Tackle (K19 Security Solutions)

by Heather Slade

  Tackle

  Heather Slade

  K19 Security Solutions Book Nine

  Copyright © 2021 by Heather Slade

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  ISBN 13: 978-1-953626-04-2

  Contents

  Prologue

  1. Tackle

  2. Sloane

  3. Tackle

  4. Sloane

  5. Tackle

  6. Sloane

  7. Tackle

  8. Sloane

  9. Sloane

  10. Tackle

  11. Sloane

  12. Tackle

  13. Sloane

  14. Tackle

  15. Sloane

  16. Tackle

  17. Sloane

  18. Tackle

  19. Sloane

  20. Tackle

  21. Sloane

  22. Tackle

  23. Sloane

  24. Tackle

  25. Sloane

  26. Tackle

  27. Sloane

  28. Tackle

  29. Sloane

  30. Tackle

  31. Sloane

  32. Tackle

  33. Sloane

  34. Tackle

  35. Sloane

  36. Tackle

  37. Sloane

  Epilogue

  Want more?

  Onyx

  About the Author

  Also by Heather Slade

  Prologue

  Tackle

  Six in the morning, and I was out wandering the streets of Boston’s Little Italy, looking for a woman who didn’t want me to find her. I walked past the closed-up shops and restaurants that dotted the first floor of buildings now labeled “live-work spaces” although I doubted a single business owner in this area lived in the luxury apartments above them.

  There were worse neighborhoods where Sloane could’ve chosen to hide out. If, in fact, she was here. It was certainly understandable why it would’ve appealed to her. Mass General Hospital was within a mile’s walking distance, and her office was even closer. Not that she was going into work very much these days.

  She’d done a damn good job of disappearing in the couple of days I was gone, called away to take care of something I wanted no part of.

  I hadn’t seen or heard from her since the day I left the house I had been painstakingly renovating for us to live in. If she’d have me, which now remained to be seen.

  When I said goodbye that morning, I had no inkling that when I returned, I’d find out she’d ghosted me.

  “Sloane, where the hell are you?” I muttered out loud, scanning the high-rises as if she’d come out on the balcony of one and I’d spot her.

  “You’re too early if you’re looking for Sloane,” said a kid sweeping the sidewalk in front of a coffeehouse.

  “You know somebody by that name?”

  “Really pretty, stomach out to here?” The kid, who couldn’t be more than ten or eleven, held his hand out in front of him.

  Rather than respond, I took the photo I’d brought with me out of my pocket. “This her?” I asked, handing it to him.

  “Yep. That’s Sloane.”

  “Have you seen her?”

  “I did the last two days.”

  “Where?”

  “Here,” the kid said, laughing as he swept dirt onto the street. “Comes down for breakfast, but not until later.”

  “What time?”

  He shrugged. “Not before nine or ten, after the morning rush is over.”

  “You said she comes downstairs. Does she live in this building?”

  “Anthony!” a man yelled.

  “I gotta go. See ya, mister.”

  “Hey, wait!” I was too late. The kid was inside with the door closed behind him.

  Tackle

  Previous November

  I raised my head and surveyed the sterile room I was in. The smell was as familiar as the surroundings; I was in a hospital.

  The last thing I remembered was lying on the floor of an airplane that was about to crash-land. I said a prayer, more for my family than myself, but the last image I saw was the same one haunting me now when I closed my eyes—Sloane Clarkson—my best friend’s younger sister.

  As hard as I tried to shake her from my thoughts, she always rose to the surface of my consciousness. She invaded my subconscious too, appearing regularly in my dreams. Sloane, who I’d watched grow from a gangling eleven-year-old to the most beautiful woman I’d ever laid eyes on, became my ultimate fantasy.

  What little she and I had experienced in reality, morphed into scenes merged with dreams I’d had of her. Ones in which a simple hug hello ended with her sprawled naked on a bed. It could be any bed; I was unaware of anything in the room other than it and her.

  “Buenos días,” said a woman dressed in scrubs as she walked into my room. “Señor Sorenson.”

  “Buenos días.”

  She took my temperature, checked my blood pressure, and listened to my heart.

  “Where am I?” I asked.

  “Foundation University Hospital Metropolitano in Atlántico, Colombia.”

  “Do you know how I got here?”

  “Sí. Government officials located the wreckage of your plane and brought you here.”

  “Were there other survivors?”

  “Sí,” she repeated.

  “How many?”

  “Dos.”

  “Can you tell me their condition?”

  When she sighed, I wondered if I was going to get a lecture about HIPAA rights.

  “There is a gentleman in the room next door. He is in worse condition than you are, but not by much. The other man is not expected to make it.”

  I was as stunned by her statement as I was by the lack of accent that had been more pronounced in what she’d said to that point.

  “Are you American?” I asked.

  “I lived there for a while.”

  I thought about asking where, but did I really care? No. “The guy next door, is his last name Clarkson?”

  She rifled through pieces of paper attached to a clipboard. “Sí.”

  I rested my head on the pillow and closed my eyes, torn between wanting to conjure Sloane’s likeness and forcing it away. As if I had a choice.

  I opened my eyes when I heard the door again.

  “There he is,” said Razor Sharp, one of the four founding partners of K19 Security Solutions, the private security and intelligence firm I contracted with but hoped to work for full-time. “How are you feeling?” he asked.

  “Better than I expected, given I didn’t think I’d be alive.”

  He smiled and shook my hand, holding on longer than necessary, but I didn’t mind. In fact, I welcomed any kind of human contact.

  “How’s Halo?” Knox Clarkson, the man in the room next door, had been my best friend since his family moved to Newton, Massachusetts, when we were both in high school. I was the one responsible for the nickname that became his code name when, after a backyard game of football, my friend broke his neck and had to wear the so-named contraption for several weeks.

  I’d been given my nickname around the same time. It wound up being prophetic when I was named the number one offensive tackle in the country while playing Division I football for the University of Virginia.

  “I haven’t been in to see him yet, but from what I understand, you’ll both be discharged within a few days.”

  “What about Onyx?”

  Razor ran his hand through his spiky ink-blac
k hair. “That news isn’t as good.”

  Should I confess the nurse had just told me our friend and colleague wasn’t expected to live?

  “As soon as he stabilizes, we’ll make arrangements to transport him to a hospital in the States.”

  “Is that a possibility?”

  “He made it through surgery but hasn’t come out of the coma he’s been in since he was brought here.” Razor looked at something on his phone and stood. “I’ll be back a little later.”

  If whatever he read was something about Onyx, I didn’t want to know. My mother would say I was a classic Libra—I dodged confrontation and bad news like a champ. I didn’t believe in astrological bullshit, but I would be the first to admit that avoidance was my coping mechanism of choice.

  “I’m going to tell as many people as I can that I love them,” Halo said to me a few days later when we buckled into our seats on the private plane that would take us home.

  “Me too.”

  “Even my extended family. My aunts and uncles will all think I’m nuts, but I don’t give a shit.”

  “Huge wake-up call,” I muttered.

  “Can I ask you something?”

  “Shoot.”

  “You ever think about settling down, getting married, having kids?”

  “I didn’t before.” I mean, I did, but only when my mother reminded me that as an only child, I was responsible for giving her grandchildren. Those reminders came more often after I’d turned twenty-nine.

  “It’s different now, right?”

  It occurred to me that maybe Halo had a specific reason for asking. “Is there anyone you’ve been, you know, seeing?”

  “Negative. What about you?”

  “There’s someone.” What the fuck? Had my life almost ending in a plane crash given me a death wish? If I told Halo the woman I’d been fantasizing about was his sister, I wouldn’t live to walk off this plane.

  “There is? Who is she?”

  “That isn’t important right now. If or when that changes, I’ll let you know.”

  “Seriously?”

  “She might not feel the same way I do.” That was an honest response, considering Sloane would have no way of knowing she even crossed my mind.

  “Is it someone I know?”

  Shaking my head felt like less of a lie than saying the words out loud. Why hadn’t I just kept my stupid mouth shut? I felt a barrier go up between Halo and me, and it was of my making. We’d known each other long enough that he could easily sense when I wasn’t telling the truth. Like he just had.

  We were quiet the remainder of the flight; I feigned sleep for most of it.

  2

  Sloane

  I bolted upright, drenched in a cold sweat, and covered my face with my hands. The door to my bedroom flung open, and my mother raced in. She sat on the edge of my bed and gently pulled my hands from my face. “What’s wrong? Did you have another nightmare?”

  I nodded. “How did you know?”

  “I heard you cry out.”

  “What did I say?”

  “Nothing decipherable.”

  Thank God. I’d been dreaming about Tackle, not my brother, as I was sure my mother assumed.

  She stroked my hair. “Go back to sleep, mija. We don’t have to leave for the airport for a few more hours.”

  She sat between me and the clock on the nightstand and my phone that sat beside it. “What time is it now?”

  “A little after eight.”

  Given that most days I was up by five, I considered eight sleeping in. However, the last few days had been so emotionally draining, my sleep patterns were completely off.

  Seven days ago, the day before Thanksgiving, my brother, Knox, whom everyone called Halo, along with his best friend, Landry, whom everyone called Tackle, had been deployed on an intelligence mission on behalf of the US government.

  Both my brother and Tackle were former CIA agents who now contracted for the agency through a private intelligence and security company.

  Before they left, I’d had a good idea where they were headed. While the information was classified, as a criminal investigator for the US Department of Homeland Security, my security-clearance level was high enough to know the op they’d been hired to carry out involved apprehending a suspected terrorist with ties to the Islamic State.

  I’d been tracking the same man’s—Abdul Ghafor—communication with known terrorist cells in the US for months. His last confirmed whereabouts were outside Bagram in Afghanistan, but sources had recently spotted him in Colombia.

  Thanksgiving Day, twenty-four hours after I watched my mother say a tearful goodbye to her son, my father, a foreign service specialist for the State Department, received a call, informing him that the plane Knox, Tackle, and two other private intelligence agents were traveling on had disappeared from the radar.

  A few hours later, he received word that the plane’s wreckage was believed to have been located in Columbia’s Macuira National Park, and the DEA agents who found it, reported there were survivors.

  An agonizing twelve hours after that, we were told that my brother had been airlifted to a university hospital in Magdalena. His injuries were not believed to be life-threatening.

  “What about Tackle?” I asked when my father’s call ended. He shook his head and walked over to where Nils and Alice—Tackle’s parents—sat with my mother. I held my breath, waiting for him to speak.

  “They’re reporting two survivors other than Knox.”

  “Meaning one fatality,” said Nils.

  Alice gasped and covered her mouth to stifle her keening sobs. My eyes met my mother’s; both of us were in tears.

  I wrapped my arms around my stomach and rushed out the back door of our house, not knowing where I was going, only that I had to get far enough away that no one would bear witness to my reaction to the news that Tackle—my beloved Tackle—may or may not be alive.

  By the time I returned to the house, my father had received an update that, like Knox’s, Tackle’s injuries were not believed to be life-threatening. Also like Knox, he’d been airlifted to the hospital.

  I could no more show my relief than I’d been able to reveal my devastation. No one—not a single living soul—knew my true feelings for my older brother’s best friend. Not even the man himself—even though I’d secretly loved him for years.

  I was eleven and he was fourteen the day his parents dragged him over to our house a few days after we’d moved in.

  Mrs. Sorenson was the head of the neighborhood welcoming committee, and given my brother and her son were the same age, Tackle had been recruited to “show my brother around.”

  “It’s too bad they don’t have a daughter your age,” my mother had said that day. I was glad they didn’t. Given I couldn’t take my eyes off Landry, I likely would’ve ignored her and been scolded for it.

  I lay in bed, staring at the ceiling of the room that had been mine for most of my life. It hadn’t changed much in the last fifteen years, other than the size of the bed. Four years ago, the twin had been upgraded to a queen when my mother announced she wanted to turn it into a guest room once I moved out. Since I still lived at home and commuted to my job in Boston, my room had remained mine.

  It wasn’t that I couldn’t get a place of my own; I could afford to, even with the sky-high prices of rentals in Boston. But if I did, the few times I had the opportunity to see Tackle would become nonexistent.

  I glanced at the clock when the smells of my mother’s traditional Venezuelan breakfast wafted up the stairs and into my room. She didn’t make perico and arepas very often. Usually only for special occasions or when she believed one or all of us needed comfort food.

  Today I welcomed the eggs scrambled with onions, tomatoes, and butter that she’d season with coriander and annatto powder. My mother would heap the perico on top of the arepas, which were round cornmeal cakes that looked similar to English muffins but tasted nothing like them.

  It was my brother’s fav
orite breakfast. I wondered if she made it in honor of his homecoming, even though he wouldn’t be with us until later tonight to eat it.

  “The Sorensons will be flying to Washington with us,” my mother said as I washed the breakfast dishes and she put them away.

  “Was there any doubt they would?”

  She shrugged. I knew she found the Sorensons cold at times, but then they probably found her over-the-top emotional. Just because they weren’t as effusive as she was didn’t mean they weren’t as excited to see their son as we were to see Knox. Or that I was.

  I took my time getting ready, wanting to strike a balance between looking my best and not overdoing it. After settling on a pair of jeans, black sweater, and military-style boots, I braided my long blonde hair and put on a minimal amount of makeup, knowing that the minute I saw my brother and his best friend, I’d dissolve into tears.

  “Are you okay?” my mother asked as we got in the car to drive to the airport.

  “I’m fine. Why?”

  “You seem nervous.”

  I shrugged. “I’m anxious.”

  By the time we arrived at the terminal in Washington, DC, my anxiety had increased to the point I was literally shaking.

  “Mija, I’m worried about you,” my mother said, attempting to hold my hand.