by Cindy Dees
Directly ahead of Tom, Casey pulled out a cell phone and dialed it quickly. He eavesdropped shamelessly.
“Ops, Scorpion here. I need full satellite surveillance of our position. All unidentified persons approaching us should be considered hostile. And could you please call the local police and tell them to quit shooting at us? We’ve got Tom Rowe, and I doubt the U.S. government would take kindly to it if the police charged with protecting him were to kill him.”
Casey listened for a minute and then muttered a disgusted “Roger.”
She stowed her cell phone.
“What’s up?” Tom asked.
“Five to seven minutes to bring a high-resolution satellite to bear. Until then, we’re on our own.”
“Okay, then,” Aleesha said briskly. “For the next five minutes we do our damnedest not to get into any gun battles.”
That was a lifetime in Special Ops terms. Five to seven seconds wasn’t an uncommon time frame in which to completely wipe out an enemy unit. And they were supposed to wait around out here for five to seven minutes? It was so time to get out of Dodge. Tom murmured over his shoulder in Aleesha’s general direction, “Let’s put Naraya in the car and get her out of here before the jungle goes hot again.”
“You, too, pretty boy,” Aleesha muttered back.
And Paige was damned well coming with him. No way was he leaving her side now that he’d found her again. Especially not after the antics he’d seen her pull back there in the jungle.
Paige murmured, “The car should be just ahead. Under that stand of palmetto.”
Handy thing about itty-bitty cars. They were easy to hide. Aleesha signaled the team to get down, and they all sank slowly into the scrub and tall weeds lining the road. Easing forward on their bellies, they approached the MINI Cooper’s passenger door. Casey reached up and opened it. The click of the latch was deafening in the tense silence.
Aleesha and Cho glided forward, dragging Naraya between them. How they managed to maneuver her inert form into the backseat that quickly and silently, he had no idea. He kept forgetting how much stronger these women were than they looked.
“In you go, big guy,” Aleesha muttered.
“Is Paige coming with us?” he replied.
“No. Cho’s a medic and I need her. Naraya’s tried to crash on us twice already, and it’ll take both of us to get her to a hospital alive. With you that makes four, and that’s all the car can hold. You’re going to have to drive, in fact.”
Aleesha must have spotted the beginnings of his ferocious scowl because she added hastily, “Besides, Paige knows this jungle better than the rest of us and already has eyes-on intel regarding who’s out here. She’s also one of the best combat shooters I’ve got. She stays.”
“Then I stay, too,” he said resolutely.
Aleesha glared at him. “This isn’t a democracy, and I’m ordering you to go.”
“Sorry. I’m a civilian. And I’m staying.”
“Don’t be a fool, Rowe—” Aleesha started.
Paige interrupted. “Go, Tom. I need you to be safe.”
“Yeah, well, I need you to be safe, too. I’ll go crazy if I leave you, not knowing if you’ve been hurt or worse.” He barged on before anyone could come up with any more good reasons for him to go. “I can pull my weight out here.”
Aleesha snapped, “I thought you’re a civilian. I don’t draft civilians into firefights.”
He opened his mouth to make a hot retort, but just then most of the team went still, listening to something he couldn’t hear. Probably a radio transmission across their headsets, he guessed.
Casey murmured, “H.O.T. Watch just came up on our frequency. They’ve got some initial imagery and report a large force moving rapidly in our direction.”
He spoke tersely to Aleesha. “There’s no time to argue. I’m an able-bodied operator and you’ve got a soldier down. Get her to a hospital and let me do what I know how to do with the others. You’re not doing your mission to protect me any good by standing here arguing.”
Aleesha glared at him for a moment and then cast an irritated glance in Paige’s direction. The Jamaican woman grumbled, “How you put up with him is beyond me, girl.”
Triumph surged in his gut as Aleesha continued grimly, “So help me, if you get yourself killed out here, I’ll haunt you till the end of time.”
Cho murmured urgently, “Her pulse is getting thready again. We’ve got to go.”
As the two medics leaned over the car seats awkwardly to work on their patient, Paige ducked into the vehicle and groped at Naraya’s utility belt. She came up with a cell phone. Ah. No doubt H.O.T. Watch could use its GPS locator function to identify her, and Paige could use it to keep in touch with her teammates.
Roxi was drafted to drive while Aleesha and Cho worked on Naraya. In a matter of a few seconds, the vehicle pulled away.
Tom turned to face the jungle. Now it was just him and the remaining Medusas against the threat lurking out there. Adrenaline surged through him and he savored the sensation. It had been a long time since he’d felt this alive. Too long. He tried to recall why it was he’d ever gotten out of the Special Ops field in the first place, and he came up blank.
Shouts erupted in the jungle behind them.
“Time to go,” Paige bit out.
No kidding. Casey sent Alex and Monica across the road to lay down covering fire if necessary. Once the pair had dived onto their bellies on the far side of the asphalt, he, Paige, and Casey raced half-crouching across the open space. No one shot at them. But that didn’t mean no one had seen them.
Tom plowed into the grass, and a scant second later, someone else pressed up hard against him. He instinctively recognized Paige’s lithe form plastered to his. He would never forget the feel of her body. And even through the tension permeating them all, he still knew the scent of her instantly.
“Stealth or speed?” Casey whispered to Paige.
“Stealth until H.O.T. Watch says otherwise.”
Casey nodded, and the group slid ghostlike back from the road and melted into the trees. Tom’s muscles protested the exaggerated slowness of movement, but his mind fell into the pattern of it right away. And it felt good.
Lying under a giant fern beside him, Paige brought the cell phone to her ear and listened intently. She hand-signaled to him that their pursuers were doing some sort of tracking maneuver behind them.
Their little team moved out once more. It galled him to be kept in the center of the pack like a helpless old lady, but Paige and the others were having no part of any other marching order. Still, it was better than being back at the hotel sweating bullets over whether Paige was alive or dead.
He checked his watch. Three minutes until the live satellite surveillance would come online. An eternity.
He took twelve steps, which in full stealth mode worked out to about two minutes…one step approximately every ten seconds. He was so close to Paige he felt the faint vibration of Naraya’s phone against his arm. She eased the instrument up to her ear, listened for a moment, and alarm burst across her face.
Urgently, she hand-signaled him by putting her index finger by her ear and twirling it around like a tornado.
Crap. That was the signal to run like hell.
The police must be across the road and coming fast. He and the remaining Medusas took off running. So much for stealth mode. And soon enough, the correctness of that decision became apparent as the woods erupted in shouts and the sounds of men crashing through trees behind them. The police were making no effort whatsoever to be quiet. Which meant…his brain hitched.
Which meant this was a herding operation.
“Are we…being driven…into a trap?” he gasped between heaving gulps of air.
Paige’s gaze snapped over to him. And that was a mistake. She stumbled, and he decelerated hard to grab her arm and keep her from going down. A fall now would be certain disaster.
She regained her balance, nodded once in thanks, and the tw
o of them accelerated again. But in the scant second the two of them had paused, the Medusas ahead of them had darted out of sight. He slowed, signaling Paige to ask if she knew where the others had gone. She shook her head in the negative.
He swore to himself. Just what they needed. To be separated from the team!
The noise was growing louder behind them by the second. They must be using some sort of motorcycles or all-terrain vehicles to be gaining on them like this. Paige signaled him frantically and peeled to her right. He followed, perplexed, as she led him in a wide half circle. She wanted to run right back into the thick of their pursuit?
But he didn’t question her. So far tonight, her instincts had been spot-on.
He definitely picked up sounds of motorized vehicles now. Then he thought he made out movement in the trees ahead. What in the hell was Paige up to? As soon as the question crossed his mind, Paige dodged left and dived behind a rotting log. He followed, going airborne and slamming into the dirt beside her. She made a quick adjustment to the oversize leaves of some tropical plant above them, and they were completely encased in green. It was a good hiding spot.
They both froze, doing their best to become one with the forest floor. Except it felt more like he was becoming one with Paige. Their bodies fit together perfectly, melting into each other as naturally as breathing. It was strange and frustrating being in the middle of an op and being this aware of the special operator beside him as a sexy, desirable woman. Must be the adrenaline spiking sky-high through his system. It was a heady combination.
And then he became aware of…something…rolling off Paige. Something musky and sexual and hungry. He heard her breath catch in her throat. She must feel this thing between them, too.
How long he lay there like that, in a suspended state of terror and unadulterated lust, he had no idea. It felt like forever and back.
He heard an odd swishing sound and frowned, trying to identify it.
Machetes. Hacking through the dense foliage. The police must have set up a search line where the motorized vehicles couldn’t go and where sweeping the jungle before them to flush out him and the Medusas. But which police? The good guys or the bad guys?
The line of machete-wielding men drew even with their position, and he held his breath in spite of himself. Paige’s ribs went perfectly still beside him. Leaves went flying no more than three feet away from his head.
Swish. Whack. Pieces of shredded fern rained down on them. Somebody must have swung at the very plant they lay beneath. He listened for movement on their other flank and thought he heard someone hacking away no more than ten feet from them.
Wow. Paige had done a spectacular job of estimating how much of a gap they’d have for slipping between the police and where to hide.
A faint tremble passed through her, and he restrained an urge to throw an arm over her and draw her even nearer. He did lean fractionally closer, though, letting the weight of his shoulder settle more heavily against hers.
The sounds of motors and men beating the jungle retreated behind them. Paige risked pulling out Naraya’s cell phone to whisper to H.O.T. Watch Ops, “Relay to Scorpion that Fire Ant and Wolf are safe and proceeding toward home base. Tell the Medusas to get out of here. Pursuit is using vehicles and machetes.”
Tom was lying so close to her that he heard the faint reply. “Roger. Will do, Fire Ant. Be advised that we have full telemetry. All hostiles are tagged and identified. We will be vectoring the Medusas from our location.”
Tom grinned. The police were toast. With satellites overhead monitoring their every movement and passing that information to the Medusas on the ground, there was no way the cops were ever going to catch anything but thin air and a bunch of frustration.
Relief surged through him. They’d done it. They’d avoided a large and dangerous hit squad and evaded a dozen or more unwitting police accomplices to the killers.
“You up for a hike?” Paige murmured.
“Sure. Why not? After all, you’ve already made me swim half the length of the island, I may as well walk the other half of it.”
Paige popped to her feet gracefully and held down a slender hand to him. An impulse to grab her hand and yank her down on top of him nearly overcame Tom. But there were still armed men out here, and this was not the time or place for a gratuitous roll in the hay…or leaves and snakes, as it were.
Paige led the way, retracing their steps quickly toward the road. Occasionally Naraya’s cell phone vibrated and she listened to some instruction from ops controllers watching them from above with high-tech spy satellites. Generally, it involved relaying a small course correction or status report on the police forces. Handy, those H.O.T. Watch guys.
After a few minutes, the wail of sirens announced the arrival of a cavalcade of ambulances. He didn’t envy the medics having to clean up the destruction the Medusas, or more specifically, Paige, had left in her wake.
When they were well away from the scene of the gun battle, Paige stopped and pulled another cell phone out of her back pocket. She fiddled with it for a few moments, appeared to listen to a few voice-mail messages and then let out a sound of triumph.
Using Naraya’s cell phone, she had a lengthy conversation with the folks at H.O.T. Watch. Tom listened, stunned, as she relayed the evidence she’d just pulled from the dead assassin’s cell phone implicating Mimi Ando in masterminding tonight’s attack on Tom.
When she disconnected the call, he stared at Paige incredulously. “Mimi?” And then it sank in—earlier she’d shouted to one of the shooters that she worked for Mimi, too. Oh my God. Mimi was behind Ando’s murder and the attempted killings of him.
“One and the same,” Paige replied grimly.
“Why?”
She shrugged. “As best as I can figure, she wanted all those billions for herself.”
“But why kill her own husband?”
Paige turned and commenced walking. She walked for several long minutes before she answered. When she finally did speak, it was in a subdued, reflective tone. “My research on him indicates that Takashi Ando was a conservative and deeply cautious businessman. What if he decided not to bid? Mimi might have thought it was too good a deal to pass up and knocked him off to pursue it herself.”
“But Takashi undoubtedly didn’t leave her all of his money or complete control of his estate.”
“He must have left her enough that she thought she could do the deal if you and Smythe were taken out of the picture as competing bidders to run up the price.”
“So she tried to have us killed?”
“That’s my guess. The guys at H.O.T. Watch said they’d relay my information to the chief of the summit’s security. He’ll take her into custody and question her.”
Tom commented bitterly, “Tell him to appeal to her ego. She won’t be able to resist bragging about her scheme if he acts suitably impressed.”
“And you dated her?”
He winced. “What can I say? It’s taken me a while to figure out what qualities truly appeal to me in a woman.”
“Do tell,” Paige murmured lightly.
He suppressed the grin flickering at the corners of his mouth. “Well, I like a woman who looks good in Valentino. And who’s interesting to talk to. And who rocks my world in bed.”
“Rocks your world, huh? That sounds like a tall order to fill.”
“Mmm. It is. I also like a woman who—”
Naraya’s phone vibrated and he broke off while Paige took the call.
Eventually she hung up and said, “They just picked up Mimi.”
They walked a while more, and Naraya’s phone rang again. This time Paige reported, “Mimi offered to trade immunity from prosecution in return for handing over the would-be assassins. H.O.T. Watch informed the summit security chief that the assassins have been neutralized and no deal is necessary. She was devastated by the news, apparently. They expect her to confess momentarily.”
“She always did have a good feel for when to cut her lo
sses and run.”
Paige shrugged. “I don’t think she’ll be running from this one. She orchestrated murder.”
Tom might have hated Mimi’s guts for trying to kill him, but it still pained him to see how far she had fallen. Paige interrupted his troubled thoughts by asking abruptly, “Is it worth it?”
“Is what worth it?”
“The wealth? The fame? Is it worth killing for?”
He snorted. “Actually, it’s a pain in the butt as often as it’s a good thing. People treat you weird and are always trying to figure out ways to get a piece of your checkbook. You have to be suspicious of everyone you meet, and it’s mostly just lonely. Sure, I have cool toys and get to do some great traveling, but all of that gets old after a while. Honestly, I’ve never been more bored in my life since I got rich.”
“Is that why you came down to the beach when Vanessa Blake called and asked you to help me that morning?”
“That, and I was desperate to get my finger back into the Special Ops pie.”
She waved over her shoulder. “You want back into all of that? The danger and death and chaos?”
“Yeah, actually.”
She snorted.
“What? Like you don’t love it? I saw the expression on your face when you went charging into that gunfight like Billy the Kid against that assassin. For which I’m planning to turn you over my knee later and paddle some sense into you, by the way.”
She laughed. “You and what army?”
They walked a while longer in companionable silence. His adrenaline levels gradually decreased to something resembling normal, and he began to process all that had happened in the jungle earlier. It didn’t take him long to glare over at her and burst out, “Are you nuts?”
“My tactic worked, didn’t it? Vanessa says to make our greatest weakness into our greatest strength. We weren’t going to be able to tell the good cops from the bad cops, so I made it impossible for them to tell each other apart, either.”