For the five years that Cyrus molested her, sodomized her, beat her for reasons Kayla could never quite fathom, a quiet rage burned inside her. Fear and guilt dominated her sisters, which seemed to be exactly the emotions Cyrus wanted, but only seething anger mulled in Kayla's growing body. Cyrus knew it, too. Somehow he sensed it, sensed the rebellion in her soul. He tried again and again to beat that rebellion out of her, to break her spirit. She finally put a stop to Cyrus Meyers's twisted ways one god-awful hot July evening.
Cyrus had finished up with Mary and Shelly, knocking off a bottle of Night Train with each girl. As he popped open his third bottle, he came for Kayla. He had no way of knowing that while he molested his older daughters, his youngest had stolen into the kitchen and grabbed a rust-speckled butcher knife.
Cyrus came into her room, stinking, staggering, bragging. He was so drunk he could barely walk. She buried that rusty knife in his heart.
She was thirteen — it was her first murder. It sure as hell wasn't her last. As their father lay dead on the worn, yellow shag carpeting of Kayla's bedroom, Mary and Shelly didn't know what to do. The older sisters seemed caught between the violent horror of a murdered father and the unfathomable relief and freedom brought on by Kayla's brutal act. They didn't know what to think, so Kayla did their thinking for them. They spent an hour arranging things. Even then, at thirteen, Kayla possessed an uncanny knack in accounting for every detail.
The police came and all three girls gave a convincingly hysterical report of a burglary gone wrong. Kayla knew the cops saw right through her story — the Meyers family didn't have anything worth stealing.
Even the most stolid, diehard, live-by-the-law cops didn't pry into the matter. If Cyrus's constant, sickening treatment of his daughters finally got him killed by their hand, well, no one was going to miss him. If it was murder, it was something all four of the town policemen had thought of doing to Cyrus more than once when they saw the Meyers girls bandaged, bruised, and laid out in a bed at County General.
The murder faded away. Kayla lived with her sisters for five more years, graduated from high school, then joined the marines. There she excelled; her killer instinct was encouraged and honed. Ironically, she never got the chance to kill while in the Corps.
Killing came in spades after she was recruited by the NSA. Kayla was a marine with a spotless record, high recommendations from her superior officers, and an IQ of 130. She was exactly what they wanted: a brilliant, beautiful woman who showed no compulsions about killing for her country. Kayla's willingness to volunteer for any mission endeared her to superiors and moved her quickly up the field-agent ladder. No matter what the obstacles, she simply found a way to get the job done.
But that was back in her NSA days, back when she had a purpose in life, a reason for being other than just collecting a paycheck. It had all been about God & Country back then. She'd been damn good, perhaps even the best in the world. Too good, that was how she figured it. No boss, especially a political animal like NSA director André Vogel, liked having a clearly superior underling.
Vogel had fired her, humiliated her, humiliated a woman who had more honor than all the men in all the intelligence agencies combined. All because of one little “incident."
Like those piece of shit children would have ever amounted to anything anyway.
Kayla shook off the thoughts, she had more important things to worry about than her old glory days. She had to worry about a payday, and a great big payday it would be if she could get just a little more information out of Connell.
Kayla knew he would use the COMSEC equipment to talk to Detroit. The compact but heavy JM-251 Harris SIGINT pack was a bitch to haul on the ten-mile desert hike from her hidden Land Rover to her current hideaway, but with it she could pick off any communication coming in or going out of the camp.
Kayla had the handset's encryption key preprogrammed into the Harris unit's memory. Eavesdropping was a cakewalk.
Connell's voice sounded thin through the handset. “It's much bigger than we thought,” he said.
"It better be, sweetie,” a gravelly woman's voice answered. “This is the most expensive test site in the company's history."
"The core samples checked out better than we'd estimated."
"Better? Are you shitting me, honey?"
"No ma'am,” Connell said. “And the deposit is far larger than we'd hoped."
"How big?"
"I can't say over this line."
Kayla growled low in her throat. She'd sold Connell this equipment — it was top of the line in security. He should feel completely safe using it, the paranoid bastard.
"Honey,” the woman said quietly. “It's that big?"
"Yes ma'am, it is. I'll keep you updated."
"I'll be looking forward to it, sweetie.” They both hung up.
Kayla felt her anger rise. Connell didn't trust the equipment. Did he think she was a fucking amateur? His paranoia — and his lack of trust in the state-of-the-art equipment — was nothing less than a personal insult.
She already knew of the mine's potential yield. The night after the workers finished assembling the administration trailer, she'd slipped in and bugged it. It was the camp's nerve center and in it she could hear every word spoken. She hadn't been able to bug the lab; security had been impenetrable around that building, even during construction.
O'Doyle's security measures were very good. She never thought he would turn out to haunt her like this. A little more than a year ago, Connell had come to her asking for a first-class security man, someone with military experience, the real deal. She'd hacked into Defense Department black files and discovered Patrick O'Doyle, a governmental assassin and killing machine who had recently been “retired” from service. She gave the info to Connell. He hired O'Doyle shortly after that.
The rest of the security staff wasn't up to his caliber, but they weren't pushovers, either. The guards, around twenty of them, carried M9 Berettas—9 x 19mm, fifteen-round magazine, semiautomatic. Dangerous weapons in the right hands.
The guards also had a dozen Heckler & Koch HK416 assault rifles stashed away. Knowing O'Doyle's record the way she did, the H&Ks were probably rigged for full automatic. You didn't even have to be remotely skilled to kill with a weapon like that — you just pointed and pulled the trigger. The weaponry didn't stop her from making nighttime forays into camp, but it did make her very, very cautious.
Powerful halogen lamps illuminated the large open spaces between camp buildings. That made it difficult to move unseen. She'd managed, spending as long as twenty-five minutes in one hiding place, watching the habits and patterns of the guards. They changed over every four hours — three hours into each shift was the best time to move. Kayla had already slipped in and out of camp each of the last two nights, careful to avoid moving during O'Doyle's shifts.
For the most part Kayla slept from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., with a few hours snatched here and there during the night. She had enough water and K-rations for two more days. After that, things would get a little dry up in her perch. She'd either have to hike back to her camouflaged Jeep and lose a day of observation, or steal supplies from the camp.
This was her ticket. This was it, the biggest platinum vein ever found. She'd already set her price tag at $2 million, and that was just for information. If someone wanted to contract her to take some form of action, to sabotage the EarthCore mine, well, that would bring an additional hefty fee. Kayla knew the South African platinum consortium would fork over $2 million in a heartbeat to learn of such a potential addition to platinum supply, and probably so would those underhanded bastards at Montana's Stillwater Mine. The Russians would balk at such a price tag for mere information. But while the South Africans probably just wanted the info, the ruthless Russians had no compunction about playing dirty pool.