Please, just let us get through this alive, one more time, Elena silently prayed to the God in Whom she’d never believed, and I promise I won’t allow any of us to do anything this goddamn stupid again.
Elena sat strapped into the chopper’s jump seat, alone with her thoughts. What was happening? What had she done? She’d always been destined to end up doing something utterly disastrous, something as insane and fucked up as this. She could see it all so clearly now.
She recalled her childhood, growing up in the West Texas desert country. Her father had been a former biker, who cooked crystal meth for the Hells Angels, until he blew himself and his cook shack to Kingdom Come, leaving Elena an orphan. By coincidence, however, she’d recently met Jules, a fellow El Paso ninth-grader, and Elena had saved her from getting stomped by an outlaw girls’ gang. Jules and her family immediately took Elena in and raised her as one of their own.
Her first year of college she’d dated a guy who’d turned out to be a bona fide Mideast terrorist. He’d returned to Pakistan, but her obsession with him had led to her join the Agency. She’d blazed through their training school—“The Farm”—with flying colors. Testing high on linguistic skills, she had excelled in the field. After becoming the Agency’s foremost undercover agent in Pakistan, she’d met Jamie there. He was running black ops for the Special Forces on the Afghan–Pakistan border, and they’d fallen in love. Eventually, she had taken over the CIA’s Pakistani desk. For a time, she’d been the world’s foremost expert on Saudi–Pakistani terrorism. But then the Company had turned on her, Jules and Jamie, putting out shoot-to-kill orders on them all. They had had to flee the country.
Eventually they’d been cleared, but they’d all sworn they’d never return to the States. Something had happened to America. The whole nation had gone wrong. None of them had wanted any part of the U.S. ever again.
But then this shit happened, and none of them could turn their backs on it—Jules in particular. She had dug up stuff on Tower and the Saudis that they just couldn’t ignore.
Still Elena knew in her soul that she, Jamie and Jules never should have come back and gotten involved. She should have somehow stopped them. She should have stood up, put her foot down.
Well it was too late for recriminations. Hell was coming to the Homeland, and once again, she, Jules, Jamie and her friends would be in the thick of it. And if the U.S. caught them, Tower would see to it that they spent the rest of their lives in some Guantanamo-style hellhole.
Or Kamal’s crew would kill them.
If she could just keep them all alive, if she could get them all out of this in one piece, she swore she would drag them all back to Sweden by their throats, crotches and the scruffs of their necks. She would never let any of them return to the U.S. ever. She would never let any of them get involved in this crazy shit again. America and rest of the world were just too fucking crazy.
Please, just let us get through this alive, one more time, Elena silently prayed to the God in Whom she’d never believed, and I promise I won’t allow any of us to do anything this goddamn stupid again.
She stared out of the chopper’s windscreen and watched the skyscrapers of the Big Apple growing larger and larger.