Codename: Nightshade (Deadly Seven Strike Force) Read Online Free PDF Page A

leaves my lips.
    “Be at peace,” the boy beside me says, reaching over to hold my hand.
    He has no idea who I am. He has no idea what I’ve done. He’s comforting the person who just caused him pain, and yet to him, he’s simply comforting someone in need.
    I hate myself.
    The soldier shoves back down the aisle then and gets off. The vehicle rumbles and rocks as we drive across the border.
    I squeeze the boy’s hand. “Thank you.”
    I can’t stop myself from looking at the picture again, and he catches me this time.
    He gives me the card. “I met him when I was just a boy. He is the reason I went to University and did not become a solider.”
    I turn the card over in my hand, breaking my own personal protocol to look the boy in the eye and speak to him. I refrain from talking about Pishkar's death. I don’t know how fast word has traveled. Having any information about the event possibly implicates me as knowing more than I should. “What did you think of his speech today?”
    The boy is young—eighteen, nineteen at the most—but I can see a lifetime in his eyes as he frowns. “I think I made the right decision.”
    I don’t hear whispers from anyone around us. No anger or other tears. “Why is that?”
    “Because he is still the monster I met as a child.”
    I look back to the card. “A monster?”
    “He killed my father.” I blanch at his candor, but I realize to the young men and women on this bus, his words are simply reality, not a dirty secret. Soldiers raiding buses, guns in their faces, death… it’s just another day for them. “My mother was sick, too sick to care for us, so my father defected to take care of us. Pishkar found him. Took the time to raid the village we were hiding in just to find my father and kill him. He turned the gun on me, pulled the trigger, but he had emptied the clip. I told myself that day that I would not become his slave. I would educate myself and defeat him instead.”
    I drop the card on the ground, taking the boys hand in mine again. “I think you made the right choice, too.”
    “Does not matter now. He is king and we are all his slaves.”
    I squeeze his hand again. “Don’t worry. False kings easily fall from their thrones.”
    “Says who?”
    I smile, whispering, “A man I used to know.”
     

     
    It’s two o'clock the next afternoon when my plane finally lands in Germany. I took the redeye under yet another alias, getting through with my less-than-American looks. A black Suburban is waiting for me at the curb outside of the airport. A tall bald man wearing a penguin suit and an earpiece holds the back door open for me.
    Why don’t they just paint a sign on my ass that says I’m a spy?
    I climb in, assessing the three other people in attendance. A woman I’ve seen a time or two here. She works in logistics, I think. Next to her sits a man with dark red hair and a cocky smirk—Claymore, a fellow agent.
    The fourth, the man I sit next to, is older-looking, with a buzz cut and a sneer. Commander Justice. He glares at me like a disgruntled parent. “Ms. Vincent, are you hard of hearing?”
    Commander Justice sounds as if his voice is pinned down at the back of his throat by a mountain of tobacco. It’s pinched and hard, forced from his lips like the bark from a dog.
    I’ve been awake for over seventy-two hours, endured lunch with Hassan, set up and executed a flawless assassination of a horrible dictator before he had the opportunity to make one move in office, and I didn’t pee the entire time I was on the six-hour flight from Qatar. I resist the urge to punch him for that question. “No, sir.”
    “Then perhaps you are unfamiliar with the English language?”
    “No, sir.”
    “Then enlighten me, Ms. Vincent, on how it is, when you were given a direct order to keep this mission covert, that you decided a bullet through the target’s head in the middle of a crowded party was subtle .”
    Out of the corner of my eye, I see Claymore try to hide