“Anything else?” Alvarez looked around, clapped his hands together. “Good. Check your comms. Get into position. Let’s do this.”
The group broke into their assigned formations, Shields exiting to the left of the container with his team while Nora, Braden, and Miller — a tall, skinny Texan with a residual drawl — stepped out of the warehouse. They streamed to the right, taking up position behind a two-story stack of rusted shipping containers.
The sun had almost set, the sky turning inky overhead, when Braden lifted the binoculars to his eyes. He was point man for their group, and she watched as a muscle jumped in his jaw, a tic she’d noticed when he was wholly focused on a task.
She forced her eyes away from his profile and leaned against the container. It didn’t take long for the cold to seep through her gear into her shoulders. She scanned the shipyard in front of her even though Kalashnik was expected to enter from the other direction. The biggest danger in a sting like this one was boredom. It could take hours for the target to arrive, and it was easy to be lulled into a false sense of safety. To get so used to your surroundings you forgot to look around. Forgot to notice things that mattered.
But everything was quiet. There was the creaking of cranes, raising and lowering the massive shipping containers on the dock, the clang of metal reverberating through the night air as they were set down. It was two hours before she heard Shields’ voice in her ear.
“That's our mark. Blue container. Almost to the ground.”
Braden swiveled his head, looking for the container. “Got it.”
Comms was quiet for ten more minutes before Shields spoke again. “Touchdown.”
“Container’s down,” Braden murmured, still looking through the binoculars. “Now we wait.”
She looked over at Miller, leaning against the container on the other side of Braden. They were still waiting a half hour later when Perelli’s voice crackled in her ear. “I hope these guys get here soon. I need to take a leak.”
“Better lock it down.” Braden’s voice was like warm honey next to her. “I’ve got movement coming through the yard to the west. Black SUV.”
“Got it,” Shields said.
“All systems go,” said Alvarez. “Repeat; all systems are go.”
3
Braden paced in front of the shipping container, avoiding the forensics team still at work. Preliminary processing had already been done on the two dead bodies on their way to the morgue. Now it was about other evidence: shell casings, fingerprints, lint and dirt samples, blood spatter. More than likely it would all amount to nothing — Kalashnik hadn’t come for the pickup — but it was all Standard Operating Procedure.
“I can’t believe how fast that went bad.”
He turned to find Nora at his side. She looked smaller without her tactical gear. Now he could see the swell of her breasts, the taper of her waist, the full hips that brought to mind all kinds of forbidden activities.
“They didn’t give us a choice,” he said.
“I know,” she said. “It’s just weird. Like they came here to die.”
“They went down swinging,” Braden agreed.
“What do you make of it?” Nora asked.
She was referring to the empty shipping container. The one that was supposed to be loaded with assault weapons. The one the two dead men had come to claim even though there was nothing in it.
“Still processing,” he said. “You?”
“I don’t know.” She cast a glance in the direction of the container, its doors yawning open in front of Alvarez and one of the dock workers holding a manifest.
It had happened quickly. The men emerging from the SUV, looking around before heading for the shipping container, hands on their guns. Braden and the rest of the team had followed the plan exactly, waiting for the men to step up to the container, unlock it, swing open the door.
But that was where everything went to shit.
It’s not that perps never defied instructions to freeze, but the words, “Freeze! FBI!” did have a somewhat reliable effect on most of them. Most people didn’t want to die. Even people like this, people who peddled death for a living. But these were not most people. They didn’t surrender or even try to run. Instead they drew their guns, even got off a couple shots before they were taken down.
He looked down at Nora, fighting the urge to wrap an arm around her shoulders. “You okay?”
She nodded. “I’m good.”
The shots hadn’t come from their team, not this time. They’d been on point, covering Bravo team, who was in position to fire if necessary.
And fire they did.
Still, Braden knew Nora didn’t like it when people died even, if she wasn’t the one pulling the trigger. The work they did was heavy on background — surveillance, undercover, sourcing, research, piecing together the puzzle. Fieldwork came at the end of months of planning, and sometimes they didn’t get there at all. They didn’t see enough action to get used to it. Braden’s time in Special Forces had inured him to almost anything, but he could see the toll it took on Nora in the way her slender shoulders sagged, the ghosts that haunted her eyes.
“Drinks tomorrow night?” The question was out of Braden’s mouth before he had time to consider it. Socializing alone with Nora was never a good idea. But that didn’t stop him from doing it.
“Sure.” Was it his imagination that she seemed pleased? “Rosa’s?”
“Sounds good.”
“I’m going to pick up the rest of my gear and head to the car,” she said.
“Be right there.”
He watched her go, feeling like an asshole for noticing the perfect roundness of her ass, the strong, lean legs he could almost feel wrapped around his hips.
When she disappeared from sight, he turned away from the crime scene and backtracked to the SUV, still sitting where the perps had left it, doors open, the forensics team busy searching for evidence. Maybe they would find some kind of fiber unique to a certain area or a hair with DNA that would lead them directly to whoever was in charge of the illegal weapons that had been streaming in from Ukraine in the past year.
But probably not.
He ran a hand over his face and sighed. They’d been working on the case for nine months. This had been their break. Their chance to find out who was calling the shots. Now they had two dead perps and no more information than they had yesterday.
He was fighting a surge of resignation when something caught his eye on the ground. He bent down, carefully pulling a piece of white paper from under the shipping container next to him. He knew what it was even before he brought it to his eyes.
A ticket for a parking garage. But not just any parking garage.
The garage near Bureau headquarters downtown.
He held the ticket on its edge as he studied it. Dated two days earlier, it could have been anyone’s. Except agents had assigned parking spots in the Bureau lot and no one wanted to park at the garage across the street where you had to wait for the attendants to execute an elaborate dance in order to extricate one car from the masses.
He looked around, wondering if anyone had spotted him picking it up. No one was there, and he removed an evidence bag from his pocket and slipped the ticket inside, then shoved the whole thing in his pocket.
He headed for the car, trying to shake the feeling that something was wrong. The whole operation felt off. Like there was another piece working in conjunction to their carefully executed plan, a piece they didn’t know existed. His gut told him there was more to this story than they were seeing, and his gut had saved his ass more than once.
He ran down the list of possibilities: the Bureau lot had been full, someone had been out having dinner nearby on their off-time, one of the agents had a lunch visit from a husband or wife and somehow ended up with their ticket.
It was a short and not very compelling list, but preferable to the alternatives already stewing in his mind. He would see if the lab could run the ticket for him. Any print
s they found would probably belong to someone at the Bureau. Someone who’d been in on the sting and dropped the parking ticket.
It was sloppy — they weren’t supposed to carry anything into a raid — but they were only human. And it was a lot more likely than the possibility that one of the perps had been hanging around the Bureau two days ago.
He told himself there was nothing to worry about all the way to the car, but he didn’t quite believe it.
4
Nora pulled into the underground garage of her apartment building and turned off the car. She breathed a sigh of relief, glad to be out of the city and back at the beach. It was one of the many things she and Braden had in common, both of them willing to make the long drive from the South Bay to the Bureau’s downtown office just to be near the water.
She got out of the car and breathed in the salty air as she made her way up the outdoor stairs. She’d asked Braden if he wanted a ride — they sometimes carpooled, one or the other of them leaving their car in the Bureau lot overnight — but he’d had some paperwork to take care of from the raid-gone-bad. Her disappointment was tempered by the knowledge that she would see him tomorrow night, ring in the weekend with beers and Mexican food at Rosa’s.
She let herself into the apartment and locked the door behind her. Hermosa Beach was about as safe a place you could get in Southern California, but three brothers, a father who’d started in law enforcement, and five years with the Bureau made a lot of things habit.
Frankie, her tiger-striped cat, meandered into the living room, staring up at Nora with wide, blinking eyes.
“Hello, sweet girl.” She set her bag and keys on the console table by the door and bent to pick up the cat, sinking into two inches of fluff as she buried her face in the animal’s fur. “Did you miss me?”
Frankie purred and Nora kissed the top of her head before setting her down.
She went to the kitchen and poured fresh food into the cat’s bowl, refilled the water dish, then pulled a plastic bottle of water from the fridge for herself. She took a long drink while she looked around the apartment. It wasn’t fancy — there were hundreds like it scattered all along the narrow streets of the South Bay — but it was hers, and she felt a swell of pleasure as she took in the overstuffed sofa, perfect for Sunday afternoon naps, and the intricate rug she’d laid over the hardwood. She’d been slowly collecting inexpensive but promising pieces from local photographers, and the plants scattered around the room gave the place a lush, slightly tropical vibe.
It was the antithesis of the big house outside Boston where she’d grown up. Her father had been a young cop, the place an inexpensive mess, when her parents bought it. But years of renovation and a thriving real estate market had turned the property into a valuable estate befitting her father’s position as D.A. for Suffolk County. It was still home, but not like this.
The apartment was one of the few places where she felt not like one of the Murphy kids or the DA’s daughter, but like the self she was underneath everything else. The self she was still discovering. Being so far away from Boston had given her the space to peel back her outer layers like the dimpled flesh of an orange, looking to see whether the inside was sweet or sour. It didn’t make up for the absence of her mother and sister, but it had begun to feel like necessary work.
Her eyes came to rest on a photograph sitting on the counter between the kitchen and the living room. Her sister was radiant in the picture, tan and smiling at the bow of the family boat, a year before their mother was diagnosed and two years before Erin met Matt.
She waited for the disgust to hit her. She’d carried her hatred for Ryan McConnell for a long time. He’d been the one to introduce Erin to drugs at a time when she was vulnerable from the death of their mother. It was his fault Erin had gotten hooked so quickly, had changed from the vital, passionate woman in the photo to one who was emaciated and paranoid, stealing from the house and from Nora and their brothers to get money for her next fix.
But somewhere along the way her burning hatred for Ryan had cooled into cold resignation. There was no going back. It had happened the way it had happened. Erin was gone and all that was left were Nora’s memories and the promise that she would never, ever lose herself so totally that she couldn’t see the truth when it was right in front of her.
Everything you need to know is right in front of you.
Indeed.
She capped the water and put it back in the fridge, then headed for the bedroom where she changed into a pair of leggings and a long-sleeve T-shirt. She layered a sweatshirt over the top of it and pulled on her tennis shoes, then grabbed her keys on the way out the door.
The sun was setting over the water, and people were making their way to the Strand, the long stretch of concrete that ran along the water from Palos Verdes to Malibu. It was a South Bay tradition, and she tried not to feel lonely as she watched the couples heading toward the water, some of them with wine glasses in hand, others with fingers intertwined.
Besides, it wasn’t just people in love. There were parents and children, teenagers with their friends, even a few lone wolves like herself, all of them lining up on the concrete and in the sand, watching nature’s daily magic show as the sun kissed the water in the distance.
She turned onto the Strand and kept walking, passing the people who stopped to watch, some of them scooting onto the low wall that separated the almost-beachfront apartments like hers from the sand.
She glanced out over the water, watching it turn to a richer blue as the sun sank. She’d never watched the sunset with Braden. He’d never suggested it, not even when the timing was right on their way to Rosa’s. She told herself she was glad. It would have been too much. Too close to the kind of relationship she both feared and desired.
She thought of his eyes. The way they flashed when he was angry. The way they sometimes seemed to deepen when they looked at her.
Or was that her imagination?
Of course it was her imagination. Braden Kane probably had a million women lined up to warm his bed. It was why she steered clear of the subject of his personal life.
She didn’t want to know.
She bowed her head and walked, focusing on the sound of her feet hitting the pavement, the smell of the sea, trying not to wonder if he really had paperwork to finish in the city or if he had other plans he hadn’t wanted to share.
5
Braden sat back in his chair, tapping a pen against his mouth as he thought about the parking ticket. Everyone else had already gone home, the office slowly cast in shadows as the lights went out one by one.
The ticket didn’t prove anything. Not until he got the report back from Rueben, and maybe not even then. Still, it was unsettling. Why would one of the agents have a parking ticket in their pocket during a raid? Some of his colleagues were assholes, but none of them were sloppy.
And if it wasn’t one of the agents, that meant it had been carried in by one of the perps before he fell dead. If that was the case, one of the dead men who was on Kalashnik’s payroll had been across the street from FBI headquarters just two days earlier.
The thought made him deeply uneasy. He could only think of one reason that Kalashnik’s men would hang around Headquarters, and that was a meeting with an FBI contact.
And that meant a dirty agent on the case.
It would explain some things: why the boss sent two flunkies to pick up an empty container for one. If they had been no-shows, it would have set off alarms within the strike team. Because there was only one way Kalashnik could have been onto the raid, and that was if someone had warned him.
Braden replayed the scene in his mind, working backwards from the moment the shooting began. The first shot had come from Bravo. The perps had been reaching for their guns, which nullified Alvarez’s orders to get them alive; no agent was expected to forfeit his own life if he could save it. Someone from Bravo had fired, but it hadn’t stopped either of the men from raising their guns. After that the chorus of gunfire
was deafening. Both men had dropped to the ground seconds later.
Braden was still seeing the scene in his mind when the elevator dinged down the hall. He instinctively put his hand on his weapon as footsteps came toward him. He removed it a few seconds later when Rueben rounded the corner, his face shining with sweat from the effort of moving his considerable girth through the halls of the building.
“Done already?” Braden asked.
“You said you needed it,” Rueben said, crossing the room and handing him a plastic evidence bag.
Braden looked at the parking ticket through the plastic. “What’s the word?”
“Only two sets of prints,” Rueben said. “One belonging to one of the guys in the morgue, the other unidentifiable.”
“Unidentifiable because it’s a bad print?” Braden asked. “Or because there wasn't a match.”
“Not a match.”
Braden nodded, exhaustion seeping through his veins. It meant he would have to take it to Alvarez. Would have to make his case for the possibility that there was a dirty agent on the case. Alvarez wouldn’t want to hear it, especially so soon after his promotion to SAC. The Agency was a family of sorts. You might not like everybody on your team, but you damn sure had their back when the chips were down.
This would be a problem. Alvarez would either make excuses or look at him like he was a rat even while telling him he did the right thing. Word would get out to the rest of the team. If he was right and there was a dirty agent on the job, that person would use his training in Psychology Ops to turn the rest of the team against Braden. They wouldn’t be a family for long after that.
He thought of Nora. What would she think? Would she think he was a rat too?
No. He knew her better than that. Her family had been involved in law enforcement for three generations. Her respect for the law was absolute. Her principles ironclad. She would back him.
Rogue Love (Kings of Corruption Book 1) Page 2