53
Operation Phantom Fall
King Security Command Center, Bulwark, Texas
“Before we connect with Brazil, we need to show you some local footage,” John Smith said, beckoning him closer.
“Footage?”
Smith nodded. “Bones finally confirmed that Carvalho had been in Texas. Six months ago.”
Six months ago?
The wall monitor flickered to life, revealing a wide-angle street view, the entrance to Fred’s Diner on the edge of the left. Though it was night, the interior of the diner was brightly lit, offering a clear view of all the patrons inside.
Rafferty leaned in, scanning the image, searching for Kamila—
But his gaze landed instead on himself and Brandy-Lyn, seated across from each other in a corner booth.
The night of his first NA meeting.
“Carvalho’s outside,” Smith said, pausing the footage. “On the left.”
Rafferty’s eyes shifted, locking onto a lone figure under a lamppost. “Enlarge it.”
It was in profile, but yes, the enlarged view clearly showed Kamila looking into the diner.
“Now watch,” Smith murmured.
The video resumed.
Brandy-Lyn stood a moment later, exiting with Amelia and the girls’ friends.
Kamila straightened, her head turning as she tracked Brandy-Lyn until she climbed into the Yukon with the girls.
Smith froze the frame and zoomed in again. Kamila’s face filled the screen, a look of pure hatred twisting her features.
Rafferty’s body turned cold. All those months … Brandy-Lyn had been in Kamila’s crosshairs. “Fuck,” he whispered.
Before he could get lost in his dark musings, Stas walked in. “We’re ready for you.”
With a last fulminating look at the face on the monitor, he followed Smith from his office to ops command center.
“You were right, Lawson,” Fox said moments later, the Brazilian operator’s face filling the screen. “The mans?o was rigged to blow. And Carvalho’s gone.”
Rafferty sank back in the leather chair, frustration rising like a tide.
He was torn clean in two.
That three a.m. decision gnawed at him, warring with the instinctive desire to personally throttle Kamila after seeing the way she looked at Brandy-Lyn on that footage.
Had he made the right call?
One part of him itched to get on the next plane, track Kamila down, and finish what he started.
The other part saw the life he could have here.
Beautiful. Undeserved.
Yet, somehow, his for the taking.
And the relief on Brandy-Lyn’s face when he told her he wasn’t going. The way she folded into him, whispering a quiet, heartfelt thank you against his chest. That moment had anchored him more than anything else could.
But even as it grounded him, another truth cut through — he’d seen the vengeance in Kamila’s eyes. Knew the darkness she carried, the awful things she was capable of.
And until she was stopped, no one he loved would ever truly be safe.
But to stop her, they had to find her.
And he knew her better than anyone.
So, in that respect, he could help bring her down.
But from a distance.
Rafferty looked up, voice low but certain. “To track her, you’ll need everything I know. Every tell, every habit, every place she might run.” He let out a slow breath. “No one knows her like I do. So yeah, I’m staying here, but I need to be part of it.”
Stas stood across the room, arms crossed, gaze steady. “You made the right call, brother. We’ve got this. She’s not slipping away this time.”
The other operators — Kosta, Ryker, Ruby, Bones, Gunner, Mario, and Banks — each echoed their own version of Stas’s vow.
Rafferty nodded slowly. “I trust you,” he said. “I do.” After a beat of silence he added, low and certain, “But when the time comes … I need to confront her.”
It wasn’t lost on Rafferty that this was the same team who had pulled him and Esther out of Brazil just months ago. And now they were diving back into danger — again — because of his past mistakes.
As if reading his thoughts, Stas cut in. “Whatever it is you’re thinking … don’t. This is what we do. We track, we find, but in this case, we apprehend, not rescue.”
Rafferty gave a faint, crooked smile. “Noted.” He glanced around the room, taking them all in.
Their steady presence, their readiness. “It’s just …
I spent years working alone. Undercover.
Cut off. No backup. No one to trust.” His voice dropped slightly.
“And now, being part of a team like this? It’s not something I take for granted. ”
A few nods passed around the room, quiet and solid.
Kosta — team lead — stepped forward. “We start from the beginning. Go over everything you gave the authorities in Brazil. Anywhere she’d go to ground. Safe houses, stash points — places she ran ops from.”
Rafferty’s jaw clenched as an image cut through the fog.
That cold, stinking concrete basement.
The sting of the lashes.
The copper tang of blood in the air.
Her all-consuming anger—
“The compound,” Rafferty said, voice low but urgent.
The room fell still.
He looked up. “The compound,” he repeated. “It might’ve been destroyed during the DEA raid, but if she’s trying to disappear, she might go back there. Back where it all started.”
*
Several days later …
Rafferty stood at the back of the room, arms crossed, eyes locked on the wall of monitors in front of him. Hannigan had agreed, albeit reluctantly, to concede Operation Prada to King Security and pay the hefty fee for their services.
“We have confirmed her presence at the compound,” John Smith had relayed earlier, summoning his presence for a briefing with the team.
A wide clearing appeared on the screen — freshly scarred, the jungle still held at bay by the violence that had swept through less than four weeks earlier.
The one-story sprawl of buildings had once been a secure compound — a functional fortress wrapped around an opulent central house. He had lived there. Worked there. Fucked there. Before she discovered who he was and dragged him to the basement.
Now, the compound was unrecognizable. Blasted open and gutted.
Concrete walls stood jagged, torn apart by explosives, black scorch marks fanning out like spider legs from each blast site.
The elaborate house, once gleaming with marble floors and high ceilings, sagged in on itself, charred and broken.
No vegetation had dared return. It was a dead place — burned, brutalized, and hollow.
On screen, a thermal overlay flickered — several heat signatures, subtle but distinct.
Stas’s voice came through the comms. “She’s here.
There are at least two guards with her. Another four on perimeter.
No comms traffic, no visible power grid.
She’s keeping it low-tech, off-grid. Smart.
” Stas appeared on another monitor — sweaty, crouched under foliage, camo face paint streaked from humidity.
Rafferty stepped forward. “Any security?”
“Mostly trip lines. Several homemade claymores — already disabled.”
“Too easy,” Rafferty blurted.
Stas grinned, all dark humor and sharp edges.
“I’m not done yet. There’s a pocket of men holed up near the ruins, just waiting for her signal to swarm in.
We took care of them. A little something in their water supply.
Let’s just say they’ll be too busy praying to the porcelain gods to pick up a rifle. ”
He leaned in, smirk widening. “So, our window’s open. We go tonight. Zero three hundred. New moon, low vis, maybe some rain. The holy trinity of stealth. She won’t see us coming — literally.”
Rafferty’s appreciation for the team surged, and he pushed back the unexpected wave of emotion. “You’ve secured a place to detain her?” They were still debating what the hell to do with her once they had her in custody.
Brazil wouldn’t extradite one of their own, especially not for a homicide committed on U.S. soil — which, of course, was why she’d run home after killing Selena.
To make matters worse, Hannigan was convinced their leak had come from inside the Polícia Federal , ruling out any hope of local cooperation.
That left them with two options — neither ideal.
Option one: Smuggle her into a neighboring country, orchestrate an arrest, and push for extradition to the U.S. The gamble? Counting on that country to play along.
Option two: The darker route. Smuggle her straight into the U.S. and tip off the authorities. Legally, it was kidnapping. A blatant violation of international law. The kind of thing that could torch King Security’s reputation — or worse, land them in federal court.
Until they figured it out, they would hold her in a secure location.
But there was a third option Rafferty hadn’t voiced yet.
One he’d been turning over in the quiet hours of the night, when logic gave way to something sharper.
Something personal.
*
That night …
The feed flickered in grainy night-vision green.
From the KS command center, Rafferty leaned in toward the screen, arms braced against the console.
His jaw clenched as the camera — mounted on Kosta’s shoulder — panned across terrain he once knew by heart.
Now it was a half-collapsed skeleton of what had been Kamila’s stronghold.
A voice crackled in his earpiece. “First tripwire located.”
The view shifted, centering on a gloved hand hovering over a taut filament strung across a fallen beam. An ungloved hand entered frame and snipped it clean.
“Tripwire down. Proceeding.”
The team moved as one — silent, fluid, lethal.
An arm signaled the entrance. It lay behind a crumbling stone well, nearly invisible. What looked like part of the well’s base was, on closer inspection, a narrow gap behind the outer wall — just wide enough for a man to slip through.
Rafferty’s breath hitched. The opening, disguised with moss covered stone and jungle debris, led into a reinforced tunnel sloping steeply downward into darkness.
He remembered it all too well.
The drag of his body. The gag. The moment he thought daylight would never come again. His prison before being taken to the coca farm.
He blinked hard and refocused.
A second tripwire was cut.
A voice came through, low and tight. “We’ve got movement. Infrared’s picking up three heat signatures farther in — one of them pacing.”
The tunnel narrowed. Darkness pressed in. The team advanced, boots whispering over concrete.
Another wire — snipped.
A door.
Wood.
Stupid. Steel would’ve held longer.
Kosta placed the charges. Held the remote.
A fierce whisper. “ Now .”
Bang.
The feed went chaotic — blurred motion, shouting, boots pounding, weapons clattering off stone.
Then stillness.
The camera refocused, sweeping a brightly lit circular chamber.
Three holding cells.
Rafferty shuddered, suppressing the memories.
Kosta’s voice came through. “Target subdued. Others neutralized.”
The view shifted. Kamila lay face-down, wrists zip-tied. Dirt streaked her cheek, hair matted — but her eyes blazed. “Do you know who I am?” she hissed.
They hauled her upright, forcing her to face the lens.
“You are nobody,” Rafferty said into the mic. “Not anymore.”
She spat blood at the camera. “Too scared to face me, lover?”
“No, Kamila,” he replied evenly. “Just no longer doing your bidding.”
Thousands of miles away, Rafferty exhaled. Only now did he realize how hard he’d been gripping the desk — his knuckles ached. He watched as the team moved Kamila through the tunnels and out into the night.
She was cuffed. In custody.
And soon, it would all be over.
*
Hours later …
He hadn’t slept — too wired from endless mugs of coffee.
But he’d showered, dressed in the fresh clothes Brandy-Lyn had brought, and eaten the food she’d placed in front of him.
Holding her in his arms, sharing a deep, grounding kiss, seeing the quiet encouragement in her eyes — those things had steadied him.
Strengthened him enough to take the next step.
“You’re connected,” Banks said.
Rafferty looked up at the monitors. Three feeds played across the screens — two from ceiling-mounted cameras in opposite corners of the room, each trained on the woman bound to a chair and the table in front of her.
The third came from the laptop on that table — its webcam capturing her face head-on.
Kamila, still filthy, blood-streaked, and defiant, stared directly into the lens.
“I’m disappointed in you, lover,” she said. “I expected you to come in person. What? Gone soft? Lost your nerve?”
“I have too much to live for to risk my freedom on you. Just seeing you bound to a chair is satisfaction enough.”
She scoffed, venom curling her lips. “That redhead? Too tame for you. And she’ll grow to hate the junkie you are.”
He didn’t take the bait. Instead, he asked, “Why did you kill Se— Sarah?”
Kamila spat off-screen. “Miserable bitch. You slept with her. Planted your seed in her. She needed to die for that offense alone.” Then her features settled into an indifferent mask.
“I wanted her to lure you out. But the loyal bitch refused. And then she made plans to run away. Bah! I had to stop her.”
Another woman had lost her life because of him.
Rafferty swallowed his sorrow. “How did you find her?”
Kamila gave a twisted smile. “It was easy. Your name is on the brat’s birth certificate.” She lifted her chin in silent challenge, but her next words held a thread of uncertainty. “Now that you’ve got me — what are you going to do?”
He was done wasting words on her. “It’s time.”
“What?” She frowned, and her eyes shifted as a masked man stepped into frame. He placed two objects on the table in front of her — a syringe and a tourniquet.
Kamila’s gaze snapped up to meet the camera, wide and uncertain. “You’re going to have me executed, lover?”
Without a word, the man untied her hands — leaving her legs and torso bound to the chair — and exited the room.
Her eyes were back on the camera, puzzled.
“No. I’m giving you a choice. Something you denied me.”
“Choice?” Her voice was tight.
“There’s enough narcotic in that syringe to end your life. Quick. Painless.”
“You’re insane if you think I’ll use it.”
“ Hmm . Thought you’d say that. There is another option.
” He paused, watching her fight for nonchalance.
But the white knuckles gave away her tension.
“Do you remember Salvador Ortega? The ruthless Colombian you double-crossed. The one who vowed to do unspeakable things to you? Worse than what you did to me?”
The blood visibly drained from her face.
“ Ah . So you do.” He allowed himself a small, cold smile. “Two options, Kamila. The syringe. Or a call to Ortega. Your choice.”
A string of profanity followed by hysterical pleas crackled through the speakers.
Rafferty reached forward and muted the mic.
He stood and turned to Smith. “Let me know when it’s done. Either way.”