Risk no Secrets

by Cindy Gerard

  Her face paled when she saw the grim looks the men exchanged. “Oh, God. Not Jorge.”

  “I’m sorry, Sophie.” Wyatt steadied her with a hand on her shoulder. “They got to him before we did.”

  The rest of the blood drained from her face, but she held it together. “Who?”

  “MS-13 thugs,” Doc said. “High-level gang members, judging by their tattoos.”

  She swallowed hard. “Tell me what happened.”

  When Doc looked at Wyatt, clearly wondering how much information to share, Wyatt shook his head. He didn’t want her to know the details.

  God damn it, he didn’t want any more of this violence to touch her. He hated that she had to be a party to any of it. Lola’s abduction was tough enough for her to deal with. The hollow look in her eyes told him what sending Hope away was doing to her. And now she had to come to terms with Jorge Vega’s brutal death.

  “Tell me,” she insisted, bypassing Wyatt and looking directly at Doc for answers. “Was he … was he tortured?”

  Doc looked away, then finally nodded, unable to lie to her.

  Her eyes glazed over with grief and guilt.

  Wyatt never should have agreed to let her stay. And the danger for her personally because of her association with Vega had just ratcheted up several degrees.

  “It’s small consolation,” Doc said, “but they won’t be hurting anyone else.”

  Her gaze shot to Wyatt’s. “You killed them?”

  He worked his jaw, hated what he saw in her eyes. Accusation threaded with satisfaction. She was struggling to come to grips with both her horror and her desire for retribution. “They didn’t give us much choice.”

  The silence was as brutal as the scene they’d left behind. The policía should be at Vega’s by now. Wyatt had made an anonymous call just before they beat it out of there.

  “Gotta figure Vega talked,” Green said with a glance at Wyatt, who had pretty much decided the same thing. “So the question is, did they have a chance to share his confession with whoever sent them to do the dirty work?”

  That was the big question, all right.

  “They both had cell phones on them,” Doc said, while Wyatt continued to watch Sophie’s face. “I was able to check one—there were no recent outgoing calls on the call record. The other phone was shot up too badly to tell. So I’m thinking no, but it’s still possible they had time to call someone before we got there.”

  “And if they did,” Gabe added, “our odds of tracking the child to the location on Vega’s map just sailed beyond long shot to nonexistent. They’re sure to move her.”

  “My money’s still on them not getting a chance to relay the info,” Doc reminded them. “In which case, we still have a chance of finding her there.”

  “I say we go for it,” Green said. “Now, before we lose any advantage we might have.”

  Joe was right. And Wyatt was more certain than ever that he had been dead wrong in not insisting that Sophie go to Argentina with Hope. She didn’t belong in the middle of all this evil.

  “Sophie,” he said, turning to her, “it’s not safe for you here. I want you in Argentina with Nate and Reed.”

  “We already discussed this.” A new resolve came over her as she pulled herself back together. “We’re not going to discuss it again. A child is in danger, a child who was mistaken for my child. Now a man is dead because he tried to help me find her.” She met his eyes then, and the hardened determination he saw there made his heart ache. “You don’t know me … you don’t know me at all if you think I would turn my back on either of them.”

  She might just be right. Maybe he didn’t know this woman. This woman had been forced by brutal and vicious predators to become someone she should never have to be. This kind of evil should never have invaded a kind and gentle heart and turned her into someone driven by fear, outrage, and desperation.

  Long moments passed as their locked gazes held and he came to terms with this new Sophie. She wasn’t backing away. “If anything happens to you,” he said, so low that only she could hear him, “I’ll—”

  “Nothing’s going to happen.” Her eyes were clear and sharp when she cut him off.

  He breathed deep, gave in to her with a nod, and prayed he wouldn’t regret his decision for the rest of his life.

  “We need to get a move on,” Gabe reminded him quietly.

  “Throw some essentials into a bag, and dress for rough country,” Wyatt told Sophie. “We roll in five.”

  They had to leave before the puppet master decided to dispatch more thugs to “chat” with Sophie. Before what little time Lola had left—sixty hours and counting—ran out.

  16

  “How’s she doing?”

  Nate glanced away from Hope when Juliana joined him outside under Villa Flores’s massive covered patio. He’d been watching over the sad and solemn girl, who had touched very little of the breakfast Juliana had served them a little while ago.

  Hope sat in the grass, staring out toward the cliff line where, far below, the azure waters of the Pacific slammed against the west coast of Bahía Blanca, Argentina.

  “She’s very quiet,” he said. “It seems even her excitement over the chopper ride and a case of puppy love over Reed can’t snap her out of this funk.”

  When Juliana smiled, Nate looked away before she could see the effect she had on him. There wasn’t one thing about her that didn’t mesmerize him. The way she moved. The way she worked. Fluidly. Effortlessly. Always with an economy of motion and vibrant energy. He sometimes wondered if she had any idea what a beautiful woman she was, both maternal and sexual, with her long chestnut hair and lush figure.

  Her face fascinated him. The warmth from her dark, intelligent eyes, the honey and gold of her complexion, the pillow-soft lips that, to this day, he swore he could taste on his tongue. But over it all, what had drawn him to her like a tether nearly four years ago was her valiant spirit, her sense of purpose.

  He’d loved her on sight. Had never stopped loving her.

  “Let me see if I can take her mind off things,” she said with a soft smile, and walked to the girl.

  How the hell did a grown man—a mature man who’d been through the wars and beyond and who commanded the respect of not only his country’s top military leaders but a team of deadly, stand—up fighting men—turn into a marshmallow when this woman did nothing more than smile? Or walk into a room. Or approach a child, as she was doing now.

  Transfixed, and hoping to hell it didn’t show, he watched as Juliana knelt down beside Hope on the grass and murmured soothing words while touching the girl’s hair. Then she lowered her head close to Hope’s, and, as if by magic, the child reached far enough out of herself to take Juliana’s hand, stand, and walk with her toward the lush gardens in back of the villa.

  Nate knew what Hope would find there. Nestled on more than half an acre of riotous blooms, miniature fruit trees, and whimsical topiaries was a wonderland right out of a fairy tale. Enchanted castles made of moss-covered pebbles and alabaster and coral seashells were hidden in secret glens. Intricate winding paths all led to a vine-covered white gazebo that hosted a half-dozen glittering, melodious wind chimes made of moons and stars, brilliantly colored butterflies, and iridescent dragonflies. Even a twelve-year-old’s imagination could run wild in this tiny paradise as she envisioned tree spirits and forest nymphs and maybe even herself as princess of the realm.

  He watched them walk hand in hand down a cobblestone path in the sparkling morning sunlight—a mother missing a child she’d lost, a child missing her mother—and he remembered the first time Juliana had shown him the garden.

  “Angelina would spend hours out here,” she’d told him, and he’d seen in her eyes that she could still picture her own daughter there. A bittersweet sadness that she tried in vain to hide would always engulf her when she spoke of the daughter she’d lost at the brutal hands of the same madman who had also taken her husband’s life.

  As he watched Juli
ana’s and Hope’s dark heads together, he couldn’t help but wonder what it would have been like to have made a child with this woman. To have had the right. To have been that young man who had wooed her and won her and taken her as a virgin to his bed.

  There was something about this place, this fortress of stone, light, and sea breeze, of towering windows and sheer, billowing curtains, of gleaming cypress floors and what Gabe referred to as dead king’s furniture, that made a man yearn for many things that could not be.

  He could not be Juliana’s first love. And during the course of the few years he’d known her, he’d come to accept that he could not be her last. Not that there were any other men in her life, but Nate had shared her bed only once—she’d turned to him for relief of both loneliness and pain. She’d never said as much, but he knew she’d always regretted what they’d done.

  He, on the other hand, had only regretted her guilt. And sometimes his own stubborn pride, which kept him from telling her that he loved her. Just his luck, he thought, as he watched Juliana and Hope, that he’d finally met a woman who could make him think about wrapping up his career and spending the rest of his life devoted to her, and she—well, she was still in love with her dead husband.

  He couldn’t compete with a dead man’s memory, especially a man as revered as Armando Flores.

  There were times when he wished he’d never met her. For many years, he’d been happily oblivious to anything but his work. He’d married the military, and she’d been a demanding and rewarding bride. But after a twenty-year union, he’d had enough of her difficult ways and called it quits. That’s when Black Ops, Inc. was born, and he’d recruited his team of merry men to put the screws to the bad guys—still under orders from Uncle Sam but without the government restrictions and colossal reels of red tape.

  Speaking of merry men. Reed thumped up behind him on his crutches.

  “What?” Nate demanded when Reed just stood there and glared at him.

  “Are you ever going to tell that woman how you feel about her? Oh, wait,” Reed muttered after Nate pinned him with a warning scowl, “I forgot who I was talking to. You haven’t even admitted it to yourself yet.”

  Only Reed, reckless, irreverent, and pretty damn secure in the knowledge that Nate wouldn’t hurt an injured man, would dare goad his former Task Force Mercy CO and current employer at Black Ops, Inc.

  “Something give you the impression that I wanted your input on my personal business, Reed?”

  The good-looking Texan only grinned and opened the door that Nate had just slammed in his face. “Bigger men than you have taken the plunge, boss. Take me for example.”

  “I’ll pass, thanks just the same. And in case you missed the message, let me repeat: Butt out.”

  “You think I wanted to admit that a little redheaded pixie had the power to bring me to my knees?” Reed continued, unfazed by Nate’s glare. “I didn’t want any part of that. But there came a time when I finally got it through my head that there wasn’t a damn thing I could do to fight it. Life got a whole helluva lot easier after that. A lot sweeter, too,” he added, grinning like a goon.

  Nate knew he should be pissed at the younger man for butting in, but he’d learned over the years that Johnny Duane Reed was a hard man to get pissed at. He was also a hard man to ignore, because behind that pretty-boy façade was one of the most stand-up fighting men and team players Nate had ever had the good fortune to command.

  “Not every story ends with ‘They all lived happily ever after,’” Nate pointed out.

  “Well, yours sure as hell won’t if you keep up the invisible-man act with the pretty doc.”

  “D’you ever think she just might not be interested?”

  Damn. Nate hadn’t meant to give Reed even that much of an admission that he cared.

  “Well, hell, boss, all you have to do is watch the woman’s face when she looks at you to know she’s got it bad.”

  Nate jerked his gaze toward Reed. He was serious. Christ. He hadn’t thought Reed was capable of surprising him anymore.

  Reed shot him an incredulous look. “You didn’t know? Shit, boss, for a smart man, you don’t know jack about women.”

  “And you’re the supreme oracle on the subject.”

  “Apparently, I know more than you do,” Reed pointed out.

  Nate squinted at him. “Aren’t you up for a performance review with a raise hinging on the results? And correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t I approve full salary while you nurse a torn ACL that you managed to injure while performing a stunt on a skateboard? Off duty?”

  “Okay, fine. You don’t want my advice. I got it. But for God’s sake, man—”

  “Zip it,” Nate cut in with a no-nonsense glare.

  Far from looking threatened, Reed just rolled his eyes. “Zipping it, boss. I’ll just go soak my knee.”

  Nate added, “And check with Crystal. Let me know if she found anything of interest on either Vega or Montoya.”

  Something had to break on the abduction case, and Nate knew that Crystal had been busy on her computer ever since she’d picked up a text this morning from Green.

  They hadn’t heard from Wyatt or any of the other guys since the night before. He checked his watch. It was close to ten a.m. in El Salvador. By his calculation, that left the BOIs a little more than forty-eight hours, give or take, before the Thursday deadline imposed by the kidnappers.

  If he had a child and that child’s life came down to a matter of two days, there wasn’t anyone he’d rather have on the case than the men he’d left in El Salvador.

  If he had a child, he thought again, for the first time in his life regretting that he’d never taken that monumentally life-changing step, he would have wanted it to be with Juliana.

  Maybe Reed was right. Maybe … hell, maybe he should let her know how he felt.

  He saw her now, shepherding Hope back from the garden. She looked guardedly hopeful.

  “What’s up?” he asked.

  “Hope remembered something, didn’t you, cara?”

  Hope nodded.

  “You can tell Nate,” Juliana assured her, her tone patient and gentle. “Go ahead, querida, tell him what you told me.”

  “I saw them,” Hope said hesitantly. “I saw the men who took Lola.”

  “Do you remember what they looked like?” Nate asked carefully.

  She looked down and shook her head.

  “It’s okay, cara.” Juliana sat down at a patio table and urged Hope to sit beside her. “It doesn’t matter that you can’t remember everything. Just tell Nate what you do recall. And maybe when you tell it again, you’ll remember something else that will help us find Lola.”

  Very slowly, Hope began telling him what she remembered, relating with a chilling clarity the feel of the sun burning on her skin, the squeal of the tires as the van skidded to a stop. The door opening, the sound of metal rolling on a track, a glimpse of the inside of the van littered with fast-food wrappers and dirty blankets. The scent of the white coffee-bean blossoms in the air.

  “He … the driver. He wore a hat. It said Los Cuscatlecos on it.”

  “Good. That’s good,” Nate encouraged, even though Los Cuscatlecos was the name of El Salvador’s national soccer team and half the male population wore caps with its logo.

  “He … the man … he had a big gun. The man pointed it at Lola, and he … he pulled her into the van.”

  She started crying then. Juliana wrapped her in her arms, murmuring praise and reassurance into her hair. “Come on, cara, that’s enough for now. You’ve done well. Very, very well. Now, let’s go see what Johnny’s up to, okay?”

  A few minutes later Juliana joined him on the patio again. “How’s she doing?”

  “She’s okay,” Juliana said. “Johnny talked her into a game of Scrabble.

  “It will come to her,” Nate assured Juliana. “She’ll eventually remember, and then we’ll be able to put faces to these guys, get a line on them.”

  “It�
�s so hard on her.”

  “Yes,” he agreed. “But it’s also good for her to get it out.”

  “She’s suffering from posttraumatic stress,” Juliana said, her dark eyes concerned.

  “That’s all going to get better,” Nate assured her, “once Wyatt and the guys get Lola back.”

  The sun prodded noon in the ass with a burning torch. But not as hard as Wyatt and the guys had been pushing for answers. They’d already visited three of the twelve potential locations of the MS-13 stronghold where Lola might be held, when Wyatt turned off the main highway following Green, Mendoza, Gabe, and Doc, who led the way in the Suburban.

  Sophie sat beside him in the passenger seat, dozing on and off. She was dead tired. Hell, they were all running on adrenaline and fumes and powering through on the few hours of sleep they’d managed to grab in the two days since Lola had been abducted. By unspoken agreement, neither had said word one about what had happened in her bed the night before.

  He sure as hell thought about it, though, and he suspected that she was thinking about it, too. And yeah, sooner or later, they would talk, but now was neither the time nor the place. This next stop would be their fourth foray into some backwater hamlet where they hoped to get lucky and get a lead on the MS-13 camp and Lola.

  So far, they’d struck out in spades. It would be at least another two, possibly four, hours before Stephanie could report on the satellite photos. Until they heard from her, the plan of attack hadn’t changed: try to find a needle in the proverbial haystack. Or in this case, locate a particular clew of worms in a jungle teeming with creepy crawlies.

  He glanced at Sophie after maneuvering over a hole in the road that was big enough to swallow a small steer. She was buckled into the passenger seat of her SUV. She looked exhausted, but she was holding up without a word of complaint about the insufferable heat or the teeth-jarring ride as the SUV labored over the rutted dirt road. Neither had she complained about the disappointment over the three times they’d come up empty-handed.

  She was a lot damn tougher than she looked, and even though he had no ownership, he couldn’t help but feel a swell of pride that she was holding her own in a grueling back country capable of beating the most seasoned off-road warrior bloody. Hell, Wyatt was a Southern boy; he knew about insufferable, sweltering heat. And yeah, he’d run as many ops in the roasting furnaces of places like Honduras, Colombia, Sri Lanka, or Indonesia as he had in the bitter cold and barren mountains of Afghanistan. But El Salvador lent a whole different meaning to the term hell hole.