by Cindy Gerard
“It’s too late, you sick bastard. You already killed her.”
“Truly? Then it won’t bother you if I empty my magazine into her.”
He moved around Rafe, lifted the AK to his shoulder.
Rafe roared and threw a body block on Emilio that slammed him to the floor. B.J. heard the sickening smack of Garcia’s head hitting the concrete floor as she drew her Glock and fired in Azeem’s general direction.
Then she rolled out of his line of fire just as the nose of the guard’s AK jerked upward and he toppled to the floor, dead. She’d been aiming at Azeem but the rounds from her Glock must have taken him down. Azeem took aim at Rafe. B.J. screamed a warning, then emptied her clip into Azeem as Rafe rolled Garcia’s limp body on top of him, using it as a shield.
Azeem dropped to one knee, clutching his gut. B.J. shot out from behind the forklift, kicked the rifle out of his hand, then swung back around and drove her heel straight into his jaw. Then she slammed her foot down on his throat and pinned him on his back to the floor.
“I want a name,” she said, meeting eyes filled with pain and terror.
She was peripherally aware of Rafe rolling Garcia off him and staggering to his feet.
“Tell the lady what she wants to know,” he advised Azeem.
“Yeah,” Savage’s voice echoed across the empty warehouse. “Tell her what she wants to know.”
Three more silhouettes appeared out of the dark behind him. They all made a circle around Azeem, their M-4s all pointed dead center at his head.
“Tell me who your U.S. government contact is.”
Azeem pushed out a hoarse croak as blood pooled on the floor beneath him.
“Say again,” B.J. demanded, lifting her foot off his throat.
When she heard the name, B.J. felt like someone had punched the breath out of her body.
“Sonofabitch,” Gabe swore.
Yeah, they’d been looking for a traitor. And yeah, they’d been looking in their own government. But the hard fact was that none of them really wanted to believe it. They’d wanted a different explanation. They’d wanted to believe in good guys.
Abdul Azeem had just forced them to deal with the ugly truth.
“What are we going to do with him?”
“It’s already done,” Rafe said quietly.
B.J. looked down.
Sheik Abdul Azeem, a religious fanatic, a terrorist responsible for the deaths of thousands, was dead.
Rafe carefully removed the Glock from B.J.’s hand. She hadn’t even been aware that she was still holding it.
“Let’s get the hell out of here.”
Reed and Doc were waiting in the vans, motors running, when the six of them materialized out of a darkness that hovered on the cusp of dawn. No sooner had they climbed inside than an explosion shook the earth and sent a shock wave reverberating through the surrounding area. B.J. watched through the van’s windshield as two additional charges detonated, raining fire and billowing black smoke and flying debris a quarter of a mile in all directions. By nightfall there would be little left of the facility but smoldering ash.
They’d just pulled out onto the street when a fourth concussion of sound thundered from beyond the wharf. Even at this distance, a wash of sea spray splattered the windshield in a blowback from the charges Reed and Doc had set to destroy the sub and everything in it.
“Time to go home.” Rafe put his arm around her and pulled her close.
“Yeah,” she whispered as the adrenaline let down and left her with no defense against his embrace. “It’s time.”
“Hard to believe I had to get tough with you to get you to take me to bed.” Completely comfortable in her nakedness, Stephanie lay back on the pillow, smiling at this beautiful man with the sensual hands.
Magic hands that performed magic acts.
She’d never been this way with a man before. Wanton. Uninhibited. Never known she was such a sexual creature. But then, she’d never known Joe. Not like this.
“Umm. Yeah. Right … there.” She groaned in pleasure as Joe sat cross-legged in front of her, one of her feet flattened against his naked chest, the other foot swallowed up in those big, sensual hands as he massaged her arch.
She knew she was supposed to be frightened. She knew she was supposed to be far more concerned about what was happening in the real world. But she didn’t want to face that world right now. She wanted to lose herself in this one.
Lose herself in this beautiful, amazing man as she’d been lost in him for the past two days and nights.
“I’ve always had a crush on you, you know,” she admitted as he extended his massage to her calf.
He smiled, slow and…yeah, sweet.
“What’s that mean?” she asked, curling her toes into his chest.
“It means I’ve always had a crush on you, too.”
“Oh, yeah? So when were you ever going to let me know about that?”
His hands moved to her inner thigh and she shivered as his fingers brushed against her pubis.
“Guess we’ll never know, will we?” He touched her then. Gently parted her thighs, caressed her until she arched against his fingers as they slid in and out of her.
“Joe …” She sighed his name, felt the heat coil tight and low. “God… Joe…”
And then he was there again. Inside her. Filling her. Thrilling her. Reminding her that this was the only place in the world she wanted to be.
“Tell me this isn’t just about sex,” she whispered later when he held her close, stroked her back, settled her as she made the slow, liquid descent from a Joe Green–induced high.
His hand stilled. And for an instant so did his breathing.
She pushed up on an elbow. Searched his face, saw nothing that she wanted to see there. Devastated, she looked away. How could she have been so wrong?
“Sorry,” she said, telling herself she wasn’t going to lose it. “I…well. I guess I put my foot in that one.”
“Stephanie—”
“No. No, it’s all right,” she interrupted when she realized how uncomfortable she’d made him. “That was my bad. Forget I said anything.”
“Stephanie.” His tone demanded that she look at him. “It’s not just about sex.”
She searched his face. “But?” The qualifier was as big as an elephant.
“But you don’t know who I am. You don’t know what I’ve done.”
Ah. Now she got it. “Don’t know who you are?” Between making love and eating and sleeping and making love again, they’d talked and smiled and shared huge pieces of their lives with each other. “Joe, I know everything I need to know about you.”
She sat up, pulling the sheet with her and tucking it under her arms. “Look. I know that up until these past few days we haven’t spent that much time together. I know it’s crazy but I feel like I know you better than I know myself.
“Bry … he used to write me about you guys, you know? He talked about you a lot. About how quiet and intense you were. About the strength of your character. About your big muscles and your bigger heart. So don’t tell me I don’t know you.”
The look he gave her broke her heart. Not for her, but for him.
“You don’t know what all I’ve done.”
“You’re right. I don’t know. But I know this. What you did, you did because you had to. You didn’t do it by choice. You didn’t do it for yourself. You did it for something greater. Something important. Something that was right, not something that was wrong.”
He crossed his hands behind his head, stared at the ceiling. “I’m not the man your parents would want for you.”
Oh, my God. There it was. “Joe. They adore you.” She dropped the sheet, leaned over him, kissed him. “I adore you.”
He finally looked at her. Touched a hand to her hair. A love so strong and tender welled up inside of her when she saw the longing in his eyes.
“You adore me, too.” This she now understood. “We’ll take it slow, okay?”
> He smiled then. Surrendered. “So, what’s your definition of slow?”
She laughed. “We’ll figure that out as we go along.”
He pulled her down next to him, held her against his side. “That’ll work.”
They’d just drifted off again when his cell phone rang.
“Green.”
Stephanie watched his face as he concentrated on the call.
“What? What’s happening?”
“That was Nate. They did it. They destroyed the bomb and the facility.”
“Thank God.” She hugged him hard. “Where are they? Are they okay?”
“Yeah. Yeah. B.J. and Rafe both had minor scrapes but they’re okay. They’re on their way home.”
“Thank God,” she said again. “This means we can go home, too.”
“Not just yet,” he said. “There’s the little matter of taking care of a traitor.”
At sixty-three, Senator Joan Bentley was still an attractive woman. She wore her straight, ash blonde hair in a stylish bob, exercised daily, and credited her size-four suits and low blood pressure to Pilates.
She preferred a good pinot noir to a chardonnay, liked her steak rare and her lobbyists generous. While she had been elected on the Independent ticket, she was known on the hill as a bipartisan player. She often found herself in the position of being the swing vote that could make or break a politician’s favorite piece of legislation.
She enjoyed the power that afforded her. She enjoyed the perks that allowed her to live the lifestyle of her choosing. And while her divorce five years ago had been cause for concern, her reelection team had put a magnificent spin on the whole unfortunate incident by painting Freeman Bentley as a womanizer as well as a blood-sucking leech who depended on her generosity for his support. In the end, she’d won the sympathy vote and cruised to victory in a landslide for her fourth term in office.
If asked, she couldn’t tell you the exact moment when she had made a decision that had forever altered the course of her life, but it had all started with Freeman. He had contested the divorce, of course. Getting rid of him had been costly; his insistent threats of blackmail were untenable. That was the first time she’d called Alex Brady and his team.
Freeman hadn’t gone softly into that good night. His death, determined a tragic suicide, had been widely covered in the press. Even in death, he’d been a ball and chain around her neck.
Next came the opportunity to invest as a silent partner in her brother’s brilliant Ponzi scheme. It had netted her millions. And when, on a goodwill visit to Turkey, she’d received a message from a cabinet minister requesting her discretion and her presence at an un-sanctioned meeting, the investor in her sensed an opportunity was about to be put in play.
Of course, there had been no Turkish minister waiting for her when a car and driver had picked her up and delivered her to a secret location. None other than Sheik Abdul Azeem had greeted her and any kernel of patriotic red, white, and blue she still embraced gave way to the color of the sheik’s money.
She thought about all these things now as she walked the halls in the Pentagon on her way to a meeting with Secretary of Defense Blaylock. While it was a bit unusual to be summoned to his office, it had been inevitable that she would eventually get a call to meet with him since she did sit on the defense appropriations committee. Her ties there had given her a direct pipeline to NSA and Alan Hendricks.
So no, she wasn’t concerned about this meeting. Except possibly that it might keep her from her biweekly appointment with her manicurist.
There was no way in hell she could be tied to Azeem’s terrorist plot. Failed plot, apparently, because the sky hadn’t fallen as planned. She’d been trying to reach Garcia for over twelve hours to find out what the hell had happened. Someone had obviously fucked up.
Frankly, that was fine with her. She’d gotten her money and she hadn’t been looking forward to the inconvenience of dealing with the fallout from the E-bomb. The Tompkins woman was still a worrisome detail but Hendricks would eventually take the fall for that and the dead couldn’t defend themselves.
Finally, she reached the sec def’s office. She ran a hand over her hair to smooth it and rapped on the door.
“Come in.”
She smiled broadly, extending her hand as she approached the secretary’s desk. “Secretary Blaylock. Good to see you.”
Only when she was met with silence did she have the presence of mind to glance around the office. All the blood drained from her face when she recognized the three other individuals in the room.
Dale Sherwood from DIA.
Anne Tompkins from DOJ.
Robert Tompkins, whose face had become so famous when he’d been the advisor to President Billings.
She’d been blindsided.
A profound panic sent her heart racing. She was swamped by a wave of dizziness and disbelief as she turned slowly back to Secretary Blaylock.
His mouth was moving but the sudden ringing in her ears—her own death toll—drowned out his words.
The door opened and a uniformed officer entered the room.
Over. It was all over.
Everything she’d worked for. Everything she’d planned.
Prison. Oh God. She could not go to prison. They’d eat her alive there.
She sank down in the nearest chair before her knees gave out on her.
And then she prayed for a fatal heart attack.
31
“Thanks, Stephanie. Yeah. Yeah, I’m doing fine. Sure. We’ll be in touch. And Stephanie. I’m sorry about your friend.”
B.J. slowly hung up the phone. Careful of her arm, she leaned back against her sofa.
It was over. Stephanie had just called to let her know that Senator Bentley had spilled it all.
Greed. A four-term senator had sold out her country for greed.
B.J. was so tired. Tired of “patriots” who skewed their views of democracy for their own gain.
“It’s not like Nine-Eleven. No one was going to get hurt.” That was how the senator had twisted logic to soothe her conscience.
“E-bombs kill electronics, not people. It would ruin the electrical infrastructure, that was all, an infrastructure that was already in shambles. So in the end, the attack would have been beneficial when we rebuilt.”
Never mind that the entire economic structure of the United States—already stressed to the max—would have collapsed, leaving the country vulnerable not only to a physical attack but to a financial takeover by a totalitarian government. Life as we knew it would have been over. Democracy would have been over.
And people had died. Lives had been affected. Stephanie had almost been killed and now she had to live with the knowledge that her friend Ben Brommel was dead because she had involved him in the search for the traitor.
B.J.’s own life had been affected. She’d experienced Raphael Mendoza and she would never be the same again.
It had been almost twenty-four hours since they’d landed back in D.C. She checked her watch. Twelve hours since she’d last seen Mendoza.
Doc had cleaned up her arm and treated it before they’d boarded the plane home.
“You need to see a doctor.”
She could see in Rafe’s eyes that he agreed but hadn’t let the concern sway her.
“I will. When we get back.”
He must have understood that she wasn’t budging so he hadn’t pushed. But as soon as they were wheels down and they made arrangements for a car, they headed straight for Gabe’s doc friend at Bethesda, who had patched her up, shot her full of antibiotics, and ordered her to come back in two days so he could redress the wound.
“I’ll be fine,” she’d insisted when Rafe had brought her back to her apartment.
He’d wanted to stay. She’d known he wanted to stay. Just like she’d known she had to insist that he didn’t.
“Okay. You want space. I get it,” he’d finally said, his face worried and grim, and him not one bit happy about leaving. “But
you call, okay? You need anything, you call.”
She hadn’t called.
She wasn’t going to call.
What had happened between them in Colombia— well. It had happened. She couldn’t take it back. But she couldn’t look back either.