“Meaning?”
She hesitated, and he continued. “I don’t either. Remember? None of us do.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“What do you mean?” he challenged.
She frowned. “I guess what I’m trying to say is that I don’t want to be involved. I don’t want anything to do with this.” She raised both hands in frustration. “I thought I was retiring. I thought I would be out of this before I headed back stateside and could get a new life.”
“What’s the matter with Paris?” he asked, with a lopsided grin.
“A lot if it’s not secure,” she argued. “We don’t have the protection of the government anymore. If anything goes wrong, we’re the ones who go to jail.”
“Yes,” he agreed, “that’s very true. Chances are we would have had some protection before, but we couldn’t have guaranteed that. After all, we never got into that kind of trouble. Or … never got caught anyway.”
“So what now? Do you think we’ll never get into trouble?” she asked.
“I gather you want to go back stateside? Leave Paris? Leave this nightmare behind?”
“Of course I do,” she stated. “I’ve got friends and family there, and so do you.”
“Well, I don’t have any family. Plus we might end up in England.”
She nodded at that. “In a way, that would make sense. You have connections with some of those people.”
“Well, we had connections through work,” he corrected.
“Yes, but, after time, they become almost personal.”
“Almost, yes, but we also don’t know if we’ve gotten the kibosh worldwide either. So far, nobody knows we’re alive and functioning still.”
“And that’s the thing, you’re not fully functioning! And, without that, we have no team. We have no skills. We have no backup, no assets. We have nothing.”
He shot her a hard glance. “We were all special ops before we joined this team. We still have skills, the same as everybody else.”
“Great, but it always felt a whole lot better having that extra advantage.”
Damon laughed, one of the first free sounds she’d heard from him. “I get it. I really do. And I agree it was a huge advantage to do some of the stuff that we did. But I sure as hell won’t roll over and show my belly just because some of my abilities have been hit.”
“Sure, but you’re one in seven.”
“Eight,” he corrected.
“Fine, one in eight. But still it’s far from the same thing. Without the support of the government, we’re screwed.”
“And what if it’s deliberate on the part of the government?”
“Well, then we’re doubly screwed,” she cried out, “because they will track us down.”
“How would they do that?”
“Because they have as many resources as we had, plus they have the finances. We don’t have squat.”
“We have the finances.” He smiled. “Absolutely no problem there.”
She looked at him in surprise. “Meaning, we can still get equipment and things that we need?”
“Absolutely.”
“Oh.” She settled back then, pondering it.
“Does that change things?”
“Well, it helps,” she agreed cautiously. “Does it change things? I’m not so sure. Because if we’re really being hunted by our own people, there’s really no place to hide.”
“No, but do you think that everybody will be okay with us being hunted?”
“If they thought we were a danger, yes,” she noted quietly. “And there was talk about shutting us down for a long time because they were uncertain how stable you guys were.”
“I know that we weren’t privy to all those conversations, but we were certainly privy to their fear.”
She snorted at that. “Didn’t seem to matter what we said. They were always thinking that you guys would go off the deep end and blow up something.”
“Which is probably why we ended up getting shut down, but I don’t know where they got that idea from and have to wonder if somebody was feeding it to them.”
“Well, it wasn’t me. You guys are the strongest individuals I’ve ever met. There was nothing even the slightest bit haywire about you.”
“Well, thanks for that, but a word of warning. You can bet that Terk isn’t feeling anywhere near as nice or as congenial as you might have thought he was before.”
“Of course not. He’s being hunted and the team attacked. And, if it is by one of our own, he’ll go underground and find out who did this. If his skills are intact, that would be something. He was the strongest of you all.”
“Exactly.” Damon smiled in satisfaction. “I’m glad you understand.”
“Is that the game then, retaliation?” She hoped not.
He shook his head. “No, it’s not retaliation. It’s about survival. If we don’t solve this, we’ll never have a life. It’s one thing for those of us who are alive and able to go underground and to hide for the rest of our lives, but it’s an entirely different thing if you and Mera have to.”
“Meaning, I’m not as good at it?” She watched as he drove the truck around a corner.
“You’re not as good at it,” he confirmed. “It’s not what you three are.”
“And yet it seems like whoever it was considered us enough of a threat that we had to be taken out too. Whoever is doing this—and, as much as I can’t quite accept that it is our own bosses, but because of the timing it’s likely—it could have been instigated by some other party.”
“But remember this. What was done to the team had to have been done by another team like us.”
She sucked in her breath. “I didn’t consider that, and that’s scary.”
“It is, and it also means that something much more powerful and more dangerous than us is out there. That’s what we don’t want.”
“No, of course not,” she agreed. “Every country wants to know that they have the most powerful weapon.”
He laughed. “Isn’t that the truth.”
As they drove toward Wilson’s address, she spoke. “I would really hate for that to be the final answer. I don’t want to look over my shoulder for the rest of my life. It’s hard enough to sleep now.”
“It doesn’t look like you’ve slept at all,” he murmured.
“Oh, so now you’re telling me that I look like shit too, huh?” But a note of laughter was in her voice.
He tossed her a grin. “I would never say that, but you look like you didn’t get much sleep last night.”
“Well, when you wake up, and seconds later your bed is riddled with bullets, it does tend to make for more sleepless nights.”
“Of course. Don’t you want to stop that?”
“I do, of course, but you’re asking for a commitment that’s very dangerous for me.”
“Yeah, but how is it more dangerous than what you’ve already been through and what you will face in the future when they figure out you got away? … We’re here with you.”