Bill’s nostrils flared but he didn’t look away from Robert. “Not without my lawyer present.”
Robert made a sound of disgust, picked up the handset on the desk and dialed a number. “Come get him.” He’d just placed the handset back into its cradle when two Special Protection Officers came in to read Bill his rights as they cuffed him. In the vacuum of silence that followed after he was taken from the room, Aaron spoke up.
“I’m sorry,” he said, looking at each of them individually. “I honestly thought I was telling the security team.” He swallowed, took in the blood on Wade’s shirt and Schafer’s hoodie and jeans. Turning his gaze back to Robert, he frowned. “The security team. You said—”
“All dead,” the director confirmed. He met Wade’s stare. “Found the three others dead in one of their vehicles about a half mile west of the house.”
Aaron sucked in a ragged breath and dragged a hand through his hair, looking shaken. “Jesus, I’m sorry. So, so sorry, I…” He trailed off, looking sick to his stomach and Wade actually felt bad for the kid.
“Go down to the conference room,” Robert told him. “We’ll need an official statement from you. And you, if you’re up to it,” he added, looking at Schafer.
“Yeah, of course,” Schafer said, though it was clear from the looks of him that he should still be lying down in the medical area.
“Okay, then let’s head down to—” Robert paused when someone else knocked on the door. “Come in.”
The door edged open, revealing another employee Wade recognized but couldn’t remember his name. The man nodded at Wade before speaking to Robert. “Something just came in. It’s big.”
Robert eased onto the corner of his desk and waved the man in. “Shut the door. This is Chris Pollock,” he told everyone. “One of the heads of our covert ops division.”
Pollock closed the door behind him and looked questioningly around the room, his brows drawn together in a frown.
“Go ahead. This involves all of them, so they deserve to know.”
Pollock raised his eyebrows at that and cleared his throat, clearly surprised to divulge this kind of intel in front of civilians. “Probable hit on Rahim’s location.”
Wade stiffened and released Erin’s shoulder, took a step toward Pollock before he realized what he was doing. “Where?” The word came out low, raspy, a surge of raw adrenaline punching through his bloodstream.
Pollock met Wade’s gaze. “You Sandberg?” When he nodded, the man continued. “Intercepted a phone call about thirty minutes ago. From a ship entering a harbor here in Virginia, not far from DC. Low level radioactive reading on board from what we can tell, but the call was between two men speaking in English, and the voice print is almost a dead match for Rahim. Port authorities have been alerted and we’re getting teams together.”
Excitement raced through Wade’s veins. Rahim was finally here, within reach. Wade could feel it. He wasn’t letting the bastard slip through their fingers again. Not this time.
“How sure are you it’s him?” Robert asked.
“Eighty percent,” Pollock answered.
“What about you? You ready?”
Wade turned his head and met the director’s cool stare. The man knew exactly how much he wanted this, what it meant to him, and that despite the fucked-up way Bill had gone about it, Wade was indeed the best bait for this shark. “More than.”
Robert stood and nodded as though he wasn’t surprised. “Come with Chris and me. Schafer, you go down to the conference room with Miss Kelly.” He strode for the door. Wade hung back. Erin was bending to help Schafer up, but Wade took her by the arm.
She looked up at him, and the pain and fear he saw there hit him like a kick to the solar plexus. “Give us a minute,” he said to Schafer, and pulled her out of the room. This far down the hallway it was quiet, and while they didn’t have complete privacy, it was as much as they were going to get. The moment he closed the door behind him she stepped back and wrapped her arms around her middle in a gesture of self-comfort. Wade set his hands on his hips and tried to think of what the hell to say. There were no good alternatives.
“You’re really going after him?” Her voice sounded small, uncharacteristically shaky.
He nodded, not knowing how to explain it to her. This thing between him and Rahim had always been personal. Now that he’d ordered a hit on Wade that had nearly cost Erin her life, it was even more so. “I know him best. He wants me almost as much as he wants to wage war on American soil. If he’s here, I’m the strongest currency the agency has to bring him out of hiding.”
She swallowed, blinked quickly a couple of times and it twisted his heart to know she was battling tears on his behalf. “So you’re going to what, sacrifice yourself? Stand out there and offer yourself up as human bait so they can bring him in—”
Wade stepped up close and curved a hand around the back of her neck to silence her. She bit her lip and lowered her gaze, hitching in a ragged breath that tore through him. “It has to be me. Can you try to understand? The risk he poses outweighs everything else.” Even his life, if necessary. He tightened his fingers slightly, desperate to get through to her, to make her see why it had to be this way. But goddamn it, he hated leaving her, hated going with all this uncertainty left between them.
He pushed out a breath and leaned his forehead against hers as the emotions bombarded him. Anxiety. Longing. An overwhelming sadness that this might be the last time he got to touch her. He didn’t know what to do with it all. “I never expected to fall for you,” he whispered, his throat tightening.
Her head jerked back and she stared up at him with those huge green eyes swimming with tears.
“I didn’t,” he insisted, feeling awed and bewildered at the realization that this woman meant so much to him. “You’ve made me feel things I never thought I’d—” He broke off, swallowing. Caressing her nape with his fingers, he cradled her cheek in his other hand and stared into her eyes. “It didn’t matter to me before if I lived or not, so long as I got him, but it’s different now. You matter to me, and I’m going to do everything in my power to come back for you. Okay?”
A tear slipped down her cheek, followed by two more, and his heart squeezed so tight that for a moment he couldn’t breathe. Erin took his face in her hands, gently shook him once. “I love you, Wade. Do you understand that? I fucking love you, and I don’t care if it’s too soon to say it or if it freaks you out. It’s how I feel, and if you don’t come back I don’t know how…I don’t know how I’ll…” She made a choked sound and flung her arms around him, burying her face in his chest as the silent sobs shook her.
Silently cursing at himself, Wade crushed her to him and pressed his nose into her hair. She was no doubt thinking about David and how he hadn’t come back, and panicking that Wade wouldn’t either.
He’d never expected her to say she loved him, but fuck, it filled him with such a fierce possessiveness that he thought his heart might explode. He’d only had two of what he’d classify as serious relationships before going undercover, and what he’d felt for both those women didn’t even come close to what he felt for Erin. He wrestled with his own feelings, struggling to make sense of them all. If love meant wanting to protect Erin from anything and everything that tried to hurt her and wanting to wake up next to her every single day… If it meant not being able to envision a life without her in it and being willing to stand by her through everything that came at them, including taking a bullet for her, then yeah, he loved her. The realization shook him to the core.
“I’m coming back for you,” he whispered fiercely. Part of him called himself out for being a chicken shit and not saying the words back to her, but he’d already bared his soul to her in a way he never had with anyone else. And he didn’t want to say them now in case he didn’t make it back from this. It would only make it harder for her to let him go. “I swear I will.”
She nodded and clung harder, the strength of her grip surprising him. He love
d the feel of her holding him so tight, pressed up against him like this, and wished they had more time.
“Sweetheart, I gotta go,” he murmured, regret in every word.
Erin squeezed him one last time and leaned back to cup his cheek. Her eyes were still wet, her dark lashes spiky with tear stains on her cheeks. She was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen.
I love you, sweetheart. His heart pounded with the fierceness of it.
Reaching up to take his face between her hands, Erin leaned up and gave him a tender, hungry kiss. Wade met it eagerly and drove his tongue into her mouth to taste her, caress her in this intimate way, hoping it wouldn’t be the last time. When he heard voices behind them down the hallway, he eased back and brushed the tears from her cheeks.
“You look after Schafer for me,” he told her. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
Biting her lip, she nodded, her eyes haunted by shadows he couldn’t erase. “Hurry back.”
“I will.” If he survived the coming battle, he’d move heaven and earth to get to her side, and spend the rest of his life earning the right to stay there.
Danger Close: Chapter Nineteen
The rig rolled away from the docks with a rattle of its trailer and exhaust streaming from the stacks on either side of the cab. From his hiding spot amongst some pallets stacked behind a medium-sized warehouse on the busy wharf, Rahim watched it cross the railroad tracks and make the turn onto the access road. The two-lane strip of asphalt would take it directly to the highway and onward to its final destination. Letting out a relieved breath, he lowered the binoculars.
Port security had been every bit as tight as he’d expected. He’d purposely had the device hidden in a container full of medical equipment to lower suspicion if the authorities happened to check inside or scan it with their mobile x-ray unit for radiation. By now, someone had to know he was trying to get into the U.S. Luckily, his container hadn’t been chosen for random inspection, likely because the importer the container was assigned to wasn’t flagged in the U.S. database. And they definitely wouldn’t be looking for a device in the food delivery truck he had waiting a few miles away. Some of his most trusted men were overseeing the transfer. He’d planted them months ago to work at the delivery company to ensure everything was in place. And now it was.
He checked his watch. Less than an hour from now, the tide of this war would shift. By then he’d be out of the port and on his first leg of the journey back to Pakistan.
And by then, Sandberg would be long dead.
He tugged his ball cap down low on his forehead and looked around, pulling in a deep breath of the cool, salt-tinged air. The docks were alive with activity, the cranes busy loading and unloading cargo from the four container ships docked here. Longshoremen drove forklifts as they moved cargo and supervised the loading of containers onto trucks. In the leaden sky that promised more rain, gulls and terns circled, their cries carried by the damp wind.
Stepping out from behind the pallets, he paused to let a forklift pass by, its driver barely sparing him a glance. Rahim smiled to himself. Everything had gone smoothly—far more smoothly than he’d ever dared hope. Customs officials had come aboard to check passports and do a search of the ship with sniffer dogs looking for drugs and bombs. Thankfully the container of medical equipment hadn’t been flagged.
It had been a ton of work behind the scenes to get what he needed to pull this off. His network had outdone themselves this time, hacking into various sites to get him the necessary documentation to pass through the tight security, then digging into employees’ backgrounds. They’d found someone here willing to take a bribe and look the other way while Rahim oversaw the loading of the container onto the truck because the man’s daughter had leukemia and he needed the money for medical costs his insurance didn’t cover.
There’d also been luck involved that the container hadn’t been one tagged to be searched at random—luck he knew had come directly from Allah. It was His hand alone guiding Rahim from this point onward.
He glanced down the length of the dock at the ship he’d come in on. It was already unloaded and refueled, about to leave port. Originally he’d planned to sail with it into international waters, but he’d since changed things so that a private helo would pick him up aboard a different ship once they were an hour out of port.
His boots made hollow thuds on the wooden planks as he strolled down the length of the dock. When the burner phone began to ring in his front pocket, he pulled it out and answered it, careful not to look around or do anything else that might cause suspicion.
“It’s me,” Safir said in English.
Anticipation tightened his muscles. “What’s up?” He turned sideways to squeeze between another forklift and a stack of pallets.
“How did the unloading go?”
“Great, no problems. How are things on your end?” He assumed that’s why Safir was calling.
“Couple things have come up.”
His focus sharpened on the conversation though he still maintained an awareness of what was going on around him. Safir must have news about the assassination. “Really?” A heady sense of anticipation bubbled up inside him.
“Heard back from a guy on the other crew. Apparently they missed the shipment.”
Rahim stopped walking as dread sliced through him. “All of it?”
“Yes. But there was a lot of damage. Emergency crews are at the house trying to put out the fire. And there was someone else involved, apparently. A man.”
Rahim frowned. “They don’t know who he was?”
“No, he just showed up at the start of everything. He left with the other two.”
The hit team had missed all of them? How was that possible? Where was the rest of the crew while the sniper had been engaged? He might not have had many options to choose from, Rahim had still hand-picked the crew, all American-born former military, and all willing to carry out the hit for the amount of cash Rahim had offered.
“Where are they now?” he asked, unable to keep the frustration out of his voice. He’d personally checked their backgrounds and credentials. There was no way all four of them could have let Sandberg, the woman and the stranger slip through their fingers, unless they were completely inept. For God’s sake, he’d made sure they’d been supplied with a top-of-the-line sniper rifle and a rocket launcher. How hard was it to hit a house with an RPG? A freaking twelve year old could do it.
“The shipments? No idea. The crew’s likely scattered, I would think.”
Because the cops and likely some Feds or CIA employees were combing the area for them, now that Sandberg and the others had reported everything. Rahim’s heart rate quickened and he resumed walking toward the waiting ship. “Is that it?” The bitter sting of disappointment filled him. He’d wanted Sandberg to die before this new phase of the war began. But maybe it was Allah’s will to let him live to see it.
“No, there’s more. I got an interesting phone call from our source a few minutes ago.”
“What did he want?”
“They know where you are. The main shipment is on its way to the docks right now.”
Rahim stopped and whirled, scanning the leaden sky above as his bravado evaporated. The cries of the gulls and sounds of the port surrounded him as he strained to listen for the thud of approaching rotors. Jihad—Sandberg, he corrected angrily—was coming here? In the wake of the shock of that piece of intel, the quick burst of elation he felt was smothered by a layer of fear. He hadn’t expected this. Hadn’t even anticipated it. Was that why Sandberg had escaped death this morning—so Rahim could deliver it by his own hand? Was this Allah’s will at work?
“I’ve already contacted your driver,” Safir went on, meaning the helo pilot. “He left about ten minutes ago and should be showing up within the half hour. I told him to keep the same pickup point.”
Rahim heard the words but his mind was racing. If what Safir had been told was true, the port would be swarming with tactical teams
by then. Even as he thought it, he noticed a group of security personnel dressed in black step out of a building partway down the adjacent dock. One of them was a dog handler, his big Belgian Malinois waiting calm but alert at his side. The men were looking at a piece of paper together, and Rahim knew it was an APB about him.
“I’ll talk to you later,” he said to Safir, and quickly disconnected. They could only trace his phone if it was on so he turned it off and shoved it back into his pocket in case he needed to call the pilot directly and change plans again. For now he needed to get out of sight and hunker down.
Tugging the brim of his cap even lower, he put his hands in his pockets and made for the ship waiting second-to-last in line. A sense of urgency drove him, made his heart thud in time with his rapid steps. He didn’t see any security personnel at the ship yet, but the tingling at the back of his neck told him the danger was increasing. At least the truck had left port without any problems. Even if authorities suspected what was happening and were searching for radiation signatures throughout the city, the bomb’s reading should be low enough that it was unlikely they’d find it in time to disarm it.
Everything hinged on that. If he died, so be it, but not until the bomb detonated. And not by some random bullet fired by a stranger. No. If he died here, it would be while taking Sandberg with him.
He showed his fake credentials at the ship and received permission to board. Other crew members—a mix of mostly Americans and Puerto Ricans—went about their business as he passed them on the way to his locker where he stopped to pick up a backpack before heading up to the cargo deck.
Once up there he found a good vantage point and hid himself behind the corner of a container to take another look with his binoculars. Sure enough, security teams were sweeping the port, slowly working their way from the access road toward the docks. Though he might be able to sneak past if he left now, it was unlikely he’d make it to the access road and find a vehicle without being noticed.
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