Cook's Bay, Moorea, Polynesian Islands
For a man of few words Damon Salvatore hated silence.
Watching the waves crashed on the beach, he wished his brother was there. Stefan's chatter would make him focus.
At this point, the third hour in a four-hour shift with nothing but moonlight and dolphins in the ocean in front of the villa, Damon prayed for a three-man paramilitary attack from the water but would settle for camera-wielding paparazzi jumping out from the Tiare bush to his left.
Anything to break up the monotony.
Funny, but at one time he had thought guarding shady politicians would be more exciting than guarding the earnest ones, but the years had taught him otherwise.
The screen door behind him slid open with a gasp and a swish. The short hair on his neck prickled in warning, but he didn't turn around. It was the woman Senator Rawlings had brought. Charlotte Bassili. The smell of sweat over perfume preceded her.
"Sorry," Charlotte said, her voice gaspy and rough. "I forgot you were out here."
That was the idea, Damon thought, and stepped farther into the shadows of the balcony.
Perhaps knowing he was out here, she would have second thoughts about enjoying the view from the balcony.
But no, the woman came to lean against the railing overlooking the bay. Her robe, barely tied at her waist, looked like a dark oil spill over her body. The colour blended with her hair. The night sky behind her.
Quickly, Damon glanced away. She had been loud in that villa. Lots of Oh, Daddies.
"Is all this really necessary?" she asked, waving her hand around to indicate him and the other members of the team, silently guarding the senator and, by proximity, her. Her accent was nearly non-existent, but the alleys of Cairo clung to her vowels.
She had come into the senator's life suddenly. A friend of a friend of an aide at some political fundraiser in D.C. Damon didn't particularly like how much they didn't know about her.
Choosing not to answer, Damon scanned the edge of the cliff to his left. If Damon was lucky, Senator Rawlings' wife would come rappelling over the edge with a submachine gun and he wouldn't have to engage in this conversation.
There were days he really missed the Marine Corps.
Out of the corner of his eye Damon saw her run her fingers over the silk edge of her robe, revealing her collarbone, the gravity-defying inside curve of her breast.
"Maybe Doug sent himself the death threats, just so he could take me someplace."
Doubtful. Damon's team didn't come cheap. And Cook's Bay was a lot of effort for a woman who probably would have put on the very same show at Four Seasons in Washington, D.C.
"Does it bother you? Listening to us?" Charlotte tipped her head, her dark hair falling down her neck. "Knowing he has a wife. A family. That he is cheating? Lying?" Her eyes glowed with certain avarice. Obviously, it turned her on. The dirty illicitness of it. Of her role in it. It explained why she was putting on a show for a man twice her age, three times her weight, and with the morality of a shark.
For a moment Damon thought about telling her she was the cleanest thing in Senator Rawlings' life. That the death threats could have come from the full spectrum of extremist groups, the product of a lifetime of double dealing and lying in the name of politics.
But, lately, Rawlings was pissing off the Yetarzikstan Ba'ath party, with vocal support of the rebels.
But Damon didn't bother explaining to her, because he doubted she cared. Instead, he looked back over the ocean. The dolphins, the moonlight. Bother him? As a rule, Damon didn't get bothered.
"Charlotte?" The senator yelled from inside the door.
She shrugged, her lips twisted in coy regret.
"Duty calls," she whispered and vanished back into the villa.
The world issued an open invitation to humanity to fail itself. To be selfish and small. Mean, even evil at times. And most people, in Damon's experience, found it impossible to turn down that invitation.
The senator and his lies were just another example in a long line.
His earpiece buzzed in the split second before he heard Colin's voice. "Damon? Roy is coming up on your six. You have a visitor at HQ."
A visitor? Here?
Suddenly he thought of Giuseppe, sick and alone in that house. Too stubborn to ask for help if he needed it.
Christ.
He and Stefan should have gotten him a nurse. They had been talking about it, but Giuseppe was so stubborn and, in the end, Damon didn't know how to fight him. Or maybe he just didn't care enough.
But Stefan didn't know where Damon was, or how to find him.
No one did.
So not Giuseppe.
His diaphragm relaxed.
Roy, a thick squat man Damon had worked with for years and managed to know nothing about, came up through the shadows. They nodded at each other and Damon slipped down the path through the ferns and wild banana trees to the guesthouse, where the team had set up headquarters.
Tropical bugs hovered around the light of the guesthouse veranda. To the left of the light and the cloud of bugs stood a man sweating through an expensive white button-down shirt, his suit jacket tossed over the railing. Damon couldn't get a good look at the guy's face, because his head was bent as he rolled his sleeves.
The intricate warning system of adrenaline, his gut and the hair on the back of his neck began to buzz. Whoever this guy was, he had gone to great lengths to find Damon.
And people didn't work so hard to bring good news.
"You are here for me?" Damon asked, stepping to the edge of the light, but no farther.
"Damon Salvatore?" the man asked, peering into the shadows where Damon with his dark clothes blended into the night.
Something niggled in the back of his head. A memory. This guy wasn't a stranger. His all-American, confident-of-his-place-in-the-world looks were familiar.
"Yes," Damon answered.
"You are not an easy man to find."
Once again, that is sort of the idea. Damon cut through the bullshit. "Who are you?"
"It has been a few years," the man said with a weary smile and held out his hand. "I'm Jeremy Gilbert."
Damon felt deep ripples of recognition, memories of this guy and his sister came running from the corners where he had shoved them years ago.
Elena.
Damon shook Jeremy's hand. Last time Damon saw him Jeremy was still a school kid who took things for granted because of his father Grayson Gilbert.
But it explained how he managed to find Damon. Jeremy had all the right connections. The Gilberts were a four generation political family out of Richmond. The Kennedys without the president, the assassinations, or the sex scandals. Though there had been plenty of whispers about Grayson, Jeremy's father.
If Jeremy wanted to find someone he had enough money and power to see it done.
Interesting, Damon thought. But why him?
"What can I do for you, Jeremy?"
Jeremy sighed and braced his hands on his hips. "I…need a man of your talents."
"I'm not all that special." Damon was not in any hurry to get tangled with the Gilberts again.
"Elena has been kidnapped."
All of his internal organs recoiled at the mention of her name, and then again at the thought of her in danger.
"Or taken hostage, I'm not sure what the proper term is."
"Who has her?"
"Somali pirates. She had been working at a refugee camp in Kenya, had gotten sick, and a friend convinced her to take a vacation in Seychelles. They hired a boat for the day, and I don't know if they got off course, or if the guys on the boat were connected to the pirates—"
"They have held her for ransom?"
"Yes." Jeremy shook his head as if he realized he had been rambling and he was grateful to be shoved back on track. "Dad has been negotiating…"
Of course the Gilberts would negotiate.
"How long?"
"Three weeks."
As a rule the Somali pirates didn't hurt their hostages—it was bad for business. But three weeks was a very, very long time to be scared.
The thought of Elena held at gunpoint and mistreated rearranged him. Reduced him to some instinctual, animal level. It wasn't right and he needed to do something about it.
It had been ten years, but in his mind she was seventeen—a protected child, stepping into womanhood. Precocious and ludicrously optimistic. Her presence in a Somali village, surrounded by armed pirates, made about as much sense as that of a unicorn.
"I will pay, of course. Whatever your fee—"
"What do you need?"
Jeremy blinked at Damon's implied agreement, but then Damon had to give the man credit—he sharpened. Focused. Maybe he had outgrown that genetic asshole problem in his family.
"I have been working with a translator, Umar. Cell phone reception on their end has been a problem but Umar has a satellite phone. And I have got a pilot on the ground outside of Garoowe."
"What do you need?" Damon repeated.
"I need someone to go get her at the drop-off coordinates. I would go, but I have been advised that things could get ugly. And I need to keep this…quiet."
Of course they did. Jeremy's father was Governor of Richmond, Jeremy was making a shoe-in run for the House of Representatives.
Whatever emotional reaction thoughts of Elena created in Damon, he managed to bury under logistics.
"What is the timeline?"
"I'm supposed to get the coordinates in twelve hours. But the pirates haven't exactly been reliable."
"How has the ransom been exchanged?" Damon didn't want to carry around a briefcase of money through the tribal lands of war-torn Somalia.
"My family will transfer it to an offshore account when we get the coordinates and proof that Elena is alive and safe."
Electronic banking. Offshore accounts. The pirates have come a long way.
"How much?"
"One-point-two million."
Damon laughed, though none of this was funny. "You negotiated down from one and a half?"
Jeremy stiffened, reading insult where there was plenty. "Damon, I need you, but you have no idea what this process has been like."
Damon's esteem for the man went up another notch.
He checked his watch. It was two A.M. Damon and the team were flying out of here with the senator at eight A.M. "You have a plane standing by?"
"The family jet. I can get you as far as Mogadishu, my pilot will pick you up there and fly you to Garoowe, where they have been keeping her. Umar will meet you and take you to Elena."
"I will need the satellite number Umar is using."
Jeremy, again proving his mettle, handed him a phone. "It is programmed with the numbers of all the people we have been in contact with. As well as a timeline, as complete as I could make it with the little bit of information I have."
Damon took the phone and slipped it in his pocket. He had to finish the Rawlings job, as repugnant as it seemed.
"Have you talked to her?" Damon asked.
"Once, briefly. They had been sending photographs, but a week ago I said unless I could actually speak to her—"
"You negotiated."
"Should I have let them shoot her?"
No, Damon thought, you should have come and got me three weeks ago.
"She said she hasn't been hurt," Jeremy said. "That she was well fed. Bored, mostly. Scared."
Again, the thing with his lungs.
"We can leave in six hours," Damon said.
Jeremy sighed like he'd been holding his breath for days. "Thank you."
Accepting Gilbert gratitude was heavily ironic and oddly difficult, like swallowing a golf ball. But he managed a nod.
"You can wait here in the guesthouse. Try to get some sleep."
"We haven't discussed any payment."
"We will."
Damon was about to knock on the front door to fill Clint in on some of the changes he was going to need to make to the itinerary. But he stopped at the edge of shadow and looked over his shoulder at the golden Gilbert child. A twenty-six-year-old man now. It had been ten years.
Elena would be a woman.
Damon pushed the thought, errant and useless, away. "Why me?"
Jeremy's eyes were older and they told a story about the last ten years, and it wasn't a happy one. "We know you will keep it quiet."
Damon nearly laughed. Yes, he had proven he could keep the Gilberts' secrets.
He pushed open the door, but Jeremy's voice stopped him. "Damon. Get her and get her home and…keep her safe."
So much easier said than done with Elena Gilbert.
x x x
Garoowe airfield
14 hours later
Damon slipped his sunglasses over tired gritty eyes. Clayton, the pilot, throttled down the engines and the sudden silence in the small plane echoed.
"That would be Umar," Clayton said, in his thick Australian accent. He pointed through the grimy windshield to a group of men standing around a Toyota Land Cruiser pickup that had been retrofitted with a heavy artillery machine gun in the back. Of the five men surrounding the vehicle, four of them had guns. Big ones. And calling them men was stretching it. They looked like boys playing with very serious toys.
They all wore the traditional ma'awii skirt with sweat-stained tank tops or, inexplicably, Chicago Bulls T-shirts. But Umar wore a blue double-breasted suit jacket over his red and white skirt, complete with gold buttons to go with his smug smile.
Damon wondered what hostage he had taken it from.
The translators were paid big money by the pirates to negotiate the deals between the Korean oil freighters and shipping boats that were the pirates' prime targets.
Civilians like Elena weren't usually targeted.
The phone in Damon's hand beeped and a text from Jeremy appeared on the screen.
Umar will take you to her.
Got it, Damon typed back before putting the phone in his pocket. Then he took another minute to check the Glock 21 in the holster under his arm and his hunting knife, a gift from Stefan he felt naked without, strapped to his ankle.
His phone buzzed again and he fished it out. This time, instead of text it was a picture. A woman, her dirt-smudged face surrounded by matted and wild brunette hair. Her brown eyes huge. Terrified and defiant at the same time.
Elena.
His reaction was an earthquake miles away, cataclysmic but distant.
They just sent this as proof she was okay, Jeremy texted. But it was the same picture they sent a week ago.
After a deep breath, Damon buried the phone back in his pocket and opened the Cessna door.
"Hey, man." Clayton put a hand over his shoulder, reading Damon's mind in the way of a fellow soldier. "Typically, the pirates don't hurt the hostages. It was why they are able to stay in business."
Damon nodded. He had been telling himself the exact same thing. But there had been that group of civilians murdered on their boat. And the old photo bothered him. So did those boys with guns. An accidental shot could kill you just as dead as a planned one.
Outside, the hot dry wind stirred the sand into the air, where it stung any exposed skin. And the tension was just as thick. He could feel the boys sizing him up, taking note of the gun under his arm. They all clutched their AKs a little tighter, tried to seem a little harder.
For the most part it worked.
Damon had gotten soft in the last ten years. Protecting dirty senators and paranoid movie stars had not put him in this kind of situation.
His whole body prickled with awareness and warning as if he had been stripped down to nerve-endings.
"Hello!" Umar greeted Damon like he was the front-desk man at a five-star resort.
"Where is Elena?"
"I will walk with you."
"She is close?"
"Enough."
The village was tiny, full of packed dirt huts cobbled together with roofs of tarps and plastic bags. Children watched him with wide eyes from dark doorways, their hands curled in their mother's clothing. Umar led him to a hut at the end of the dirt stretch crisscrossed with tire tracks. The tarp roof was an eye-searing orange. Two jerry cans of water stood near the door. There were embers of a dying fire in front, scattered pots. A knife lying in the dust.
"She is in there," Umar said, pointing to the door.
Damon scanned the area before stepping into the dark room. The boys were chewing Qat, the narcotic leaves and stems turning their teeth and lips green.
A bunch of high kids with guns. Perfect. This is what Jeremy had meant when he said things could get ugly.
Elena needed to find Elena and get the hell out of this place.
Inside, the room was cast in a strange orange glow from the sunlight coming through the tarp—it took his eyes a moment to adjust, and what he initially thought was a bedding moaned.
Elena.
Instantly, he was beside her, helping her roll to her back.
The Marine Corps basic training, the brief time in Afghanistan, it took over and his reaction to Elena and the shape she was in got buried. Put down some place crowded now with fear and outrage.
She had been beaten. Recently. Blood covered one side of her face, still oozing from a giant gash over an eye already swollen and black. The sundress she wore was filthy, bloody and torn at the low sleeve, revealing in the back of her arm a deep slice that dripped thick dark red blood. He grabbed a handkerchief from his back pocket and tied it around the dirty wound.
"Elena," Damon said in a loud clear voice but she didn't open her eyes. A concussion probably. With steady hands he felt her arms and legs. No broken bones. Then he pressed her belly, there was no way of knowing if she had internal bleeding, without a CT scan. But the tissue all felt solid. She was able to move, which ruled out dangerous spinal damage. When he touched her ribs, Elena moaned. Carefully, as gently as he could he traced her ribs, not finding any broken ones. But the skin was raw and turning dark.
She had been kicked.
The outrage boiled over and all Damon could do was clench his teeth against it. There were major medical questions unanswered but he couldn't leave her lying in the dust with armed children getting stoned out front. He slid his hands under her body, and lifted her into his arms.
"Fadlun," she whimpered. Please. For a moment, stark and wild Damon wanted to tear down the hut, beat every dead-eyed teenager out there. But he swallowed the furious instinct and concentrated on what was important. Getting Elena to reliable heath care.
Outside the door, Umar stood with his band of boys. A new man was there, raw red scratches across his face. And when he looked at Elena he could hardly contain his distaste. He muttered something Damon couldn't hear, turned, and spat in the dirt.
Some of the boys laughed and the whole scene teetered on a knife's edge.
I could put a bullet in your head and the world would be a better place, Damon thought, a hair's-breadth from doing it.
Ignoring the boys, who stared at them with unfocused eyes, Damon walked toward the plane, which Clayton had fired up the minute Damon had stepped out of the hut.
A hundred meters, he thought.
"There was a situation," Umar said as he jogged to catch up to Damon.
Fifty meters. He could see Clayton's features through the dusty windshield of the Cessna.
"The man with the scratches on his face?" Damon had no doubt that Elena had done it.
Almost there.
"When it came time for Yeri to separate the women, they fought him."
Good for them. "Where is the other woman?"
"Taken to Mogadishu, where her family will pick her up."
Damon didn't believe Umar for a minute, but any further conversation with these criminal bastards was a waste of time. And Elena was his priority.
Under his boots the sand turned to the asphalt of the short runway and Clayton reached across the cockpit and opened the rear cargo door as they approached the plane.
"We are done?" Damon said to Umar.
Umar smiled, revealing gold incisors and molars. "All is satisfactory. Yes?"
If I ever see you again, Damon thought, I will make you choke on those teeth.
Instead of saying that aloud, he nodded a curt affirmative and turned his back on the translator.
"Is she all right?" Clayton asked.
"Unconscious," Damon said, sliding her into the cargo area of the small plane. He made a pillow for her head and surrounded her with the blankets they had brought.
"Holy shit," Clayton said when he got a look at her.
Damon felt very keenly the guns behind him. The old Browning in the back of that truck could bring down the plane, kill all of them.
Quickly, Damon climbed into the cramped cargo area with Elena and shut the door.
"Get us the hell out of here," he said.
Rattling down the runway clearly caused her some pain and he did everything he could to cushion her, protect her. But it wasn't enough.
Violently, he dug the first aid kit from beneath the pilot's seat. It popped open under his rough hands, gauze unravelling across the metal floor of the plane.
They had touched her. Hit her. Kicked her. Terrorized her.
Elena.
The thought was a hot wire in the centre of his brain. His uselessness ached.
The plane lifted and bounced onto the air, banking in a hard right.
"We need to make a stop in Nairobi," Damon said.
"That is where I'm headed. We have just enough petrol to get there."
It was a three-hour flight, but the closest reliable medical facility.
Damon pulled his phone out and called Jeremy.
"Is she all right?" Jeremy asked before the first ring had stopped.
"She has been beaten," Damon said, looking out the window down at that technical truck with the guns and boys—the symbol of a country out of control. "She is unconscious, probably has a concussion, maybe cracked ribs. We are heading to Wilson Airport in Nairobi; have a doctor meet us there."
Damon hung up and started opening the small packets of alcohol wipes to try to clean Elena's face. He would need about thirty for the blood alone.
And in truth, there was nothing he could do to clean this up. Nothing.
"Damn," Damon growled, and unable to stop it, unable to hold it back anymore, he took aim at the passenger seat in front of him and punched it. Hard. The plastic seat cracking against his knuckles. "Damn. Damn. Damn."
"Oy, mate," Clayton snapped. "That is my plane you are punching."
Right. A dozen deep breaths and Damon brought himself back under control. He opened his aching fist. Alcohol swabs. Clean Elena up. Do what he could to make this go away.
But when he turned to her, Elena was staring at him from the one wide brown eye that could open.
His heart kicked hard against his ribs as if seeking its freedom and he couldn't breathe for the obscene pleasure of her being alive and awake.
And near.
Tears gathered against her eyelashes, pooling in the corner of her eye and dripping down the side of her nose. Tears leaked out from under the purple swollen lid of her other eye. And her body, dirty and battered and bloody, began to shake.
"You are okay," Damon told her, leaning in close to her ear so she could hear him over the engine noise. He placed a hand at the top of her head, the other at her shoulder. A hug of sorts. "You are out. You are safe. Everything is going to be fine."
Damon wondered if in her shock and the long stretch of years between them, she would recognize him. And if she did, he hoped it didn't cause her any more pain. She had enough on her plate.
But her fingers, the nails broken and jagged and dirty and, Damon was pleased to note, rimmed with blood—hopefully Yeri's—twisted into the sleeve of his grey T-shirt.
"Damon?" He barely caught her whisper over the sound of the plane, but he nodded.
"It is me, Elena," he said, wiping the tears and blood from her face, while her eyes slowly shut and she slid back into sleep. "I got you."
