Suzanne Brockmann - Team Ten 07 - The Admiral's Bride

by Suzanne Brockmann

  "I won't."

  He stopped pacing to look searchingly into her eyes. "Are you really okay with this, because if not—"

  "I'm okay with this." Zoe's smile was tremulous. "I'm really okay that you trust me to be able to handle Vincent."

  "While you're doing that," Jake told her, "I'm going to rig the main power supply and the backup generator to blow. I'll try to take out the main computer while I'm at it."

  "Are you telling me you can make a bomb from cleaning supplies—things that are just lying around—that will do that much damage?" she asked.

  "Well, I probably could, but I don't have to." Jake smiled. "I brought two bricks of C- plastique into the fort, inside your duffel bag."

  She stared at him. "Holy Mike! What if my bag had been searched?"

  "It was," he said. "I hid the C- in with a couple slabs of modeling clay and some other art supplies. No one knew."

  "Including me."

  "I thought it would be better if you didn't know."

  "That's what / thought about Vincent's proposition."

  "No more secrets," Jake said. "Okay?"

  Zoe smiled weakly. "Then I guess I better tell you that this afternoon I snuck into Vincent's quarters with a cleaning team."

  Jake closed his eyes. "Zoe. God."

  "It was all right. Ian Hindcrest found me in there, but I

  played dumb, and all he did was send, me back to the kitchen."

  "Why would you risk everything to—"

  "Because I thought if I found the Trip X I wouldn't have to have sex with Christopher Vincent!"

  There was absolutely nothing Jake could say in response to that. Nothing but, "I'm sorry."

  "It was okay, Jake. I got shoved around a little, but Hindcrest bought my story."

  Shoved around a little. Coming from the queen of the understatement, that could mean anything. It helped a lot that she was standing in front of him, looking to be in one piece.

  "What are the odds he didn't tell Vincent about the incident?" he asked.

  "I'll take care of that," Zoe promised. "When I go in there, I'll confess to Chris I was so eager to have dinner with him, I snuck into his office this afternoon, hoping to get a chance to talk to him." She turned his wrist, looked at his watch. "Meanwhile, I'm now ten minutes late."

  "I'm not sure I want you to go at all now."

  "Just tell me your plan," Zoe said. "Please. You just rigged the power and computers with a bomb. Then what?"

  "I'll set a delayed fuse and go up to Christopher's quarters. I'll make a stink, play the part of the jealous husband, make like I've reconsidered this whole sordid deal, push my way into the room. Once I'm there, the bomb will go off, power will go down and in the confusion, we'll overpower Vincent—"

  "With what? The salad fork?"

  "That could get messy. I was intending to just use my hands. Get a grip on him, threaten to snap his neck. Hopefully there'll be a guard or two in the room. Once they drop their guns, we'll be armed."

  Zoe nodded. She didn't say a word about the fact that Christopher Vincent had at least fifty pounds and several inches on Jake. She didn't doubt his ability to do precisely

  what he'd said. She didn't make a single comment about his age, about the fact that it had probably been years since he'd threatened to snap another man's neck. She had complete and total faith in him. He couldn't keep himself from kissing her.

  "We'll lock ourselves into Vincent's private office," he continued, "and we'll sit tight until the rest of the team arrives. Your job is to not let .the scum bag touch you and to be ready for me, you got it?"

  "I do."

  "Good," Jake said. "Now go. And make it look as if you're going even though I don't want you to. Let's get that jealous-husband thing happening starting now."

  She pulled away from him, twisting free from his arms, her words contradicting her body language. "Be safe, Jake."

  It wasn't hard for him to look as if he didn't want her to leave. "You, too, babe."

  Zoe hesitated at the door, looking at him. "I love you."

  How could three little words make him feel both so damn good and so damn bad? "Zoe—"

  She was gone.

  Lucky had been left behind to man communications.

  He wasn't completely certain how it had happened. One minute he'd been ready to move out with the rest of the team and the next he was waving goodbye from the window of the trailer.

  Somebody had to stay behind. Somebody had to watch those video screens, hoping for another communication from Admiral Jake Robinson. Somebody had to be ready to relay that information to the team.

  Lucky had hoped that that somebody was going to be Bobby or Wes. Or Cowboy.

  He had his headset and lip mike on, connecting himself to the rest of the team, now split into two groups, one led by Cowboy, the other led by Crash and Harvard. He could

  hear the second group's chatter over his phones as they circled the sky in a plane above the Frosty Cakes factory.

  Jake and Zoe had split up, and Lucky was following them both, keeping them both on screen—no easy task for anyone besides Bobby.

  Zoe was in the stairwell, looking as if she'd stepped out of his own personal sexual fantasy. He liked women dressed in what he thought of as contradictions. And Zoe's breathtakingly short skirt and low-cut top combined with the rather formal, opera-bound debutant-style of her hair really worked for him.

  He forced his attention away from Zoe and onto Jake. The admiral left the men's room on the fourth floor and went into the same stairwell, heading down, though. But then he stopped, looking up, and Lucky realized Zoe had run into trouble.

  She'd left the stairwell. He could hear raised voices from the other side of the door on the stairwell camera, and he quickly adjusted, keying in the numbers to pull in the picture from the security cam in the hallway.

  It jumped onto the video screen. Ian Hindcrest and a half a dozen armed guards had surrounded Zoe.

  Lucky swore, and over his headset, Harvard's voice responded. ''What's happening, O'Donlon?"

  "We've got six zealots with Uzis, aiming them at Zoe."

  "I don't know what you're talking about." Zoe didn't look frightened, only amused.

  Jake had moved silently up the stairs, and he stood, right outside the door, listening and looking out, the door open infinitesimally.

  "So you deny you were in the leader's office today as a spy."

  Zoe laughed. "Spy? Me? Do I look like a spy?"

  "She's definitely made," Lucky reported. "We've got some serious trouble here, Senior Chief."

  He knew exactly what Jake had to be thinking. Every

  instinct the man had was screaming for him to go out there and start kicking butt, to rescue Zoe.

  Except one unarmed man against six men with automatic weapons... There was no way in hell he could possibly succeed. Three seconds after he leaped out from behind the door, Zoe would still be in trouble, but he'd be too dead to help her. One of those grim-faced cleaning crews would be mopping what was left of him off the floor.

  No, it was definitely neither the time nor place to attack.

  'Take her to General Vincent's office," Hindcrest ordered the guards.

  General. Talk about a sudden promotion. Of course, when you run your own little fantasy world behind a high electric fence and walk around with security guards with Uzis, you can call yourself Lord God Almighty if you want.

  "Does Jake know about Zoe?" Harvard asked over his headphones.

  "Yeah. He's on it, Senior. But there's only one of him and he's not armed."

  As Zoe was led away, Jake turned and went down the stairs, moving fast.

  Lucky followed him via camera down the stairwell, down the hall to his room. The admiral grabbed what looked to be—hot damn!—two solid bricks of C- explosive and a bunch of fuses and was back out in the hall, moving fast.

  It wasn't until then, until Jake hit the stairwell going down again, that Lucky realized the man was sending him
a steady stream of hand signals.

  Now, Jake was signaling. Now. Over and out.

  God, Lucky had missed it all. Do what now?

  He quickly rewound the tape. "Got a message incoming from the admiral," he announced as he watched it. "He says he's taking out security, power and computers, and he'll blow a hole in the electric fence, as well." He snorted. "Well, sure, why not? One guy doing the job of ten men. Who does he think he is, one of the X-Men?"

  •

  "No, just Jake Robinson," Harvard responded.

  "He says five minutes—oh, is that all? Or maybe even less till it blows. He says he needs support. He says come in as covertly as you can, as quickly as you can. He says he's ready to guess where the package—meaning the Trip X—is, but it's just a guess. Wear gas masks, be ready for anything, don't forget there are women and children here. He says come now. Now."

  On the other video screen, Zoe had arrived in Christopher Vincent's outer office.

  She looked so small, so fragile compared to the CRO leader's bulk. She was looking at something Vincent held in his hand.

  "That's a paper clip," she said. "You're all worked up over a paper clip?" She laughed. "Chris, I'm a waitress. I'm not a spy. That's crazy!"

  Christopher hit her with his fist, like a club against the side of her head, and as Lucky watched, Zoe went down, hard.

  "Move fast, team," he said, his heart in his throat. "Zoe's in serious trouble."

  The room spun, and Zoe clung to the floor, trying desperately to regain her senses, fighting the waves of nausea and dizziness that made her want to retch.

  That was her fault. Her fault. Crazy. She should have remembered that Crazy Christopher went ballistic when he was called crazy.

  Her head pounded and her vision blurred as two of the guards dragged her to her feet. She fought to focus her eyes, Christopher stood in front of the open door to his private office. That door was heavy duty, as Jake had pointed out, with dead bolts that would withstand anything short of explosives. If she could get in there and lock that door behind her...

  "Here in the CRO fort, like most countries, treason is a Vincent was holding a gun on her.

  Zoe blinked, but the gun was real, not a result of the problems she was having with her eyes.

  It was a. German-made Walther PPK twenty-two caliber. The kind of gun any inbred militia leader with Hitler aspirations would take pride in owning. "Is Jake Robinson also here to spy on us?" he asked her.

  Zoe let herself start to cry. "Chris, I don't know what you're talking about—"

  "Yes," he said. "He is, isn't he? He's here because of the anthrax."

  Every now and then, there came a mission in which it was necessary to accept that her cover had been blown. And if Christopher Vincent thought that the poison he'd appropriated from the Arches test lab was merely anthrax...

  It was definitely time to lay all of her truth cards out on the table.

  Zoe stopped crying, stopped pretending. "Chris, you don't have anthrax. What you have is called Triple X. It's a nerve agent. A chemical weapon that's deadlier than even you can imagine."

  "So you are a spy."

  "I'm here to try to help you," Zoe told him. "If you give me the missing canisters of Triple X now, I'll make sure it's known that you cooperated fully—"

  "Guilty," Christopher said. "I find Jake and Zoe Robinson guilty as charged. Their sentence is death, to be carried out immediately." He looked at his guards. "Find Robinson. Now."

  Zoe kept talking. "Chris, this is the dead last thing you want to do. If you kill me, if you harm anyone, if you even attempt to use the Triple X, the CRO will be crushed."

  Christopher Vincent lifted his gun, and as Zoe stared into the deadly blackness of its barrel, she prayed. God, please don't let Jake come bursting in the door right now. Please, God, keep him far, far away from here.

  "Oh, God," Lucky said. "Oh, God, he's going to kill her!"

  There was nothing he could do. He could only watch on the video monitors, completely unable to stop the murder that was about to happen miles away in the CRO compound. It was the most awful, completely impotent moment of his entire life.

  He was going to watch this woman he admired so much, his friend, die while he sat here, unable to lift a finger to save her.

  Zoe could barely stand after that blow Vincent had 'given her to her head, but the guards moved back from her, out of their leader's range.

  Zoe was still talking, telling Vincent about the Triple X, trying to make him understand that the United States Government would not rest until they recovered it.

  Vincent smiled, and...

  "No!" Lucky shouted. "No!"

  The bastard fired the gun, the roar deafening over his headphones.

  And the screens all went black.

  "Sit-rep, O'Donlon." Harvard's voice came in. "What are you shouting about?"

  Lucky worked frantically to get some sort of signal. But there was nothing. There was no signal to receive.

  Jake, true to his word, had taken out the security system.

  "Security's down," Lucky rasped. "But, God, H! Vincent shot Zoe. Point-blank. The bastard executed her." His voice shook, and he couldn't stop the tears that came to his eyes. "I've got it all on tape."

  "Oh, God."

  "Cowboy's team intercepted all six canisters of the Triple X about ten minutes ago." Zoe would've been so glad to hear that. Lucky pushed his lip mike away from his mouth so the senior chief wouldn't know he was sitting here crying like a baby. But, dammit, this operation wasn't over yet. He didn't have time to lose it this way. He took

  a deep breath and repositioned his mike. "As far as I know, Jake's still alive. But they're looking for him, Senior. Let's make sure we find him first."

  "We will. But we're still about two minutes from contact." Harvard's voice was grim, cold.

  "If you come face to face with Christopher Vincent," Lucky said, doing what he knew Harvard was doing—turning his grief into frozen hard anger "—hurt him bad for me."

  Jake covered his head as his fourth and final bomb took out a big piece of the fence surrounding the CRO fort. It was hard to blow a fence like that, and he'd used a little too much of the C-. Bits and pieces of what once had been trees and underbrush rained down on him.

  He shouldered the Uzi he'd appropriated from a careless guard. A guard who'd have one hell of a headache when he finally woke up.

  Jake moved silently through the darkness toward the factory—toward Zoe.

  She was still in there. He prayed she was able to take advantage of the sudden explosions, of the power going out. But even if she wasn't, it didn't matter. Because he was going in after her.

  Smoke alarms were wailing, and he could hear shouting, sounds of confusion from inside.

  He hadn't used enough of the explosive to start a real fire, but the smoke and dust were thick. And the complete darkness had to be daunting to a group of people used to living under the constant scrutiny of bright spotlights.

  Jake was nearly to the door of the building when he looked at the velvety blackness of the night sky.

  It wasn't so much that he'd heard them or seen them. It was more that he'd sensed them.

  And sure enough, it was his SEAL team, parachuting in, dropping out of the sky.

  So much for blowing the hole in the fence to let them in.

  The SEALs gathered their chutes as they landed, unhooking themselves, instantly armed, weapons locked and loaded.

  Senior Chief Harvard Becker recognized Jake almost as quickly as Jake recognized Harvard.

  "Sir. Are you all right?"

  "I'm fine." Jake had smeared himself with dirt in an attempt to cover the reflective paleness of his face as he'd crossed to the fence in the brightly lit yard. "But Zoe's still in there. I could use some help getting her out—and finding that damned Trip X, as well."

  "Sir, the Trip X was intercepted by Lieutenant Jones and his men. Christopher Vincent tried to send it to New York tonight." The door t
o the building opened with a crash, and they all stepped further into the shadows. Bobby and Wes had joined them, as well as Billy, and two other men Jake recognized but didn't know—Joe Catalanotto and Blue McCoy, the Captain and XO of SEAL Team Ten's Alpha Squad. Harvard apparently didn't call just anyone for backup. And despite their higher rank, they were standing back and letting Billy and Harvard run this show.

  "Jake, I think it would be really smart if we got you out of here right now," Billy said.

  "You better think again, kid, because I'm not leaving without Zoe."

  Billy looked at Harvard, who shook his head very slightly. Bobby looked at his feet.

  "You guys gonna help me help Zoe, or what?" Jake asked.

  Silence. Complete, total silence.

  Then Harvard put his hand on Jake's shoulder. And Jake realized Bobby Taylor was crying.

  "Jake," Harvard said, his voice thick with emotion. "Zoe doesn't need our help anymore."

  No. Jake knew what they were telling him, but he couldn't believe it. He looked at Billy and saw the awful truth echoed in the kid's eyes.

  "She's dead," Billy said. "I'm sorry, Jake."

  Chapter Nineteen

  Zoe was dead.

  Jake stood there. Somehow he managed to stand there, to keep his knees from crumbling, to keep himself from folding into a ball of pain and anguish. "No," he said.

  ' 'Lucky saw that prick Vincent kill her. He shot her right before the power went down." Wes sounded strangled.

  Zoe was dead.

  Pain screamed through Jake, growing louder, stronger with every beat of his heart, with every ragged breath that he took. And as it grew, it changed. It boiled and churned and hardened and blackened, and it numbed him. It deadened him, and all the joy and the life that Zoe had breathed back into him with her laughter and brightness over the past few weeks dried up and skittered away like leaves in the cold winter wind.