“The Witness Protection Program? Honest?” That surprised Seth.
Ritter nodded. “I’m a Marine, sir, I’m always honest. If we can secure Husam’s sisters without drawing Khadeem’s attention, his entire family could be offered protection. I’ve seen it happen, but sometimes, these guys are so fed up with the state of affairs in their countries, they seek asylum instead of entering the WPP. Because of their unique status, Immigration tends to go easier on them.”
“What unique status? Why them instead of other refugees?”
Ritter’s shoulders lifted. “It’s complicated, and to be honest, I don’t know all the answers. But you have to understand, Khadeem’s holding something over each one of these men, err, boy’s heads. They owe a debt they could only pay by fighting his war and by dying. Because of you and what we know now, that’s changed. Once word gets out that Khadeem’s ruse failed and these boys are still alive, he’ll unleash his death squads to exact retribution on their families, only the world will never hear one word about it.”
“How do you know that?”
Ritter grunted. “Because I know how the press works. They pick and choose what sad stories they want to tell Americans. Trust me. No one’s interested in what happens in the Mideast anymore. America’s sick of hearing the same old bylines about IEDs, ISIS, and terrorists. They’ve moved on. Just wish we could.”
“Shit,” Seth hissed under his breath, his fingers already digging his satphone from his pocket. “I need to make a call. You wouldn’t happen to know the name of Husam’s town, er, village, would you?”
“Yes, sir, I do. Abu Dat. It’s off the beaten road in the middle of nowhere, due west of Ras Al-Khair.”
Wherever that was. “You’ve been there?’”
Ritter shook his head, but Seth was pretty sure the corporal had said more than he’d let on during those less than rapid-fire questions and answers with Husam. Seth thumbed the preset key for Alex. The phone never rang.
“Been waiting for you,” Alex said, a weary hint of patience in his tone.
“I hate to ask, Boss, but one of Khadeem’s men, Husam al Din, actually, he’s a sixteen-year-old prisoner of war now. Anyway, he left three sisters behind in a little village called Abu Dat. It’s due west of Ras Al-Khair on the Persian Gulf, and—”
Ritter interrupted with, “Tell him Ras Al-Khair is sixty miles north of Jubail. That will help him triangulate.”
Seth shot Ritter an appraising nod. “Did you catch that, Boss?”
“What are you asking me to do now?”
Seth drew in a deep breath before he said, “I’m asking you to send someone to rescue those little girls before Khadeem finds out that every one of the boys he sent to Cuba surrendered to FAST today. Khadeem’s entire army is comprised of teenage boys, Boss. The only reason they’re here is because he’s threatened their families, and as soon as word gets out that they’re still alive, Khadeem’s death squads will hit the streets, er, villages, and there’ll be nothing left for these kids to go home to.”
Alex didn’t say one word, but Seth could hear him breathing over the line. Right about now, he’d be squeezing the bridge of his nose between two fingers, his eyes would be closed, and that razor-sharp brain of his would be ripping through solutions, scenarios, and strategies with the concise precision of a Ginsu knife. A steady migraine would be pounding inside his skull, and he’d be one tired SOB, because—
Oh shit. Seth squeezed the bridge of his nose, too. Too late he’d realized—it’s Saturday. That’s why Alex is at the office? Because of me. Damn. I’ve asked too much this time.
“What else?” Alex asked, not a hint of sarcasm coloring the question.
Seth didn’t dare ask if Alex planned to rescue Husam’s sisters, so instead he asked, “Have you heard from Eric yet?”
“Yes. Adam and Maverick intercepted your uncle’s pontoon off the Keys. As soon as he lands, we’ll move everyone to safe quarters and treat Cassidy. Anything else?”
“How is she?”
“She’s awake and pissed. Eric’s had to sedate her to keep her from jumping ship to go back after the rest of Montego’s men. She said there’s more women and more kids, that she’s not leaving them behind.”
That sounded just like Cassidy. “Thanks, Boss,” Seth said quietly.
Until this exact moment, he’d never considered the entire cost, nor the weight of all that Alex shouldered so The TEAM could accomplish what they did on a daily basis. The endless infils into and the exfils out of hostile countries. The worries. The near hits and misses. The fear of answering his phone one day only to hear those two awful words: Man. Down.
Alex carried the weight of the world, yet he was always first in the office every morning, and the last out at night. The man seemed propelled through life with more energy, more willpower, and more guts than anyone Seth had ever known. Well, except for Uncle George, the mystery man in Seth’s family, whom he was going to have a serious chat with once George woke up.
“Are you okay, Boss?” he had to ask.
“I will be once your ass is back on US soil. You got an ETA yet?”
That sounded more like the tough guy Seth knew and—loved. “I’m headed for GITMO now. I’ll be on the next flight out of there—”
“Tomorrow morning,” Ritter interrupted with a definite nod. “Delaney left orders for a one-way ticket to the Keys, departing at oh five hundred hours.”
“I’ll be home first thing in the morning,” Seth relayed.
“Don’t miss that damned flight,” Alex ordered.
“Copy that,” Seth said, ending the connection. “You’re all right, Tex,” he told Ritter. “You’re all right.”
Ritter shot him a cocky grin. “I’m more than all right, Agent McCray. I’m a Marine.”
Chapter Thirty-One
Dev waited until Joachim finally left. By then it was dark. He’d paced the cramped motel room like a trapped panther, which told her he was hiding from someone. Not like she didn’t already know he was some kind of criminal. Any guy who manacled a woman to his bed was a dirtbag, and she had no intention of hanging around until he returned.
He hadn’t touched her since that one and only encounter, but… the nerve! Shivers raced up her bare arms at the thought of his greasy hair in her eyes and mouth, and at the way he’d pinned her to his bed. As soon as she got out of this cuff, she was gone!
Rolling to her feet, she took quick stock of her precarious situation. Metal cuffs. Metal bed frame. Metal headboard. All seemingly inescapable and attached to each other, which meant she wouldn’t get far since she couldn’t drag the bed through the door. No matter. There had to be another way out of this mess.
She’d already tried to slip out of the cuffs, but that hadn’t worked. Spying the phone across the room on the battered, shabby credenza, she traced the cord visually from the receiver to the wall connection above the baseboard. It certainly looked authentic from where she stood. Useable.
All righty then.
On her feet now, she shoved the mattress off the frame with both feet since she had limited mobility, and her arm only stretched so far. But damn. Who in their right mind bolts a bed to the floor and the headboard to the wall? This baby wasn’t going anywhere.
Which told her precisely what kind of a motel this was, didn’t it? The kind with hourly rates, bed bugs, and ugly, greasy blond, two-legged rats. The kind where cheaply made headboards banging into walls could make a lot of noise unless everything was bolted down.
Swallowing hard now, she stretched for the phone, but it might as well have been on the moon. Desperate, she glanced upward. Every motel room had a handy, dandy spigot on the ceiling in case of fire, didn’t it? Not. This motel wasn’t up to code, and she was running out of options and time. Joachim would be back soon. Sly maybe, too.
Hurry, Dev. You can do it. Hurry!
Stubbornly, Dev stamped one bare foot and declared, “I will not be turned into a namel
ess statistic, not by Sly, and not by Joachim. There has to be a way out of here.”
Standing there in the empty room, still shackled to a bed frame that had to be from the turn of the century—hadn’t these people ever heard of Memory Foam?—she broke out in a sweat. “I can’t die like this,” she told the silence as her heart started pounding an anxious beat. “I’ve got a son to live for. A man who actually loves me, I know he does. I’ve got a life!”
Her nagging conscience piped up with: And look what you’ve done with it. You’re still worried about James, you’ve been sold by Sly, and now you’re trapped in a motel room, by a man who thinks he got a bad deal when he got you.
I know, I know. Think, Dev. Think.
He’ll be back soon. Hurry!
Okay then. If this was the end, she meant to let the whole world know. Dev opened her mouth and screamed. For minutes upon minutes, she yelled for help, screamed, “Fire!” and just plain bellowed her heart out.
For nothing.
After giving her all without even a single knock at the door or a friendly, ‘hello, are you in there?’ she dropped to her knees on the matted, grungy carpet, out of breath and running out of time.
Guess this wasn’t the kind of motel where considerate people intervened in other people’s business, either. No, she had to end up in a motel where murderers shot slasher films, while some unwilling victim earned several minutes of fame the hard way, by getting her throat cut. This was where good girls turned into hookers, and where hookers died hard lonely deaths when they pissed off their pimps.
Her time was running out. No one knew where she was, but here she would die. Maybe. Joachim would be back soon. Maybe he’d bring Sly and that creep, Prince Bagani.
Oh, God, not him. What else can I do?
There seemed nothing left to do, but… cry.
Seth made good time after he hit GITMO. The facility itself was a bastion of gray against the green Cuban landscape, but instead of waiting for a chopper in the morning, another already sat on the tarmac to take him to Florida. Before he knew it, he was in the air and on his way to the land of the free. Nothing felt better.
His heart turned toward Devereaux and her ragged little bungalow on Starfish Drive as the camouflaged bird flew low over the waves between Cuba and home. America always looked grand after a hard operation, and this one had been tougher than most. Seth still didn’t know whether Alex would help Husam and his sisters or not. What had seemed a simple request only hours earlier now seemed an impossible dream.
Alex didn’t just send his TEAM off without vetting his intentions through proper federal channels, and when he did, it was usually because he’d signed a contract to support whatever federal entity needed his help. He wasn’t running a charity, but a topnotch business known the world over for getting the hard jobs done right. He followed his own strict protocol, and because he did, he’d garnered trust throughout the world. He had allies in Afghanistan, Liberia, even inside Russia and China.
For the most part, Alex followed the order of law. Yet there were a few times, he’d stormed the beaches to get one of his men or women back, politics be damned. Seth hoped this might be one of those rare times. Otherwise, poor Husam, his sisters, and his brothers-at-arms didn’t have a prayer. Khadeem’s death squads would squash their families, and Corporal Ritter was right. Because of the political quagmire America’s supposedly free press had turned into, very little of the world’s real news ever hit American palates.
By the time the chopper’s skids touched down at the United States Coast Guard Station at Islamorada, Florida, instead of on Drunken Sailor Island, which Seth would’ve preferred, night had fallen. But he didn’t argue with the location. Home was home, and he knew how to drive. Within the hour, he’d rented a Chevy truck from a twenty-four-seven rental agency and was on his way west.
Traffic on Overseas Highway US Route 1 was light but steady. His shoulder still ached, but the quick patch job he’d done on himself once he’d left Eric behind at the prison must’ve been enough. The bullet hadn’t struck him full on anyway. He’d only been grazed, and the wound wasn’t feverish, just sore. He’d live.
The night was warm and the breeze off the Atlantic filled his nose with the scents of wind, sand, and salt. All the truck’s windows were open, and for the first time in years, life was on its way to being good again. Make that great. He had a woman in that life again, and she made all the difference. How well he knew that man wasn’t meant to live alone—or with ghosts.
He’d been coasting on ‘good enough’ for too long. The moment he’d taken Devereaux in his arms and made love with her, his life had changed for the better. Colors were brighter. The air smelled sweeter. Even his heart pumped differently, as if it had a reason to keep him alive, as if his veins pumped more oxygen now. As if the ghosts of his past had finally let loose the stranglehold they’d had on him and his heart.
His chest expanded with every breath of—life. Damn, it was good to be headed back to Devereaux’s home. Just one smile from those pretty blue eyes, and he was a goner. She had a way of making him feel better about himself, and it wasn’t just because of the incredibly hot sex they’d shared. No. Though that was definitely one of the things he loved about her, there was more going on between them, and he knew it.
Despite her economic situation, Devereaux had an eternally optimistic take on life that seemed to sweep others along in her wake. Of all the people in the world, she had a right to be bitter, and he wouldn’t blame her if she were. Most single moms worked their asses off just to end up living on the fringe of poverty, and because of her pig-headed brother, Devereaux wasn’t far from being homeless. Yet she gave and gave until her kitchen cupboards were literally bare.
Well, no more. Seth intended to remedy at least that much. There had to be an all-night grocery store, at least a 7-11 open between here and her house, where he could stock up on a few necessities for breakfast. Seth’s shoulders lifted like a little kid hiding a gift behind his back for his best girlfriend. Wouldn’t Devereaux be surprised to see him on her doorstep with his arms full of groceries in the middle of the night?
That 7-11 had better have a box or two of donuts. Everyone loved donuts. And a rose. Didn’t all convenience stores keep a bin full of silk roses near the checkout stand for sappy guys like him? Seth hoped so.
Memories of kissing Devereaux’s warm, lush lips warmed his blood. It was time to tell her. Hmmm. Yes. Tonight was the night.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Dev lifted her head at the sound of heavy footsteps outside her door. Joachim had been gone for hours and the room was a mess. He might as well know she wouldn’t go easy, not with him, Sly, or whatever rat bastard he was bringing with him.
Still manacled to the cursed bed frame, she stood and planted her feet, posturing for one or two good kicks to the big guy’s nuts. Damn him and damn all dirtbags like him who thought they could abuse women and get away with it. A woman shouldn’t have to be so scared that she couldn’t think. Her heart shouldn’t be pounding like a freight train so hard she could barely breathe. Her stomach shouldn’t feel so ready to crawl up her throat.
But Dev was all those things and more. The doorknob twisted, but just as a hairy knuckled hand reached in, feeling the wall for the light switch, she barreled into the door and crushed that arm between the door and frame. There! Take that!
Shaking like a leaf, she knew she’d lost the element of surprise, but fear had won out over common sense. She’d panicked and given herself away, and now Joachim was pissed. Well, so was she.
“You bitch!” Joachim bellowed as he cleared the door and slammed it behind him. Once again, he hit the switch and glared at what she’d done to the place. “You fucked up my room!”
‘Yeah, well, you’re next,’ she thought, shifting her weight on the balls of her feet, ready to go down swinging, but scared to death. Cord always told her to fight back. Well, today was that day. Or night. Or whatever. She hon
estly didn’t know what time or day it was.
“You ass,” she hissed, her tone as lethal as she could make it. “Unlock these cuffs and let me go.”
The idiot had the nerve to roll his eyes like some drama queen. “What part of ‘I paid for you’ did you not understand, woman?” he bit out as he took a menacing step toward her. “You’re mine and you’re going nowhere but where I tell you to go, and if you mess up my room like this again, I will beat the shit out of you.”
Damn, he was big, and he flexed those massive fingers like he wanted to choke her. Dressed in dirty jeans, a tie-dyed black-and-white Ron Jon t-shirt that looked like one big bird dropping, Joachim’s size alone intimidated Dev. He was wider than Cord, but not fit in any way. Over-weight, slack-jawed, and unkempt, the stench of body odor rolled off him in waves, along with the distinct stink of tooth decay, alcohol, and cigarettes on his breath.
Dev flexed her fingers, too. Yes, she was way out-matched, but it was time for some payback. “I’m leaving,” she told him. “Unlock these cuffs and let me go.”
“Sit your ass down,” he ordered, stabbing one long finger at the floor.
“Let me go,” she ordered, though she hadn’t intended the shrill tone in her demand. But damn, he had big, mean, capable-of-breaking-her-neck hands, and her false bravado would only get her so far. “I have a son, Joachim. I need to go home now, before my friend calls the police. I should’ve been home hours ago…” Maybe days. “So, let me go before she files a missing persons report with the police, and they come looking for me. I won’t say a word. I won’t tell anyone what you’ve done.”
Joachim cocked his head at that. “What I’ve done? Who do you think you are? Some kind of princess from Arabia I should bow down to?”
Damn, he knows about Lianna. What else does he know?
Her heart stalled, and Dev’s tongue took a futile swipe over her dry lips. “Please,” she murmured, her resolve crumbling as she took a step backward. “Please let me go, Joachim. I’m no one important. You don’t want me. I’m not one of your pretty, party girls. I’ve had a baby and my boobs sag and my belly’s got stretch marks all over it and… Please. No one will ever pay even a dollar in ransom money for my return, if that’s what you’re after.”
Seth (In the Company of Snipers Book 17) Page 25