Page 17 of Acting on Instinct
“I will not discuss Raine Meyers without her express permission.”
Again, Ty watched as Banyon reached beside her, pulled out her manila folder, leafed through the pages, extracted one, and slid it across the table toward him.
Ty lifted the single sheet with neat print in black ink, followed by the flourish of Raine’s signature. Raine gave him permission to talk about her in this meeting, and she wished him the best of luck and every happiness. It was a simple, direct, two sentence letter with no nuance, and no information that he should glean of when he could speak and when he should shut up.
“What do you want to know?” he asked, placing Raine’s letter on top of his commander’s.
“White chose your unit for her mission because she owed you, she said. When she researched your teammates, she decided that you would be best for the psyops part of the mission. She said she picked your team because of Storm Meyers. The person responsible for hurting Storm was White’s target—I know that to be true. I know the story from White. It sounds to me like a revenge mission. Are you vengeful, Ty?”
“I’m interested in justice and the safety of the United States and its citizens. I follow my orders.”
“Perhaps, then, you can share your version of how White offered the mission to your team.”
“Raine Meyers was known as Storm Meyers at the time that she was in the military,” Ty said. “At that time, she was engaged to my Echo brother, Damian Prescott. She was a member of the Army's cultural support team. She went out with the Rangers and special operations forces to interact with the women we encountered. One day, she was traveling in a convoy. The insurgents attacked her line. Most of the soldiers were killed in the ambush. Those who survived became hostages. Echo tracked the hostages. We arrived as they were making a snuff video of Storm. A Terry Taliban held a sword to the front of her throat, and they demanded that she read a board. She refused. As I shot to remove the threat, Terry pulled his blade across her throat through her windpipe. I was able to start a trach tube andhand her to the PJs. She survived. The commander of that group of insurgents also survived and wanted to do more harm.”
“A tracheotomy performed with water bladder tubing. Quick out-of-the-box thinking. I like that.”
Ty frowned. At least he knew that she wasn’t bluffing when she said that White had told her the story.
“Storm received a medical retirement, and she moved on to put her skills to use with the DIA, now retired. During her time with the DIA, she was sent down to Fort Bragg under cover to rescue Delta Force from the Russian psyops campaign that threatened The Unit’s existence.”
“Did that inspire you to seek revenge for what happened to her?” Banyon asked.
“Ma’am, I was issued orders to work with White. I didn’t seek out the mission.”
“What was it like seeing Storm again?”
Now, how in the world was he supposed to answer that? “It was a gut punch,” seemed like the wrong approach. “She came to the fort telling us that she wasn’t using her military name ‘Storm’ any longer to please call her by her proper name, ‘Raine.’ She was definitely different. Storm was a force of nature, and Raine was demure. It was unsettling. But I had Rory with me, and Rory treated her with compassion and quiet. It’s hard to get a Malinois to chill. Around Raine, he was almost docile. I recalibrated how I acted around Raine to match Rory’s kind of energy, so she’d feel safe.”
“Because of Rory’s behavior, you think that while she acted out of character and was demure, there was also an aspect of her that would be more comfortable around latent protection.”
“Yes, ma’am. That’s what I thought then. Not to take anything away from Storm—Raine, she was fiercely protective of the Delta Force family, putting her life on the line time andagain. I just think that it was a good plan for her to retire from violent work.”
Dr. Banyon adjusted her glasses. “And you think the same for yourself?”
“I think that I did the work I was called to do. And I think that my life’s calling could effectively translate into the missions that Cerberus Tactical performs worldwide.”
“You’re looking at different possibilities because of Kira.”
“She is a large part of my calculus, yes ma’am,” Ty acknowledged.
“And it’s thanks to Storm, way back when, that you even know Kira. Isn’t it interesting how life works? But for Storm being an Echo sister and you going in and saving her life, White could well have chosen a different team.”
Ty sat perfectly still. He couldn’t imagine a life where he hadn’t met Kira.
“But meet Kira you did,” Banyon said. “And that’s when you performed your own psyops mission, manipulating her into loving you through applied behavioral science.”
Ty reached out and laid his hand on the letters of permission from his commander and Raine. “The CIA approached me because they needed information about the interior of a compound. They needed me to get in there and get the information for them. Kira was a means behind the gates.”
“Through psychological manipulation,” Dr. Banyon pressed down on those words, increasing their weight.
“Of Kira and of me.”
“You were able to give consent to that emotional manipulation. Kira was not,” Banyon said.
“Correct, ma’am.”
“But you wanted in on that mission so badly you were willing to target a U.S. citizen.”
