Full Throttle

by Julie Ann Walker

  A smile spread across Dan’s face. She tried not to think about the fact that he’d worn that exact same expression as he loomed over her in bed. “Leo Anderson.” Dan dipped his chin. “He’s good. All of his men are good. We’ll be lucky to have ’em.”

  “Bueno. And hopefully, by the time they get here, we’ll have located Abby, scouted the area she’s being held in, and have a plan in place for her extraction, eh?”

  Which reminded Penni… “Um…guys? I’m not sure how easy that’ll be.” She pointed a finger at the iPad’s screen.

  “What do you mean?” Dan’s brow puckered.

  “According to this, Abby’s tracking devices have been scattered all over the city.”

  Steady stopped loading the backpack to pin her with a hard look. Black Ops… How could she have missed it? It was written all over him. Dan too, for that matter.

  Oh, yes indeedie! Just my luck. I go looking for human connection and wind up seducing one of them! For shit’s sake! Because Black Ops and human connection might as well be antonyms in the wide, wide world of—

  Whoa. Okay. So it was difficult not to flinch when Steady stalked toward her. And she did flinch, just a little, when he motioned for her to hand over the iPad with a hard flick of his fingers. The guy’s expression was the facial equivalent of a grenade with a loose pin.

  Passing him the device, she rubbed the little bump on her nose—it was a nervous tic that, most days, she tried to contain. But this was not most days. Evidenced by the fact that Steady cursed like a convict as he studied the iPad’s screen. Then he tilted his head from side to side, cracking the vertebrae in his neck, before impatiently handing it back to her. Pulling his iPhone from his pocket, he thumbed it alive. His expression was unreadable as he stepped over to Dan, gesturing at the screen. “What do you think?” he asked.

  “Roger that.” Dan nodded. “Maybe we’re lucky.”

  “Or maybe we’re good.”

  Huh? Lucky? Good? Not necessarily the adjectives she’d use to describe this god-awful situation. But before she could ask what the flippin’ hell they were talking about, Steady turned to her. “You’re right. Her clothes are scattered to the four winds. So whoever took her knew about the transmitters. I thought that information was classified.”

  “It is,” she stressed. “Just like our hotel room numbers were classified. Just like the covert locations we occupy while on duty are classified.” Covert positions because Abby hated drawing attention to herself, and nothing said look at me! like a group of guys and gals in suits standing sentry by her side or beside her door. And since Abby was such a sweetie pie, so kind and generous and flat-out likeable, Penni and the rest of the Secret Security agents had gone out of their way to accommodate her need for a bit of normalcy. Unfortunately, covert positions left them alone and vulnerable. Case in point…the slit throats. Christ! “Just like this whole assignment is classified!” she finished, her voice breaking on a hard edge. Okay, and her hysteria was beginning to bust through to the surface, opening cracks in her demeanor.

  “There’s a leak or a mole inside the Secret Service,” Dan said. The thought was enough to make Penni—already close to blowing chunks—press a hand against her rebelling stomach. “It’s either that or…” He glanced sharply at Steady. “You don’t think this has anything to do with—”

  “I seriously doubt it.” Steady was quick to shake his head, and Penni had to bite her tongue to keep from asking who or what they were talking about. “How would he have gotten his hands on the Intel from a different department?” Okay, so it was a who, a…he to be more precise.

  “True.” Dan nodded. “So, you’re thinking total inside job here.”

  “If I were a betting man,” Steady said, “which I am. It’s entirely possible that Intel we were given about Caroline being the target was simply a red herring. Used to throw us off the trail.”

  “Mmph,” Dan grunted. “When I spoke to the president, he said no similar attempts have been made to snatch Abby’s sister. But they’re gonna take her to a secure location anyway.” Gonna, wanna, coulda, shoulda…Penni wondered if Dan’s penchant for slamming two words together was a Detroit thing or simply a Dan thing.

  “Good.” Steady nodded, having moved back to his position beside the bed. He checked yet another clip before stuffing it into the backpack. And that was five fully loaded magazines by her count. So definitely not a hike he was planning. “How did el Jefe sound?”

  El Jefe? Just how close to the president were these guys?

  Dan shook his head. “About like you’d think. Pissed. Ready to send in the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines. Scared even though he was doing his damndest to hide it from me.”

  Okay, so, close. Which meant they were, indeed, blacker than black. Probably the president’s very own beck-and-call boys. Years ago, she’d heard rumors about such a group of men. Now she’d wager her entire 401K she was sitting in a room with two of them.

  “No ransom demands yet?” Steady asked.

  “It’s too soon.” Dan watched Steady attach a Nalgene water bottle to the outside of his pack with a bungee cord. “I suspect he’s gonna hear something when the kidnappers have Abby in a secure location.”

  Steady glanced at Dan. “But we’re going to find her and take them out before that happens. Am I right, amigo?”

  “Bet your ass.” Dan’s grin looked like an executioner’s right before the ax fell.

  Penni couldn’t stay quiet a second longer. These guys really knew how to put the big in ambiguous—as in big, cryptic A-holes. “How in Christ’s name do you propose we do that?” she demanded, pointing again at the iPad’s screen for emphasis.

  “Simple,” Steady said. “While we wait on the SEALs, you and Dan will check each and every one of those signals.” He spoke while digging inside a giant camouflage duffel bag, transferring some of its contents into his backpack. “It’s possible the kidnappers didn’t know where all the transmitters were. Or maybe they allowed her to keep her underwear or shoes. We can’t leave any stone unturned.”

  “Me and Dan?” Penni lifted a brow. “And what will you be doing?” Besides getting ready to start World War III with those five full-to-the-brim clips?

  “I’ll be following the other set of signals.”

  “Huh?” Okay, so not her finest retort ever. But, really, with the horror of her coworkers’ deaths, the guilt of being the lone survivor, and the fear of what was happening to Abby all rolled up in a big ol’ suffocating lump that was located center stage in her throat, she considered it a win that she was able to form words at all.

  Steady zipped the backpack and threaded his tan, tattooed arms through the straps. It occurred to her that at some point—probably when she and Dan excused themselves to slip across the hall and retrieve their clothes, you know…because running around in their skivvies was so professional…not—he’d cleaned off the blood that’d coated his chest and hands and changed into a pair of camouflage cargo pants, some green lace-up jungle boots, and an army-green tank top. So he looked professional. No, come to think of it, that didn’t quite capture it. Menacing, maybe? Okay, that was closer. Threatening… The word whispered through her head, and she admitted that pretty much summed it up. Carlos “Steady” Soto looked completely, irrefutably, unmistakably threatening.

  Goose bumps peppered her arms and caused the hairs on the back of her neck to lift, especially when he fixed his piercing black eyes on her again. “I supplied Abby with a set of faux diamond earrings embedded with high-powered transmitters.”

  “You did? I never heard anything about—”

  “That’s because I didn’t tell you,” he cut her off. “I didn’t tell any of you.”

  She narrowed her eyes. “Why?” She let her gaze swing over to Dan. “Did you guys”—she was careful to pronounce the words correctly instead of the instinctive yous guys that was poised on the tip of her tongue—“suspect there was a leak even before you got here?”

  “Not in so many
words,” Steady admitted. “It’s just that we’ve been in this business long enough to know it’s always best to have a plan B. And most times a plan C and D, too.” After that explanation, which was really no explanation at all, he turned to clap a hand on Dan’s shoulder. “Okay. I’ll call once I figure out whether or not those secondary signals lead to Abby. You do the same if you get lucky here in town, eh?”

  “Roger that.” Dan dipped his chin curtly. “And speaking of plans C and D, you geeked up?”

  Steady tapped the watch on his wrist, nodding. “Sí. I put it in when I changed clothes. You?”

  Dan pointed a finger toward his watch. “Same here.”

  Huh? What in the flip is—

  “Okay.” Steady turned toward the door. “All cylinders here, bro. Let’s go!”

  “Wait a goddamned minute!” she demanded, standing. She was sick and tired of feeling like she was outside the loop on this thing. And, despite her best efforts, her hysteria was beginning to bubble to the surface. “Where are you going, exactly?”

  “From the current trajectory of the signals coming from the earrings”—Steady walked toward the door. The way he moved, the way he and Dan both moved, epitomized the phrase economy of motion—“I’m headed up somewhere past the spot where Jesus lost his sandals.” He pronounced the word in Spanish, so it sounded like hey-soos. And then, before she could ask what the ever-loving hell that was supposed to mean, he turned to Dan. “Speaking of… Do me a solid and call back to HQ. Ask Boss”—the way he said the word, she could tell it began with a capital B—“to send detailed topo maps as well as all the highway, road, and trail maps he can find for the central and northern regions of Malaysia to my cell. I’m itching to follow those signals and don’t want to wait to—”

  “Say no more.” Dan once again pulled his cell phone from his pocket, already dialing a number.

  Steady jerked his chin in a quick up-and-down, the guy equivalent of thanks, bro, before twisting the doorknob. But before stepping from the room, he hesitated.

  “Wazzup?” Dan asked as he lifted the phone to his ear.

  Steady’s shoulder blades hitched together. “I feel like I’m forgetting something.” For a couple of ticks of the clock, he didn’t move, remained statue still. Then he shook his head, shrugged, and slipped into the hallway.

  She turned to Dan, blinking. “Up past where Jesus lost his sandals? Does that guy ever give a straight-forward answer?”

  Dan lifted one big shoulder. “That’s Steady for you.” Then his call went through, and she listened to him quickly relay Steady’s request back to their mysterious HQ. Clicking off, he turned back to her. “So, you ready to do this?” He motioned with a broad hand toward the door.

  “You bet your ass,” she told him, although, truthfully, she wasn’t exactly sure. She was reeling from the events of the last hour, all inside out and topsy-turvy. And it was the fact that her head was absolutely spinning that accounted for the tingling sensation in her bicep when he gently grabbed her arm to escort her from the room.

  That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it…

  Chapter Six

  The northern Perak region of Malaysia

  Seven hours later…

  The rising sun baked the dense jungle air. And with every breath along the mile hike back to the spot where Steady had hidden the sport bike he’d appropriated off the street in Kuala Lumpur, he felt like he was dragging hot soup into his lungs.

  Oh, cry me a river… That was Ozzie’s retort the last time Steady complained about the heat while they were slogging through the waterlogged rainforests of Colombia, evading a group of FARC guerrillas bent on introducing the sharp edges of a couple hand-hewn machetes to the blunt parts of his and Ozzie’s necks.

  Ozzie…Dios! His best friend was probably on the operating table right now, and how he wished he could be there.

  But that was not his mission.

  His mission was Abby. And, saints be praised, he’d succeeded in his task because he’d found her. Unconscious and tied to a filthy bed—which was bad enough and made him seriously consider going all John Rambo and taking the entire terrorist encampment, plus the twenty-three men occupying the ramshackle huts, by storm—but she was blessedly, wondrously alive. So he’d forgo the bloodletting in order to hold his position, keep a weather eye on the kidnappers, and wait for the cavalry to arrive and assist him with her rescue. But in order to do that…

  He pulled his cell phone from the side pocket of his cargo pants, checking to see that, sí, he still had ten percent battery life and two teensy-weensy bars. Good thing on both counts because the thing he’d forgotten in his haste to get to Abby was his satellite phone. He’d managed to remember the portable charger for his iPhone—which he’d completely used up while downloading the maps and topo charts Boss had emailed him while simultaneously tracking the signals emitted from Abby’s earrings—but the sat phone? It was a classic case of head/desk. If there was a desk around this hellaciously hot jungle on which to slam his head, that is. And he suspected it was all thanks, in part, to Abigail Thompson and the fact that she’d been making him forget himself, his name, everything since day frackin’ one.

  The memory rolled over him…

  “You know who her father is, right?” he asked his sister as they walked slowly across Georgetown’s Healy Lawn toward the South Gatehouse where they were meeting Rosa’s brand-spanking-new Mini-Me…otherwise known as her protégé for the next two years while the girl was an undergrad.

  Jesús Cristo, he was happy he hadn’t signed on for a similar position. Four semesters playing nursemaid and mother to a snot-nosed teenager sounded like his version of the Seventh Circle of Hell.

  “Of course I know who he is.” Rosa slid him a look that questioned the validity of his MCAT scores. The warm, early autumn wind blew in over the Potomac, playing with the ends of her jet-black ponytail. “I may have spent the last semester with my head buried in advanced pharmacology texts and pulling forty-eight-hour shifts during clinicals, but I wasn’t hiding under a rock.”

  “They say he’s poised to win his party’s nomination,” he continued, throwing an arm around her shoulders. “And if he does, he’ll likely take the whole kit and caboodle, which means you’ll be mentoring the president’s very own daughter.”

  Onyx-colored eyes exactly matching his own—except for the application of eyeliner and mascara, of course—turned in his direction. “Do you really think that’s escaped me?”

  His chin jerked back as he stopped in the middle of the walk. A young man in a corduroy jacket, Buddy Holly glasses, and carrying a Cordovan-colored shoulder bag mumbled “excuse me” as he darted around them.

  “You sly minx,” he laughed. “You agreed to the position because she’s poised to be the next first daughter. And how great would a recommendation from POTUS look on job applications, eh?”

  Rosa shrugged and tried to appear innocent. It didn’t work. Then her expression changed, became more somber. “Well, there’s that and the fact that after having spoken to her on the phone a few times, she seemed like a nice kid. Funny, too. She didn’t make my back teeth itch by using the word ‘like’ ten times in one sentence.”

  “Like, seriously?” he asked, feigning astonishment. “Like, do you suppose she might become, like, your new BFF? Do you think you’ll, like, be invited to the White House for, like, dinners and stuff?”

  “Cut it out.” Rosa rolled her eyes and threaded her arm through his as they resumed their journey. “You should have applied to be a mentor, too. With our brown skin, we have to take advantage of every opportunity to get a leg up on our East Coast, Hamptons, and Manhattan born-and-bred competition.”

  “They can get bent.” He was never one to worry about the occasional obstacles his race threw in his path. “And besides, I’d suck as a mentor. I have no patience for long-winded explanations.”

  “And that’s the understatement of the century.” She chuckled as they approached the green park ben
ches lined up beside the road that ran through the South Gatehouse. Rosa shook his arm. “Oh, look! There she is!”

  “Where?” he asked, frowning. There were about ten different girls lounging around the grassy expanse and seated on the benches.

  “The one bending over that rosebush. She told me botany is a hobby of hers.”

  Botany as a hobby? Mierda, this girl sounded like the female equivalent of Steve Urkel. Did I do that? If she wore suspenders, he’d happily eat his own dissertation. Although…

  He tilted his head. She did have quite a nice backside. It was round and firm and—

  Well, of course it’s firm, cara pincha. She’s only eighteen!

  But the thought had barely finished skipping through his mind when the short, lithe blond straightened and turned in their direction. The instant she saw Rosa, her face split into a smile. But not just any smile. We’re talking a fully weaponized smile. It was enough to lay waste to a man’s composure. It certainly laid waste to his…

  And now he could only wish she was the female equivalent of Steve Urkel. Hell!

  “Rosa!” the girl called, shouldering her backpack and jogging toward them. When she was about ten feet away, he watched, dumbfounded, as a pair of crystal-clear eyes—eyes so minty green that for a moment he thought there was no way they could be real—swung in his direction.

  Inexplicably, his lace-up boots took root in the path, locking him in place. And since Rosa still had her arm tucked through his, his sudden stop-and-stare forced her to a stumbling halt.

  “What the hell?” she grumbled, quickly regaining her footing and glancing at him. “Oh, no. No, no. I recognize that look. Don’t even think about it.”

  “I’m not thinking about anything,” he lied straight through his teeth.