“I’m saying they chose that picture because we’re good looking people who’d just majorly kicked some poacher ass and saved an entire sub-species of elephant.” He unlocked his car with his key fob and turned to grin at her.
“Well,” she shrugged, returning his smile. “I’ll definitely agree about the ass-kicking part.”
She started to load her bag into the car and paused.
“Damn!” She unzipped her duffel and began to paw through it. Colorful fabrics and loose toiletries shoved to one side and the next as she dug through her bag.
“What’d you forget now?” David asked with a wry affection in his tone. He would have been shocked if she hadn’t forgotten something upstairs.
“I forgot to return Nell’s access key to her. A ha!” She held up the lanyard with the plastic card attached on one side. “Let me just run it up to her real quick.”
“What happened to your access card?”
“Do you even have to ask, David?”
They laughed as he shook his head and she hoisted her bag over her shoulder again. She was basically allergic to her building access card. The man at the security desk wouldn’t even make her new ones anymore. They pretty much dissolved into thin air the moment they touched her hand.
“Let me just run this back up to her and I’ll meet you back here.”
“I’ll drive around front and pick you up there to save some time. We’re cutting your train close as it is.”
“Okay.” Elena nodded and jogged back toward the stairs of the parking lot. As usual, the second she wasn’t engaged in conversation with someone, her mind instantly went back to the impact report she’d just been reading.
She turned over the statistics she’d just read on the impact of mining on the Amazon rainforest. Of course, it was having a greater effect than previously projected. Wasn’t that always the case? That if humans got involved, stirred the pot for their own selfish gain, then it was the Earth that paid the precious price? Her mind filled with her own memories of the gorgeous, dangerous, spooky, flirtatious Amazon rainforest. How much she’d loved it! How much she wanted to go back. She’d never seen greens so bright they were almost alien as she had there. It was her lifelong dream to spot a jaguar. Maybe next year she’d take a long vacation and try to see a jaguar again. Belize, maybe? Or—
As she swung open the door to the stairwell, a monster made of heat and sound shoved her forward three feet. Elena’s body slammed into the concrete stairs, one hand stopping her fall, but not able to prevent her temple from bouncing on the step. Her vision blurred, darkness zeroing in on her, but not before she twisted backwards and saw the monster firsthand. It was bright orange and flickering. It had charred black feet that were shaped like the wheels of a car and its body was made of flames. Elena’s eyes closed as her body sagged weakly, her skin scraping against the concrete.
She couldn’t make sense of what she’d just seen. A pillar of flames where David’s car should have been. So much sound that everything went quiet, as if she were in the middle of a waterfall. She started to float away from herself, into unconsciousness. But she couldn’t float away. David! She had to get to David!
But she couldn’t move. Couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t do anything but melt away into nothing.
***
One Month Later
“Swift.”
Cedric Swift carefully set the weights he’d been lifting back on their rack and slicked a towel over his face as he turned toward the very familiar voice. “Yeah, boss?”
Javier Rook stood in the doorway of their in-house gym, his hands in the pockets of his slacks and his shoulders nearly filling the entire doorway.
“Gotta talk with you about a new client I’m thinking about taking on. Shower up and meet me in my office.”
“You got it.” Cedric tried not to let the question enter his voice. He was the second longest-running employee of Rook Securities, second only to Rook himself. And he was often brought in as a consultant on any number of the security-based situations the company found itself in, but he’d never been consulted about whether or not to take on a client before. Rook had made it clear, time and again, that his word was final on who their group of five personal security specialists took on.
Cedric couldn’t help but be curious at why Rook would want his opinion now. He hurried through a shower and pulled his standard uniform on. Black slacks, an undershirt and a white button up. Cedric, like pretty much everyone at Rook Securities, had to get his shirts specially made to accommodate the cannonballs of his shoulders, the breadth of his chest. Part of him still thought he looked utterly ridiculous in nice clothing. His body was designed for athletic-wear and not much else. Wearing anything else pretty much made him look like a tiger in a bow tie.
But, whatever. Rook had strict ideas about what personal security should look like and even stricter ideas about how they should act. This was the best bodyguard gig that Cedric had ever had, by about seven hundred million miles, and he wasn’t about to mess it up. So what if he didn’t exactly love the uniform?
Exactly six minutes after Rook had summoned him, Cedric was taking the back stairs two at a time to head up to his boss’s office. Rook Securities was based out of a repurposed warehouse in Red Hook. It was right on the edge of Brooklyn, looking out onto the Hudson Bay, the city winking like it was made of diamonds in the distance. This wasn’t a hip part of Brooklyn, and most of the other factories and warehouses in the area were still abandoned. This one didn’t look like much on the outside, but on the inside? It was probably the safest place on the Eastern Seaboard. And that included the Pentagon.
Rook had built this warehouse into a state-of-the-art bunker. There was the gym and several safe-rooms in the basement levels, a garage and track in the main atrium, an office for each member of the team on the second and third level, and on the absolute tip top, in a sort of crow’s nest at the top of the warehouse, was a set of guest rooms where they occasionally housed clients who needed it.
Cedric jumped off the stairs at the third level and strode down the hall to Rook’s office.
“Come in,” Rook called, without Ced even having to knock. Of course, the entire place was crawling with surveillance cameras. You couldn’t sneeze in this hallway without Rook offering you a tissue. He saw all.
Cedric ducked through the door to find Rook at his desk, frowning at his computer screen. Cedric suspected that his boss needed glasses, but no matter how gently he’d brought it up in the past, Rook had staunchly refused. Behind him, the view of the Hudson and the Statue of Liberty was perfectly framed in the window.
Cedric wondered, for the hundredth time, why Rook would face his desk away from the view instead of toward it.
“You wanted to see me?”
“Yeah. Listen, I’m considering picking up a new client, but it would be a full-team job for a month or two. We’d have to go dark while we got a handle on what kind of protection she’s really gonna need.”
“All right,” Cedric said, leaning forward so that his elbows balanced on his knees. It wouldn’t be the first time that Rook had suspended all their other jobs to put the entire team on one person. And it wouldn’t be the first time that he had them all go dark. AKA, completely untraceable and offline, while they delved into the intricacies of the client’s protection needs.
Rook Securities were not private detectives, but they’d found, over the years, how useful it sometimes was to play offense as well as defense. There were the members of the team, like Atlas Bone and Georgia, who were truly reliable members of their “defensive team.” Their jobs were to be a bodyguard to the clients. And they were damn good at it. Their instincts were supernaturally sharp and they excelled at keeping their clients out of messy situations and getting them out of dangerous ones. Sequence Bone and Rook were much more on the offensive side of keeping clients safe. They liked to attack the danger at the root. They wanted to find out exactly who the client’s enemies were and find ways to eliminate the proble
m at the source.
Cedric was a bit of a jack of all trades. He was good at both sides of the game, which was perhaps why he was Rook’s right-hand man. Cedric was always the one who could get the job done. No matter what the job happened to be.
Perhaps once a year, Rook would suspend all the other jobs that he’d assigned to his team, and he would put all of them on one person. That usually meant that that one person was in a significant amount of danger. It was a big decision, and it was one that greatly affected the team. They would, after all, be working 24/7 for however long it took for Rook to feel he completely understood the protection needs of the client. It was taxing and often boring and completely inflexible work. He wouldn’t put his team through it if he didn’t judge it to be necessary for the safety of the client.
It wasn’t strange that he was considering doing it.
It was strange that he was asking Cedric’s opinion on it.
Rook eyed Cedric over the desk for a minute. “Have you heard of the IWCF?”
As it so often did in situations like this, Cedric’s mind went completely blank. He fucking hated acronyms. Actually, he hated letters and symbols of all kinds. It was like they’d been put on this earth just to taunt him. It had been a long time since Cedric was the big, dumb lump sitting in the back of a classroom, praying to blend in enough that the teacher wouldn’t call on him. But moments like this always immediately brought him back there. Whether or not he had heard of it, he’d need Rook to repeat the acronym a number of times before he’d be able to make sense of it. Instead, he cleared his throat.
“Should I have?”
To Cedric’s relief, Rook just shrugged. “I’d never heard of it before yesterday. The International Wildlife Conservation Fund.” Cedric couldn’t help but feel like Rook was studying him for some kind of reaction.
“Nope, never heard of it. It’s got something to do with our potential client?”
“Yeah. She works there. She’s a policy analyst and a conservation officer. Apparently that means she’s some kind of super genius. The fact that she’s able to hold both positions at once.”
Cedric grunted to show he was listening. Besides his learning disability, Cedric didn’t consider himself to be particularly dumb. But he literally had no idea what a policy analyst or a conservation officer would possibly do. If they took this client, he’d look it up later, make his audio software read him the articles out loud so that he could follow along.
“Anyways, she was part of a team that worked the last few years to get a piece of legislature passed that prevents the importation of ivory of any kind.”
“She’s an animal activist?”
“Looks like it.”
Cedric immediately got a mental image of a white woman with dreadlocks and baggy clothes.
“Congress passed the law about six months ago and then about three months ago, she and a team went to Mali to help aid in this big poaching bust.”
“A team of civilians aided in a poaching bust?”
Cedric was an former Marine. He knew exactly how helpful a group of civilians would be in a situation like that. About as helpful as a school bus full of preschoolers in a knife factory. They would have been an incredibly burdensome liability.
Rook chuckled for a second at Cedric’s disbelief. “That’s exactly what I said. But no, they didn’t actually aid in the bust, but they did aid in the re-location of several hundred elephants who’d been herded off their migration path by the poachers.”
“Ah. Makes more sense.”
“Right. So, anyways, it was a big win for the IWCF and a big win for the elephants, I guess. They all came home and the IWCF was riding high off the good press and the success, so they underwent this visibility campaign for a big donations push and they plastered our girl’s face all over their promotional materials, telling her story. She and her partner at the org.” Rook leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms. His dark eyes pinned to Cedric’s face. “About a month ago in D.C., her partner was killed by a car bomb that was most likely meant for both of them.”
“Right. I read about that.” And by read, he meant that he’d sweated over the article, word by word, until he’d told himself he had the gist of it and tossed the paper in the recycling. “The feds caught the perpetrator, right?”
“They did. But yesterday, I get a call from Miranda Leary, the Chief Operating Officer at the IWCF. Apparently, she thinks that the feds got the wrong guy. Or, at least, they got the fall-guy, not the actual people behind the attack.” Rook, as usual, didn’t fidget or stretch, and his eyes never left Cedric’s face. “She thinks that the people who got shut down back in the Sahel desert are the people behind this.”
“The poachers?” Cedric asked in surprise. “Isn’t international assassination a little bit of a far reach for a group of poachers?”
“Apparently not. Actually, I did a little research myself.” Rook turned his computer monitor so that Cedric could see it.
Cedric leaned forward and squinted at the screen. It was a tactic he’d used countless times. “Forgot my reading glasses.”
He hadn’t. Because his vision was damn near perfect. But he wasn’t about to stumble over every other word of the article in front of his boss right now. He leaned back in the chair.
Rook’s eyes narrowed for half a second, but he nodded. Cedric had disclosed his learning disability to Rook when he’d been hired, but since then, he’d done his royal best to minimize it, to blend in as usual. And the two men had never really talked about it since.
“Basically,” Rook said. “There’s a lot of data that links animal poaching to illegal organizations all over the world. It’s the same as groups that control diamond mining on the Ivory Coast. As brutal as poaching is, these animals end up being goods that, once they’re sold, it’s impossible to tell if they were acquired illegally or not, so the buyers don’t ask many question and the sellers get rich.”
“And the IWCF just closed a main pipeline for this group of poachers.”
“Exactly. And even more exactly, the poster child for the IWCF just closed that pipeline. She was even there, on the ground in the Sahel, when the operation got shut down for good.”
Rook reached in to a file on his desk and pulled out a small photograph. He tapped the corner of it on the desk before he held the photo out to Cedric. “The man with his arm around her is David Cauley, the man who was killed by the car bomb.”
Cedric took the photo and, again, was extremely conscious of Rook’s eyes on him, awaiting a response of some kind. When Cedric let his own gaze fall to the photo, he finally understood what Rook had been waiting for.
Surprise and recognition sliced through Cedric in twin spears. He couldn’t stop the softening of his expression or the little electric jolt he got at seeing her face for the first time in twelve years.
He could almost laugh at himself for thinking that the woman they were going to be guarding would be some dreadlocked hippie who smelled like patchouli and wore hemp underwear. Because the woman in this picture couldn’t have been farther from that stereotype, and she, in fact, was the only animal activist whom Cedric had ever met in real life.
“Elena Vasquez,” Cedric said, allowing himself the pleasure of saying her name out loud. “I’ll be damned.”
She had the same impossibly dark eyes that he remembered from high school. And though, in the photograph, her hair was whipping in the wind and covered in desert sand, he could tell that it was just as long and shiny as it had been back then as well. But her face had changed a bit. Her cheekbones were more defined, the shadows of her face sharper. It made her lips look fuller. Her slightly large nose was just a touch off center now, as if it had been broken at some point and he could see the bright silver of a thin scar along one side of her jaw.
She’d always been more than just pretty, she’d always had character. But now, the collection of her attributes at thirty years old meant that she was gut-punchingly gorgeous. Almost painfully beautiful. He sho
ok his head as he looked at the photo.
His eyes fell to the masculine arm around her shoulders and he trailed it to the man at her side. Blond haired and blue eyed, he looked like a Ken doll on safari. Their kinship was obvious through the photo. Their body language was comfortable and triumphant and loving. The way she leaned into him, the grip of his fingers on her shoulder.
Cedric’s mouth thinned into a line. Some child of jealousy and regret curled gently through him.
The man was dead. David Cauley. Murdered.
Cedric, very aware of Rook’s gaze, set the photo back on the desk. “I’m sorry to hear that she’s in trouble. She’s a good person. Doesn’t deserve that.”
“So, you obviously know her.”
“And,” Cedric replied with a bit of dry in his tone, “you obviously have already figured out that she and I went to high school together.”
Rook nodded. “I did a background check on her. You were in at least four classes together.”
“And did a history project together once,” Cedric recalled. He’d never forget the exquisite torture that experience had been. He’d been torn between the ecstasy of getting to spend alone-time with her and absolute terror that she’d figure out his learning disability and think he was dumb. He hadn’t, in the end, handled it all that well.
Rook’s steady gaze didn’t waver, but it did become a touch more intense. “I take Elena Vasquez on as a client, this gonna be a problem?”
“This?” Cedric wasn’t quite sure what Rook was getting at.
“Your feelings for her,” Rook replied, point-blank.
Cedric laughed in surprise. “Feelings? Nah. No. I mean…” And for a moment, just the briefest sliver of a moment, Cedric considered lying to Rook. Something he’d never before done. Which was exactly what told him he needed to tell him every single molecule of truth. Because Rook needed all the information he could get in order to decide whether or not to safely take this client. Cedric cleared his throat and fought the urge to shift his butt in his chair like a middle schooler in the principal’s office.
Rook Security Complete Series Page 2