She didn’t doubt it, given the way he’d threatened to pull the trigger of his gun earlier. “You must have some qualms or you wouldn’t have said that. In fact, I think you’re pretty damn offensive. You would have never said that to a man. Don’t be such a sexist pig.”
He let out a sardonic chuckle. “I couldn’t give a damn that you’re a woman. Truth is, you’re a worthy adversary, and I would’ve loved to have you on my team. It breaks my heart a little to have witnessed your fall from grace.”
There were so many questions that sprang to her mind from that comment that she didn’t know where to start. His team? She’d already figured out that he was no run-of-the-mill ICE field agent. He had the sophisticated moves and toughness of a black ops agent, which begged the question, once again, of why she’d never heard of him before today.
At a slow, deliberate pace, she bent and stretched her right hand down toward her gun. “What’s your real job with ICE?”
He tsked. “I’m sure you’ve already guessed the answer to that. You want me to tell you, anyway?”
She tugged her pant leg up, then ever so tediously unbuttoned the strap holding her backup nine millimeter in place. “Why don’t you go ahead and spell it out for me what you’re doing here and why you had a front row seat to my so-called fall from grace?”
“Did you think the need for a black ops crew disintegrated when you and your team did?”
Honestly, she hadn’t given much thought to ICE since they forced her to go on disability leave. Just thinking the term made her temper catch fire and gave her a fresh surge of adrenaline.
Closing her eyes, she visualized the position of his gun-holding arm, his stance and his height and breadth, calculating exactly how she’d need to move and strike to gain the upper hand. Then she dropped the gun between her legs, the barrel propped against the top of her right foot.
“What’s your plan with that move? Are you going to kick it up and grab it from midair?”
“Something like that.”
“It’d almost be worth letting you try that, but how about instead you shuffle it behind you.”
“I would, but I can’t move.”
He lifted his knee away from where he had her leg pinned, so she slid the gun back just as he’d asked, biding her time. She gave a start as she felt his hands on the bare skin of her waist where her shirt had pulled up from her pants. He must have spotted the belt she’d strapped to her ribs under her shirt. She remained doubled over and let him look.
“I wasn’t going to strip-search you, but you’re not giving me a lot of choice.” He used his gun to push her shirt higher, revealing her concealed carry-gear belt. “You’re like a one-woman army, here. Grenades, ammo, flash bangs, multi-tool. And I’m sure there’s more in here somewhere.”
He felt along her bra, then gave a humph as he reached the hilt of the knife she’d sewn into it. His touch was clinical, free of any sexual undertones, but she still had to ignore the sensation of being violated. “Ingenious. Makes me wish I was more creative with my concealed carry.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t look as good as you do in cargo pants.” She pushed off her left leg and stood, twisting into the hand that still held her wrist to pin it behind her and bringing his face into strike range. She elbowed him in the nose, then ducked under his gun-holding arm and twisted again, locking out and twisting the arm of the hand that held her wrist until he had no choice except to release her.
Before he could spin to face her, she kicked him with all her might, then reached under her shirt and ripped her knife from its sheath in her bra as she dropped to her knees near his head. She held the knife to his throat.
Wearing an expression of respect, he touched the clotting blood on his thigh from where she’d stabbed him. His eyes were watering, his nose bloody. He reached with unsteady hands into his pocket for her gun and she let him get it clear of the fabric before she elbowed him in the gut, then plucked it from his hand and aimed it at him with her left hand.
“Should I shoot you or slice your neck open?”
“Nicely played. There’s just one little problem.”
She registered the sound of a vehicle at the same time he raised his head and looked past her. A van done up like a resort’s airport shuttle, but with darkly tinted windows, screeched to a stop not two meters away. She supposed the shuttle look was as much camouflage on a tropical island as the type of run-down A-Team knockoff van she and her black ops crew had driven in the Third World countries they often found themselves in.
The side door of the van swung open to reveal two ripped, fit men holding automatic rifles, both aimed at her. Driving the van, and with a handgun aimed at Alicia, was an equally fit young woman.
“Alicia Troy, meet your replacements.” The glee in McCaffrey’s voice made her want to punch him in the face all over again.
Damn it all.
“Drop the gun and get your hands in the air,” Logan said, the smug smoothness returning to his voice. “We’re done dancing.”
Out of ideas, she complied, setting the knife and gun on the ground.
While she processed the turn of events, Logan scooted from beneath her, gathered her discarded weapons and stood. He returned to the car she’d planned to steal and retrieved her computer bag from the passenger seat. “We’ll need this as evidence.”
And, boy, would they find it on that computer. Her gut twisted.
“I see you weighing your options, but the only one that’ll keep you alive is to get your hands in the air. We’re the best of the best and I wouldn’t underestimate us if I were you.”
“If you’re the best, it’s only because my team’s out of the picture.”
Logan and his crew all chuckled. Logan shook his head. “Nearly two years ago, you and your merry band of misfits nearly destroyed a billion-dollar, international operation, and Rory Alderman sold national secrets to the highest bidder. If you ask me, it’s a miracle ICE decided to give their black ops experiment another try.”
Given all the guns pointed at her and that she was outnumbered four to one, her best option—her only option, really—was to do as he said, at least for the time being. For the first time in her life, she raised her arms in a show of surrender.
Chapter 5
Through the painted iron bars of the Ammaly Bay Resort’s pool enclosure, John watched resort security take statements from a couple who had apparently been robbed of all their belongings during the water volleyball tournament less than an hour earlier. So John’s hunch had been right. Rory had used the resort as an ATM to fund his disappearance.
The question still was, had Alicia caught up to him before he was able to slip away?
Cutting a wide berth around the pool, he walked the winding path through the hotel grounds, then through the lobby. After Rory gathered funds, the next logical step would be to steal a car. With that in mind, John headed into the parking lot, but what he saw had him cursing and ducking for cover behind the nearest parked car.
Alicia. But she wasn’t alone.
He watched as she climbed into a white hotel shuttle van along with at least four others.
He raised up slightly as the van cruised past him. He didn’t recognize either the woman behind the wheel or the man in the passenger seat, but they both looked calm, yet vigilant. Something was definitely not right about the situation, but he couldn’t put his finger on it.
Then his eyes widened and his stomach dropped. Something akin to a boiling sensation started in his chest. Sitting right beside Alicia in the middle row of the van was Logan effing McCaffrey—the man John had thought was his only friend left in ICE. Guess they weren’t such great friends, after all.
No wonder Alicia had been so cavalier about breaking the law by hijacking that helicopter. No wonder she hadn’t shot to kill Rory. It wasn’t that she’d los
t her touch; it was that she had something going on with ICE that John didn’t understand.
No, check that, he did. There was no two ways about it. He knew exactly what had happened. “Mother of God, Logan and Alicia set me up.”
He watched the van roll out of the parking lot headed north, toward Frederiksted, then jimmied the door of an old hatchback. The once-silver paint had turned gray, and the engine strained before it caught, but it blended in with most of the other vehicles on the island, which was John’s only requirement.
His palms sweating against the steering wheel and his throat tight and sore as though from screaming, John waited until the van was a good distance away before pulling onto the road behind it. It was a slow crawl along the two-lane coastal road to Frederiksted. He hung back as far as he could while still maintaining a visual on the van, biding his time to strike as his anger gathered force.
They’d played him a fool—Logan, Alicia, ICE. Everyone. In his mind, he could see the email from Logan that morning. Alicia is missing.
Oh, they played him good. He huffed out an exhale, fighting to get a grip. The van drove slow and steady over the straight stretch of the highway toward the heart of Frederiksted, with John following at a distance.
John had spent a lot of time in Frederiksted, the second largest town on the island, yet far and away more charming, with its rustic buildings, Dutch history and killer beaches. He used to love the place, but this was the spot where he’d realized, a year or so ago, that his complacency had finally consumed him and he’d lost his taste for life.
It’d happened on a moonlit rooftop deck across the street from the pier, with a beautiful woman in his arms and four shots of rum in his veins. She’d trailed kisses over his chest, her hands exploring lower, and he remembered looking up at the moon and thinking, I feel nothing. Not drunk, not desire, not even anger at Alicia or Rory. Nothing.
It’d been enough to scare rationality back into him. That was the night he left St. Croix and sequestered himself with his weapons and computer on a barely inhabited island east of St. Thomas. That was the night he’d started training again—when he’d started preparing for this, his first and most critical mission back in the game.
And all the while, through his pain and rebirth, Alicia and Logan had been plotting something, preparing to use him.
Instead of stewing on why it seemed to be his lot in life to be a patsy, he should be asking himself what Logan and Alicia were trying to accomplish with Rory’s escape and John’s pursuit of him. It didn’t make sense. Logan was the ICE recruiter who’d brought John and Rory over from Army Special Forces and had facilitated their training. He didn’t work cases, so what was he doing in the field?
Come to think of it, maybe an even better question than that was why would Alicia help ICE in the first place? She’d quit the agency more than a year ago, and as far as John could glean at the time, not on the best of terms after they’d put her on disability.
All John knew was that he was sick and tired of being jerked around and played for a fool. That was going to end right the hell now. Seething inside, he gunned the engine and swerved right, ripping around one corner, then another, onto a side street that ran parallel to the coastal highway on which the van continued to travel. With a whining protest, the hatchback complied. Keeping one eye on the road and his foot pushing the gas pedal to the floor, he reached into his bag and brought out his rifle.
At a corner where the van was set to pass by as it headed in the direction of the airport, he screeched to a halt in the middle of the road, threw the car into Park and ran up an exterior set of stairs to a rooftop deck, rifle in hand. This plan might ruin his getaway car, but John couldn’t worry about that now. There were plenty of other cars on the island to steal.
No more than a minute after he flattened to a shooting position, the van came into view.
His index finger slipped to the trigger. Compared to hitting a buoy, this was going to be a piece of cake. Taking aim, he squeezed the trigger and held it down until the two front tires were shredded.
The van’s brakes smoked as it jerked into a spinout. John then took aim at the windshield and squeezed off a single round that hit right in the corner as the van turned. The windshield beaded into thousands of white balls of glass, but the plastic safety film covering the glass kept the windshield erect, though no one could possibly see through it.
Someone in the van fired a shot out of an open window, then another, but John ignored the danger. It was a little hard to squeeze off an accurate shot from a vehicle spinning out of control. He stood, ready to spring. The van slammed into the side of the building adjacent to the one John stood on, nearly taking out the beams holding the second-story balcony up. The airbags exploded as it shuddered to a stop.
John climbed onto the corner of the ledge and jumped, rifle in one hand and his HK45 in the other. His boots slammed hard onto the hood of the van, but all the fury and adrenaline pounding through him kept pain the furthest from his mind. He kicked the windshield. This time, the glass did shatter, raining down over the airbags.
He fired shots into the bags, deflating them in seconds, then kicked the female driver and the man in the front passenger seat both in the faces as he took a seat in the empty windshield frame and had a look inside at the handful of operatives aiming guns at him, looking ready to act should he give them the slightest opening.
He didn’t recognize anyone except Logan and Alicia, but the other three had the physiques and postures of highly trained special agents. Their firearms were top rate and high-powered. Too bad for them because John had an automatic military-grade M4 rifle and an HK45 semiautomatic aimed right back at them—and every person there knew that in the time it would take to get one good shot in him, he could level them all to the ground.
Boots still on the driver’s and passenger’s necks, he locked his knees, pinning them to their seats. Then he plucked their guns from their hands and threw them over his shoulder. Call it a product of growing up in the South, but he hated using physical force against women—seriously hated it—but it’d been Logan who’d retrained John after the army that in black ops, nothing mattered except getting the job done, including an opponent’s gender.
Alicia had confirmed Logan’s words for him more than once that it was insulting to women in the field to be treated differently. So he did what he had to without flinching, when he had to, but he didn’t have to like using force against the female driver right now.
There were two guns still aimed at him—Logan’s and the one held by the man in the very back of the van. John focused one gun on each man, even though there was no way he’d take a chance of hitting Alicia by firing at Logan.
Alicia’s expression was cold, blank. He let his gaze flicker over her before it landed on Logan. He swallowed, caging the impulse to beat that shadow of a smile off his former friend’s face.
“Alicia and Logan, you make quite a pair.” He swallowed, correcting the emotion in his tone, replacing it with steel. “I want answers. And I want them now.”
“Thriller, that was quite an entrance. I wish I could say it’s a shock to see you here,” Logan said, using John’s old code name and a slick tone that made John want to bare his teeth. “Because I was in the room when your superiors gave you explicit instructions to stay out of ICE business and off U.S. soil. Here you are violating both directives.”
“And yet, you knew exactly what would happen when you contacted me this morning.” And he was downright pissed at himself for being so gullible. Guess he had further to go than he thought toward rebuilding himself as a warrior.
“Predictability always was a weakness of yours.”
“No, not predictability. Loyalty. That’s why I’m here.” The woman in the driver’s seat looked as if she might be making plans to counterattack. He unlocked his knee and kicked the underside of her chin hard enough to s
erve as a warning. “And I’ll tell you, Logan, Alicia, it’s the damnedest thing because two years ago, I never would have classified my loyalty to my fellow soldiers and teammates—the people in the world I should trust most—as a weakness.”
He met the gaze of the man in the way back of the van, the one with the flat Polynesian nose and the Kimber 9mm trained on him. “That’s ironic, right? Because when I was a soldier, they drilled it into our heads over and over again that loyalty was everything.”
The man’s eyes narrowed. John winked at him, just to be contrary, before returning his focus to Logan. “This is a good-looking crew you’ve compiled. I guess your superiors have you working in the field now?”
“Wait...you two know each other?” Alicia said.
The question gave John pause. If she’d really teamed up with Logan, she would have known that. Unless she was playing dumb.
He didn’t take his eyes off Logan when he answered her. “Logan recruited me for ICE from the army.”
“I trained you, too. Don’t forget that part of the story.”
John shifted the aim of his rifle to Logan’s face. “Then how is it that there are five of you and only one of me, and yet we find ourselves in this position? This must be one of those times where the student surpasses the teacher.”
“I wouldn’t bet on it.” At the first movement of Logan’s gun, John engaged the muscles of his trigger finger, but didn’t take the motion any farther. Instead, he schooled his features against the bolt of panic that hit him as the butt of Logan’s gun found Alicia’s throat. “Where are my manners? I owe you my thanks for leading us to Alicia. She was our target all along and I knew you’d be the one to help us neutralize her.”
Steady, man. Loyalty is your weakness, remember?
Odds were that this was just another ploy to manipulate him. Keeping his focus on Logan’s trigger finger, he noted in his periphery that Alicia’s hands were behind her back. A bruise was forming on her cheek and he saw abrasions on her neck. Her shirt was dotted with debris, as if she’d been flung on the ground. In fact, the more he studied her, the more beat up he realized she was.
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