Free Bare Nerve by Katherine Garbera Page A

this country. My father once served here as an ambassador.”
    “Sterling,” he said, his voice distant as if searching for a memory.
    “Yes.”
    “You were that girl,” he said quietly in Tamasheq.
    “What girl?” Jack asked, stepping up next to Bay.
    She was surprised that Jack knew the dialect, but she shouldn’t have been. He was the kind of man who was very efficient at everything he did. And it bothered her more that Bay might know or remember the girl she’d been.
    She shook her head. “That’s a story for another time. Bay has given us some good information. Is your team ready to roll?”
    Jack looked like he wanted to ask more questions, but she was an expert at keeping her own confidence and wasn’t about to push open the gateway to her past any further than she already had.
    “We can take a few minutes for your story now,” Jack said.
    She shook her head. “There are some things I don’t ever talk about.”
    “Maybe you should. It’s never a good idea to keep something traumatic bottled up inside,” he said.
    “What makes you think it’s a trauma?” she asked. She didn’t want to believe Jack was coming to know her so well.
    “You would talk about it if it weren’t.”
    He walked away before she could respond.

Chapter Seven
    K irk left their team in Algiers to try to reconnect with his contacts on Andreev’s team. It was difficult to do because Andreev had always played his cards close to his chest and changed his people often. His theory, according to Kirk, was that if you were always reinventing yourself, no one could find you.
    And, to be honest, that plan had worked for Andreev for many years. It wasn’t lost on Jack that Andreev’s downfall had been his attempt at normal life. If Andreev hadn’t taken the pseudonym of Ivan and started a family, they would never have gotten as close to him as they had.
    It confirmed what Jack’s men had been saying on the plane—that women were the downfall of men. That somehow meeting a woman who skewed a man’s normal perspective could be his downfall.
    Was Anna Sterling going to be his?
    “Hell, no,” he said under his breath.
    “Pardon?” Anna asked. They were in the Humvee, and he was driving, following the coordinates she’d given him. Bay was in the backseat, along with Justine and Hamm. Charity was in the second vehicle with the rest of his team. They had left the beauty of the White City behind and were heading into an area that during the early nineties, had been dubbed the Triangle of Death.
    Being in this business, Jack was intimately familiar with death and with the warring factions of Northern Africa. He looked at the desert landscape and realized the scenery had nothing to do with the brutality of the people. There were some parts of the world where peace was a concept that made no sense. And no matter how hard Algeria tried to bring itself into this new century, there were always going to be people like Bay who clung to the old ways.
    “Nothing,” Jack said in response to Anna’s question. “Are you going to tell me about your past here?”
    “No, I am not. But you can tell me about yours. I did a background check on you, Jack Savage, and you don’t exist before nineteen ninety-three.”
    “I don’t?”
    “Nope. Why is that?”
    “Did you spell my name correctly?”
    She gave him a look that he was coming to realize meant she was annoyed. “What are you hiding?”
    “The same thing as you, I suppose.”
    “I doubt that very much,” she said, a trace of melancholy in her voice.
    “We both have something we refuse to talk about. I’m guessing that means we didn’t have rosy childhoods.”
    “Is it only your childhood you’re hiding?”
    “Not at all. I’m an open book.” Jack didn’t delve into his past. He’d always believed that each day he survived was another one he had behind him. And that past wasn’t anything that needed to be explored and examined. He’d done some things he’d rather never