Chapter Seventeen

Nomad

Nomad lay on his bed in the American barracks. At the end, he'd positioned a chair with a stack of pillows to give himself the extra inches he needed so his feet weren't dangling off the mattress.

T-Rex stood at the open door and caught Nomad's gaze. "Up and at ‘em. Looks like rest time has come to an end."

Nomad swung his legs around, sliding his feet into the boots he always kept prepped for a quick transition. He pulled the laces into efficient bows and followed along behind T-Rex.

"Where's Echo heading next?"

"Not Echo." T-Rex pointed. "You."

Me? Interesting. Nomad silently followed T-Rex out the door into the hallway to the elevator and pressed the button. "Did the CIA update you on how she's doing?" Nomad wouldn't speak Red's name outside of the mission. But T-Rex would know exactly whom he was asking about.

With his hands on his hips, his lips pressed tight, T-Rex shook his head, and Nomad felt a vice tighten around his heart.

During the extraction, Nomad had taken charge of Red. In the back of their vehicle, Nomad had cradled Red in his arms from the hotel to the docks with her head resting on his chest. He'd carried her to the boat and held her, draped across his lap, as he protected her from the swells while T-Rex motored them farther out to sea where the rescue helicopter could reach them.

Red had been oblivious to all of it.

Nomad had been scared; he'd admit it. He'd felt her clinging to life. They had arrived when she held to the last thread, and it was probable that their last push was too little, too late.

Throughout the race to get her to an American hospital on an American base, Nomad had this crazy thought that if he held her tight, he could hold her in her body. That if he sang her name and just plain asked, "Can you reach down deep? Can you find the thing that can get you through and anchor yourself to it? Can you listen to my voice and stay with me?" she would try harder to stay alive. Like when his buddies were hurt on the battlefield, and he'd yelled at them to keep their eyes open, "Stay with me." He just kept asking, terrified that he was watching her take her last breath. Angry that this rescue was taking too long.

Yeah, it had been bad.

When T-Rex walked through his door to get him, Nomad had been lying there staring at the ceiling, flinging those questions out into the universe. "Red, are you trying? Are you holding on?" In his imagination, Nomad had been reliving the relief he'd felt as the helicopter crew sent the basket down. Arranging her as comfortably as he could, Nomad had pulled the straps securely into place to keep her safe.

As the rope lifted her, Nomad steadied the swing of the basket. It was an honor to do it. He'd felt that acutely. And it was his privilege to fly back to the base with her, to be the one who got an I.V. into her arm, to run beside the gurney as the rescue EMTs took over her care.

But as the ambulance receded from view, a sensation flooded Nomad's system, rocking him like a rogue wave.

It was a lot.

Big.

Hard as hell.

He didn't know her name.

He'd never get to talk to her.

He'd never see her smile.

This mission was the embodiment of those damned lines from Longfellow:

Ships that pass in the night, and speak each other in passing, Only a signal shown and a distant voice in the darkness; So on the ocean of life we pass and speak one another, Only a look and a voice, then darkness again and a silence.

Nomad had never read that poem as bleak. He lived that life and loved it. Everchanging missions and postings, people came, people went. His family was a distant, calm harbor he could return to at any time, which was enough for him.

The passings in the night was a life choice.

He was a novelty-seeker. An adventurer. He had the DNA of his Viking ancestors racing through his blood. Tired of the rocks and snow and needing to see other things, they climbed into a boat and headed to sea, driven by something deep inside, hungry for the next adventure.

And yet, this mission. This mission. He didn't want to let it go. Didn't want to see the ambulance fade into the distance.

He wanted her back in his arms.

Crazy, right? he asked himself. Nomad held his breath, waiting for the update, terrified that T-Rex would say, "We did our best, but it wasn't enough."

As the elevator doors drew open, he said, "I have nothing on her status." T-Rex tipped his ear toward the door. "I do have Colonel Watts holding. Let's move."

They exited the elevator, and Nomad followed T-Rex into an empty room. Colonel Watts was on the screen, looking down at a report that held his focus.

"Sir," T-Rex and Nomad stood at attention in front of the camera.

"At ease. Take a seat, both of you. Nomad, I wanted to review a few things from your file with you."

"Yes, sir."

"Let me catch you up to speed." He turned toward T-Rex. "You, too. I just got some interesting information from the Mediterranean. I'm going to put you on split screen." Another man's face came up in the frame on the right. "This is Javeed Hasan, DIA." DIA was military intelligence similar to the CIA.

Nomad had assumed intelligence would be taking the reins when dealing with Poole. Maybe Javeed Hasan was the one interrogating the guy.

"Call me Hasan. I'm going to cut to the chase. Our AI system spat out your name, Nomad, as the right guy, in the right place, at the right time, with the right skills—technical and otherwise."

"Sir."

"Thank you for your assistance in bringing Sgt. Poole back into the fold."

"Yes, sir."

"We want to keep the circle tight with this information for many reasons," Hasan said.

Nomad thought they didn't want to affect morale, encourage copycats, or look like idiots for giving this guy clearance. No good could come from broadcasting the issue or spreading the knowledge.

"So we needed to pick wisely for this next step," Hasan continued. "My understanding is that you have an association with the Viennese embassy. Tell me about that."

Nomad crossed his arms over his chest. DIA and the Viennese embassy in the same breath with mentioning Poole?

What was his association? Nomad's parents had been CIA field officers who worked under the guise of jobs with the diplomatic corps. One of the places they worked was out of the Viennese Embassy.

Was that what this DIA officer wanted, for Nomad to out his parents?

When he hit high school, his family moved to Vienna. Nomad had slowly been figuring out his parents' true professions. It was at that time that his family had gone to a dinner party where Nomad met a Green Beret, some relative of the Viennese ambassador, and his wife.

Was that what Hasan wanted to chat about?

That night had been pivotal for him. At eighteen, he'd been an idealist and a patriot. When this Green Beret had talked about his work as a diplomatic special forces operator, the kind of special forces nobody made movies about, Nomad was honed in. He did his research and signed the contracts. He'd go to boot right after graduation and then on to Ranger school.

His parents had taken the news with gray faces, their muscles held tight under their skin. Usually, they were better about masking. Well, if anything happened to him, they'd have his twin, who was heading toward medical school to become a brain surgeon. The contrast was stark. His parents treated Nomad's career decisions like personal affronts to their life's sacrifices.

Since no one knew what they had done for a living, Nomad was pretty sure that his grandparents on both sides would have met their choices with the same strain around the eyes and tightened lips.

To this day, the extended family didn't know about his parents' CIA service, and even for Nomad, it had been a guess, a source of curiosity.

After spending a decade with the Green Berets, Nomad had been asked to consider joining Delta Force because of his unique background as a kid growing up with parents in the State Department, moving every year or two, picking up not just the languages but also the mannerisms, the etiquette nuances, and high cultural intelligence.

He could blend.

He was a nomad.

Of course, his parents had also taught their sons spy skills. They'd treated it like a series of games to learn new cities as they moved about. When the CIA was providing the new Delta Force members training in spy craft, Nomad already knew how to do handoffs, how to change appearance and disappear into a crowd, how to work with dead drops, to follow a rabbit—the name for a person you were tracking—to set up a safe house, the hows and whys, and wheres of caches. All of it. None of it was new.

In training, Nomad was so good at it that they looked into his background.

And Nomad knew precisely when that happened because his parents had shown up.

Their visit was an in-person plea that Nomad keep the family secret quiet. They just went for a sail and made sure that he wasn't wondering and therefore digging and asking questions.

It was all good. He had been eighteen when he'd made peace with all that. The affirmation was appreciated, though.

Was that what Hasan wanted him to reveal?

"You know Vienna?" Hasan asked. "You speak German?" Hasan already knew that if he'd read Nomad's folder.

"I speak German. My father worked at the Viennese Embassy for a time. If you gave me an address, I'd need a GPS to get there. It's been almost twenty years."

"And you have social skills?"

"What does that mean?" Nomad hadn't been asked these kinds of questions before. It had always been, "Go here. Accomplish this."

"Dancing skills, and by that I specifically mean ballroom dancing skills, the waltz at the very least." Hasan glared through the camera at Nomad. "Delta Force and ballroom don't usually pair together."

"Yes, sir. I'm comfortable with all of that."

"Okay," Hasan spoke to someone off camera. "I think this is our guy. He has the right look if he were in white tie and tails. Do you have his measurements? Good. Get everything ordered. Correct car. Correct hotel. The works. And with the car, you must remember his height, yes?" Hasan turned back to the camera.

"Sir?"

"Solo mission. It's going to take some creativity on your part. There's a woman, her name is Elena Savas. She's supposed to attend a ball in Vienna this Saturday, and we want you there with eyes on her."

There had been the mention of Poole, keeping a tight circle, and now a woman named Elena …

Poole was most likely still in a brig under the Mediterranean Sea.

Not everyone was trained to withstand interrogation.

It wasn't easy.

Nomad learned this the hard way in SERE school. Survival being the goal—escape was the best of all worlds. But when necessary, they knew how to resist, which could be an external resistance or an internal one. And they'd been trained to escape.

There was no escaping a submarine.

Obviously, Poole had given something up.

"Yes, sir."

Hasan drummed his fingers on the table. It had the quality not of impatience but of anxiety to get the job done. The sense that he wanted boots on the ground. And he wanted them to be aggressive. "Poole is a traitor. We have a limited understanding of his actions and their implications. Right now, we recognize that there are people out of the Iraqi attack who are staging to go over our southern border to mole into our communities and to affect some large-scale act of terror. We want to know their end goal and net them before they burrow into some hole where we can't find them anymore."

"Yes, sir. Do you know Poole's motivation for his involvement?"

"It looks like he was a bored soldier with a high-security clearance that an attractive woman developed for intelligence. And a car that he wanted to buy."

"And this has to do with Elena Savas?"

"Exactly. We need you to turn that whole honey pot thing around on her."

Nomad didn't respond.

"Elena presents as Poole's girlfriend. In her messages, she mentioned she'd be in Damascus this week."

Nomad sat stoically. Was Elena the reason why Poole risked going AWOL?

"We believe he'd planned to surprise her. Poole told Elena he'd been paid for the information he'd brought in from his base. She congratulated him. He said he wasn't going back, and she tried to change his mind. She mentioned a group that was heading over the southern border of the U.S. and that the information he'd brought in was crucial for the success of that team—"

"Team?" T-Rex jutted forward.

Hasan's gaze turned to t-Rex. "That was the English term she used, yes. This came from a text exchange. She texted that the information he'd provided the team would make their infiltration and ultimate success possible. The mission would be a go very soon."

Shit.

"From the discussion, we know that Poole agrees with the purpose of the event. He knows that the event will be taking place in the United States and is a terrorist event, but he doesn't know who, what, or where. That's why we need Elena."

"And she'll be at the ball," Nomad said. Yup. This was big. Innocent lives would be on the line.

"A ball in Vienna will be the perfect place to meet her in public and make contact. Perhaps, make a move toward some kind of romantic connection. If not making a move, at least place bugs and trackers on everything she has with her, her phone especially, then we can follow along until we have a better opportunity. That night, we need to know with whom she's interacting. Whatever happens, time is of the essence. We need Elena's information fast to stay three steps ahead of the event."

"Yes, sir. But why the ball, sir? Is there a connection?"

"From the texts, going to the ball sounds like it will result in a big payday. It came up in her texts just a couple of days ago that she'd made contact with the buyer who wants to meet her there to look at the ring."

"Ring. So, a piece of high-dollar jewelry?" Nomad asked.

"We believe so—could be code for something else. The DIA knows that Elena Savas has been dealing with sales of specialized items—cultural artifacts, for example—to European elites since the Civil War began in Syria and that business models in that region include a hefty cut of the profits going to ISIS. Further than a basic file, the DIA hasn't been involved. Up until now, she's outside the scope of our directives."

"Is Interpol prepared to pick her up for questioning?" Nomad asked.

"I have nothing to do with that. I will be sending you a file with your plan of action. It will include some of Elena's pictures that we found on Poole's phone. Enough that you can identify her. We discovered through the FBI that Elena Savas is on the attendance list as the guest of Joel Brighton, an American citizen living mostly in Dubai. We'll have his images available as well."

"You had mentioned making a romantic connection, sir?" Nomad asked.

"We need to ask Elena some pointed questions, and we need to do it in such a way that we are not tipping off the group that she's targeted so they scatter to reorganize later like some damned murmuration of starlings."

Nomad suppressed a smile. "Poetic, sir."

"I liked that image." He held up a finger. "Here's the challenge, we want to ask Elena our questions. To do that, we need to get her into international waters. And she needs to go there willingly. Or maybe, quasi willingly."

"Drugging her would be illegal," T-Rex said.

"Alcohol, freely consumed, is not," Hasan countered. " Romance is not."

Nomad leaned back in his chair. "I see." Surreal. This fell under private life skills he'd never considered applying to his soldiering career.

"Be creative. We can provide you with a yacht, for example—maybe she and her friends, if that made her feel safe—would enjoy that. You could, for example, ask, ‘Would you all like to go out onto the water to see the stars or the sunrise?' Be creative . We could have a helicopter available. Would she like to fly and see the lights? And that helicopter could move to a ship in—"

"International waters." Yeah, he got it.

"Correct. Son, I'm not saying this is going to be easy. I'm also not saying it has to be done the night of the ball. If we can get trackers on her and her things, that would be a step forward."

"Do you think she's in an actual relationship with Poole?" T-Rex asked.

"He does."

Foreign spy or not, this kind of operation didn't align with his ethics. He didn't lie to a woman for manipulation—kidnapping. Nomad taught fighting skills and blew shit up. This op was someone else's bailiwick. "Is there a reason that JSOC is turning to Delta Force instead of CIA or DIA?"

"You know how this works," Hasan must have caught something in Nomad's tone. "The number of people who have to sign off if we shift to a new team. The pebble hits the water, and the rings expand outward." Hasan glowered through the camera. "For myriad reasons that I don't feel compelled to share with you, we'd like to limit the number of pebbles that get tossed. Frankly, we think your unique situation and … attributes will make it more likely that you will be successful. Those officers in the area might have less hair on their heads than you and more jowls. You've already been read in on Poole. The more people who know, the more chance that this might somehow, for example, get into the ears of a reporter and the story finds its way into the papers. That would be a bullhorn blaring out our position when we want to sneak up on the tigers, catch them in our nets, and turn them to our will."

"Yes, sir." So they needed someone young and fit to try to attract her enough to move her to a place where the laws were more plastic.

But did that make sense? The CIA, after all, knew about Poole. They had developed the intelligence packet for Echo to find him that was dead on. Of course, having handed off the package to JSOC, the field officer would have no idea what had come of it.

"Need to know" meant the players often had no idea how a puzzle fit together.

If Echo had missed, JSOC might have asked the officer to work their asset and try to get their next coordinates but that was about it.

"The problem," Hasad said, "is getting you in there. Security is tight. Tickets to the Secret Order of the Raven's Gate Gala are impossible to come by."

"We reach out to the American embassy," Nomad offered. "Surely, the ambassador would have procured tickets when they became available. My parents went to that ball when they worked in Vienna. I remember them talking about it."

"We called the ambassador. State confiscated their tickets for national security reasons. Others needed them."

"But not us?" T-Rex asked. "Some other team that needs to be there for a different reason?"

"The CIA might be on hand, possibly the FBI. But they'd be working a different case."

Ah, here was another reason for tapping him for this mission; Nomad might have some strings he could pull. "Some of my parents' society friends will be going, I'm sure," Nomad said. "Do I have permission to reach out to my mother for contact names and numbers?"

"You do. Other than that, you might end up needing to come down the chimney like Santa Claus."