Hell or High Water

by Julie Ann Walker

  Doc’s grin melted away as he called Romeo a foul name beneath his breath. But to Leo’s surprise, Doc didn’t hightail it up to house. Instead he angled his head, his eyes searching Leo’s face over the glow of the fire.

  “Well?” Leo asked. “What are you waitin’ for?”

  “It, uh…” Doc lifted a hand to scratch his head.

  “What’s up, bro?” And, yes. More than his men, or his friends, or even his crew, the five guys who’d hitched their wagons to his mule were his brothers. In every way that counted.

  “You know, the, uh, the way I see it,” Doc said haltingly, “part of our pledge included no more pussyfooting around when it comes to going after the things we really want.” Leo watched Doc unconsciously rub the tattoo on the inside of his left forearm. “And it’s been obvious since day one that you want Olivia Mortier.”

  Damn. Just hearing her name spoken aloud made the hairs along the back of Leo’s neck stand up.

  “So, why don’t you send her an email, huh? See if she’ll take some time off from The Company to come down here for a little visit.” And now that smug smirk was back on Doc’s face. “Maybe after she’s wobbled your knob a time or two, you’ll stop mooning around like a lovesick teenager.”

  Sonofa—Sometimes it sucked ass living in such close quarters with a group of men trained and tested in the fine art of observation. “Wobble my knob? What are you? Thirteen?”

  “Avoiding the question?”

  Damnit. “For the record,” Leo growled. “I don’t want her to wobble my knob, as you so eloquently put it.” A voice inside his head warned him his nose would be growing Pinocchio-style any minute now.

  All right. So, if he was totally honest, he would have liked to see where things with Olivia were headed. He would have liked to know if all those not-so-subtle flirty looks and that one ball-tightening kiss could have turned into something more—knob wobbling included. Unfortunately, Fate had intervened in the form of the goatfuck of all goatfucks, which had precipitated his exit from the Navy and negated all chances that he’d ever again work in the same arena as one oh-so-tempting Olivia Mortier.

  He was a civilian now. And civilians and CIA field agents weren’t exactly known to find themselves in a position to mix it up. So even if he could convince her to take a vacation from missiles and mayhem, it’s not like there was any real chance at a future for them. After all, the woman was all about the adrenaline high, and he was…well…retired.

  Chapter Two

  3:21 a.m.…

  “We need to haul Leo Anderson’s ass out of retirement,” Olivia Mortier told her supervisor over the phone as she hastily threw T-shirts and shorts into an overnight bag, admonishing herself for not already being prepared to go. Then again, her part in this mission was supposed to be finished. She was supposed to have a night off because Morales was supposed to be running the show from here on out.

  But nothing is certain except death and taxes. Okay, and yeah. There was that.

  Blood rushed through her veins until it pounded in her ears, and her adrenaline was spiked way past the red line. She chalked up both afflictions to the fact that she’d just found out their scheme to root out the CIA mole or moles had officially and finally failed spectacularly, and not the fact that she might get the chance to work with Leo again.

  Big, world-weary Leo “the Lion” Anderson.

  A recollection of the last time she’d seen him blew through her brain like a mortar round, making her forget where she was in her packing. He’d been climbing into the back of a CH-47D heavy-lift Chinook helicopter, and when his dusty combat boots hit the ramp, he’d turned to look back at her, grabbing her hand and squeezing.

  Holy shit, you better believe the moment was crystalline in her memory…

  The wash from the rotors caused his sandy hair to riot around his head, and the shaggy beard covering his comic-book-hero-esque jaw had been matted with blood and dust. She’d wanted to tell him so much, too much because…well, because in the three months they’d been stationed together, she’d grown not only to like and respect him, but to care for him in a way she’d never cared for anyone.

  Of course, she’d done her duty and kept her mouth closed despite knowing that his hawk-like gaze was searching her face from behind the mirrored lenses of his sunglasses. And his expression in that moment? Sweet baby Jesus, even now, all these months later, it still made her sick to her stomach. It had been the look of a soldier who had crossed long miles on short rations. The look of a leader who had just seen one of his most loyal men loaded into a body bag.

  He didn’t know it—and a part of her, a cowardly part, hoped he’d never find out—but that body bag was all her fault…

  As it happened any time she thought about that catastrophic mission, a wave of unremitting guilt washed over her, the force of which was almost enough to drop her to her knees. Then Director Morales spoke up. “Why Anderson?” he asked, and she was able—just barely—to focus on the question and the problem at hand while pushing the paralyzing remorse to the back of her brain.

  Compartmentalization. It was a handy skill. One just about every CIA field agent learned to master lest one day they find themselves eating a bullet from their own service weapon. And considering her background, she was better than most at keeping things locked away in safe, separate emotional cubicles.

  What had she been doing? Oh yeah. She snapped her fingers. Underwear.

  Turning toward her dresser while balancing her cell phone between her shoulder and her ear, she told her boss, “Because he’s the best deep diver on the planet. And considering that the pressure gauges on those tracking devices say the package is sitting almost two hundred feet below the surface, we can’t take a chance with anyone but the best. Plus”—she sweetened the pot—“Leo is already in Florida with his very own salvage boat.” So sue her; she’d kept tabs on him.

  “By my calculations, he can reach the package in four hours once he pulls anchor, which might be faster than we could find other divers and scramble the equipment they would need to go down and do the retrieval. And if all of that doesn’t convince you, how about this? By using Leo, we can still maintain radio silence within government ranks. And that just might let us get out of this mess without alerting the traitor or traitors to the fact that we’re on to them. It might give us a chance to set another trap.”

  She figured that last bit was just the impetus her supervisor needed to give her the go-ahead. And cue the music…

  “What makes you think Anderson will agree to this?” Morales asked.

  “You mean besides him being a patriot, and that turning down a request for help from his country goes against his very nature?”

  “Yes”—Morales’s tone was skeptical—“besides that.”

  “He needs money.” And, okay, so she’d really, really been keeping tabs on him. That was her nature. She was a spy, after all.

  If that’s what you have to tell yourself…

  For the love of—Fine. So, the truth was she couldn’t seem to forget about him or what had happened on that arid plateau. And even if she hadn’t realized it before now, she’d been looking for a way to help him. Looking for a way to—not make up for it; she could never make up for it—maybe balance the scales a bit. Put some providential change back into her karma bank. And put some actual change back into Leo’s real bank.

  See? It’s win-win!

  “Money for what?” Morales asked.

  “To pay for equipment, fuel, and all the other expensive crap that I suspect comes with searching for a four-hundred-year-old sunken ship.”

  There was silence on the other end of the line, and Olivia held her breath. Then, finally, “How much do you think it’d take to convince him?”

  Hip-hip-hooray! And since the CIA was in the business of carting around briefcases full of cash to pay off warlords, rebels, and mercenaries, she didn’t feel the least bit hesitant to tell her supervisor, “Half a million dollars would probably do it. Keep them
in the black for a year or so.”

  Without missing a beat, or likely batting a lash, Morales said, “Fine. I’ll have the cash waiting for you…where?”

  She shot an imaginary fist in the air. “Reagan National Airport. As soon as I hang up with you, I’ll request that one of my local assets have a private jet waiting for me on the runway there.”

  “You and your assets.” She could almost hear Morales shaking his head. He liked to tease her and say she collected informants, snitches, and sources the way a squirrel collected nuts.

  “You know me, sir. I figure it’s better to have a bird in hand and two in the bush.”

  He snorted. “I’ll meet you there and bring along an additional signal locator, as well as a secure satphone.”

  “Sounds like a plan,” she said, checking the time on her glowing digital alarm clock. “With drive time to the airport and flight time to Key West, I figure I’ll be on the ground in sunny Florida around daybreak. If you could have a floatplane ready to take me out to Lieutenant Anderson’s family’s island—”

  “Done,” Morales interrupted her, never one to use ten words when one worked just fine. She was in the process of shoving clean bras and panties into her go-bag when he added, “But I’m only giving you twenty-four hours. After that, I don’t care that we’ll blow the top off this operation”—and likely blow the top off their reputations and careers—“I’m calling in The Company big guns and doing whatever it takes to get back those chemicals.”

  “Roger that,” she said as she threw her toiletry kit into the black duffel.

  “And, Agent Mortier?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Be careful. We don’t know what happened out there. It’s entirely possible you could find yourself surrounded by unfriendlies. Since I can’t use the satellites to track you, I’ll be flying blind.”

  “I hear you, sir.” She shivered at the thought of floating out in the middle of the endless blue ocean, surrounded by members of the offshoot al-Qaeda faction. “But don’t worry. You can count on me.” And Leo Anderson. Because if it came to holding off a group of militants at sea, she could do a lot worse than the big SEAL nicknamed “the Lion.” But she probably couldn’t do much better.

  “I know I can,” Morales said. “Now, the question is, do you want me to have the A-Team meet you in Key West?”

  Olivia thought about arriving on Leo’s doorstep with a group of private contractors in tow and grimaced. “I think, given all parties involved, it would be better if I go it alone. But I wouldn’t be opposed to the apprehension team joining us out at the package.”

  “Done,” Morales agreed. “See you at the airport.” As was typical, the line went dead without her supervisor first signing off.

  Typing in the number for her asset at Reagan, she quickly made arrangements for the private jet. Then she opened the top drawer of her bedside table and pulled out her trusty Sig P228. When she first joined the CIA, she’d come to terms with the unsavory idea that at some point during her career, she would probably be forced to use her sidearm for more than simple dissuasion. But as the years dragged on, and the occasion for violence never presented itself, she’d begun to think perhaps Fate had thrown her a bone, kept her out of harm’s way so she would never have the weight of a lost life anchoring down her conscience.

  Of course, Fate wasn’t known to be a fickle bitch for nothing. True to form, all Olivia’s good fortune had ended in the most inconceivable way that day in the high desert when somehow, someway—she’d since come to suspect the mysterious CIA leaker’s involvement—her cover had been blown, and she was forced to end a man. It had been awful. Worse than she’d imagined. Particularly since that death had resulted in a blowback that claimed the life of one courageous American warrior.

  Not for the first time since that disastrous mission, she questioned whether she wanted to continue working for The Company. The stress she could handle. The danger and the intrigue? Piece of cake. But the killing and the death… Those were whole other ball games, weren’t they?

  “Sonofabitch,” she cursed, shaking her head at herself. “Get it together, Mortier.” Forcing some steel into her spine, she straightened her shoulders and took a quick look around the tiny loft she kept in Washington, DC.

  A full-sized bed with a drab, gray coverlet took up most of the space. It was flanked by two nondescript bedside tables she’d purchased five years earlier from IKEA. Not one piece of art graced the brick walls. Not one photo sat on a shelf. And rounding out the whole antithesis of Better Homes and Gardens decor was the uninspiring desk and chair she used on those rare occasions when she was home and needed to work on her laptop.

  As she turned toward the kitchen, the yellow wash of the overhead light revealed that the ivy plant she’d impulse-purchased a month ago—or had it been two months ago now?—had shriveled up and died in its pot on the windowsill. Its once-glossy leaves were brown and brittle. They seemed to mock her in death. Apparently she couldn’t even keep one hardy little vine alive. And that was just…something. Sad, maybe? Pathetic? More like typical.

  “Not leaving much behind, are you, old girl?” The words seemed to echo around the cramped space, circling back to slap her in the face.

  There had been a time, not so long ago, when she would have laughed at the melancholy turn of her thoughts. After all, the only thing she’d wanted since she was fourteen, sitting under the big oak tree in the orphanage yard and reading Tom Clancy novels, was to be a spy. Aloof. Unattached. Indifferent.

  But something had changed in the last several months. Something was…missing.

  A place to really call home? People to care about? People who cared about her?

  Sh’yeaaah, as if. She’d never had that. Never needed that. Never wanted that.

  But maybe it was recently reaching the milestone of her thirtieth birthday, or perhaps it was some sort of sadistically ticking biological clock thing, because the words sounded hollow even though they were banging around inside her own head.

  Okay, so if she wanted to be completely honest, the truth was that ever since Syria, ever since meeting Leo, ever since that kiss…

  Holy hell! That kiss!

  Even now, anytime she thought about it, she got all soft and gooey inside. All estrogen-y and womanly and not at all CIA agent-y, which was…not exactly something she was proud of, but there you go.

  “Sheesh, Mortier. You’re a sad piece of work. You can’t let one little smooch—” Wait…little? That kiss hadn’t come anywhere close to being little. In fact, in the Guinness World Records, you could probably find it under the title “Deepest and Hottest Lip Lock of the Century.” Because it’d been a long time coming. Three months to be exact, ever since they first locked eyes on each other. And just when she was beginning to think the man would never make a move, he did.

  They’d been standing in front of a weapons locker checking their inventory, of all things, when he suddenly turned to her, placed a warm, callused hand beneath her jaw, and lowered his head. His hot breath had whispered across her lips the second before his mouth landed atop hers. And when his tongue slowly, languidly pushed inside? Well, like a pin pulled from a grenade, her passion had exploded and her knees had buckled beneath her. Actually buckled. Which she’d thought only happened in sappy rom-coms and cheesy romance novels, but she’d learned that afternoon that fiction really did mirror fact.

  Well, whoopty-friggin’-doo! Good for you! Not.

  She squared her shoulders and tried again. “You can’t let one kiss throw a wrench into your entire life plan.”

  There. Done. She’d said it. And it was sound advice. Unfortunately, she knew it was advice she’d be hard-pressed to heed. Because she was mere hours away from seeing Lieutenant Leo “the Lion” Anderson again…

  * * *

  7:34 a.m.…

  Everything inside Leo’s skull—gray matter, blood, cerebrospinal fluid, what have you—had congealed into one giant throb of hangover pain. He lay motionless in the
hammock strung up between two palms. The shrill cock-a-doodle-doo of the rooster that had stowed away on the catamaran during one of their many supply runs from Key West to Wayfarer, and the fact that Meat was bathing the fingers of the hand he had hanging over the hammock in rancid doggy slobber, made Leo seriously consider the possibility that he might be doing himself and everyone else in the world a giant favor if he tied a load of rocks around his waist and chucked himself into the ocean.

  Why? Why had he thought it would be a good idea to polish off the last of the beer with his uncle after Doc, Romeo, and the ladies turned in for the night? He was a reasonable, rational, grown-assed man. So, repeat, why had he done this to himself?

  Oh yeah. That’s right. Because without the benefit of his friends’ ribald conversation to distract him—and probably owing much to Doc’s knob-wobbling comment—his mind had shot like an arrow from a speargun straight to Olivia and that god-awful mission. To dull the memories, one still so painful it made it hard for him to breathe and the other so damned hot it made him hornier than a forty-year-old virgin, he’d chosen door number two when his uncle asked him, “So, you want to talk about it, or you want to drink about it?”

  Bad idea. Really, really bad idea.

  A dull shnick-ing sound told him his uncle had just pressed Play on the bright-yellow boom box circa 1980-something that sat on a small wrought iron table on the front porch. The thing ate D batteries by the half dozen and came equipped with exactly three cassette tapes: Bob Marley, Harry Belafonte, and Jimmy Buffett. Just those three because his uncle’s musical tastes were embarrassingly limited, and because the rest of the guys wouldn’t have the first clue how to contribute to the selection of tunes because, you know…cassette tapes. Enough said.

  Leo had a brief moment to wonder which song his uncle had chosen to start off the day when—ah, Christ, I should have known—Bob Marley started crooning in his Jamaican accent to smile wit dee risin’ sun!

  “Shit,” Leo groaned as he carefully lifted the hand not being bathed by Meat’s big, wet tongue. He pressed it to his forehead as he slowly, gingerly pushed into a seated position, careful to keep his eyes slammed shut against the merciless rays of dee risin’ sun already hanging hot and heavy above the eastern horizon.