Missing In Action Read online

  Missing In Action

  Kate Canterbary

  Vesper Press

  Contents

  About Missing In Action

  Before you dive in…

  Prologue

  1. Wes

  2. Wes

  3. Wes

  4. Wes

  5. Tom

  6. Wes

  7. Tom

  8. Wes

  9. Tom

  10. Wes

  11. Tom

  12. Wes

  13. Tom

  14. Shannon

  15. Tom

  16. Wes

  17. Tom

  18. Wes

  19. Tom

  20. Wes

  21. Tom

  22. Wes

  23. Tom

  24. Wes

  25. Will

  26. Wes

  27. Tom

  Epilogue

  Excerpt from The Cornerstone

  An Excerpt from Coastal Elite

  Also By Kate Canterbary

  Acknowledgments

  About Kate

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2020 by Kate Canterbary

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any forms, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission of the author.

  Trademarked names appear throughout this book. Rather than use a trademark symbol with every occurrence of a trademarked name, names are used in an editorial fashion, with no intention of infringement of the respective owner's trademark(s).

  Editing provided by Julia Ganis of JuliaEdits.

  Proofreading by Jen Graybeal of Jen Graybeal Editing Services.

  Cover design by Sarah Hansen of Okay Designs.

  Created with Vellum

  About Missing In Action

  Former Navy SEAL turned covert agent Wes Halsted spent his days—and weeks and months—being someone else. But with his cover blown and his injuries requiring months of recuperation, he must learn how to be himself again.

  Only…he'd rather save his issues for another day and get to know a stressed-out, suited-up businessman instead.

  Tom Esbeck has everything under control. Meal plans, workout plans, project plans, five-year plans. A plan for everything and everything according to plan.

  Except there's no plan for a surprise—and shirtless—encounter with the built-for-sin spy he'd crushed on years ago.

  But crushes—and spies—burn out fast.

  Before you dive in…

  If you need some tunes to set the vibe, check out the Missing In Action playlist.

  Join Kate Canterbary’s Office Memos mailing list for occasional news and updates, as well as new release alerts, exclusive extended epilogues and bonus scenes, and cake. There’s always cake.

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  Prologue

  Wes

  Christmas Eve

  It wasn't the worst of times but this sure as shit wasn't the best of times.

  In the best column, I was listing the nun's habit I nicked out of a countryside convent last night. No one fucked with nuns. Most people avoided eye contact with them altogether. Bad memories of wooden rulers and forced recitation of multiplication tables. This vestment was keeping me off the radar and doing a sensational job of concealing both my beard and my injuries.

  The convent also yielded a pair of granny glasses, tattered scarves, and a small purse loaded with supplies to treat my injuries. Gauze, alcohol swabs, antibacterial ointment, an old bottle of penicillin, a sewing kit, and a pair of needle-nose pliers.

  That was where the best column ended.

  As far as the worst of times went, getting shot was at the top of the list. There was a bullet lodged in my flank and I'd been bleeding, slow and steady, for hours. A cold sweat covered my body, my heart was wobbling in my chest, and I could only see straight if I squinted. That was fucking unpleasant but my only objective was getting to the port.

  I'd spent the night on the run, zigzagging and backtracking to shake the secret police from my tail, and didn't have the time to dig that son of a bitch out of my soft tissue. There was also the matter of my broken arm and the electrical current burns on my legs but I could manage those. The gunshot wound though, that thing was going to turn septic in a hot minute.

  If those issues weren't enough to earn the distinction of Really Fucking Bad, I had a few more lined up. My CIA handlers had no idea where I was. I hadn't seen my partner Veronica in two weeks, and I suspected she was dead or close to it. My local liaisons were dead, both executed in front of me.

  A hostile foreign government had discovered that I'd been spying on them for a wee bit of time. The same hostile foreign government was pissed that I didn't fold under their charming interrogation techniques. I could only imagine they regarded my exit from their off-book detention facility—and all the guards I took out in the process—as an unwanted aggravation.

  Based on the activity I'd observed as I made my way north toward the Barents Sea, that government had dispatched entire armies to root me out. They intended to find me and make an international example. Regardless of whether they succeeded at nailing my nuts to the wall, they would also plan some prime-time retaliation.

  I went on squinting at the road ahead, breathing slowly and worrying the rosary beads between my fingers to displace some of the pain streaking through my body. If I could get to the port, I could get home.

  I walked with purpose, careful to keep my eyes down and my steps confident. I was playing the part of a local, one who wouldn't normally draw the attention of the heavily armed law enforcement agents on every corner.

  It wasn't supposed to go down this way. I figured that was how all agents prefaced their debriefs of operations gone bad. I wouldn't know. My operations never went bad.

  Until now.

  I'd been working this assignment for almost two years. Two years of cohabitation and marital bliss with a woman. Even if that woman was also a highly skilled operative, it was one hell of a long-running hetero con. Two years of chipping away at Moscow's society circles, playing the part of the eccentric antiquities dealer who also trafficked in weapons of war. Two years of planting seeds and watching them germinate.

  There was no reason for this operation to fall apart weeks before we were due to get out of town. Our work was airtight and the information we'd gathered was solid gold. There were bumps in the road, for sure, but that was the way with every hop. This hop had been one of the good ones. Difficult, exhausting, grueling—but one of the good ones, until I woke up in a dirt-floored dungeon with my hands and feet shackled to an ancient stone wall.

  I stifled a laugh at that. My father liked to say that if you thought an operation was going well, you weren't paying attention.

  I had paid attention. I knew this operation, every corner and seam of it.

  If I made it home, I was certain he'd tell me I hadn't.

  For the first time in my fucking life, I wanted to hear my father tell me I was wrong. I wanted to make it back to the States and I wanted him to take apart this mission and point out my flaws.

  A large family came around the corner, and I spared them a warm glance. "God be with you," I said in Russian, affecting my most provincial accent. Nuns didn't rock the upper-crust city accent I'd employed during my time here.

  They nodded, mumbling the blessing back to me. I hunched into m
y habit, hoping to obscure some of my height. Nuns weren't six three.

  My thumb and forefinger rolled to another bead as the bone-on-bone pain radiated up my arm and into my shoulder. I was furious about that. The motherfucker who broke it didn't know what the hell he was doing. He just wailed on me with a lead pipe as if that was going to yield any actionable information. Talk about amateur hour. I needed the use of both arms right now, and I didn't have it because some foot soldier with anger issues didn't like it when I told him his mother was bad in bed.

  I pressed the pad of my thumb into a rosary bead as a gust of nausea threatened to knock me over. I continued walking, my gaze trained on the stories-high cargo ships and cranes looming tall over Kola Bay. I was almost there, and breathed a small sigh of relief.

  A liquefied natural gas tanker was leaving from Murmansk this morning, one with a crew that knew how to look the other way for the right price. The tanker was set to sail around Scandinavia to the Atlantic, and make several stops along the east coast of North America. If I could get on that tanker, I could send word to my handlers. They needed to pull their operatives out of the country and turn down the volume on current assignments, and prepare for the disproportionate response headed their way.

  I picked up my pace as I marched through the rows and lanes of shipping containers. Unsurprisingly, I was the only nun in sight, a spectacle in a sea of metal and machinery. The roughnecks and longshoremen eyed me as I passed, and I offered the sign of the cross in response. Something about that gesture, coupled with my rosary beads and exaggerated hunch, earned tolerant nods from the men.

  When I reached the far edge of the port, I lifted my arm in greeting to the quartermaster. He eyed me with an appropriate amount of suspicion as I moved toward him. From the habit's deep pockets, I retrieved a small coin purse. It was lined with enough cash to ensure passage to North America, and a little more to keep the questions at a minimum.

  No, I hadn't robbed the convent. Even spies had standards. Most of the cash was courtesy of the secret police I took down on my way out of their black site last night. At the off chance the bills were tagged and traceable, I turned them over in small towns throughout the region. Now, all the money was clean and I was a matter of steps away from surviving the worst of this ordeal.

  "A beautiful day the Lord has granted us," I said to him, that provincial accent heavier than ever. I worried my beads, forcing his attention there rather than my face. "Do you have room for one more?"

  He regarded me for a long minute in which I debated whether I could strangle him without arousing the notice of the other dockworkers and then stow away aboard the tanker. The short answer was yes, I could do that, but no, it wasn't a wise move. And I needed to conserve energy like a motherfucker.

  "Room," he repeated, pulling the beanie from his head and wiping his hands on the wool. "Headed for America, you know. I have space for one more on deck five, but only deck five. Nothing less."

  In other words, he wanted at least five thousand American dollars.

  I held out the coin purse. "You're a true servant of our heavenly Father, my child." If I hadn't been holding back a roar of pain, I would've laughed at myself. I figured I'd laugh later, when a steady stream of morphine was coursing through my veins and my humerus bone wasn't trying to tear through my skin. I'd laugh about this whole fucking thing.

  Thankfully, the quartermaster wasn't listening to a word I said. He was concerned only with thumbing through the money. He mouthed the numbers as he counted, his head bobbing as he neared five thousand. His eyes lit up when he hit six, and then popped right out of his greedy skull when he closed in on seven.

  Every payoff was associated with a moment, a beat where the deal could progress as planned or everything could go pear-shaped. This was that moment. The quartermaster was gripping the cash and sizing me up, debating whether he could shake me down or hold me hostage for more. If I knew his type, I knew he was also thinking about dragging a blade across my throat and throwing me overboard once we left port.

  And there was nothing I could do about it. Couldn't reason my way around it. Couldn't walk away. I had to wait it out.

  He gestured to the medallions hanging from the rosary beads. "Saint Nicholas," he said, pinching one of the charms between his grubby fingers. "Watches over the seafarers, yeah?"

  "The seafarers, yes, of course," I replied. I shook the beads at him. "I've been calling upon Saint Nicholas for safe passage."

  He unzipped his coat and peeled back several layers of thermal shirts to reveal his bare chest. He pointed to an old tattoo. "Saint Nicholas." He tipped his head to the gangplank. "Be well, Sister."

  I offered him a grateful smile and started up the ramp.

  Now I only needed to survive the rest of this journey. I was one step closer but still an ocean away from the other side of this mission. If I made it home, I was taking a long-ass vacation. I was due for some sun, sand, and a sexy man by my side.

  "If," I murmured to myself, laughing as much as my broken body would allow. "I'm getting home if I have to steer this motherfucker myself."

  1

  Wes

  A week later…maybe?

  I was having the weirdest fucking dreams. Nightmares? I wasn't sure.

  I'd never given much thought to Peter Pan but my head was filled with nighttime flight and "second star to the right and straight on till morning."

  The others were stress dreams. Live action to-do lists screaming at me to get shit done. Time sliding away from me, fast-forwarding as I watched everything go to hell. Bursts of light and whole-body jolts like the bottom was falling out.

  And then there were the shadows. The whispers around every corner. Goddamn, I couldn't get away from those shadows. They were worse than the stress dreams. Worse by a lot. They reminded me I'd missed something. I'd missed something and people were dead because of it.

  There was flying and stress and shadows but there was quiet too. An uncomfortable quiet, like the silence before a detonation. That quiet made me wonder whether I was dead too. Or close to it.

  I was a spy and I'd long accepted the fact I could—and likely would—die on the job. My work necessitated a life lived as if I had nothing to lose. I wasn't afraid but I wasn't ready either. I didn't want this to be the end, not here in a dark, wet corner of a gas tanker somewhere between home and away. Not before—before everything else I needed to do.

  "Not here," I mumbled to myself. My mouth was sandpaper. "Not dying here."

  I summoned the strength to reach for the wound on my side. I had it packed with a length of fabric from my vestment, the best I could do to slow the bleeding. I yanked the layers away from my skin, hoping to find the dressing dry. Bleeding to death was not the way to go. Too slow, too painful. Give me fast and quick—and blissfully unaware.

  But a pair of warm hands stopped me, saying, "Whoa there. Easy, easy." Then, louder, "He's waking up. Seems agitated. Can you give him something to calm him down? The last thing we need is torn sutures or an open incision."

  "Not fucking agitated," I muttered, forcing my eyes open. "Goddamn, how fucking bright is it in here?"

  I squinted at the woman holding my hand against my chest. Her dark braid snaked over her shoulder and brushed my arm. She wore a slim black t-shirt, long-sleeved and unadorned. There was nothing remarkable about her but I knew her. I was certain of it. But I didn't know how or from where.

  Then the realization hit me. I wasn't dead and I wasn't on that tanker anymore. I glanced down at the crisp hospital gown covering my chest, the tubes taped to my hand, the blanket covering my legs. The whiteboard on the wall ahead of me announced the names of my care providers. The date too. December thirtieth.

  "Where—" I tried turning my head to the side but fuuuuuck that hurt.

  "Halifax," she replied. "Nova Scotia."

  I blinked up at her. "Why the fuck am I in Canada?" I rasped. "Why stop a hundred miles from the US border? I could've jogged there!"

  She s
queezed my wrist, offered me a grim smile. "You didn't have another hundred miles. You barely made it here. You lost half your blood volume. Your heart stopped twice. Trust me, this is as far as you could go."

  "Me?" I barked. "Please. I had another—" I glanced at my arm, the one on the receiving end of the lead pipe treatment, and found a long, ugly scar from my elbow to wrist. "Fuuuuuck."

  Now I was really pissed about that lead pipe.

  "Like I said," she continued, "you didn't have another hundred miles." She released my hand, stepped back. "There were diplomatic reasons as well."

  "Say again, Tomb Raider?" I asked, an eyebrow arching up as I peered at her. Who the fuck was this chick?

  The door opened and in limped Jordan Kaisall. "You're awake. Good. We gotta move."

  Once again—fuuuuuck.

  If Kaisall was standing in my hospital room—in Nova Scotia of all the damned places—a couple of bad dreams were the least of my worries. Kaisall was a black ops contractor. He took on jobs too risky, too dark, too plausibly deniable for anyone else. His teams went in after the SEALs, the Green Berets, the Rangers, the CIA operatives. Got them—us—out when shit turned sour.