“So why’d you come?” He stepped closer.
“I agreed I’d try to get you something. I honor my agreements.”
“Yeah, but you could have done it over the phone.”
She looked up at him, and her cheeks flushed, because they both knew he was right.
He smiled. “Thanks for the tip.”
“Sorry it’s not much to go on.”
“Don’t be sorry. It’s more than you think.”
* * *
Luke was being followed.
He wasn’t sure how he knew, exactly, but his frog sense had been going crazy the last few hours, starting before his beach run and continuing when he swung by the grocery for pizza and beer. He’d shaken it on the way home, but as he pulled into his parking lot it was back again, that jangly feeling that told him someone was on his tail.
Luke checked his rearview. Nothing. He grabbed his groceries and got out, subtly scanning the area as he neared the building.
Gotcha.
Dark blue sedan, end of the block. He’d seen the same vehicle parked at the beach, but there had been a couple of patrol cars there, too, responding to a call, so he’d chalked it up to San Diego PD.
Luke headed for the mailboxes, which gave him a few extra seconds to scope out the car. Dark blue Taurus, late-model, antenna on the back. Two silhouettes inside, both tall. He took out his phone, tried to remember who was around. Derek and Cole were in Texas. Owen had gone to L.A. with some cocktail waitress, and Greg was with his fiancée. He called Ric Gonzales.
“Gonzo, it’s Jones. What’s your twenty?” He could tell from the noise that he was somewhere crowded, most likely a bar.
“I’m at O’Malley’s. You coming?”
No way. Luke was still feeling the effects of last night and the night before that. He’d spent the past four days getting wasted and hooking up with women whose names he barely remembered, in a pathetic attempt to forget their last mission. But it was still stuck on replay in his brain.
“Think I’m in for the night.” Luke rested the phone on his shoulder as he shifted his bags and unlocked his mailbox.
“Dude, you’re killing me. Come play pool with us. I just won fifty bucks off some jarheads. Easy money tonight.”
Luke grabbed a pile of junk mail. “I’ll think about it. Hey, I got a question for you. You noticed anyone on your six today?”
“No. Why?”
“I’ve got someone following me.”
“Who?”
“Feebies, I think. You haven’t noticed anyone?”
“No, man. Why would feds be tailing you?”
It was a good question. And he was beginning to think it had something to do with the meeting he’d had with all the suits the other day. In which case, they might only be tailing him and Derek. Or maybe just him. Luke glanced around and spotted a second familiar vehicle, a white Toyota he could have sworn had been in his rearview mirror when he stopped at the store. So two cars following him. No silhouette in this one.
“Jones?”
“Yeah, forget it,” he told him. “It’s probably nothing.”
“What the fuck do they want?”
“Who knows?”
“Bring ’em on down to O’Malley’s, and we’ll ask ’em.”
“Yeah, maybe I will. Catch you later.”
“Later.”
Luke dropped his phone into his grocery bag and glanced at the car one last time as he headed back toward the stairs. Gonzo had a good idea. Maybe he’d screw with these guys a little before giving them the slip.
Luke’s apartment building was a two-story square. All four sides looked out over a central courtyard that was basically a patch of asphalt ever since the el cheapo management company decided to fill in the pool that used to be there. The place had two staircases and a walkway that surrounded the second floor. His unit was closest to the west staircase. Luke took the steps at a deliberately slow pace, unlocked his door, and paused to listen.
Footsteps on the other staircase. He set his stuff inside the door and loudly pulled it shut. Then he crept soundlessly around the corner and waited.
More footsteps.
He slipped past the north-facing units and around the other side. He reached the south units just as a dark form disappeared around the corner.
Rookie. Luke would have loved to tackle him right there, but he’d probably piss his pants or maybe fire off a shot. He’d settle for letting him know he’d been made. A few more steps. He listened. Nothing.
Luke rounded the corner and smacked into the guy, sending him sprawling on his ass.
Only it wasn’t a guy. Luke’s heart damn near stopped.
“Holy shit, Hailey?” He dropped to a crouch beside her. “Are you okay?” He noticed the cast peeking from the sleeve of her windbreaker. “Shit, did I hurt your arm?”
She rolled to her knees. “It’s okay.”
He wanted to help her to her feet, but he was scared to touch her. She got up on her own, and then they were standing there, and she was gazing up at him with those blue eyes that had been haunting him for weeks.
“Hi.” She smiled. Sort of. It was more like a grimace.
“Really, did I hurt you?”
“I’m fine.” She glanced around. “I didn’t mean to crash into you.”
She met his gaze again. Hailey Gardner. It was freaking bizarre. At first he’d thought he was hallucinating, but she was right there, staring up at him from beneath the brim of a Boston Red Sox cap. What the hell was she doing here?
“You’re probably wondering why I’m here.”
“Yeah, I am.”
“Is there a place we can talk?” She glanced over her shoulder. “There’s something I need to tell you.”
Chapter Eight
Luke was hyperaware of the fact that he hadn’t shaved in three days and he smelled like ass from his six-mile run. But Hailey didn’t seem to notice as she took a seat at the graffiti-covered picnic table in the middle of the courtyard. He’d considered taking her to his apartment . . . for about a nanosecond. But the place was a mess, and he was pretty sure he’d left a condom wrapper on the table by the couch.
He sat downwind of her on the bench. She wore a black windbreaker that swallowed her and probably belonged to her dad or maybe her boyfriend, and she’d flipped the cuffs up. Under the jacket, she had on one of those clingy black yoga outfits. She also wore Adidas running shoes, no socks, and she had her hair pulled back in a ponytail. The sporty look had always done it for him, and her stretchy top showed off a very nice rack. And he was probably going straight to hell for thinking about her breasts right now, but they were right there in front of him, and he couldn’t help it.
“You look surprised to see me,” she said.
“You could say that.”
Last time he’d seen her, she’d been sitting on a gurney in the base infirmary waiting to have her arm set. Her face had been tear-stained and filthy, and Luke had been trying for weeks to forget the shattered look in her eyes.
“One of my college roommates lives here,” she said. “She thought maybe I could use a break, so . . . she invited me out for a visit.”
He just looked at her.
“She lives up in La Jolla,” she added, because he was sitting there like a moron, not making this any easier for her.
“So you’re staying up there, or . . . ?”
“I’m at the Del.”
The Del. As in the Hotel Del Coronado. He remembered that she came from money—at the time of the raid, her family had actually been trying to help MedAssist come up with the ransom money. Ten million dollars. They had to be seriously loaded to think they could even get near an amount like that.
She glanced around the courtyard, probably second-guessing her decision to come here.
He still couldn’t believe she was here. The feds on his street were starting to make sense now. Derek had told him that when he’d dropped in on Hailey at her parents’ condo, she had her own private security d
etail. So the feds hadn’t been tailing him. They’d been tailing Hailey, who’d been tailing him. He’d bet the white Toyota down the street was her rental car.
Damn, it was weird to see her.
“How’s your arm?” he asked.
“Fine.” Her smile was tight this time. Maybe she didn’t want to be reminded about her ordeal. Although he doubted a minute went by that she didn’t think about it.
“How are you?” she asked.
The look of concern on her face made his chest tighten. She was worried about him? He wasn’t the one who’d come home in a cast. Or a pine box.
“I’m doing all right.” He thought of his alcohol-fueled sex binge. “Most days, anyway.”
“That’s good to hear.” She looked down at her lap. “So there’s something I need to tell you. Two things, really.” She touched her hand to her neck and cleared her throat. “Sorry. This is harder than I thought.”
Luke waited. Dread pooled in his gut as he thought about what on earth she could have traveled hundreds of miles to tell him. Even if she’d come out here to see a girlfriend, she’d still gone to the effort of finding him at home.
She met his gaze. “First, I want you to know how sorry I am. About Sean Harper.”
His throat burned. “Thank you.”
“You two were close, I take it?”
He nodded.
She looked down again. “I could tell. Everything you did in the helicopter . . . the way you talked to him. I’m sure it was comforting to him to hear your voice right then.”
As he bled out, she meant. Luke had been elbow-deep in Sean’s blood, and by the time they’d loaded him onto the medevac plane, he’d barely had a pulse.
She looked across the courtyard at a pair of abandoned scooters. “I keep thinking about that day—the first day—about how if we’d taken another route, or left earlier, or had one more car in our convoy, none of this would have happened.”
“Don’t.” He put his hand on her knee, then quickly pulled it away. “You can’t think like that. Take it from me. You can’t think like that, or you’ll go crazy.”
For a moment, she just stared at him. Then she said, “The other thing I wanted to say is thank you.”
He didn’t respond.
“What you guys did for me . . . what you did—”
“It’s my job,” he said, and it came out too harshly, because she looked stung. “I mean, you don’t have to thank me. It was—” My pleasure to rescue you? If he said something that stupid, he should be strung up from the nearest tree. “It was my privilege to be able to help.”
Which sounded only slightly less idiotic. She was staring at him now, no doubt thinking he was a total asshole, and he didn’t blame her.
“So . . . how long are you in town?” he asked.
She bit her lip as she looked at him, and he prayed she was going to get off the serious stuff. He wasn’t good at shit like this. It was no secret that his bedside manner sucked. It was even a joke in the teams—his bedside manner consisted of bedding as many women as possible in any manner he could.
And if she’d been able to read his mind right now, she’d probably run straight back to La Jolla.
“My plans are kind of up in the air,” she said, looking away. “I was thinking a long weekend.”
“Well, I hope you enjoy your stay.”
The silence stretched out, and the only sound was the faint noise of a TV in one of the nearby apartments. She stood up, taking her cue, and he felt a mix of relief and disappointment as he stood, too.
She was leaving. This was it. He’d probably never see her again. Something clawed at his stomach, but for the life of him, he couldn’t think of what to say or how to keep her in the courtyard of his slummy apartment for even a minute longer.
“Well . . . ’bye, then.” She held out her hand, cast and everything. “It was good to see you.”
* * *
Elizabeth sat on the floor of her hotel room amid case files and cartons of Thai noodles. After a marathon team meeting, they’d downshifted into sweatpants and carryout food.
“I still can’t believe I’m here.”
Elizabeth glanced over at Lauren as she picked at her noodles. “Why?”
“Do you realize we’re working for Gordon Moore? I can’t understand why he put me on this team.”
Elizabeth set her carton aside. “He works in mysterious ways.”
“You, I get,” Lauren said. “You’ve worked for him before. But why me?”
“Because you’re an expert on the Saledo cartel, and they play an important role in this. And because you’re a great agent.”
She snorted.
“What?”
“I won’t argue,” Lauren said, “but really, come on. Let’s get real. I’m a good agent, yeah, but this task force already has a token female.” She reached for Elizabeth’s carton. “You finished with that?”
“Help yourself.”
Elizabeth had thought long and hard about why she’d been picked for this task force, and she doubted it was because she was a token female. She had the sneaking suspicion that Gordon had put her on the team specifically to keep tabs on Derek. Gordon was manipulating her, and by getting closer to Derek, she was playing right into his hands.
“Anyway,” Lauren said, “I don’t want to look a gift assignment in the mouth, so . . . done worrying about it. How’d breakfast with your friend go?”
“It got cut short.” Elizabeth slurped her drink. “I had a meeting.”
Her mind flashed to today’s encounter with Derek on the firing range. And even more unexpected, her encounter with his mother. SEALs often seemed like superheroes, capable of death-defying feats of strength and bravery. Sometimes it seemed like they came from another planet, so it was almost surprising to discover that Derek came from a tree-lined street in suburbia.
His mom had seemed so normal. So friendly. And clearly bursting with curiosity about why an FBI agent would want to talk to her son.
“That’s it?” Lauren stared at her. “That’s not much of a review.”
“It wasn’t much of an event.”
Elizabeth watched Lauren finish off the noodles and thought about whether to tell her about Derek. She felt awkward. Opening up about her personal life didn’t come naturally.
“There’s more, isn’t there?” Lauren asked. “Are you hung up on this guy?”
“What? No.”
She was saved from further explanation by a knock at the door and jumped up to answer it. “That’ll be Potter.”
Lauren sighed. “So much for girl talk.”
* * *
It was standing room only the next morning in the briefing room.
“Something’s up,” Torres muttered as he grabbed a patch of wall space next to Elizabeth.
Torres was right. There was a definite tension buzzing in the air. The entire team was here, and the only hint that it was Saturday morning was that several agents wore workout gear instead of their usual suits, as if they’d been called in on their way to the gym. Elizabeth had a feeling their morning plans were about to get disrupted.
Gordon strode through the door, closely followed by his tech expert from Washington. He looked over the assembled troops and motioned for everyone to sit. He sank into a chair as his assistant flashed some slides onto a screen.
“Several updates,” he said briskly. “As you all know, Interpol uses one of the most advanced facial-recognition programs on the planet at border checkpoints. What you may not know is that that system was recently upgraded. They just implemented a state-of-the-art software package that allows them to identify, match, and cross-check literally millions of faces a day with unbelievable accuracy. Today it identified these two men.”
Two separate pictures appeared of men standing at immigration checkpoints. Elizabeth recognized Rasheed.
“Both of these images were captured ten days ago,” Gordon said. “The man on the left is traveling under the name Martin Delgado, but y
ou’ll recognize him as Omar Rasheed.”
“Who’s the man on the right?” Torres asked.
“As of now, he is our biggest problem.” Gordon paused and looked around. “His name is Zahid Ameen. He’s on the terrorist watch list for numerous bombings and was most recently implicated in an attack on a bus in Kabul.”
The image of a charred bus carcass flashed onto the screen.
“Sixteen schoolchildren died in this bombing, all girls, along with twelve adults. The bus was on its way to a newly opened school.”
Silence fell over the room.
“Ten days ago, Ameen boarded a flight from Athens to Caracas, Venezuela, that landed just hours before Rasheed’s flight. One week ago, Rasheed entered the U.S. with a Mexican coyote, most likely through border tunnels controlled by the Saledo cartel. We believe Ameen did the same.”
“What do the Venezuelans have on them?” The question came from Lauren, who was seated across the room.
“Nothing,” Gordon said. “Or at least, nothing they’re willing to share. Our relations with them haven’t exactly been cozy lately.”
Elizabeth’s stomach tensed as she looked at the mangled bus. Sixteen schoolgirls. There had to be a special place in hell for someone who would do that.
“If he’s on a watch list, why didn’t they pick him up in Athens?” Lauren asked.
“His passport worked,” Gordon said. “And he’s had some plastic surgery recently. Looking at our previous photos of him, there isn’t much resemblance, so it’s no surprise they missed him. But this new biometric security software they’ve got—it’s beyond anything anyone’s ever seen before. Its matches are amazingly accurate. Based on this intelligence, we are now operating under the assumption that both Rasheed and Ameen are within our borders, and they’re working in tandem. We believe they have contacts here. And we believe they’re planning an attack.”
Gordon turned to face the screen displaying the charred bus. “With Ameen involved, we know that no target is too soft—schools, shopping malls, subway stations. Heavy civilian casualties are his trademark, and he’s completely without conscience. We are pulling out all the stops to find him. Every agency in Homeland Security is engaged in this manhunt.”
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