Second Chances Chapter Two
Ordos, China
Ten years ago….
John Reese sat in a building of the abandoned city, Ordos, China, alongside his partner Kara Stanton. They were supposedly waiting for darkness to signal their whereabouts for extraction from the city. They had retrieved the laptop sold by someone in their own government to the Chinese.
At the back of Reese’s mind the thought was always lurking, he had been ordered to retire his partner, Kara. There would be no extraction for him until he carried out that order.
Reese was also thinking about Jessica, the woman he loved, still did. John had left her to do what he thought was his duty after the Towers had fallen. His duty eventually led him to working in the CIA with Kara as his partner.
John didn’t know if Stanton’s owned warped sense of duty had trained him, molded him to what he was now or if the darkness was already there waiting to be let out. Regardless, why Reese had become what he was now, John had given up Jessica; let her walk away in an airport to a life without the former soldier in it, to marry another. The trained CIA-assassin didn’t believe he deserved someone like his former girlfriend now.
Reese was also thinking of the woman’s phone call to him, Jessica’s unspoken plea for help, and his promise to get to her as soon as he could. That promise was delayed because they were sent here. No personal emergencies John was told, you have no one now.
Stanton got up to throw out the flares signaling their position. John was ready to take the shot, kill his partner, but he couldn’t do it. How could he go to Jessica, to help her, with fresh blood on his hands from killing his CIA partner, either good or bad, he had been through hell with for years now?
Instead John tried to warn Kara, before she suddenly turned and shot him. Maybe Stanton had plans to leave him bleeding in that building alone and didn’t have it within herself to actually kill her CIA partner. If she had, Reese would have been dead, “Sorry John.”
It was now obvious to Reese that both of them were being betrayed. “I got the same orders as you”, John said before fleeing what he knew to be incoming fire from aircraft not sent to extract them.
The CIA operative was half running, half stumbling as fast as he could to get a safe distance away before collapsing, the explosions rocking the ground under him, lighting up the night sky. Reese didn’t know how long he lay there: was it minutes or hours?
Reese heard the approach of some vehicles, the op jumped up, ran over, and into ditch alongside the road leading into the city. He hid there until long after the vehicles passed by. John was lying low in the ditch, hiding, trying to think what he could do to get out of this mess, when several men approached. The trained assassin took them out before they even knew he was there. One of those men had a radio.
It took some time but John adjusted the frequency to get through to ….. Rangers never leave a fallen comrade ….
Reese was healed from his gunshot wound; finally home in America, the CIA none the wiser. The betrayed former operative was in New York on the subway heading to New Rochelle. John thought it best to go to the hospital where his former girlfriend worked.
John walked up to the nurse’s station and asked for Jessica. Reese’s world fell apart as the nurse on duty there told him the woman he’d left behind was dead. It was an accident the woman at the desk broke the news to him, but Reese instincts told him otherwise, he felt certain Jessica’s death was anything but. He stumbled blindly away running into a man in a wheelchair on his way out.
An anguished Reese broke into the Arndt house, waited for the man he knew was responsible for Jessica’s death. John watched some video recordings, in some he saw Jessica happy with her new husband, Peter and in others a pretense of happiness, something entirely different showing in her eyes.
When Arndt walked through the front door into the living room, Reese confronted him. John hadn’t intending on harming the man but when Peter raised the fire place poker and swung at the intruder in his home asking questions….
Reese was again riding the subway to New Rochelle; the op had fool hardily contacted his old handler in the CIA, Mark Snow, to get answers, maybe return to the agency if there had been some kind of mistake. John had barely escaped the welcoming committee Snow had waiting for him. When the twice betrayed man reached New Rochelle once more he went to the city’s cemetery and Jessica Arndt’s grave, the grieving man silently asked for her forgiveness, then disappeared into New York’s homeless population…………
~*~
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen