She didn’t even try to hide her smile. “Wrong.”
Instead of getting angry or issuing orders, Reid looked amused. “What am I missing?”
“The backup of all our findings so far is on a jump drive I hid in the bathroom of the one building not on fire or in danger of catching fire at the moment.”
Parker nodded as he shut down the hose. “Impressive.”
“There should also be supplies and some extra clothes in the cabin at that end.” She pointed, hoping they were still there since the idea of walking around in bloodstained clothes made her physically ill. She knew she should have changed before, but her mind hadn’t been working right. Now it was . . . so long as she blocked out the memory of stabbing a guy.
“Maybe I should put you in charge,” Reid said.
“No doubt about it.” She glanced to Parker, hoping to get an assist for what came next. “We need to check Reid here before he passes out.”
Reid scoffed. “That will never happen.”
And she had no doubt that he could make sure of that by using sheer will.
“We need to get moving,” he said.
She was about to ask to where when Parker said, “They came off the mountain.”
“Otorten.” Just saying the name made her shiver.
Parker dropped the hose and stomped out the remaining flames, catching the few stray glowing embers. “Mountain of the Dead.”
“Sort of.” The folklore on that, as far as she could tell, was overblown. Probably dated back past the Dyatlov Pass incident and the propensity of people to want to make it into some sort of crazy alien conspiracy. “Technically, I think it actually means ‘do not go there’ in Mansi, the language of the indigenous people who live in this area.”
“Oh, that’s better.” Reid’s tone still contained a rasp but his eyes looked clearer now.
The last thing she needed was two people searching for whacky reasons to be afraid of an impersonal slab of earth. They had enough to worry about without taking on the mountain. “The point is, men—not the mountain—just attacked us.”
Reid stood up a little straighter. “Speaking of which, that could have been the first wave.”
“Of what, exactly?” She could not take on one more thing right now. Her body craved a shower and a bed. She needed a few minutes to clear her mind and come at the idea of finding her missing team from a different angle. Nothing she’d thought of so far had gotten her one step closer to an answer.
He didn’t blink. “Attacks by the people who want you dead, or at the very least, with the rest of your team.”
“Great.” The word slipped out before she could stop it. A few more seconds and she might sit down on the ground and not get up again. She’d run out of energy and her emotional strength was all but drained.
Reid lifted the collar of his shirt to inspect his wound before glancing at Parker. “Any ID on these guys?”
“Of course not.” Parker shrugged. “But at least we have more weapons now. Newer ones. These guys were trained and well-equipped.”
“Probably military or at least former military.” Reid grumbled something under his breath before talking in a regular voice again. “Take photos, just in case we can get something back to the Warehouse for face recognition.”
She caught words here and there. None of them sounded too good to her. “Warehouse?”
“The official name of our headquarters,” Reid explained.
She still didn’t like the sound of it. “Seems ominous.”
Parker slipped around her and headed for the still body closest to him. “Almost as ominous as being stuck in the mountains in the middle of nowhere with limited weapons.”
She stared at him. “You’re not really a people person, are you?”
Reid smiled. “Parker is better with Yetis.”
Now wasn’t the time to give the man a list of all the reasons Yetis didn’t exist. If these two insisted on watching over her and shooting men who wanted to grab her, she could put up with a little nonsense talk. “Even I would take a Yeti right now. So long as it was on our side.”
“I knew you’d come around,” Parker said as he started taking photos.
“I’m a scientist.” For some reason she felt the need to point that out. It likely had to do with the fact nothing made sense or was within her control right now. Falling back on what she knew to be true gave her some comfort.
Parker frowned at her. “So?”
“Not a big believer in things that have no scientific basis.” That summed up her life. Usually she was fine with that way of operating, but thanks to the blank stares she was getting, her confidence faltered.
“Like falling for some random guy and getting engaged in a few days?” Parker asked.
Reid groaned. “Parker, really. Shut the fuck up.”
But the guy had a point. Of all the plans she’d made for her life, someone like Reid—lethal and strong and ready to die for a cause—hadn’t fit in anywhere. She didn’t generally get lured in by a fit body and gravelly voice. At least, not until Reid.
“I did, didn’t I?” Those weeks still stunned her. Falling so fast and so hard had run counter to her practical nature. She’d backed out believing that sort of intense relationship shouldn’t morph into anything long-term. That it couldn’t survive. And even if it could for her, there was no way it could happen like that for him. She just couldn’t see it.
It all sounded smart in theory. In practice, leaving him left her in pieces. Fast or not, whatever she felt for him refused to go away quietly . . . or quickly.
“As you pointed out, whatever you felt didn’t last for long. You wiggled out of it.” Reid stared at her as if waiting for her to challenge him. When she stayed quiet, he pushed on. “We need a plan for this situation.”
The man was six-feet-whatever of pure stubbornness. She walked over to him and peeled back his shirt. Both because he needed medical attention and because, in that moment, she needed to touch him. “Any ideas?”
She half expected him to shrug her off or insist he was fine. Instead, he stood there and let her fuss over him. Winced and glared but didn’t push her away.
“Easy, I head out. Possibly draw out anyone who might be following, and go back to the last point where the communications system worked.” When the shirt underneath his jacket stuck to the wound, he looked at her. “That doesn’t feel great.”
She assumed his calm comment meant that it really did hurt. She also knew they could be looking at much worse injuries if they went along with his dangerous plan. “So, your plan is to get shot. Take one for the team and all that.”
He frowned. “Hopefully not.”
“Hope? That’s not good enough. Come up with something else. Preferably, a plan that keeps you alive.” She tried to remember where they’d dropped their backpacks before storming the compound, then decided it would be easy to find supplies amidst the wreckage in the sleeping quarters. “And I need to sew that up, so don’t think we’re done with the medical part of this.”
“It’s a flesh wound. The bullet just grazed me.” He lifted the shirt again and studied the area she just touched.
“Did you get a medical degree on one of your days off?” She knew he had limited training for just this sort of out-in-the-field issue, to get team members injured in action out. If possible. But that wasn’t really the point.
“Did you?” he asked. But before she could volley a response at him, he changed the subject. “What if we made use of a labor camp? Off-the-books, Stalin era. Covert.”
She glanced at Parker. When he didn’t protest or say anything, she turned back to Reid. “That sounds awful.”
“Russia insists it was something else. I don’t really care, but from the aerial photos I studied on the way over, it shouldn’t be too far.” He started to shrug, then hissed in reaction to the movement before letting his wounded shoulder fall again. “More importantly, it’s abandoned, or should be.”
Parker made a humming
sound. “That’s a lot of ‘shoulds’ in that comment.”
“Do we have another choice?” Reid asked.
“Huh.” Parker shrugged. “Like I said, perfect.”
He had to be kidding. They both did. She could barely control the fear rattling around inside her. “Do you know what that word means?”
“And that’s why scientists aren’t in charge of the Alliance.” Reid squeezed her upper arm then let his hand drop again.
Not that she had any desire to be, but still . . . “Because we’re practical?”
“You play it too safe. Sometimes you’ve got to take a risk to get the big reward.”
The intensity of his stare almost knocked her over. “Are we still talking about this situation or something else?”
The corner of Reid’s mouth kicked up in a smile. “I’ll let you figure that out.”
6
TASHA GREGORY stared out her glass-walled office and into the Warehouse situation room. High-end equipment hummed with life and covered table after table. Oversized monitors showing news from around the world and covert camera feeds from hotspot locations hung from the ceiling and lined the walls.
The space was modern and sleek. Very industrial. The career types who sat in the big building across the fenced-in grounds of Liberty Crossing, the home of the National Counterterrorism Center in Virginia, liked to testify in their secret congressional hearings about the Alliance being an example of true international cooperation between the U.S. and the UK. That was when they weren’t too busy berating her in private for every little thing the Alliance did and every dime spent.
But the higher-ups liked a big public show, complete with lots of self-congratulations. They also felt qualified to make decisions without ever picking up a weapon or making a life-or-death spot decision in the field.
Both the Americans and their British counterparts micromanaged to an annoying degree. Tried to plan everything out, as if a national crisis came with the ability to call time-out to regroup. They spent a lot of time designing manuals and talking about protocol. Never mind that the setup of the Alliance outside of the CIA and MI6 meant the team was not hamstrung by the rules the intelligence agencies had to follow. And she would not have been able to convince her men to read operation manuals even if she ordered it, not that she ever would.
The Alliance could move from country to country with great freedom. She took the heat and played the game so her team could work with her as the only true oversight. Move in and out without being seen. Get the equipment they needed while standing in the middle of a firefight. Skate the very thin line between right and wrong as they assessed how to contain the damage. No one was better at any of that than her team.
To her, the fancy office space and Marine guards at the entrance gate amounted to pure window dressing. The real beating heart of the Alliance was the team members, and she trusted them to make the hard calls. She directed and ordered, but she listened and made adjustments. Right now most of them were out.
The place usually bustled with activity, but she’d sent the members of both Bravo and Delta out on mandatory leave. They’d lost one of their own and needed to grieve, even though they fought the idea. Almost every one of them thought that heading straight out on a new assignment and concentrating on doing what they did best was the answer. Part of her agreed. But the higher-ups in the CIA and MI6, the intelligence agencies that trained most of the team members and sometimes supplied backup for missions, argued the point and she conceded.
There were fears about vigilante frustration and the potential for something catastrophic to happen. Having risen through the ranks of MI6 and set up the Alliance, Tasha had a high tolerance for handling catastrophe. Her team was no different.
She planned to call them all back in next week, reassemble and get back to work. It wasn’t as if the gun runners and human traffickers and every other terrorist and piece of human garbage out there looking to cause trouble took the month off because Harlan Ross, lifetime British intelligence officer and Alliance administrator, sacrificed his life in exchange for saving a terminal of people at Paris’s Charles de Gaulle Airport and the Alliance team members standing in the room with him. Including her.
No one outside the Alliance even knew about his sacrifice. And that was the part that ticked her off the most. All those years of service to the Crown, and he wouldn’t receive even a star on a wall like the CIA did for their own. Harlan had been an MI6 officer before joining the Alliance and there would be no public appreciation for him because he died after leaving MI6. That was a choice he’d made when he joined the Alliance.
Harlan wasn’t the type to seek accolades and the job didn’t allow for it, but the covert end for a hero still sucked. She wanted him to be recognized but knew it would never happen.
“Is it usually this quiet around here?” The deep male voice bounced around her office. Caleb Layne looked from one corner to the other, not trying to hide the fact that he was taking in the position of every paper clip and notebook.
“Actually, never.” She gestured to the guard hovering in her doorway to leave. After a brief hesitation he did, closing the door behind him.
Once alone with her guest, she focused all her attention on him. That was no hardship. She might be engaged to an administrator in the Alliance but her eyesight worked just fine.
The phrase “tall, dark, and handsome” might have been invented to describe Caleb. He was a guy with a bit of a reputation. Outside of these walls, the public saw him as a technology genius who went from creating apps that made life easier, to building a gaming company that supplied the world with an endless stream of postapocalyptic role-playing activities.
Impressive but a bit ruthless, and inside these walls a valuable asset. He excelled at creating what he called “pathways to further communication” but others would see as hacking or even potentially espionage. He could access systems that no one should be able to break. Closed systems. Top secret, lives-depend-on-no-one-knowing-this systems.
Which is why Tasha hired him to make sure the Alliance’s system remained secure. The last time someone penetrated their internal communication it touched off a manhunt that led to many deaths, including Harlan’s. That would not happen again. Not on her watch.
Caleb smiled as his gaze hesitated on the file open on her desk. “Is the world on fire and the rest of us don’t know about it?”
Thirty, with coal black hair and something in his facial features that hinted at his Asian heritage. She couldn’t quite nail that part down, but he did look just like his sister. Tasha just wished she could fully trust the man to tell her the truth rather than try to play her.
“Probably.” She closed the unimportant file, letting him think he might have seen something when he hadn’t. He was a man drawn to solving problems, so she liked to keep him motivated by giving him some. But she hadn’t called this meeting. “I’m guessing that’s not why you’re here. You’re not one to panic, and I sensed worry in your voice when you called.”
His confident smile slipped a little but regained its full wattage before he leaned back in his chair. It creaked under his trim runner’s build. “Thanks for seeing me.”
“You’ve done work for us. Tell me how we can repay the favor.”
“This isn’t just for me. It’s for you, too.”
That sounded bad. Like she’d missed something, and she did not miss things. “You’ve lost me.”
“I can’t reach Cara.” Caleb stared down at his hands for a second before meeting Tasha’s gaze again. “To be completely accurate, the science expedition she’s on has gone dark.”
His word choice didn’t make much sense. It was a little too dramatic for Caleb’s usual choices, so Tasha treaded carefully. “Where?”
“Ural Mountains.”
She forced her body to remain still. At times the world felt as if it were on fire, with regional outbreaks of violence, and nations threatening other nations. For the first time in a long time, the Urals
made the list of potential problem areas. Sixteen hundred miles stretching up to the Arctic, some of it home to small cities and towns. Much of it desolate and hard to investigate, and that didn’t even take into account the difficulty in dealing with the country’s leadership.
She leaned back, matching her relaxed position to Caleb’s even though she knew they were both playing games here. “What kind of expedition is this?”
“The undercover type.”
She mentally flipped through every briefing file and satellite photo from the last two weeks but could not place any mention of a field operation disguised as a science expedition. “And that’s where I come in? You think this is something the Alliance either knows about or should?”
“Reid is there. I think he took Parker Scott with him.”
Tasha could hear the air rattling around inside her chest. Feel the tension ratchet up as her body and brain prepared for battle. “Excuse me?”
Caleb blew out a long breath. “I lost contact with Cara and I went to Reid.”
“You’re telling me you lost two of my men.” Two men she planned to strangle when she got her hands on them.
“I wouldn’t say it that way, since you know how to use a gun, but yes.”
Good thing she had plenty of fury to go around because right now it extended past the man in front of her to the two on the ground she trusted not to be so reckless. Apparently they were unclear on the concept of vacation. Since neither their real names nor any of their aliases tripped an alarm through passport or visa control, she had to assume they sneaked into Russia. Not exactly a country with the warmest regard for that sort of thing.
“Why?” And she didn’t explain further. She knew Caleb knew what she was really asking.
“Cara has a tracker. I thought maybe Reid could find her faster than I could.”
This conversation just got worse and worse. “You’re saying Cara let him implant a device on her?”
Caleb winced. “‘Let’ is the wrong word.”
“When Reid gets back and starts the mandatory refresher course on international travel restrictions I plan to make him take, I’ll throw in one on consent as well.” Reid’s boundaries had never been great, but this . . . damn it.
Under the Wire: Bad Boys Undercover Page 6