A TERRORIST TRAITOR
The long silence was sickening. Gaia could only stand there and stare at Catherine’s face—her glasses, her cream-colored skin, the intelligence in her eyes. This was absolutely her friend and roommate, the woman she’d literally thrown everything away in order to save—yet at exactly the same time she was a complete stranger now, someone Gaia didn’t know at all. Someone who was pointing a gun in her face.
A word began to buzz through Gaia’s head, repeating itself endlessly like one of those unbearable car alarms on a New York City street. It had become her least favorite word in the English language—one she’d sworn to avoid for the remainder of her adult life, even if it meant living in relative seclusion.
Betrayed. That was the word. Betrayed again. It kept growing louder in her mind like a permanent echo. The painful sensation of burning acid erupted in her chest and began climbing up her throat….
How many times had she been betrayed like this? Never mind, she told herself. Never mind all the “woe is me” crap.
Never mind the laundry list of trusted friends and family who’d stabbed her in the back over the years. Never mind how sad it was to consider all the loyalty she’d wasted on her “partner” Catherine. This moment wasn’t about her sadness or her confusion. It was about rage, pure and simple.
“Do you have any idea … ?” Gaia shook her head slowly. Her fingers curled into fists, the nails digging into her palms. “Do you have any idea what I went through to find you?”
“Look, Gaia, please,” Catherine said cautiously. “Just try to stay cool, all right? I know this is a lot to process, but we can—”
“Process?” Gaia spat. “A lot to process?”
“Gaia, everything’s going to be—”
“No, I don’t think you heard me,” Gaia barked. She took a step closer, closing the distance between her and Catherine’s gun. “I asked you a question. I asked you if you had any idea what I went through for you. Wait, what am I saying? Not for you. What I went through for my partner, Catherine—my partner and my friend, Catherine Sanders. I don’t know who the hell you are.”
“Yes, you do,” Catherine insisted. “I’m still your friend, Gaia. Your best friend and your partner. I need you now more than ever. We all do.”
“Oh, you all do,” Gaia scoffed. “As in you and—and your father out there and the rest of your terrorist organization?”
“No.” Catherine shook her head vehemently. “No, we are not a terrorist organization. That’s just what the bureau wants you to believe. We are not terrorists, Gaia, we’re activists. All we’re trying to do is send a message to this country and free people from modern-day slavery—corporate slavery. And we can’t free them without our leader. We can’t free them until we free Nino. I know you can see that. I know you—I know if you look in your heart, you’ll see the truth.”
“The truth?” Gaia narrowed her eyes with disgust. “You’re talking to me about the truth? I guess that’s what terrorists do, isn’t it? They tell you about the ‘truth’ with a gun pointed at your head.”
“I am not a terrorist!” Catherine shouted. “You think I want to point a gun at you? I don’t. Of course I don’t.”
“Then put the goddamn gun down!” Gaia shot back. She lurched slightly forward, forcing Catherine to thrust the gun out more securely—tightening her grip on the handle with both hands.
“I will,” Catherine promised. “I will put the gun down, I swear. I just need to be sure I can trust you.”
“Trust?” Gaia bellowed. “Now you want to talk about trust? I trusted you. I promised myself I’d never make that mistake again, but I did. Like a true idiot, I put my faith in you, and this is what I have to show for it!”
“Gaia, you just don’t understand, that’s all,” Catherine insisted. “You’re just not seeing the big picture yet. You can trust me. I am your friend. I’ve always been your friend. You’re the reason I came to Quantico, for God’s sake. Socorro put me there to meet you—to find out if it was true about the ‘fearless’ girl from New York. Once I knew you were just as talented and smart as all the reports said, I knew I had to recruit you for this mission. I knew you’d be able to see the importance of what we’re doing here.”
Gaia had stopped listening when she heard the key word:
Recruit.
Jesus. Of course …
She’d been so busy feeling furious and betrayed she hadn’t even bothered to put the pieces together. But now she finally understood. The memo … the warning about Socorro recruiting an FBI trainee for D-day … Catherine wasn’t the recruit—Gaia was. She always had been, since her very first day at Quantico.
But still, it was Catherine who was missing the big picture here. Because Gaia wasn’t about to be recruited for any kind of Socorro D-day. All she was thinking about was how to get that gun from Catherine’s hands and get her ass under arrest and back to Quantico.
“Gaia, you’ve got to help us break Nino out of that courthouse,” Catherine declared. “This is the day. His parole hearing. You need to help us create chaos in that courthouse and then lead him back here through those water tunnels….”
The longer Catherine babbled about her ludicrous agenda, the more Gaia noticed that she didn’t have quite the same discipline with the handgun as her father did. She wasn’t pointing the gun at Gaia quite as relentlessly—in fact, she seemed not to be paying much attention to the gun at all. Gaia inched a step closer, feeling the adrenaline start to rush through her veins at full speed.
“With Ramon free and with Dad and you joining us, Gaia, we’ll be unstoppable,” Catherine continued. “Can’t you see that?”
“No,” Gaia snapped. “No, I don’t see that happening.”
“Don’t say that, Gaia,” Catherine warned. “Please say you’ll do this. I told him I could get you to do this voluntarily, but if I can’t, they will use force, and I don’t want see that happen. I need you to see it now, okay? You’re perfect for us. You’re brilliant, a devastating fighter, a born leader—and you’re just like me—you hate rules and authority. You’ve got to follow the beat of a different drummer. Believe me, when you hear what Nino has to say, it will all make sense to you—rebellion’s in your blood, Gaia. And that’s why you’ll be a great freedom fighter—a natural Socorro soldier.”
The door was opening, and through its aperture Gaia could hear a crowd of people moving to enter the room. Catherine heard it, too—her attention was pulled marginally away from Gaia, and her father’s Beretta slipped farther downward.
This was Gaia’s moment and she knew it. Not just the moment to escape this nightmare—but the moment to exact some revenge for everything Catherine had put her through.
In the blink of an eye Gaia leaped forward and dove into the air, aiming a swift downward kick at Catherine’s gun hand. Catherine was fast, raising the gun and firing, but not fast enough—the bullet blasted downward, ricocheting loudly off the concrete floor and smacking into the concrete wall back out in the tunnel. The gun clattered to the cement floor and slid far away to one side. Gaia landed, spun, and aimed another kick, but Catherine had suddenly stabbed out her own fist for a block, knocking Gaia off balance.
Catherine was a much better fighter than Gaia had ever realized. She had obviously been hiding her strength and her skill since the day they’d met—the day that, Gaia remembered, Catherine had fallen off the obstacle course. She was extremely strong, and her moves were as precise and devastating as one would expect from a young terrorist who’d been receiving combat training from her father her entire life.
Catherine slammed a karate chop into Gaia’s shoulder, and the searing pain distracted her while Catherine spun around and aimed a kick at Gaia’s solar plexus. Gaia lost her breath completely, slamming to the floor, seeing red. Ignoring the pain in her bruised abdomen, she reached out from her position on the floor and grabbed Catherine’s foot, twisting it to bring her down. Behind Catherine, Gaia could see that Marsh and several Socorro henchmen had re-entered the room—James Rossiter was among them. Once Catherine hit the floor, the five henchmen from before came forward and Gaia, her lungs burning, gasping for breath, barely had time to get to her feet before the men closed in and she was fighting all six of them.
And right then Gaia finally let all of her anger take over completely. Her entire hellish journey flashed through her head in an instant—the midnight drive, the horror of Catherine’s hairs on Rossiter’s basement cot, the agents chasing her down, the day spent on the run with Marsh, poor Will potentially throwing away his entire career for her and for this mad chase … and all of it for nothing. For terrorist traitor who obviously had a screw loose.
Gaia let go of the last vestiges of her restraint and went into a near transcendent state of combat. She unleashed a series of moves so quick that even she wasn’t altogether conscious of her combinations. Offense melded together with defense as she tore into Catherine and the five men. The moves were like a complex chess game at high speed, and she was seconds from prevailing, beating them all, when suddenly—
Click.
Gaia wasn’t sure how she knew—how she recognized the sound instantly and what it meant and how it sent a chill through her body so complete that she stopped moving, her leg poised to kick one of the henchmen in the side of the head, and turned toward the quiet, deadly sound she’d heard.
James Rossiter stood with a gun held to the head of a figure kneeling on the floor.
It was Will.
He was poised there, halfway out from the crate he’d been hiding behind, and Rossiter was right behind him, his hand clamped on Will’s shoulder, holding a .45 Magnum pistol against Will’s head.
“Stop,” Rossiter ordered Gaia.
Will—!
Will locked his eyes with Gaia’s, telegraphing all his frustration, regret, and remorse in one ironic crooked smile. “Turns out I followed you anyway,” he said. “I couldn’t leave a lady in distress. Guess it didn’t work out so well.”
“It didn’t,” Rossiter agreed, the lights glinting off his yellowing teeth as he stared at her. Gaia could see the gun’s cylinder moving as Rossiter began to squeeze the trigger. “Get your hands behind your back, Gaia. I got no problem blowing a hole in your boyfriend’s head.”
“Don’t listen to him, Gaia,” Will said easily. “We can take them.”
No, Gaia thought. No, no, no.
Not again.
If there was one lesson she’d learned, and learned harder than anything else she’d learned in her whole, strange, sad, violent life, it was this one.
I won’t do it, she told Will with her eyes. She couldn’t tell—maybe he understood. I can’t take the chance of losing you, and I won’t let you take it either. I cant let you try to be a hero here. That’s how I lost Jake, and it nearly killed me.
Slowly, making no sudden moves, Gaia lowered her suspended leg and placed her hands behind her back.
Giving up.
“What—? Gaia, no!”
Will sounded furious as Rossiter roughly pulled him to his feet. Gaia felt the Socorro henchmen roughly pushing her forward and pulling her hands behind her back. She let them do it. She had nearly gone limp.
“Good,” Catherine said, looking Gaia in the eye from up close. “Smart move, Gaia. Very smart. I knew you had it in you.”
Gaia stared right back at Catherine. She didn’t say a word.
“All right—let’s get these two locked up,” Marsh ordered the henchmen, clapping. “Once you’ve done that, go back to preparing the weapons.”
The henchmen started leading Will and Gaia out of the room toward the metal doors.
“Back to work, people,” Catherine called out. “Today we finally see some justice. Today Nino goes free. El Dia has begun. And they don’t see it coming.”