by Gayle Wilson
“He had a knife,” Jake said, the focus of his gun unchanged. And unchanging. “He came up over the side, Griff, barefoot and carrying a knife.”
“He thought we’d been victims of the same people who attacked him and Jordan. This was a rescue, Jake, not an assassination.”
Assassination seemed to reverberate through the sun-touched air that shimmered between them. Griff wished he had been more careful in his choice of words. Because that was exactly what Hawk did, of course. Assassinations. That had been his job in the years he’d been with the team. He had assassinated a few madmen—including the one with the suitcase nukes.
It was what he had done in Baghdad. That time to revenge the death of those senselessly killed at Langley. To avenge Griff’s death. Which had not, of course, been a death at all.
“Claire thinks I owe you an explanation for the CIA’s version of my retirement,” he said.
“You don’t owe me anything, Griff,” Hawk said softly. “You never have.”
There was far more unspoken in that quiet statement. A lot of memories hidden in that soft, deep voice. Memories of a mission that had gone wrong. Of a long, unpleasant recuperation in Virginia, which Hawk had silently endured. As he had endured Griff’s inept nursing. And maybe a long delayed acknowledgment of friendship that had been offered to a bitter loner long before there was any sign that it might be reciprocated. Acknowledgment of things they had never before seen any need to express because they both understood them so well.
“Put the gun down, Jake,” Griff ordered again, his voice even lower than it had been before.
This time, however, his words had an effect. Slowly Jake lowered the weapon he held. Then he turned and walked over to the rail near where Claire stood, every motion an indication that was an order he had unwillingly obeyed.
“What if you’re wrong?” Claire asked.
Griff looked at her, pulling his gaze from Hawk’s face, more than satisfied by what he had seen there.
“I’m not,” he said simply. And then he smiled at her. “But you’re more than welcome to argue the point”
His sudden surety about Hawk was like a weight lifted from his spirits. Maybe things had gone wrong. Maybe he had made mistakes. But not about this. And the people he would have staked his life on when this started were, thank God, unchanged.
“You have to know that someone—”
“Not Hawk,” he denied, breaking into her disclaimer, despite the invitation he had just issued. This wasn’t the time or the place for the debate he’d invited.
“This is my daughter’s life,” Claire argued.
“My daughter as well,” Griff said. “I haven’t forgotten.”
Perhaps because she knew him so well, well enough to recognize the implacable quality of his voice, she didn’t try to plead the case she had made last night. Instead, she walked across the deck toward Hawk. She stopped just before she reached him, looking up into his harsh features.
Although Claire was tall for a woman, Hawk topped her by at least six inches. He met her eyes, unflinching before their assessment. She studied his face for a long, silent minute.
Finally, she shook her head, moving it from side to side only once or twice. Not so much, Griff believed, a denial of what he had said as an indication of her own uncertainty. She had turned away, starting toward the stairs that led belowdecks, when she hesitated, turning back to face Hawk again.
“Here,” she said.
She held out her hand, fingers cupped downward over what it held. Automatically, Hawk held his out, palm up. Claire placed the transmitter on his outstretched hand.
“A souvenir,” she said softly, her tone bitter.
Without waiting for a response, she turned again and walked across the deck to the stairwell. Griff moved out of her way, but she didn’t even meet his eyes as she went by.
Hawk was still looking at the object that rested in his palm. Then he closed his fingers over it and raised his eyes to Griffs.
“Is Jordan where you can reach him?” Griff asked.
“I can try,” Hawk said after a small delay, after seeming to think about it.
“Can you do it from here?”
Hawk nodded, walking toward the helm. Griff glanced to his left, where Jake was still standing at the rail, his back to them, shoulders stiff. With anger? he wondered. Or with resentment over having his judgment questioned?
When Hawk got to the helm, he reached toward the bank of instruments and turned a dial. Immediately there was a small steady beep, the sound soft, but very clear in the dawn stillness. Hawk’s brows lifted slightly, blue eyes finding Griff’s again. His mouth moved, one corner lifting.
“Your locator seems to be working,” he said.
“Damn cold comfort,” Griff said. “And just a little late.”
“That’s what I heard,” Claire said, her voice coming from behind him. “That night,” she said. “I came up here after the explosion, and as I was coming up the stairs I heard that sound.”
The three of them listened to the small steady message the beacon was sending out. The same message it had apparently been sending the night Griff had exploded Diaz’s private jet and parachuted out of it into the emptiness of that cold, dark sea.
“I heard it,” she whispered. “And then Jake reached out and touched something and...the sound stopped.”
He should have reacted sooner, Griff thought, when his eyes swung to find Jake. Because Jake certainly had. But then Jake had probably known exactly what was going to happen as soon as he heard the first beep of the beacon’s transmission.
By the time he and Hawk had figured out what Claire’s words implied, it was too late to do much about it. Nothing beyond staring at the dark eye of the weapon Jake was once again holding, competently directed this time at the two of them.
“Join them, Ms. Heywood,” Jake ordered, “or I’ll put a bullet in his kneecap. The good one,” he added softly.
Considering all that had already happened, including Diaz’s brutal murder, no one could afford to doubt Jake would do exactly what he had threatened. Griff didn’t. And his stomach tightened, guts clenching in sick anticipation.
Apparently, Claire didn’t doubt Jake’s threat, either. She walked across the deck, putting herself in Jake’s sight. And in the line of fire.
“Thank you,” Jake said softly when she had joined them. “Now if we only had Jordan here...” he suggested, the thin edge of sarcasm back in his voice, touched now with triumph as well.
Because he had bested the hotshots? Griff wondered. Had that familiar raillery, which they had all dismissed as Jake’s way of putting them in their place, played any part in this? Jake’s way, Griff thought, fighting the same sense of failure Claire’s accusations of Hawk had caused last night. It had been Jake all along. One of his team.
The problems associated with this particular mission had been Jake’s doing. And perhaps he had been involved with what had happened to Jordan, as well. Maybe even with what they’d done to Hawk. Jake had certainly been in a position to affect the outcome of those events.
Suddenly, he remembered Carl Steiner telling him that it had been Jake who had confirmed that Sheik al-Ahmad’s assassination was an extremist plot. Which was the reason Steiner had released Tyler Stewart from protection and almost gotten her killed.
“Why, Jake?” Griff asked. Why would he endanger people he had worked with for more than ten years?
“Because I got tired of the bureaucratic BS,” Jake said, his voice seeming too calm to reflect enough anger or resentment to enable him to do what it was obvious now that he had done.
“We’re not the bureaucrats,” Griff said.
“This had nothing to do with you, Griff.”
“Nothing to do with me?” Griff asked, his voice incredulous. “It’s my daughter they took, Jake. Or are you saying you weren’t in on that?”
He thought about that possibility, but if Jake had used the transmitter to keep them from making the rendez
vous with Hawk and Jordan, obviously to give his fellow conspirators a chance to get to Diaz, then he had to have been in on this from the beginning.
“Nothing’s happened to the baby,” Jake said. “Harming her was never part of the plan.”
“Then what exactly was the plan? What the hell has been going on here?”
“You don’t have a clue, do you, Griff? But then I shouldn’t be surprised. You never had a clue about what it’s like for the rest of us. They screw you over, they destroy you, and you retire and live out your life in luxury. They screw us, and we stay screwed. I didn’t like that.”
“So you target the rest of us?”
“There’s nothing personal about this,” Jake said. “None of you were ever the targets of what I did.”
“And now?” Griff asked quietly, allowing his eyes to fall to the Glock. “Aren’t we the targets now?”
Jake didn’t answer, and in the waiting silence, they could hear subtle sounds beginning to emanate from the boats moored around them. Their occupants were starting to stir. Maybe even to come out on deck. And soon, someone would notice what was going on here.
“It wasn’t supposed to be this way,” Jake said finally. His voice had lowered, perhaps in recognition of what was taking place on the boats around them.
“How was it supposed to be?”
“I had something coming to me. But I watched what those bastards were doing to the others, and I knew that unless I did something, it wasn’t going to happen for me. Not unless I made it happen. But nobody on the team has been hurt by what I did. Not Jordan. Not you.”
“And Tyler Stewart?” Griff asked. “You’re the one who told Steiner to release her. You had to know what would happen to her when you did.”
Beside him, he felt Hawk move. A start of reaction, small enough that it would have been indiscernible to the others.
“I thought if Steiner believed it was just regional politics, he’d see that he didn’t have any legitimate reason to hold Hawk. As soon as I realized that idiot had released her, I called Jordan. What happened at the airport...” Jake shrugged. “You can’t hold me responsible for Ahmad’s insanity.”
“And what happened to Jordan?” Griff asked. “Or can’t you be held responsible for that, either?”
Jake’s denial of his responsibility for Jordan’s situation was several seconds longer in coming than it should have been.
“You son of a bitch,” Hawk said softly as the silence stretched. “You set Jordan up. That whole deal was a setup.”
Hawk didn’t move, however, despite the fury in his quiet voice. Griff thanked Hawk’s habitual control for that—a control that had been acquired the hard way.
“Nothing happened to Jordan,” Jake said, seeming to be trying to make his case to Hawk now. “I saw to that.”
“You saw to it?” Hawk repeated unbelievingly. “You were controlling things? You were up there playing God with people’s lives?”
People’s lives, Griff thought. Jordan’s life. And the lives of the Sorrel family, which included a couple of small children. And apparently—
“Jordan rescued Sorrel’s wife and kids,” Jake asserted. “He got them out of a situation they’d been living in for three years. Nobody else could have done that. And nobody was hurt.”
“Except an FBI agent named Helms,” Griff said.
“Helms was willing to take his chances,”
For a sixteen-million-dollar payoff. A lot of people would have been willing to take their chances. Including Jake Holt.
“You and Helms were in on that together,” Hawk suggested.
They had to have been, Griff realized. And that’s how Helms had found Jordan and the Sorrel family at the Virginia mansion. Not through an outside invasion of Jake’s computers, as Jordan had thought, but through Jake.
“You did it all for the money, Jake?” Griff said unbelievingly.
For the Mafia’s sixteen million dollars. Money that everyone else was looking for. Except Jake Holt had the inside track. Insider information. And he had had Jordan’s friendship and trust, as well.
It had taken him too long to put this all together, Griff conceded. It had taken all of them too long. Distracted by what he had known were the agency’s intentions for his people, he hadn’t been aware of the traitor in their midst. A traitor who had tried to use the skills of the team Griff had built to provide for his own retirement, something Jake obviously believed was impending. Except, of course, his situation was different from the rest of them. Because Jake wasn’t one of the hotshots.
“You could have written your own ticket, Jake,” Griff said. “Whatever the agency did with the rest of us, they weren’t going to let you go. You’re too valuable to them.”
Jake laughed, the sound short and bitter. “Like I said. It’s okay for you to work all your life for the company rate and a miserable little pension when it’s over. The rest of us weren’t born with any silver spoons in our mouths. And I don’t intend to analyze satellite data in a hole in the wall at Langley for the rest of my life.”
For money, Griff thought again. He really had done it all for money. But of course, Jake was right about a part of that. Griff had never needed the salary the agency paid him. Just as he hadn’t needed the generous pension they had given him when they had put him out to pasture.
And as soon as they had, they had begun dissolving his team and retiring his men. The beginnings of this hadn’t been Jake, of course, although the agency’s own disloyalty seemed to have set him off.
“Where’s my daughter?” Claire asked, breaking into his useless self-recrimination.
Jake’s eyes focused briefly on her face before they came back to concentrate on the men, whom he wisely saw as the greater threat. “Somewhere safe,” he said.
“Did you do what Hawk said?” Claire asked. “Did you try to use Gardner to discredit the team? To embarrass the agency?”
“His motives weren’t quite that noble, Ms. Heywood,” Hawk said. “How much was the contract on Diaz, Jake? How much did you stand to make on this?”
“What do you care?” Jake asked. “You didn’t do the hit. Nobody owes you.”
“And when you found out that Griff wasn’t willing to kill Diaz, you told whoever had put out the contract where to find us. And you gave them Diaz, bound and gagged, so they could do it themselves.”
“Actually, they kind of liked it that way,” Jake said. “A little bad blood between the parties involved. And nobody got hurt,” he added.
“Nobody but Diaz,” Hawk reminded him softly.
“You know, old buddy, I find concern for Diaz pretty funny coming from you,” Jake said. “Diaz deserved to die every bit as much as those bastards you lined up in your sights and blew away.”
“That was never my decision,” Hawk said.
“No, it was always Griffs decision. Based on information I supplied. Situations I analyzed. Based on my assessment of the threat they presented. And there was nothing different about this one. So let’s don’t pretend to be sentimental over some scumbag drug runner, Hawk. Morality doesn’t become you, good buddy. It doesn’t really become any of us. Not after the things we’ve been a part of through the years.”
“If you felt that way—” Griff began, only to be cut off.
“None of your sermons, Griff. I’ve had a bellyful of those, too. Sanctimonious defenses of just exactly what I did to Diaz. I made my choices. And you made yours. Who’s to say one was better than the other? They’re all still dead. There aren’t going to be any resurrections.”
Griff said nothing, his eyes on a man he had known for ten years and had realized only now he hadn’t known at all. Maybe he hadn’t really known any of them.
Hawk’s hands were clenched at his sides. But after his small, involuntary reaction to the knowledge that Jake had been responsible for what almost happened to Tyler, he hadn’t moved.
“Now what?” Claire asked softly.
Not the ideal question in this situation,
Griff thought, but she couldn’t know that. He just didn’t want Jake pressured into making any sudden choices. They might not be the right ones.
“We get the hell out of here,” Jake said. “Before somebody gets curious.”
“What about Jordan?” Griff asked.
“I’ll deal with Jordan later,” Jake promised. “Take her out, Griff,” he ordered. “We’re going back out to sea. And once we’re there...” He hesitated, thinking about his narrowing options. “Once we’re there, I’ll decide what we do next.”
Chapter Fourteen
“I’m afraid it isn’t going to be quite that easy, Jake.”
Only Jake didn’t react to the quiet voice they all recognized. The eyes of the other three lifted to find Jordan Cross standing on the flybridge of the cruiser in the next bay. He held a rifle, sighted carefully at the back of Jake Holt’s head.
Griff supposed he should have been expecting Jordan to show up. If they suspected something had gone wrong on the cruiser, Hawk and Jordan wouldn’t have split forces. They would have done exactly what it appeared they had. They would have come at the situation from two angles, prepared to back each other up.
Griff didn’t know how long Jordan had been up there. Since the beginning? Since Hawk had come over the side? Or maybe the sounds he had heard seconds earlier had been Jordan climbing to his perch.
With Claire on deck, he had never allowed his concentration to waver from Jake and the gun he held, always prepared to put his body between hers and a bullet. Whenever Jordan had arrived, however, it was obvious that he had been up there long enough to figure out what was going on.
And Jordan, of course, had been as much affected by Jake’s treachery as he and Claire had been. Maybe more so, Griff acknowledged, remembering what had happened at the summer house. Jordan had taken a bullet from Helms in order to protect the Sorrel children.
“Put the gun down, Jake,” Jordan ordered softly. “This is over. Even you have to realize that. You can’t kill us all.”
“I can take one of them out before you can squeeze that trigger,” Jake said, his voice still calm, seemingly unaffected by the threat Jordan represented. “I’d even be willing to let you choose which one it’s going to be.”