So here’s the quick and dirty.”

“It’s always quick and dirty with you, Savage.” Just like Cav was always going to say yes to whatever Wyatt asked of him.

Over a decade and several dead bodies had stacked up since he, Wyatt, and Joe Green had guarded one another’s backs in service to Uncle. While Wyatt and Joe had said hasta luego to the CIA several years ago and teamed up with Nate Black’s private security and military contract firm, Black Ops, Inc., Cav had stuck with the Company. Until now.

“Cav… you still there?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I’m here,” he said when he realized he’d lapsed into silence. He glanced toward the liquor cabinet. “What’s going on?”

“Two days ago an American woman stepped off a plane in Mandalay, Myanmar, hired a taxi that let her off near her hotel downtown, and she hasn’t been heard from since.”

Cav reached absently for a pen, then flipped it back and forth between his fingers. “One of yours?” Black Ops, Inc. specialized in immobilizing bad guys on the international front.

“No. She’s not with BOI. Carrie’s a friend. And she’s as green as the damn grass.”

“What kind of friend?” Wyatt had gotten married last spring, yet he sounded damn rattled over this friend. Cav had missed the wedding. Like he’d missed many important events over the years, because he’d been embroiled in some covert op to gum up the works in a would-be tyrant’s attempted coup to overthrow a U.S.-sanctioned government, or an op to intercept an arms shipment bound for a terrorist training camp, or a score of other missions that had kept him on the razor’s edge of life or death. A lot of lives. A lot of deaths.

A lot of post-op scotch to blur the memories that hovered like ghosts around a crypt.

“Just a friend,” Wyatt said, snapping Cav back. “I grew up with her. Our families go way back. She’s a small-town hospital administrator. She wasn’t prepared for Myanmar. She’s never even been out of the States. Hell, for all I know, she’s never been out of Georgia.”

Cav could hear the desperation in Wyatt’s voice.

“Her family begged me to talk her out of going, and I tried. Believe me. I tried to scare her smart. But there was no stopping her.

“Look”—he paused, and Cav could visualize his friend rubbing his brow with his index finger—“she’s important to me, Cav. I’d be there in a heartbeat but Sophie… she’s pregnant and… Christ, Cav.” His voice broke and Cav sensed that what came next wouldn’t be good.

“There are complications. We… we might lose the baby.” His voice was thick with strain. “I can’t leave her right now. The doctors say it’s going to be touch and go for the next forty-eight to seventy-two hours.”

“I’m sorry, man.” Cav knew all about Sophie. One drunk midnight, shortly after the Company had paired them up as partners all those years ago, Wyatt had told him about the one who’d gotten away. Cav had been happy as hell when they’d finally found their way back to each other this past year. Now this tough break. One that was clearly tearing Wyatt apart.

Now he understood the reason for Wyatt’s call. He couldn’t go to Myanmar. Cav could. And he could get there a helluva lot faster from Jakarta than Wyatt could from Georgia.

“What’s the word from our embassy?” he asked.

“They’ve got nothing. It’s like she fell off the face of the earth. They’ve got calls in to both local and government officials, but so far it’s clam city.”

Cav listened intently while Wyatt gave him Carrie Granger’s physical description.

“Let me make some calls. See what I can find out. I’ll be back in touch.”

“Thanks, man.”

“Don’t insult me.” They’d been too much to each other to ever have to say those words.

“Right. Love you, too.”

A quick smile curved Cav’s lips as a glimpse of the Savage he knew finally surfaced. He disconnected, then started looking up old contacts who might have connections in Myanmar.

TWO HOURS AND several calls later, Cav still had nothing. In a city peopled with Asians, a slim, pretty, blue-eyed blonde, five foot seven or eight, should stick out like a square peg in a round hole. But he’d butted up against dozens of brick walls. No one had seen or heard anything about an American woman. This wasn’t good.

Myanmar was a country where human rights—especially women’s rights—were basically nonexistent, and this was starting to stink like a government cover-up. Which meant two things. One: Carrie Granger of Nowhere, Georgia, was in big, bad trouble. Two: Cav couldn’t hang up his spy shoes just yet.

It was a full forty-eight long hours later before he finally managed to rattle the right chains and come up with some answers. He flipped open his phone and called Wyatt’s number.

“I found her,” he said without preamble when Wyatt picked up. “As far as I know, she’s still alive.”

“And the bad news?” Wyatt asked, too savvy to feel relief.

Cav glanced toward the window.

“You don’t want hear the bad news.”

Two

SOMEWHERE NORTH OF MNDALAY,

IN THE MOUNTAINOUS JUNGLES OF

THE SHAN PLATEAU NEAR MOGOK

Until last week, the closest Carrie Granger had come to a monsoon had been in the comfort of her living room, watching news footage on CNN. Detention camps where people were held with no shelter, their food tossed in through the bars of a crude wooden cage, were the stuff of documentaries exposing the horrors of third world injustice.

Until last week, she hadn’t truly understood the term “living nightmare.”

This week, after being herded into the back of a truck like cattle with several other prisoners, then traveling for hours over mountainous roads to this hellhole, it was far too clear.

She huddled into the corner of the make-shift outdoor cage that was her jail cell and new living quarters. She and a dozen captives—all of whom appeared to be Burmese and none of whom spoke English—had been forced to build the cage themselves at gunpoint when they’d arrived at the labor camp.

Their cage was identical to ten others, also filled with slave laborers, crowded along the mountainside. The bars were made of roughly cut wood that her jailers had hastily chopped from a stand of small trees. Her hands were still raw from the wood and hemp rope slivers she’d gotten lashing the poles together. The reward for their labor? Each night after they’d worked in the mud and the rock and the ruby mine for twelve or sometimes fourteen hours, they were shoved inside the seven by seven–foot cell like animals.

No roof. No shelter from the elements or the creepy crawlies that slithered out of the jungle edging the mining site.

Wet to the bone, Carrie dragged the sodden hem of her coarse work pants out of the mud and shivered against the unrelenting downpour. Even the vicious dogs that patrolled the site had better quarters.

She stared at the guard who took particular pleasure in shoving and hitting and prodding with the nose of his rifle. The one who had been watching her in a way that made her nauseous in anticipation of the day he decided he wanted more from her than endless days of hard labor.

Watch your back, you slimeball, she thought, before cutting her gaze away from where he stood under the shelter of a tree in the fading daylight, his back to her, his rifle slung over his bony shoulder. If he and his buddies force-marched them up the steep mountainside path into the mine tomorrow and he came within shoving distance, the little sadist was going to find himself on a fast ride to the bottom of the deep, rocky ravine.

Once, she would have felt guilty for having such horrible thoughts about another human being. That was before she’d experienced the depth of man’s inhumanity to man.

Her belly growled with hunger. She tried not to think about it, or about the cuts and bruises on her body and her feet and the utter, consuming hopelessness that clogged her throat like a rock. Instead she thought of ruby slippers, a magic lantern, a get-out-of-jail-free card. Anything to keep her from dwelling on the dull, lifeless eyes of the others who shared this prison with her.

She’d settle for a rabbit hole in Wonderland. A frickin’ time continuum. Please, God, anything to take her back in time to before she’d flown halfway across the world, wide-eyed and ready to embrace the first big adventure of her life—a humanitarian mission to help set up a dialysis unit in a rural Myanmar hospital.