Gabe (In the Company of Snipers Book 8)

by Winters, Irish

“Why are you asking me? You’re co-owner of this outfit, too. Do what you want.”

  “We both know why, Mark. Each of us brought a different aptitude to this place on the day we were hired. I may be your equal in title, but there can only be one in charge.” David glanced toward the door. “Besides, they’re already following you. As am I.”

  There it was again, the humbling enlightenment that he, Mark Houston, was the top dog now. It rattled him to his boots. “Thanks. I guess.”

  David offered the barest smile. “I would think a farmer’s son would know the cream rises to the top. In ten years, no one will remember caliber or weapon, only that you stepped up to the plate and salvaged a team worth keeping when they needed you most.”

  “Well, there’s an old Marine saying that tells us to shoot everything that moves, too.” Mark rolled his eyes at his friend’s implied compliment. He, of all people, knew better. He wasn’t the cream. He hadn’t risen to the top because he was the best. More like in the wrong place at the wrong time. “Grab Mother or Ember, whoever’s got the time to help. Let me know what you find. But while we’re talking, how’s Mother seem to you?”

  David’s eyes narrowed. “She’s grown quiet since the funeral. Why do you ask?”

  Mark dug his thumbs into his tired eye sockets. “Maybe it’s just the grief talking, but she’s been short with me a few too many times. And that scene at the hospital was just plain weird. She’d brought her overnight bag. She meant to move in. It’s almost as if she wanted Kelsey all to herself.”

  “You do know she had strong feelings for Alex.”

  Mark grunted. Yes, she’d been known to declare she loved everyone on The TEAM, Alex included. Mark just hadn’t thought of it as that kind of love.

  His cell phone interrupted the awkward conversation. It was Mother’s snippy voice on the other end of the line. And that was another thing. Why hadn’t she buzzed him on the intercom, as she would’ve done with Alex?

  “If you’re not too busy, would you mind spending a couple minutes with Steven and me for a change?”

  He drew in a deep breath and prepared to be extra patient. “Be right out.”

  David excused himself while Mark went immediately to Mother’s workstation as summoned. Actually the center of the work bay, her station formed command central, a beehive of monitors, CPUs, phone lines and everything else computer related.

  She stood behind Junior Agent Steven Cross, her crisp navy-blue blazer and skirt complementing her silvery short hair and cream-colored blouse while she followed his progress over his shoulder.

  Mark wasn’t worried about the crime scene across the street anymore. He doubted the roof would hold a hint of believable evidence once the FBI was through with it. Thankfully, the lack of hard evidence hadn’t stopped Mother or Steven from checking into it.

  Steven pointed at his monitor the minute Mark arrived. “Look at this, Boss.”

  “Don’t call me that.” Mark didn’t mean to snap.

  “Sure. Sorry, but you need to see this,” Steven continued unfazed.

  Mother rolled her eyes. Something was definitely bothering her. She’d taken a stern position behind her poor apprentice, her arms crossed over her chest and her toe tapping.

  Mark rested his hand on Steven’s shoulder to take the sting out of his rebuke. “Whatcha got?”

  Steven reversed the video and ran it forward in slow motion. “The shooter. I think. Watch this.”

  Mark watched while once again, Alex pulled up to the security gate on the day of the shooting. He extended his left arm through the driver’s side window and keyed in his pass code. The gate rolled to the right. The vehicle’s left-turn indicator blinked bright red.

  Everything looked normal until the car’s tires rotated forward.

  A flash of bright red followed by puffs of white hit the windshield. Alex slumped forward in his seat belt and Mark’s heart hit the floor. Damn. The god-awful empty feeling of losing a buddy never went away.

  “Run that again. Slow it down,” he said hoarsely, licking his lips to restore moisture.

  “Yes, sir.” Steven reversed the video and decreased the tempo.

  This time Mark knew where to look. There it was again. The flash of red highlighting the front windshield a scant second before the burst of white, only the flashes hadn’t come from the same location. One was high. One low.

  “Run it again.”

  Steven complied quickly, and there it was. The flash of red from the rooftop, exactly where the FBI and ME reported the kill shots came from. Hell, they’d even trumped up diagrams to support their so-called evidence. Liars. The kill shots came from a window directly across the street from the parking garage exit, not the roof.

  Guys in Afghanistan called it painting a target. They’d laser tag a Taliban terrorist’s front door or a munitions dump to guide an F-16 bomb strike. Some asshole had painted Alex from the roof while another murdered him. What the hell? Was that sniper so poor of a shot he needed his targets marked? Or—

  Damn. David was right. The FBI and ME’s reports were bogus. Every word out of their lying mouths was intended to one hundred percent misdirect them. That’s why the Bureau refused to release the so-called crime scene. It wasn’t one, but as long as The TEAM believed that, they hadn’t looked further.

  Only Steven had. And Mother. And David.

  Another wave of frustration edged up Mark’s spine, filling him with the need to strike back. Hit something. Had he had his head in the sand all this time?

  He stuck his index finger to the monitor screen, pointed to the dark window across the street. “Can you zoom in right here? I want to see this area closer.”

  “Already zoomed in and enhanced, sir.” Steven brought up the requested image.

  At first, Mark could only make out the blurry outline of the tools of the trade—the tripod holding what had to be a sniper rifle, the round lens of a scope that brought targets up close and personal.

  Steven worked to bring the image into better focus.

  The broad shoulders of the bastard behind the scope materialized. The man raised his head to assess the damage he’d caused. The sonofabitch smiled.

  “Who the hell is he?”

  Steven handed Mark a printout from their private facial recognition database, a compilation of every national and foreign facial rec database. The sonofabitch in question was Samuel Becker. Ex-Navy SEAL. Current FBI undercover sniper. Flaming asshole.

  “The FBI killed Alex.” Mark lowered his voice too late. Every head in the work area popped up and all agents crowded into Mother’s workspace.

  She stood smugly behind Steven, rocking back and forth on her heels. “Go on. Show him what else you found.”

  He handed Mark another photo. “Sir, I also ran thermal imaging on this sequence of shots.”

  “What am I looking at?” Mark asked, his blood humming with a spike of adrenaline and a boatload of righteous indignation. The day Libby lost her sister, Faith, to an FBI protective detail gone bad was the day Mark knew Alex was right. The Bureau couldn’t be trusted. Ever.

  What had they done now? Taken Alex out because he was their better? Because he and Jed McCormack, the local billionaire, were tight, and Jed had more clout in Congress than the FBI director? Or just because Alex had been a flaming pain in the ass from day one? Because he really could do more with less? God help the FBI the day the American taxpayer found out that little nugget of more-bang-for-your-buck information.

  Damn. Was this assassination because of the FBI annual budget? Was this nothing more than the Bureau director’s personal vendetta carried out by his in-house snipers?

  The wildest scenarios flooded Mark’s head until Steven pointed to the video monitor, following the slow-mo trajectory of the kill shots. “See? Right here. There’s no heat signature, Boss, umm, Mark. Sorry. Whatever FBI Agent Becker shot into the victim lacked a significant heat signature. It was not a live round.”

  “Say what?”

  “Exactly,�
�� Mother purred. She had her smug face on. I told you so glistened in her crystal blue eyes, and something else, but Mark simply didn’t have time to analyze her bitchy mood.

  “So you’re telling me Becker’s shot wasn’t lethal? He didn’t kill Alex? Then why did he fire at him? What kind of ammo did he use?”

  “Whatever it was, sir, it wasn’t the ten millimeter the ME and FBI claimed. That size of round would’ve lit up under thermal imaging, both from the combustion gases and the friction when the rounds exited the chamber. This, whatever it is, was significantly cooler. It might’ve been a smart bullet. I need to run more data to be sure.”

  “Can you enhance it?” Mark asked impatiently, the facts he thought he knew at war with this newest intel. What the hell is going on? Is Alex alive or not, damn it?

  “I’m still working on that. If I can’t do it, I’ll find someone who can,” Steve answered quickly.

  “Good job, Steven. You, too, Mother.”

  Mark mulled Steven’s breakthrough over on his way back to his office—umm, Alex’s office, damn it. Had Steven just proved Alex wasn’t assassinated? No way. They were missing something. They had to be.

  I saw the blood. The body. There is a reasonable explanation. There has to be. He is dead, damn it.

  Isn’t he?

  Chapter Thirteen

  “Man, Boss. Even up there in heaven, you surprise me,” Gabe muttered when he opened the door to Kelsey’s backyard shed. A shelf ran the length of the back wall with a pegboard wall behind it that held everything from hedge clippers to garden gloves.

  Shovels, rakes, and a hoe hung in their appointed place to the right of the door—a green garden hose neatly coiled on its rack hung at the left. The only thing on the concrete floor was a simple push mower with a grass catcher. Even the damned grass catcher was clean. His OCD boss really was—OCD.

  Gabe knelt to retrieve a roll of garbage bags for the wisteria trimming he’d promised Kelsey. Why not? All the video feeds showed normal, and besides, trimming an unruly vine seemed a damned small thing to do. Hell, he would’ve painted her house if it had made her happy.

  Besides, it also kept him out of Sullivan’s domain.

  Her brows had spiked plenty when he and Zack had returned Kelsey, after her less than thirty-minute walk, to the end of her driveway. The poor thing was exhausted, so Sullivan took over and ushered her to her bedroom. Of course, Sullivan’s evil eye was in play by then, which only made Gabe want to laugh in her face.

  She thought she looked mean with that skimpy raised brow of hers? Hell no. The thing wasn’t even bushy. She ought to meet a few Afghan tribal lords he’d worked with while in the Corps. Those unibrows meant business. Sullivan had nothing on them.

  Shaking the plastic bag out, he latched onto a pair of stainless-steel hedge clippers and prepared to tackle the wisteria beast. If it was anything like his mother’s, this could turn into an all-day chore. Of course, Alex also had a chainsaw. Gabe deliberated for all of one second, but Kelsey liked the vine. Hacking it off at the roots was probably not a good idea.

  He commenced clipping and trimming, pulling long strands of woody vine away from the swing. The wisteria demanded careful concentration. One particular branch turned into a twenty-foot long tentacle that travelled the entire length of the rain gutter under the eaves. He clipped it where it sprouted from the main branch and pulled until the dead wood lay in circles at his feet. As gnarly and stubborn as it was, the massive vine offered a definite blind spot to this corner of the yard.

  He stepped around the back of the swing, hoping for easier access to the tangled mass. The sight stopped him cold. Imprinted in the soft soil was a clear set of boot prints.

  Only they weren’t his. Zack’s either. They both wore the prescribed work boots, steel-toed with a zigzag pattern on the sole and a circle on the ball of the foot. Whoever had been standing in this spot of the flowerbed had left a definite elliptical pattern bordered by a waffle-weave of rectangles.

  “Hey, Gabe. You ready for breakfast?” Zack called out the back door. “Miss Shelby made omelets. They’re good.”

  “Come here.” Gabe motioned him over. “Look what I found.”

  Zack ambled to the flowerbed. “That explains camera nine. I thought maybe we had a bad lens. All I’ve gotten this morning is glare.” He scanned the backyard. “We’ve been had. Look at that.”

  Gabe followed where Zack pointed. A finger-sized metal cylinder on the neighbor’s fence post aimed a bright red light at camera nine, the one Gabe had personally situated under the southwest corner of the Stewart’s eaves. A laser.

  “Mark will want to know about this.” Gabe scoped the fence line for additional camera placement to make sure this didn’t happen again. “He’s looking for any reason to pull Kelsey out of here. That will do it. Someone is definitely stalking her.”

  “The dogs didn’t make a sound, though,” Zack said. “They let this guy get in close.”

  Gabe looked at the kennel. “You’re right. I was up most of the night with Kelsey. I’d have heard them. These guys never made a peep.”

  And she swore someone was in her bedroom with her. Was she right?

  Conversation stalled. Gabe wasn’t going to say out loud what had to be on both their minds. There was one person who could’ve easily disarmed this security system. He would’ve known TEAM protocol, too, and where the new cameras would’ve been installed. And the dogs wouldn’t have made a sound when he showed up.

  Nope. Dead men don’t visit their widows, not like this.

  “Let’s eat,” Zack said.

  “You bet. Let me finish up here and I’ll be right in. You mind checking Kelsey’s bedroom window the first chance you get? Make sure it’s locked and secure like we think it is?”

  “You bet.”

  It didn’t take long to bag the wisteria debris, rake the odds and ends, and stow the clippers, but the puzzle remained. Somebody had gotten inside their perimeter and maybe the house.

  After double-checking the immediate area around the entire house, then walking the perimeter, which he expanded to five houses just to be extra safe, Gabe wandered inside. “How’s the rest of our stake?” he asked.

  Zack sat in the front room at the laptop, a mug of his usual flavored cream with a touch of coffee in his big mitt. “Good. Window is secure. Whoever our intruder was, he knew exactly how to approach the house and get under the eaves without being seen. Except for a couple of bright flashes, which had to be that damned laser, I’ve got nothing. This guy’s good.”

  Just like the boss.

  “We’ve got a clear set of boot prints, though. I’ll make plaster casts soon as I’m done eating.” Gabe glanced down the hallway. “Are the women in Kelsey’s room?”

  Zack nodded, one brow lifted. “Speak.”

  “Why would anyone stand outside her locked bedroom window? It’s not like a guy could get in from there without making any noise,” Gabe whispered.

  Zack lifted one shoulder. “It doesn’t matter. That intruder just blew our one and only chance to stay here. Hit the shower. I’ll call Mark, but I’d plan on moving before night falls.”

  “I’m good with that.” Gabe rifled through his duffel, grabbed his shaving kit along with another set of the prescribed uniform of the day and hit the head opposite the guest room. A good breakfast wouldn’t hurt, but he needed a shower first.

  After he turned the faucet to hot, he kicked off his boots and stripped out of his dirty clothes. His holster and weapons went to the top of the hamper outside the shower, just in case. A sniper never let his weapons out of reach.

  While steam warmed the glass-enclosed tub, he shaved at the sink, his mind filled with reasons their intruder couldn’t be Alex. It made no sense. People didn’t come back to life. Good husbands didn’t torment their widows. And wishing something didn’t make it so.

  The fact remained. This encroachment felt like an inside job. Too bad Whisper and Smoke couldn’t talk.

  Of course,
Kelsey wanted to stay in her own home. It made a difference in her recovery. At least she believed it would. Now he wasn’t so sure. Was there any way in hell somebody had gotten into bed with her last night, that she hadn’t been having a nightmare? That she was right?

  Acid pitched up his throat at the thought of an intruder inside her bedroom. Predator or ally, it made no difference. No one would get that close to her again, not if Gabe had anything to say about it. The time had come to button up any holes that might still exist in their defenses and hunker down. Or move the hell out.

  When Gabe told Kelsey at the hospital that he believed, it hadn’t seemed like a lie at all. He’d meant it as encouragement, but now that he’d seen her fall apart after a dream, he understood exactly what he’d done. He’d tossed her a lifeline, and she was hanging on for dear life. She desperately needed someone to stand with her until... Alex came home.

  Yeah, right. Gabe pursed his lips to one side as he shaved. His loyalty for Kelsey ran deep. She deserved all he had to give and he would do no less, but if she wanted to stay? That was a tough one. This little home was fast becoming an indefensible position.

  TEAM safe houses were out of the question. Anyone with inside intel, like Alex, would know right where to find her again. Hotels were full of innocent civilians, another no-go. That left one place that no one knew about, because it had just been remodeled prior to Gabe signing a seven-year mortgage.

  Hell, Taylor and Maverick didn’t even know that a one-level rambler on the outskirts of Silver Springs was his yet, and they were his best buds.

  He was lost in plotting a strategy for Kelsey’s safety when the bathroom door banged open. He thought he’d locked it, but Sullivan stood there with an armful of bath towels and her mouth wide open, her teeth all but falling out of her head.

  Silly woman must not have heard the shower running.

  “I, umm... ah...” she muttered without saying anything intelligent—or rude.

  He grinned at her flustered confusion while those violet-blue lasers of hers zipped down to his feet and back up to his eyes in about two seconds flat. Crazier yet, she finger-stabbed her glasses back up on her nose.