Tanner looked up. Wilde’s face was white with tension.
“My daughter,” he said in a low voice. “Her name is Alessandra.” He paused. “Turn to the next page.”
That nasty this-is-a-mistake feeling came over Tanner again, but this time nothing could have kept him from following through.
“Fuck,” he whispered.
It was the same woman. There was no doubt about that. It was she, but everything else had changed.
She stood not on a porch but in a clearing. A jungle clearing. Tanner had spent enough time in jungle clearings to recognize the riot of trees and vines and shrubs. Her hands were behind her. Tied, he knew instantly. She was wearing torn jeans and a stained T-shirt. Her hair was loose; he could see bits of leaf and twigs caught in the tangled strands, but it was her face that commanded attention.
It was battered.
There was no other way to describe it.
One of those beautiful blue eyes was half-shut, the skin around it greenish in color. There was another bruise high on one cheekbone. Something dark—caked blood, he thought—was clumped at the corner of her mouth.
She stood framed between two men. They wore filthy camo pants and combat boots. One was naked from the waist up; the other wore a black T-shirt. They were grinning at the camera. Each had an AK-47 slung around his neck.
Each had a hand on the woman.
One man cupped her breast.
The other’s hand was low and not visible. No question, he was cupping her ass.
Tanner’s belly knotted. He had never seen this pair before, but he knew what they were. Newspapers call them guerrillas or freedom fighters, depending on the politics of the day.
They were neither.
They were monsters, and they were capable of anything.
Anything.
Still, something was wrong with the photo. Bright Star never sent pictures of its soldiers. That was what they called themselves. Soldiers. They sent only pictures of their victims. If these pigs were soldiers and the woman was their captive, which certainly seemed the case, why were they grinning for the camera?
Tanner switched his gaze to the woman.
She looked terrified…and yet, for all of that, her chin was raised, her eyes flashed with what could only be defiance.
He looked at Wilde. “She was kidnapped?”
“Yes.”
“When did you get this picture?”
“Two days ago.”
“How?”
Wilde flushed. “That’s complicated.”
“Begging your pardon, sir,” Tanner said in a way that made it obvious the polite words were a sham, “how is it complicated? Your daughter was kidnapped. How did the kidnappers contact you? By courier? Fed-Ex? UPS… What?”
“The photo wasn’t sent to me. It went to the San Escobal office of the organization my daughter was visiting. They sent it to State, and someone who knows me in State passed it on to me. He knows—he knows enough about me to have thought Alessandra might be my daughter.”
“You’ve lost me, General. Is the woman your daughter or isn’t she?”
“She is, but very few people are aware of that. We’re—we’re estranged, and she doesn’t use my last name. She calls herself Alessandra Bellini.”
There was surely more to the story than that, but details could wait. All that mattered now was the status of the kidnap victim.
“She was taken in San Escobal?”
Wilde nodded.
“What was she doing there? How could you let her go to a hellhole like that?”
The words shot from Tanner’s lips uncensored. He didn’t give a damn. Neither, apparently, did the general, who walked to the loveseat, sank down on it and folded his hands in his lap.
“I told you, Lieutenant. We are—we are not in touch with each other. Alessandra didn’t ask my permission or seek my advice. Even if we’d been, you know, close, even then, she’d have done what she wanted. She’s very independent. She’s always made her own decisions.”
Tanner nodded. What Wilde meant was that his daughter didn’t give a crap for him or for the rules most people lived by.
He knew the type. The offspring of the rich and powerful were often raised to believe the world belonged to them. Being a SEAL meant you met people you wouldn’t otherwise meet, and that included the spoiled, pampered, bitchy daughters of the wealthy.
The problem was, every now and then reality bit them in their well-tailored derrières.
“Lieutenant?”
“Yes.” Tanner looked at the photo again. “You said she’s working for an organization.”
“Yes. The FURever Fund.”
“I’ve never heard of them.”
Wilde snorted. “Neither has anyone else. A bunch of idiots, if you ask my opinion.”
“I don’t give a damn about your opinion. Sir,” Tanner added quickly, at Wilde’s look of shock “I’m trying to determine what you need to do next if you want to get your daughter back.”
The general rose to his feet. “Of course I want her back! That’s the reason I’m here.”
“Yes. Okay. I get that.” Tanner paused. “Did they send a note? A list of demands? Information on how they intend to make contact?”
The general took a plastic baggie from his briefcase. It contained a piece of paper.
“My man at State bagged it, but a dozen people at the wildlife place had probably already handled it.”
Tanner took the baggie and held it up. The piece of paper was a message, written in English and addressed to someone named Tomas Anerson.
Tanner looked at the general.
“Thomas Anderson,” the general said. “The head of the wildlife organization.”
The message itself was brief and to the point.
One hunert thousand dollares you get her live. There is a cafe on the square in San Felipe. Be there too days from now. Only you an the mony. Tell anybody an she dies.
There was no signature, just a crude, almost childlike drawing of a star.
Tanner frowned.
Something wasn’t right. Forget the misspellings. They didn’t matter. What bothered him was the relatively low amount of the ransom demand. Bright Star dealt in millions, not thousands. And the drawing of the star was off, too. He’d seen what the guerrillas used as a logo. It was a five-pointed star, not this crude rendering.
“Lieutenant. Tanner. I need your help. You’re the one man who can get my daughter out of there.”
It was almost true. Why waste time being modest?
He wasn’t the one guy who could organize a rescue, but he was definitely one of only a handful who knew Bright Star, knew San Escobal, knew its fetid, hot, all-but-impenetrable rain forests.
What made him the only man for the job was that the others were the guys in his unit, and they were deployed thousands of miles away.
He’d vowed not to sit behind a desk, but how could he not do it this one time? As it was, even with him coordinating things, the odds were against saving the woman.
Bright Star’s record in returning victims after collecting ransom money for them was not encouraging. That this victim was young, female and beautiful made the chances of things going well about as good as the chances of Tanner’s leg ever being completely normal again.
Not that he was about to admit either of those things to his captain or the general.
He looked up. “Who’s collecting the necessary data?”
“You just saw the data, Lieutenant.”
“What I mean is, who’s in charge of collating it? Interviewing the people at the place where the kidnapping took place. Checking out the town of San Felipe. Checking out the bar where they want the meet to occur.”
“We are dealing with animals here, Lieutenant,” Wilde said sharply. “And you want to waste time checking things out?”
“General. I understand that you’re upset—”
“Did you see that photo, Akecheta? Her face. The way those men are—are touching her�
�”
Point taken, Tanner had to admit. He picked up the photo again. Not the one sent by the kidnappers; the one that showed Alessandra Wilde laughing and happy.
“What was your daughter doing in San Escobal in the first place? It’s not exactly a tourist attraction. Unless something’s changed that I don’t know about, there are State Department advisory warnings about travel there.”
Wilde shrugged. “Yes, there are.”
“Then why did she ignore those warnings? The beaches are as good in Belize or Guatemala, or in half a dozen other safe places… What?”
“She was there tracking jaguars.”
Tanner blinked. “Jaguars?”
“Jaguars, Lieutenant.”
“She’s a wildlife biologist?” Tanner asked in the same way he’d have asked if Tinker Bell was an astrophysicist.
“She’s designer. A fur designer.”
Tanner almost laughed.
A designer. The title confirmed what he’d already figured.
What Wilde meant was that his daughter was a rich, spoiled brat.
When you served in Special Ops, you all but tripped over women like her, hot for guys like SEALs, even hotter for Special Ops guys who belonged to teams and divisions so tightly classified that they were only whispered about. The one thing people always knew were the bars where the teams and units hung out.
For most STUDs, it was a place in Santa Barbara called The LZ. The Landing Zone. It was where you could chill, down a few beers, rock out to whatever was blasting over the sound system, maybe catch a football game on one of the big screen TVs that hung on the walls.
It was also a chick magnet. Chay had once joked and said there had to be a sign somewhere that said Only Tens Allowed.
The LZ drew spectacular looking women.
The hookups were easy and exciting, but you figured out pretty fast that what really attracted the women wasn’t so much you as it was their image of you.
What got them turned on was being fucked by a guy who was dangerous, a badass dude who—they hoped—had done a lot of really badass things.
At first, Tanner laughed at it. It was funny.
After a while, not so much, especially after he made the dumb mistake of almost falling for a gorgeous green-eyed redhead. Almost falling? Man, he’d been head-over-heels crazy for her. Crazy as in starting to think about their future together.
She was a jewelry designer. Not that he ever saw anything she’d designed. She said she was waiting for the right time.
She was also the daughter of an international banker whose family motto might have been Who Needs Morals When You Have Money?
When she told him she couldn’t spend Thanksgiving or Christmas with him, that she had to be with her family, Tanner had taken a deep breath and said, well, yeah, he understood that…and maybe one of those holidays would be a good time for her to let her family get its first look at him.
“They don’t know about us yet,” she’d said. “I’m just waiting for the right time.”
Chay had tried to warn him that he was in over his head. In fact, it had been the first occasion their whole life that he and Chay had almost ended up decking each other.
Idiot that he was, he’d bought into the rationalization, gone on believing she wanted him for himself, not for the image he represented—until the night he’d been deep inside her and she’d cupped his face between her hands, wrapped her long legs around his hips and whispered, “Sugar? Tell me how many men you’ve killed.”
Since then, he’d never been foolish enough to forget what women like that wanted from men like him. And, what the hell, why not? It wasn’t as if he was looking to settle down, not with the life he led.
It was just increasingly difficult to play the game. Not the sex part. That was easy. What was tough was the part that involved listening to rich, spoiled babes call themselves designers and consultants and decorators.
Those seemed to be their favorite occupations.
He’d met one bubblehead who called herself a color designer.
“It’s like feng shui?” she’d said in what he thought of as West Coast Speak, where every sentence was a question, “but with colors?”
Tanner had nodded and kept a serious look on his face when what he’d wanted to do was howl.
Now, here was this one, a four-star’s daughter, and she was into furs.
Nasty.
You killed an animal for food, or because it was trying to kill you. You didn’t kill it so some rich broad could wear it—but his opinion of Alessandra Wilde or Alessandra Bellini or whatever she called herself didn’t mean he could just let her die.
“Lieutenant. Please. You have to find her before they—they hurt her.”
Tanner suspected please was not a common part of John Wilde’s vocabulary.
And that photo. The bruised face. The men touching her. She’d been hurt already, he thought, and his stomach rolled. The only question was how much more would they do before they killed her, because killing was what Bright Star was all about—assuming this was a Bright Star kidnapping, and his gut was telling him maybe not.
Should he tell that to Wilde? No. For one thing, he didn’t have any facts to support the supposition. A low ransom figure, a poor drawing… It wasn’t enough.
For another, he’d have to also tell him that if Alessandra had been taken by two bandits working on their own, she might well be in even greater danger.
As vicious as it was, Bright Star at least operated under an organizational umbrella.
“Okay,” Tanner said briskly. “Give me the name of your man at State. I’ll speak with him, make some suggestions.”
A flush rose in Wilde’s face. “State’s not involved.”
“But you said your contact there…”
“I said he sent the information to me. Privately. Not officially.”
“Why the hell not?”
“I told you. State isn’t involved.”
“I don’t understand. What do you mean, State isn’t involved? I’d have thought your first action would have been to pull at the strings you could.”
“They don’t… That Alessandra is my daughter is not public information.”
Tanner folded his arms over his chest. “Meaning what, exactly?”
“Meaning it’s a long story.”
The general’s tone had hardened. He’d gone into command mode. Screw that, Tanner thought. If he was going to take on the job of collecting information and formulating a plan to rescue the woman, he needed to know what was going on.
“Then give me the abbreviated version, General.”
Wilde’s face reddened. There wasn’t a way in the world anyone ever spoke to him like this. They both knew it, just as they both knew that the general was just going to have to deal with a new reality, a reality that was standing in front of him, glowering.
“Alessandra is—she’s a child I had with my, ah, my second wife.”
“And?”
“And…” Long pause. “And, nobody knows I had a second wife.”
“I don’t follow. You divorced your first wife?”
“No.”
“Then what? She died?”
“Yes. And I don’t see what any of this has to do with finding my daughter and rescuing her from the clutches of a ragtag bunch of killers.”
“Wrong.” Tanner’s voice was as grim as the look on his face. “Don’t dismiss them as a ragtag bunch. They’re well financed and their leaders, at least, are well trained. And I still don’t get why you haven’t involved the State Department. They know how to handle things like this.”
“I told you. Nobody knows about Alessandra. About my—my second marriage. It took place in Italy. There’s no record of it here. I’d have to waste precious time on a lot of pointless explanations.”
Explanations the man didn’t want to make. The unspoken words all but echoed through the room.
And yet, Tanner thought, not involving State could be the best course of action fo
r whoever planned and coordinated a rescue. He wasn’t a fan of protocol and diplomacy and red tape, and he sure as hell hated dealing with by-the-book government functionaries making life-and-death decisions when the toughest life-and-death issue most of them ever handled was traffic on the Beltway each morning.
Somebody working off the grid with contacts in Special Forces would best know how to handle this situation—somebody with contacts in the CIA. In the NSA. In the place referred to only as The Agency.
In STUD.
A coordinator like that would have worked in the field. He’d know how to bypass the petty rules established by petty politicians.
And he was the lucky guy Blake and the general had chosen to oversee the rescue of the spoiled estranged daughter of a four-star general. Of a woman who wanted to turn cats into coats.
She’d certainly chosen the right place.
San Escobal was pretty much the jaguar capital of Central America. He’d learned that when he’d served there. A couple of times, he and his squad had been lucky enough to glimpse the big, graceful cats slipping through the trees.
Had she gone there to make the arrangements herself? Maybe she’d wanted to take a personal look at the creatures she was going to pay men to kill. There were laws against hunting the cats, but there were laws against lots of things in San Escobal and one of the reasons people went to such places was because nobody paid attention to the laws.
Amazing. He’d never met the lady, and he already didn’t like her. Still, she didn’t deserve to be raped or murdered or worse. And yeah, there was worse.
“Who else knows about this besides this jungle group and your pal at State?”
“Only you.”
“And Captain Blake.”
“Yes. I told him everything. He immediately suggested you. He said you knew more about Central America, more about the scum operating in its jungles, than any operative he had.”
“Why did you contact the captain instead of someone else? You surely have access to every service that exists.”
“We go way back. Jim and I served on a joint task force in Europe years ago, and now he’s in charge of STUD.” Wilde managed a quick smile. “No point in playing games, Akecheta. We have the world’s best military, but everyone knows STUD is where to turn when you’re knee-deep in shit.”
Power: Special Tactical Units Division (In Wilde Country Book 3) Page 3