by Gayle Wilson
Jake was on the same side of the yacht as she was, looking across the expanse of its deck at Hawk. And he was holding a gun. A big gun, which he held as if he knew what he was doing.
“Jake?” Hawk said, his tone questioning.
Surprised? Or trying to sound as if he were? Or trying to sound...innocent? Claire wondered.
“Are you all right?” Hawk asked. “We were worried mat—”
“Put the knife down,” Jake ordered, his words louder and more forceful than that first quiet command had been. The muzzle of the gun lifted a little, pointing at the center of Hawk’s chest. “Bend your knees, arms out to your side, and lay the knife down on the deck. Then we can talk.”
The cold blue eyes of the man they called Hawk held on Jake’s face. He seemed to be considering the demand, but he didn’t obey. For endless seconds nobody moved.
“Do it now,” Jake said. “Don’t make me have to shoot you, old buddy. I sure don’t want to have to do that.”
Despite that seemingly reassuring avowal, Jake’s voice had hardened. Sharpened with certainty. And suddenly there was no doubt in Claire’s mind that he would do exactly what he had threatened.
Hotshot or not, Jake Holt was a CIA agent. No one got to that position without the kind of training it would take to pull that trigger. The kind of courage necessary to put a bullet into the heart of a man he had once considered to be his friend. A man that he had evidently decided, as she had last night, might be an enemy instead.
Apparently Lucas Hawkins heard in Jake’s voice the same quality Claire had beard. His arms moved slowly upward, lifting carefully away from his body. His eyes remained on Holt’s face as they did. His knees began to bend, however, the powerful muscles in his thighs stretching the faded material of his jeans.
When Hawk had stooped as low as he could, his right arm began to lower, that movement as smooth and unhurried as the other had been. He laid the knife on the deck.
“Push it toward me,” Jake directed, while Hawk’s fingers were still touching the hilt. “Hard enough for it to get here.”
There was a half second of hesitation before Hawk sent the knife sliding along the slick surface. It came to rest about two feet from Jake’s right foot. Jake’s eyes had never left their contemplation of the man who was still squatting, balancing on his bare toes, across the cruiser from him.
“Good job,” Jake said softly.
His lips tilted a little as he made the compliment. The smile didn’t have a warming effect on Hawk, whose lips were thinned and set, his eyes even colder.
Moving slowly, he began to reverse the process that had brought the knife close enough to the deck for him to leave it there. Arms again lifted slightly away from his sides, he pushed up out of the low squat until he was standing once more.
“What’s going on?” he asked.
“You tell me, man,” Jake countered softly. “You tell me what the hell’s going on.”
Hawk’s eyes held their focus on Jake’s face for a few seconds more before he nodded and began to talk. “When we got to the rendezvous, we were ambushed. They took Diaz and his bodyguards and left us tied up.”
“Must have been a hell of an ambush,” Jake said, sounding amused. Sarcastic. “Your reputations obviously hadn’t preceded you.”
He didn’t believe Hawk’s story, Claire realized. Jake had worked with these men for years, and of course, considering all she had heard about them, it would be pretty difficult for her to believe that someone could catch Hawk and Jordan unaware.
She had just seen a demonstration of the kind of caution Hawk would bring to an operation. No wonder Jake had his doubts about the scenario Hawk had described.
“We were expecting to meet Griff,” Hawk said. “We weren’t expecting a trap.”
“Neither were we,” Jake said.
“You had trouble?”
“You could say that,” Jake said.
“Where’s Griff?” Hawk asked.
For the first time, his eyes left Jake and moved back to the stairs that led below. Then they rose, finding Claire’s.
“Griff downstairs?” he asked.
There was no doubt the question was directed at her. She just wasn’t sure what Jake would want her to say. It was an obvious attempt to get information, but she wasn’t sure why Hawk needed that particular piece. Just to place everyone? More of that habitual caution? Or because he was really concerned about Griff, which was what his tone implied?
In any case, she opted for saying nothing, waiting for Jake to step into the breach and tell Hawk whatever he wanted him to know. And after a second or two, he did.
“Griff’s asleep. He had a pretty rough couple of days.”
Hawk’s eyes had remained on Claire, even after Jake answered the question he’d posed. And then, moving with what appeared to be a deliberate redirection, they went back to Jake’s face. He had never once looked at the gun, which was still pointed, steady and unmoving, at his heart.
“What does that mean?” Hawk asked softly. “A rough two days?”
“Spending more than twelve hours in the sea for one thing,” Jake said. “The transmitter didn’t work. You got any explanation for that, Hawk?” Again there was an edge in Jake’s voice. Mockery. Or a challenge.
“It worked when I checked it,” Hawk said. “There wasn’t a damn thing wrong with the transmitter when we left.”
“Well, it didn’t work when it needed to. And that’s a real big ocean out there. Too frigging big to be lost in. If it hadn’t been for Claire...” Jake shrugged.
Hawk’s eyes came back to her face, quickly this time.
“That’s why you weren’t at the rendezvous,” Hawk suggested, his own voice without inflection.
“We had a choice. We leave Griff out there or we miss picking you up,” Claire said, wondering how long Hawk was going to pretend that he hadn’t known any of this.
“And the kidnappers?” Hawk asked.
You tell me, she thought. That’s exactly what she wanted to demand of him. Tell me where my baby is, you bastard. Tell me how to get her back.
She opened her mouth, and Griff’s voice interrupted.
“What’s going on?” he asked.
From where she was standing, she couldn’t see him. Obviously, he was in the stairwell that led down to the companionway. Hawk was far enough away from the other rail that he probably could see Griff.
“He climbed over the side,” Jake said. “Carrying a knife.”
“We thought something must have gone wrong,” Hawk said. “That something had happened to you. You didn’t make the rendezvous, and we got ambushed when we did.”
“Ambushed?” Griff repeated.
“Somebody sneaked up on Jordan and Hawk and tied them up,” Jake said.
His voice was no longer sarcastic. Or amused, but somehow he still made it obvious he didn’t believe Hawk’s story. And obvious he didn’t expect Griff to, either.
“Where’s Jordan?” Griff asked, instead of commenting on the ambush.
“Trying to contact the kidnappers,” Hawk said. “Trying to find the baby.”
“And you came here to rescue us?” Griff asked.
Unlike Jake’s, his voice was totally devoid of inflection. Even Claire, who knew him so well, couldn’t read the emotion behind those words.
Hawk shrugged. “We thought you’d run into trouble, too. We thought the same kind of thing might have happened to you that had happened to us. I’ve been waiting to see if the yacht showed up back here.”
“How did you get back to Miami?” Griff asked.
There was a fraction of a second’s hesitation. Hawk’s eyes went back to Jake before he answered, and when he did, Claire knew why.
“They left the skiff behind,” he said.
“Whoever tied you up left the inflatable?” Jake asked, his tone openly disbelieving now. “How very considerate of them,” he said, smiling. “That was just real convenient, old buddy. Wouldn’t you say?”
&nb
sp; It was a little ingenuous, Claire thought, but maybe it was the best Hawk could come up with. Maybe he hadn’t ever intended to have to answer questions.
“What I’d say is that’s exactly the way they planned it,” Hawk said quietly, his voice controlled, not responding to Jake’s obvious incredulity. “Just exactly what they intended.”
“Why?” Griff asked.
Hawk looked at him again. Griff was standing now at the top of the stairs. That air of being in charge, of being the one who had the right to ask the questions, emanated from him. Despite the fact that he was, as she had envisioned earlier, unshaven, and his eyes were as tired as she’d remembered them being last night.
“Setup,” Hawk suggested, blue eyes focused on Griff’s face, his voice still unemotional. “And I think I know who’s behind it. Jordan and I have figured out who’s been behind everything that’s happened to all of us. And more importantly, Griff, we think we know why,” he added.
Chapter Thirteen
Whether or not he had been right yesterday about the agency’s intentions, Griff thought, watching Jake hold the semiautomatic on Hawk, the result of what they had done had been exactly what he’d feared. The destruction of the External Security Team had become a reality.
And that it was happening in this way seemed far more painful than the other would have been. All the bonds they had formed during the last ten years were being irreparably broken by the distrust that spread like a virus between them.
“Unless you’re not interested in who’s behind this,” Hawk said softly.
Griff realized that Hawk had been waiting through his silence. Waiting for a response. For some indication that Griff wanted to hear whatever theory he and Jordan had devised. But Griff kept thinking instead about the one Claire had suggested last night. And, despite his feelings about Hawk, despite their friendship, about how much sense it had made.
“I’m interested,” he said aloud.
Hawk nodded, the acknowledgment small, totally controlled, as was every action Lucas Hawkins ever took.
“This has to be Steiner,” Hawk said.
Griff realized that after he’d appeared, some of Hawk’s tension had eased. Of course, one would have to know Hawk very well—and few people did, certainly not as well as Griff—to even recognize that he had been tense. Or to recognize that he’d relaxed as a result of Griff’s appearance.
Griff wasn’t entirely sure why that had happened. Because Hawk believed he would never allow Jake to pull that trigger? Or because he and Hawk had always been so close, closer perhaps than anyone else on the team? Griff knew the reason for that, although he had always recognized the dangers inherent in that closeness. In the jealousies it might foster. Hawk, however, had never had anyone else. Nothing besides the team. The next mission. And Griff’s friendship. At one time those had comprised the whole of Lucas Hawkins’s world.
They didn’t anymore, of course. Hawk had found a woman who loved him, without any questions about who he was or what he had done. Like the rest of them, however, Jake Holt excluded, Hawk no longer had a profession. Or the missions. The friendships.
“Why do you think it’s Steiner?” Griff asked, watching Hawk’s face, a face he would have said only a week ago he could read like an open book. Somehow, that no longer seemed so easy.
“If they could get us to do this,” Hawk said, “if they could make it appear we’d done it—that’s all the excuse they’d need.”
“Excuse for what?” Jake asked. “What the hell makes you think the bureaucrats ever need an excuse for what they do?”
“Because there are people who understand the value of what we did,” Hawk said. “People who know you, Griff. And who aren’t going to be so easily convinced that doing away with the External Security Team is the best thing for this country.”
Jake’s snort of laughter expressed his ridicule. It was loud enough to be distracting, and Hawk’s eyes briefly left their concentration on Griff to track back to Jake’s face. His thin lips tightened before he went on.
“The oversight committees have read the reports. I think Steiner will have a hard time convincing them that there won’t be a need for our kind of missions in the future.”
More words than he’d ever heard Hawk put together before, Griff thought, resisting the urge to smile. Because he recognized that most of them were words he’d learned from Griff. Standing guard.
“Why now?” Griff asked.
After all, the decision to disband the unit had probably been made not long after the terrorist attack in which he’d been injured. A year ago.
“Somebody in a position to do something about it finally got wind of what they were planning,” Hawk suggested.
“How?” Jake asked, the sarcasm that had been in his voice no longer there. It had been replaced by interest.
“Because they haven’t been particularly discreet about their intentions for standing down the team,” Hawk suggested. “Ms. Heywood’s grandfather may have figured out what they were doing. You asked for his help in setting up that meeting with Steiner,” Hawk said.
His eyes had shifted again from Griff’s face, this time to focus on Claire’s. Griff found his own gaze following Hawk’s, and then he wished it hadn’t. Deliberately, he hadn’t looked at her since he’d come up from below, but he had known exactly where she was standing. He had been totally and completely aware of her position. Just as he had always been when they were in the same room. Completely and totally aware of everything about her.
She was on the other side of the deck from Hawk, with the rising sun behind her. The thin white cotton of her nightgown was made transparent by its light, the outline of her slender body clearly revealed.
And despite the seriousness of what was happening here, Griff’s thoughts went back to last night. When she had lain on his bed and allowed him to touch her. Allowed him to see the changes the last year and a half had made in her body. Changes that had come as a result of the birth of a child they had conceived together. A baby who was now a pawn in a game that seemed to grow more complicated as each layer of motivation and corruption was peeled away.
“I asked for his help,” Claire agreed, “but...I never told him what that was all about. And he never asked me,” she said.
“Maybe because he had his own sources,” Hawk suggested. “He knew Griff. With his connections, your grandfather had to be aware of exactly what Griff did for the agency. He probably knew that Steiner had taken Griff’s place. Your request could have been enough to make him start asking questions. And questions from a former DCI about what they were doing with External Security would make a lot of people nervous. Your grandfather has been a player in Washington politics for half a century.”
“Nobody has better connections than an old spook,” Claire said softly.
That was a truism often repeated in the capital, maybe because it was so damn true, Griff thought.
“But even if that’s what happened,” he said, “even if Claire’s grandfather asked questions they didn’t want to answer, how does kidnapping Gardner fit into that?”
“Taking your daughter—Ms. Heywood’s daughter,” Hawk amended, “was guaranteed to get you involved. Guaranteed to make you take the bait. To force you to kill Diaz. They know they have to discredit you in order to discredit the team.”
Hawk’s voice was softer than it had been before. But the conviction in it seemed just as sincere. His eyes had been on Griff as he made that argument And then he glanced again at Claire before he went on.
“And it might also have been intended as...a reminder to your grandfather. A warning that no matter how much influence he has, he can’t protect his own family. He can’t protect anybody. Not if they really want to get to them.” The silence that fell after those words was broken when Hawk added quietly, “And maybe it was even a warning to you.”
“To me?” Claire said. “A warning to me?”
“You threatened Steiner with going public about what they were doing to me.
”
Griff hadn’t known that, but he wasn’t surprised. That was exactly the kind of courage Claire had always had. The same courage it had taken to constantly challenge him. To make him argue the right and the wrong of what he did. If she really had threatened Steiner—
“And then you helped Jordan gather the media when he needed them to turn over the money Sorrel took,” Hawk added. “Maybe Steiner just figured he ought to remind you of the nature of the league you’d chosen to play in.”
A tough, dirty league, Griff acknowledged. Tougher and dirtier than anything Claire Heywood had ever faced in her entire life. And the agency was certainly capable of issuing that kind of warning. In this case, however, Griff didn’t believe anything they had done had been intended as a threat to Claire. Or to her grandfather, although he didn’t doubt that the old man was capable of digging deeper than they would be comfortable with.
Griff believed this had all been arranged with him as the target. Because he had dared to question their intentions for his men. And because they were people who didn’t like being questioned. Griff had known that all along. He just hadn’t dreamed they would retaliate against his family. Even as the word formed in his mind, he recognized that he had no right to use it. He and Claire weren’t a family, despite the fact that they had conceived a child. A child who, even now...
“Put it away, Jake,” he ordered quietly, remembering the mission. But Jake’s gaze didn’t falter from the man he was targeting. And the muzzle of the Glock didn’t lower.
“Griff,” Claire protested.
“Hawk had nothing to do with this,” Griff said to her. “He thinks he’s the cause of it, but he isn’t even right about that. And if you couldn’t hear what was in his voice when he talked about your standing up to Steiner on his behalf, then you’re not nearly as intuitive—or as intelligent—as you used to be.”
He had allowed a thread of amusement into that explanation, intending it to reassure her, just as listening to Hawk had reassured him. Hawk had nothing to do with Gardner’s kidnapping. Griff would stake his life on that. It was obvious the others thought he was.