Duke: Alpha One Security: Book 3

by Jasinda Wilder

  “Get the keys,” I said, pointing at the ring. “Start letting people out.”

  I kicked a shotgun across the floor to them. “Use that, if you’re so inclined.”

  There was a moment of silence, and then a girl of maybe twenty or so stepped forward; she had dark hair and dark skin and a bindi in the middle of her forehead, making her from India. She caught up the shotgun, examined it, then bent and scooped up the key ring. She nodded at me, and then moved down the hallway to another door, tried half a dozen keys, and found the one that fit the lock. She threw it open, waved, and went to the next door.

  I didn’t stick around for the reunions, though. I stuffed the spare magazines in my pockets and jogged for the open door at the end of the hallway. I heard shouting, and knew my not so subtle escape technique had alerted the rest of the compound, or whatever this place was.

  Reaching the doorway, I leaned my shoulder against it and peered around the frame and up the stairs; light from above cast long, distorted shadows that were moving down the stairs toward me. I hesitated, considering letting them come down to me, but then decided I didn’t really have the patience for tactics. I jogged up the stairs, twisted to aim the submachine gun upward. As soon as I saw a flash of black BDUs, I fired a burst, and then leapt up the stairs three at a time, hitting a landing, aiming upward, and firing again. There were more coming down the stairs, a lot of them. In this scenario, though, I had the advantage. No one behind me, no one in my way. A rifle barked and a round pinged off the railing to my left, then ricocheted off the wall. I ducked away, leaning against the wall to find the best upward vantage point, firing another burst at the scraps of black I saw on the stairs above.

  I worked my way upward like that, ducking the occasional close round, but these operatives were clearly not well trained in the art of stairway warfare. It’s all about angles, and being an accurate shot. You see a scrap of cloth or a hint of a body, you have to make the shot instantly and accurately, or your round will hit the stairs or the railings, which most of theirs did and a good number of mine as well, seeing as I was firing with a handicap. Fortunately the MP5 is small enough and packs little enough of a kick that I was able to fire across my elbow, even though each burst sent jolts of pain through me. All I could do was grit my teeth and keep going.

  I reached the top of the stairs eventually, climbing over bodies, and kicked open the door, hesitated to one side, then took a peek.

  Fuck.

  The door led outside to a nook between wings of the building, and surrounding the door at a distance of twenty feet or so was a semi-circle of mercenaries waiting for me, their rifles trained on me.

  In the center of the group was a single, unarmed figure. Tall, broad-shouldered, dressed in the same paramilitary black as the others. He was rocking a bit of a gut, with side-swept blond hair and brown eyes. He held himself erect with the bearing of a career military man, his hands behind his back.

  “Mr. Duke Silver. Thank you for joining us.” He spoke with an Eastern European accent.

  “Cain.”

  He nodded. “That is one of my aliases, yes.” He gestured to me. “Come, lower the rifle. We have to talk.”

  “So talk,” I snarled, not leaving the doorway.

  “I would prefer to do it somewhere more…amenable.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m not feeling particularly amenable.”

  Cain shrugged. “You’re probably wondering why I brought you here.”

  I groaned. “Is this where you monologue like a James Bond villain?”

  “Aren’t you at all curious?”

  I shrugged. “To kill me slowly, I assume, and send the video to Harris.”

  “Oh my, how unoriginal. No, not at all.” He brought his hands around front, revealing a tablet computer, an iPad or something, which he set on the ground and slid over to me. “Press the home button, and then play the video.”

  I snagged the pad with my injured hand, and then ducked back inside the doorway. I hit the home button as he’d instructed, which brought the screen to life, showing a stilled, blurry image of blond hair and pale skin.

  “Fuck,” I snarled. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

  I touched the play icon at the center of the screen, and the blurry image began moving, resolving into Temple, handcuffed and gagged, eyes wide and fearful.

  She tried to talk past the gag, and a gloved hand reached out and yanked the gag down. “Duke, they got Puck, at that cabin. I don’t think he’s dead, but—baby, I—”

  She was cut off by the gag being shoved back into place. In the background, beside Temple, was another woman, darker skinned with long black hair, gagged and bound as well.

  A hand reached for the screen, and the images went still and blurry again.

  “You see, Mr. Silver? It is in your best interest to cooperate.”

  Outside I heard a helicopter in the distance. Rage was seething inside me, then, black and thick and all consuming.

  “It was never you, you see. I knew who Temple was the whole time. She was the target all along, as a matter of fact, you were just a bonus addition.” A pause. “You met some of my…chattel, I believe the word is, down below, yes? Well, your new friend Miss Temple Kennedy, and the other woman, Lola Reed, who is associated with your large comrade Thresh, I think…they are going to join my operation. I know several wealthy gentlemen who will pay a rather staggering sum of money to possess a beautiful, and famous, woman like Miss Kennedy.”

  “People aren’t for sale, you bastard,” I shouted.

  “Of course they are,” Cain answered, his voice smooth and unperturbed. “It’s an ancient, time-honored business, the sale of woman flesh. And rather lucrative, I might add.”

  I took another peek outside the door, and saw that the helicopter was getting closer, approaching over the horizon. I could make out the tail markings, now: N10043Z.

  Harris.

  How was Harris here?

  What about Puck, and the girls?

  What the fuck was going on?

  I took a breath as I swung back behind the doorframe, switching mags.

  I prepared to roll out and face the firing squad—

  And then I heard Anselm’s Barrett belching thunder, and that fifty cal machine gun started ripsawing, and chaos erupted.

  I heard small arms fire from the mercs, and the Barrett, and the fifty cal, and a lot of screaming and shouting, followed by silence.

  “Yo, dumbass get out here,” Thresh called.

  I stepped out; the mercs were all dead, but I didn’t see Cain anywhere as I jogged through the mess toward the helo, which was hovering a couple feet off the ground.

  I reached the strut, and Thresh reached down with his right hand, grasped mine, and yanked me up and in. I found my footing, and faced my best friend, noticing he was sporting a similar busted left arm—although that was no news to me, I’d just forgotten. The scene in Nevada seemed ages ago, now, although it had only been a matter of a week, if that.

  “Thresh, you big bastard. How are you?”

  He clapped me into a one-armed hug, and then backed away, as Harris brought us skyward. “They’ve got our girls, buddy.”

  I nodded. “Yeah, Cain showed me a video.” I glanced around, saw Anselm with his rifle in a seat, and Harris in the pilot’s seat, but no Puck. “In the video, Temple said Puck had gotten shot or something. Where is he? What the fuck happened?”

  Thresh winced. “Yeah, um, well…we heard shooting so we hauled ass back to Puck’s cabin—”

  “Wait, back up,” I interrupted. “How did you get there? And why?”

  “We were stashing the girls there. Puck said nobody knew where it was, that it would be safe. We figured they’d chill there while we came and got you.” A shrug of his huge shoulders, though his dark, angry expression belied the casualness of the gesture. “They were on the ground less than fifteen minutes and they got ambushed. Puck laid into ‘em, but they popped some tear gas on the girls, snatched ‘em, laid Puck out, and took
off.”

  “So where’s Puck?”

  Another shrug. “We don’t know. He wasn’t there. Saw a little bit of blood where he’d been, but he was nowhere to be seen, nor were the girls. There were a bunch of tire tracks near the base of the mountain not far from the cabin, but…” Thresh lifted his good hand in a helpless gesture. “They vanished.”

  “Puck keeps a dirt bike near the cabin. Think he went after ‘em?”

  “It’s the only idea that makes sense. He wouldn’t just vanish, not when he knew we were there waiting. But if he had a bike and thought he could catch up to the fuckers? Yeah, he wouldn’t hesitate.” Thresh held up a radio. “He had a radio, but it was on the ground where we found the blood.”

  “So…you said fuck the girls, let’s get Duke?” I demanded, feeing the anger bubble up. “Forget me, I can take care of myself!”

  Anselm stepped forward, holding a hand up in placation. “We assumed it was you they had put a tracer into,” he said. “But it was not. It was—”

  “Temple,” I bit out. “Yeah, I figured that out myself too. Cain said before you showed up that it wasn’t about me, it was about her.” I rubbed my temple. “All this time I’ve been assuming Cain’s guys were after me, following me, tracking me.”

  “Meaning what?” Anselm asked.

  “Meaning this whole fucking thing has been about Temple! He’s gonna sell her to someone as a sex slave.” I glanced at Thresh. “So how do we find her?”

  Thresh answered. “With the help of our good buddy Lear.” He gestured outside, to the compound we were flying away from. “He’s hacked into their system. He says he can find the signal they’re receiving and send us to it.”

  “And Puck?”

  Anselm answered. “Would you want to be on the receiving end of a very angry Puck?”

  I pulled a face. “Hell no.”

  “We go after the girls, and assume Puck will make his presence known along the way.”

  Harris twisted in the pilot’s seat, his expression grim. “More bad news, boys.” He tapped his headset. “Just got a call from Roth. Apparently Cain’s guys hit the island too. He’s got Layla and Kyrie, too.”

  “Shit,” Thresh, Anselm, and I all said at once.

  “He’s planning an auction,” Thresh said.

  I met Harris’s gaze. “I think we’re going to need more friends.”

  Harris nodded. “Already done. I’ve got Sasha and the rest of the Caribbean crew headed this way, along with a very, very pissed off Valentine Roth.”

  Everyone went silent at that news; Roth was intimidating when he was in a good mood.

  Harris turned back to the controls, and we flew in silence for a few minutes. After a bit, Harris sat up straighter, listening to something in his headset.

  He turned back to face us. “The good news is, Lear has the signal.”

  “And the bad news?” I asked.

  “They’re over the Atlantic, heading to Europe.” Harris reached out and clapped my shoulder.

  “What about Puck?” I asked again.

  Harris chuckled darkly. “Something tells me he’s on that plane.”

  Keep reading for a sneak preview of:

  PUCK

  An Alpha One Security novel

  By

  Jasinda Wilder

  1: 99 PROBLEMS

  Now, I’ve been in some hairy situations before, but this one? This was a hell of a pickle.

  I’d followed the Hummer with the girls in it for something like a hundred miles, keeping off the road and following from just inside the tree line, staying as far back as I dared when the tree line ran out. Which was a difficult job in and of itself on a dirt bike, but considering I’d taken half a dozen NATO rounds to the center of my chest, and another one that had claimed the upper half of my favorite finger—the middle one on my left hand—I was not happy.

  I was wearing a vest, so the rounds to the chest had just left gnarly bruises and hurt like a bitch, but weren’t anything to worry about. The finger was a bit of a problem, though. How the hell was I going to flip people off, now? One full birdie and a stump? Fuck that. And yeah, it didn’t tickle, having a finger shot off. There hadn’t exactly been a lot of time in which to do triage, so I’d lit my cigar, puffed till it was nice and hot, and then used the nice bright orange cinder to cauterize the end.

  Sounds fun, right?

  Yeah, it wasn’t.

  Problem was, a cigar cherry ain’t nowhere near hot enough to really truly cauterize something, so the stump was getting bloody again.

  Which was number…like, fifty, on my list of problems.

  Ninety-nine problems, but a bitch ain’t one—the Jay-Z line went through my head, which was funny, because it wasn’t one bitch that was the problem, it was two. And don’t get your panties in a cinch. I just meant “bitch” as a generic term for woman, and in this case, I meant it as a term of endearment—I like those girls, Lola and Temple, which is why I’m here in the first fucking place.

  Significantly higher up the list was the fact that I was in the cargo compartment of a privately-owned 727, and we were way, way up there, which meant it was cold as fuck in here; they hadn’t bothered warming it, since it was empty…except for little old me.

  Also a problem was that I had no weapons, since I’d had to leave the shotgun behind in order to ride the dirt bike.

  Furthermore, I had no plan for what to do when we got wherever the hell we were going—the lack of knowledge was yet another problem on the list.

  Additionally, Harris and the gang, as far as I knew, had no idea what was going on, although I trusted them to find out eventually. Which meant, for the moment, I was on my own.

  In the hold of an airliner at cruising altitude.

  Without a weapon.

  Responsible for the lives of two beautiful women, who happened to be the girlfriends of my two closest brothers-in-arms.

  And have I mentioned the twenty-some armed men a few feet above me in the passenger cabin?

  Going in my favor, though, are two facts: I’m a stone-cold, hard-ass motherfucker, and I’m really pissed off.

  Good thing I like to party hard.

  Puck: Alpha One Security: Book 4

  COMING SOON

  Jasinda Wilder

  Visit me at my website: www.jasindawilder.com

  Email me: jasindawilder@gmail.com

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