Ghost: A Linear Tactical Romantic Suspense Standalone Page 2

  Annie nodded. “About Jordan’s house burning. Sure.”

  “No, the message was for me. The message was to let me know that it was definitely Wraith.”

  Now Dr. Diaz took a few more steps into the room, eyes narrowed. “Wraith is dead, Dorian.”

  They had talked about Grace before. “I thought that too. I was wrong.”

  Dr. Diaz stared at him, not saying anything further, concern in her brown eyes.

  Annie finished attaching the bandage and stepped back. “Why do you call her Wraith? I know your codename in the military was Ghost. Don’t ghost and wraith mean the same thing?”

  He began slipping on his button-up shirt, careful of his stitches.

  “Yes, close.” They’d all had similar codenames in Project Crypt: Ghost, Wraith, Shadow, Phantom, Vision. The government black-ops group that had assigned them their names had been nothing if not consistent.

  “You worked with each other in the military?”

  “In a roundabout way.” That and so much more. More on every possible level.

  Annie took off her gloves. “But you thought she was dead until today. Why?”

  Dorian looked down at his shirt. “I watched her die in an explosion in Kabul. Trying to get to her was how I got captured in Afghanistan.”

  Wraith shouldn’t have been there in the first place.

  She shouldn’t be here now.

  Dr. Diaz studied him without speaking as he finished buttoning up his shirt. Dorian knew she wanted to talk further about this, but she wouldn’t in front of Annie.

  Annie turned to walk out the door. “Well, dead then or alive now, I think that this woman is dangerous. You need to find some answers, Dorian.”

  He couldn’t agree more.

  2

  “I think we look pretty good for dead women, Grace.”

  There were only a few things Grace Brandt knew for certain in this life. The fact that she could not be further from her namesake was one of them.

  “Ray. I don’t go by Grace anymore, Angela, I go by Ray now.” Grace had been dead for a long time.

  The two women sat at a table in a small coffeehouse in Reddington City. Ray had chosen this place because of its three separate exits, all of which would allow her to disappear into the crowded streets of the Wyoming city within moments. She sat with her back to the wall at a corner table with four different weapons strapped to her body within easy reach. And that didn’t count the ways she could kill someone with her bare hands if she needed to.

  It still took all of her self-control to stay seated and normal in the café.

  Too many people. Too much chatter. Too much everything.

  Lately, the more she was around people, the more it seemed intolerable. Of course, being alone was no picnic either, between the dizziness, nosebleeds, and blinding headaches.

  She forced her attention back to the woman who’d spoken to her. Angela Landry. She was another reason Ray had chosen this coffeehouse, and this table in particular. It was easily accessible by someone in a wheelchair.

  Ray didn’t make the mistake of thinking someone in a wheelchair couldn’t be a threat, but in this case, she and the woman across from her had the same enemy.

  The enemy of my enemy is my friend.

  “I’ve technically been dead a lot longer than you, so I think I should get the most points for the beauty section of the pageant.” Ray forced a smile at Angela, forced not because she didn’t like the other woman, but because Ray just wanted to get out of here. Get away from all these people.

  And because smiling seemed so completely unnatural to her.

  “Are you sure you’re okay?” Angela whispered.

  Ray gripped her coffee cup with a strength that was close to shattering the ceramic but forced her features to remain neutral. A skill, ironically, her handlers at Project Crypt had taught her.

  “I’m okay. Just don’t like crowds.”

  Angela nodded rapidly. “Oh, yeah, sure. That makes sense. A lot of the Crypt agents had difficulty being around crowds. A tendency toward introversion was one of the psychological traits sought after in agents.”

  Ray wondered once again how much about Project Crypt Angela actually knew. As far as Ray could remember, she hadn’t been much more than a glorified intern, fetching coffee and taking notes.

  Ray studied Angela with her sunny disposition despite the wheelchair. The woman was probably a couple of years older than Ray’s own thirty-two years. Even at her low clearance level, Angela had to have known about Project Crypt’s questionable morality.

  But did she know the truth?

  Did she know about the brainwashing and the sleeper missions and the fact that, in the end, it wasn’t the US government that held Project Crypt’s reins at all?

  Ray sure as hell hadn’t known. Not at the beginning.

  Ultimately, it didn’t matter now, and if Angela didn’t know, Ray wasn’t going to tell her. The woman had already paid a huge price for being part of the organization at all.

  A year and a half ago, someone had started eliminating anyone who’d ever had anything to do with Project Crypt. Not only the active agents still left, who arguably might need to be eliminated, but everyone. The scientists, and even an attempt at Angela, who’d barely been more than an intern.

  So now Ray and Angela were somehow mismatched partners—one broken on the outside, one broken on the inside—on a journey to find and stop the killer.

  Angela was studying Ray now, completely uncaring that her back was to so many people and potential dangers in the room, something Ray could never have stomached. “I haven’t heard from you in more than a month. Not since you went to see Ghost. Are you okay? I’ve been worried about you.”

  Ray forced her hands to gentle their grip on the mug, then took a sip of the lukewarm brew she didn’t really want. “I’m okay.”

  She wasn’t okay. She wasn’t anywhere near okay, and shooting Dorian with that arrow a month ago had made everything less okay.

  Why had she done that?

  She’d stayed dead for six years, giving Dorian no clue at all that she was alive. Then shot him with her crossbow. With a fucking note.

  She could’ve notified Dorian of the fire at his friend’s house a half dozen different ways. Or she could’ve done what she was trained to do: mind her own damn business and not worry about a civilian fire where no one was getting hurt.

  Instead, she’d shot Dorian with her crossbow.

  Why had she done it?

  Because she’d wanted him to know without a shadow of a doubt that she was alive.

  But why?

  Angela was still staring at her. “I thought you had planned to stick around Oak Creek to see if Ghost might be the killer,” the woman said.

  “He’s not.”

  “Are you sure? After what he went through in that Afghan prison, he’s the most likely to have incurred the damage necessary to alter his psychological state. The most unstable.”

  “Dorian isn’t the killer.” Ray kept her tone even and her hands relaxed on the table.

  Angela took a sip of her own coffee. “I know you two were close back in training, and I don’t want to believe he’s capable of this sort of thing either. But—”

  “Dorian didn’t do it.”

  Not only did Ray believe that because Dorian was one of the best human beings she’d ever known, but also because after watching for more than a month, she didn’t think he was actually capable of successfully carrying out the attacks against the Crypt members. Particularly not the agents who had exceptional skills when it came to detection and defense.

  Maybe that was part of why she’d shot him with her crossbow. It had been a test.

  She should’ve never been able to get the drop on Dorian. He should’ve sensed her and taken her out. No, his skills were no longer good enough for him to be the killer she and Angela were hunting for.

  “It’s not him,” Ray said again.

  Angela held her hands out in a ge
sture of surrender. “Okay, I’ll take your word for it.”

  “Look, Angela.” Ray fought against the urge to rub her forehead at the pounding starting there. “Maybe we should just get out. Everyone thinks we’re dead. Why don’t we keep it that way?”

  Ray would disappear. She wasn’t sure where she would run to, but she’d get the hell out of Wyoming. Away from Dorian and the life he’d built.

  She wasn’t sure what Angela would do, but honestly, that wasn’t her problem.

  “I was thinking that too. But then this happened last week.”

  Angela pulled out a thin file that had been stuffed between her leg and the edge of the wheelchair. She opened it and slid it across to Ray.

  It was a newspaper clipping dated from last week, the stabbing death of a scientist in Los Angeles.

  “Dr. Holloman,” she whispered.

  The face that starred in her nightmares. Project Crypt had been the brainchild of Timothy Holloman—a genius in his own right, with multiple doctorates in both the medical and behavioral sciences.

  He’d been the one to recruit them. He’d been the one to put them through all sorts of mental and physical tortures in order to make them into more perfect agents. He’d looked right into their eyes and lied as he told them it was all for the good of their country. That they were heroes.

  He’d been the one who’d brainwashed them. Made them into sleeper agents stripped of free will.

  Ray had found out about the sleeper missions by sheer accident. And she’d still allowed herself to be Holloman’s puppet for too long.

  So seeing him dead didn’t exactly disturb her. She should’ve killed him three years ago herself rather than only destroying as much of Project Crypt’s labs and computer files as she could.

  “If you’re expecting that to upset me, it doesn’t. The world is a better place without Holloman in it.”

  “This also happened.” Angela pulled back the newspaper clipping to show the rest of the story. Not only had Holloman been killed, but his wife and two small children had also been brutally murdered.

  Even Ray flinched at the photograph of a four-year-old lying in a pool of his own blood.

  “Whoever’s doing this has to be stopped,” Angela whispered. “Those children were innocent.”

  Ray stared at the pictures.

  Did the person doing this really need to be stopped?

  Obviously, killing preschoolers wasn’t acceptable. But wiping out the rest of Project Crypt? Destroying the monsters Crypt had created—including her—and the people able to create more . . . Was that a bad thing?

  There was something to be said about wiping the slate clean.

  But that would also include Dorian.

  “Whoever did this is just going to keep going,” Angela continued. “More innocent people are going to get hurt. All of this points to an agent. Someone trained to do this sort of killing.”

  Ray nodded, sliding the paper back over to Angela. They’d talked about this possibility before, and with every death it looked more and more likely.

  Of the twelve Crypt agents who’d started ten years ago, only four remained.

  Three had died in active missions before Ray had found out what Project Crypt truly was.

  Five more had died in the past eighteen months, systematically eliminated, along with at least three scientists—now four, including Dr. Holloman—involved with the project.

  All the deaths had been made to look like accidents or random acts of violence. Only people trained in Crypt’s ways would see the workings of another Crypt agent.

  “I’m not trying to guilt-trip you, but as one of those trained agents, you might be the only one who can stop the killer.”

  Everything in Ray—from the pounding in her head to that little voice in the back of her mind—told her to get out. To stand up right now and walk away.

  That this was the only chance she would get if she wanted to get out of this alive.

  But she already knew she wouldn’t.

  Dorian. The killer would eventually come for Dorian.

  “Fine.” Ray finished the last of the cold coffee. “We need to get as much information as we can on Phantom and Shadow. One of them has to be the killer.”

  Angela raised an eyebrow. “Are you sure? Nothing I’ve been able to find on Shadow suggests he’s alive at all. And Phantom was always one of the more calm and rational active agents. Almost cold. The psychological profile of this killer would suggest mental deterioration.”

  “So you think it’s Ghost.”

  “He’s the only one who was ever taken off of active-duty status because of psychological damage, due to his . . .” Angela waved a hand in front of her.

  “His torture,” Ray finished for her.

  “The torture the leaders at Project Crypt knew about and could’ve taken measures to prevent. That gives Dorian a lot of motive for killing everyone.”

  “He doesn’t know about that.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Relatively.” If Dorian knew Crypt had been able to do something about his capture and subsequent torture six years ago, he would’ve demanded answers. He would’ve pulled at Crypt’s strings until it had all unraveled.

  He would’ve found out the truth, and the truth would’ve destroyed him.

  A truth Ray would take to her grave to make sure he never found out. Watching him the past few weeks in Oak Creek had only reaffirmed that for her. Those people were his family now.

  But was Angela right? Had something snapped in Dorian’s mind and made him the killer? She hadn’t seen anything that suggested so, plus Dorian was no longer in the top form it would take to bring down other Crypt agents like the killer had.

  But it was possible.

  It was time to find out how possible.

  “You focus on Shadow and Phantom, but be careful,” Ray told Angela. “Whoever the killer is, if he finds out you’re snooping around, he’s going to know you’re alive. He won’t make the same mistake the second time and let you live.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  Ray pushed her coffee cup to the edge of the table. “I’m going back to Oak Creek. It’s time for me to figure out who my enemies are.”

  Ghost was either the killer, which meant she was going to have to make some really hard decisions, or he was an over-trained civilian caught in a situation he wasn’t aware of or prepared for.

  Either way, it was time for her and Dorian to have a talk.

  Hopefully, they would both come out of it alive.

  3

  Ray wasn’t surprised to find Dorian in the woods when she went looking for him three days later, after finally recuperating from her meeting with Angela.

  More headaches and nosebleeds. Another blackout. Each time, it took a little more out of her.

  But today she was feeling better and had caught up with Dorian teaching some sort of wilderness survival class. The Linear Tactical website had provided a course description.

  Even a dead woman could stalk the internet.

  It was absolutely pathetic how many times she’d studied Dorian’s picture on the Linear website. How often she’d watched the video where he demonstrated a self-defense move while someone else narrated.

  It had been one of the few things that had kept her sane three years ago when she had discovered what an utter fool she’d been with Crypt. She’d known their methods were morally corrupt, but until then, at least she’d thought the hell she’d chosen for herself benefitted her country.

  Nope, sorry, Ray, no such luck. You’ve been selling your skills, your mind, and your body to your government’s enemies! Thanks for playing, better luck next time.

  The knowledge had cost her the last piece of her soul.

  So watching a video of Dorian teaching a basic o goshi hip throw—and maybe or maybe not pausing on his tiny little grin at the end—had become a basic part of her survival for a while.

  Not that she’d deserved survival.

  Th
e class Dorian was teaching now wasn’t self-defense, it was wilderness survival. It included elements of the SERE training—survival, evasion, resistance, and escape—they’d gone through for Crypt.

  Not so much the resistance and escape part; the half dozen high school–aged boys Ghost was teaching probably didn’t need to know how to survive torture. But shelter building, fire craft, plant edibility, preparing animals for consumption, water purifying . . . A lot of the training elements were straight out of the SERE handbook. And good, useful information that everyone should know.

  She’d been watching them for two days. At first, she’d stayed far enough back that detection would be nearly impossible. She’d mostly studied Dorian and his teaching partner. The other adult male from the Linear Tactical team was a tall, handsome man with a lithe swimmer’s build, unlike Dorian’s in-your-face strength. Like Dorian and all of the Linear Tactical men that she’d seen, Swimmer Guy had well-developed situational awareness.

  The teenagers tended to be a little boisterous and unaware of what was happening around them, but Dorian and his friend definitely weren’t.

  So she kept her distance.

  She circled widely and silently around them so she could observe from different vantage points. But what she saw was always the same: the kids responded to Dorian. He was patient with them, friendly. She couldn’t hear what was being said, but it was obvious from the body language she caught in her binoculars. These kids respected Dorian, and he respected them.

  He also took this training gig seriously, on occasion leading the boys somewhere so that finding the food or water they needed would be more difficult, teaching them to think for themselves.

  More than once, she’d thought the boys had been assigned a task they couldn’t do.

  More than once, she’d been wrong. Dorian seemed to know when to push them and when to help.

  Now, on day three, with a storm approaching from the southwest, Ray decided to get a little closer. Dorian had been out here for more than forty-eight hours, his attention split between the needs of the group and what he was trying to teach. The storm would give her even more cover.