“Just give him a minute,” Elena and Rook informed one another at the exact same second. They grinned. Apparently they both knew Cedric pretty damn well.
Cedric finally looked up at Rook. “I’m off Elena’s case, but I’m still working for you?”
“That’s what I want. But look, let’s get back to NYC and we’ll work out the details there, okay? Our flight boards in two hours.”
“But I thought we’d changed it to have a long layover?” Elena asked.
“Nope. I changed it back.” His face clouded for a minute. “I’m anxious to get back to Brooklyn.”
While Elena had been safely abroad over the last week, Rook had been able to see his daughter twice. Which had given him immeasurable joy. What had not given him immeasurable joy, however, was his discovery that his ex-wife was dating again. It’d been years since their divorce, so yeah, he’d known it was going to happen at some point. But the reality of it had been like a knife to the gut.
Rook had arrived at their brownstone—the one that he used to live in with them—to pick up Ricky, and there May had been, looking gorgeous and dolled up and smelling good. All for another man. She’d been as embarrassed as Rook had been horrified. She’d obviously not meant for him to see her dressed up for her date. But there they’d stood in the hallway outside her bedroom. Their old bedroom.
His first glimpse of May in almost two months and she was dressed up for someone else. Rook had wanted to puke.
Now, being across the ocean from his ex-wife and daughter made Rook feel anxious and unsettled. Like, by the time he got back, this bastard she was dating would have up and moved in with them already. No. He didn’t want to kill time in Paris with two newly minted lovebirds. He wanted to get the hell back to Brooklyn.
“Besides,” he finished up, shutting down his face so that none of his thoughts broke through his expression. “It was easy to switch us back to our original flight plan.”
Cedric’s brow shuttered down, as if that bothered him in some way but he didn’t say anything.
Rook held up their tickets and steered them back toward security to check back in. Cedric pulled Rook aside as soon as they were through and Elena had ducked into the bathroom.
“Isn’t reverting to our original flight plan going to flag us with the airline?” he asked.
Rook scowled. It was true that toggling back and forth between itineraries would make them easier to trace by anyone with an in with the airline, but Rook had hedged his bets in his desire to get home fastest. “Maybe, but we’ve got good news back home.”
Cedric’s face brightened. “You got the third smuggler.”
Rook nodded. “Sequence tracked him out to a friend’s house in Far Rockaway and the cops picked him up about eight hours ago. $500,000 bail. Those fuckers are staying put until they stand trial. Elena’s definitely safe until then at least.”
Cedric’s brow furrowed. “Unless they make bail.”
“They’re not making bail. Their operation doesn’t have that kind of cash.”
“Theirs doesn’t, but what about the poachers back in Mali? They definitely have that kind of cash and they’re all working together, right? They all want Elena dead?”
“You know that Sequence has been tracking their movements. There’s been no overseas contact between the poachers and the smugglers. We have no reason to think that the poachers were ever involved in taking out Elena. All our intel suggests that after the hit on David, they considered their message to have been sent.”
Cedric nodded, thinking hard. “You truly believe that the smuggling half of the operation were the only people who wanted Elena dead.”
“Yes.”
“And now they’re all in county while they await trial?”
“Yes.”
“And as of now, they have no idea where Elena is anyways.”
“Correct. They think she’s still at the bunker.”
Something nagged at the corner of Cedric’s mind, but he couldn’t quite figure what it was. All of Rook’s leaps in logic made sense to Cedric. That wasn’t the problem. The problem was Cedric’s gut.
“You’re not convinced,” Rook guessed, reading the look on Cedric’s face.
“I can’t tell if my spidey senses are actually going off right now, or if I’m just hypersensitive when it comes to my girl, you know? But something feels off in all this.” Cedric cursed and dragged a hand over his face. “It was sloppy, calling you in to meet us. Why the hell couldn’t I have held it together until we got back to New York and she was safe in a new location?”
“Because you love her,” Rook said after a minute. “And that kind of thing doesn’t follow rules.”
Cedric looked over at his boss’s face and saw a deep sadness etched into every harsh line.
Rook took a deep breath. “We’re gonna get her to the new safe-house without a hitch, all right?”
Cedric nodded. But he didn’t relax until Elena was strapped in the middle seat between he and Rook.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Elena stepped into JFK with a crick in her neck and a gigantic man on either side of her. After her trip she felt surprisingly… light. She felt, in a way, that going to see the elephants had been a kind of replacement for David’s funeral. She’d gotten to see something beautiful, that they’d both shared, and she got to say goodbye to him in her own way.
Elena didn’t see it as a coincidence that that was where things had come to a head with Cedric. The jagged, desolate part of her heart that had been torn open from David’s death had begun to heal, and with it, love was pouring in from all sides. Now they were back in New York and about to start their lives together.
She felt as free as a bird. Until she looked up at Cedric’s face and found him frowning, his eyes scanning their surroundings.
“Everything all right?” she asked him, hitching her bag up farther on her shoulder.
“Yeah,” he answered, but she got the distinct impression that he was not telling her the truth.
“You got any signal?” Rook asked Cedric, tapping his smart watch.
“No, but that happened last time we were in JFK too. We’re too far out in Queens for a good signal, I guess.”
“Hmm.” Now Rook was frowning as much as Cedric was.
“Am I missing something?” Elena asked, looking back and forth between them.
“Nope, let’s get going.” Apparently that was all Rook was going to share.
Elena figured she was expected to skip the long line at the bathrooms and just followed Rook, Cedric automatically taking up the rear.
They shuffled out to arrivals and sure enough, there was a hulking SUV waiting for them. And in the driver’s seat sat a hulking man.
“Sequence!” Elena chirped as she slid into the backseat.
“Hey, gorgeous,” Sequence ground out through a clenched jaw. “Took a year off my life,” he snapped at Rook as he and Cedric slammed into the car.
“What? Why?”
“I couldn’t get a hold of you.”
“No signal in the airport,” Rook responded, making eye contact with Cedric in the rearview mirror. “What’s up?”
Sequence’s gaze flashed to Elena, like he didn’t want to say what he had to say out loud. But then he sighed and shook his head. “Jake Clint made bail. He’s out.”
“Pull over!” Cedric shouted as Sequence started to pull out of the pick-up lane and back toward traffic. “Pull over now!”
Without waiting, Cedric grabbed Elena around the middle and yanked her across the backseat into his lap. The two of them were suddenly out, back into the outside air and then they were landing hard on the pavement, on Cedric’s side, and skidding a few inches.
“What—?” Elena choked, scrambling up, but then Cedric was dragging her away from the SUV that Elena could see Rook jumping out of.
Cedric was dragging her away, over the curb and then behind a bench along the edge of the airport.
“Call 911!” She heard Cedric scream
to an airport cop who was goggling at them from the sidewalk. “Call the bomb squad!”
“Bomb—” Elena repeated weakly. And it was as if her word were a magic spell, because just like that, the shiny SUV in front of her was suddenly a pillar of flame and noise. Elena was smashed to the ground, underneath Cedric’s body. She felt the familiar ravenous heat on her exposed arm and the side of one leg. There was no sound. There was only a roaring silence.
Cedric’s weight disappeared from her and Elena was staggering to her feet. She watched the car burn and she was flashed back to that moment in the parking garage. But she wasn’t passing out this time. This time she was stumbling forward.
“Sequence!” she felt herself scream before two strong arms dragged her back away from the indescribable heat. “Sequence!”
Tears streamed down Elena’s face as she clawed at the air and attempted to run toward the fire.
She could hear Cedric screaming in her ear, he was trying to tell her something. But she couldn’t hear him. She couldn’t understand him. There was nothing he could say right now that would soothe her.
It wasn’t until Sequence himself stood in front of Elena, took her by her shoulders and gave her one good, hard shake that she stopped shouting for him.
“We got out, Elena. No one was hurt,” he told her.
No one was hurt. No one was hurt. No one was hurt.
It was her new mantra, her new prayer. She clung to it like a life preserver in the middle of the ocean. She must have said it to herself a hundred times before the ambulance got there, and then cops in all forms and ranks. Elena was transported on her own to the hospital, but she didn’t care. She saw nothing. She noticed nothing. Her eyes were open but dead-like. The world raced past her as she had oxygen strapped to her face and the ambulance sped her to the hospital, but time didn’t move. She was stuck in that moment, over and over again. The sickening silence of the bomb. The noise, the heat, the flame so intense that even the memory was eating her alive.
***
Cedric, Rook, Sequence, Atlas, and Geo all stood in the hallway outside Elena’s hospital room. She had a mild concussion from where her head had smacked the pavement, but nothing like last time.
She had some scrapes on her hands and knees and temporary hearing loss, but beyond that, she was all right.
Cedric had been chanting that information in his head for the last ten hours. She was sleeping. She was okay.
He was still shuddering when he thought about what would have happened if they’d waited any longer to get the hell out of the SUV.
Apparently Atlas was thinking the exact same thing. “You know, Swift. For a slow moving guy, you sure thought fast in the SUV.”
Cedric grunted. “Something about the whole situation had been bothering me. It all just kind of clicked together at once.”
“What did?” Atlas asked. “I’m still in the dark about this.”
After the team had been cleared by medics, there had been no rest for them. Atlas, Sequence, and Rook had worked nonstop to deduce exactly what the hell had happened. Cedric was sick at the information they’d dragged up.
Cedric shuddered again and dragged a palm over his face. Sequence laid a hand over his friend’s shoulder and surprised them all by being the one to answer Atlas’s question.
“We figure that Clint put the bomb under the car when we caught him in the garage a few weeks ago. But he wasn’t going to activate it until he knew for sure that Elena was in the car. Looks like there were a few surveillance cameras in the interior that we hadn’t seen before either.”
Cedric cleared his throat, together enough to jump in again. “He missed a chance last week when we took her to the airport because one, he was in lock-up and two, he didn’t have any idea that we had been planning on moving her. But he figured that if she was going away somewhere, then she was definitely coming back. So, all he had to do was wait for her to come home from the airport and then he could… do it then.” Cedric basically spit the last words out, as horrifying as they were.
“So he was tracking the SUV?” Geo asked and received a few nods. “Was it just a coincidence that he made bail when he did? Or did he know that they were coming home then?”
“The bail money came from overseas. From Mali, actually. There was no way the operation here could have afforded it. We think he had a man overseas who gave him intel on Elena’s whereabouts and sent the bail money over so that he’d be able to activate the bomb at the right time.”
“Who was it?” Atlas asked.
“Bastien Agard,” Cedric said through clenched teeth, wishing he’d gutted that bastard like a fish when he’d had the chance.
“What?” Atlas yelped. “But I cleared him!”
“No,” Cedric shook his head. “Bastien didn’t try to kill Elena, or send the money to bail out Clint. He was apparently just the lovesick jackass who was running his mouth to the wrong people about her return to Mali. Some of them were the poachers who were connected to Clint. I guess they searched Bamako until they heard of two Americans who were staying at our hotel, one of whom matched the description of Elena. They tracked us to the airport, found out we were headed to Paris. And at that point, Clint’s surveillance told him that Rook had already taken off for Paris. He put the pieces together that Rook was coming home with Elena.”
“‘Scuse me, folks,” said a male nurse pushing a cart filled with medicines. He fiddled with one corner of the cart as he pushed past them and into Elena’s room. Cedric glanced at the clock. It was already time for another round of medicine. The hands on the clock blurred and he shook his head. He was so damn tired.
Geo checked her phone. “Still no word on Clint,” she told the group. “Still in the wind.”
Cedric restrained a groan. After the bombing, the bastard had up and disappeared, even though there was a tri-state alert going on. As he was suspect number one in an airport bombing, the feds, locals, and staties were all combing the city for him.
Cedric’s head snapped up.
“Did that nurse have a mask over the bottom half of his face?” he asked no one in particular.
A crash from the hospital room had Cedric sprinting forward.
***
Elena’s vision was a little bit blurry, but that was to be expected with a concussion. She was used to it by now. She hated being in the dim, gloomy hospital room by herself, with just the beeps of machines to keep her company, but she could hear the tones of Cedric speaking in the hallway and let herself be soothed. He was watching over her.
She was curled on her side and staring at the cracks of light through the blinds when she realized that someone else was in the room with her.
“Oh. Hello,” she said to the nurse. She was pretty sure she’d met him before. He looked vaguely familiar, though the bottom half of his face was covered with a surgical mask.
He pulled it down to speak to her. “Hello.”
She definitely recognized him. But… not from the hospital. “Do I know you?” she asked as he tinkered with a few different medicines on the cart he’d wheeled in. He was drawing something clear into a syringe.
“I’m your attending,” he told her without turning around.
That got Elena’s attention. She started to pull herself up. She could still hear Cedric speaking in the hallway. “I thought Nurse Redding was my attending.”
“She’s on break.”
Elena’s eyebrows pulled. Nurse Redding was man. When the man turned around, holding the syringe, she got a much better look at him than before. She recoiled at the unkempt beard, the wild look in his eye. Her vision went blurry again, but not before she suddenly, searingly, placed him in her memory.
He had been the new janitor at the IWCF DC. Only there a week or two toward the end of Elena’s last stay. David had mentioned that he’d been looking at her quite a bit. She’d thought he was a little odd. Always skulking around.
Elena froze as he approached her, whatever was in the syringe sparkling in a sh
aft of light from the hallway window.
She didn’t shout. Instead, she kicked out as hard as she could, the bottom of her bare foot connecting with the man’s hip. He staggered back and sent the cart behind him flying into the wall.
Elena screamed then. One word. “Cedric!”
And then she rolled hard off the far side of the bed, the sheets tugging at her feet and the IV in her wrist pinching as it tore out of her skin. She heard her heart rate machine devolve into a flatline as tape tore free from her chest. The man came flying over the edge of the bed after her. His eyes were bloodshot and later, Elena would realize that he stank badly. But in that moment, all she could focus on was the shiny silver syringe as he lunged toward her. She scrambled back.
Elena watched in suspended fascination as the man’s head suddenly snapped backward. He was levitating, lifting off straight into the air in front of Elena’s eyes. But no. That wasn’t right. He wasn’t floating. Someone was lifting him into the air. There was a gigantic hand around the man’s neck. A familiar hand.
Cedric hefted Clint into the air like he was lifting a puppy by the scruff of its neck.
He heard Elena scream as Cedric threw Clint into the wall with enough force to have the watercolor painting on the opposite wall crash to the ground.
Clint crumpled in a heap for a moment before he was up and sprinting toward Elena again. But Cedric did not let that happen. He was in-between them, sweeping Clint’s feet and watching as his head cracked the ground.
Clint tried to get up again but he gasped. He rolled and looked at his right hand, holding it at the wrist. In it were the shattered remains of the syringe he’d intended for Elena. There was a bright red slice across his palm where the glass had cut him.
“No,” Clint gurgled as he tried furiously to wipe what Cedric could only assume was poison from his palm. “No.” He curled in on himself.
Cedric had seen enough. He turned to Elena, scooped her up, and strode out of the room.
Rook Security Complete Series Page 24