11:24am Paris
The trio had to walk several streets before Amir pointed her to a house on a side road, "We're here." Whether he was talking to her or to his team, Yvette wasn't sure.
Yvette was struggling to breathe, fighting the excruciating pain caused by the bullet. The first bullet had hit Kevlar and simply knocked her down. The second had obviously done some damage.
"Welcome to an American safe house." Dalton opened the door and ushered them in.
Jaz was much less happy at their arrival. She swung a fist at the other woman as they stepped inside. Yvette was quick, sidestepping the blow and managed to send an elbow into the American. Jaz followed up with a second swing but Yvette blocked her punch and countered, sending Jaz into a wall. Dalton and Amir stepped in, grabbing and separating the two women.
"Tehran! You expect me to ignore that?" Jaz shouted.
"I expect you to grow up and realize that after killing Jabril you are lucky his men didn't kill you on the spot at the hotel." Yvette snapped.
Dalton blocked Jaz after she made another move toward the French woman, "That's enough."
Amir pulled Yvette away, "After all that's happened, you are still fighting us?"
"I didn't start this fight." Pain crashing over her, Yvette leaned against the wall as her legs went weak. Amir tried to grab her as she crumpled to the floor.
Dalton cupped Jaz's face to be sure she looked at him before he promised her, "Look, we will deal with that, but not now."
"McGuire." Amir called for his teammate, "She's hurt."
The medic appeared and followed the two into a nearby room to assess, "Let's get her shirt off."
Yvette helped the guys pull off her shirt but she winced at the pain caused by her movements. Amir reached for her Kevlar vest and unfastened the Velcro. The men pulled it off. McGuire removed the chest seal and wiped the blood from her skin to see the bullet entrance wound and covered it with a gauze patch from his medical supplies as he evaluated her injuries, "Is there an exit wound?"
"No." Amir grabbed her shoulders to look over her back and didn't see any recent wounds. But to his shock, he saw very scarred skin including injuries that he believed to be knife stabs and possibly a whip. Stunned, he reached out to touch the rough damage. Where did these come from?
She pushed his hand off her body and refused to look at him, focusing instead on McG, "Can you get the bullet out?"
"It depends how deep it is." McG pressed his hand next to her injury to try to determine the depth.
Yvette glanced at her daughter, "Preach, can you take Amanda out of here? I don't want her watching this."
The man bent over to pick up the girl, "Hey sweetie, let's go over here."
"Dalton, I'm going to need you and Amir here to hold her down so she can't move." McGuire pulled more supplies out his medical bag. Dalton left Jaz to assist.
Jaz glared at the situation in front of her. She was watching her team try to help the foreign operative. A woman who was involved in her torture. Jaz couldn't just forgive that.
"What do you want to know about Tehran?" Yvette glanced toward Jaz as McG started prodding the injury.
"What?" Jaz stared at the woman.
"I need something to distract me from the pain and that's the first thing that came to mind." Yvette groaned.
"You'll tell me about torturing me?" Jaz was suspicious.
"I didn't actually do any of the torture, that was the General."
Jaz snorted. Like that mattered. "So what did you do that you thought would help me?"
"Distracted a few guards, upset some timetables…made sure that the convoy moving you didn't have enough security vehicles when they left. But nothing too over the top. I didn't want to get killed by Tehran secret service or Ephraim either."
"Would he have really killed you?"
Yvette jumped as the Doc used his hands as he tried to locate the bullet. Dalton and Amir held her still. She breathed deeply, "You mean your dad?"
"Yes."
"Absolutely." She groaned at the pressure from the doctor.
"Why?"
She tensed as McG found the bullet and tried to grab it. Yvette bit her lip to hold back a cry and automatically jerked at the pain but the guys restricted her movements. She fought a moment with the pain before responding to Jaz, "You didn't have the home life you wanted but he would have tried to move heaven and earth for you."
"Why would he ask you?" Jaz wondered.
"I was in Tehran."
"But how did he know? Why does he target you? What made him so interested in you."
"Apparently he thinks I'm a pushover."
"That's definitely not it. There not a shred of weakness in you." Jaz pushed back.
Yvette groaned as McG's poked, "Give me a second guys!" They let her go and she stretched, the pain echoing through her torso and her body reacting to the damage.
"How did he know you wouldn't turn him in?" Jaz wondered.
"I was undercover so just the hint of impropriety would have gotten me killed so I couldn't out him. If he was stopped by Tehren—even accidentally—he would have outed me just for spite and they would have killed me immediately." Yvette nodded at McG and the guys grabbed her again. This time, he grabbed the bullet, extracting it smoothly from her body.
"How did this miss your organs? And with the fact that you walked all this way here, you should be in excruciating pain and not able to move!" McG was shocked at the damage.
"I've had some experience with pain." Yvette closed her eyes.
Jaz continued pushing, "Why does he care about you?"
"I was a target…" She was vague and Jaz snapped, "Don't try to play me!"
"We need to get the bleeding stopped. I'm going to have to give you several stiches." McGee told her.
Yvette nodded at the doc before glancing at the American female. She sighed, "There was an eight-month period where Ephraim thought turned me and I was a double agent working for him. But I really wasn't. Even now, he doesn't want to admit he failed."
"But you gave info to America." Jaz wondered.
Yvette winced at McG's touch, "Ephraim murdered my mother. Anything that man wants I will screw it up if I possibly can. The instant he showed up, I reported the contact but pretended to be interested and strung him along. Having him find a pretend vice was pretty good too. If a spy thinks they can blackmail you, they believe they are in control. He really thought he was getting good intel but Paris intelligence reviewed anything I gave him and most were good fakes or info we would have shared anyway."
Jaz fell silent as she watched the Frenchwoman. She was trying to figure out if Yvette was being truthful.
"That's all I can do." McG met Yvette's gaze as he finished the stitches. He pulled out some gauze taping it over the injury.
Yvette breathed hard, "Thank you."
"I don't believe you." Jaz's voice was low.
Yvette shrugged, "That is up to you."
"You need to go to the hospital." McG suggested to the patient.
"Not now."
Preach came into the room. "Patricia is calling."
Dalton headed into the next room to greet the caller, "Director."
"How is everything?" Patricia wanted to know
"Tense." He kept an eye on Jaz as she entered the room.
"I've got a diplomatic plane leaving in 2 hours to get you out of France. You need to get back to the embassy."
"We can do that." Dalton signaled to the crew to pack up.
Patricia noticed Yvette in the background, hand resting on her injury, "Yvette how are you doing?"
"I'll be good. Thank you. Your help was very appreciated today." Yvette glanced at Amanda approaching her. The woman reached her hand to the girl's head as the Amanda hugged her legs, looking cautiously at the Americans around the two.
"Yvonne, we need to debrief you." Patricia tried to convince the operative.
"Director, I am not going with them." She was firm.
"I think you should. Your sister was killed." Patricia reminded.
"By Americans."
"And the kidnappers were killed which puts you at the top of everyone's discussion list." Patricia pointed out.
"I can handle the pressure."
"Can Amanda?"
"You helped me save my daughter. I owe you for that…but I'm not defecting." Yvette pulled out a flash drive from her pocket. "This is the information that Hampton wanted." She offered it to Dalton.
"You left that on the table when he was shot: how did you get that?" Amir was immediately suspicious.
She looked at the intelligence officer, "The car that stopped."
"What is it?" Dalton accepted the drive.
Yvette reached for a nearby chair, "I was proving that Hampton was a traitor by ordering the death of several Americans. It was supposed to buy some goodwill for France when I turned it over to American Intelligence. He apparently got wind of my questions and started trying to pressure me, but I had a good team who kept him at bay. I had no idea he'd target my sister."
"And your daughter."
Yvette was silent a moment. "I thought I hid her well. But he's good."
"What about my son?" Patricia asked the question that had been burned into her mind since Hampton's comment.
The foreigner was silent as Dalton glanced at the other Americans in the room. Everyone waited for Yvette to speak.
"Hampton was leading several off the books black ops teams. I have evidence that many specific hits were not government authorized only mercenary kills that benefited Hampton personally by killing his enemies or making money with contract killings. Several years ago, he started recruiting people that set off red flags and I stumbled across this information about assassinations of Americans. When the child of a known intelligence officer shows up in an undercover capacity, people notice." She paused, "Patricia, your son was someone he recruited."
"My son was in the army, not a black ops team." Patricia argued.
"And their families think they are normal military." Her voice was sarcastic as Yvette gestured to the Americans surrounding her, "Misdirection is a main staple of spy work. If you knew the truth about your son, you would have gotten involved in his assignments and they didn't want your overwatch."
Memories of happy moments with her son flooded over Patricia ending on the news of his death, "You're wrong."
"Hampton recruited Jared personally and made sure his jobs matched his unit's army deployments." Yvette responded. "French Intelligence identified him when his crew arrived in Paris and we were alarmed because of your position in US intelligence. I was supposed to figure out if he was something France needed to be worried about. I had barely started my investigation when they were ambushed and killed. I found out later a journalist was asking questions connected to an op they did. An assassination of an Afghanistan leader. Supposedly the death was connected to a poppy field but really it was because he refused a bribe. Hampton got nervous about the journalist's questions and wanted to be sure none of the operatives could talk. I do believe that Jared's team didn't know their hits weren't authorized. They thought they were being patriotic but Hampton was getting rich off their work." Yvette paused and took a breath, "I met Jared three days before he died."
Patricia paced away, her mind racing, "He died building a school for Afghan kids."
"His former military unit was there. Hampton covered his death up by adding him to the casualty list after the explosion. He actually died two days before the suicide bomber at the school. His military commanders were told to add his name in order to protect special ops."
"Do you have any proof?" Noah asked.
She glared at the screen, "Hampton was afraid enough of my investigation to kill my sister. What do you think?"
"Who was the journalist?" Hannah asked.
"Katrina Van Housen."
"She died in a car accident, didn't she?" Preach wondered.
"You are sure it was an accident?" Yvette raised her eyebrows, "It's all on that flash drive."
Dalton entered the flash drive into the secure computer to upload to America.
Noah ran a high-tech security program to check for malware and typed in the password. The first thing he saw were photos listed by dates. He opened one. It was a surveillance photo. And the subject in the middle was Patricia's son. He clicked another photo. This one had several men, including Jared. He scanned through the files. Photos, videos, he scrolled through, "There are a lot of documents."
"The pieces are tiny and it's hard to get the full picture, but everything I have is on that. Every hit or kidnapping, bribes, purchases, financial records, everything." Yvette let out a deep breath, "There's notes from interviews with people I talked to, notes from the journalist, surveillance videos I tracked down, it's all there. Several murders are actually on video, but the quality isn't very good."
Patricia laid a hand on Noah's shoulder. He paused on a photo of her son.
"None of them told me what they were doing; what their mission was or what they had done. Jared was a good solider, good intelligence operative, and didn't give me anything. But Hampton authorized a public shooting in a bar to keep his team from talking. Four civilians died plus the six operatives."
"You were there." It was a statement, not a question.
Yvette nodded.
"Who is Paul?" Patricia made the connection to the earlier conversation when Hampton arrived at the table.
"The CIA operative who led the hit on Jared's team."
"CIA." Patricia rubbed her face.
"Who was the guy who had Amanda? The one you killed." Noah asked, "Got a name?"
"No."
Amir narrowed his eyes, "You're lying." His voice was soft but he knew Yvette heard him. But her undercover expression slid back into place and she didn't react.
"Hampton killed anyone who could make the connection to him. It took me months to unravel even tiny pieces of the operation…and then I would find out the smoking gun was dead and have to start over. I finally was able to track down Hampton's right-hand man, another former CIA employee. He is loyal to Hampton so I couldn't flip him but I was able to make my point that continuing to kill Americans would look bad for the CIA so they backed off or at least I think they did. I don't expect you to take my word for it, but it is the truth."
Silence stretched between Paris and Virginia. Could they trust her? Even more importantly, should they trust her?