“You’re saying Scorpion is on a secret hit list,” she interpreted. Maybe that was wishful thinking. She knew that Elliot Blom ran a special division in the CIA. His agents were very well educated. Each of them had been an officer and trained in special ops. They were highly motivated, spoke several languages, and could operate easily alone in any environment. Some called them ghosts. Few people ever saw them, but they got the job done, taking out terrorist cells, the heads of drug cartels, in a hot zone, opening a way for a unit of soldiers pinned down to escape. They recruited agents and then brought those agents to safety if their cover was blown. They were also the men sent after killers like Scorpion.
Raine brought up a file and opened it. “We found these two kills only because an assassin known as Deadly Storms tracked them down. He’s notorious in the Middle East. Several countries hire him to get rid of men like Scorpion.
“I don’t have his identity for certain, but these two kills, which have been kept under wraps, pointed toward a diplomat from Canada. He travels with his own people when he goes to another country. I’m telling you this in strict confidence, Shabina. We don’t know for certain who he is. He’s under suspicion, but the fact that he’s a diplomat for a foreign country makes it very difficult. We have to have irrefutable evidence that this man is the serial killer.”
“He’s a mass murderer,” Shabina whispered.
“The two men, Cole Caron and Saul Charpentier, were Canadian and they worked for a diplomat named Darian Lefebre.” Raine began to close her file.
“Wait.” Shabina stopped her. “Everyone knows the ambassador Darian Lefebre. I can’t imagine that he would be involved. I need to know how the men who worked for him died. Why they would be linked to Scorpion?”
Raine sighed again. “Is that necessary? They’re dead, Shabina. They can’t get to you.”
Shabina lifted her chin. “How did they die, Raine? How do you know this Deadly Storms killed them?”
“What I’m telling you is classified. Very, very classified. This assassin was named Deadly Storms because he comes out of the sand and takes the intended target right under the noses of an entire camp. No one ever hears or sees him. He’s a ghost. He vanishes, and so does his target. He found both men and he took them.”
Her heart jumped. Skipped a beat. An assassin who came outof the sand and took targets out right under the noses of an entire camp. A ghost. No one hears him. No one sees him. She knew someone like that. She kept her face averted from Raine just in case she gave herself away, but her fingers dug hard into her thigh.
“Is he one of ours?”
Raine didn’t respond, just shrugged. When Shabina remained silent, looking at her, she sighed. “They know Deadly Storms is an assassin for hire in the Middle East.”
That definitely didn’t rule out Rainier.
“How did he kill them?”
“You don’t want to know. He doesn’t always kill cleanly. In this case, both men were tortured. They bore identical marks on them.”
Shabina frowned. Considering. “How do you know the same man killed them?”
“He left behind his signature tattoo just above their left wrists. The tattoo signifies Deadly Storms. It isn’t a tattoo as if he spent time with a needle tattooing them. He burned the tattoo into their arms like a brand.”
Her heart leapt. More and more she was certain the assassin was Rainier. She resisted rubbing the tattoo on her left arm, scant inches above her wrist—the one she never allowed anyone to see. When she swam, she wore a swim shirt over her bathing suit to ensure scars and the tattoo of a scorpion were covered and she wouldn’t get questions.
If Raine had the photographs of the dead terrorists, she very well could have the photographs of sixteen-year-old Shabina Foster, scars, tattoos and all.
“Do you have photographs?”
“I’m not showing them to you. I will say this: if you were to take transparent paper with a map of the wounds on your body,including every violation done to you from head to toe, and place it over their bodies, there would be an exact match. Is that what you want to know?”
“Yes.” She wrapped her arms around her middle and held on tight.
“Rainier.” She whispered his name to herself. Her anchor. The one person who kept her safe. He had come when there was no hope. He’d been like the desert storms, sand whirling like tornados, rising out of nowhere and passing fast, leaving devastation in their wake.
He’d hunted down two of the men who had tortured her. Two of the men who had massacred an entire tribe. She knew him and his ruthless, single-minded purpose. He wouldn’t stop until he found each of the men threatening her.
“You know the identity of Deadly Storms, don’t you?” Raine asked, her voice gentle.
Of course Raine would know. The way he’d killed the two men was a dead giveaway. Blom might not put two and two together. He probably didn’t want to know, but Raine knew.
“You can never tell anyone, Shabina,” Raine cautioned. “Not ever. Take that to your grave.”
“I took his life away from him,” she confessed. “I didn’t mean to, but it happened. I took everything from him.”
“You didn’t, Shabina. You take on the world. Scorpion did that to you. He made you think you were guilty, responsible for everything he did. Rainier makes his choices, he always has. No one runs him. No one. That man can’t be controlled by anyone.”
Raine didn’t know the entire story. Shabina nodded her head because what else could she do? Raine had just gone against her code to help, showing her classified files. That went above and beyond friendship.
