I hated it with a passion and hated it worse that the fucking man knew how to reach me. He knew exactly what to do to rattle me.
Jack always said, if you can’t get the head, cut off the foot or stab the heart.
He was right. All villains checked weaknesses first. It made sense to because those weaknesses were the way to cut down your target.
If you were as cold-hearted as Balthazar though and didn’t have a heart, it was so much the better, for him, for men like him.
I couldn’t be like that even with my background. I couldn’t. It wasn’t in me, that innate instinct to care was a part of me as badass as I was. I was a fucking badass, but when it came to it, my heart stood in the way a lot. It was what stood in the way the night Claire and the guys died.
I’d thought of Paul first. He was a comrade and friend. Although I knew rescuing him could more than likely be a trap, I still went. It was that element of a chance at rescuing him that made me do it. It made the guys in the team do it too. Protocol would have told us not to get him because it was too risky, but even Ethan didn’t follow protocol that night.
When we saw that he was on board to go rescue Paul and get us out too, it encouraged us to try. I tried and went against instinct. It made me put my woman in danger by allowing her worries to get to me.
I would never forget what she said to me back at the base. She would have said yes when I asked her to marry me. She mentioned us having kids. I never even thought that far but it was logical. It made sense. It was beautiful when the image of the future came into my mind, and as I’d watched her die the vision wiped from my mind. It became no more. A possibility I wouldn’t have.
Like today with Jia.
This morning when we woke up, she’d been in my arms. I held her and it felt like something we always did. Wake up together, make love again before we left for the day. Try to leave the bed and only bring ourselves to leave because the idea of having breakfast together was nice.
It was nice and I was glad we had it. I was glad I got to tell her I loved her, although the circumstances where shit. It was something I should have said as I made love to her, not as I was leaving her and saying goodbye.
Up ahead was the entrance to the chamber. It had taken me less than fifteen minutes to get here.
Well here goes. I was going in blind. Just like that night so long ago.
There were so many similarities.
Mostly it was the uncertainty. The not knowing if I was going to make it, not just this part but all of it.
I had to just trust in my skills.
Quietly, I got my tools out and looked on the device to see if anyone was inside the chamber.
Everything seemed okay. No one was around, so I went in and headed to the section where Wes and I had seen Giovanni and The Chameleon go through the flooring into the secret vault.
I rushed straight to it and took out the fingerprint mask. Placing it on my thumb I touched the hidden panel on the wall. Thank fuck it worked. I’d hoped like hell it wasn’t his whole hand because it seemed that way from the cameras. It was difficult to tell at the time. I’d thought maybe that it was one of those recognition panels that would allow clearance at a certain percentage of accuracy.
Regardless of how it worked, thank fuck it worked for me and there was the hatch in the floor moving open for me to get in.
It was truly all very clever and I had to give the bastard credit where it was due. First, the place had no surveillance so there was no way outside people would have been able to hack the system, and then there was this. Giovanni had gone on the basis of the old ways. Out of sight, out of mind.
It showed the depth of his greed.
There were some steps that led down inside the hatch. As soon as I took the first step, a light came on. Dim at first like the rest of the place above, then growing brighter. I walked down the steps and the minute I got to the last step the hatch closed and the light brightened right up.
It was truly fascinating.
What was more fascinating was seeing the fucking blueprints I’d worked so hard to find these last few weeks –month. Fuck it was a day over a month.
They sat in a glass case in the center of the room, that was all that was in here, just the case. It was like the room had been made for it, it almost felt tomb like.
Seeing them sitting there in a glass case, in the same tube roll Ethan had shown us back at the base when we’d first been told about the mission was something else.
For the first time today I felt some form of triumph.
Good, now for the next part of the plan. Get the prints and go.
My body moved of its own accord and went over to the case. First I checked out the case to make sure there wasn’t some sort of alarm that would go off when I touched it, that would have been shit and a half.
