“Jake,” Harvard said, his voice thick with emotion. “Zoe doesn’t need our help anymore.”
No. Jake knew what they were telling him, but he couldn’t believe it. He looked at Billy and saw the awful truth echoed in the kid’s eyes.
“She’s dead,” Billy said. “I’m sorry, Jake.”
Chapter 19
Zoe was dead.
Jake stood there. Somehow he managed to stand there, to keep his knees from crumbling, to keep himself from folding into a ball of pain and anguish. “No,” he said.
“Lucky saw that prick Vincent kill her. He shot her right before the power went down.” Wes sounded strangled.
Zoe was dead.
Pain screamed through Jake, growing louder, stronger with every beat of his heart, with every ragged breath that he took. And as it grew, it changed. It boiled and churned and hardened and blackened, and it numbed him. It deadened him, and all the joy and the life that Zoe had breathed back into him with her laughter and brightness over the past few weeks dried up and skittered away like leaves in the cold winter wind.
Zoe was dead.
“Please, Jake,” Harvard said again. “We’ve got what we came for. The Triple X has been recovered. It’s time to move you to safety, sir.”
Zoe’s arm was on fire.
She sat on the floor of Christopher Vincent’s inner office in the dim emergency light, bleeding onto the carpet, listening to the sound of the CRO guards pounding on the steel-reinforced door.
She’d surprised Vincent by rushing toward him rather than away right before he’d discharged his weapon. She’d dived for his feet, and he’d tried to compensate, but his bullet had only skimmed her.
It was just enough to make her bleed like crazy and hurt like hell.
But at least she wasn’t dead.
And the pain was a good thing. She could use it to keep her focus—to keep herself from blacking out from that blow to the head he’d given her.
She crawled toward Christopher’s desk on her hands and knees, afraid if she stood up, she’d fall over.
She searched the desks, hoping for some kind of weapon—a handgun, a switchblade, anything.
She found a book of matches and…She had no pockets. Damn, not wearing her jeans was so inconvenient. She tucked it into her bra, hoping she wouldn’t inadvertently light herself on fire.
The door to the fabled inner chamber was still tightly locked, and she searched for a paper clip. She unfolded it and set to work on the lock.
Jake looked at the Uzi in his hands. “Does somebody have an M16 for me, or am I going to have to use this piece of crap?”
The captain finally cleared his throat and spoke. “Begging your pardon, Admiral—”
He looked into the man’s compassionate brown eyes. “No,” he said. “No, Captain, I’m not ready to be taken to safety. I suggest if you have further support available, you talk to them via radio and tell them about the hole I just blew in the fence. Remind them that there are women and children here. I need eyes open and brains working. No autopilot. The same goes for the rest of you. Because we’re going in there. Our goals are twofold, gentlemen. We’re going to apprehend Christopher Vincent. And we’re going to recover Zoe’s body. She was a member of this team, and SEALs don’t leave teammates behind. Even when they’re KIA.”
Killed in action. Jake’s voice shook. Even the numbness spreading through him couldn’t keep him from hurting as he spoke the acronym he’d hated so passionately for so many years.
Zoe had loved him. A miracle had happened, and he’d been given a second chance to find happiness. She hadn’t been Daisy, but no one was. No one could have replaced all that he’d had with Daisy. But in the exact same way, Daisy hadn’t been Zoe. Zoe had touched parts of Jake’s soul that Daisy would never have been able to reach even if their life together had lasted another thirty years.
There was no way really to compare, no contest as to which woman he had loved most, because although he had loved them both, he’d loved them differently.
And yet, when Zoe had offered him forever, he’d been too obsessed with doing the math. He was too old for her. When she turned fifty, he’d be seventy-four—if he even lived that long. It had seemed so absurd, and he couldn’t understand why she would want that, why she would want him.
But he understood now. Because love didn’t always make mathematical sense. And forever was completely relative. Zoe wasn’t ever going to turn fifty now. Not ever. Her forever had been obscenely short.
And Jake had forsaken every opportunity in the far-too-briefness of their time together and hadn’t even told her that he loved her.
He felt ancient as he looked into the still-young faces of his SEAL team. “I loved her,” he said, his words far too little, far too late. “Who’s going to help me bring her out?”
Bobby stepped forward, pulling a twelve-gauge shotgun from a holster he wore on his back. “Since you’re taking the point, Admiral, you might want to carry this.”
Admiral. When Bobby said it like that, it wasn’t a title, it wasn’t a rank. It was his old nickname from Nam.
Harvard nodded, his dark brown eyes deadly. “We’re right behind you, Admiral. Lead the way.”
Zoe found it.
The Triple X.
Behind the locked door to Vincent’s inner chamber, inside a cheaply made safe.
It was no longer stored in the testing lab’s metal canisters. Instead, someone had put the powder in old coffee cans. Here at the CRO compound, they’d replaced the Folgers crystals with the dried ingredients of a deadly nerve gas.
In the office, the door strained against the battering it was receiving from Vincent and his guards.
Zoe closed and locked the door to the inner chamber, and using all her Girl Scout training, she set about building a campfire in a small metal trash can right on top of Christopher Vincent’s conference table.
She could only destroy half of the chemicals. There was no sprinkler system in this part of the factory, but the possibility of someone bursting in and spraying the fire with water and creating a massive amount of potent Trip X was not worth the risk.
She used single sheets of paper as kindling and twisted chunks of computer reports in place of wood.
She took the matchbook from her bra and lit the fire, waiting for it to really start burning before she added the A component of the Triple X.
She knew that the chemical would burn clean. The smoke would be nontoxic. But smoke didn’t have to be toxic to kill.
This room had no windows and only the one door.
Already the smoke was chokingly thick.
She added the first coffee can of chemicals to the fire, then stayed low to the floor. She stayed as far away as she could from the flames, praying she’d have time to destroy all the chemicals before the smoke overcame her.
The fire alarm went off.
Jake and his team had just moved out of the stairwell and onto the fifth floor.
The noise was deafening—it came from one of those old-fashioned bells attached to the concrete block wall. It was good. It would mask their approach. No one would hear them coming.
There was one emergency light at the end of the hallway. It was old, with a bulb that sputtered and flickered, giving the impression that they were lit by leaping flames.
Welcome to hell.
Jake slowed as they moved closer to the door that led to Christopher Vincent’s private suite of rooms. And when the door opened, he moved against the wall into the shadows. He didn’t need to look behind him to know that Harvard and the rest of the team had disappeared, as well.
Christopher came striding out.
He was followed by his entourage of guards and lieutenants.
“Get the car, Reilly,” he ordered. “Bring it to the front and—”
Jake stepped into the light, shotgun held high, finger heavy on the trigger. “I think you can probably leave the car in the garage for now, Reilly,” he said, shouting over the noise of
the alarm.
Christopher Vincent froze, but behind him, a half a dozen guards shouldered their weapons.
Jake didn’t have to turn around to know that his SEALs were standing behind him, their weapons already locked and loaded. He could see them in the eyes of Vincent and his men.
“What do you think, Chris?” Jake shouted over the alarm. “My guess is we could have it out right here. Maybe some of your guys will get away, but you sure as hell won’t. Do you know what a twelve-gauge can do to a man at ten feet?” Jake turned his head slightly without ever letting his eyes leave Vincent. “Hey, Bob, what you got in here? Double ought buckshot?”
“Five rounds of it.” Bobby’s deep bass voice had no problem cutting through the racket.
“One round’ll do,” Jake told the CRO leader. “Think of it as the equivalent of me firing, oh, about six or seven regular bullets all at the same place at the same time. It’ll put a big hole in you, Chris. And while I’m looking forward to doing that, you may not be, in which case it would be really smart of you to tell your men to drop their weapons. Now.”
Jake had played mind-game poker plenty in his career, but this was no bluff. He suspected Chris recognized the edge of insanity he saw in Jake’s eyes.
“Do as they say,” Christopher ordered his men.
Harvard took over, collecting their weapons, pushing the men onto the ground and searching them none too gently for anything they might be carrying concealed.
“Can someone shut that damn thing off?” Jake asked. His head was aching and his stomach hurt. Part of him wished Christopher Vincent hadn’t given in. It didn’t seem fair that he was still alive while Zoe…
He was going to have to go in there, into Vincent’s quarters, and carry Zoe’s lifeless body out of here.
Bobby raised his MP-4, and, firing a single burst, shot the alarm bell right off the wall. The silence seemed only to emphasize Zoe’s absence.
“McCoy and I’ll hold Bozo and his clowns here,” Captain Joe Catalanotto of Alpha Squad volunteered. “We’ve got another team already inside the gate coming up to meet us, but it might be a good idea to use Vincent as a hostage, guaranteeing our safety out of here.”
“I’ve got a sit-rep if you want one, Admiral,” Harvard said.
Jake didn’t have a headset, but the other men did. “Any casualties?”
“None so far.” Harvard corrected himself. “Besides Zoe.” He cleared his throat. “The other teams have run into some opposition, but not a lot. A couple of men have locked themselves in one of the storage sheds. And we had a sniper on the roof with the lousiest aim in the Western Hemisphere. He’s been taken care of.”
Jake looked at the captain. “These dirtwads are going to be charged with treason, conspiracy and murder. If they so much as look at you funny,” he ordered, “shoot them.”
“With pleasure.”
Wes stepped forward. “Admiral, I want to bring to your attention the fact that there’s a raftload of smoke coming from Vincent’s quarters.”
Smoke.
It was rolling out the door, already thick against the high ceiling of the hallway.
Holding his shotgun at the ready, Jake pushed through the door into Christopher’s outer office. The smoke was even thicker in there.
He braced himself as he made a quick visual sweep of the room, but there was no sign of Zoe, no broken body bleeding on the floor.
The door to Christopher’s private office was hanging on its hinges. The smoke seemed to be coming from there. Covering his face with one arm, Jake again took the point.
Zoe wasn’t in Christopher’s private office, either.
The smoke was coming from behind the door to Christopher’s inner chamber.
Hope hit Jake hard in the chest, taking his breath away. Somehow Zoe had survived. Somehow she’d gotten in here, found the Triple X and was now…burning it?
But Harvard had told him they’d recovered the missing canisters, and Lucky had seen Zoe….
Die? Or fall? And what exactly had been inside those canisters Lieutenant Jones had recovered? No one besides Zoe would be able to identify whether or not it actually was the Trip X.
The door to the inner chamber was locked, and Jake pounded on it. “Zoe! It’s me! It’s Jake—open up!”
Harvard was beside him, compassion in his eyes. “Sir, I don’t—”
“She’s in there!” Jake was sure of it. But the smoke was in there, as well. And just standing out here was making him choke and cough.
This door was as heavily reinforced as the other. The lock was a piece of junk, but it would take too many precious minutes to pick it. If Zoe was in there, she’d been breathing in the smoke for quite some time. If she was in there, she was dying.
Jake hadn’t been able to do a damn thing when Daisy had died. He hadn’t been able to fight her cancer, to wrestle it to the ground and even try to save her life.
But he sure as hell could try to save Zoe.
“Stand back,” Jake ordered, tossing the shotgun to Bob and taking the last of his C-4 from his pocket. It wouldn’t take much, just a little around the lock. He lit the fuse, moved behind Vincent’s desk and…
Boom.
The door swung open, and smoke billowed out, chokingly thick, coming from a garbage can that flamed atop a huge conference table.
Jake was the only man without a gas mask but the first one inside. He couldn’t see a damned thing, but if Zoe were in here, she’d be on the ground.
He found her in the corner. She’d torn nearly half the carpeting off the floor, yanking and pulling it on top of her to create a small pocket of air for herself.
She was unconscious and streaked with blood from a bullet wound on her arm and soot from the fire. But she was still breathing.
She was still alive.
Jake didn’t pretend that he wasn’t crying as he carried her out of there.
“She’s alive!” Wes was practically running in circles around him.
Harvard followed him, too, taking off his gas mask as they hit the fresher air in the hallway. “Sir, we intercepted six canisters of what we thought was the Triple X outside the gates. But it sure looks as if Zoe thinks she’s found the chemicals right here. There are six coffee cans in there, three empty. I think that’s what she was burning.”
“Stay with the rest of it, Senior,” Jake ordered him. “Don’t let it out of your sight.” He raised his voice. “I need to get Zoe down to the medics now. Let’s get this sideshow moving!”
With Vincent and his men in handcuffs, Bobby’s shotgun aimed at the CRO leader’s head, and with the rest of the SEALs surrounding Jake and Zoe, they went down the stairs and into the yard without mishap.
FInCOM had arrived, and as the dark-suited agents read Christopher Vincent his rights, Jake carried Zoe through the hole he’d blown in the fence to a waiting ambulance.
The medic gestured to a cot inside the vehicle. “You can put her there, sir.”
“No,” Jake said.
The medic looked at him in surprise.
Jake smiled to soften his words. “No, you see, I’m…I’m not going to let her go.”
“Ever?”
He looked down to see Zoe’s eyes had opened. Her voice was whispery from a throat that must’ve been raw from all the smoke she’d inhaled. Her hair hung in strings from her French braid, and her face was streaked with soot and blood. He was certain he’d never seen her look more beautiful.
“No,” he told her. “Not ever.”
The medic was about twenty years old and trying as hard as he could not to listen as he gently slipped several thin tubes from an oxygen tank into Zoe’s nose.
“Give us a minute,” Jake said to him. “Will you, pal?”
The medic faded back. Or maybe he didn’t. Maybe Jake just stopped seeing him as he lost himself in the depths of Zoe’s eyes.
He touched her then, her face, her hair, her throat, unable to keep his eyes from filling again with tears. “I thought you died,�
�� he told her quietly. “Lieutenant O’Donlon saw Vincent shoot you, and…we all thought he’d killed you, Zo.”
“Oh, Jake,” she whispered.
“But then you really could’ve died,” he said. “What the hell were you doing, starting a fire in a room without ventilation?”
“I was doing my job,” she said quietly. “And I trusted that you’d do yours and come get me out of there. I took a gamble that this teamwork thing would pay off.” She smiled. “I won.”
“Yeah,” Jake said. “I did, too.”
“I think this would be a really great time for you to kiss me,” she said.
Jake laughed and kissed her. “I love you, Zoe.”
She shook her head. “Oh, Jake, I don’t need you to say that.”
“Yeah, but I need to say it,” he said. “I thought I would never get a chance to. I thought…” He had to clear his throat before he could go on. “Zoe, I would be honored if you would agree to make this craziness legal and stay Zoe Robinson. You see, I’m too old to—”
“Jake, how can you ask me to marry you—in a completely half-assed way, might I add—and then in the same breath claim to be too old—”
“You want to let me finish? I am too old. I’m too old not to learn from the past. I didn’t expect to outlive Daisy,” Jake told her. “And let’s face it, babe, your job being what it is, it’s entirely possible that I could outlive you, too. I had a taste of that today, and it was pretty damn sobering. The truth is, neither of us can possibly know how much time we’ll have together. And we’re both of us too old to waste another precious second of it.”
Tears were leaving clean tracks in the soot on her face. For a tough operator, Zoe cried more than just about anyone he’d ever met. He kissed her. “Marry me.” He kissed her again, longer this time. “I want you to be my friend and my lover and my wife for however long forever lasts.” He smiled at her. “How was that? Not quite so half-assed that time?”
She was smiling through her tears. “That was…inspirational. And very persuasive.” She laughed. “Not that I particularly needed persuading.”
Tall, Dark, and Dangerous Part 2 Page 68