Seduced

by Angel Payne

  Nichols managed a shrug. He was considered a handsome guy—a job hindrance more than a help, which Ethan really understood—but right now, every inch of his face was taut with tension. Ethan also commiserated on that front right now. “Uh, yeah,” Nichols finally answered. “It’s as good a word as any.”

  “A football?” Bella darted a glance between them, expecting someone to cave and let her in on their tease. “Even I know that’s not a football, gentlemen.”

  “It’s called that because of its portability,” Nichols explained. “The real one travels with me most of the time, though it stays in a secure location, guarded twenty-four seven, because it gives me access to our nuclear arsenal from wherever I’m at in the world.” He swiveled his gaze to the Secret Service guy with whom Ethan had shared a cautious glance a minute ago. “And Rob is about to confirm to me that the real one is still safe so I’m not forced to have your boss arrested for treason.”

  After the agent nodded at Nichols to confirm the real football was where it should be, the president visibly chilled and traded a fresh smile with Stock.

  “I think you’ll appreciate the bells and whistles on our special version of the pigskin,” the man said. He opened the aluminum lid, reached inside, and pulled out yet another console, showing that the unit wasn’t a laptop but instead a bulletproof case for a sleek tablet. Ethan moved a little closer, feigning curiosity, until Stock’s glare of warning froze him. He got near enough to see that the console resembled a bigger, marginally more sophisticated version of the handheld gaming devices Rhett and Rebel were always battling each other on.

  Stock unplugged the unit from the case and walked it over to a “workstation” in the set. Unlike the other workspaces, there was no keyboard at the spot. The director hit a button that made the surface slide back, revealing a docking station beneath. Once he parked the tablet in the dock, two things happened. A map of the country, with major cities detailed, flashed onto the large screen overhead. On the pad itself, a handprint identification cue appeared.

  “Well, well, well,” the president murmured.

  “Nice, eh?” Stock concurred.

  “Shit,” Ethan muttered. Shit, shit, shit. The gut that had helped steer his team out of harm’s way on countless occasions, that growled at him when situations were wonky, let out a full roar now. His logic backed up the warning, beating at his brain so hard that it vibrated down to the base of his throat.

  If all of these consoles weren’t props…

  If Lor and Stock had managed to recreate the nuclear football in tablet form…

  Holy fuck.

  Stock pulled the pad back out, making both screens go black again before telling Nichols, “You’ll have visuals tonight during the show. Some of them might not sync up, but don’t worry. We can fix them to look right in postproduction.”

  “I’ll bet you will,” Ethan spat under his breath.

  “Right now we need you to practice handling all of this as if you really know it. Get comfortable with the feel of things and—”

  “Nobody’s getting comfortable with anything, Stock!”

  Dan Colton’s voice, coming from overhead, was a Godlike bellow through the cavernous building. But if the command was the Almighty, the outbreak of chicks and chooks, a chamber-loading party from on high, was the most angelic sound Ethan had ever heard. His chest swelled with emotion, and a shit-eating grin danced on his lips. The wild boys of the First SFG are awake, dickwads. And they’ve come to play. Hard.

  “Put the tablet on the table—slowly—and then raise your hands and step away from the president.” Colton still used the God voice.

  “What the hell?” Nichols charged as three of his men ran toward him. On the way, they grabbed Bella and flung her back. Now off-balance in her heels, she shrieked and tumbled to her knees but was able to skitter into the shadows along with crewmembers who’d found safe corners.

  Ethan breathed deep to calm his heart rate and refocus his attention. As much as he ached to join the agents, he held back. Unarmed and untrained in their protocol, he’d be dead weight, perhaps literally. As much as it sucked ass, he could do more good where he stood, with his hands up. “Mr. President, let them get you out of here. Now!”

  “I’m afraid I can’t let that happen.”

  Every God voice needed a Satanic sneer. It just blew chunks when the voice had an asshole monster attached to it. The King of Hell made his entrance now, emerging from the shadows in the form of Ephraim Lor. He moved with such sleek grace, Ethan wondered if any of the guys even saw him yet. Since there wasn’t a single step from above, he assumed he was the only one with a clear visual of the bastard, dressed completely in black—including the custom CZ pistol in his hand.

  “Down, down, down!” Ethan yelled, hitting the floor himself.

  Not fast enough. Fuck!

  Three shots exploded. Three bodies thudded to the floor.

  “What the fuck?” The stunned mutter belonged to Charlie, who’d smacked the deck a few feet away.

  “Stay down,” Ethan told him.

  “Dear God.” The stunned mutter came from Nichols.

  Lor cocked his pistol again. “My apologies, sir. I am sure they were good men.” He paused and drew in a deep, long breath. “If anyone moves again, the next bullet I shoot shall be through the president’s skull. I presume that is clear to everyone?”

  Nichols took a breath too, but his shook with fury. “Who the hell are you, and what do you want?”

  Lor tsked. “Where have my manners fled? My name is Ephraim Lor, Mr. President. You probably know me better as Enzo Lemare. I’ve produced this show for two years and helmed several more before that.” He spread out his free hand. “In short, I have had plenty of opportunities to walk the gilded sidewalks of this country, to drive its golden roads, to consort with its most pampered few—who over the years have certainly become the few.” The man’s stance stiffened. “It is time to, how do you all say it here, level the playing field once more. It is time, Mr. President, for America to start over. When the people of this country watch six of its states decimated at the hand of their own leader, with the cities of his strongest opponents targeted, it will not be long before the rest of the land falls into chaos.”

  Ethan was glad he was already on the floor. His senses became a bread pudding of stunned. When he, Colton, and Franz were talking last night, looking for a deeper commonality to the dots on the map, politics had never entered the discussion—nor, he bet, any of their minds. “Goddamn,” he uttered.

  Nichols gave a more eloquent reaction. “Are you insane?”

  “Sometimes burning the forest is the only way to save it, my friend.”

  Lor finished that with a sad smile as five of his soldiers appeared and locked on to Nichols from behind. Ethan spat a dozen fucks beneath his breath as the assholes forced Nichols to kneel in front of the missile-launch station. It would’ve been more, but Ethan and Charlie were grabbed too. Four of the mercenaries hauled them up, twisted them around, and slammed them facedown onto the table. The left side of Ethan’s face erupted in pain, though it didn’t prevent him from picking out a new cry that erupted amidst the frightened voices in the shadows. Ava.

  Shit!

  While his chest cramped from the thought of her near any of this chaos, his head reconciled the sense of it. His headstrong little hellfire had likely been the one who’d guided Franz and the guys in here. She had the passkeys, codes, and layout knowledge they’d needed to get to the building and infiltrate it from above. That didn’t mean Ethan had to approve one goddamn bit of the decision. That didn’t mean he wasn’t hoping that the subtle movements from the catwalks would morph into his teammates descending on fast ropes any second. But as long as Lor’s gun was parked on the president’s face, they were as trapped as he was.

  He prayed like hell that Kellan was somewhere up there. And that he had some decent sniper firepower in his hands.

  “Can we warm up the set a little more?” Lor shout
ed. “Seems a little dim for our purposes. And Cameron, my friend, after you get the tablet locked back into the console and reconnected to Vandenberg, I believe we’ll need to fire up that camera. Or do you think we should try for two angles for this?”

  Ethan listened to the director stroll over to Lor. “Sure; what the hell? I own these guys for a minimum eight-hour call today. Not that there’ll be much for them to spend the money on around here later.”

  Breathe. Focus. The second one of these asswads lets up on the pressure, you have to get free and haul ass to the president.

  Nichols was proving his own backbone—and capacity for steely defiance. “Thought this thing looked a little too sophisticated for a prop,” he seethed.

  “You are not a stupid man,” Lor countered. “Everyone, even your political opponents, knows that. It is why nobody will give a flinch of doubt when watching the footage of you taking over our rehearsal to enact your scheme. It was why we activated five cells at once upon learning you’d be coming to this area for a visit. We worked together to manipulate the show’s scripts toward this plot finale, to get the necessary communication going with your office, and to build the station that would interface with the tablet.”

  Nichols’s voice thickened with bewilderment. “So you’ve had the tablet complete for a while?”

  Lor chuckled. “With our resources, that was the easy part. For the harder pieces, such as the plausibility and GPS locations of all the targets, as well as selling off the tablet to an advantageous buyer when we’re done, required some third-party partners and a great deal of patience.” He released a pleased hum. “Today, I can confirm that patience has its rewards. Yes, my friend?”

  Stock’s grunt officially outed him as the bastard’s accomplice. “Right on. Sure. Whatever you say.”

  “Stock?” Nichols’s amazement saturated his voice. “You’re drinking this Kool-Aid too?”

  “Pfft.” The director stressed it with a sharp chortle. “Hell, no. I’m just a selfish sonofabitch who negotiated the business behind all this. I’m going to have fun watching the show from my secure condo in Bora Bora. I’ll drop you a postcard if you want.”

  There was a significant pause from Nichols—but not a dormant one. Ethan felt the furnace of the man’s rage from where he stood, roiling hotter by the second. “So Lor, my friend, you despise the excessive ways of our people yet have used that for every inch of your gain, even now. To paraphrase my teenager, I call bullshit on your hairy, hypocritical ass.”

  A sickening whomp filled the air. Nichols’s stiff groan followed. As disgusted as Ethan was that Lor had pistol-whipped his president, the sound was a goddamn sonata to his ears. For a few precious seconds, that separated the president’s face from the muzzle of that pistol.

  A few seconds was all Franz and the guys needed.

  Sure enough, a throng of heavy ropes were unfurled from the catwalks. As his teammates skimmed down them faster than tree monkeys on crack, Ethan opened the gates on his dammed-up adrenaline, letting it fire both his elbows back. His guards, distracted by the shouts, gunfire, and disorder, were easy to wrench from now. He was able to incapacitate the first with a knee to the gut, but as he grabbed for the guy’s rifle, he was knocked down with the butt of another gun. As he went down, he was reassured to see Charlie getting away safely. The guy had pulled a slick cold-cock on one of his guards and then paralyzed the second into shock by kissing him.

  Ethan lifted his head far enough off the floor to shake the equilibrium back into it. As long as he could see, he was still good to crawl. A lot of damage could be done on an effective crawl. He already had a direction. Rhett, Tait, and two members of Nichols’s detail were struggling to hold their own against half a dozen of Lor’s burliest men, with a seventh running to join the goons.

  But the seventh soldier had…something of a handicap.

  In the form of an auburn-haired wild woman latched onto his back, firing what sounded like gutter-grade Spanish as she tried to scratch his eyes out.

  “Shit!” Screw the equilibrium. He pushed to his feet, ran straight for Ava, and hauled her off the guy’s back—

  And then he was thrown to the floor too. With Ava on his right side, Tait on his left, and the black hole of a rifle muzzle staring at him from straight ahead.

  Just as a savage howl erupted from the president.

  Ethan locked his fingers into Ava’s and squeezed hard as she gasped. The horror in her eruption reflected what everyone felt while watching Lor, assisted by his soldiers, flatten the president’s palm to the handprint recognition pad. After five seconds, the large screen over the console fired to life.

  Loading Target Coordinates — Launch Sequence verification in 00:5:00.

  As Nichols roared again, Lor pushed away with a triumphant smile. “Hope you got all of that, Stock. I don’t think the president wants to reshoot.”

  Stock shrugged. “We can fix what we need to in editing.”

  “Perfect. And thank you, Mr. President, for your cooperation. It was a bit rough in the beginning, but since this is only the phase of redirecting the missiles at new targets, you’ll get a chance to give us your better side in five minutes.”

  Ethan couldn’t see clearly to Nichols due to the guards still hovering over him. The president remained on his knees, probably held there by the bastards. That made everyone’s new directive pretty fucking clear. He eyed Franz, Colton, and the others, confirming his conclusion in each of their faces.

  Get to the president. Get him as far away from that launcher as possible in the time they had left. Four minutes, thirty seconds.

  If lives had to be given in the process, so be it.

  Franzen gave a subtle but affirming nod. Ethan knew what it meant. He’d dip it again three times. On the third, they’d all move as one and pray like fuck for the element of surprise on these dickwads.

  Priceless seconds. God, it wasn’t enough. Not the hours he needed to look at Ava and tell her everything she’d come to mean to him, all the ways she now filled his life, his heart. Not even enough to utter the three words that now resonated in his soul for her. All he had time to do was try to save her from the venom and fire they were about to unleash on this crackpot crew.

  “Listen to me.” He whispered it without moving his lips. “When we move, you move. Far away. Do not disobey me.”

  Franzen nodded another time. Then another.

  Before he got his head down the third time, Nichols bellowed again in fury. “This is sick! You’re sick, Lor! I’ll order my soldiers to kill me first. I won’t participate in this!”

  Lor rocked back on his heels and rolled his eyes. “I really loathe the word won’t.”

  “Really? And I really loathe guys who drink like fish at my bar, gawk at my tits for hours, and then only tip me a buck.”

  The tense silence that followed was broken by two words. They came from Tait, and they were thick with fear. “Fuck. No.”

  Lor’s face contorted with confusion. He almost laughed as he took a few steps toward the darkness between the set flats. “Laudia?”

  He reappeared a second later, blown back by six feet with a rifle hole in his chest.

  The woman who followed him reloaded the weapon in don’t-fuck-with-me determination. “The name’s Luna, you crazy anus, and that’ll teach you to mess with the FBI.” She rotated her bright-purple gaze around to the rest of Lor’s guys, including Stock. “Anyone else want a sample of my specialty cocktail for the day?”

  In seconds, the assholes scattered. Franzen motioned everyone on the team to stay put just as the foam-covered walls let in a faint peal of sirens from outside. “They’re not going to get far. LAPD’s already on alert.”

  Even if that wasn’t the case, chasing minions wasn’t their immediate priority. Getting the president out of here and averting nuclear disaster across six states? That was clear at the top of everyone’s to-do list.

  “Bogeys have officially bugged,” Franzen announced.

  Col
ton threw a fast grin at Luna. “Excellent work, Agent Lawrence.”

  “Right,” Tait added with a snort, “Though it earned your ass a few kisses from my palm once we’re out of here.”

  Franzen’s forehead tightened. He looked over to the launch console, where Nichols was now surrounded by three of his own men. “Hey, guys,” he called to the agents. “Coast is clear. We’re good to go.”

  The riposte to that came from Nichols himself. “No, we’re not.”

  The president’s men stepped back to reveal Nichols hadn’t moved from his knees. More troubling was the position of his hand, still flattened to the electronic recognition pad—because it had been tightly cuffed into place there.

  “Fuck.” Ethan led the stampede over to the console. Rhett was his wingman, though Ava formed a reassuring presence on his other side.

  “Oh, my God,” she blurted. “There’s four minutes left.” Like he needed a reminder.

  “What the hell?” Rebel queried.

  “Everyone hold your panties,” Franzen ordered. “It’s an altered smart pad, right? We saw Stock click it in there, so just pull it back out.”

  “No!”

  The protest came in tandem from Rhett and one of the Secret Service guys.

  “It was our first thought too,” the agent explained, “but the second we started to budge the brick, their failsafe lit up the whole damn screen.”

  “Yeah,” Rhett muttered. “Why the fuck do bad guys have to be so brilliant too?”

  Ethan moved another step closer. His chance to observe Craig Nichols in a huge variety of situations today, including the rare pistol-jammed-at-the-skull conundrum, had knocked his protectiveness about the guy into something more than just duty. Now, Rhett’s stress officially prodded his. “What the hell kind of failsafe?”

  Rhett grimaced. “If the unit gets pulled, it’ll blow up inside ninety seconds.”

  “Sons of smack house bitches.” Franzen’s lips took on a malicious curl. Several of the guys chimed in with their creative titles on the situation.