Seduced

by Angel Payne

  “Later, okay?”

  “Roger.”

  After they stepped inside, they had to let their eyes readjust to the dark, even after the murky street they’d left behind. The place was crowded for a weeknight. There were at least twenty stools occupied with customers of all kinds, including some guys who looked like they’d stepped out of a trendy magazine spread, some burly types in T-shirts from the local stage employees union, two girls with purple hair who flanked a third in blue tattoos, and a multipierced couple with their tongues down each other’s throats. A TV played a silent repeat of tonight’s Dodgers game. The ceiling-mounted speakers pulsed with one of Tait’s favorite Dave Matthews songs, though he wasn’t sure that was enough to officially bring the place into the twenty-first century. Could’ve had something to do with the yellowed rope lighting tacked up around the perimeter of the room.

  Seventies Christmas kitsch aside, the strands came in handy for guiding them to the back corner, where the place’s sole booth already held most of their battalion mates. Franz, Rhett, Rebel, Zeke, and Garrett were present, along with a new guy he didn’t recognize. Wouldn’t be surprised if they called him Ken, though. Dude looked like a supersized version of Barbie’s famous boyfriend, complete with perfect haircut, square jaw, and muscled shoulders that pushed against a T-shirt emblazoned with Jack Kerouac’s face.

  As they settled into the booth, he looked around to flag a bartender. There was only one, and the friendly old guy was laughing at a joke made by a customer at the other end of the room. Shit. That fifth beer was going on hold for a while. Might have been a good thing, if the terse look on Franzen’s face was an accurate indicator of the theme for this powwow.

  After another head check around the table, he threw out, “So Archer’s in the head?”

  Rhett waggled his brows. The rope lights picked up the red tints in them, making him look like a demon king from those bow-and-arrow computer games he played. “Archer isn’t here yet.”

  “What?” Kell got the rejoinder out before he could. “We beat Ethan?”

  Zeke smirked. “Twenty says Mr. Time Clock was busy getting laid.”

  Nobody took him up on the bet. Ethan was always the first one in the door at team meetings. An exception could only involve a woman or a natural disaster. Best as he knew, the only disaster tonight had been what the Dodgers had wielded on the Mariners.

  They didn’t have to wallow long in curiosity. The door opened and the rope lights illuminated the dark head of their party’s last arrival. Runway hurried to the booth and scooted in across from Tait, next to Rhett. “Hey.” He nodded in deference to Franz. “Came as fast as I could.”

  Zeke made sure that didn’t get ignored. “Aw, we sure hope not, Runway.”

  “Huh?”

  Z snickered. Garrett backhanded the purple-and-gold Hawaiian print that covered his friend’s huge torso and gave Ethan a diplomatic smile. “Dude, it’s always a good idea to check in the mirror before dashing out the door.”

  “What?” Ethan looked down. “Why?”

  “Your shirt’s inside out, your fly is open, and for the record, a little hand sanitizer or olive oil is great for getting lipstick off your earlobes.”

  “Shit.” Runway joined the rest of them in chuckling at his expense. The moment was temporary. Ethan’s grin fell to a shocked gape, aimed right at Malibu Ken, who’d been hidden from him by Zeke’s bulk. “Colton?”

  The guy jabbed his chin up. “Pleasure to see you, Archer.”

  “Likewise, but what the hell are—”

  “You’re getting on the tracks in front of the train, Runway.” Franz sliced it in before jamming his elbows to the table and circling his stare over all of them. In the dim light of the room, he looked like Don Corleone had gotten a makeover from the Scorpion King. “Gentlemen, thanks for circling the wagons even on your vacation, which I’m afraid is being cut short.” He paused for a second, smiling a little when nobody at the table so much as flinched. “I know it’s not the first time you’ve heard that from me, nor will it be the last. The fresh factor here, as you’ve all surmised, is the pretty young thing sitting to my left.”

  The Ken doll snorted. “Pretty young thing who whipped your ass last time we were at the firing range.”

  “Eight months ago,” Franz sneered.

  “You’re still buying my Scotch tonight.”

  Good luck with that. Tait glanced at the bartender, who’d headed back their way but stopped halfway. It was like someone else was tending the second half of the bar, a ghost only that old guy could see.

  “Now you’re talking,” Ethan added to Ken doll’s comment. They bumped fists in front of Zeke’s rolling eyes.

  Franzen chuckled. “Clearly some of you are familiar with Agent Colton already.” He glanced to Rebel and then Tait. “For those who aren’t, allow me to introduce Daniel Colton, one of our best guys currently serving the Central American region of the CIA.”

  Ken doll muttered, “And South.”

  Franz frowned. “Huh?”

  “Central and South America, shit-for-brains.”

  “Oh, yeah. That’s right.” He added under his breath, “Overachieving spook.”

  “Adrenaline-whore ground-pounder.”

  Tait exchanged perplexed scowls with the other guys as Franz and Colton snickered like they’d slung the last decent insults in history.

  Archer was the next to speak. “Sorry to break up the riff, Captain, but what the fuck’s going on?” To Colton, he queried, “What’re you doing on this side of the border? You didn’t let the Aragon truck get away, did you?”

  That caused a ripple of tension at the table. The entire team had nearly ground their nuts to dust in helping the spooks track the Aragons from one side of the globe to the other. Raids, searches, surveillances, interferences…an undercover op that had included Rebel in drag…Ethan practically going comatose from questioning dirtbags from Abbottabad to Zacatecas… They’d pulled out all the stops on the fuckers, leading to Bernardo Galvaz finally spilling about the massive heroin shipment due for the border three days ago.

  But confiscating the smack was only part of why that goal was important. Several families had paid the Aragons for safe transport into the States on the truck, not knowing the Aragons would never allow loose ends like that in their business. If the CIA had let the Especiales “handle” that truck into invisibility, Agent Colton might find himself resembling Mr. Potato Head instead—with the parts in the wrong places.

  “We didn’t lose it,” Colton stated.

  “Thank fuck,” Rhett and Ethan muttered together.

  Tait threw an assessing look at the spook. “So why do you still look like you’re going to tell us Bin Laden is really alive?”

  Colton went still as all eyes at the table riveted back to him. Franz leaned and muttered, “Sergeant Tait Bommer. He’s half of my sniper team.”

  “He’s the spotter?” Colton returned.

  “Oooo, you can be bright when you want to be.”

  Despite the banter, Colton’s mien didn’t change. He steepled his fingers and stared over them back at Tait. “You have good instincts, Sergeant,” he stated. “Our interest in the Aragon Cartel has gotten a whole lot more urgent since we stopped that truck.” He swung his gaze to everyone at the table. “No. Fuck urgent. This is sticky. Peach pie on the sidewalk in the middle of July, being eyed by a thousand flies, sticky. Got it?”

  Garrett emitted an admiring groan. “That was impressive, man. Shit, I may need to borrow that.”

  “No,” Zeke interceded, “you will not.”

  “Toss out that shirt and I’ll consider it.”

  As the friends grunted into a truce, Tait directed his attention back to Colton. “What’s going on? And what can we do to help you, Agent Colton?”

  If it were possible, the agent’s posture went stiffer. Everyone pressed in by another inch.

  “The takedown on the truck got…messy,” he muttered. “Dark and messy. The guards had he
at. We expected that, of course, but it was serious heat. High-end semiautomatics and a shitload of handguns. They were well-trained to use it all too.” He jutted his jaw and huffed. “Just listening to it on the radios was a nightmare. It was like a goddamn Michael Bay movie. There must have been ten or twelve of them too. We caught eight. The rest took off into the desert.”

  “Probably maggot food by now,” Rebel commented in his Louisiana drawl. “In one way or another.”

  “But ten or twelve?” Kellan added. “For a basic heroin shipment and a handful of innocents? Doesn’t add up.”

  Garrett dragged a hand across the blond mess atop his head. Tait could practically predict what the soon-to-be new father would ask. “Casualties?”

  “Only one,” Colton supplied. “A passenger in the truck.”

  “Shit.”

  “An adult,” the agent clarified. “And not an innocent.” In response to their puzzled frowns, he explained, “A courier.”

  After they digested that in perplexed silence, Ethan asked, “A courier for what?”

  Colton laced his fingers. “We don’t have the answer to that yet. It’s the blank in the middle of the crossword puzzle, missing all the key letters. I can sure as hell tell you want the feeder words are, though.”

  “Lay ’em down,” Franzen encouraged.

  “Secrets. Layers. Lies. And danger.”

  Rebel had the guts to spit out the laugh they were all feeling. “You stirrin’ gumbo up in that gray matter, Colton? Maudit. Sounds like a bad movie ad.”

  The agent shrugged. “Agreed. But the guy had himself handcuffed to a laptop.”

  Franz’s brows jumped. “Handcuffed?”

  Colton nodded. “With no key on him to unlock it.”

  “What’s on the thing?” Ethan asked.

  “That’s the billion-dollar question,” Colton replied. “Everything on the computer has been encrypted behind the nine cyber-circles of Hell. That’s why we reached out to the bureau here in LA for a helping hand.”

  Rhett gave that an approving nod. “The LA-based FBI guys are some of the best. A lot of them helped implement the city PD’s RACR war room, which is goddamned impressive. A bunch more have been drafted from the security teams at high-list terrorist targets like Disneyland and the Hollywood hub. Their people know some good shit.”

  Colton turned a cryptic look at him. “Yeah. Their team is an interesting melting pot.”

  Garrett grinned. “Something tells me this plot’s about to thicken.”

  Zeke snorted. “You forgot your flappy hat, Arthur Conan Doyle.”

  “Holy shit,” his friend returned. “You read that book I gave you!”

  Tait threw an evil eye at them both. “You two clowns wanna let the guy finish?”

  “The courier also had a cell phone on him,” Colton continued. “There were a number of California-based numbers stored on it, though none with any names attached. One was definitely the guy’s favorite.”

  “And you tried calling it?” Rhett questioned.

  “Fifteen minutes after we confiscated the thing.” Colton shook his head. “No answer; no voice mail.”

  “Which means his calls to the bastard at the other end were set for prearranged times.” Rhett’s mouth went tight. “I’d bet both nuts it was disconnected the next time you tried calling.”

  “Your gonads are safe, amigo.” Colton tapped his folded hands atop the table. “Which brings me to the reason why the LA bureau was a gift from the gods.”

  Rhett smiled. “They knew the number?”

  “Instantly.” The agent took a deep breath. Tait watched the guy, and the tension that still laced his posture, with even more care. “It belonged to a target they’ve been watching with increasing interest. His name is Ephraim Lor. But he’s better known as Enzo Lemare.”

  For a group of guys trained to remember everything from license-plate numbers to GPS coordinates in a single mission, summoning the man’s name from three hours ago, when Magneto ninja invoked it in Bella’s living room, wasn’t a hard jump. Still, Tait clarified, “The producer of Dress Blues?”

  “And the guy who played hoochie target practice with Bella Lanza last night?”

  Kellan stole his follow-up, but Tait was grateful. It let him focus on Ethan’s reaction. Wasn’t every day that a guy discovered his college girlfriend had grown into a knockout TV star with a Malibu villa—and Bella had made no secret of her desire to rekindle a connection with Ethan. Had they done that tonight? If so, how would he feel about knowing the man who’d been between Bella’s sheets last night was now connected to a mysterious courier with the Aragon crime cartel?

  “Yes and yes,” Colton answered to the queries. “And now that we know a great deal about Lor, thanks to the agent who’s stuck to him like moss on a cypress, we’re ready to start connecting dots.”

  Nobody said anything. Ironically, Archer himself finally spoke up. “All right, I’ll bite. The dots to what?”

  Colton pulled out a tablet. He woke it up and then opened a slideshow containing pictures of a sophisticated man with black hair, eyes that were too pretty for a dude, and a lean but rugged build. The first shots were clearly from the man’s younger years, showing him in ornate European settings. “Lor was born and raised in Rome. His father was Palestinian, his mother one hundred percent a Roma girl. She was a devout Catholic who worked as a cleaning lady at the Vatican. It seemed a love match until Daddy had to return to his motherland, where he apparently reconnected with Allah. When he returned to Rome a year later, he became deeply involved with the Red Brigade paramilitarists. He was in charge of a secret plot to take down Vatican City from the inside out.”

  Zeke emitted a low whistle. Other than that, everyone was quiet as Colton advanced to more photographs, grainier shots depicting Lor as a boy of ten or eleven, outfitted in soldier gear with a rifle over his shoulder. “According to our source, the guy grew up idolizing these rebels. They were his Avengers, his Luke Skywalkers, his Jack Reachers. But when the brigade dismantled in the eighties, he was lost. His parents divorced, and though he remained with Mamma in Italy, he kept close contact with his father. He ran away on the day he was supposed to go to his First Communion and quickly found his way to Cairo, where he hooked up with his father. Near as our bureau contact can figure, he was fully radicalized by the time he hit his fifteenth birthday.”

  As newer pictures lit up the tablet, now showing Lor as a teenager in militant regalia, Rebel spoke up again. “After all those years of goin’ to Mass in Saint Peter’s Square?”

  “Time can change a lot of things, Master Sergeant Stafford.”

  The bottom fell out of Tait’s gut before he finished looking toward the source of the interjection. Sweet God. That voice. Silken enough for fantasies but rough enough to say don’t fuck with me. Or other things, like Stay where you are, Weasley. I don’t want to hurt you.

  “Holy crap.” Garrett spat it as Luna planted herself in front of the table, flipping her long ponytail and bracing her hands on hips that looked poured into dark-red denim pants. Hugging her torso was a short-sleeved black T-shirt, a fitting visual lead to the tattoo of angels and demons that ran down the length of her left arm. On her feet were black combat boots that were caked with beach sand.

  Zeke looked like he’d been strangled with barbed wire and sounded like it too. “What the hell is she—”

  “Calm down, Zsycho.” Franzen issued it in a growl. “That’s an order.”

  “She’s supposed to be in prison!”

  “I feel you, okay? I was there for all the reasons why.”

  “Oh yeah? You sure about that? Maybe you need to be kidnapped, drugged, and abandoned in Vegas again as a refresher. Or watch me almost die because of the neurotoxin unleashed in my blood by the monster she aided and abetted. You remember those reasons, Franz?”

  “Yeah. And I also remember that Rayna would be some foreign asshole’s sex toy by now if this woman hadn’t stepped up and done the right thing in the e
nd.”

  Zeke slammed back against the leather seat with a glare the temperature of an inferno. “This is bullshit. Unbelievable, unorthodox, unfuckingreal bullshit.”

  Tait leaned forward. He balled his hands to prevent himself from doing two things. One was reaching for Z’s strained neck. The other? Grabbing Luna, hauling her next to him, and announcing to everyone that the next dickwad who contributed to the Luna Lawrence slur campaign could do so with his fist in their mouth. That helped him gain enough control to say, “Z, maybe it’s a good idea to hear her out. If the bureau has trusted her—”

  “Then the bureau’s a bigger bunch of imbeciles than I thought.”

  He slid his hands off the table. Atop his thighs, they shook in rage. Z’s hands were still as steady as an idiot preacher who’d sentenced an adulteress to hell. It wasn’t fair. Yeah, Luna’s crush on Z had been a tad zealous and hadn’t wound up how she’d wanted after their intense scene in the Bastille dungeon all those months ago, but the woman had owned up to her misstep. She’d come clean and been responsible for saving Rayna’s life because of that. Had Zeke just tuned that part out from Franz? Didn’t that matter?

  A glance up at Luna said the answer to that might be an ironic no. She dipped her head at Z in contemplative scrutiny. “To be honest, Sergeant Hayes, I don’t give a shit what you think anymore. Our heads can’t be there right now. Our job is bigger than that. Way bigger.”

  Even through the vacation scruff on his face, Zeke’s jaw turned the texture of a granite wall. “Isn’t your ‘job’ supposed to be washing orange jumpsuits?”

  Screw it. Tait shoved his elbows backward and prepared to lunge. “That’s more than enough, asshole.”

  The only thing that held him back from Z now was Luna’s hand, cream skin accented with lavender nail polish, pressed against his bicep. “Chill. It’s okay.” Her profile was regal and gorgeous, even in the bar’s crappy lighting and even as she continued to endure Zeke’s glower. “Your panties are in a wad, Zeke. It’s understandable. Hopefully the episode recap on this will hold you for now.”