Page 5 of The Devil's Ransom

I sat up and hissed, “No! Stop that. She’s sleeping. She’s in her own bag.”

“It looks like you two were wrestling.”

Jennifer stirred, rubbed her eyes, and said, “What’s up?”

I said, “Nothing. The little devil is here to wake us up.”

Amena said, “Only two more days left. We need to get to work.”

We were at a place called Ajina Tepa, about a hundred kilometers from Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan. Known as the Devil’s Hill in Tajik, it was an eighth-century Buddhist monastery and temple that had been on the UNESCO world heritage tentative list since 1999, and was the biggest archeological site in the entire country.

Our company, Grolier Recovery Services, had asked permission to camp out and explore it for a couple of weeks, and the country of Tajikistan had obliged—mainly because they thought we could get them a leg up on the UNESCO decision, but since the designation had been sitting dormant for more than two decades, I seriously doubted it.

That, and because our company really had nothing to do with archeology or UNESCO, but that was a secret I wasn’t going to tell anyone in Tajikistan.

GRS was what we called a front company. Ostensibly, we facilitated archeological work around the world, helping real archeologists on their way in areas that were not that conducive to the work. Meaning, we could assist them both with the government in question and the bad man outside the gates. Jennifer had a degree in anthropology, and I had a degree in killing people, which worked out for our little company.

We spent our off days helping universities and other organizations with government permits, doing security assessments, and generally greasing the skids, and it was a good living, but while Jennifer loved these excursions, I thought of them as work. I wanted to hunt, but I understood the reason for this trip. We needed to make sure our cover was solid if anyone came looking.

In the end, using that façade, our real purpose was hunting terrorists in both nonpermissive and permissive environments, cloaking our actions with the company’s name. It was ingenious, if I do say so myself, because there were very few places on earth that didn’t have some sort of archeological site we could leverage.

Jennifer was my partner in the company, and she truly loved this end of the work. She had developed into a little bit of a killer herself over the years for the other side of our job, even if shewouldn’t admit it. She didn’t like looking in the mirror and seeing what came back, but shewasa killer. At her core, she wanted to explore, digging up pottery shards and pieces of skulls, because that’s what made her whole. But I’d seen her on the other end of a barrel, and she was a predator just like I was. I, on the other hand, could fully admit that digging up bones in the middle of nowhere was about as much fun as sticking a fork in my eye.

This excursion was really nothing more than a vacation designed to increase the believability of the company. Called a “cover development” trip, it was paid by the U.S. taxpayer, and solely designed to show that Grolier really did do archeological work. Don’t believe me? Just take a look at this work we did in Tajikistan!

We had to execute about two cover development trips for every one where we put somebody’s head on a spike just to make sure we could bullshit our way around anyone investigating us—be that a friendly government or a hostile sub-state group—and this was one such trip, only this time Jennifer had brought Amena with us.

For the life of me, I don’t know why. We’d brought her on our honeymoon a couple of months ago, and that had turned into an absolute shit show.

Jennifer sat up, her blond hair looking like she’d plugged her finger into a socket, and smiled, saying, “Well, at least two of us enjoy the work.”

Amena fully unzipped the tent and scampered inside, saying, “There’s room in here for me. Can I stay with you guys at least one night?”

I let her flop on top of me and said, “You have a tent. Why cram three people into one?”

She said, “Nick snores. I mean bad.”

I laughed, knowing she was just making excuses. I had three other team members with me on the “dig,” all there simply to solidify their “employment” with the company. We needed to have ironclad backstopping when we did clandestine work on the off chance we were compromised, so I could “prove” they were who they said they were.

Given that, it meant three tents total for the excursion, which left one tent with only a single person. Nicholas Seacrest—callsign Veep—had been chosen as the outlier, 1) because he was the junior team member, but 2) because his girlfriend was actually Amena’s nanny when we were away.

Given that the sun had barely crested the horizon, I was regretting she wasn’t watching Amena right now.

Jennifer tousled her hair and said, “Yeah, maybe you can stay for one night.”

Amena looked at me to see if I agreed, and I smiled. I literally couldn’t tell her no. In truth, Jennifer was the disciplinarian of this relationship, but Amena and I had a little bit of a personal connection that went beyond adoption. Meaning when we’d first met, I’d slaughtered several men to keep her alive. Those actions hadn’t been pretty, but the end result had been. She was now my daughter, not by birth, but by a shared experience.

I heard a scuffling outside the tent, then my second-in-command poked his head in. I rolled my eyes and said, “Come on in, Knuckles. Let’s get everyone inside here.”

Knuckles looked every bit like some wandering Birkenstock-wearing backpacker, complete with shaggy black hair, a T-shirt espousing some ironic saying, and puka beads around his neck. If you looked closely, you’d see that shirt stretched over ropes of muscle, and if you reached his eyes, you’d see that he wasn’t beingironic. He was wanting you to test him for wearing it. And if you did, you’d be the worse for it.

Knuckles was a Navy SEAL, but I didn’t hold that against him, because he was one of the finest operators I had ever served with. He’d just picked the wrong service to start with, his wardrobe notwithstanding.

He chuckled and said, “No, that’s okay. Jennifer looks like she’s been in a dogfight. Not sure what you guys do in here at night.”

Amena laughed, and Knuckles grew serious. “Pike, the sat phone went off in the night. I think you should check it.”

I sat up, moving Amena to the side, and, while putting on my boots, said, “What’s up?”

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