Flashpoint

by Suzanne Brockmann

  “You didn’t steal her,” Decker said.

  “Yes, I did. I was with her, and I wanted her, so I took her. I’m a total asshole,” Nash said. “I knew how you felt about her, and I still couldn’t keep my hands to myself.”

  What was it Nash had said before about guilt talking? “If you want,” Decker said, “you could give me fifty thousand dollars. It does wonders, you know, in relieving feelings of guilt.”

  Nash stared at him. “You’re joking,” he said. “I’m standing here, trying to have a serious conversation about some extremely serious shit, and you’re joking.”

  “We have work to do,” Decker reminded him. He started back inside. “Was there anything else?”

  “Yeah, you got any extra condoms? I’m almost out. Three last night and one this morning—the woman sure loves to fuck.”

  Deck stopped short and turned back to look at Nash. What the hell? It was as if Nash were trying to make him angry, as if he were disappointed in Decker’s reaction to his earth-shattering news.

  Except Decker had seen the way Tess looked at Nash. The fact that they were involved not only was not a surprise, it was a relief. He’d been hoping it would happen, and his earth hadn’t come anywhere close to shattering when it had.

  Nash, however, looked as if he were standing on shaky ground. He managed to look both defiant and embarrassed. And he glanced around them to make sure no one else had overheard that crude and very personal statement he’d made about Tess.

  And here was an interesting thought. Did Nash actually want Decker to kick his ass?

  Would it make him feel better, less terrified and out of control perhaps, if Decker rang his bell a few times and knocked him to the ground?

  Maybe just the threat of violence would do the trick. Deck was tired—it had been one hell of a long night. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d slept. Was it yesterday or the day before?

  “You better be treating this woman with the respect that she deserves,” Deck said, his voice as hard as the look he gave Nash.

  Nash said nothing. He just stood there, working hard—from the look of him—on grinding his teeth into little stubs.

  So Deck gave him some more of the same. “Not just when you’re with her, but all the time,” he continued. He’d always hated locker-room talk, and Nash knew it—which made this whole thing even weirder. “Or I’ll kick your ass.”

  “How could she want me when she could have you?” Nash shook his head, his eyes haunted. “I can’t figure that out.”

  This was . . . unique. Them talking like this. Decker had to wonder if Nash found it as strange and wonderful as he did.

  Or just plain terrifying.

  And was Nash really serious? Because from Deck’s point of view, Nash got it completely backwards. How could she want Deck when she could have Nash?

  Either way . . .

  “It doesn’t have to make sense,” Decker said to his friend. “You just . . . roll with it, and thank God for your good fortune.”

  “What if . . . ,” Nash started. He couldn’t seem to look Decker in the eye anymore. “What if I don’t want her?” he finally said. “You know, the same way she wants me? What if I just can’t resist the sex?”

  Decker wanted to cry for his friend. He wanted to urge him not to run away from Tess just because he was scared of everything he was feeling. But to acknowledge both of those things—that Nash was scared, that he had feelings . . .

  He couldn’t do it.

  “Then you better tell her that now,” Deck said instead. “Right? Don’t make her think you’re on the same page and then ditch her after the assignment’s over.”

  That muscle jumped in Nash’s jaw again. “It’s impossible to know what the future will bring.”

  Decker got in his face. “It’ll bring some serious trouble if you string her along and then ditch her after this assignment is over. Do you hear me?”

  Nash didn’t respond. Not to that, anyway. He just said, “Condoms?”

  “There’s a small supply in the medical kit, in the kitchen,” Decker told him before going back into the barn. “You’re going to have to ration.”

  Tess and Nash were late to the meeting.

  Nash had gone up to get her, and it took them at least fifteen minutes to find their way downstairs and over to the barn.

  Tess’s cheeks turned pink when she realized they were all there and waiting—Decker, Dave, and even Sophia.

  “Sorry,” Tess said. “I was, um, researching kidney failure.”

  Sure she was.

  She looked directly at Sophia. “It suddenly occurred to me that what you might’ve seen in Sayid’s room was a dialyzer—a tall machine, kind of narrow, with tubes coming in and going out?”

  Sophia glanced at Decker. She’d just had this exact conversation with him.

  “Understandably, Sophia didn’t spend much time looking at it,” he answered for her.

  “It was some kind of medical machine,” she told Tess, “and yes, it was tall, but other than that . . .” She shrugged.

  Tess handed Deck a printout from her computer. “I’d bet the farm that three times a week Sayid needed something called—”

  “Hemodialysis,” he finished for her. “You’d win that bet. I just spoke to Tom Paoletti, who, long story short, found out that the autopsy team was having a deadline crisis, so they rushed the report—including only information about the injuries that pertained to Sayid’s death. The fact that he had something called a”—he consulted a piece of paper upon which he’d handwritten some notes—“PTFE graft in his arm—access for hemodialysis. It was considered unimportant.” Deck laughed his disgust. “File that under information we could have used a week ago. Which reminds me,” he interrupted himself. “Paoletti let me know that Vinh Murphy’s doing well.”

  “Thank God,” Tess breathed, the only one of them brave enough to give voice to her relief. She turned to look up at Nash, who was standing close enough to touch her—just a hand briefly on her back—without anyone but Sophia noticing.

  “He’s been medevaced all the way to Germany,” Decker told them, “and he’s already had the first round of surgery on his leg. Commander Paoletti also gave me a heads-up—Murph’s name is going to be released on a list of Americans killed from that car bomb, so if you happen to catch the news and hear he’s dead, don’t get upset. It’s being done to protect the helo crew and the hospital staff who helped smuggle him out.”

  “Angelina’s been told he’s all right, hasn’t she?” Tess asked.

  “I’m sure Tom’s taken care of that,” Decker said. “But when I talk to him again, I’ll double-check.”

  “Any news on who’s behind the car bomb?” Tess asked.

  “GIK extremists,” Dave answered. “There’s lots of talk on the streets—rumors that there’ll be more attacks. We need to keep our eyes open when we’re out there, and stay away from potential targets.”

  “Like hospitals?” Nash asked.

  Decker handed a piece of paper to Nash and to Dave. Sophia leaned closer and saw that it was a list of names and addresses of hospitals. “Here’s what we need to look for,” he started, but Tess interrupted him.

  “Where’s mine?” she asked.

  Decker glanced at Nash. “We decided the risks of sending you out alone were too—”

  “We decided?” she said.

  “I decided,” he told her, taking the bullet for Nash, whose idea it clearly had been. “The police have been known to keep tabs on people who’ve been in custody. If you were seen going from hospital to hospital asking questions about dialysis equipment, you could put this entire mission in jeopardy.”

  Tess backed down. What could she say to that? But it was clear from the look she gave Nash that he was going to hear more about this later.

  “Let’s get to it,” Decker said.

  It was well after four a.m. when Jimmy returned. Tess was still up, obviously waiting for him, and he was so overwhelmingly glad about tha
t, he almost turned around and ran right back down the stairs.

  Instead he closed the door behind him and carried the bucket of water he’d brought up from the kitchen into the bathroom.

  He heard the click as she closed her computer. “How did it go?”

  As he came back out of the bathroom, he was sure he let nothing show on his face, but somehow, just by looking at him, she knew there’d been trouble. She scrambled to her feet. “What happened?”

  It seemed pointless to lie or even to soften it. “I was set up. My contact—Leo—figured out that it was Sophia Ghaffari I wanted smuggled across the border. I guess his plan was to grab me and, uh, convince me to tell them where she was hiding.” That part he did soften by not using the T-word—torture. No point in upsetting her—Deck hadn’t let it get that far.

  Tess was at his side instantly. “Are you hurt?”

  “I’m fine.” Jimmy met her eyes and knew she was remembering that that was what she’d told him, while sitting in a K-stani prison. He corrected himself. “I’m not hurt. Deck came in, got me out of there.”

  The lump on the back of his head where they hit him didn’t show—she didn’t have to know about that. But he’d scraped the heel of his right hand when he’d fallen, and she found that now.

  “You need to clean this out,” she said.

  “Yeah, I’m going to. I brought up some water.”

  “Any other ‘dings’?” she asked, looking at him hard.

  “I don’t think so.” He allowed himself only the briefest of embraces before he pulled away from her. She was warm and soft and he knew that all he had to do was kiss her and she’d fall back with him onto the bed. He desperately wanted to take advantage of this adrenaline-induced hard-on he was still packing, but right now he smelled bad.

  Cold sweat always made him stink.

  Of course, he hadn’t started to sweat until he and Deck were on their way back here. It wasn’t until he started thinking about how bad it would be if one of Leo’s men managed to follow them to Rivka’s that he got good and scared. If he and Decker let that happen, Sophia wouldn’t be the only one in danger.

  Tess would be at risk, too.

  Someone coming in to grab up Sophia might take Tess instead. Or they might simply take both women to Padsha Bashir, not knowing or even caring which one would win them that hefty reward.

  Jimmy didn’t want Tess anywhere near the sadistic warlord. Even being in the same city with the son of a bitch was bad enough.

  He sat down in the chair so he could take off his boots. Damn, his feet hurt. He and Deck had clocked about seven miles tonight at hyperspeed, and these boots weren’t made for running.

  Tess was hovering, ready to help him out of his jacket, and then his shirt. She was checking him for more dings.

  “I didn’t realize Deck was going with you tonight,” she said, pulling him up and out of the chair so he could take off his pants.

  “He tagged along, hid in the shadows. . . .”

  Clearly his erection wasn’t as much of a distraction to her as it was to him. But it wasn’t as if she didn’t notice—how could she not? She was just more interested in taking inventory of his injuries.

  “That must hurt.”

  She was talking about his knee. It was rug-burned. He’d scraped it right through his jeans, or maybe because of his jeans. And he was going to have a bruise there, too. It was already starting to turn purple.

  “I’ve had worse,” Jimmy said. “You know, sometimes I think Deck’s got some kind of sixth sense—like he knows there’s going to be trouble before it happens.” He shook his head. “All the nights he didn’t come, I didn’t need him. Tonight I did, and he was there.” It was doubly freaky, because it had happened before.

  “Maybe he picks up something from you,” she suggested. “Maybe you give off some kind of signal that something’s wrong and—”

  “Tonight I didn’t know,” Jimmy said. “Tonight, I was caught completely off guard.” That was what shook him up so much—the fact that he hadn’t spotted the setup going in. That was the kind of careless mistake that could get him killed. Or worse, it could get Decker or Tess killed.

  God damn it, he hated that he’d put them both in danger.

  “Maybe it’s subconscious on your part,” Tess said. “Maybe it’s subconscious on his part, too. Whatever, it is, I’m glad for it. It’s what makes you guys such a good team.”

  “Yeah, I don’t know,” Jimmy said. “Decker would be good with anyone—and maybe even unstoppable with a better partner. You said yourself I’m not a team player.”

  “What? Jimmy, I was mad at you at the time.”

  “That doesn’t make it any less true.”

  She led him into the bathroom, taking one of the candles in with them and setting it on the back of the toilet. “You and Deck are unstoppable. You’re legendary.”

  “Notorious,” he corrected her as she splashed some of the water from the bucket into the plugged sink.

  “That’s bullshit, and you know it.” She wet a washcloth and got to work cleaning all the bits of dirt and cement from his hand.

  “Ow!”

  “Better find a bullet to bite, because this is going to take a while.”

  “This would hurt less if you were naked,” he told her, and she glanced up at him.

  “You’ve used a variation of that line on me before.”

  Crap. “Sorry.”

  “I bet.” She glanced up again. “Now might be a really good time to tell me what happened tonight.”

  What was there to tell? Leo had made the mistake of using force, of instigating violence, of putting the death card into play. Tell me where Sophia’s hiding, or we’ll kill you. Once Leo did that, the game became deadly. And when Decker burst through the window and threw Jimmy that weapon . . .

  “Leo the Claw made a big mistake,” he told Tess now.

  She laughed. “Leo the what?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “That’s what he calls himself. Leo the Claw. What the hell does that mean? And oh, by the way, never trust a man who gives himself his own nickname.”

  Tess laughed again.

  That was good. He was entertaining her.

  “I did some business with him a few years ago, before he became ‘the Claw.’ He was bipartisan back then—you know, he worked for the highest bidder. I actually liked the guy. . . .”

  Jimmy realized that he’d fallen silent and that Tess was looking at him, concern in her eyes. He forced a smile. “But apparently he’d had one run-in too many with Padsha Bashir and discovered he liked staying alive so much, he was willing to make less money and pledge allegiance to Bashir.

  “So fast-forward to a couple of days ago. I contacted him, not knowing about his new connection to Bashir, and told him I was looking to smuggle a friend across the border, how much would it cost?

  “I think that’s where I gave it away—you know, that my ‘friend’ was Sophia. Because Leo said fifty thousand dollars U.S. and I didn’t leap out of my chair and say the K-stani equivalent to Are you out of your freaking mind? I just sat there and nodded, because I was thinking that it would probably end up being at least that much—the same as the price Bashir had put on her head.

  “So okay,” Jimmy continued. “I don’t realize it, but I’ve given it away. I come back here”—thank God Leo’s men hadn’t followed him then—“and Leo the freaking Claw toddles off to see his business partner and says, ‘Yo, yo, yo, I think I’ve found Bashir’s missing girl, but I’m a little understaffed.’ So the partner gives him a half a dozen more men—” All amateur soldiers with lousy aim. All no longer of this earth, poor bastards. “And they wait for me to return. Which I obligingly did tonight.

  “Like I said, when I arrive, my guard’s down . . . And so they bring me into this little room, and they’ve got me in this chair, and Leo’s doing his Nazi interrogator routine. And Deck comes through the window, Leo dives for cover, and . . . Off we go, running six-minute miles in work boo
ts through a disaster zone. It took us a long time to get here because we had to make sure we weren’t followed.”

  They had been.

  At first.

  But Jimmy had gone around behind the man trailing them, in a move Decker called “circling back on their own six.” He’d taken the tracker out silently and left him there as a warning to anyone who might come after. As a warning to Leo. Don’t ever fuck with me again. . . .

  “I think this is as clean as it’s going to get,” Tess told him.

  He looked at his hand. Out, damned spot. . . . “Thanks. It’s . . . Thank you.”

  “So . . . are you going to tell me what happened?” she asked.

  Jimmy laughed, but it was obvious she wasn’t being funny, and he felt his smile fade away.

  She was just standing there, waiting.

  So he said, “Okay, I left out where they hit me on the head and I fell. I mean, I figured you knew that because . . .” He held up his scraped hand as exhibit A. “But other than that . . .”

  She nodded, folding her arms across her chest, as if she were cold. “Okay.” She pointed over her shoulder at the bedroom. “I’ll, um, be out here while you finish getting washed up.”

  He’d disappointed her. He knew he’d disappointed her. But what was he supposed to say?

  There were more of them and they had superior firepower, but it still felt like slaughter, like shooting fish in a barrel.

  Or, That last man didn’t hear it coming. One second, as far as he was concerned, he was alone. The next he was in a headlock, and then he was dead. He barely had time to struggle, didn’t have time to reach for a weapon.

  It had helped that he had been one of the ones in the room—laughing—while Leo had described the effect of a full electrical current attached to a man’s gonads.

  But the truth was, Jimmy had seen too much death, too much bad for the alleged sake of good.