Forged in Ash (A Red-Hot SEALs Novel)

by Trish McCallan

  Tony and Jimbo—Mac backtracked to the beginning of the discussion. “Tony and Jimbo? The two security guards you mentioned?”

  “Yeah, Dr. Benton had brought everyone on board personally. I mean, he recruited me from the university. I’d interned under him there. He had the same kind of personal relationship with every person he brought on board.”

  That made sense. He’d want to know he could trust them. “So he’d handpicked the two security guards?”

  “Yeah, he’d known them since they’d been kids. They were totally reliable and trustworthy. But two weeks ago, they were killed in an automobile accident; they missed a curve in the road and sailed over an embankment. They were both killed on impact. According to the autopsy reports they both had blood alcohol levels twice the legal limit.”

  “And why did this raise an alarm?” Zane asked.

  “Because Tony was allergic to alcohol; in fact, a couple of Christmases ago, we had to rush him to the emergency room after he ate a piece of supposedly alcohol-free fruitcake. His face swelled up like the Pillsbury Doughboy and then it was all itchy and splotchy for days afterward.”

  “And someone allergic to alcohol isn’t going to go out and get falling-down drunk,” Zane filled in. He shook his head. “Sloppy, they should have checked out whether the guy was a drinker.”

  “Exactly,” Faith agreed. “Then a couple of days later, two new security guards showed up, courtesy of Dynamic Solutions, only Dr. Benton couldn’t contact Embray to verify their employment. And when he tried to fire them, he was politely told that their employment was a condition of our continued funding.”

  “And your project head just accepted his?” It didn’t seem likely if he was as paranoid as she’d made the guy sound. If he’d been in the poor bastard’s place, he’d have walked on the spot. The only reason he hadn’t resigned his commission after that fiasco with the feds, following the hijacking, was because those bastards had his team squarely by the balls. No way in hell was he abandoning Rawls, Cos, or Zane. And then there was McKay.

  Somebody was going to pay for McKay’s death.

  “Of course he didn’t accept it. He told us he was shutting the project down effective immediately and told us to start looking for new jobs. But when he gave notice, he was told that he, along with his entire team, would be persona non grata with the entire scientific community.”

  “So he backed down,” Mac said, feeling an unexpected kinship with the researcher. The poor bastard had been forced into compliance for the same reasons Mac had. He’d been protecting his team.

  “He wasn’t given a chance to back down,” Faith said tightly. “Later that day, the new security guards let a delivery truck in. The truck was full of heavily armed men. They rounded everyone up then killed Marcy, Angel, and Bekka, our clerical staff, and Julio, the janitor. They loaded everyone else up in the van. And then they unloaded seven bodies. Five men and two women.”

  Mac swore. “There were five men, two women on your research team?”

  She didn’t say anything, but her silence was confirmation enough. So they’d kidnapped the entire research team and then faked their deaths so nobody would look for them. No doubt they were even now altering the autopsy reports to match the people supposedly killed in the explosion.

  It was brilliant in an ugly sort of way. They had the entire team at their disposal now. They could either make sure the research disappeared, or they could complete the technology and make sure they owned the rights, the patent, and the control over it.

  Except, of course, they’d screwed up somehow and allowed one of the scientists to escape. “How did you avoid your teammates’ fate?”

  “Pure happenstance,” she said after a moment on a sigh. “During lunches and breaks I like to read. But the break room is too crowded and noisy, so I have this…well, nest…behind all the supplies in one of the closets. There are a couple chairs back there and a bunch of books, some personal things. I was back there packing things up when the delivery truck came through.”

  “And they didn’t hunt for you?” Zane asked, the same surprise in his voice that Mac was feeling.

  “Gilbert dialed my cell phone as soon as they came in and hid his behind the centrifuge. So I could hear what was happening. He told them I’d left early. When they couldn’t find me after they searched the building, they must have believed him. I could hear a lot of movement in the lab where he’d hidden the phone, and then one of the men said that Charlie hadn’t found me at home. And the other guy said it didn’t matter. If I was camped out inside the building, the explosion would take care of me. If I wasn’t, they’d find me sooner or later. After they left, I snuck out the back door, took a bus downtown, and paid cash for a motel.”

  Mac fell silent. The kind of research she was talking about was revolutionary. Yeah, people would kill for it. They’d keep killing for it.

  “There’s obviously a tie-in between Dynamic Solutions and what happened at the lab, hell—what happened last spring to flight 2077. Although it still doesn’t make sense. Why didn’t they just grab everyone from the lab originally? Why bother trying to take the damn plane?”

  Rawls glanced in the rearview mirror, his gaze lingering on the scientist. “Why did you sneak back into the lab? What were you doing under that machine?”

  For a moment, it didn’t look like she was going to answer, but then she shrugged. “There was supposed to be a backup disk, detailing our research, taped beneath the machine.”

  The frustration in her voice was a pretty clear indication that the disk had been missing, but Mac asked anyway. “I take it the backup was gone?”

  She blew out a tight breath and nodded.

  Zane’s cell phone chimed. He fished it out. “It’s Wolf, calling back.” He lifted the phone to his ear and asked for Cosky then quickly filled him in with what they’d learned. After a few minutes of listening, he lowered the phone. “Cos says this Wolf is okay. Apparently he’s got a place that nobody will be able to find. He’s sending us the location.” His phone chimed again. “Fuck,” he said. “It’s the Sierra Nevadas. That’s at least a fourteen-hour drive.”

  Mac was silent, thinking. “He cleared the guy? He was trying to kill him yesterday.”

  Zane shrugged. “That’s what he says.”

  “Hell,” Mac said after a second. “He’d be perfect. Nobody will link him to us, so nobody would go looking for us there. Besides, Russ’s sis is already there. Is he okay with us coming?”

  “Apparently,” Zane said. “We need to decide fast. It won’t be long before your new BFF’s buddies head out looking for him.”

  “Is that right, Pachico? You got some buddies looking for you?”

  The shoulder beneath his hand didn’t tense this time. But Mac knew damn well the bastard was awake. Fine, they’d let him play possum for a while and once they had him at the safe house they’d rip every bit of information they needed from the bastard.

  “He’s awake?” Zane asked with a glance over his shoulder.

  “It’s a damn safe bet, he’s just feeling shy,” Mac drawled and sent Zane a hard grin. “If the bastard is smart, he’ll spend the next couple hours ruminating on the fact he has some pretty pissed bosses right now. I’m guessing these aren’t the kind of men you want pissed at you, so it would be in his best interest to come clean and help us nail these bastards before they take steps to nail him.”

  Zane grunted and turned back around. “Amy, if they found your car, they know you were involved in this tonight. Your and Dr. Ansell’s best bet is to come with us.”

  “Where are your boys?” Mac asked abruptly, glancing over his shoulder at the woman who’d been the bane of his dreams for the past few months.

  She frowned, her hazel eyes shifting to meet his. “They’re spending the night with a friend. Why?”

  He shook his head. “You need to call someone. Send them somewhere safe. You could be gone for a while.”

  Amy already had her phone out and was dialing.r />
  Zane shook his head, but continued frowning. “I’ve got a bad feeling about this. They know we were at the lab, they know we have Pachico, they know we have Jillian. These bastards aren’t going to sit idly back and wait for us to come to them.”

  Mac nodded. He’d been thinking along the same lines. “They’ll push back.”

  Zane gave a grim nod. “Hard.”

  * * *

  Chapter Twenty

  * * *

  JILLIAN AWOKE FROM a deep, drugged-like sleep to the sound of voices.

  Many voices. A jumble of tones, but no real words.

  She recognized some of them: Marcus Simcosky’s flat, chilly tone; Kaity’s throatiness; Zane Winters’s calm; even the commander’s gravelly growl. But there were others she didn’t recognize. A woman’s brisk, no-nonsense, clipped voice. And another female voice that was slower, higher, less assured.

  She didn’t realize she was listening for Wolf’s voice until she heard it.

  “Drag him into the kitchen.”

  She barely recognized the feral grittiness to his voice; it was such a departure from his normal smooth velvet baritone.

  “Let’s just dump him on the couch,” Rawlings said in that Southern twang she recognized from the condo. “He’s playing possum, so he’s a deadweight.”

  “The knives are in the kitchen. There’s water for clean up,” Wolf said with that earlier feral viciousness.

  Boots sounded in the hall outside her door, followed by the scuffed sound of shoes being dragged across wood.

  “He was kidding, right?” the woman with the brisk, clipped voice asked.

  “Hell, I don’t know.” The commander sounded like he didn’t care either.

  She stretched and settled back against the pillows. She felt amazingly good, the pain in her head and eye gone. Lifting her hand, she probed at her left eye.

  To her shock, the swelling was gone. So was the pain. She closed her right eye and focused on the oil painting across the dusky room. The mountain view was shadowed, but visible.

  Good lord. She could actually see.

  How long had she been asleep?

  Apparently, long enough for the swelling to go down and her eye to return to normal. She swung out of bed, and headed for the bathroom to take a look.

  She had no intention of leaving her bedroom, though.

  Maybe the men who’d invaded Wolf’s cabin hadn’t killed her children. But they’d still killed her brother. The brother who’d loved her. Who’d loved his nieces and nephews. Who’d stepped in to fill Steve’s shoes after he’d died. She would never have been able to keep the house without Russ. Or gotten the van.

  It felt like a betrayal of everything he’d done for her to get chummy with his killers.

  Wolf was different. He hadn’t been directly involved.

  “Someone should wake Jillian,” Zane Winters said, his voice right next to her door. “See if she recognizes him.”

  Jillian stopped dead, her heart suddenly leaping in her chest. She could only think of one person Zane would expect her to be able to recognize.

  She returned to the clothes she’d neatly folded on the chair beside the bed, and dressed in a daze.

  Had they really found one of the men who’d killed her children? A combination of apprehension and anticipation balled inside her, settled in her chest like a cold, hard weight.

  Rather than strapping the knife to her calf as Wolf had done, she held it in her hand and tugged her sleeve over it. The sweatshirt dwarfed her, so the knife disappeared.

  Nobody was in the hall when she walked through her door.

  “Jillian described him as tall, thin, with brown eyes and no hair.” Wolf’s icy voice drifted down the hall.

  Jillian started walking in his direction.

  “A perfect description of our fake detective, wouldn’t you say?” Mackenzie said. “Grab one of those knives. Let’s wake this bastard up.”

  With each step, the hall seemed to elongate, like one of those carnival fun-house mirrors. The kind that stretched on and on forever.

  The voices in the kitchen seemed to rise and fall too, which added to her feeling that the world had slipped its axis and she was free-floating in zero gravity, tumbling head over heels without a tether.

  “He’s faking,” Wolf said tightly.

  And suddenly Jillian found her tether. Her anchor. She locked onto his voice and let it draw her down the hall.

  “No fucking shit,” Mackenzie snapped.

  “Actually, he could have passed out,” Rawlings said. “That was some chokehold you had on him when you grabbed him in the living room. I thought you were going to strangle him.”

  “You still have your questions,” Wolf said.

  A pause shook the room.

  “Mightily obliged you held back,” Rawlings drawled, but he sounded wary.

  “It’s not my place to dispatch him.” Wolf’s voice dropped back into that feral grittiness.

  “We don’t even know if this is the guy,” the woman with the clipped voice said. “And no talk of dispatching him. He’ll be turned over to the authorities once he’s answered our questions.”

  Nobody responded.

  “We agreed—” the woman snapped.

  “I agreed to nothing,” Wolf said in his flat, inflexible voice.

  For the first time in months, her chest warmed. Flushed with heat.

  When she stepped through the kitchen door, Wolf was waiting for her, his black velvet gaze locked on her face.

  “Hooku bexookee,” he said, and that feral bite was gone. “Do you recognize this man?”

  “What the hell did he call her?” Mackenzie asked.

  His lioness. He’d called her his lioness.

  The heat in her chest spread out, infusing her with warmth.

  Her hand tightened around the handle of the knife.

  There was a bound man slumped in one of the kitchen chairs. He was bald. She could see the shimmer of his scalp above the white bandage ringing his head like a crown. Blood spotted the right side of the bandage and streaked the side of his face.

  Her breath hitched, and her throat went dry.

  Wolf caught one of the chair legs with his boot and swung the chair around to face her. The screech of the plastic feet against the plank floor swelled in her head. The man’s bald head was bent, chin poking his chest.

  But she recognized him.

  “You do what you’re fucking told and you and the brats will be fine. But one wrong step and we’ll kill a kid. We’ll make you choose.”

  Wolf reached down, grabbing the man by his chin, and jerked his head up. Hard. The guy sprang to life, fighting his bindings. He twisted his head until his chin slipped free. “Do you recognize him, Jillian?”

  “Get down on the floor. Don’t say a word. Not one word, understand?” His bald head gleamed beneath the garage’s overhead lights. Empty brown eyes studied her face. “You’re doing really good. You keep this up and everything will be just fine.”

  Liar.

  Murderer.

  “I’d say that’s as close to a yes as a look can get,” Rawlings murmured. Suddenly he frowned, stepped closer to Jillian, and stared fixedly at her left eye. “I’ll be damned.”

  Zane Winters stared at her for a second too. He turned to Cosky and lifted an eyebrow. “Another miraculous recovery?”

  “I don’t know what the hell you clowns are accusing me of,” the bald murderer said. Flat brown eyes touched her face and slid away. “But you just made a big mistake. One that’s going to bury you. I’m undercover, working a case, and you just blew my cover.”

  Jillian took a step forward.

  “Was that before or after you opened fire on us in the lab, you motherfucker?” Mackenzie growled.

  The man’s mouth snapped shut. He shot Jillian an assessing glance. “You’re fucking with me, right? You believe her lies? The woman’s crazy. You saw that yourselves.” His gaze shifted to Marcus Simcosky. “For Christ’s sake, she tr
ied to shoot you and then run you over. She went after your girlfriend with a knife. She’s got some major screws loose.”

  “We need some pictures, okay? Nothing scary. Just taking some pictures to remind your brother of what’s at stake. Be a good girl and tell your kids to come along.”

  “Is this the man who killed your kids, Jillian?” the woman with the clipped voice and short red hair said. “We need you to identify him.”

  Jillian opened her mouth, but the affirmation got stuck behind the locked muscles of her throat.

  “You are stronger than you think, hooku bexookee,” Wolf said softly. He grabbed the man’s chin again and wrenched it over until he was facing her. “Look at her.”

  “She’s a crazy fucked-up bitch,” the man who stole her babies spat. “I can’t believe you’re buying into her shit. She probably didn’t even have any kids.”

  Jillian wasn’t aware of moving.

  One minute she was across the kitchen. The next she was standing in front of him.

  With the ground gritty and damp beneath her knees, and her children kneeling on both sides of her, Jillian watched her killer drop the camera and lift a big black gun with an extra-long barrel. “Sorry, sweetheart,” he said as the first bullet struck in an explosion of pain. “Nothing personal.”

  Without hesitation she lifted the knife and drove it into his chest.

  Just beneath and slightly to the left of his sternum.

  “Sorry, sweetheart,” she whispered. “It’s personal.”

  Cosky froze in absolute disbelief, staring at the knife plunged hilt deep into their best shot at getting some answers. For an instant, shock held everyone silent and still. Faces went slack. Mouths fell open. Eyes rounded.

  Pachico—they still didn’t know the poor bastard’s real name—looked more startled than anyone. His mouth was the widest, eyes the roundest. His face blank. Somehow the white bandage crowning his head added to the shocked look on his face. And then, oh so slowly, he fell forward. He would have kept going, fallen right out of the chair face-first onto the floor if Cosky hadn’t leapt forward, grabbed the back of his button-down shirt, and hauled him upright again.