Seth (In the Company of Snipers Book 17)

by Irish Winters

  “Alive,” Seth answered, the oddest pinch flaring inside his chest. He’d come so close to losing her, so close he could barely breathe now that it was finally done. He couldn’t go through that again, not losing the woman he loved. He wouldn’t survive. He had to tell her.

  “And Bagani?” Alex asked quietly.

  “Gone, Boss. I let him go like you said. Man, he’s an arrogant—”

  BOOM! The too close shockwave of a damned big gun vibrated the air. Even Alex heard it. “What the hell was that?”

  “Not sure,” Seth muttered as he carried Devereaux with him to find out. “Honey, I’ve got to set you down while I go check something. Will you be okay outside here on the porch?” he asked her.

  Alex chuckled. “Sure hope you aren’t talking to me. I like you, son, but not that much.”

  What an odd thing for Alex to say, but Seth had bigger things on his mind than his boss’s uncharacteristic teasing. Bagani’s car was still rolling forward, but it had veered into the tall grasses along the right side of the road.

  Settling Devereaux against the outside wall of the motel room, Seth ran toward the Maserati to investigate. Holy hell. Bagani sat slouched behind the wheel, his seatbelt on, but his eyes wide open, and a neater-than-shit hole in the center of his forehead. Brain matter and blood painted the leather upholstery behind him. Spider webbing decorated the entire rear window, centered around one sure as shit bullet hole.

  “Um, Boss?” Seth asked as he looked over his shoulder, sure he’d spy the bad-assed man he worked for standing off in the not too far distance with the butt stock of his sniper rifle on his hip. But there was no one out there, anywhere. Not Alex. Not anyone.

  “Where are you?” Seth had to know.

  “At my office,” Alex replied without one twinge of snark in his tone, which in and of itself was odd considering Seth had asked a rather dumb question, the kind Alex had no use for. “You’re the one who called me, didn’t you?”

  “Yeah, I did, but…” But calls could be forwarded to anywhere on the planet, even to a cellphone or satphone in the middle of the Florida Keys. “But someone just offed Prince Bagani. Head shot, Boss. That’s what that noise was.”

  Canting his head, Seth closed one eye to block the glare of the rising sun, as he looked southward. “Whoever did it is a damned good shot. One to the middle of Bagani’s head. Through a darkly tinted windshield, no less. Spot on. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  “Well, damn,” Alex muttered, though he didn’t sound upset. “I guess that means I’m your alibi, huh?”

  Seth’s gaze strayed to Devereaux, still sitting on the porch where he’d left her with the wet towel, now stained red, pressed against her chest. “I’ve actually got two, Boss. Devereaux and you, but…” But this was just plain weird. A sniper had just sniped a member of the Arabian royal family from one helluva long ways off. “I’ve got to call this into the police. There’ll be an uproar, and the press will be all over me and…”

  “You do that, Seth. I’m on my way with irrefutable evidence that we were speaking on the phone when Bagani went down. Sit tight. The police can’t hold you for a crime you didn’t commit. Talk to you soon.”

  Seth disconnected, still dazed at the turn of events. Bagani was finally dead. Killed by a sniper. If not Alex, then who?

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Dev sipped at the cool mango/orange juice in her hospital cup. She couldn’t seem to get enough of it, not after her near-death experience. As soon as she’d been allowed to, she’d showered and washed her hair to get the rank odor of that vile motel off her. Then she’d lounged with an icepack pressed to her poor, battered breast for most of the day, waiting for Seth to return so the hospital would release her. The admitting doctor wanted to keep her overnight for observation, and she still had to wait for the plastic surgeon, but she wanted out of there. Home. She just wanted to go home.

  Dressed in the soft cotton nightgown that Seth had bought her—cotton because he’d said nothing felt better than cotton—she waited on his return from the police station. He’d been there most of the day answering questions and offering his assistance in locating Prince Bagani’s unseen shooter, but he’d be back. Dev knew he would. She just couldn’t wait.

  Royal prince, my ass. Knowing Bagani was dead went a long way toward calming Dev’s hysteria. Yet every time she thought of what surely would’ve happened to her and Cord if Seth hadn’t shown when he did, her heart still raced, and her throat clamped shut. Her stomach ached, and her head hurt. She could still smell the rank ugliness of Joachim’s dead body after Cord had laid him low. A migraine had been threatening all day. Seth said those reactions were normal, but Dev only knew that she felt better when he was there, and she needed him now.

  Poor Cord stayed out in the hall, standing guard he said, but she suspected he was avoiding her more than anything else. Her big, tough brother might never forgive himself for blowing Seth’s more sensible plan to retrieve her. Yet in the end, it had all worked out, and Seth wasn’t angry at Cord. He understood what had driven Cord to ignore his better instincts.

  Come to find out, the missing princess hadn’t been missing at all, more like relocated by another person who’d followed her gut, Trish. After Cord had left Lianna with Trish when he’d gone to join Seth, she’d taken it upon herself to rent a room at one of the more prestigious hotels on the beach. There she and Lianna had lounged by the pool for the last two days, sipping piña coladas, while Scottie swam and played to his heart’s content on a giant watermelon-red floaty. The little guy was as tan as he’d never been before, making his blue eyes seem even brighter.

  Dev teared up thinking about how close she’d come to losing her son—and him losing her. Never, if she lived to be a hundred, would she forget the panic in those sad blue eyes when Trish had brought Scottie to visit her at the hospital this afternoon.

  Motherhood could be such a bitch sometimes. It was a never-ending job on top of an already never-ending battle of robbing Peter to pay Paul, but seeing how scared he’d been, and feeling that trembling little boy body of his, when he’d run to her and clung to her, sobbing, “Mama!” like his heart was breaking—yeah. There was nothing better, nor sadder, nor more precious in Dev’s world.

  Even though it had hurt to hold him, she’d had a hard time letting Scottie go. He’d been so frightened for her just because she’d been hurt and should stay in the hospital overnight. The official story he’d been told was that she’d had an accident at work.

  But man, what he would’ve gone through had Bagani accomplished his evil deed. If her body had never been found, and if Scottie’d spent the rest of his life wondering where she’d gone and why she’d deserted him. It was enough to set her heart racing again. He’d never know how close he’d come to losing her, not if she could help it. No, that was one bedtime story Scottie would never hear from her lips.

  Then there was her other sweet little guy, Gru. That Seth, out of all the people out and about last night in Key West, was the one who’d found him—twice—was a coincidence too great to ignore. Karma seemed determined that Seth and she be together, and Dev agreed. The sooner, the better.

  She glanced at the clock on the wall across from her bed. Where is he?

  Lianna Khadeem was now under the care of the king of Saudi Arabia, and on her way to his grand palace with an invitation to stay as long as she desired. Earlier this afternoon, he’d graciously and publicly apologized for the inconsiderate suffering she’d experienced at the hands of a distant member of his family. Though he didn’t name Basheer Bagani directly, it wasn’t hard to make the connection. Better yet, he vowed retribution to the sinister man behind the debacle, aka Khadeem. Lianna now had a home to return to, just not her family.

  As usual, the press turned her recovery into a media circus. CNN still hashed and rehashed her narrow escape from a known human trafficker on their thirty-minute recycling of the news timelines. Round and round they went
with the details of her journey into Montego’s lair, yet not once had they mentioned the guys who’d rescued her, nor what it cost Cord and his men to do what they did.

  Not that Cord minded. He’d told Dev about the offer he’d received from Seth’s boss, Alex Stewart. But she detected a hint of reluctance when it came to Cord accepting that offer. This is the offer of a lifetime. What’s not to like?

  So, yeah. It was another day living in paradise at the southernmost tip of the United States. Setting her nearly empty glass aside, Dev breathed out a contented sigh and leaned heavily into her pillow. All would be right with the world again—as soon as Seth returned.

  Seth sat in his rented truck in the hospital’s overflow parking lot. Thinking. Worrying. He now knew Eric hadn’t left Florida with Cassidy, which wasn’t a good development. If there was anyone who hated Basheer Bagani more than Eric, Seth didn’t know the guy.

  Years back Eric’s wife Shea had encountered Bagani during a dark time in her life. She’d been smart enough to escape his clutches, and as far as Seth knew, Bagani hadn’t done anything more than tie her to his bed. But he’d intended to do to Shea what he’d done to Devereaux and more. Whenever Bagani’s name came up at the office, Eric lost his focus and his already dark eyes roiled with cold, black intent. It was as if he had internally planned for the day he came face-to-face with Bagani, and Seth couldn’t blame him. It had taken all his better senses not to kill the bastard when he’d had the chance.

  The question remained. Who killed him? Eric? The vengeful husband who had every right to want Bagani dead? Or Alex, the best ghost in the covert business, and the well-known owner of the most elite covert surveillance company… In. The. World?

  But would Alex risk all he’d accomplished to kill a man like Bagani? Seth knew damned well Alex could and would. The man was lethally capable, especially where women, little girls, and boys were concerned. He was one of those rare men who’d never ceased training or grown soft when he’d left the Corps. Even his sweet little wife Kelsey could turn nasty under the right circumstances. Seth hadn’t worked for Alex at the time, but he’d heard the stories. He knew who’d shot and killed Kelsey’s maniacal ex-mother-in-law during a hard-fought battle for survival, and it wasn’t Alex. But that was another story for another time.

  After listening to the evidence the Key West police presented, Seth leaned toward Eric Reynolds doing the deed. Bagani had died from one precisely placed round to his head, and that was just one amazingly helluva difficult shot that Alex simply couldn’t have made while chatting over the phone as easily as he’d been at the time.

  Yes, he could’ve been using a headset, leaving himself hands-free to manage his rifle. Yes, Alex was smart enough to sound carefree when he wasn’t. But no sniper Seth knew or had ever worked with was that dispassionate while zeroing down on a known target, particularly not Alex. The man plain damned cared too much.

  Sniping took supreme focus, uncanny attention to detail, and a damned smart man or woman to calculate the mathematics behind distance, windage, and elevation, not to mention the angle of the rising sun. Factor Florida’s humidity, the early morning temperature, and spindrift, the bullet’s rotation, into that one calculation, and it raised another question. Did Bagani’s killer have a spotter, a partner at his elbow who’d watched Bagani through a rangefinder, while he’d coached Bagani’s killer as to precisely what Minutes-of-Angle scope corrections to make to achieve said target? Minutes-of-Angle being the standard measure for elevation and windage. Sure seemed like this job had taken two very savvy snipers to get it done.

  According to the laws of terminal ballistics and what was left of the back of Bagani’s skull, the shot had to have come from nearly a mile south of the motel, through a tinted windshield that would’ve been nearly impossible to see through at that distance.

  Whoever’d done Bagani would’ve most likely been flat on his belly on a raised platform, a table maybe. He or she—Seth wasn’t about to dismiss the fact that this could very well have been a female operator—would’ve used a thermal imaging scope, possibly one of the new, enhanced Starlights, to have seen his target through the tinted windshield. And… he would’ve been the steadiest, luckiest son-of-a-bitch on the planet.

  The police still hadn’t found the bullet, the sniper hide, or any casings. Which meant the shooter knew exactly where Bagani planned to be this morning. Which also meant he’d been following the arrogant bastard for days, possibly weeks, months, or years to get the shot. He might even have witnessed Bagani’s depravity, waiting for this perfect opportunity. Didn’t that make the tiny hairs on the back of Seth’s neck stand up and take notice? Especially since his gut had been warning him for days now that someone had been watching him. Jesus H. Christ. Even in Cuba.

  You want to talk about an impossible, scary shot. This one was that—and a helluva lot more. Seth only knew three Americans who’d made similar, record-breaking shots, and they were all either the arrogant owner of The TEAM or working for him.

  Had Eric taken the law into his own hands to end the man who’d threatened his wife? Quite possibly—yes.

  Given what Seth now knew about Bagani’s deviant past and the death toll he’d racked up as he’d traveled from country to country, Seth would’ve done the same thing if he were Eric—if Eric had indeed offed the son-of-a-bitch. Surely Alex had known about Shea when he’d assigned Eric to accompany Cassidy to Cuba. Surely he hadn’t put Eric in close proximity to Bagani for this exact ulterior motive.

  Or had he? Was Alex just that—accommodating?

  Seth sat there drumming his fingertips on his steering wheel, not sure what or who to believe. The more he pondered the ramifications of Bagani’s death, the more he worried the FBI might zero down on his boss or his friend. Alex had a long-running feud with the Bureau. It could happen. They could swoop in with their SWAT, and Alex and Eric would never be heard from again.

  Major Delaney’s comment came back to haunt Seth: ‘…tell that ornery boss of yours to look me up the next time he’s in GITMO.’

  By hell, that exact scenario very well could happen. Both Alex and Eric were hands down capable. Both had means, motive, and opportunity. And wasn’t it odd that Alex had instantly declared himself Seth’s alibi, as if he’d thought that far ahead? As if he’d planned that precise scenario? But if he was Seth’s, and Seth was Alex’s alibi, who was Eric’s?

  “Where the hell are you, brother?” Seth whispered, his kneecap jerking against the underside of the steering wheel with every anxious toe tap. “Call me. I’ll help you, whatever you need, no questions asked. Just ask. Don’t wait for the authorities to hunt your ass down. That’ll hurt Shea and your kids, and that’s not what you want. I know you, man. You love your wife more than your need for revenge. Call. Me.”

  But what husband, especially if he were already a military trained sniper, abundantly blessed with the eyesight of an eagle, and employed within a covert surveillance company the likes of The TEAM, wouldn’t search out and destroy a known, albeit protected, murderer to keep his wife safe?

  A man with morals—like Eric—that was who.

  Okay then. Problem solved. That sure knowledge was enough for Seth. Sucking in a gut full of trust in his boss and in his friend, he exhaled as he turned his mind to the problem at hand. Alex was due to arrive at Naval Air Station Key West any moment now, and soon after, he’d be at the hospital. He’d want answers. Hell, didn’t they all?

  But before that?

  Seth had a woman to kiss.

  Chapter Forty

  ‘Damn, he’s sexy,’ Dev thought as she sat in her hospital bed watching the trio of warriors sitting in the corner of her room. Seth had barely lifted her into his arms, when his boss arrived. Darn Alex Stewart. Why’d he have to be so… so… punctual?

  All three men, Cord, Seth, and Alex, an impressively younger man than Dev had expected, were seated on molded hospital chairs by the single floor to ceiling window. All leaned forward
into each other, their elbows on their knees, and all intent on their muted discussion.

  Too tired to eavesdrop on their acronym-filled mumblings, she’d already been served and eaten the blandest food ever. These guys had to be hungry. It was past dinnertime.

  Dressed in his customary get-up—black everything—Cord was as handsome as ever. Alex Stewart, on the other hand, had a definite alpha wolf thing going for him. An athletically muscled man in his mid to late thirties, he wore faded jeans and a gray t-shirt under a navy blue casual jacket, its zipper undone. Tall, handsome, and dark-haired with the barest hint of silver at his sideburns, he gave off the powerful vibes of one badassed warrior who was comfortable commanding others.

  Yet the man had the bluest eyes. When Seth had introduced him, she could’ve sworn he’d seen right through her, but she’d glimpsed something, too. Alex could’ve stayed in far-off Virginia, but he’d chosen to be here with his men, and that told Dev a lot. This guy didn’t mind getting his hands dirty. He was one of those ‘follow-me-boys’ leaders, the kind that led the charge, instead of the glory seeker who stayed safe in the rear.

  Alex reminded Dev of a WWII battleship parting the stormy Pacific like a hot blade slicing through butter. He carried himself proudly and confidently, as if he dared Mother Nature, or anyone for that matter, to stand in his way. Both Seth and Cord were intelligent alphas in their own right, but Alex was another animal altogether. He was that solitary predator at the top of the food chain, and it showed in the ease with which he handled the professionals sitting with him.

  But Seth? A smile came automatically to her lips. Seth—well, he glowed. That was the only word for him. His persona seemed to shine above the others. He’d changed clothes since he’d rescued her that morning, but as usual, he’d chosen jeans and a plain white t-shirt that stretched tightly across his impressive chest. Damn, he was one drool-worthy male. But humble. Not once had he lifted his voice like Cord was prone to do, and when Alex spoke, he listened instead of arguing, another Cord trait.