Drake was sitting in the armchair with his feet propped on the bed.
He was shaking his head, but his eyes didn’t move from looking at her.
“Damn, woman. I could really get used to being around you.”
Right. He’d been in the room when she’d stripped on her way to the closet.
She kicked his leg hard enough to hurt, “Thought you were in a hurry.”
“You’re enough to make a man think very slow thoughts.” But he clambered to his feet. “Metal detectors at the ramp. No weapons bigger than a four-inch knife allowed.”
“Shit!” She untucked her shirt and pulled the nice little Glock 36 Subcompact Slimline out of the small of her back and returned to the closet to lock it in her rifle case.
“Extra rounds?”
She pulled the two clips out of her back pocket and tossed them in as well.
“My kinda gal,” he took her hand and led her out into the suite.
“That didn’t take the two of you nearly long enough,” Zoe protested from the chair she’d been slouched in.
“Don’t you ever think about anything other than sex?”
“Hunter-killer drones. But other than that? Why bother.”
Altman was already by the door.
Arthur didn’t look happy when Drake led his entourage as the last ones on the open taxi boat, but he was too buried in the crowd to make an excuse and rush for the exit.
Belize City harbor was too shallow for the big cruise ships. Even their mid-sized model couldn’t make it in. But the city had a jitney service of hundred-passenger open boats that had rushed out to unload the cruise ship and take them the twenty minutes to shore. For twenty minutes, Arthur wasn’t going anywhere, so Drake sat in his seat and ignored him.
A very curved lady with skin the color of warm chocolate and hair curling well past her shoulders stood up front. In charming British English she told the passengers about the wonderful opportunities to be found in Belize. There were apparently still open slots in diving, caving, river rafting, and Mayan temple jungle tours. He let her liquid accent lull him into a comfortable semi-trance state as they powered toward shore.
Nikita curled up against him and appeared to be just as content as he was to take in the sunshine, the sea air, and the twenty minutes of peace.
“We are now arriving in the Tourist Village. There are many shops and restaurants to explore here if you are not traveling farther afield on one of our tours. We do wish to caution you to be careful beyond the boundaries of this area. There are clear signs posted. There are parts of Belize City that I regret to say are not very safe and you certainly don’t want to be caught there after dark.”
After weaving through various anchored boats—mostly luxury yachts in the eighty- to hundred-and-fifty-foot range—the jitney nudged up to a dock and unloaded from the same ramp. They’d been last on, so they were first off.
A glance to Altman, and he and Zoe hung back. Drake led Nikita slowly up the dock and toward town. So slowly that Arthur would have no choice but to catch up with them as the crowd cleared. Zoe and Altman would make sure that he was herded along.
They were three quarters of the way down the nearly empty pier when they all came together. Zoe’s idle chatter warned him that the gap between them was now under a dozen meters. He turned aside.
The big industrial piers with their cargo containers were in another section of the city, away to the south. This was a tourist transit pier, colorfully decorated with a scattering of old maritime equipment tucked here and there under the well-spaced palm trees that he supposed would be considered a festive air.
Arthur had to know he was in a pincer, so he followed them until all five of them were in a tall palm’s shade.
“It would have been easier if you had bought the painting,” Arthur sighed. “I had to go to rather a lot of difficulty to avoid selling it last night.”
“So you had us shot at to make up for it?”
“Shot at?” that surprised him enough that he tipped his head down to look at Drake over the top of his sunglasses. “Who shot at you?”
Altman’s curse was emphatic.
“You are supposed to be the one telling us,” Drake couldn’t believe this was happening. He’d had it all figured out in his head; or part of it anyway. He hadn’t behaved the way GSI historically had, so Arthur’s people were applying pressure to make them behave. A decidedly weak scenario, but that was all he’d been expecting from these people. Paintings of nudes and patently obvious art dealers struck him as awfully lame fieldcraft.
“Okay,” maybe Nikita had some ideas. “If you didn’t shoot me—”
“You were actually shot?” Arthur’s astonishment didn’t look faked, but Nikita ignored him.
“Who else do you have aboard for this operation?”
“No one,” Arthur started looking around as if someone other than Drake was about to shoot him. “There isn’t an operation. What kind of an operation? Did you need one for being shot?”
Drake grabbed him by the lapels of his summer jacket and forced him to focus. “Who the fuck tried to kill Nikita?” He agreed with her that it had been an accident that she was shot, but she could have just as easily leaned in to kiss him, or he her, and taken a bullet to the head.
“I swear to god I don’t know,” the man’s voice actually squeaked.
“Shit!” Drake cast him aside hard enough that he’d have crashed to the ground if Altman hadn’t jammed a hand against this back.
Either he was just as clueless as he appeared, or he was in deep. Head of an operation could perhaps pull it off, but that was too movie-villain evil to be credible. He’d vote for sniveling weasel in over his head—but watch out for scheming bastard.
If it was the former…
He grabbed Arthur’s lapel and yanked him in again until their noses were just an inch apart.
“You want to get out of this in one piece, you find out who else is on that boat. And you don’t tell them, you tell me or her,” he nodded toward Nikita. “On second thought, don’t go near her. She’d be far more likely to throw your sorry ass overboard than I am.”
This time when he shoved Arthur away, Altman simply stepped to the side and let him stumble to catch his balance before racing off.
“Any bets?” Drake asked the others.
“Twenty says that he’s just as useless as he looks,” Nikita pulled out a bill to make her point.
Altman eyed her, “I’m still on the fence about him.”
“Personally, I thought he was going to pee himself,” Zoe sounded delighted. “This is so much more entertaining than sitting at a drone’s ground-control station. You,” she poked a finger against Altman’s chest, “definitely have to show me more, Luke. Much more.”
Altman looked down at her finger as if it was a dangerous weapon to be treated with great caution.
The four of them were the last ones off the pier other than a pair of poor crew from the ship who were standing beneath a small white awning in full uniform just in case someone had a question three hours from now.
At the head of the pier, Drake spotted a familiar face—a pair of them.
“You’ve got to be shitting me.”
Nikita startled. She’d never heard Drake swear, except about her being shot.
There, just outside of security, in front of a row of glitzy tourist shops thick with bad ugly t-shirts and tiny collectors’ plates with pictures of a palm tree, stood Jared Westin and Sugar.
Drake blew past the pier’s security guards. In a dozen steps he had grabbed J-dawg with a pincer grip around his windpipe and pinned his back against a palm tree even though the guy was a couple inches taller and several times broader than he was.
“Do you have a shooter on the boat?” Drake was practically spitting in his face.
“What are you talking about?”
“Do you have a goddamn team on board our boat?”
J-dawg narrowed his eyes and looked down at Drake, not a
ppearing to even notice the death grip on his throat. “Did you say a shooter?”
“Just answer the goddamn question!” Wherever the mild-mannered Drake Roman had gone, he was awfully far away.
Nikita noted that the rest of the team had circled up, masking the action as much as possible. The waterfront was mostly quiet; the initial blast of cruise passengers had moved farther into the city. The only local paying them any mind was a little girl in an I Heart Belize t-shirt and eating a chocolate ice cream cone. She was watching with avid interest.
“No,” J-dawg sounded like he was talking to an idiot schoolboy. “I do not have a team on your boat. Now answer my goddamn question. Did you say shooter?”
In answer, Drake released his hold on J-dawg’s throat. He shot out a hand so fast that it surprised even her instincts. He grabbed her good arm and pulled her to him. Then he slid up the sleeve on the other one and showed him her bandage. There hadn’t been time to change it, so there were some spots of blood seepage from last night.
J-dawg’s eyes went as dark as Drake’s had last night.
“Somebody did that to Sugar, I’d annihilate the bastard.” His voice went just as rough and scary, too.
The two men shared their agreement with very mano-a-mano looks.
“What is it with over-protective men?” Nikita had to yank a bit to recover her arm from Drake’s grasp.
“Aren’t they just the sweetest little things when they do that?” Sugar was smiling up at her husband.
Nikita wasn’t sure about sweet. She was getting sick and tired of being “the babe” of this whole operation.
“When I find him,” Drake wasn’t over it yet, “annihilation is the least of what I’m going to do.”
“I’ll hold him down for you,” J-dawg muttered and pulled Sugar close. “Any guesses?”
Drake just shook his head. “It must be someone who really doesn’t want GSI returning to Honduras, but that’s all we’ve been able to come up with. Up half the night sketching out scenarios, didn’t find squat that made sense. Shooter is aboard. Silenced .22. That’s all we know.”
Nikita looked at her three teammates and saw the dark circles of their sleepless night. And she’d been asleep, well drugged, but she didn’t like feeling useless.
The kid who’d been watching them all so intently while she ate her ice cream leaned against Sugar’s other side and earned a hand around her shoulders. She’d watched Drake attack J-dawg as if such things happened every day.
“Yes, Swimmer Girl, she’s mine.” Sugar noticed the direction of Nikita’s attention. “Asal saved my life on an Afghan hillside and I jes’ figured that returning the favor was about the only thing I could do.”
“She fought like a demon for the kid,” J-dawg said with obvious pride. He turned back to Drake. “You’ve got a good grip. Glad you didn’t use it.” There were still five red fingerprints on his neck but he hadn’t even flinched. How strong was this guy?
It was time she took control of the situation.
“If you don’t have a team on the boat, J-dawg,” Nikita dragged it out, “what the hell are you doing here?”
Asal answered for him in a high, girl voice and acceptable English, “Checking up on his invesrent.”
“His investment?”
The girl nodded and then began practicing the word to herself.
“What investment?”
J-dawg shrugged, “When we took over GSI, we took over all of their bank accounts, too. I get all the bills for everything charged to them, including this trip.” Then he looked her up and down, once, assessment with no trace of a leer. “Hope the rest of what you bought looks this good on you. It better, it was a hell of a bill.”
“Good!” She still didn’t want to like the guy.
“You’ve got taste. Keep it all.”
“I’ve got the taste,” Zoe piped up. “She’s hopeless. Black t-shirt and camo pants is her idea of a Sunday formal.”
“With a McMillan Tac-50 over my shoulder. I always wear a good rifle with my Sunday best.”
J-dawg roared with laughter at her joke. “Now that is my kinda woman. You pay attention, Asal,” he reached over to scrub the kid’s hair. “You wanta grow up to be just like Lily or this lady here.”
Asal studied her for a long moment, then nodded as if she’d seen something in Nikita.
“Are you deluded enough to think that the clothes would be a bribe, J-dawg?” Zoe asked. “What are you expecting in return?”
Nikita appreciated that Zoe was reminding her of just who they were dealing with.
“A gift, Pint-size. Just a gift.”
“So, what are you doing here? A family vacation snorkeling on the reef?” Zoe waved a hand at the waterfront. It had a case of the late-morning sleepies, not even a cat was stirring. The only boat on the move was a water taxi scuttling across the wide mouth of Haulover Creek—the river that cut the city in half.
“Not so much.”
Nikita felt slightly nauseous and didn’t think it was the last of the drugs seeping out of her system. “You’ve got assets on the ground in Honduras? A bunch of trigger-happy goons that we’re going to stumble on where we least want to?”
J-dawg finally stood up from where he’d been slouching against the palm tree Drake had slammed him into. “Colonel Be-damned McDermott said I’d never get another government contract as long as I lived if I put someone on the ground there.”
“So where are they?”
Nikita saw his eyes flicker aside for a second at her question. They all turned to look while J-dawg cursed at being caught out. A couple hundred meters off the harbor wall, among the anchored motor yachts, was a long, dangerous looking one. Black, sleek, and at least a hundred feet long—it looked as dangerous as its owner.
“Real subtle, J-dawg. Real subtle.”
J-dawg had led them to a place called Baymen’s Tavern. It was actually an outdoor restaurant at the Radisson Hotel with a sweeping view from the north side of the peninsula that formed Belize City. They sat beneath the shade of a massive umbrella. The tall palms around the edge of the patio rustled lightly in the sea breeze. The waitresses were efficient and a pleasure to look at. All very high-end.
“This place is upright, respectable—”
“Family friendly,” J-dawg cut him off.
Drake could only laugh.
“Come down here with just the team, I can show you where to get real food, but it’s deep in a bad quarter. Food is worth it though.”
Drake would bet on more than just the food by his expression, though with the way he acted about Sugar, it was probably for memories past, not futures planned. He didn’t like what Titan did, but he understood Jared’s need to protect, even if Nikita didn’t. It wasn’t a conscious, thought out, or innately macho plan. It was simply a fact of life—nobody was getting to her without going through him first. He could see that whatever else was going on, he and Jared were in a hundred percent agreement on that point.
“Family changes a man in surprising ways,” J-dawg looked at Sugar and Asal discussing the meal with the contentment of a man well pleased with the way his life was going.
Asal was working her way through an appetizer of chicken tenders like she’d never stop.
“Kid hasn’t slowed down eating since we pulled her off that mountain six months ago. Stays thin as a rail, just keeps getting taller. Most of the way to starved when we found her, probably set her metabolism for life.”
Asal had ended up between Sugar and Zoe. Drake had made sure Nikita sat between him and Altman. J-dawg was across the table with a lazy arm on the back of Sugar’s chair. Without even noticing, Drake had mirrored J-dawg’s position with an arm behind Nikita. It was surprising that Nikita hadn’t chopped it off and fed it to a piranha or whatever Belize had. Maybe he’d leave it there and see how long before she noticed. The open spot at the end of the table was in glaring sunlight and not even the mad-for-sun Zoe had taken it.
“So, Jared.”
“Finally gonna use my damned name. About time someone in your outfit did.”
“What are you doing here?” Drake had opted for ice tea instead of Belikin Beer, much to Jared’s disgust.
“Already told you that.”
“I don’t buy checking on your invesrent. Try again.”
“My mess to clean up.”
“Not according to Colonel McDermott,” even Nikita’s tone seemed to be easing around Jared. She only sounded disgusted rather than her usual murderous.
“Still mine. I should have taken them down years ago. Would have saved a lot of people a lot of pain. You want someone who should have been shot by his own men in the field, head of GSI was the poster boy.”
“How can you—” Nikita flopped back, clearly angry again, and knocked Drake’s arm off the back of the chair without even noticing.
Jared leaned in hard and fast enough that Drake leaned forward ready to block any attack on Nikita. “Because a lot more of my unit would have come back alive it wasn’t for him.”
Nikita shot to her feet. Her face wasn’t red with anger, instead it was the palest white, as if all the life and blood had been drained out of her.
When Drake tried to rise, she placed a hand on his shoulder, keeping him in his chair. Then she simply turned and walked away.
“J-dawg,” Sugar said sharply as she rose. “You did not just say that to her of all people.” She sounded pissed as hell, as primal a force as Jared. For the first time Drake could see that, despite how she might look, she was actually a good match for him.
Also, she obviously knew exactly what trigger Jared had just hammered his fist down on.
“Zoe, would you mind staying with Asal?” Sugar didn’t wait for an answer.
When the two of them were gone, Jared looked across the table at him.
“What the hell did I say?”
Drake tried to figure out how to say it without punching Jared a good one, but Altman saved them both by speaking up first.
“Did you hear about the mess that took down Curtis Contracting?”
“Sure, cheap bastard strung his own men out to dry. Wouldn’t authorize the fee for the intel some chick had a lead on. Chas Hayward and Barry… Wait. Didn’t Nikita say her last name was Hayward?”
Target of Mine: The Night Stalkers 5E (Titan World Book 2) Page 12