Verifiable Intelligence

by Kaitlin Maitland

  She could overlook the broad shoulders, washboard stomach and trim waist. She could even deal with his really firm backside. The tanned hue of his supple skin was nice, but she could get past that, too. It was his face. His strong sloping jaw and stubborn chin were appealing. But his lips were unforgivable. The only word she could come up with to describe them was sensual. His full, perfectly shaped lips only looked unyielding. And thanks to a teensy slip on her part on a South Texas beach, Dayne knew just how resilient his lips could be. Soft, pliant, with the ability to give a woman the chills and…

  “Dayne, where are you going?”

  Ryan’s quizzical voice yanked her into the present with a resounding thwack.

  Good God, she was acting smitten! It was disgusting, vile, and dangerous. Why did Jace have to keep looking at her like that?

  His intense hazel eyes, not green and not brown, could mesmerize her like a mouse caught by a cat. Dayne gave herself a mental shake and nudged Ryan past a souvenir shop full of blown glass into the arcade.

  Open on both ends, the structure hosted plenty of patrons who wandered in and out at will. She glanced around and waited for her gut instincts to relax. When she felt reasonably sure no threat lurked behind the overweight, middle-aged attendant or the half dozen kids swarming around the whirring machines, Dayne relaxed.

  “Be careful, Ryan. And if I tell you to get your butt back over here, you do it. Understand?”

  He rolled his eyes. “Yes, Dayne.”

  Keeping one eye on Ryan, Dayne turned to Jace. Dressed in well fitting jeans, work boots and a simple T-shirt, he looked deceptively normal. She wasn’t fooled. She knew he had a weapon on him somewhere but even unarmed he wasn’t any less lethal.

  “I never told you thanks for letting me live in Hong Kong, McKay.”

  Dayne almost choked on the words when she spit them out. Why would she start a conversation like that? Reminding him that she already owed him? Never wise.

  He situated himself with his back to the wall. “How are you involved in all of this, Dayne?”

  “Honestly, I haven’t a clue.” She crossed her arms. “I was minding my own business in the library yesterday afternoon. Next thing I know, Ross King walks in and the situation ends in murder and kidnapping.”

  “Ross King?”

  “Look, don’t act like you think I don’t know who Ross is. He’s got that scar you left on his cheek in Baja. And he’s still missing teeth from my run in with him this past December.”

  The corners of Jace’s mouth twitched. “You knocked out his teeth?”

  She dropped her gaze on the pretext of checking her jagged cuticles. “Yeah, he was pretending to be Santa Claus and I whacked him with a big candy cane.”

  “That guy must really hate you.”

  “At least teeth are fixable.”

  Jace’s eyes drifted toward Ryan. “Whatever, we still don’t have any idea who’s behind this.”

  “Tony Barnes was one of the guys holding your brother.”

  “Barnes the militia mercenary?”

  “Yep, and some guy named Novack.”

  His brow wrinkled as he sorted through his memory database of sleazebags for hire. “That was probably Rusty Novack. Did he have a bald spot and a big nose?”

  She tucked a stray piece of hair behind her ear. “Yeah, that was him. They kept referring to a boss.”

  Jace made a noise somewhere between a growl and a sigh. “Your pal Herrera seems to think it’s Dolohov.”

  “He’s not my pal.” She didn’t bother to hide her annoyance.

  “You seem to have a lot of male pals on the wrong side of the law.”

  “Ha, Ha.” She shot him a withering look. “Can we not argue about Vitale right now?”

  There was a brief pause while she watched him work things out in his head. She probably should’ve been doing the same thing, but her brain was tired of mulling over questions she couldn’t answer. Instead, she let herself get distracted from the situation by pondering Jace’s abrupt return to her life.

  The half-light in the arcade cast him in equal parts light and shadow. It was actually a direct reflection of the way he felt about things. She had never understood his unspoken code of ethics. The very idea of ethics in a job like theirs was ludicrous as far as she was concerned. But Jace had a strict set of morals he followed. It’d been those morals causing most of the disagreements during their eight-month partnership. That and his unreasonable hatred of Ramsey Vitale.

  “Dayne?”

  His tone wasn’t rude. In fact, she suspected he knew she’d been spacing out instead of thinking about their situation.

  “We’re going to get out of this.”

  Was he actually trying to reassure her? “It isn’t like we have a choice, do we?”

  He ignored her sarcasm. “None of it makes sense. The players don’t match. The teams don’t add up. And there has to be some bigger problem we’re not aware of. Are you sure you didn’t hear anything else?”

  “Oh,” she said. “I forgot to mention the list.”

  “Beg pardon?”

  “Barnes and Novack were talking about it in the hangar.”

  “Are you saying there’s some kind of hit list out there?”

  “Hit list, shopping list, I have no idea. But when they came after me they brought high-powered Russian assault rifles with some major armor piercing bullets. They knew I was going to be hard to kill and they were prepared to do whatever it took to finish me off.”

  “And you’re telling me these guys are working off some kind of list?”

  She paused to think this over. Now that Jace had said it. It did almost seem like there was a hit list out there with her name somewhere near the top. “Actually, I’ve got no idea what’s on the list. But they talked like their boss had something to do with it.”

  “Shit.”

  Even under the circumstances, she found the expression on his face amusing. His smooth brow was furrowed, the two veins in his forehead becoming more visible each second as his mood darkened. Since they’d first met, she found she had an uncanny ability to ruin his mood. Needless to say, she was used to watching him get mad. Somewhere along their twisted road, it had ceased to unnerve her.

  “We have to get a handle on this, Dayne.”

  “I’d be more worried about it getting a handle on us.”

  He took another deep breath to say something else but he never got the chance. They both heard it. You didn’t last long in their line of work if you couldn’t pick the sound of gunfire from innocuous background noise.

  Chapter Nine

  “Down!” Jace growled.

  Dayne didn’t get a chance to look for the shooter before her world tilted on its axis. Folding her against his body, he rolled to the ground. He grunted when they landed hard on the unforgiving cement. No more than a breath later, the rifle round shattered cement inches away from their bodies before ricocheting into the ceiling.

  Under any other circumstances, she would’ve spent a moment trying to digest the fact that he had probably just saved her life again. But she had to know where the bullet had come from. An amusement park might’ve made a great hiding place, but it also worked as a sniper’s playground. Picking them off one by one would be child’s play if they couldn’t find a way to get the upper hand.

  “Ryan!” Dayne snapped in her no nonsense voice.

  She had long ago decided that assassination had become easy money simply because Americans were far too comfortable. The scene in the arcade was proof positive of that theory. Nothing had changed. Nobody had heard the bullet over the persistent blare of the machines. And nobody cared that the two of them appeared to be rolling around on the floor together in public.

  Ryan was eyeing Dayne as if she’d finally lost her mind. He’d just started in her direction when she caught a sunspot off a roof nearly a hundred yards away. Knowing she had less than a second to react, she squirmed out of Jace’s grip and lurched in Ryan’s direction. Her hand caugh
t the cuff of his jeans. She wrapped her fingers firmly around his ankle and yanked his legs out from under him.

  Ryan crashed to the ground as the second bullet buried itself in a game only inches away from where he’d been standing moments before.

  “Jace! Get a move on!” she ordered.

  Ryan suddenly seemed to realize what was going on. He threw himself at his brother’s prone form. “Why isn’t he moving?”

  It had only just occurred to Dayne to wonder the same thing. The possibilities weren’t nice to think about. There were so many reasons she didn’t want Jace dead yet, and not all of them were business related.

  She needed time, at least two or three minutes to try and figure out what was going on. She needed cover. There was only one obvious way to do it.

  “What are you doing, Dayne?”

  Ignoring Ryan’s panicky tone, she pulled out her Sig and aimed in a ninety-degree arc out the front door. Despite the evil connotations surrounding her job, she wasn’t a monster. She didn’t actually want to kill a tourist as a diversion. So because what goes up must come down, the ninety-degree angle would keep the velocity of her bullet from being lethal when it found its mark outside somewhere.

  As she’d hoped, the unmistakable crack of her pistol in the enclosed store created instant chaos. Just to make certain she created a large enough window of time, Dayne added a lusty scream of her own.

  “He’s got a gun!” she wailed at the top of her lungs.

  The arcade exploded like an anthill on picnic day. Kids and parents ran screaming out the doors, the attendant huffing along behind them.

  Ryan fixed his wide-eyed stare on her. “What are you doing?”

  “Shut up and help me roll him over.”

  She could already see a red stain spreading across the back of Jace’s white T-shirt. It seemed to originate from his left shoulder. When she and Ryan managed to roll him onto his back, she could see a nasty swelling on his forehead as well.

  “Is he dead?” Ryan asked fearfully.

  “Don’t be silly. If it were that easy to kill him, I’d have done it years ago.”

  Her bravado went only as far as her words. She had very little time. And there was no way she and Ryan were going to be able to carry Jace’s body out of the park if she couldn’t get him to come around.

  “Jace?” Dayne spoke in a calm, but forceful voice.

  “Why isn’t he waking up?”

  She slapped him smartly across the face. It pained her to pummel him when he was unable to defend himself, but she needed him awake and she needed it now.

  Jace blinked experimentally. Obviously, he wasn’t dead. The excruciating pain radiating from his shoulder told him that much. Ryan’s pale face slowly slid into focus before he felt Dayne probing his wound.

  “Hey, welcome back,” she said in a clipped voice. “You’ve got a through and through, left shoulder. But I need you to get moving.”

  Her high-handed attitude would’ve annoyed the hell out of him under normal circumstances. But somewhere in his foggy brain he remembered the events that had happened only minutes before.

  Jace didn’t want to move. He wanted to throw up. His head was pounding like a freight train, but he sucked in a deep breath and lurched into action.

  “Where’s the shooter?” he asked, his voice hoarse.

  “I caught a gleam on the roof of the theater about a hundred yards away.” Dayne gestured toward the right of the doorway.

  “Did I hear another gunshot?”

  She didn’t even try to hide her grin. “That was me. I needed a minute.”

  “He know we’re still here?”

  “Hard to say.”

  Jace plowed through the fog in his brain. “I know I lost those tails before I even headed out here.”

  “You had company on the way over and didn’t think to mention it?” she asked.

  “Too late to worry about it now. Which way?”

  “I’m not sure. But there’s not a lot of ways to make an exit.”

  “All right, I’ll take Ryan and go left.”

  “No.”

  No? She was going to argue with him now?

  “Look Jace, I know this place. You’re going to have to trust me.”

  He was too groggy to fight, so he had no choice but to rely on her. God knew she’d had enough opportunities to take Ryan and run, but she hadn’t.

  “Whatever.”

  Dayne looked relieved. He realized she’d expected him to put up a fuss. Somewhere in the back of his brain he found that funny. It said a lot about the way things were between them.

  “I need you to go right and draw his attention. I’m going to take Ryan and go left.”

  “Where’s your ride?” he managed. His tongue felt like a wad of cotton in his mouth.

  “All the way at the back of the park, in the employee lot.”

  “How do I get there?”

  “Forget it, Jace. The shape you’re in, you’d end up lying in the middle of the sidewalk somewhere. After Ryan and I are clear, double back left and meet me in the rear of Miss Kitty’s Saloon.”

  He wondered at first if his fuzzy mind had just fabricated that order. But her face was set and he was in no position to protest. He wasn’t even altogether certain he could create a diversion without getting himself shot again in the process.

  She nibbled her lower lip. “I need to know if you can do this for me, Jace.”

  Unable to articulate, he nodded. The nodding was worse. He felt like a bobble head doll; head too big for his body, wavering about like a free weight.

  Her lithe body was warm where she pressed it against him, bolstering his strength and helping him gain his feet. He glanced down and realized she’d used a strip of material from her loose flannel shirt to bind his shoulder. Though the gesture was touching, he could already feel his blood seeping through the wrapping.

  “I don’t want you to go, Jace,” Ryan’s voice was on the verge of a whine.

  Jace wrapped his right arm around his little brother and squeezed as mightily as he could. “You’ll be safe with Dayne. She’s too damn stubborn to let anything happen to either of you.”

  A smile twitched at the corners of her full lips. “You got a weapon?”

  “Do I ever run around without one?”

  Her mouth thinned and he saw a muscle jump in her jaw. “Just lay low until I get back to you, all right?”

  He tried not to bristle at the naked command in her voice. It wasn’t like he had any other choice, but a man had his pride. Jace hated taking orders, especially from Dayne.

  The courtyard was almost empty when he headed for the doorway. He’d half expected to see a few security personnel. Screaming was a normal occurrence in a place like this, as were adrenaline-induced hallucinations. He could hardly blame the rent-a-cops for taking their time when there were no dead bodies and no obvious crime.

  From the corner of his eye, Jace could see the telltale gleam of a weapon in the waning sunlight of the fall afternoon. Keeping his movements carefully measured, he slipped from the arcade entrance to a copse of nearby trees. Though partially hidden, he’d made certain to give the sniper a broad view of him exiting. As anticipated, the sound of a bullet scraping across tree bark before thudding ominously into the mulch at his feet was followed by a muffled rifle report.

  Dayne took hold of Ryan’s arm with one hand, and her Sig with the other. As soon as Jace exposed his profile, she took off, Ryan trailing like a rag doll. She cut a zigzag pattern around trees, between paths, up onto a park bench and over the low fence behind it.

  She couldn’t have planned a better situation. The Tommy G. Robertson railroad station was less than 35 yards away, and she could see the muted black and gold engine coming to a hissing stop at that moment.

  “When I say, we’re going to break for the train, Ryan. Got it?”

  “The train?” he wheezed, ducking behind a flowering bush.

  “I’m going to put you on. I want you to stay on unt
il either Jace or I come and get you.”

  “But…”

  “Don’t argue with me, Ryan. Just do it.”

  His wide blue eyes opened just a fraction wider. She felt bad for him. None of it was his fault. Who could blame him for being related to Jace? It wasn’t as if he were responsible for his genetics.

  The waiting passengers were settling into their seats when she made her break. She kept expecting to hear a shot, but there was nothing. That was almost worse. What if it meant they’d already managed to down Jace?

  “Go!” Dayne growled as she hurled Ryan over the white barrier fence.

  Fortunately, the railroad attendants were too busy flirting with each other to notice one little boy climbing into the rear car before settling low into the last seat. She waited an interminable four seconds for the train to emit a massive cloud of clinging steam before chugging out of the station. Each one was agony. She kept expecting the shot, to see a bullet shatter the fiberglass hull of the train car or bury itself inside Ryan. But nothing happened and she began to wonder if someone was playing games with them.

  It was dim and quiet inside Miss Kitty’s costume storage area. Jace could hear laughs mingled with tinny piano music coming from the dance hall on the other side of the door. The air was thick with dust and the scent of old fabric.

  He wedged his big body between two enormous racks overflowing with Wild West costumes. It was a tight fit for his shoulders, but he gained a little extra room by sinking to the plank wood floor.

  He was honestly shocked that he’d managed to make it all the way to the saloon without being shot again. He knew his athleticism was considerably handicapped by the shoulder wound. The fact that he’d been able to avoid the shooter worried him.

  The most important detail was to figure out who the target was. Herrera had mentioned a contract on Dayne, but the possibility existed that Yuri was trying to smear Jace off the map in retaliation for his brother Kiryll’s assassination. Jace had decided from the beginning that Ryan’s kidnapping was designed to draw him into the open. There was no other possible reason to bother with the kid otherwise. Messing with Ryan had also involved the local authorities. And while they were more of an annoyance than a problem, it was still more publicity than these people usually liked to attract.