True Shot by Joyce Lamb

Samantha and that bastard she’d hooked up with, had left him thirsty. “I’m not going to lose her, Marco.”
    “Yes, sir. I’ve traced the tags to the Avis rental agency at Dulles Airport, sir. The guy’s name is Mackenzie Hunter of Lake Avalon, Florida.”
    “What’s his relationship to Samantha?”
    “I don’t know, sir.”
    “Wait, did you say Lake Avalon?”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “That’s Samantha’s hometown. And Hunter’s from there, too? Yet she insisted she didn’t know him. I suspected she was trying to protect him.” How long had Samantha and this man been in touch? What had she told him about N3?
    “Sir?”
    Flinn tamped down the black anger. “What else do we know about Hunter?”
    “As requested, Natalie is compiling a more detailed report, but it will take some time, sir.”
    Sir. The overabundance of respect irked him. He didn’t even know when Tom and Deke had stopped sir -ing him to death, but it had been a relief. Now all he had was Marco, the muscle he liked the least.
    He rubbed a hand over the smooth skin of his head. “Let’s put a tap on the phones of Samantha’s family members in Lake Avalon. Parents and two sisters. If she tries to contact them, we can trace the call from that end. Does the Jeep have GPS?”
    “No, sir.”
    “Fuck!” Flinn fought the urge to crush the can of Coke in his fist.
    Marco’s dark expression didn’t change. “Sir?”
    “The transmitter’s been tampered with, Marco. She’s out there right now with no memory of who she is. What she is.”
    “Yes, sir. Isn’t that the way the fail-safe is supposed to work, sir?”
    Flinn gulped down some more Coke. That was indeed how the fail-safe drug worked. For a couple of days, anyway. And then it wore off. He’d never told his operatives that part. What good would the fail-safe do if under interrogation an operative told his or her captors that all they had to do was wait out the drug’s effects, that within a few days, they could begin the interrogations and torture all over again and get what they wanted?
    The drug was specifically designed to suppress only episodic memory—the what, when and where of personality. The operative retained the instincts and skills of a trained government agent. The goal was to block the operative’s access to sensitive information for at least three days, giving N3 enough time to mount a rescue. Unlike intelligence officers in other agencies, his operatives were not easily expendable. They had abilities that no amount of training could instill in even the most ambitious agent. And there were far too few of them. At least, there were now . He would change that very soon. First, he had to retrieve Samantha. Once he had her back, forcing her to cooperate would be the easy part.
    “Sir?”
    Flinn glanced at Marco, who maintained parade rest, legs set wide, hands behind his back. Awaiting his orders instead of thinking for himself. Flinn detested people who didn’t think for themselves. Samantha did and, while that was a problem now, it had been the reason she was one of his most competent operatives.
    “We’ve lost three men, Marco.” He clenched his teeth at the renewed surge of anger at Samantha for costing the team so dearly, and at such a critical time. “We need more muscle.”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “I have to return to the District for a meeting, but I need you to stay here and clean up this mess. I’ll check in with Natalie and have her line up some new men in the area. You can pick them up on your way back.”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “And I need a new cell phone. That bastard Hunter destroyed mine.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN
    C arrying two white plastic grocery bags from the drugstore a block away, Mac stepped into the dimly lit motel room and shut and locked the door on a weary sigh.
    He could see from there that Samantha . . . Sam hadn’t budged under the covers of the double bed in the center of the tiny room—the best he could do with half of the hundred bucks