The Admiral's Bride

by Suzanne Brockmann

  She was in his arms then, holding him as if he were her salvation. And she was crying. Brave, strong, tough Zoe had dissolved into tears.

  “I didn’t want to do it,” she told him. “I wanted you to tell me not to. I kept hoping you’d stop me, but you just seemed to think it was something I’d do, something you expected of me. And when you said it had nothing to do with you…”

  Her face crumpled, and she clung to him.

  “I’m sorry,” he murmured. “Jeez, Zo, I’m so sorry.”

  “I wasn’t completely honest with you, Jake.” She drew in a deep breath as she pulled back to look into his eyes, wiping her face with her hands. “I wanted to impress you, make you think I was like, I don’t know, James Bond or something.”

  He had to laugh at that.

  “And you believed me, even when I tried to tell you it wasn’t true. And then it got even worse because I…” She lifted her chin a little higher. “I fell in love with you.”

  Jake stopped laughing.

  “That’s what I was coming back to tell you.” Fresh tears brimmed in her eyes. “I’ve never used sex to get information or…or anything. Not ever. I’ve never slept with anyone I didn’t love at least a little, only with you I…I don’t know what happened. I thought it would be safe to fall a little bit in love with you because I know you can’t love me, but somehow a little bit became a little bit more and then more and…And it’s good, it’s a good thing because I didn’t think I’d ever feel this way about anyone, but now I know, and it’s wonderful and…and tragic, too, because now I also know what you lost when Daisy died, and I’m so, so sorry.” Her tears again escaped.

  Jake held her tightly, bemused, amazed, a lump in his throat. Zoe was crying for him. Her tears now were for his loss. She was, without a doubt, one of the most remarkable human beings he’d ever met.

  “I know you still love her,” she said softly, her face wet against his neck. “I’m not asking you to stop loving her. And I know I can’t replace her. But maybe, if you don’t mind, we can keep seeing each other for…I don’t know, a while, after this mission is over?”

  Jake tried to clear the lump from his throat, but it wouldn’t budge. “A while,” he repeated. “About how long is a while?”

  He could feel her breath warm against his throat. He could sense her weighing her responses, wondering the best way to answer his question.

  “Honestly,” he told her. “Tell me honestly, babe. How long—honestly—would you want that while to last?”

  “I guess,” she said carefully, “I was hoping for anything between, say, thirty years and forever. Leaning heavily toward forever.”

  Forever. Jake closed his eyes as he held her even closer. “Oh, Zoe, your forever’s a whole lot longer than mine. My life’s half over—yours is just starting and, jeez, I’m—”

  She covered his mouth with her hand. “It’s okay,” she said. “You asked me to be honest, so I was. I know you’re not ready for anything like this. And I know now’s not the best time for another installment of the you’re too old for me debate. Right now we’ve got a different problem to deal with.”

  “Vincent’s expecting you in his dining room,” Jake agreed. “You’re already five minutes late.”

  “What are we going to do?”

  “I signaled the team this afternoon,” Jake told her. “They’re on standby, waiting for my next command.”

  “I keep coming back to our theory that Vincent doesn’t truly know what he’s got—that he doesn’t know what the Trip X is capable of,” Zoe said. She wiped the last of her tears from her face. “We haven’t found any kind of delivery method, no missiles lying around. No bombs—unless they’re already locked up tight with the Triple X and—”

  “I’m ready to gamble,” Jake said. Hell, Zoe loved him. He was feeling pretty damn lucky tonight. “Are you?”

  She could read his mind. “Gamble that the Trip X is somewhere in Vincent’s private office behind one of those two locked doors?”

  “It’s either there or it’s somewhere outside this facility,” Jake said. “I’m convinced of that.”

  She nodded. “I am, too.”

  “Okay,” Jake said, thinking fast. “Here’s our plan. We take control of Christopher’s private quarters. You and me. Between the two of us, we can hold off the entire CRO until the SEALs arrive.”

  Zoe looked skeptical. “Without a weapon?”

  “I’m sure Christopher has something in there we can liberate. And have you seen the door to his office? You would need a serious explosive to get that open after it’s been locked. The trick is in getting it locked behind us instead of in front of us.” He started to pace. “Look, here’s what we do. You go to Christopher’s dining room. Make a big deal over the fact that you’ve heard his chef is a four-star gourmet, that you’ve been really looking forward to this meal. Don’t let him skip right to the dessert—which I’ve got to assume is you.”

  “I won’t.”

  He stopped pacing to look searchingly into her eyes. “Are you really okay with this, because if not—”

  “I’m okay with this.” Zoe’s smile was tremulous. “I’m really okay that you trust me to be able to handle Vincent.”

  “While you’re doing that,” Jake told her, “I’m going to rig the main power supply and the backup generator to blow. I’ll try to take out the main computer while I’m at it.”

  “Are you telling me you can make a bomb from cleaning supplies—things that are just lying around—that will do that much damage?” she asked.

  “Well, I probably could, but I don’t have to.” Jake smiled. “I brought two bricks of C-4 plastique into the fort, inside your duffel bag.”

  She stared at him. “Holy Mike! What if my bag had been searched?”

  “It was,” he said. “I hid the C-4 in with a couple slabs of modeling clay and some other art supplies. No one knew.”

  “Including me.”

  “I thought it would be better if you didn’t know.”

  “That’s what I thought about Vincent’s proposition.”

  “No more secrets,” Jake said. “Okay?”

  Zoe smiled weakly. “Then I guess I better tell you that this afternoon I snuck into Vincent’s quarters with a cleaning team.”

  Jake closed his eyes. “Zoe. God.”

  “It was all right. Ian Hindcrest found me in there, but I played dumb, and all he did was send me back to the kitchen.”

  “Why would you risk everything to—”

  “Because I thought if I found the Trip X I wouldn’t have to have sex with Christopher Vincent!”

  There was absolutely nothing Jake could say in response to that. Nothing but, “I’m sorry.”

  “It was okay, Jake. I got shoved around a little, but Hindcrest bought my story.”

  Shoved around a little. Coming from the queen of the understatement, that could mean anything. It helped a lot that she was standing in front of him, looking to be in one piece.

  “What are the odds he didn’t tell Vincent about the incident?” he asked.

  “I’ll take care of that,” Zoe promised. “When I go in there, I’ll confess to Chris I was so eager to have dinner with him, I snuck into his office this afternoon, hoping to get a chance to talk to him.” She turned his wrist, looked at his watch. “Meanwhile, I’m now ten minutes late.”

  “I’m not sure I want you to go at all now.”

  “Just tell me your plan,” Zoe said. “Please. You just rigged the power and computers with a bomb. Then what?”

  “I’ll set a delayed fuse and go up to Christopher’s quarters. I’ll make a stink, play the part of the jealous husband, make like I’ve reconsidered this whole sordid deal, push my way into the room. Once I’m there, the bomb will go off, power will go down and in the confusion, we’ll overpower Vincent—”

  “With what? The salad fork?”

  “That could get messy. I was intending to just use my hands. Get a grip on him, threaten to snap his neck
. Hopefully there’ll be a guard or two in the room. Once they drop their guns, we’ll be armed.”

  Zoe nodded. She didn’t say a word about the fact that Christopher Vincent had at least fifty pounds and several inches on Jake. She didn’t doubt his ability to do precisely what he’d said. She didn’t make a single comment about his age, about the fact that it had probably been years since he’d threatened to snap another man’s neck. She had complete and total faith in him. He couldn’t keep himself from kissing her.

  “We’ll lock ourselves into Vincent’s private office,” he continued, “and we’ll sit tight until the rest of the team arrives. Your job is to not let the scum bag touch you and to be ready for me, you got it?”

  “I do.”

  “Good,” Jake said. “Now go. And make it look as if you’re going even though I don’t want you to. Let’s get that jealous-husband thing happening starting now.”

  She pulled away from him, twisting free from his arms, her words contradicting her body language. “Be safe, Jake.”

  It wasn’t hard for him to look as if he didn’t want her to leave. “You, too, babe.”

  Zoe hesitated at the door, looking at him. “I love you.”

  How could three little words make him feel both so damn good and so damn bad? “Zoe—”

  She was gone.

  Lucky had been left behind to man communications.

  He wasn’t completely certain how it had happened. One minute he’d been ready to move out with the rest of the team and the next he was waving goodbye from the window of the trailer.

  Somebody had to stay behind. Somebody had to watch those video screens, hoping for another communication from Admiral Jake Robinson. Somebody had to be ready to relay that information to the team.

  Lucky had hoped that that somebody was going to be Bobby or Wes. Or Cowboy.

  He had his headset and lip mike on, connecting himself to the rest of the team, now split into two groups, one led by Cowboy, the other led by Crash and Harvard. He could hear the second group’s chatter over his phones as they circled the sky in a plane above the Frosty Cakes factory.

  Jake and Zoe had split up, and Lucky was following them both, keeping them both on screen—no easy task for anyone besides Bobby.

  Zoe was in the stairwell, looking as if she’d stepped out of his own personal sexual fantasy. He liked women dressed in what he thought of as contradictions. And Zoe’s breathtakingly short skirt and low-cut top combined with the rather formal, opera-bound debutant-style of her hair really worked for him.

  He forced his attention away from Zoe and onto Jake. The admiral left the men’s room on the fourth floor and went into the same stairwell, heading down, though. But then he stopped, looking up, and Lucky realized Zoe had run into trouble.

  She’d left the stairwell. He could hear raised voices from the other side of the door on the stairwell camera, and he quickly adjusted, keying in the numbers to pull in the picture from the security cam in the hallway.

  It jumped onto the video screen. Ian Hindcrest and a half a dozen armed guards had surrounded Zoe.

  Lucky swore, and over his headset, Harvard’s voice responded. “What’s happening, O’Donlon?”

  “We’ve got six zealots with Uzis, aiming them at Zoe.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Zoe didn’t look frightened, only amused.

  Jake had moved silently up the stairs, and he stood, right outside the door, listening and looking out, the door open infinitesimally.

  “So you deny you were in the leader’s office today as a spy.”

  Zoe laughed. “Spy? Me? Do I look like a spy?”

  “She’s definitely made,” Lucky reported. “We’ve got some serious trouble here, Senior Chief.”

  He knew exactly what Jake had to be thinking. Every instinct the man had was screaming for him to go out there and start kicking butt, to rescue Zoe.

  Except one unarmed man against six men with automatic weapons…There was no way in hell he could possibly succeed. Three seconds after he leaped out from behind the door, Zoe would still be in trouble, but he’d be too dead to help her. One of those grim-faced cleaning crews would be mopping what was left of him off the floor.

  No, it was definitely neither the time nor place to attack.

  “Take her to General Vincent’s office,” Hindcrest ordered the guards.

  General. Talk about a sudden promotion. Of course, when you run your own little fantasy world behind a high electric fence and walk around with security guards with Uzis, you can call yourself Lord God Almighty if you want.

  “Does Jake know about Zoe?” Harvard asked over his headphones.

  “Yeah. He’s on it, Senior. But there’s only one of him and he’s not armed.”

  As Zoe was led away, Jake turned and went down the stairs, moving fast.

  Lucky followed him via camera down the stairwell, down the hall to his room. The admiral grabbed what looked to be—hot damn!—two solid bricks of C-4 explosive and a bunch of fuses and was back out in the hall, moving fast.

  It wasn’t until then, until Jake hit the stairwell going down again, that Lucky realized the man was sending him a steady stream of hand signals.

  Now, Jake was signaling. Now. Over and out.

  God, Lucky had missed it all. Do what now?

  He quickly rewound the tape. “Got a message incoming from the admiral,” he announced as he watched it. “He says he’s taking out security, power and computers, and he’ll blow a hole in the electric fence, as well.” He snorted. “Well, sure, why not? One guy doing the job of ten men. Who does he think he is, one of the X-Men?”

  “No, just Jake Robinson,” Harvard responded.

  “He says five minutes—oh, is that all? Or maybe even less till it blows. He says he needs support. He says come in as covertly as you can, as quickly as you can. He says he’s ready to guess where the package—meaning the Trip X—is, but it’s just a guess. Wear gas masks, be ready for anything, don’t forget there are women and children here. He says come now. Now.”

  On the other video screen, Zoe had arrived in Christopher Vincent’s outer office.

  She looked so small, so fragile compared to the CRO leader’s bulk. She was looking at something Vincent held in his hand.

  “That’s a paper clip,” she said. “You’re all worked up over a paper clip?” She laughed. “Chris, I’m a waitress. I’m not a spy. That’s crazy!”

  Christopher hit her with his fist, like a club against the side of her head, and as Lucky watched, Zoe went down, hard.

  “Move fast, team,” he said, his heart in his throat. “Zoe’s in serious trouble.”

  The room spun, and Zoe clung to the floor, trying desperately to regain her senses, fighting the waves of nausea and dizziness that made her want to retch.

  That was her fault. Her fault. Crazy. She should have remembered that Crazy Christopher went ballistic when he was called crazy.

  Her head pounded and her vision blurred as two of the guards dragged her to her feet. She fought to focus her eyes. Christopher stood in front of the open door to his private office. That door was heavy duty, as Jake had pointed out, with dead bolts that would withstand anything short of explosives. If she could get in there and lock that door behind her…

  “Here in the CRO fort, like most countries, treason is a capital offense.” Vincent was holding a gun on her.

  Zoe blinked, but the gun was real, not a result of the problems she was having with her eyes.

  It was a German-made Walther PPK twenty-two caliber. The kind of gun any inbred militia leader with Hitler aspirations would take pride in owning. “Is Jake Robinson also here to spy on us?” he asked her.

  Zoe let herself start to cry. “Chris, I don’t know what you’re talking about—”

  “Yes,” he said. “He is, isn’t he? He’s here because of the anthrax.”

  Every now and then, there came a mission in which it was necessary to accept that her cover had been blown. An
d if Christopher Vincent thought that the poison he’d appropriated from the Arches test lab was merely anthrax…

  It was definitely time to lay all of her truth cards out on the table.

  Zoe stopped crying, stopped pretending. “Chris, you don’t have anthrax. What you have is called Triple X. It’s a nerve agent. A chemical weapon that’s deadlier than even you can imagine.”

  “So you are a spy.”

  “I’m here to try to help you,” Zoe told him. “If you give me the missing canisters of Triple X now, I’ll make sure it’s known that you cooperated fully—”

  “Guilty,” Christopher said. “I find Jake and Zoe Robinson guilty as charged. Their sentence is death, to be carried out immediately.” He looked at his guards. “Find Robinson. Now.”

  Zoe kept talking. “Chris, this is the dead last thing you want to do. If you kill me, if you harm anyone, if you even attempt to use the Triple X, the CRO will be crushed.”

  Christopher Vincent lifted his gun, and as Zoe stared into the deadly blackness of its barrel, she prayed. God, please don’t let Jake come bursting in the door right now. Please, God, keep him far, far away from here.

  “Oh, God,” Lucky said. “Oh, God, he’s going to kill her!”

  There was nothing he could do. He could only watch on the video monitors, completely unable to stop the murder that was about to happen miles away in the CRO compound. It was the most awful, completely impotent moment of his entire life.

  He was going to watch this woman he admired so much, his friend, die while he sat here, unable to lift a finger to save her.

  Zoe could barely stand after that blow Vincent had given her to her head, but the guards moved back from her, out of their leader’s range.

  Zoe was still talking, telling Vincent about the Triple X, trying to make him understand that the United States government would not rest until they recovered it.

  Vincent smiled, and…