Dangerous to Know

by Dawn Ryder

  * * *

  “You’d better have a powerfully good reason for fingering your superior.”

  Saxon didn’t let Kagan’s tone get under his skin. It wasn’t something many men could claim to be able to do. Kagan was massive, from his excessive height to a shoulder span that would have made several professional football players feel lacking.

  “I’m not fingering anyone. Yet,” Saxon clarified.

  Kagan wasn’t impressed. He gestured to the chair in front of his desk. “Make your point. And it had better be good. Tyler has already been on my tail demanding permission to set the dogs on your ass.”

  “Now I’m pointing my finger,” Saxon said as he sat down.

  Kagan drew in a stiff breath. “Why?”

  “I’ve been off grid for exactly eight hours. Why is Tyler nursing a hard-on for me? When have I ever failed to bring in my target? What’s his reason for doubting me this soon into the operation?”

  Kagan’s expression didn’t change. “Interesting questions.” His section leader leaned back as he plucked a pen from the desktop and started tapping it against his lips.

  “Tyler claims he’s concerned you’re heading down the same path your brother took.”

  “Get off my brother’s ass. He performed his mission. Got the girl back with nothing more than a few scratches on her.”

  The pen hit the desktop. “He screwed her, too.”

  Saxon shrugged. “It happens. Stop acting like it’s the first time you’ve heard of it, or done it.” Saxon shot his superior a hard look. Kagan’s lips twitched in what could almost be called a grin. A cocky one. “The way I heard it, the girl didn’t complain.”

  “Her daddy sure did and still is,” Kagan shot back. “Personally, I couldn’t care less about Vitus blowing off a little stress or whose thighs he does it between. But Congressman Ryland is of the opinion that his little girl would never be interested in anything like that.”

  “Right, and the good congressman has morals, like being faithful to his wife,” Saxon answered.

  Kagan had the pen back in his fingers and began tapping it against the armrest of his chair. “Thing is, the danger breeds a certain level of passion that is nearly impossible to ignore. You know it. So did your brother. The little snowbird? Well, she was an innocent. At best, Vitus failed to keep his perspective. That part he was guilty of. That girl had no idea how to handle an experienced operator like your brother.”

  Saxon had to nod in agreement.

  “The punishment didn’t fit the crime. It was a situational lapse. Not an uncommon one, either,” Saxon said. “Hardly worth pulling a shield from a man with an impressive service record.”

  Kagan nodded. “Agreed. Except this was a high-profile target. Every man knows those politicians’ daughters come with an additional set of rules. Jeb Ryland is a hopeful for the next vice-presidential nomination. His little girl can’t be screwing the help.”

  The pen stopped. “I think that’s what’s pissing Tyler off. He knows you’ll go to Vitus and together, you two won’t be easy to pull in.”

  “Again, why the hurry to haul us in?”

  “You have the hard drives,” Kagan answered. “However, you’ve created an interesting situation by dropping off grid with the evidence.”

  “Exactly,” Saxon said. “Someone took out my men. And went for my mole and the mule. Seems like a lot of people need to be silenced all of a sudden. I went off grid to see who had a problem with it and I’m in your office to prove that is the only reason.”

  The pen started tapping again. The office was silent until Kagan moved and the wheels on his desk chair ground against the tile floor.

  “Dig in.” He pulled a cell phone from his breast pocket. “There’s a scrambler on this one, so watch your back because I won’t be able to send in the cavalry. New location is in there, too. And pull your man in, keep that package secure.”

  Saxon looked up from reading the information on the phone. “You want the cheese and the mule in the same location?”

  The pen went back to tapping. Saxon stared at Kagan, waiting for the man to finish thinking.

  “The cheese was a setup. The intel is fake.”

  “What?” Saxon hissed. “I lost men on this operation. I don’t do bullshit missions.”

  “Your team is activated when we need them to perform.” Kagan spoke slowly. “The suspected leak was on the other side. A couple of the Defense Department civilian personal. Better fake intel than the real deal. We still need to plug the leak. Someone picked it up. I want to know who.”

  “I still question the order to bring my man in. His target might be the perpetrator.”

  Kagan let out a soft sound. “She was in your custody when the last batch was moved. Someone took out the cameras your team placed in her house. Tyler does have some explaining to do because someone is feeding inside information to the man picking up the intel. But the girl is a mule.”

  Saxon sat back.

  “Don’t scare me.” Kagan was eyeing him critically. “You almost look relieved. She’s a mark in an operation.”

  “She’s innocent—”

  “That’s what I just said,” Kagan cut in. “But something is still going on with the family. Her brother is making waves. Knows she’s missing. I want to know how he found out. So pull your man in and get that information. Keep her muzzled while you do it. I’m reactivating your brother, unofficially. I want a man on this one who no one will think to keep an eye on.”

  “Yes sir.”

  Saxon walked through the nondescript office building toward the door. He didn’t make eye contact with anyone working at the plain desks. Their computer screens had filters over them to blur the images, and it was possible the entire office would be moved by tomorrow. With Kagan, you were wise to expect nothing and anticipate the unexpected.

  A healthy attitude for them all.

  He stopped on the pavement outside to send a text message to Mercer. There was no reply, but he hadn’t really expected one. Mercer had bugged out. He’d be off grid completely, only checking in every couple of days to make sure his location couldn’t be pinpointed. Saxon walked around the building twice. Thais and Greer surfaced and joined him.

  “Good news,” he informed them. “We’re not getting our shields pulled.”

  His team members’ expressions tightened. Good news? Only when you didn’t stop to consider the fact that Mercer’s gut instinct had been right. Tyler was up to something.

  And that was definitely bad news. The type that just might get them all toe tags when push came to shove and people started trying to cover their tracks.

  Saxon selected a new vehicle from the ones left in the parking lot for teams to take.

  He did enjoy a challenge.

  Even one with deadly consequences.

  * * *

  “We need fuel.”

  Mercer pointed at a roadside gas station and snack shop. She was stretching a little to call it a snack shop. The entire building was covered in tin roof siding, all of it in different stages of rusting. It look like a giant patchwork quilt. If she couldn’t peg it as scavenged, the piles sitting on the dirt nearby would clue her in. There was a dented pickup truck with a bed that had more exposed metal than paint left on it.

  Mercer stared at her for a moment before he turned and rode down toward the station. It was just a stop on a rural road, somewhere in the middle of the state where there was nothing much but farms for hundreds of miles around.

  A half-grown kid came out as they pulled up. The hems of his jeans were ripped and his T-shirt was in tatters.

  “We need some gas,” Mercer said.

  “Cash only.”

  Mercer nodded and pulled a couple of twenties from his pocket. The kid shoved them into his own pocket before lifting one of the pumps up.

  “Tamales?” a woman called from the doorway of the shop. “Fresh and hot. Best you ever tasted.”

  “Sure.” Mercer looped an arm around Zoe and tried to
guide her into the shop.

  She sidestepped him. Something snapping inside her as he got too close. His eyes narrowed but she started walking toward the shop, refusing to give him any of her attention.

  Ha! Like she could ignore him.

  Well, she could at least not appear to be panting after him.

  She was still no closer to thinking her way out of the mess she was in. The shop smelled amazing, distracting her at least for the moment. The woman patted a counter that looked like it had been lifted out of some soda shop from the 1940s. There were four bar stools in front of it, their cushion seats wrapped with duct tape.

  She laid out a couple of place mats before serving up two plates of steaming-hot tamales.

  “Gracias.”

  The woman flashed her a bright smile, showing off two silver crowned teeth. “Se habla Español?”

  Zoe nodded. The woman went off in a peel of Spanish, happy to have someone to talk to.

  “How about letting me join the conversation?”

  The woman looked at Mercer and clicked her tongue. “That’s a handsome man you have there,” she said, still in Spanish.

  “Just a friend,” Zoe answered back.

  The woman offered her a disbelieving look. “I’m not blind,” she said.

  They polished off the tamales and Mercer jerked his head toward the doorway. The woman smiled happily as she tucked the twenty-dollar bill Mercer gave her into her bra.

  Zoe looked at her bike dubiously. Her backside was aching.

  “We’re not going far.”

  She looked up at Mercer hopefully. Hell, sure she was a little mad at the guy but her butt was killing her, so she’d take whatever escape she could from riding the bike. Even if it meant having a conversation with Mercer.

  Of course that brought her face-to-face with just how mouthwatering he was. There was dark stubble on his chin now, making him look even more edgy. Damned if she didn’t feel a stab of desire go through her.

  I’m hopeless.

  Nitwit.

  Yeah, whatever. “What do you mean we’re not going far?”

  He swung his leg over the bike and revved up the engine. Zoe ground her teeth together as she did the same.

  “My ass is killing me, too.”

  Whatever she’d expected him to say, that hadn’t been it. Was he really commiserating with her? The sound of the bikes made further conversation impossible. Mercer peeled out of the station leaving her little choice but to follow him.

  They rode through open land. It was dry desert. The cropland around them was fed by aqueducts but wherever humans hadn’t interfered, there was just dry, rocky dirt, scrub brush, and the odd tumbleweed.

  She followed him to the base of some hills. He pulled the bike up to a gully and left it there. Zoe yanked her helmet off and waited for him to explain. All he did was pull out the cell phone and look at the screen for a few moments.

  The wind blew a dried-up tumbleweed past them as a couple of crows flew overhead. Something started buzzing off in the distance. Zoe lowered the water bottle she’d been drinking from and looked up.

  “Our ride home,” Mercer informed her.

  In the distance, a pair of helicopters was hugging the line of hills.

  “So, we’re done bugging out?”

  He nodded. It was a short, hard motion of his head. He’d slipped his mirrored sunglasses on again, making it impossible to judge his mood. The tamales were suddenly not sitting so well. Her belly knotted as the helicopters swooped in and hovered a foot off the ground.

  Mercer cupped her nape, making sure she bent over as they approached the aircraft. The wind whipped up, dirt flying in her face as he guided her into the machine.

  She stumbled into the backseat, fumbling with the body harness as Mercer pulled on a pair of headphones and she watched his lips moving as he spoke to the pilot. He glanced back at her, checking to make certain she was buckled in.

  And then … his attention was on the mission. Completely.

  The observation hit her like a punch to her solar plexus.

  From the moment she’d met him, she’d suspected what he was. Spent a lot of time mentally trying to pull his cover story back because she just knew it wasn’t right.

  This was right.

  It was what he was.

  There was a beauty in it and confirmation that their time together was limited.

  Well, live in the moment, girl.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Harley let out a squawk when he saw her.

  Zoe stepped away from Mercer, relieved to have a reason to pull her arm from his grip. The house they were in wasn’t the Malibu Cliffside location. They were somewhere in the San Fernando Valley. But once inside the house, they might have been anywhere on the globe. Once again, the windows were dressed to look normal from the street—but they were nothing but plywood boxes on the inside, so that she couldn’t see out. The artificial light lent a stale, prison-like feeling to the structure. The guns Saxon and his team members wore reinforced that feeling. She reached for the parrot cage door, desperate for affection, or at least some remnant of her life.

  She opened Harley’s cage and let him step up onto her hand. She shook as he rubbed beneath her chin.

  “Told you he was a kitten.”

  It was Thais who spoke, her voice still as dusky and alluring as Zoe remembered. Even without makeup, the femme fatale looked amazing. Zoe rubbed beneath Harley’s wing and felt grubby. She fought the urge to fuss with her hair while Saxon and Greer were sizing her up.

  “I get along with the bird just fine,” Saxon informed his teammate drily.

  “If you call needing stitches just fine,” Thais shot back smoothly.

  Zoe peered at the team leader, but Saxon only curled his hand into a fist in response. “Enjoy your trip to the mountains, Ms. Magnus?”

  “Helped me tighten a few things up, that’s for sure.” Her entire backside felt like stone.

  He choked on a sound that might actually have been a laugh. She wasn’t 100 percent sure, though.

  “We found the intel.”

  She felt like the blood was draining from her face. “That’s not possible.”

  He gestured her toward Thais, his expression confident.

  Thais had turned a dining room into a workshop once more. Zoe stared at it all, more than a little in awe of the way the house had been so quickly transformed into a technical command center. She slid into a chair and laid her fingers on a mouse. The screens flickered to life, showing a complex digital display of the information on the hard disk from Zoe’s home computer.

  “This hard drive is from your system. I had to bring in a language specialist to help me with it but it’s clean. Your friend Roni is right, you need to get out more. You spend an insane number of hours working.”

  “Like you clock out at five on the nose.”

  Thais sent her an amused look. “Point taken.”

  She clicked on one of the screens and brought up another image. “Here’s the hard disk from the parrot party laptop.”

  The screen was full of images of maps, broken up by pictures of Harley on kids’ arms. It was a grotesque collage.

  “Clever really,” Thais said as she scanned the information on her screen. “See … right here … you can see where the information is and where the pictures began to be written over it. Graphic files take up a lot of storage. Since you’re using this for parties, you delete files and write over the hard drive multiple times. Very clever way to try to cover up the tracks.”

  “Since the laptop was in the van, we missed it when we swept your house,” Saxon said.

  Zoe felt like someone had punched her in the gut. She needed air but couldn’t seem to make her lungs work. All she could do was stare in horror at the screen.

  Thais rubbed her eyes. “It’s going to be a bitch to piece together. There are only fragments of the intel, but it’s there.”

  “It … can’t be…” Zoe muttered, her brain in complete denial.
She felt the weight of Mercer’s hard stare. His body had tightened up as he took in the information being displayed.

  “Your prints weren’t the only ones on the keys.”

  She snapped her head to look at Saxon. “Excuse me?”

  The team leader was a very unlikely candidate for a savior. As in, never in a million years. Her brain just couldn’t absorb it. She blinked, trying to understand him.

  “Tim’s were. He used the laptop.”

  “He doesn’t do the parties,” she blurted out, trying to think the situation through.

  “We know.”

  Saxon’s voice sounded like a gavel pounding. Of course they knew. Investigating was what they did. “Does he have a key to your house?” Saxon asked.

  “Yes.” Her brain was working at a frantic rate. Harley snapped at her when she rubbed him too hard. Zoe jumped and put the parrot down. “In case something happened to me and Harley needed to be taken care of. He and my dad go way back.” She turned to stare at the screen again. “I … can’t believe it.”

  “Not many others will believe it, either,” Saxon said. “Not yet. This is circumstantial at best.”

  Zoe whipped around to stare at him. But it was Mercer who answered her stunned look.

  “It still happened in your home, Zoe. Unless we get a confession out of Tim, you’re as likely a suspect.”

  “Except that I was with you when the last intel was intercepted,” she argued.

  “Intel that surfaced while you were in custody,” Saxon replied.

  “What?” Zoe demanded, her brain finally shaking off its paralysis. “If that’s the case, aren’t things becoming sort of clear? In my favor?” She wished she could be happier, but she wasn’t.

  Saxon shook his head. “Might be a clever way for your partner to take the fall for you. An older guy would do that for the right person. Like a lover.”

  Her brain was right back to feeling like it couldn’t deal with things again. Saxon offered her no mercy, studying her from behind a stony expression.

  “You’ll be staying here until we decide how to shift the fact from fiction. It’s in your best interest to cooperate.”

  “Fine.”

  She tightened her jaw and straightened her back. There was no way she was going to let any of them know how defeated she felt. Saxon looked like he was trying to peel away her facades and didn’t really care if she ended up a babbling mess on the floorboards.