of exercise aimed at her? The Medusas did some wild stuff in the name of training, but surely they wouldn’t scare the hell out of a bunch of kids and teachers. Nah. This was the real deal.
A hand grabbed her shoulder roughly and threw her over onto her back. She rolled with the shove, not resisting. Unfortunately, the roll exposed her cell phone, and one of them kicked it away from her with his foot. Reflexively, her hand went out to retrieve it, but she froze as she made eye contact with the kicker.
Clear amber eyes stared down at her, the color of a fine cognac. They were hard eyes, but they didn’t contain the rage or fanaticism she’d expected.
He glanced at her outstretched hand splayed on the floor and did a double take. She swore mentally. Clearly visible on her fourth finger was her West Point class ring. In her guise as a civilian historian, she told people it had been her father’s, but it was actually hers.
The man’s eyes lit with recognition as he spied the chunky ring and its dark green central stone.
Dammit.
“Here she is!” he called out to the others in Farsi.
What? These men were here for her? How on earth did they know who she was? Nobody knew about the Medusa Project. It had been resurrected from ashes less than a year ago, for crying out loud.
Everyone had been led to believe the program was defunct and the military had abandoned the idea of training and equipping a team of female Special Forces operatives after the second Medusa team was wiped out in a mission gone terribly wrong.
The other two masked men grabbed her by her arms and hauled her upright. Adrenaline roared through her body, and it took all the discipline she had not to lash out and fight for her life against these men. She was hopelessly outgunned, and three on one was not the kind of odds she wanted to take into a fistfight.
She was a good hand-to-hand fighter, but she wasn’t invincible. Martial artists won against three attackers only in the movies. Carefully choreographed and scripted movies. Not real life. Not in an elementary school full of children.
“You’re sure this is her?” one of the other men asked the terrorist who’d hidden the little girl.
He stared at her indecisively. His gaze strayed to a telephone sitting on the desk beside her, to the exit door and then back to her face. He exhaled hard. Regret glinted in his stare. “Yes. That’s her.” His voice was a rough baritone and sounded stressed.
Who in the hell did they think she was? Who were they?
Her only play was to delay these guys as long as she could. Give the police time to respond to her call.
“Who are you?” she demanded in English. No way was she giving away that she understood anything they were saying to one another. “What do you want with me?”
She didn’t see the blow coming. A fist plowed into her jaw from the right side, snapping her head hard to the left and making her see stars. Dazed, she stared at the first man—the one with golden eyes—wincing silently in front of her.
Gingerly, she poked her right cheek with her tongue. No teeth felt loose, but the inside of her cheek was shredded. She opened her mouth, flexing her jaw experimentally. It didn’t feel broken.
Well. That didn’t go as planned. Dazed, she stared at her attackers. Real fear for her life flowed through her. She registered it, cataloged the emotion and forcibly pushed it down. She had no time for fear. Not if she wanted to live. And not if she wanted to protect the kids in this building.
She had to get these men outside, into the range of armed law enforcement officials, but slowly enough that said officials could get here before these guys fled.
“You’re sure it’s her?” the third man asked doubtfully in Farsi. “She doesn’t look much like her picture.”
“Yes, yes,” Goldeneyes snapped back in Farsi. “Blonde. Tall. Thirty years old. And she does match the picture. These Western women wear a lot of makeup and it changes how they look. I’m used to that, and you’re not. I’m telling you it’s her.”
With that declaration, Goldeneyes apparently sealed some sort of fate for her. The other two men nodded, accepting his word.
What picture? Part of becoming a Medusa was having her life scrubbed completely off the internet. Completely off. A team of cybersecurity experts did the initial wipe and then maintained continuous scans for any new images that might pop up. Even official public records were scrubbed. She did not exist in cyberspace.
So, how did these guys know her, let alone have a picture of her? She certainly had no idea who they were.
Belatedly, her mind working a couple steps slower than normal, she mentally corrected him. She was twenty-seven years old, not thirty, thank you very much.
In the distance, sirens became audible. God bless the 9-1-1 operator. She’d called in the cavalry, after all.
“Time’s up. Let’s go,” Jaw Puncher bit out.
The men hustled her out into the hallway. She briefly considered making a stand right there in the entrance, but they had AK-47s, and one blow from the butt of one of those would knock her out cold. She would just as soon stay conscious if she could. Also, there were all those kids just down the hall. She had no way of knowing if there were any more armed men in the building, and she dared not provoke these guys to start shooting.
She did her best to slow the men down, though, shortening her steps and resisting moving forward between them in the guise of being too zoned out to do anything but shuffle along drunkenly.
Irritably, they overpowered her and shoved her outside into the parking lot. More sirens were audible now. Lots of them. Unfortunately, they still sounded a half-dozen blocks away.
Goldeneyes stepped up close behind her and bodychecked her hard but not painfully, shoving his hip into her lower back, helping the other two men throw her into a white step van. She tumbled to the floor, slamming hard into its metal ribs. Gasping for air, she noted a fourth man darting out of the building to join them. A fifth man drove, pulling away from the front door with a hard lurch of the van.
One of the men snapped at the driver not to leave tire tracks, and the vehicle lurched again as he slowed down abruptly.
Fear bubbled up again in her throat, momentarily choking her.
She did the four-step breathing technique she’d been taught. In. Hold breath and count to four. Out. Count to four. In...
It took several breaths, but calm prevailed once more over her panic.
Okay. She was being kidnapped. Major suckage.
But there had been multiple witnesses. Law enforcement would put out an APB for this van in a few minutes. Houma was a small town deep in the bayou country, which meant there were only so many roads these men could travel in between the copious waterways.
This would be okay. An hour. Maybe two. A standoff, perhaps. With her, a trained Special Forces operative, on the inside. She would be the police’s secret weapon when it came time for a rescue. All she had to do was stay conscious and keep her wits about her. Trust her training.
The
